by Liz Schulte
The two guards ran past me, shouting something I couldn’t begin to understand. Frost and I raced ahead as quietly as possible, putting distance between us and the guards.
“Looks like you owe me one,” I said when I was reasonably sure the police wouldn’t hear.
Frost didn’t say anything, but I could feel her silence get markedly haughtier. After about ten minutes of near jogging, with no more brushes with humans, I figured we had to be getting close and I slowed, watching for an access hatch or something that would take us down.
“How do you do that in heels? Especially on uneven ground?” Frost asked, slightly winded by the pace I’d set. “I can barely walk down the sidewalk in heels.”
I always wore heels, the higher the better. Even though I was already tall, it never hurt to be a little bit taller. Plus, land a kick the right way, and a heel was a hell of a weapon. “I’m just that awesome.” I flashed her a grin. “It’s a combination of practice and good balance.”
Frost shook her head. “Anything over an inch and I’d fall flat on my face. And the blisters.” She shuddered. “After an hour down here in those, I’d walk barefoot with a twisted ankle for the rest of the mission.” She eyed my shoes doubtfully.
I noticed a dark spot about twenty feet ahead to the left, at the base of the wall. I veered toward it. Bending down, I stuck my hand in the hole and didn’t find the back. “This could be it.”
Frost shined her tiny flashlight directly into the space and squinted into the darkness beyond the reach of her light. “I can’t see anything, but the feeling of death is getting stronger. That’s probably a good sign.”
“What exactly does death feel like?” I asked, genuinely curious. It wasn’t a sensation I would likely ever experience.
“It’s a buzzing beneath my skin, like something in me is stretching toward it. There’s this longing that comes with it too, which starts in my core and spreads. It’s like it awakens a part of me that isn’t fully present when not surrounded by death. It’s hard to describe, but it’s always there. Sometimes it is more dormant than others. I’ve come to recognize it over the years.”
“I bet going to cemeteries is a trip for you.” The hole had been chipped through the tile and stone until it broke out the other side—or at least I hoped it did.
“I can’t see where it comes out. I don’t want to get in there and get stuck,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t the spot.” She moved the light from one side of the tunnel to the other.
Distance was impossible to judge on the map with any accuracy. This looked like it was the marked place, but it was possible it wasn’t. However, time wasn’t on our side. If we intended to keep avoiding the guard, we needed to go before they started back through. The deeper we could get into the tunnels the better. “Where’s your sense of adventure? This is the only thing even remotely resembling a way inside. Might as well try it—and I hope you aren’t claustrophobic. I don’t know how deep we’ll have to go to hit the tunnels.”
She ran her tongue over her lips. “Maybe one of us should go at a time.”
“No, I don’t know how deep this is or if you’d be able to hear me if I call back up. We should stay together.” I tied my backpack around my foot. “Keep your pack in front of you,” I told Frost. “If it gets caught on anything behind you, you won’t have anyone back there to push it out. Doesn’t look like there will be much wiggle room in there.”
She nodded, then tugged at her gloves and retied the strings of her hood tightly. “If either of us gets stuck, just remember that you can’t touch my skin. I’m pretty well covered, but be careful.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, cursing Sy. I’d forgotten that skin-to-skin contact with a necromancer equaled death. That could potentially complicate matters here even more. And how was she supposed to help me swim when she couldn’t even touch me? “It’s not too late for you to back out.”
I could feel her glare better than I could see it in the darkness.
“Whatever; it’s your choice. Don’t get stuck.”
My night vision was a lot better than a human’s, but in the complete absence of light, that didn’t help me at all. I pulled out my own penlight and held it in my mouth. I flattened onto my stomach and shimmied the upper half of my body through the hole. There was a general downward grade, which helped, but it was going to be tight, definitely no room to turn around. Using my forearms, I crawled into the unknown.
The cold, jagged stone occasionally scraped against my body as I used my upper body strength to pull myself along. The deeper I went, the mustier the smell was. It coated the inside of my nostrils, threatening to make me sneeze. Some spots barely let my hips squeeze through, while others were wide enough to actually give me a couple inches to spare, which was beginning to feel luxurious. Tight spaces had never bothered me, but I could already tell this place would test my limits as far as that was concerned. The air felt thin in my lungs the deeper I went. It was probably just in my head. Nerves about having no room to move.
After about thirty feet, there was a bend. At least, I hoped it was a bend and not a dead end. “Turn up ahead,” I warned Frost. I twisted to my side and bent around the corner. When I tried to slide through, something snagged on my hip, stopping me dead. I pulled again, but it kept a firm grip on my belt loop. After all the grief I’d given Frost, I couldn’t be the one to get stuck.
“Why aren’t we moving?” Frost’s muffled voice carried, but I pretended I hadn’t heard it.
I jammed my knee against the wall hard enough it’d leave a mark, and managed to get my foot braced on the wall behind me. I pushed myself through—and heard a tearing sound. That was why I didn’t like to wear jeans. I never had this problem with leather.
