“You’ll just have to wait for whatever other indulgences you had planned, Cal. My day is booked. At least until I pass out and sleep a good ten hours.”
Behind her, she heard the Traveler grunt.
“That’s what you think,” he muttered.
She rolled her eyes, snorting a little.
She wasn’t lying about the spa.
She booked the same resort and spa every time she came here, and it wasn’t even all that cheap, not even by Los Angeles standards––not even for someone like her, who could afford to stay most places she wanted, due to the lucrative nature of her clubs.
Here, in the local currency, it cost a bloody fortune.
She didn’t care.
She didn’t mind splurging when she traveled, especially since she spent almost nothing when she was at home.
According to Jules, she was practically a monk.
Alexis paused on the not-trail, gazing up the hill.
They were pretty far from the tourist part of the island hill by then, not to mention all of the sprawling residential homes down below. Some of those were closer to mansions or estates than houses. Penang had a large and fairly wealthy expat community, in addition to the wealthy locals who made their homes here.
She could see it up ahead.
The gate was well-hidden, but she immediately recognized a number of landmarks: an enormous boulder that looked like a face, a fallen tree with three trees growing out of the side, a particular patch of reddish bushes.
A dense thicket of bamboo stood in front of the entrance to the gate itself.
It filled the narrow opening between broken sections of cliff, surrounded on both sides by piles of heavy granite and a darker slate.
There was literally nothing here, in terms of the outside.
There was also no way to distinguish that particular thicket of trees, rocks, and bamboo from any of the dozens of other, similar configurations they’d passed. This whole part of the mountain was dense with plant life of every kind, choking off the sun, as well as any real view either up or down the mountain.
She knew she was in the right place.
She could feel it.
Yet still, she hesitated.
“What is it?” he said, walking closer to her. “Is something wrong?”
She couldn’t really answer him.
“Do you see something?” he pressed. “Sense something?”
No, she didn’t see anything.
She didn’t really sense anything either.
It was a feeling.
It wasn’t even a Lightbringer feeling, where she legitimately picked up on something concrete, measurable. It was more of a ghost of a feeling, based on nothing at all.
It felt like a finger trailing lightly, maybe a quarter-inch off her spine.
There was nothing there.
She couldn’t actually feel anything.
She considered drawing a quick spell, seeing if she could discern more that way. At the very least, it should settle the question definitively about whether someone or something might be waiting for them.
The cave they wanted lived just on the other side of that bamboo thicket.
But she really couldn’t sense anything.
For the same reason, she found herself reluctant to use even a tiny portion of her magic on what was probably just jetlag mixed with paranoia.
Really, she didn’t want to use even a fraction of her strength until she knew whether or not they’d need it––certainly not on something so flimsy as a vague disquiet.
She was still run down.
She’d recharged some, but she wasn’t at full strength, and the jetlag didn’t help.
She was vulnerable, and she knew it.
Hesitating, she glanced at the Traveler.
“Do you feel anything?” she asked. “Any extra minds out here? Any foreign presences? Anything besides us and a handful of monkeys and snakes?”
The Traveler frowned.
“Snakes?” he muttered, glancing at the ground.
“Cal––”
“All right, all right.”
His eyes shifted back out towards the jungle. She watched as they slowly altered from a dark brown to a pale, jade green.
For a few seconds, she just watched him, nearly holding her breath.
“No,” he said, glancing at her. “I do not… feel anything.”
“No other minds?”
“No. That is what I answered.”
“No other presences? Or beings watching?”
“I answered that, too.”
She nodded, strangely reluctant to let it go.
In the end, she looked up at him again.
“Are you…” She hesitated. “…feeling anything else? You know. Like a premonition? Any kind of ‘gut’ feeling I should know about?”
He turned, staring at her for real, his expression harder.
“Gut feeling?” he said, quirking a dark eyebrow. “Explain gut feeling to me, Lightbringer, and I will tell you if I am experiencing it. Is that a special tingle in my lower intestine I’m supposed to pay attention to? A spell of gas? A difficulty in digestion? The hard-on I’ve had since we fucked the other night?”
He paused, studying her eyes.
“What am I supposed to be feeling, precisely?” he said. “Please tell me it involves that last thing… because, I admit, I’m beginning to obsess a little. I would very much like to watch you kiss my cock when we are next alone. Leisurely, if at all possible. With intent.”
Gritting her teeth, she shook her head.
“Never mind.”
She resumed walking up the hill.
She kept her attention on the bamboo thicket, still faintly annoyed, but feeling her muscles tense as they walked.
She found herself wishing she hadn’t sent all of their luggage ahead to the resort.
She should have brought the case with her swords, at least.
She did have her whip, mostly because it had been on her person when they rode on the plane. She’d had it coiled up in a special, protective bag in her backpack, but the rest of it––the guns, the swords, a knife she’d brought with her from home––all of that had to go through baggage claim, after she’d declared each item and displayed permits.
