“Out. Now.”
The coat-check girl poked her head out. “Boss?”
“Take the amnesty,” he told her. “I’ll be fine. You won’t. I want all the staff out of here, now. Go.”
Daniel sucked air between his teeth and took his phone out. He talked while he tapped out a text message.
“None of us are going to be fine.” He stared at the screen. “Shit. That was fast.”
“What happened?” Marie asked.
He showed her the phone. No bars.
“Nyx’s flunkies outside are using a cell jammer. Probably already cut the landlines. They don’t want us calling in the cavalry.”
“Wait,” Marie said. “But everything you said back there…that we were under your protection, that you’d fight anyone who stood in your way? I mean, you can beat her, right?”
Daniel blurted out a laugh. He stared at her, incredulous.
“Are…are you kidding me? Wow, you’re new. You are super new. No. That was a bluff—a bluff I’ve pulled one too many times, apparently—and she just called it. Listen to me: Nyx is a freight train, and her cargo is murder. When she comes back, she’s probably going to rip my spine out and beat you to death with it.”
The club emptied out. A few last heavy footfalls thudded along the puzzle-piece corridor, and the steel door slammed shut in their wake.
“Let me be absolutely certain I understand this,” Nessa told him. “You were sent to aid us? That part was true?”
“Yep. There’s a lady in Nevada who needs a word with you two. She sent me to find you at Carolyn Saunders’s place, but apparently we missed each other.”
“You know Carolyn?” Marie asked. She remembered the author’s notes about the club and the doorman’s comment. “So are you…the guy?”
He winced. “Please don’t call me that. It’s a long story.”
“You were sent to aid us,” Nessa said, “and your means of introduction was to step into a bad situation, escalate it beyond all hope of repair, and leave us standing in a deathtrap.”
“It may look that way, on the surface—”
“You made everything worse.”
“I’ll fix it,” he said. “Okay? I’ll fix it. Freddie, you’ve got to get out of here.”
She pouted at him. “And miss all the fun? Hardly, darling. I’m not leaving my favorite thief and my two new BFFs in the lurch.”
“You’re our lifeline right now. I need you to go, get out of jammer range, and tell Caitlin what’s going on. She’s tight with Calypso, so hopefully she can make him call off the dogs. This whole bounty is shady as hell; the man’s just trying to protect his investment.”
“His investment?” Nessa asked. “Meaning?”
“You don’t even know, do you? Your father-in-law’s little deal?”
She shook her head.
“Alton sold his soul,” Daniel said. “Calypso isn’t his campaign manager; he’s his personal genie. To fulfill the contract, he has to get Alton into the White House. And that means any potential threats—like you two, in particular—need to be taken off the table.”
Nessa and Marie shared a glance. “I can’t even pretend to be surprised,” Nessa said, her voice flat.
“The Order can’t just go after anybody,” Daniel said. “They’ve got rules, strict ones, so I’m betting he made up some accusations to get the contract issued. The kind that’ll fall apart like a house of cards in a stiff wind. He was just hoping they’d take you out before anybody thought to look into it.”
Freddie air-kissed his cheeks and gave a regal wave as she headed for the exit.
“I’m out, my darlingest darlings. Ta for now, try not to die.”
“We’ll make an effort,” Daniel told her.
Marie had her eyes on al-Farsi. The man had sounded a little too confident when he said he’d be fine. Considering he obviously had a history with Nyx, and not a happy one, he should have been just as worried as everybody else. Instead, he’d cleared out his staff and now he was lingering at the edge of the empty room, hanging back from the conversation. Too far back. She kept him in her peripheral vision, pretending she wasn’t watching, and saw him sidestep to the left. Toward the brass elevator door.
She locked eyes with him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
The elevator chimed. As the door rumbled open, he made a break for it. Marie whipped her pistol from the mirror bag, took aim, and snapped off a shot. The weapon boomed, the empty room catching the sound and bouncing it from wall to curtained wall, and her bullet chewed into the puzzle-piece floor at al-Farsi’s feet. He jolted to a stop. A sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead.
