Moving forward was better than staying still, even if it was the wrong direction. So I went after him, dragging Brynn along with me since she was clinging like a lamprey. Grim trotted up to pace Yejun while Nod dropped back beside Amber, who trailed along in the far rear. She’d warned me she would, I remembered.
Our feet crunched down the tunnel. It was pitch black beyond Yejun, which made me uneasy. Our noses told us there was nothing living ahead of us for thousands of yards. On the other hand, the tunnel went on for thousands of yards, and so much could change here in that distance.
Brynn’s fingers dug into my arm. “Do you think this tunnel is haunted?”
I glanced at her and noticed how pale and tense she was. Reassuringly, I said, “I don’t think so. This doesn’t feel like a haunt. They’re not usually subtle.”
“And you know about haunts, right? You said your mother was a ghost?”
Had I? I vaguely remembered saying something like that when talking about Jen and wished I hadn’t. But not answering wouldn’t reassure Brynn at all. “Yeah. When she has bad dreams, my father’s pack knows it right away. They have nightmares, too, waking ones. Everything turns against them.” My father’d eventually locked her locket in the trophy case when I was around thirteen, because nothing else would stop the haunts. I’d really enjoyed how they pretended nothing was going on.
After a moment of silence, Brynn asked, “What happened to your mother? How did she die?”
“She had a bad heart,” I lied, with the ease of long habit.
“Really?” asked Brynn, her voice odd. I snuck another glance at her. “My dad died when I was a baby. He had a heart attack while he was driving home. Do you think he’s around as a ghost, too?”
“Uh.” I flailed for an answer that somebody as removed from the supernatural world as Brynn would be able to follow. “Well, it depends. Most people don’t stick around as ghosts. They go on to Heaven or whatever. Some of them stay on Earth because they’ve accepted an offer from somebody like Tia. And sometimes they linger because they’re not ready to move on. Because they’ve got unfinished business, or they’re afraid, or they just like it here.” I realized this wasn’t much of a reassuring answer and added, “If your dad was religious, or even just raised religious, he probably didn’t stick around.”
“I don’t think we’ve had any haunts,” Brynn said thoughtfully. “There was the fae—um, there was something once, but it turned out there was another explanation.”
“Oh, haunts only happen if they’re unhappy about something,” I said quickly. “There are plenty of ghosts who just like to stick around and watch their descendants.”
That seemed to satisfy Brynn, and after a minute, she found her courage or something, because she let go of my arm and dropped back with Heart. I couldn’t help myself: as soon as she let me, I moved up to pace beside Yejun. Grim, trotting between us, looked first at him and then at me before giving a whole-body wiggle of delight. He really liked it when I walked beside Yejun, because he was ludicrously optimistic.
Yejun scratched Grim’s ears, but he didn’t look at me at all. The disc he held glowed with a peculiar radiance, lighting up the passage ahead and behind without being blinding. He had his sunglasses off again.
“I want to know more about Cat,” I said after a moment of his silence. “Why did you apologize to Jen about him?”
Yejun’s gaze slid toward me before returning to the path, but he didn’t say anything.
Brynn muttered behind us, complaining about how endless the passage seemed. Heart chuffed companionably in response. Amber was far enough behind us that I couldn’t hear her, and only my connection with Nod told me she was still there.
“Because,” I explained to Yejun patiently, “He’s really cute, but I kind of want to tear him apart right now. I know not to trust nice-looking men, I really do know, but he seemed different. He seemed... kind.” I gnawed on my lip. “Is he hurting her somehow? Because if so, we have to do something.”
Yejun stopped and looked at me, his expression inscrutable even when Brynn bumped into him and complained loudly. After a second or two, he caught up with me.
“Sen was the wizard and Jen was her assistant, but they were also together. You know?” Yejun kicked a pebble down the passage. Brynn shut up abruptly. “I was only with them a few weeks before the demon inferno, and they’d picked up Cat around the same time. And it was cool at first. Sen talked about spending years teaching me after this Wild Hunt thing was over.” He laughed humorlessly. “I think she wanted to adopt me, like I was some little street urchin.”
