The Neon Graveyard

by Vicki Pettersson

  As he lifted his head, Kai’s smile was in his eyes. “The entrances to Midheaven align with the moving Zodiac, not the fixed one. He claimed he tracked dying stars, right?”

  I nodded mutely, close to understanding but still wanting him to spell it out.

  “He was punking you all, man. He marked the twelve fixed signs in case someone was suspicious, but he knew about Ophiuchus.”

  Freedom arises from the Serpent Bearer.

  “So there’s another entrance,” I whispered weakly. “One not linked to the existing system.”

  Kai’s head bobbed, his dreads flopping. “Totally nar nar.”

  That’s what the Tulpa has been looking for. Ophiuchus. The Serpent Bearer. A way into Midheaven.

  “Let me see that.” I bent over the maps, making sure the constellations were aligned with the tunnel entrances. There was prominent star where all the tunnels converged, but I slid my index finger away, to a long scribble that stood for the fucked-up old Greek dude who loved two sisters so much he brought them back from the dead. “Where is that?” Vincent asked, squinting as he bent low. It was like looking at the city from the backside of the galaxy.

  “Summerlin,” Kai said, jerking his head west.

  “Uh-uh.” Oliver, who drove the most, shook his head. “North of it.”

  “And west of the loop,” I said, referring to the beltway that circled the whole of the valley like a snake eating its own tail.

  “Looks like Lone Mountain,” Vincent said, and I froze. Lone Mountain was a road laid across the valley from east to west, but its euphonious namesake crouched along the city’s outskirts like a grouchy hunchback.

  “Joanna? You okay?”

  Dizzy, I pushed from the table, feeling Vincent’s steadying hands on my back before it’d even registered that I’d lost my balance. My inhalation was an involuntary reaction of horror, revulsion, and fear . . . along with a sharp click of recognition. My exhalation was the release of all those things as I locked eyes with each gray, everything finally snapping into place.

  The Tulpa knew this entrance led to Midheaven, though he had yet to discover where it was.

  Warren had no idea it existed at all.

  But Hunter had known all along.

  “I know this place,” I managed, dizzying again. Vincent took my wrists, holding them gently but firmly, until my breath steadied and I opened my eyes. Craning my neck, I gazed directly up into Ophiuchus’s face. “I almost died there.”

  12

  Joaquin’s lair.

  The last time I’d been here, the ceiling was writhing. Scorpions, vinegaroons, every size spider the desert could hold, and the snakes that stalked the terrain like lethal little ninjas . . . all were gone. It seemed they too had fled the abandoned place, fearing it, knowing it for abnormal.

  We’d entered as I had upon my first visit to this hillside hell, through a secret passageway in a tract home squatting like a hen above us. Unlike that initial foray—when I’d been alone and walking into an ambush—there was a foreclosure sign up in the weed-choked yard, and the home was empty, even of the guard dogs Joaquin had used to secure the location from the agents of Light.

  The trap door leading from the hallway closet to the underground vault was the same though. I showed the others how to access it—a false interior wall that flipped to drop a person underground on the wall’s backside. And on Milo’s backside too, I thought ruefully, as a muffled curse floated up before the wall swung shut. He and Fletcher—and, surprisingly, Kai—had insisted on going first, and I just as readily insisted on letting them. I’d barely escaped being murdered and buried alive in the manmade hollow back when I had powers that could rival anyone’s. I certainly wasn’t going to hop blindly into the literal snake pit now that I was mortal.

  But Milo called out to us after a minute, enough time to canvass the short, squat tunnel leading into the mountain without venturing too far by themselves. “Man, there are Zodiac symbols etched everywhere, shoobies . . . some I don’t even know,” Kai said, when we’d all joined them.

  Glancing up from dusting off my jeans, I caught the nearest etchings, deep-cut whorls painted in the side sweep of Gareth’s flashlight beam. I angled my own beam upward as well where more carvings hovered on the ceiling. “They’re stamped all over Midheaven too.”

  Vincent ran his hand over a spiral surrounded by spikes, a corona of light. “There’s no way one man could have done all of this himself. This place looks ancient.”