“Don’t even think about it,” Marie said. “I didn’t miss. That was a warning shot, and you only get one. Get over here.”
Daniel put his hand on his hip. “Unbelievable. You Mr.-Darcy-looking dandy motherfucker. You were going to run upstairs and hide while Nyx chewed through this place and killed the rest of us.”
Al-Farsi had enough grace to look ashamed. “This isn’t my fight,” he mumbled to his shoes.
“Wrong,” Daniel told him. “When Nyx and her crew roll in here, she’ll hunt you down and kill you just because she can. And she’ll probably do it slow, because you made her work for it. You want to live? Stand with us. Don’t tell me you don’t have any magic up your sleeve, because I’ve seen it in action before.”
The manager waved a frustrated hand. His shadow did the same, stretched out at his back—but his arm’s shadow turned serpentine, bending the wrong way, then broke. It shattered into a dozen slithering blots of darkness, sprouting centipede legs and scattering in all directions.
“And I’ve seen what Nyx is capable of,” he said. “This club has its defenses, yes, but they won’t be enough. My shadows might slow her down. Annoy her, at best.”
“Well,” Nessa said, shooting a glare at Daniel. “We’ve already seen where annoying her gets us. If fighting isn’t an option, all that remains is a tactical retreat. Is there really only one way out of here?”
Al-Farsi stared at his feet. He shuffled his weight from side to side, looking like a kid who just got sent to the principal’s office.
“Time,” Nessa told him, “is not on our side. Or yours.”
“There is a way,” he said, relenting. “A secret tunnel. I had it built early in the club’s history, as a last-resort option in case of an emergency.”
“Pretty sure this qualifies,” Marie said.
“You don’t understand. It was built a long time ago, and I haven’t set foot down there in decades. It was never structurally sound—for all I know, it collapsed years ago—and I’m fairly certain a stretch of it is underwater now. It isn’t safe.”
“Unsafe,” Daniel said. “As opposed to waiting here for the murder demon to come back and eat our faces. I think we’ll take our chances. Let’s go.”
Twenty-Five
A hatch behind the bar whistled open. A narrow flight of steel stairs led down into darkness.
“This is the storage cellar,” al-Farsi explained, leading the way. A string of lights clicked on, casting a soft, fuzzy glow against racks of bottles and bar supplies. Beer kegs stood stacked along the walls in stainless-steel pyramids. Nessa, Marie, and Daniel gathered behind their host as he crossed the bare concrete floor.
In the farthest corner of the cellar, one stack of barrels was older than the rest, stamped with a brand Marie had never heard of. Al-Farsi rapped his knuckles against a keg. It rang out, hollow. His fingers slid along the rim and felt for a hidden catch. He found it, squeezed, then gave it a twist.
The pyramid pulled away from the wall as one welded piece of metal, squealing on concealed hinges. Behind it, a chunk of the old brick wall had been chiseled away, leaving a ragged gap behind. Dusty brickwork stretched to the edge of the electric light and beyond, vanishing into the gloom.
“There you go,” he said. “If the path is still viable, and I make no promises, it only runs in one direction.
Follow it, and eventually it’ll spit you out near the Division station, under North Milwaukee Avenue.”
“That’s cute.” Daniel grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “You say that like you think you’re not coming.”
Al-Farsi’s cheeks went tight. “I would be safer hiding upstairs—”
“So when Nyx shows up, you can offer to trade us for your own life and tell her exactly where we went. Nice try.” Daniel shoved him toward the hole. “You’re leading the way.”
They had to hunch down in single file to squeeze through. Four phones woke in the darkness, their faces turning to rectangles of light. Dust danced on the beams and made their throats itch. Daniel turned, pulling the concealed door closed behind them, and al-Farsi put a hand on his arm.
“Don’t. It automatically locks. We don’t know if we can even get out this way.”
Daniel pulled it the rest of the way shut. The concealed catch clicked.