I paced along beside him, bouncing on the balls of my feet. He’d never said so much at once before and I was afraid of where the story was going.
“It was different with Cat. He looks like he’s my age, but he’s... not, somehow.” He glanced at me again. “Maybe he’s like you, older than he looks. He moves kind of like you. But I don’t know. There was a... a thing between the three of them. I didn’t really want to know details. None of my business. As long as he didn’t mess up what I had going for me, I didn’t care. And Sen...” He shook his head. “She promised me it would be fine. That no matter what happened, she’d keep me with her. You don’t trust cute guys? I should know better than to trust anything that looks like it could be good. Anyhow, since Sen died, Jen has been even weirder about Cat. She’s told him Sen would be alive if he’d never showed up. She’s told him they’d both be dead, too. Like she wishes that was true.” He fell silent.
After a moment, I prompted, “And what does Cat do when she says this stuff?”
“What? Oh. He listens, he puts up with it. He loves her, I think.” Yejun shrugged, as if this was normal, as if what he’d said hadn’t hit me like a hammer.
I blinked rapidly. I wanted to run away suddenly, wanted the story to be over. I liked my love stories light and frothy, not full of blood and fire and grief. But I’d asked and now I had to listen.
Yejun went on. “He told me right after the fire that Sen contacted him as she was working her final magic. Told him to save Jen. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
I frowned, trying to work through this. “I don’t understand. How does she feel about him?” The corridor curved ahead of us and the sound of our footsteps changed subtly.
He sighed and closed his hand loosely over the light he cupped. His fingers made bars of shadow on the walls. “She’s not happy with him around, but when she gets all spooky, he’s the only one who can get through to her.”
“Yeah, but why did you tell him off?” I persisted.
Yejun turned and looked at me again, his eyes glinting. “You’re something else, you know that? I hung up on him because he’s not in any position to treat me like a little kid who’s pushing on the playground. Especially when the person I’m pushing is you.”
I stopped, staring at him. The light made the planes of his face stand out so that he looked not quite human. Except for his eyes, his face was impassive, like once again he wanted something from me. I swallowed and said, “Okay. Thanks for the answer.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you ever defend yourself?”
“Sometimes I break peoples’ arms,” I said distantly. “Wouldn’t help here. It’s okay. Let’s keep going.”
“Guys,” Brynn ventured cautiously. “We’re not in a cave anymore. Why is that?”
I looked around. The walls of the passage were smoother and more angular than they’d been before. The few protrusions were regular, rectangular.
“Bricks,” said Brynn, touching one with a single finger. “They’re walls. Concrete walls.”
Yejun closed his fingers more tightly over his glowing disc. I immediately noticed Amber’s luminous eyes behind us, which I still didn’t like. Then I realized that there was a very dim light spilling around a corner ahead of us.
I went toward it.
“AT?” said Yejun in the dark.
“What?” I said, stopping.
“You ow
e me a better answer sometime.” He brushed past me, the back of his hand touching the back of mine. The dim light faded until he went around the corner.
Brynn put her hand in mind and I instinctively pulled away. “Dammit,” she muttered. “Sorry. You don’t owe him anything, though.”
“I do,” I whispered. “He answered me.” Something about his response made me think he didn’t just want me to argue with him, he wanted me to win. But that was crazy. Nobody wanted to lose a fight. Nobody wanted to be wrong. Did they?
Behind us, Amber inquired, “Are we waiting to hear if he screams? Because I’m okay with that. He probably deserves to scream a bit.”
I shook my head and went around the corner, too. Yejun waited on the other side, looking down what was very clearly a corridor, poorly illuminated by a very distant hanging light.
“We’re still on the trail of the camera,” he observed.
“Did somebody move it?” I was bewildered.
