All Things Wicked

by Karina Cooper

New Seattle cops wrecked anyone caught lighting fires, even for warmth. Down in the bowels of the city, the police didn’t care all that much if a family froze to death in the winter. But God forbid the wealthy upper city burned.

  Her fists clenched, and she tucked them hard against the wall as Caleb watched whatever claimed his attention around the corner.

  He was a pale blur in her watering vision, and she still couldn’t ignore how badly her guts twisted up at the sight of him.

  How long had she nursed a crush?

  At least two years. Since the day he’d shown up at Curio’s side, a serious-faced witch with cool blue eyes. Juliet had been twenty-three and high on the coven master’s promises of family. Of commitment and safety and home.

  Caleb had been quiet and cold, even then.

  Two long, bloody years later, and nothing had changed. Except, she reflected, throat aching around a sudden stricken knot, all the family she’d ever known was gone. Dead, disappeared, or worse. And it was all Caleb Leigh’s fault.

  Alicia’s words floated through her mind. She doesn’t know?

  Of course she did. Everyone knew how Caleb Leigh had turned against them.

  “Move it,” he whispered, then vanished around the corner. His shadow danced across the walls, a wicked flicker in gray and black as she hurried up the stairs, wincing with every creak and groan of rotting wood.

  The room was empty of all but Caleb, crouched by a fire pit hastily dug in the center of the eroded floor and circled by broken slabs of mortar and concrete. He rose, features expressionless as he studied the gaping hole that was all that remained of one wall. His fingers glistened, damp from the drink he’d dipped them in, and he gestured at the abandoned mug by his feet. “He’ll be back,” he said brusquely. “Drink’s still warm. Grab that light and let’s go.”

  “Can you—” She swallowed as he tipped his head toward her, his mouth tight with impatience. The firelight painted everything over in radiant orange, colored the lurid bruises marring his face into vivid welts. Purple and red and angry and so raw, it hurt to look at. She squared her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “You’re concerned?” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t be. Let’s go.”

  It wasn’t as if they had much of a choice. Still, his casual dismissal stung, and she turned away before he noticed her disappointment. And her exhaustion.

  She found the flashlight he indicated, discarded on an end table whose finish had long since peeled away to a cracked, gray shell. She palmed it neatly, watched him pick up a rough denim jacket discarded on the floor. He slid it on, and if she hadn’t been watching, she would have missed his flinch.

  So he did actually feel pain. Only human, huh?

  Yeah, right.

  He strode out through the jagged hole, buttoning the jacket as he went. Shadows lapping at his heels, the devastated tomb swallowed him as completely as if he’d walked off the face of the world.

  With a last frown at the yawning black void that had been their prison, she hurried after him.

  Shapes rose alien and menacing in the shadows cast by the campfire’s orange flicker. It seemed that her footsteps clattered in the pressing silence, that every inhale and exhale rasped and echoed back at her until it became a rickety hiss of sound and motion. She caught herself holding her breath as she stepped over the slimy, moss-ridden stones of what had probably been some kind of street or sidewalk. It was impossible to tell now.

  Fifty and some odd years of neglect had only aggravated what a world-changing earthquake and massive flooding had started.

  To look at it now, it was hard to imagine the chaos, the sheer hell that had overwhelmed a once-thriving city. Five decades had worn the worst of the cavity to a dull edge, helped along by industrious rich people who had built a new city right on top of the half-eaten ruins of the old. They’d planted a few thousand columns, paved over the whole damned thing. It was a solution, of sorts.

  A Band-Aid.

  The lucky ones got to live within the walls of the new metropolis. Rumors and stories whispered of the unlucky ones, the people trapped outside the new city’s walls to be hunted down, torn apart by the things that existed between the remaining cities of the world.

  She didn’t know what was true, she’d never been outside the guarded walls. She’d never met anyone who had. She knew there were other cities, and that heavy transports moved between them—how else could goods be imported in?—but that was all she knew.

  As far as she could tell, it was all anyone down in the layered city was allowed to know.

