Taking a few steps to the side, I went out of phase and pushed through the concrete wall. As soon as my eyes came out on the other side I stopped so that I could study the top floor. If going through something felt weird, staying there was like hanging on the knife’s edge of throwing up. With my ears still inside the wall, all I heard was a dull hum.
Determining that the third floor was as empty as the first, I stepped out of the wall and let myself go solid. Even then, I still had a turgid feeling in the pit of my stomach Note to self—hanging out in the walls is probably not a good thing.
Up here, things were more spread out. The most cluttered rooms boasted neat rows of exercise bikes. The others were almost completely empty save for the occasional pile of rolled-up exercise mat. It didn’t take me long to make a circuit of the entire space.
Back by the stairwell, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and sent a text to Carlos. 3 clear. Nada. Headed to 2.
The second floor was much the same. There were more free weights and exercise machines on this level. Though the additional equipment slowed my inspection, the result was much the same. The second floor was as empty as the third.
Back in the stairwell, I resisted the urge to kick the wall. I was so sure. What did I miss? My irritation made it more difficult to maintain my slow pace, but one shoe squeak on the stair was more than enough to remind me to take my time.
Pausing at the first-floor landing, I pulled my phone out one more time and debated on what to say. I could push the guards to talk, maybe, but I didn’t like that for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost, I didn’t like to use my abilities on people. Yeah, I could make them forget what had happened, but I’d still know.
Of course, if they’re in the cult, as soon as you show your face, that might ring the alarm bells and let them know we didn’t take off. Kent, Cassie, and the rest of the gang back at the house had enough firepower to go to war with a street gang or two, but I didn’t think Donnie and Tlaloc would go as easy. If they sent anything against the house, it would be an overwhelming number, and no display of magical prowess would be enough to force them to back off.
“Shit,” I whispered. And then I saw it.
The stairwell door from the first floor opened on the left side, and the stairs ascended on the right. Unless you stepped aside to let the door shut, it was impossible to see the wall opposite the stairs.
Coming down the stairs was a different story, which is why I supposed the cultists had camouflaged the door to look like just another gray-painted concrete wall. They’d done a hell of a job, too—I couldn’t even make out the seams.
But I could see the drying outline of a footprint, bordered in grass clippings, cut in half at the base of the wall.
There was either a door there, or someone else was doing my walking-through-walls trick. I stepped up to the wall and pressed my ear to it. For a moment, I heard nothing, but as I kept my ear there, I got the vague sense of a chorus of voices, rising and falling in cadence. The sound was too muffled to make out the words, but it made the hair on the back of my neck bristle, nonetheless.
“Okay,” I muttered. I dropped the cloak, went out of phase—and lurched backward as the wall itself seemed to push back as I tried to move through it. “What the hell?”
I placed my hand on the hidden door. It didn’t feel abnormal in the least, but when I tried to phase my hand through, an uncomfortable buzzing sensation pulsed up my wrist.
With a frown, I tapped a message on my phone. Change of plans. Don’t cut the power—head for the guard station. See you there.
No longer caring for stealth, I yanked the door opened and sprinted toward the gymnasium entrance. If I cut across the grass, I thought I could make it to the guard shack at the same time as the De La Rosas.
And then we were going underground.
Valentine
Phoenix, Arizona—Saturday night
The flash of light off in the distance told Val that Locke’s friends had started their van. “Here we go,” he said. “They’re headed back this way.”
Morgan gave him a frustrated growl in response. “I just got the tax records back for that place.”
He kept the binoculars up, tracking the van as it moved down the road. “And?”
“Upward Path Rehabilitation Center. Built back in ‘13. Treasury and DEA say they’re clean.”
“Pretty big place. What do they specialize in?”
“Little bit of everything, per their website. Rehab of the rich and famous. If you’ve got the cash, they’ve got the program for you. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, whatever.” She laughed. “Okay, I’ve heard of this place. This is where all the ambulatory Hollywood pricks come to make up for their poor behavior with young starlets so they can be the next comeback story.”