“I don’t think so,” said Yejun slowly. “Send one of the dogs back the way we came, will you?”
Grim volunteered before I could ask, galloping back down the passage behind us. He ran for a solid minute, but the concrete walls did not become an earthen cave. Eventually, he came to a corner, dimly lit from the other side. When he peeked around the corner, in the distance, he saw a hanging light we’d never passed. It was enough to make even the happiest of my dogs whine and put his tail between his legs.
“The cave is gone,” I told Yejun flatly, and called Grim back to me. I was used to Backworld terrain being strange, but I’d never been trapped by it before. You were supposed to be able to get back to where you came by going backwards, right? But apparently not anymore.
“That’s what I figured,” he said. “It’s like we’re traveling through depth as well as breadth. Although I didn’t really expect a concrete hall to be on the far side of a forest.”
“The more fool you,” said Amber glumly.
Yejun frowned at Amber, then said to nobody in particular, “Why exactly is she with us? Do we need an annoying tagalong blond—”
It was Brynn who cut him off. “Because she knows Tia too. Right?” She shot a look at Amber.
Amber crossed her arms and leaned her hip against the wall. “Sure.” She made a show of studying her nails.
Brynn scowled at Amber, but only said, “See?”
Yejun squinted at Brynn. “How do you know? That wasn’t very convincing.”
Now it was Brynn’s turn to look uncomfortable. “She recognized Tia earlier. And Tia knew about her.”
“Tia seems to know a lot more about everybody than we know about her. It’s not really inspiring double the trust here.” Yejun turned and walked away down the corridor.
Grim stayed with me. All three dogs clustered close enough to trip me if I wasn’t careful. There was something wrong with the concrete hallway, something that worried Nod and Heart. It actually frightened Grim, who didn’t hesitate to fill my head with his anxiety. He thought the light from the fixture was the reversed shadow of something alive. He worried that it would make us sick somehow. He was afraid that it would devour us and what came out the other side would just be flesh on bones.
I might have laughed at him another time, but the image he shared of me walking around post-light was too disturbing. Me, as I looked in the mirror, just me. Except the image was imbued with the horrifying awareness that really, I was just raw meat clinging to bones, that any semblance of life was a dream, and the true me had been devoured by the secret behind the light.
My breath caught in my throat. Heart growled at Grim, then licked me. Whatever Grim sensed, she and Nod didn’t think it was that bad. Or that his vision was particularly likely.
After a minute, as if giving me a less than honest reassurance bothered him, Nod admitted Grim’s vision was basically already true. But Nod always thought like that. It was probably why he liked Amber so much.
“What’s wrong?” asked Brynn, looking at me curiously.
“She can probably sense where we’re going,” said Amber darkly.
“And where’s that?” Brynn demanded, looking between Amber and me.
“You’ll see.” Dramatic music failed to crash with Amber’s words, but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled all the same.
“Hey, come on! I don’t want to walk around this corner and strand you all in endless back hallway hell.” Yejun stood directly under the hanging fixture, looking back at us. I hurried after him and he started walking again as soon as we caught up.
We went around the corner.
Another long hallway stretched ahead of us, lit dimly by a distant, hanging fixture. The walls were bare concrete blocks, jutting out a handswidth here and there. As we walked down the hallway this time, Brynn counted her steps under her breath.
We went around the corner.
Another long hallway stretched ahead of us, lit dimly by a distant, hanging fixture. It looked exactly the same as the two hallways before.
My skin creeping, I stopped dead. Brynn brushed past me with her jaw set in an oddly familiar way. I wanted to catch her arm and draw her back before she got hurt, but I didn’t know why. Instead I walked close behind her, looking at the walls and the floor and smelling the dry and dusty scent of the concrete. The floor was poured cement with no cracks, no slab lines except at the corner itself.
We went around the corner, into more of the same hallway. Brynn stopped. “They’re the same length. We’re walking in circles.”
Yejun shook his head slowly. “I don’t think it’s circles. Spirals through this screwed-up place, maybe.”