When I finally rounded the corner, the tunnel took on a steeper downward grade, then appeared to end—but really it dropped into another tunnel. As the light between my lips rested on what had looked like the end, I could see only one thing: bones. I couldn’t even be sure there was enough room for us to crawl through, but I kept going. The last few feet were almost vertical. It would be hard to control the slide into the mass grave. I gave Frost a warning then lowered myself down. The entire tunnel was filled with aged, broken bones, but at least I could crawl and didn’t have to keep sliding along on my stomach.
The bones shifted beneath me as I dropped onto them. Once I was certain I wasn’t going to fall through, I let Frost know she was safe to come down and started an unsteady crawl, hopefully toward an exit. A shard of bone stabbed into my hand as it landed just right. I hissed and pulled it out. Son of bitch; now I probably had the plague. I squeezed my hand into a fist, giving myself a few moments to heal while I listened to Frost catching up to me. When she sounded like she was close, I kept going, a little more careful about where my hands landed.
A noise brought me out of my thoughts and back to what I was doing. I stopped and switched off my flashlight.
“Are you stuck?” Frost asked behind me with a tight voice. “If not, can we start moving again? Seriously, I think a rat just bit me. You need to move if you aren’t stuck. I’m trying not to freak out back here, but getting eaten by rodents isn’t on my bucket list.”
“Shhhh,” I said. “I heard something.”
Closing my eyes, I dismissed the sounds of scurrying rats and shifting bones, and focused on the voices. I could hear enough of what they were saying to know I didn’t understand a word they spoke. “People. Probably human,” I warned as I started moving again. “Be as quiet as you can. The rats won’t hurt you much. Just think of them as our future meals.”
“You are so helpful,” she said dryly. “Can’t imagine why we’ve never hung out before.”
A few minutes later, I dropped out of the bone-filled tunnel without a noise, landing on my feet. That could have been a lot worse. I stretched my cramped limbs. I took a couple steps to the right and then to the left to see if the humans were around. I didn’t see a light, and we appeared to be alone. At least
for now. Maybe Frost’s occasional yips as the rats checked her out had scared them off.
Frost pushed her backpack through the hole, letting it crash to the ground as she scrambled out of the tunnel, nearly falling on her face and knocking several femurs around in the process. She pulled in deep breaths, beat at her legs with her hands, and shuddered. “I’m fine,” she wheezed between breaths. I hadn’t been worried about her. She was moving, so obviously she was fine. “I don’t mind tight spaces, but I hate rodents. And was it just me, or was it hard to breathe in there?”
I picked up the displaced bones and tossed them back inside the tunnel. “You should make some more noise. I don’t think the entire city has heard you.”
She flipped me off. “We should have gotten those helmets with lights on them.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think about that. Next time. Have you recovered from your brush with our breakfast? Can we go, or do you want to flail around?”
Her lips curled in disgust. “I’d rather starve.”
“It won’t have to come to that if you get a move on.”
“Just a sec.” She reached into her pocket and retrieved a piece of chalk. She made an X on the wall next to the tunnel. “I like to have an exit plan, or at least know where I’ve been, so I’m not walking around in circles.”
I hadn’t thought about that at all. It was a good idea, especially given all the twists and turns of the map. Granted, it would make it possible for someone to follow us, but it’d be easy to get turned around down here and not be able to find our way out. Out of the two, an exit seemed more important. I opened the map, smashed it against the wall with one hand, and shined the light on it with the other. “This is where I think we are,” I told Frost, poking the map with the end of my light. “Everywhere you see an X is where a recent body was found. I want to check out the locations and see if there are any clues that survived the human police. Hopefully we can find something that will lead us to Shezmu.”
She studied it for a moment, her brow furrowing. “Are you sure you’re holding it in the right direction?”
I put the map away. Who was she to question my map-reading skills? Of course I was sure. I had been reading maps longer than she had been alive—well maybe not, but close enough. “Yes, I’m sure. We’re going this way.”
Chapter 4
The tunnels we were in didn’t look like the pictures you saw of the catacombs. There wasn’t any art constructed from the skulls and bones. In fact, in this particular tunnel, most of the bones lay scattered over the floor where they’d been knocked out of the way from the offshoots that led to the more decorated areas. The further we went, the more something around us grew, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The suffocating feeling nagged at me until I finally put my finger on what it was. There was a constant white noise, probably caused by water, judging by the beaded droplets on the ceiling.
My chest tightened. This mission had better pay off in a big way if I ended up having to swim. Like, when I got out I better have the information I needed to make the council crap their pants or it so wasn’t worth it. Why did there have to be water? There were other noises too, but I couldn’t pick them out—mostly because I couldn’t stop listening to the water, waiting for the moment it would come rushing toward me. Of all the ways to die, drowning had to the worst.
One of the early lessons Sekhmets learn in dealing with emotion is to direct the energy to another source. I was scared of the water, but instead of thinking about that, I thought of all the ways having to bring Frost annoyed the hell out of me. First, she’d never said a damn word to me before this and, frankly, she wasn’t saying much now either. In fact, it was almost like being alone. Obviously, it was driving me crazy. Holden was chattier than this woman. She was the interloper; the least she could do was entertain me. Second, I couldn’t touch her and she couldn’t touch me. How exactly was she supposed to be useful on this mission? She couldn’t save me from drowning. I couldn’t help her if she got caught anywhere. Mostly she was a mute time bomb waiting to kill me. Third, she was noisy. She might not have spoken, but I could hear all of her steps. And if I could hear them then so could Shezmu. There would be no element of surprise.