  Old Seattle existed somewhere in between the real world and the old. It was a cesspit of forgotten legacies, secure behind the city walls and all but alive with history and, she’d always felt, malicious hunger—dying to feed on the corpses of the unwary.

  The coven lost witches every year to the ruins. Carelessness, sheer rotten luck; it didn’t take much.

  Juliet looked back again, dragging her free hand through her sweat-damp hair and out of her face. The fire left untended behind them shone like a beacon, practically a comet in the vast emptiness. If they were true to old habits, the witches wouldn’t risk the light if they were anywhere even close to the roads that led up to the city proper.

  They were deep, then. Deep enough that they could light fires and set up shop, sloppy though it was.

  The light dogged their footsteps until Caleb jerked to a halt, seized her arm, and yanked her into a side alley. She stumbled over chunks of loose rubble and found her back pressed against cold cement, her palms splayed over hard, denim-clad muscle. It was a thin barrier. The heat of his body worked its way through his stolen jacket, and for a shuddering moment, she couldn’t think of anything but how cold her hands and feet were. How cold her extremities had been since she’d woken up in a grimy basement.

  How cold all of her had been for too many long, empty months.

  His body was warm and hard and strong against hers, and as she opened her mouth, he slid one hand over it, murmuring a wordless warning.

  Her breath caught in her chest. She couldn’t see anything but the faintest impression of his silhouette, his angled jaw tilted to the side as he studied something, listened for something somewhere out in the black and barren ruin.

  His elbows hemmed in her shoulders, caging her between them. His long legs braced hers, his chest rose and fell against her own in slow, rhythmic breaths that only pushed a slow, rhythmic—oh, God, an all too familiar burn to the juncture of her thighs.

  She swallowed, opening her mouth again to complain. To protest. Her lips rasped against his callused palm and he froze.

  She forgot how to breathe as Caleb turned his head. Forgot how to think as his breath warmed over her cheek. She didn’t have to hear it to know his breathing hitched; she felt it in the startled catch of his chest against hers. Felt it in the sudden slam of his heart.

  Echoed in her own.

  Her lips moved again. Shuddering, her lower lip brushed his palm on words she couldn’t form, and the hand splayed against the wall beside her head shifted. Slowly, so lightly that she wasn’t sure if she imagined it, the side of his fingers skimmed the curve of her cheek. Ghosted over her jaw.

  His gaze gleamed in the faint light, chips of diamond. Unreachable. Unreadable.

  Had she ever seen them warm?

  Once, breathed a traitorous sigh deep in her body. Once, they’d caught fire. Just for her.

  She shoved at his chest with a low, raw sound. He let her go, released her as easily as if she hadn’t just shivered under his touch. His weight shifted, drew away even as he lowered his head to whisper, “The guard came back. Keep the flashlight close, but not on. Can you keep up?”

  She’d die before she admitted to anything else. “You’re the handicap,” she muttered, struggling to sound as calm and unaffected as he was.

  The bastard.

  In the diminishing light, his teeth flashed. A smile? A scowl? She didn’t know. She gripped the flashlight in her fist as he turn
ed and whispered, “Hold on to my coat. We’re moving fast.”

  Juliet grabbed a handful of the jacket. “How will you see?”

  “Better than average night vision,” he said matter-of-factly, and eased into a jog.

  Before they’d taken twenty steps, she realized that concentrating on not tripping over rotting city would take more energy than she was sure she had. After only five minutes, Caleb was running in a smooth, easy cadence and she was struggling to breathe.

  Within ten long, interminably slow minutes, she was ready to beg for mercy. She clenched her teeth and kept up.

  She didn’t know how long they ran. At some point, Caleb slowed, asked her for the flashlight, and took off again, the thin light paving his way. Her breath rasped through her dry throat, rough as chalk, and her lungs seized as every breath tore through her right side. The cramp locked barbed hooks under her rib and made every step a newfound riot of torture.

  She jumped, climbed, sidled, and jogged until she thought she was caught in a nightmare, an endless stream of rocky, slimy, treacherous, rubble-strewn road. It was all she could do to focus on putting one foot in front of the other until he finally stopped.