“Like I said,” Daniel told him, “we’ll take our chances. Bad enough Nyx is coming back in force, we don’t need to leave her a trail of breadcrumbs.”
Marie took the lead. Daniel didn’t trust al-Farsi to stay behind, and she didn’t trust him up front. Besides, she felt better taking charge. For as helpless as she’d felt tonight, surrounded by magic when she didn’t have any of her own, this was a job she could handle. She could keep Nessa safe.
The rough stone was damp against Marie’s palm as she navigated along the tunnel. The stale air carried the wet smell of mildew, like old dirty socks left out to dry. Nessa’s hand rested on her shoulder as she followed right behind. Her slender fingers gave a reassuring squeeze.
“Eventually,” al-Farsi said, “if fortune smiles, this passage will connect to a stretch of the old cable-car tunnels. Chicago’s original transit system, long before the elevated trains.”
“I don’t understand why they all ran,” Nessa said. “An entire club filled with magicians, and they ran.”
“They prefer their faces uneaten,” Daniel said. “Crazy, I know.”
“If everyone stood together, if everyone fought—”
“Nyx would have hit the place like a living buzz saw and killed every last one of them before you had time to blink. Look, whatever you saw back there, those people aren’t world-class threats. Most of ’em know a tiny magic trick or two, a little something to slant the odds in their favor. Nothing that can take down an incarnate demon. If they showed off a little, it’s only because the Bast Club is a sanctuary, way off the grid. It’s one of the only places on earth where they don’t have to hide.”
“That,” Nessa said. “Why? We have magic. Why hide it? Give me twelve competent witches, and do you know what I could accomplish?”
Daniel didn’t answer right away. He let out a long, low whistle that echoed off the rough-hewn walls, reverberating into the distance.
“Wow. You are both so…new. Nobody ever clued you in? How’d you learn magic in the first place?”
“A book taught me,” Nessa said.
“Weird. Weird and borderline unprecedented. Ninety-nine percent of grimoires are missing key information, or they’re filled with traps, or both.”
“And yet,” Nessa said.
“Okay.” Daniel kept one hand on al-Farsi’s neck, pulling him along. “There’s one rule in magic. Just one. And breaking it means the entire occult underground will come crashing down on your ass like the fist of an angry god. You do not, under any circumstances, tell the world that magic is real. You can bend that rule—after all, if we didn’t, nobody new would ever learn the art—but you never break it.”
“Why?” Nessa demanded.
“For starters, it doesn’t matter how much of a mystical badass you are, you’re not a bigger badass than the United States Marine Corps. Plus every other branch of the military, from every government on earth. Two, three thousand years ago, maybe you could start some shit, make yourself a god-emperor or something; today, they’d just nuke you from orbit. Technology picked up the work of human progress where magic left off a long time ago, and if you think commanding the power of actual hellfire is scary, just wait until you see how a Hellfire missile can ruin your day.”
The procession stopped. The tunnel dipped sharply up ahead, and the glow of Marie’s phone played across dark, stagnant water. The odor of rot was more pungent here. Patches of oily black mold clung to the stone. Marie got down on one knee at the water’s edge and bent low, straining to see.
“Flooded,” she said, “but not all the way. There’s a pocket of air between the water and the ceiling of the tunnel, maybe a foot or so, at least as far back as I can see. Might get better, farther in, or it might not. Do you know how low the tunnel dips?”
“It was a long time ago,” al-Farsi said. “Obviously, we have to turn back.”
“No.” Marie squinted at the water, watching its algae coat ripple.
A long black shape writhed under the stagnant water, slithering just below the surface. Marie took a deep breath and steeled herself.
“I’ll go first,” she said.
“You certainly will not.” Nessa pointed at al-Farsi. “We’ll make him do it.”
“So he can run away once he gets to the other side? Or lock doors in our way, or warn people on the other end? No.”
“Marie—”
“I’ll go first,” Marie said. “If it’s too deep or too dangerous, I’ll double back. If I do make it, I’ll shout over to you. You come across, then al-Farsi, then Daniel.”