  “But Vegas isn’t,” I said. Troops only formed around the most populous cities—places where the battle between Light and Shadow, good and evil, had a mortal population to draw energy from.

  “Big deal,” Foxx answered, impatiently taking the lead. “Have you seen how quickly they throw up mega-hotels in this city? This place was a breeze to build in comparison.”

  It was an unfair comparison, matching mortal skills against whoever had dug the two rooms tripling the square footage of the home above . . . and that wasn’t even counting the path leading to them.

  “So where’s the Serpent Bearer, princess?” Foxx tossed a look over his shoulder.

  “There are two more rooms that way,” I said, pointing to where the tunnel fell and then rose again into the mountain. That’s how we found ourselves dumped in a surprisingly opulent room . . . or at least part of it was opulent. The other half had been caved in like an MMA fighter’s face.

  “It’s like an underground consignment shop,” Fletcher muttered, gaze narrowed on a Louis XIV chair smashed into bits beneath a ragged boulder.

  “But none of it’s junk,” Milo said, lifting a Ming vase, and he was right. The room had once contained a sampling of fine furniture from every culture known to mankind. For some reason Joaquin had loved—no, craved—authenticity. But I’d once been tied to Fletcher’s destroyed chair, helpless until the Light had arrived like the Western cavalry. So I felt nothing but satisfaction as I stared at the heap of wood crushed beneath the resulting hillside collapse.

  Other cave-in casualties: Chinese ceramics and hand-blown glass, now littering the floor in pretty shards; priceless Oriental rugs, half buried, an antique farm table now splintered perfectly for firewood. What remained of the room was taken up mostly by a giant oak bed. It’d been clipped during the cave-in, yet clearly moved since. A stack of aged first-edition novels stood in for two missing legs, though the bed was otherwise fine. Even clean.

  I ran a finger over a waist-high bookcase. Only a light coating of dust. “You know, back when I had my own place, I could barely keep it free of the valley’s dust.” Yet this place—composed entirely of rock and sand—barely had a particle out of place.

  “I smell him,” Foxx said, suddenly beside me.

  I mentally knee-jerked to Joaquin. The memory of being caught in his crowbar grip was so strong I even caught a whiff of his soiled breath.

  That’s why Kai’s answering nod took me completely off guard. “Your brohah Hunter must have returned here after they busted you out.”

  Blinking, I looked around, superimposing Hunter upon the decorous cave in lieu of Joaquin. That would explain the relative neatness of the place, every surface wiped clean. New bedsheets too, though I shuddered to think of Hunter sleeping underground, alone.

  “He’d been devising an attack for a long time,” I said. First upon Joaquin and his guard dogs. Then Midheaven and Solange.

  “So why didn’t he follow through? He was far ahead of everyone else, save Joaquin, that is. Why didn’t he use the entrance?”

  I blinked at Gareth. “Me.”

  Light finds Light, that’s what my troop had said after saving me from Joaquin. I’d thought at the time that they’d located me by my glyph, the star symbol on my chest that had lit from within when in danger. But Hunter, I realized, already knew exactly where Joaquin and I would be. He gave up this entrance—and the chance to find his daughter—to save me.

  I thought back to Hunter’s long absences, and his surly and noncommi
ttal replies whenever asked about them. The agents of Light had just assumed he’d been laboring in his workshop, fashioning the weapons we’d carry into battle, devising tactics and outlining plans of attack. But he’d circled back here again, even after Joaquin was dead.

  God, the man was relentless.

  Stepping close, I arrowed my flashlight into a hole Hunter had punched into the rubble. It was half the size of a full-grown man, but twice as wide. Agile but big, Hunter would need the room. There were also support beams propped intermittently within, and I stepped forward, studying them closer. Ah, so that’s what became of the antique bed’s legs.

  “Wait a minute,” Vincent pulled up next to me. “You can’t go in there.”

  “It’ll hold,” I said, having utter confidence in Hunter’s engineering. And despite the sprawling mound of debris, the earth seemed to have settled. “It’s packed tight.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You said he couldn’t have entered Midheaven this way, right?”

