by A. J. Aalto
“I can’t share everything with anyone,” I said on a sad laugh. “That would be disastrous.”
“Is this?”
I considered Malashock's record with the preternatural and put a knuckle against my pursed my lips. “Probably, yeah. But if things get bad enough that telling you won't make it worse, I will.”
“That's not exactly reassuring.”
“We should decide on a plan. What’s Plan A? What’s Plan B? We should have ten plans, just in case.” I did some counting on my fingers. “I'll take the vowels, you do the consonants. We only need to come up with stuff up to Plan J.”
She jingled her overloaded belt at me in answer. “Our plan should be: contact the feds and get paperwork signed and stamped before entering a protected zone, then dust the vamps. I don’t know why the fuck that’s not the plan.”
“Because I promised Ludovic. No dusting.”
“I should call the PUC.”
“You mean like this?” I cupped my hands around my mouth and stage-whispered, “Hey, Nyquist, I’m being a very bad girl. Come out and spank me with a rolled up Form A-6409-slash-J.”
“Hush,” Malashock said suddenly. “Did you hear that?”
I was familiar with a whole variety pack of darknesses, but something was unusual about this one. It was more than the weight of the stone and earth above or the close, moist air. The shadows had opinions here. Eyes that calculated from a distance, mouths that parted to taste our passing like cats drawing more scent. I turned on my headlamp, but all that did was highlight the hanging mist that choked the space. Nyquist said that boggles lurked just below the surface of the mud — were they seeing us through it? Were boggles causing the ripples in the walls? Something let out a long croak, like a toad stuck in a vise. I was engulfed by unease, followed by the rush of cold fever-chills and sudden faintness. My heart galloped, and I forgot how to breathe.
Hood’s training kicked in, and without thinking I turned to bolt. I only got a two steps before Malashock snagged the strap on my fanny pack.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Helping!”
“That’s running away. There’s no running away in monster hunting.”
“There is when I do it!” I cried.
“Freeze!” She pointed her Maglite at me, momentarily blinding me. “Monster hunters never flee.”
“I’m a rebel, though. I do it my own way. And my way is currently in that direction,” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder as I squinted through the rain and the glare of her flashlight. She didn’t look like she was buying it. “My methods have saved my life a hundred percent of the time. I know people who can’t say the same.”
Her answer was a long sigh.
“Fine, we’re going in,” I said. “But if I get goobered on, you’re washing my hair when we get home.”
Malashock approached the crack in the shale for a second time, leaving me waddling behind her across the rolling, muddy pebbles and gritty sand in my Keds like a kid sister tagging along.
“I didn’t mean to flee,” I whispered at the back of her head. “It was an accident.”
She shot back, “Sounds like you have that accident a lot.”
I let her get a little further ahead of me so I could make faces at her in the dark. We returned to the sour mist emanating from the mouth of the crevice in the rock face. I poked Malashock in the lower back to indicate that she should go ahead and take point.
“I’ve got your back,” I whispered.
“You’ve got my nothing.”
“Fine. Play hard to get.”
She sidled towards the breach, not making a sound as she slipped through. In the spotty moonlight, the fracture in the shale glittered with crystalline speckles. I didn’t hear or see any sign of the thing that had made that guttural, hair-raising croak, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still lurking within the rift.
I was just about to suggest we leave and come back never when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket, startling me into a high-pitched squeal. Liv stepped out of the cave again and let her head fall back as she scoured the night sky for her patience. Fumbling for my phone, I turned off everything, so that wouldn’t fuck with us in the caves. I thumbed the screen to check the message.
Wes. Have wtf-type visitors. Glen & Ghaz. Rum Runner disappeared. No Z. Ghaz asking Harry for sanctuary; scared shitless. Glen says trust no one — you’re being led down the wrong path. More than one person lying to you
Harry had a full house. Glen and Ghaz? If Ghazaros was faking vulnerability and a need for sanctuary to get close to Harry again, both Glen and Wes would know it. Where the hell were his buddies Zorovar and Rotten Roy? Wes could suss that out, too, if Ghaz knew the answer. The urge to rush home snagged me in the gut, but I reminded myself that Harry was older than Ghaz, and if he needed to haul out some preternatural whoop-ass, he could manage his own fights without me. Led down the wrong path.