As we walked, we passed another passage completely filled with bones. It was cool in a creepy I-like-dead-people sort of way. Maybe Frost really enjoyed it in here. She could be having a moment or something. I glanced over my shoulder, sort of hoping she’d be giddy with excitement. “Hey, Corpse Bride, enjoying the sights?”
She gave me an annoyed look. “Never heard that before. Dead jokes are almost as funny as short jokes. Do you really want to piss me off when there are six million bodies I could tell to rise up and tear you limb from limb? This is my world, not yours.”
Now that was an impressive threat. Maybe I’d underestimated her. “If you can really do that, maybe you’ll be useful after all. And here I was thinking you were just a burden.”
“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” It was quite possibly the first time I had ever seen Frost crack a smile. It almost made her seem…pleasant.
“You’re different,” I said. “At least different than how I thought you’d be. You’ve always seemed so standoffish. I mean, you aren’t a ray of sunshine now or anything, but you also aren’t a complete drag.”
“Forced socialization has ruined me. I tried to tell the coven that, but they just kept hugging me and making me watch chick movies with women and crying. Now I see telephone commercials and get weepy.”
I laughed. Maybe she wasn’t the worst partner.
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Um, Femi—” She pointed at the floor in front of me.
I pulled up short and nearly tripped avoiding the heap. It was my own fault for not watching where I was going.
Frost shined her light on the form. “Maybe we didn’t go the wrong way,” she said, putting a hand underneath her nose. “That’s disgusting.”
In front of us lay a man’s body, torn limb from limb and left in gory pieces. Large segments of skin had been cut from him. In a signature Shezmu move, the skull had been crushed in what was probably a vise of sorts. I picked up his severed left leg and took off his shoe. Sure enough, his heel revealed a coin imbedded deep into his flesh, as if it had always been there. Damn it.
“What is that?” Frost asked.
“His toll for the River Styx.”
She made a face. “That’s not real, right?”
I shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe. It’s one of Shezmu’s signatures—that and the very specific mutilations you see before you.”
“It’s a bit of an overkill.”
I looked down at the body. After my father was killed, I had become moderately obsessed with Shezmu and what he did to people. I couldn’t help picturing the things I read over and over again as I thought about my father’s final hours and how horrible they must have been. But it never looked like this in my mind. My young, fragile imagination could have never visualized this sort of desecration. The man hadn’t just been killed—he had been carved like a piece of meat, mouth frozen in the shape of a scream. Shezmu liked to hear his victims suffer to the point that if they passed out he would stop until they awoke again.
The distorted face on the body suddenly morphed into my father’s. Mangled and swollen from trauma, it stared lifeless at me, as if saying, “This is what will happen to you.” I tightened my jaw and made fists with my hands. Over my dead body. I touched the demon-killing knife at my side. The slaughterer of souls was going to regret the day he ever came near my family. I looked away. Blew out a slow breath. It wasn’t my father. It was just my imagination. I forced myself to look again, and the body was back to being the stranger’s.
I cleared my throat. “According to legend, the coin is made from the blood of his victim. It holds the only remaining blood in his entire body. Want to see?” I pulled out a knife. “It’s the only way to know for sure.”
“That’s destroying evid
ence.”
“Who cares? It’s not like humans would know what to do with it. Besides, we don’t want them to find Shezmu or even make that connection. Wouldn’t this just be proof of the Abyss? That’s exactly what we’re supposed to prevent them from finding.”
Frost tugged on her braid. “I don’t want to ruin his chance of getting into the underworld. He’s still a person.”
I shook my head. It was still possible someone was copying Shezmu’s signature, and part of me needed to know which parts of the legend surrounding him were real. “He’s not going to the underworld. This is just for looks. Shezmu devours the souls of those he defeats. Even if he was going to the underworld, which he isn’t, he would have to believe it to be bound by it. What are the odds? And it’s the only way to know for sure.” I stuck my knife into the center of the coin. With a pop, blood gushed from it, leaving only a deflated gold circle of skin.
“That’s bizarre.” Frost’s nose wrinkled. “How do you know all of this?”
“Let’s just say it’s become a passion of mine.”
She stared at the foot in my hand. “How does he make the coin?”
“I have no idea. We can ask him when we find him.” But this proved it was definitely Shezmu’s work. I didn’t know any other creature that killed like this.
“Do you believe you need the coin?” she asked.
Belief probably wasn’t quite the right word, but a long time ago I decided that if that was the way my dad went, that was the way I’d go too. “Doesn’t hurt to cover your bases.” I took out two coins and handed them to Frost. “Wipe off my prints then put them in his pocket.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t going to the underworld.”
“He isn’t right now, but if we kill Shezmu, I hope it will free the souls he has trapped.”