  “Else he would have,” I answered, starting forward again.

  But Vincent stayed me with a hand. “Then he didn’t break through to the other side yet. And you . . . can’t.”

  Sighing, I put my head down, then stepped back and gestured him toward the tunnel entrance. But as he ducked, I muttered, “ ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ ”

  Quirking a brow, Vincent angled a glance back at me. “You know Milton?”

  “Who doesn’t?” I smiled wryly, returned to the foot of the bed, and settled in to wait.

  While the grays dug, I set up a makeshift vanity out of a bronze paperweight and a mirror cracked with someone else’s bad luck. The light was dim, but Oliver had found matches and a few tapers in addition to our flashlights. This, I thought, looking around, was probably what it felt like to be trapped along the ocean floor, the same all-encompassing oblivion of sound, darkness as thick as oil. Were the creatures native to this habitat still here, they too would be considered just as odd-looking as their water-dwelling counterparts; their skins and armament suited toward survival in a place most human eyes would never see.

  I pulled out my shoulder bag, and my mother’s henna kit, intent on drawing another kundan on both my chest and inner wrist.

  “Pretty,” commented Foxx from the corner, as I began painting my wrist with the readied paste. He was sprawled in a chair close to those thickening shadows, his features blurred, his only movement the occasional flare of a cigarette as he flicked ash over the earthen floor.

  “Don’t let pretty fool you,” I murmured, keeping my head down and on my work. I didn’t give a shit what it looked like to Foxx. Eyeliner, kundans . . . it was all the same to him. But this was ceremony. This was ritual.

  I was preparing for war.

  Meanwhile, Oliver had perched himself at the makeshift tunnel entrance, shouting loud encouragements to Vincent, Milo, and Fletcher, while alternating curious glances my way. I finished the design, slapdash and a bit wobbly, but clear enough.

  Just then there was a victory cry, then a deep rumble. Cringing, I glanced up at the ceiling, but the shift had occurred on the pile’s other side. A puff of dust billowed from the hole, blown as if from a giant’s mouth, and Milo emerged in a quick, crablike crouch. The black-skinned man was so caked with dust he looked like a mime. I had to shut my eyes after that, hiding my face in the sleeve of my shirt until the bulk of it dissipated.

  When I finally looked up again it was through a haze that obscured even sound. Milo’s voice as he called in to Fletcher and Vincent seemed as far-off as Ophichius. “Y’all cool?”

  A moment of silence, then Fletcher appeared, beckoning like a specter before disappearing again. Milo eased back in, careful not to bump, and possibly dislodge, the support beams. Oliver hesitated, and Foxx angled a longing glance at the corridor leading back to the house.

  I, in turn, ambled forward with the conviction of a woman with no other choice. I’d come too far. Burrowed too deep. The oppressive anteroom held no answers, and despite the freedom of the sky above and Ophiuchus’s presence in it, we’d exhausted this world’s resources for the time being. “You coming?”

  “What if it caves and we’re trapped there?” asked Foxx.

  “Then I’ll eat you first,” Gareth replied, bumping his shoulder as he followed me in. I didn’t know if Foxx would follow. I didn’t care.

  I wandered a few feet into the dark, coughing lightly on the knock-back from the dust, which filtered through our flashlights in fractured golden spurts, both there and not. Then our beams began catching on objects like they were swimming out at us from the mist. As the density of the dust lessened, I made out candelabras and tapers standing like stoic sentries, and knew we were in.

  A light flared, as one of the thick, black candelabras was set to burn. As the room began to glow, we turned around ourselves in silence, the faint scent of stale champa still evident in the air, like the room had been holding its breath. Rows and rows of cylindrical crevices stretched from floor to ceiling, honeycombed bookshelves that had once held a vast collection of Shadow manuals. Joaquin’s private collection, I remembered, though they were now empty. The grays poked through the cubbies anyway, while I crossed to the simple trestle table parked in the room’s middle.