I refrained from flicking my gaze to Malashock, but on the inside, my suspicion ratcheted up a notch. I knew Nyquist to be a liar, but if he wanted to work for the PUC, he had to be; lycanthropes weren’t trusted in the workplace. There was every chance Malashock and Nyquist were both lying to me. I could only afford to trust Malashock to a point. When I put my phone away, I also removed my gloves and put them in my pockets.
If the source of the revenant shenanigans was in this cave, and I was getting close enough to panic House Sarokhanian, and Strickland was safe with Harry, then I needed to go forward, not back.
I looked up to find Malashock scowling impatiently. Then she made a series of mystifying hand gestures. I supposed they were SWAT signals, but I didn’t speak that language. I showed her a few of my own flittering hand motions, none of which meant a thing. I might have been calling for a sacrifice bunt for the office softball team.
She mouthed, watch my six.
I gave her a double thumbs-up. She shook her head at me and stepped into the dark rift.
Thirty-One
A few steps further along, and the sound of rocks falling brought us to an abrupt stop.
“Just... hold on,” she whispered, turning off the Maglite. My headlamp was useless, serving only to brighten the mist and muddy our view; reluctantly, I turned it off as well. We waited, listening. Thunder rolled in the distance, but when it faded, the silence was filled with soft noises. There were weaker croaks now, and some moist clicking noises, and deep within the cave another light flickered, illuminating moisture and mud.
“I’m warning you,” I whispered, “one jump-scare and I’m gonna pee down my leg into my shoes. Then we’re trading shoes.”
“They won’t fit me.”
“All the more reason for you to turn on the fucking flashlight.”
Malashock set our unused bolt cutters down to keep her hands free. “Let’s keep going, nice and slow.”
When goosebumps tripped up the back of my neck, a sudden invasion of cold discomfort, I knew better than to slow down. Skin crawling, I slipped my compact out of my back pocket with an economy of cautious movement, peeking into the glass. About twenty feet behind us, the shadows were thicker along the rock face, shifting without noise. Boggles and goblins and ghoulies, oh my. My heart hammered and my hands felt clammy, and though I tried to control my physical reactions, not wanting to give any nearby revenants a reason to salivate, my body was reporting that when it came to the fight, flight, or freeze options, it wanted to flee. It very much wanted to flee. I am being hunted, it told me. My fear cast chills through my chest, but in typical Baranuik style, it also awoke a far more dominant reaction. In spite of my fear, I felt a spike of stubbornness rush in to push back against the dark unknown.
I am the fucking predator, I told my body, forcing myself to stop in my tracks. I turned to face the shadows.
Nothing. Just the slit in the rock and the sand and the rainy night beyond. It was probably just my imagination that the crevice looked narrower than it had before. I turned and caught up to Malashock at a
three-pronged fork in the tunnel.
Behind us, the storm was building, but muffled now by distance and stone. To the left, twenty feet in, a lantern flickered on the ground next to a pile of plain grey rocks. Ahead was nothing but pitch black. From the right, there was a soft noise and a row of doorways that seemed familiar; it looked an awful lot like where Rotten Roy had taken my hand and led me to the windowless cellar speakeasy of the Blind Tiger.
I stared down that hall for a long beat, reassured by the fleeting familiarity of it. But that was a trick of the mind; I had felt safe, but I had never truly been safe. I was only remembering the feeling of security that Roy had manufactured, and not the truth. I had been lulled, seduced into trusting him, and too easily at that.
Malashock gasped, and Roy was promptly forgotten.
The thing that slunk out from the dark corridor ahead made my brain stutter and stall. Sleek grey skin covered it from sagging jowls to folds of belly. I swallowed the dread that wanted to rampage through my veins, narrowly avoided wetting my pants, and studied each detail closely with a biologist’s eye. Mud Goblin, my brain offered, recalling Nyquist’s notes, but I didn’t have time to process my first sight of that before the next creature materialized.