He resisted the urge to shake his head. “Whatever happened to owning up to your actions?”
“You’re joking, right?” Morgan put her phone away. “This is the modern equivalent of buying a plenary indulgence, my good man. ‘I didn’t mean to grope that girl, I have a problem.’”
Val grinned. “What was the name of that old boy in Hot Springs? Caleb, right?”
“He’d never have tried to cop a feel if I hadn’t had to track you to such a hotbed of vice and iniquity.”
“I’d never do such a thing, these days. And I didn’t even need rehab.” The van turned into the driveway and came to a stop in front of the guard shock. The battered, rust-streaked vehicle was incongruous compared to the gleaming and polished building. Two of the guards strolled out, and he imagined how the conversation might go. “Now what are we doing here, boys?”
“You want to move closer?”
“No, we’re good here. Any closer and we run the risk of someone spotting—” Before Val could finish his thought, the area around the guardhouse became a blur of activity, moving too fast for him to follow with the binoculars.
CHAPTER 23
Paxton
Phoenix, Arizona—Saturday night
“—Private facility, pendejo. Take the rust bucket on down the road.”
I made it across the grass in time to hear the guard finish ripping Carlos’ head off. I didn’t know if my friend saw me coming or not, but I didn’t want to take the chance. “Hey!”
One security guard was Anglo while the talker was a light-skinned Hispanic, but they could have been cut from the same cloth. They were both tall, well-groomed, and muscular. I suppose access to the weight room came with the benefits package.
They started to turn in my direction, but I pushed before they could make eye contact. “Freeze.” They froze, and I let out a sigh of relief.
“What the hell’s all this?”
I turned to the other voice. He was an older guy, balding, and still trim. Looking at him was a mistake. When he saw my face, his eyes widened, and he fumbled for the holstered pistol at his belt. Shit.
“Stop!” I pushed, but nothing happened. Bad sign. Carlos yelled something, but I was too focused on leaping forward. I grabbed the older guard’s gun with both hands. We grappled for a moment before I realized that he had me outclassed in terms of strength. The barrel of the pistol began to swing in toward me.
It was me or him—I made the choice so rapidly that I didn’t have the chance to feel guilty about it. Force blades snapped into existence at the end of my hands, and the guard’s gun hand went tumbling as they blazed through his flesh. He howled in agony, clutching at the blackening stump as the line of fire advanced up his arm. The sleeve of his polo shirt caught fire, and the screams mercifully ended when the fire consumed his chest.
I stood, surrounded by silence, and tried not to look at the smoldering pile of bones at my feet.
Behind the wheel of the van, Carlos crossed himself and murmured, “Madre de Dios. That’s a new trick, ese.”
Grimacing, I shrugged. Turning to the mesmerized guards, I commanded, “Into the guard shack.” Dutifully, they turned and strode inside. I followed at a bit of a distance,
in case one or both were conning me. “Open the gate.”
The push, thankfully, is not literal—it relies more on my unspoken intent than the actual words I speak. That aspect of the spell has bitten me in the past, but all it meant, this time, was that the guard closest to the control opened it up while the other stared at me with placid eyes.
“How many people under the gym, tonight?”
The spell didn’t allow them to look surprised, and their answers came with near-simultaneity.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Under the gym?”
That settles that, I guess. If they were under the same influence as the rest of Donnie’s cultists, they’d have been able to resist the push. They were pure innocents in this, guilty only picking a bad employer. “I want you to lay down on the floor and go to sleep. It will be a restful, relaxing sleep, and when you wake up, you won’t remember anything that happened after the van got here.”
Heading out of the guard shack, I went around to the passenger side of the van and pulled open the sliding door. Climbing in, I looked Carlos right in the eye. “Head to the gym. We’re going inside.”
Scope raised a hand, then asked, “What about the lights? Am I still blowing the power?”