Really, she should have hired a private plane.
If there hadn’t been a Penang flight so soon after she realized they needed to go there, she probably would have. As it was, they’d been able to leave almost immediately from her home to L.A.X. once she’d packed up her weapons and a small roller-bag with clothes and other things she thought they might need.
She’d told herself this was just a scouting mission.
Now, remembering her last night in Los Angeles at the Old Zoo, she found herself wondering why she’d let herself frame it in that way.
She should have come out here better prepared.
It seemed the Traveler was thinking along the same lines.
“You didn’t happen to bring a gun, did you?” he muttered. “Any explosives?”
He walked closer to her now, virtually shadowing her steps as they approached the dense thicket of bamboo.
She didn’t bother to answer.
Reaching the line of hard stalks, she pushed one of the thick ones to the side.
Even entering between the stalks had a sort of map to it, a certain order and sequence that allowed it to work without her being locked out, or even stuck halfway.
Lowering her head below that heavy piece of bamboo, she turned her body sideways and slid through, giving the Traveler a bare glance before she disappeared into the dark.
“Follow me exactly,” she told him. “If you don’t, you could get lost in here. Even I might not be able to find you if that happens.”
His mouth twisted in a frown.
He didn’t argue, or even scoff at her warning.
He didn’t roll his eyes.
Instead, his expression remained nearly hard, his now-dark eyes inscrutable.
She waited for him to nod, to show he understood.
Once he had, she stepped the rest of the way through to the bamboo maze.
21
The Cave
Darkness descended within seconds of her beginning to make her way through the thick stalks. She moved almost solely using muscle memory, via instinct, sliding right, then left, the forward, moving under and around the biggest stalks of bamboo.
She felt the Traveler behind her.
His fingers even brushed her once or twice, as if he feared losing her in the maze of thick bamboo trunks.
She’d never timed how long it took to make it through the opening.
Something about the primary portal felt timeless… as if even just being this close to it meant she’d stepped into a non-dimensional, no-time space, something that didn’t really have distances, or seasons, or a time of day, or even a solid mooring on Earth.
When she reached the other side of the bamboo, it was pitch dark.
This part, she remembered to prepare for.
Before the resort’s chauffeured car drove away with all of their luggage, Alexis dug out her silver Zippo lighter, the one with the Anubis head etched on the surface.
Now she pulled it out of her back jeans pocket, and flicked it open, using her thumb to ignite the fuel-soaked wick.
Once the flame flickered in the darkness of the cave, she looked around, reacquainting herself with the contours of the shadowy space.
The size of it always surprised her.
The ceiling stretched up to around twelve feet just past the bamboo-covered opening.
She knew from experience that several other caves could be reached through that bamboo thicket; in fact, she’d woven spells to enhance the disorienting quality of the bamboo, to make it significantly more likely anyone who wasn’t her would end up in one of those other caves, and not in the entryway of this one.
While potentially interesting to a casual hiker, those other caves were unremarkable to anyone who knew what lived out here.
Warm and dry, they each sank maybe forty feet into the mountain, with a number of old-looking paintings on the wall that Alexis painted herself, hoping it might get any casual explorers to take a few photos, then leave.
So far, she was pretty sure no one had even gotten that far, not in the almost fourteen months since the main portal had relocated here.
She had supernatural tripwires set up, as well, that would have informed her if anyone came within a hundred feet of the bamboo-covered entrance, then a few dozen more alarms set up at various spots closer in.
The outer perimeter had only been tripped once, and she was pretty sure it had been by some kind of wild pig, or possibly a dog.
She had the sensitivity rate set to larger animals, mostly so she wouldn’t get freaked out every time a bird flew near the portal, or a snake slithered over that part of the woods, or a mouse or mongoose ventured into the bamboo, looking for something to eat.
Anything that set off her alarm had to weigh at least forty pounds.
That even crossed off most small dogs, as well as cats, foxes, most monkeys.
It would, however, pick up a number of larger dogs, not to mention some goats and other domestic animals that might wander up here, and yes, a fully-grown pig… or a human.
So it could have been a human.
If it was, that was as close as they got before something turned their head, and they wandered off in the other direction.
Given the number of repelling spells she’d put over this whole area, it could have been anything, really, even a fae or a vampire.
All of them should have been turned away by her spells, unless they’d known exactly where they were going, exactly what they were looking for, exactly who guarded it and how… and they’d taken supernatural precautions.
She suspected it had been human, though.
Or maybe a dog.
It could have been a dog.
Pushing all of that from her mind, she saw the torch stuck in the bracket on the wall and walked over to it. Using her Zippo light to ignite the end, she clicked the lighter shut, shoving it in her back pocket as she raised the torch high.
Glancing behind her, she saw the Traveler looking around the cave, obvious interest in his eyes.
Runes covered the walls in front of them––more magic, but in this case, not hers.
Whoever built the original gates put their own set of spells over the portals.