This new shape, hulking, rose from behind the goblin. Mud cascaded from its haunches and sluiced down the wall it was emerging from, sucking around the emerging limbs. Covered in grey and black layers of pebbles and shells which clicked together as it moved, the thing kept rising out of the mud, bigger than I’d expected. This was not the dull, stony species of Blind Shale Boggle that Nyquist had described, but a much larger and gnarlier variety, bull-headed and broad-shouldered, with massive jaws; it was something I had no name for. Maybe nobody did. It opened its huge, frog-like mouth, shot forward with startling dexterity, and latched onto the slimy goblin head-first. The Mud Goblin flailed its arms wetly, hanging from the creature’s mouth. The goblin's cries sounded like sandblasting and wet gravel being stomped on.
“That thing looks like an appetizer,” I warned. “I hope we’re not the main course.”
Liv grabbed me by the elbow and hauled me down the lantern-lit corridor to the left, choosing light as if it promised safety. Shaking, we bolted behind an empty, moldy shelf. “Quick, shape-shift into something more useful.”
“What? Shape-shifting wasn’t part of the plan.”
“We didn’t have a plan beyond finding this Exile phantasm and moving him,” she said, and the Blue Sense nailed her as a liar. I did my best not to react on my face, even as my heart hammered. Moving him was not what Malashock had in mind, but I would deal with that after she helped me find him. Liv glared at me. “Now shift.”
“Pardon me, your royal fuckness,” I whispered harshly in the near dark. “I can’t just shift on command.”
“Well, try.” She squinted to look beyond me, her Maglite playing down the tunnel. “And hurry up, that thing back there looked hungry.”
“Probably powering up on another goblin-kabob.” I unzipped my fanny pack and threw a few handfuls of turkey jerky back down the tunnel the way we’d come. Hopefully, that would distract the big whatever-it-was for a little while. Feed the sightless shale.
Ludovic and I made a good team, I thought. I should have brought him in here, not that he would have ever agreed to that level of involvement without a serious promise of major gains. Would have been cool, though.
I sniffed the air. The tunnel had a faint fragrance of sour milk. I added distractedly, “Hey, do you smell something?”
“Mud. Animal shit.” She scowled. “I dunno. Something.”
“Yeah, we definitely took a turn down Bad Shit Happens Boulevard, here, bestie,” I told her, keeping my voice low, spinning in a full circle. “I don’t think that’s boggles, though. Sulphur and sour milk.”
“More smuggled cheese?” she murmured, double checking the hall behind us to make sure the big, ugly boggle wasn’t coming. Then she pointed with the light. “Look at this.”
She aimed her flashlight at the ground near the wall, where the lantern sat by a wooden board covered with black mold propped up the crumbling edge of a mud shelf. There was a wooden crate full of clear plastic bags tied tightly resting atop it. In the dirt were several lustrous chunks of gemstone, black and crystalline like the ones on the big boggle-thing — which, until someone else named it properly, I was going to call a Big-Ass Boggle. I wasn’t sure what minerals recrystallized in shale-heavy environments like this boggle cave, but the color of them made me think dark ruby.
A noise from the opposite direction of the boggle revealed a figure shuffling from the shadows, arms full of plastic bags. When he spotted us, he stopped dead, some of his treasures spilling from his grasp. For a moment, until the gears caught, I was relieved to see a friendly face. Then I remembered he’d not been much of a team player lately, and realized why.
“Oh, there you are.” I stuck my thumbs in my belt loops and rocked back on my heels, showing him a cheery smile. “Look, Liv, it’s our old pal, Nyquist. Our harmless, innocent, very human friend Nyquist. Whatcha got there, Indy? Research materials? Samples? For the government? For the human government?”
Malashock shot me a look. Nyquist gazed worriedly down at the few gemstone-encrusted rocks that he’d dropped from the bag, and the ones he still held.
“You should get a fanny pack like mine,” I suggested. “Probably, when you steal gems from boggles in a federally protected preserve, you shouldn’t use clear plastic bags. Not exactly stealthy.”