I shook my head. “It’s not on top of the gym. It’s down below, underground, I guess. No idea how deep, but I’ve got a feeling we’ll want some lights down there.”
Javier cursed, and Scope stared at me as Carlos put the van in gear. “Well, hell,” he said. “And here I thought I was going to get a chance to hang and cover you guys from long range.”
I didn’t feel the smile. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“S’all right. Close quarters battle is just as fun.” He glanced at my Mossberg. “You got a flashlight for that thing?”
“Skipped that feature. The side-saddle adds enough weight as it is.” The Mossberg held seven rounds in the tubular magazine, and the carrier on the side put another eight close at hand for quick reloads.
“We got you covered.” There was the slightest quaver in his voice as he opened one of the Pelican cases they’d hauled from San Diego and fished through it. “They’ll have lights of some sort, right?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “No reason why they wouldn’t.”
Carlos wasn’t messing around. He gunned the engine and hopped the curb. The van’s suspension complained the entire way, but once he had the rust bucket in place he killed it and pulled the keys from the ignition. He bounced them in his hand for a moment, then pulled open the center console and dropped them inside. “They’re waiting for whoever makes it back.” He tried to pitch his voice as though it was a joke, but I could tell that it wasn’t. Javier and Scope didn’t react but busied themselves in buckling on gear and double-checking the things they carried.
The confident air they’d held at Kent’s house had evaporated. The way the security guard went out has them spooked. I cleared my throat. “We got this, gentlemen. We’re on the side of the angels, here. And Carlos is too damn pretty to die.”
He flashed me a ghost of a smile in the rearview. “You got that right, bro.”
We gave up any pretense of stealth. The De La Rosas carried compact submachine guns with sound suppressors and flashlight attachments, and the beams of light waved wildly as we piled out of the van and jogged to the gym entrance. I considered the door for a moment, then ran a force blade between the jamb and frame. The heat of the mystical knife’s passage spot-welded the metal in a few places. A couple of hard tugs and the door came open straight away. I repeated the process on the second door, and we were inside.
The interior of the gym wasn’t nearly as scary lit by the lights of my three companions, but the atmosphere was still ponderous. I led my companions to the stairwell. The footprint was almost completely dry at this point, but the telltale traces of grass clippings still demonstrated that the wall was more than it seemed.
Javier pushed on it for a few moments before he backed away and shrugged. “If there’s a hidden catch, I’m not seeing it.”
“Maybe someone on the other side has to open it,” Scope mused.
I adjusted the strap of my Mossberg. “You have any more explosives?”
He scoffed. “What do I look like, C4 Depot? I didn’t like hauling the little amount around that I did have. Do you want me to run back to the substation and get it?” He eyed the wall. “It might be enough. Might not be, too.”
“No,” I decided. “I don’t think we have time for that.” Something inherent in the wall had proven resistant to phasing. It was time to find out if it could stand up to something better. “Step back.”
I wasn’t trying to show off, but a vague-but-visible blue corona formed around my hand as I unleashed a force blade. Scope and Javier took a step back. Carlos sighed.
“You need to keep me filled in on all the new tricks.”
“Thank Cassie for this one,” I said, and jammed the blade into the wall, near the ceiling. If there were seams, they weren’t visible. In the end, it didn’t matter because the blade sunk into the concrete with only a bit more resistance than I’d encountered using it on the cultists. Wondering how thick the door was, I brought the blade down to chest height, then twisted my hand and brought it to the left.
When the blade reached the center of the door, there was a solid thump that we could feel in our feet. The wall sagged away from me and trickles of dust rained down from the ceiling. Pausing to look up, I realized that the entire section of wall had moved.
That’s why there aren’t any seams, I realized. The entire wall was the door. Twisting my hand again, I brought my hand back up, then withdrew it. I’d carved a rough half-oval in the wall that looked a bit like an upside-down tombstone. I hoped that wasn’t prophetic.