Alexis had always been curious about this, about whoever wrote those symbols, or drew the paintings, or made the mosaics she sometimes found in these places.
It was strange to her, how old they looked.
She almost wondered if here, on Earth, the portals rotated among locations that were much, much older than she’d ever been told.
“This is the primary portal?” he murmured, looking at her.
She nodded, frowning a little.
“Not right here, obviously,” she said. “But yes.”
Was he questioning that? Really?
“Does it not feel different to you?” she said. “Compared to the portals you traverse? To me, the primaries always feel different.”
He nodded back, slowly, glancing at her again from where he examined a painting on the ceiling. That one depicted a dark orange and blue sun, split down the middle with a flaming line. She’d probably looked at it five times before she realized that line was a sword.
“Yes,” he said, after that pause. “It does feel different.”
“Have you been to a primary before?” she said, still watching him, seeing something in his face, something she found herself trying to interpret. “In other dimensions, I mean. On other worlds. Have you been to one of the primary gates?”
That time, he gave her a real look, his eyes pale in the torchlight, almost colorless.
“No,” he said.
His voice held that strange note again.
She frowned, wanting to ask, but not certain what she would ask.
In the end, she brushed it off, stepping forward into the cave.
While it opened up here, just past the bamboo, there were a number of narrow crevices off the main entryway––six in total.
More confusion for anyone unauthorized venturing in here.
Without hesitation, Alexis aimed her feet for the one second from the left.
Holding the torch a little higher and in front of her, she slid sideways into the crevice and began to wind her way through the narrow passageway beyond.
A few yards further, there was an even more narrow opening.
The crevice was tall––it stretched maybe thirty feet up, over her head.
At the same time, it remained relatively narrow all the way through, especially around turns and curves that appeared after she’d been walking maybe fifteen or twenty steps. In parts, it narrowed down to only a few feet wide, which was fine for just her body and clothes, but more tricky when she carried things in here.
It had been part of the reason she’d opted not to bring her swords.
When considering whether to take the swords and scabbards out of their padded case, or let them travel on to the resort on the north end of the Penang coast, Alexis had been thinking about this cave, and what a pain in the ass they’d been the last time.
She remembered having to angle herself just right to get through the passage.
Of course, some of that had been the heavy backpack she’d worn.
Even now, she was conscious of the bag hanging from her shoulders, but she’d made a point of not filling it too much, of sticking only with bare necessities.
The Traveler was significantly more broader-shouldered than her, and significantly taller, but he wore nothing but the expensive-looking, tailored suit.
Even so, when she glanced back at him, he was looking down at a black mark on the light fabric of his suit from the walls, scowling a little.
She smirked, in spite of herself.
“Not sure where you though
t we were going, Traveler, that you’d wear a suit more fitting for a polo match or a neocolonial garden party.”
He made a dismissive noise, looking at her.
“I suppose I should have taken my cue from your horribly unflattering, dig in the dirt outfit,” he said, his tone somewhere between derisive and annoyed. “But I’m still not clear how I, as a non-native to this world, am supposed to distinguish the appropriate clothing to wear from the varieties you’ve shown me so far, Lightbringer… considering you wore one of your sex-madam outfits into the woods when we were still in Los Angeles.”
She rolled her eyes, but didn’t bother to respond.
Still, she tried to remember what she wore that night.
Sex madam? That was a bit of a stretch.
Focusing her attention forward, she calculated how far they’d already wound into the hill. Some part of her mind had been counting steps, even in her annoyance at the Traveler.
Pulling her whip off her belt, she held it behind her as she continued to hold the torch up and forward, to light their way through the narrow ribbon through the black and gray rock.
Even though she’d been here a number of times before, she still managed to be startled when the space opened.
The crevice ended, and she found herself in a maybe twelve feet wide by six feet long shelf of rock overlooking what she knew to be a deep canyon.
Even as she thought it, she held up the hand gripping her coiled whip, making a line of her arm to keep her companion behind her.
“Careful, Traveler,” she warned him. “Don’t fall off the edge.”
He came to a stop at her words, right behind her outstretched arm.
Then both of them were looking out over the canyon inside the hill.
It bewildered her as much now as the first time she’d seen it.
All of the resting places for the main portals had been bizarre, but this might be the weirdest one she had seen since she began this work.
Below the ledge of rock where they stood, a steep drop brought the floor of the cave down another hundred and fifty, possibly two hundred feet.
The area should have been pitch black, but a lake stood there, in the middle of the cave, filled with phosphorescent creatures that made the water glow a pale blue. The light illuminated the area directly surrounding the lake, but also reflected off the shiny, black, volcanic stone of the cave’s ceiling and walls, shedding a faint light over all of it, and allowing them to see the entire dimensions of the enormous cavern.
Lightbringer: An Enemies to Lovers Urban Fantasy with Demons, Portals, Witches, Renegade Gods, & Other Assorted Beasties (Light & Shadow Book 1) Page 16