“I’m only collecting samples,” he started, eyes wide.
I shook my head. “You’re only involved in a smuggling ring. A smuggling ring with a family of revenants that you pretended to know nothing about. And your cut involves gems. Right?”
Nyquist gave no indication he was going to move, and then his hand was a blur, but the gun was clear enough. “Now you show me yours,” he said, his voice and hand shaking. “Nice and slow.”
I saw something new and pale and completely unexpected moving quietly in the shadows behind him. My belly quivered in response, though I couldn’t tell if it was in excitement or fear. I also wasn’t entirely sure the pale figure was a good thing, but I felt the need to keep Nyquist distracted until I could figure out how to deal with it.
“You’re going to kill two people for a handful of rubies, Nyquist?” I asked.
“They’re storm-garnets,” he corrected. “Very rare.”
“Whatever.”
The pale shape behind him hunched down.
“Not whatever. Be precise. It matters. I thought you were a scientist,” he said to me, then bringing the gun around to point at Malashock, who was admittedly the bigger threat.
I nodded. “Sure, I took a geology class, sophomore year at University. The easy one. Rocks for jocks.”
“Guns,” Nyquist said. “Out. Now.”
Malashock showed him her empty left hand while her right hand slowly un-holstered her gun and put it on the ground, bending smoothly and cautiously, then straightening back up at the same speed. “What the hell, Mickey?” she said softly. “This isn’t you.” There were still two stakes in sheaths behind her back but she made no move to reach for them.
“You, too, Rocks for Jocks,” Nyquist said, motioning at me with the tip of his gun.
“Didn’t bring one,” I said, monitoring the pale movement behind him.
“Then what’s in your fanny pack?”
“Turkey jerky.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“In Colorado, in my night stand, next to my new vibrator. It’s still in the package so the spriggans won’t hump it — the vibe, not the gun.”
Nyquist glared.
I asked Malashock, “You know why Indy smokes so much pot? It’s to cover the smell of fur.”
“Shut up,” Nyquist insisted, his pointy teeth flashing.
“I smell sour milk,” Malashock said, clearly baffled.
“Nope, that's unwashed fur. I bet dogs
can smell him.” I felt an easy calm come over me. I was in a bad place, that much was true, held at gun point with a Big-Ass Boggle lurking behind us in the tunnel, but thanks to the pale shape behind the twitchy geologist, there was a good chance that the danger for Nyquist was much higher. “Dogs. Wolves. Foxes… other canid lycanthropes.”
The shaggy white werefox slipped from the shadows behind Nyquist and towards the meager circle of light cast by the lantern on the dirt floor.
“Ignore her, Mickey,” Malashock said, focused entirely on him. She was speaking in a low, steady negotiator’s voice. I recognized the tone. “Let me help you end this peacefully. It can all be undone, no issues. Nobody has to die. We can work this out.”
“This is not a negotiation,” Nyquist told us. “I win. I’m taking my treasure.”
“Those belong to the boggles,” I said. “Do they know you’re stealing their rubies?”
“Storm-garnets,” Nyquist snapped.
“Do the vampires know?” I asked, hearing the V-word slip out again. “Do the other smugglers know? Did Shakespeare know? Did he tolerate you? Did one of them make you some kind of deal? This is where you disappear to, when you’re not picking up your phone? You’re in here, but who else knows you’re here? Did you pay Shakespeare off? I saw you eating grapes out of his dumpster.” I cocked my head. “What’s that all about?”
“Shut. Up.” Nyquist waved the gun in the air to remind me of its presence.
“Are you all in it together?” I asked. “Or — ha! Oh, no, dude, are you clueless enough to steal from undead bootleggers? Maybe the vampires don’t know about the rubies.”
“Storm-garnets!” he shouted, aiming the gun at me briefly then swinging it back at Liv.
“Don’t listen to her, Mick. We can settle this,” Malashock assured him.
I interrupted her attempts. “Try not to take this the wrong, Mickey, but you’re probably gonna die in a second. I’m not confident I can save you. I don’t think this is gonna be a bite-and-run situation.”