“Help me push,” I said. The four of us clumped together and shoved at the small section. Concrete rubbed on concrete with a gritty sound, and the plug began to move. At first, I didn’t think it was going to stop, but when we’d pushed it in about a foot, it came loose and fell out of sight into darkness.
All at once, a brackish miasma slapped us in the face. The mixture of smells was almost indescribably disgusting—as soon as I thought I’d identified one portion of its makeup, something else made me shudder in disgust. Rotting meat, shit, and the iron stench of blood mixed with other, more primal things that told me I’d been right to fear the dark as I child.
The cut I’d made revealed the stub of a steel rod, centered in the massive slab of the wall. I looked up at the ceiling and saw a matching piece. “It swivels,” I said. “Of course.”
No matter how hard we pushed from either edge we couldn’t get the wall to swing open. When I ran a force knife along the edges, I heard subdued snapping sounds, and the door moved freely until it hit the concrete slug on the opposite side and pushed it through.
With the door open, it was brighter in the opposite room. The De La Rosas shined their flashlights inside, revealing an oddly-shaped chamber with an unfinished floor of coarse tan soil. I studied the irregular contours and guessed that it was a dead spot in the construction blueprints, a consequence of the fanciful interior and exterior design.
As Carlos’ flashlight beam found the hole in the floor, I wondered if that was a misguided assumption.
From where we stood, we could see the low angle of depression as the tunnel descended deeper underground. A rush of wind from below carried the reeking stench past us. I grimaced and wished I had something to plug my nose with. Throwing up all over yourself wasn’t a typical hero move.
Javier’s quiet voice made me turn. “What are these?”
He stood next to the opened door, fingering etchings on the rear side of the concrete. As I saw them, I understood why I’d been unable to phase through. Densely-scripted sigils covered every square inch of the concrete, to the extent that they overlapped in many places.
There’s no real written language of magic. Legends of runes and the like probably came about from past
wizards who adopted them for their own spells. Myself, I keep things simple. When I want to bind a mystical effect to a physical surface, I use a simple X-shaped crisscross . The intent was what mattered. Whoever had decorated the back of this door either didn’t know that, or their intent had required an overkill of symbolism. Given how it had pushed back against me, I imagine it would feel like running into a brick wall to the typical ghost or—
I pulled away from my study of the door and inspected the walls of the chamber. They were difficult to make out with the multivariate shadows cast by the trio of flashlights, but when I saw the first sigil, the rest fairly well leaped into view. Like the door, dense script covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. It represented a hell of a lot of work and more mojo than I wanted to think about. This is a prison. For what? Ghosts?
I shuddered at the thought of something akin to the Edimmu having a captive audience to dine on spirits at its leisure. Or the psychic trauma that might have on people—kids—stuck down here and forced to bear witness to it.
“Someone needs to stay up here and cover our exit route,” Scope muttered. “What happens if some more security guards come along and decide to cave the place in?”
“No way do we split up,” I interrupted. “That’s like the most basic rule of horror movies. We go together, or not at all.” I stared at each of them in turn. “I’m not leaving those kids down there.”
I didn’t have to stare them down long. We looked at each other, the De La Rosas nodded in solemn agreement, and we began our descent.
Helen
Salome, Arizona—Saturday night
Paper rustled.
It wasn’t the volume of the sound that stirred Helen from slumber. It was the variance in the routine of the night. In prison, there’d been any sort of real silence during the night. Before her arrest she’d been the sort to sleep with a night mask and ear plugs to keep things as silent as possible. That wasn’t possible on the cell block, forcing her to learn to sleep in something other than absolute silence. With the foldout beds, there was plenty of room for the coven to spread out—though the familiars didn’t sleep, really—but even so their confines were close enough that she’d grown accustomed to the night sounds of each of her companions. This was different. As she sat up to stare at the front of the motor home, a thrill of excitement ran through her. The tracking spell.
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