“Evidence?” Brynn demanded. “Because I counted. You can count, too. You walk eighty-seven steps, turn right, walk eighty-seven steps, turn right, eventually you end up exactly where you started. Basic geometry.”
“Funny you should say ‘geometry’,” I muttered, but she was too busy glaring at Yejun to hear me.
Yejun looked annoyed. “The spell I cast says your camera bag is ahead of us. If I turn the other way, it’s behind me. If we were going in true circles, that wouldn’t be true. It’s just a trick, like the night was before.”
This time Amber walked past the rest of us, to a point halfway down the hall. She fished in her cleavage and pulled out a tube of lipstick. Opening it, she displayed it to us, announced, “Sinner Red,” and then carefully drew a smiley face on the wall. “Well? Come on.”
We went around the corner. Another long hallway stretched ahead of us, lit dimly by a distant, hanging fixture.
Yejun said, “See?” The wall Amber had drawn on looked unblemished.
“Let me see,” said Brynn and ran down the hall. “Hah,” she said, and the look she threw back at us burned. “Hah!”
We caught up with her and looked at the wall. The smiley face was gone, but in its place was a faint red smear, as if somebody had imperfectly cleaned up the graffiti.
“Hah what?” said Yejun. “It’s not the same. It’s exactly what I would have expected. Unless you think somebody is running ahead of us with a roll of paper towels.”
Brynn opened her mouth, hesitated, then turned toward Amber and held out her hand. “Sinner Red, please.”
Amber said, “Nuh-uh. You’re too young. What do you want to do?”
“Mark how many times we pass by.” Brynn drew a line with her finger beside the faded red smear. Amber shrugged and copied her with the lipstick, except she drew a stick figure instead.
“Now we keep going?” I encouraged, my fingers curled tight in Nod’s fur.
We went around the corner. Another long hallway stretched ahead of us, lit dimly by a distant, hanging fixture. The fixture was swaying gently, making the light move and twist. It had a texture that I could no more describe than I could describe a scent. I couldn’t remember if normal light had a texture, too. I’d never thought to look.
Acidly, Yejun said, “Maybe the fiend with the paper towel roll hit the light on his way through.”
As we watched, the swaying stopped. Only when it had stopped did we walk forward to inspect the Sinner Red smear. The second mark Amber had made was smeared now, too. This smear reached toward the first smear.
Humming under her breath, Amber made a third mark: a happy face with a question mark for a mouth. Then we kept walking.
Once again, the light fixture was swaying when we went around the corner. Nobody except me waited until it stopped swaying this time, setting out into the writhing light like they were unaware of the danger.
“What?” said Yejun, turning to look back at me. The light moved behind him like the bubbling of his tree of nodes and I averted my eyes.
“Nothing,” I lied, and moved forward. If the light attacked us, maybe that would at least be something to fight.
The third mark was a faded smear as well now, and the two previous smears had changed shape, crimson inkblots crawling across the wall toward each other. Amber pursed her mouth, turned the base of her lipstick to push up more color, and drew an EXIT sign. “Because why not?”
We went around the corner. The light fixture swayed as if somebody had just bumped it, and we ignored it. The EXIT drawing was just a smear, reaching toward where the other smears had merged into a single writhing bloodstain.
“Oh well,” said Amber. She drew a 5. We went around the corner.
The quivering light. The smear. 6. The walk. I stared at the cement floor and listened to each of our footsteps. Amber, Yejun, Brynn, Heart, Nod, Grim, me. Was there somebody else walking with us? Behind us?
The corner. The trembling light. The smear. Brynn caught Amber’s hand as she went to draw a 7 and said in a sick voice, “Don’t. Stop feeding it.”
All but the previous smear had merged into one now, and it was a different shape. There was a hint of a hand, a hint of a mouth.
“If we keep going, we’re going to get somewhere eventually, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Yejun flatly. “Brynn’s camera bag.”
Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3) Page 13