  The place felt more like a wine cellar or church than a supernatural library, I thought, glancing around. And unlike the anterior room, this one had always been kept clean and orderly. Gold candlesticks, paired. Austere chairs, the same. Everything matched up in symmetrical simplicity. A thirteenth entrance, without a partner, should certainly stand out. Yet the walls were smooth as bone, the floors the same. If this room had a face, I decided, turning around myself, it’d be expressionless. Lots of eye sockets, yes, but otherwise blank.

  “A poker face,” I muttered, striding to one of the walls.

  “What?” asked Vincent, who’d read my mind and was feeling the seams on the whitewashed wall face.

  “Oh, nothing. It just reminds me of Midheaven.”

  And that lurked like a mugger nearby. The knowledge inhabited my mind like oxygen in the blood, and I automatically reached for the blade against my side. Two-thirds of my soul had been retrofitted to that place, so in some ways I was more a part of that world than this one.

  I paused halfway around the room, feeling an odd angularity in the wall. Narrowing my eyes, I marked the place—located directly across from the room’s entrance—then traced my steps back to the doorway. Warm palm, cool rock, smooth as bared teeth . . . in every place but one.

  “It’s not even,” I said, stepping into the doorway, the best place to view the room as a whole. “It’s also not round.”

  “What?”

  “The room,” I said, stepping back inside. “See the slant of the walls? They’re rounded, but only because they reach an apex at the top. There are multiple walls here. It’s not perfectly round.”

  “Maybe it’s your stellar eyesight,” commented Foxx. I didn’t spare him, or the chip on his shoulder, a glance.

  “No, she’s right,” Vincent said. “Count the walls.”

  After a brief argument over whether the doorway constituted one wall or two, we assigned one gray to every other wall, and began again that way. “Thirteen,” said Vincent, and the others nodded in consensus. One for each star sign on the moving Zodiac.

  “Yeah, but where does it start?” Gareth asked, looking straight up. The Western Zodiac started with Aries, but we needed to find Ophiuchus, located in the Zodiac wheel between Sagittarius and Capricorn. While Kai tried to calculate which way was north—quite a feat while trapped in the base of a mountain—Foxx and Oliver took random guesses, almost coming to blows when their answers didn’t match up. Ignoring them, I angled my eyes to the trestle table. “Did any of you have training rooms, or dojos, in your sanctuaries?”

  And just like that, every gaze hit the center of the room. Dojos too had apexes—at least the one belonging to the Light had. Unlike these pockmarked walls, tha
t room had been smoothly mirrored and shaped like a pyramid. While its primary function had been to provide a safe place to teach and train the agents for combat in the real world, the room also reacted to emotion, mirrors fogging over, flashing onyx during the heat of battle. The victorious agent’s star sign popped on those reflective surfaces. And so did the pinpricked Universe . . . if you stood in the room’s center.

  “Somebody move that fucking thing,” said Vincent, gesturing toward the trestle. Foxx took two great steps, tucked one arm beneath the antique table, and flipped it with enough unnecessary force that Oliver had to dodge its skittering length. “Hey!”

  I’d have rolled my eyes if they weren’t already firmly focused on the symbol etched into the hard-packed earth. A snake wrapped around a staff. “The Serpent Bearer.”

  Our curious knot tightened and Kai bent to one knee, careful not to touch the symbol. “Gnarly. I bet Joaquin didn’t even know this was here.”

  “I bet he did,” I muttered, thinking back. Joaquin had barricaded himself in this room to escape the Light during my rescue. Looking back down at the centered symbol, I couldn’t help but remember one of Tekla’s favorite sayings. Take your mark in order to leave your mark.

  Literally.

  Yet Midheaven required a third of a person’s soul for entry. Joaquin’s aura had always been full. Ugly, but sharp.

  “Shit,” I finally said, awed. “It isn’t connected to the tunnel system.” Just as Ophiuchus wasn’t connected to the fixed Zodiac. “It’s a free fucking pass.”

  Nobody moved. Suddenly this was it. This was the place and moment in time I’d been straining toward since discovering Hunter was being held against his will. Though I was unable to even approach the pipeline entrance, this was a way around my mortality. A way to enter too without giving up the last third of my soul. Yet I still hesitated.