  Her numbed fingers fell from his stolen jacket. Juliet sank to her knees and bent over nearly double, gasping for air. The ends of her damp hair clung to her lashes, her face, and she wheezed as she scraped it back with shaking, sweaty fingers.

  “Never,” she panted, “again . . . Ever. Would rather . . . die.”

  Caleb said nothing.

  The light skated over piles of fallen, decomposing timber and jagged edges of rusted metal. A fetid smell punctuated the air, like things left too long in the rain and musty air. Flesh and bone; wood and decay.

  Dragging the sleeve of her jacket over her forehead, she staggered to her feet as Caleb braced himself against a moldering wall. He was flushed, at least. Sweaty and as breathless as she was.

  Small favors.

  “Where are we?” she finally asked when she could manage it.

  He hesitated, swinging the flashlight back the way they’d come. “Somewhere near the trench.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Listen. You can just barely hear the water.”

  Juliet stared at him. At his outline, just a glimmer behind the light. True to his word, the faintest whisper hovered just out of auditory reach; a trace of sound that felt like pressure. Like depth and motion and— “Oh. Oh, Jesus. That means we’re . . . We’re going to die.”

  “Relax.”

  “Don’t you tell me—!” Juliet caught herself, clipping off hysteria before the world around her got any more sharp and shiny at the edges. “Being lost this far into the ruins is as good as a death sentence,” she said tightly, fingers curling into aching fists. “You know this.”

  After the fault had opened up under the city, the Old Sea-Trench had eaten away at the abandoned carcass long after the aftershocks stopped. The place was a death trap then. Fifty years later, it was suicide. Pitfalls, loose ledges, nature’s own booby traps had claimed more than one explorer over the years.

  Every so often, the occasional tremor still rumbled through the fault. Sometimes, more shifted, fell over, or crumbled. The trench bottom was a rushing river of glacier-fed water, and she didn’t want to be just another body washed down the fault line.

  “Relax,” he repeated. “We’re not dead yet.”

  Exhaustion knocked on her skull. She dragged her hands through her hair. “Okay,” she said after a deep breath. Much, much calmer. She could do this. “How do we get back?”

  “Not sure.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I’m working on it.” He straightened as she closed the distance, his expression shadowed and wary. Forcing her brain to override her feet, Juliet spun before she could do whatever it was her body had intended. Slap him. Push him.

  Throw herself at him and beg to be comforted.

  He didn’t touch her. God help him if he tried. Anger warred with fatigue and left her feeling that the dark glittered hungrily around her, like some kind of starving crevasse.

  “Fine,” she managed. There. Civil.

  He clicked off the light. “Sit. Rest. We’ll set off again soon.”

  “I don’t want to rest,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut as the thick web of shadow threatened to smother her. Her voice tightened. “I want to get back to civilization.”

  “Rest anyway. If you collapse—”

  “If I collapse,” she cut in, aware that she was talking through her teeth, that she was being unreasonable and whiny and so beyond caring, “you’ll have one less worry, won’t you?”

  Silence met her accusation, flung with wild, angry precision. She couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him, damn it, she couldn’t see him.

  And in the suffocating dark, Juliet felt abandoned. Isolated. Completely and terribly alone.

  Fear.

  “Look.” Caleb hesitated, barely a fraction of a second, then said crisply, “You’re going to have to get it together. If you panic, I’m going to leave you behind.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  His voice thinned. “Wouldn’t I?”

  It was as if he’d pushed her off some indefinable edge. Everything in Juliet’s body, her mind, spilled free. The fury—terror!—battering at her control cracked, and it seemed as if she watched someone else wearing her skin turn and launch herself in the direction of that so calm voice.

  As if it wasn’t her body that collided with his, her voice that strangled on a sound shredded from a throat gone tight and raw.