Nessa’s hand was an iron vise on her shoulder. Marie gently pried her fingers away. Then she raised them to her lips and gave them a gentle kiss, meeting Nessa’s anxious gaze.
“Let me do this,” Marie said.
The first step into the flooded tunnel soaked her to the ankle in icy water. Algae clung to the leg of her jeans, the denim glistening with slime. The dip was steeper than it looked: her second step brought her knee-deep in the mire. The mildew stench clung to the back of her throat, itching when she breathed.
She took the mirror bag and held it over her head. If she lost Nessa’s book, or the mysterious card someone had so carefully planted for them to find, they might as well give up now. Another step brought her waist-deep. Then the water rose to her chest.
Marie started to shiver as the cold sank into her muscles, and the waters kissed her throat. She couldn’t walk anymore; to keep the bag and her phone dry, she had to swim. She kicked away from the tunnel floor, letting herself float, gently churning her legs to keep her mouth and nose above the morass.
A long, dark shape slid through the water like a razor blade. It glided past her cheek, almost close enough to touch. She held her breath until it moved on.
Ten more feet. She could see the other side of the bend, the tunnel rising from the flood and offering dry land once more. She knew she couldn’t let panic take over, not with more dark shapes rising from the murk all around her. Something rubbery coiled against her hip, lingering for a moment, then slipped away into the deep. She stayed slow and stayed steady.
The first thing she did, once she emerged onto damp stone, was check the bag. No damage. The second was to call out.
“I’m across,” she shouted. “It’s clear. Maybe thirty feet of water in all. There’s, um…there’s a couple of snakes, and it’s really cold, but it’s not as far as it looks. Just take it slow and be careful.”
Marie saw the light from Nessa’s phone strobe on the far side of the flood, held above her head as she made her descent. It reached the farthest edge of the dip where the air pocket shrank. The light froze.
“Marie, I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can,” Marie said. “Listen, just…close your eyes. It’ll be better if you don’t look. Just close your eyes and follow the sound of my voice. You can do it, I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Soaked to the bone, teeth chattering, she still wanted to jump in and swim at Nessa’s side. She’d have to do the
next best thing and make the ordeal as easy as she could for her.
“Just come toward my voice. Nice and slow, okay? Don’t rush or”—Marie watched a pair of snakes gliding under the water—“just don’t rush. No sudden movements.”
The distant phone light jittered, unsteady in Nessa’s trembling hand. Marie thought fast.
“You want to hear a story?”
Nessa’s tiny, nervous laugh echoed off the dank stone. “O-okay.”
“Once upon a time, there was a powerful witch, known as the Great and Terrible Owl. And the Owl wasn’t afraid of anything in the world, because her faithful knight was always at her side. And she knew that her knight would always keep her safe, no matter what happened.”
Ripples lapped the damp stone shore. Nessa was dog-paddling with one hand, stirring the water more than Marie had as she made her way closer.
“The witch and her knight went on a great adventure.” Marie’s stomach clenched, the beam from her phone tracing across the serpentine shadows that writhed just below the surface. More than she thought there were when she made the crossing. A lot more. She fought to keep her voice steady, soothing, hiding every trace of the panic she felt.
Nessa bit back a squeal. A snake slithered past her neck, rubbing up against her throat in the water.
“A great adventure,” Marie said quickly, “and…and they faced many perils, but the Owl’s knight was always with her, protecting her from harm. And, um…they…eventually settled down, and moved to Portland, and opened up a really nice bed-and-breakfast.”
Tears rimmed Nessa’s squeezed-shut eyes, but she still let out an anxious laugh. “Tell it right,” she said, making her way to the edge of the flood.
“Okay, okay.” Marie had to smile. “The Great and Terrible Owl faced every challenge in her path, laid her enemies to waste, and conquered the world. And she and her knight lived happily ever after.”
On the final word Marie grabbed Nessa’s hand and pulled her from the mire. Nessa leaped onto dry land and fell into her arms. Their sodden clothes squished as they clung to one another, shivering.
Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2) Page 17