  Caleb caught her, but not easily. He deflected her, struggled to grab her shoulders, her arms, cursing in surprise and warning and staggering as she battered at him. As she twisted her fingers into claws and sobbed something that didn’t make it into real words, his back flattened against the wall. His boots scrabbled for purchase amid the rocks that crumbled at their feet.

  Something cracked. Juliet hoped it was bone—she would have settled for his thick head. Then the world tilted on its axis. Vertigo slammed home as Caleb’s arms tightened around her, and the weak cement crumbled into nothing behind them.

  They toppled as she screamed.

  Chapter Four

  Air rushed past her ears, air and darkness and screams that echoed from all sides. It seemed as if she hung forever, trapped and falling all at the same time, her fingers somehow twisted in his jacket.

  Juliet didn’t have time to think. Didn’t have time to watch her life play through the projector of her mind. One wide hand wrapped around the back of her head and Caleb’s voice roared by her ear, “Inhale!”

  She managed to open her mouth, to reverse the flow of air from an endless scream to a breath sucked into her burning lungs as the rushing sound grew louder and louder.

  Between one second and the next, air turned to ice and she gasped as they plunged into the frozen river at the bottom of the trench. Caleb’s jacket wrenched out of her grip.

  Bubbles streamed around her face, mind spinning wildly as the cold sucked every ounce of warmth from her body. It stole her breath, her thought, her ability to move. Her memory. The current wrapped liquid fingers around her limbs and dragged her tumbling downriver.

  Was this how she’d die? Sucked into the icy currents and thrown against some desolate shore miles away?

  Juliet flailed. She forced her eyes open as her lungs burned for air, thrashed and fought through water that seemed thick and viscous from cold. Water filled her ears, her mouth and nose, her skin, and she struggled to kick her booted feet. To climb through layers upon layers of freezing currents until finally, thank God, her head broke through the surface.

  Lungs burning, she sucked in air, choked on a mouthful of water and thrashed as a cresting swell sloshed over her head. The flow moved too fast to see anything in the near dark, and she didn’t tread water so much as force herself to float on the top, to not fight as she relearned how to breathe.

  “Caleb!” Th
e white-capped rush of icy water swallowed the sound, threw it back at her in taunting, muffled echoes. She caught a mouthful of water, choked again, sobbing.

  It was as if she floated in freezing, weightless nothing; a void of sensory deprivation so intense that it took her breath away. She fought the current—didn’t she? She could feel herself thinking about it, but she couldn’t shape the words in her head.

  Swim. Stay afloat.

  Rest.

  Something closed around her ankle. She barely managed a breath before her head slid beneath the surface, hands grasping at nothing. The river pulled at her, fought to keep her, and the grip tightened to near pain.

  Then another anchor, an iron band laced around her upper arm, and she gasped as it yanked her back to the surface. Panting, she couldn’t fight it as she was bodily hauled through the vigorous tide. She slammed against something hard, garbled a protest as jagged rock grated against her chest, her cheek. Maybe it hurt. How could she tell?

  Sobbing with every breath, all she could do was cling to the cliff face, heaving up what bits of the river she managed to inhale.

  “Don’t fight me, I’ve got you.”

  Caleb’s voice, soothing at her ear. He curled one arm around her ribs, under her breasts, as secure a hold as she’d ever known in her life. It didn’t squeeze. He only held her, solid support against the current.

  Juliet sobbed in relief. The river pulled at her, swirled around her waist, but he wedged her tightly between his braced legs and let her tremble. Let her cling to the cliff wall and pull herself together.

  It was harder than it should have been.

  When her panting sobs had eased to hiccups, and then to forced calm, she realized that his left hand hooked into a crevice, fingers twisted just so to provide an organic clasp. His arm extended, a mottled line in the dark and so taut that she knew it had to hurt. The other still splayed at her ribs, fingers tight. His hips braced hers against the wall, his chest warmed her back even in the cold water.

  She couldn’t help herself. Adrenaline and fear drained out of her like a sigh, leaving her empty and exhausted and so cold that it hurt to think, much less move. She let her head fall back against his shoulder. Weary to the bone, her eyes drifted closed.