Behind me, Anastasia stumbled. She recovered quickly, putting a hand on the wall to steady herself. But she should never have stumbled in the first place.
“Anastasia?” I said, trying to glance over my shoulder at her. “How close to dawn is it?”
“Very,” she said, with astonishing calm. “The sun is rising.”
“At least that means Roman’s not likely to come back,” Ben said. He had a point.
“Grace,” I said. “We need to get back to Xiwangmu.”
“There’s no time,” Anastasia said.
“Okay, then we have to get to a room, someplace with just one door and no windows, no access to sunlight.”
“And defensible,” Cormac added.
“I can’t just find a room like that instantly,” she said. “I’m not Sun Wukong.”
Anastasia slumped against the wall. “I need to rest, just for a moment.”
“Just a few more steps,” I said blithely, staving off panic.
If she collapsed here, we could stop and try to protect her. At least there wouldn’t be any sunlight—I hoped. I didn’t see any vents or storm drains. But in the open corridor, anything could find us. We’d already been awake all night, and we hadn’t been completely rested when we started. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to guard anything for another eight-plus hours. The monster’s grumbles still echoed down the corridor.
Ahead, Cormac stopped. A narrow wooden door was set into the wall. Grace pushed forward, fumbled in her bag for a moment, and drew out a ring of keys, which she began fitting, one by one, into a rusted lock. Her hands were shaking.
“Take your time, Grace,” I murmured.
“I wasn’t ready for any of this, I didn’t agree to any of this, my ancestors didn’t agree to any of this, they had no right—”
“Careful, girl,” Anastasia said. “They’re watching.”
Grace’s shoulders slouched. “I’m sure they knew what they were doing. But—times are different, it’s not like I have Mongol hordes to battle, it’s just me. I run a video store. I’m not strong enough.”
“You are, and you honor them,” she said.
After pausing a moment to draw breath and maybe say a prayer, Grace returned to trying the dozen keys on the chain.
Meanwhile, Anastasia slumped against the wall and slid to the floor.
I helped Ben prop up Henry and knelt at her side, hand on her shoulder. “Anastasia—”
She shook her head weakly. “I really didn’t think I’d go out like this.”
So, she agreed that if we stopped here we were done for. “It’s not over yet.”
“I should have let the pearl go. It isn’t worth all of this. All of you. Kitty—thank you. For what’s left of my life. Thank you.”
Maybe we should have all cut and run a long time ago. Like, at sunset. Momentum had carried us all night long.
“Anastasia, we got the pearl back, it’s going to be okay.”
“Li Hua now, I think…”
The door popped inward with a high-pitched squeak of rusting hinges. A cloud of dust rattled loose from the frame. Cormac pushed past Grace and entered the room. He held up the quartz crystal from his pocket, which glowed, blinding. The candle lantern was long gone.
“Everyone in,” he said, stepping back out a moment later.
“You got him?” I said to Ben. He grunted an affirmative as he pulled Henry over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I drew Anastasia’s arm over my shoulder. She tried to pull away, attempting to stand on her own while propping herself against the wall.
“You called me asking for help, let me help,” I grumbled at her. That she didn’t grumble back worried me.
I glanced back down the corridor; Sun Wukong still had not joined us.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” Cormac said.
“Because he’s a god?” I muttered, saying it like it was a joke.
“Because he’s a hell of a fighter. Get in.”
All six of us were in the room. Cormac closed the door behind, and Grace locked it with the key.
Our only light was the glow of the quartz crystal, which he had muted with a handkerchief. That was a good thing, I told myself. It meant no sunlight would creep in. But I could really have used some sunlight right about then. The crystal’s light was fading.
“Anastasia?”
“I’m all right,” she whispered, but she was slipping, her head lolling, like a child fighting sleep and failing. Ben had settled Henry against the far wall. I lowered Anastasia to the floor next to him. She was gone, her skin cold as ice, no different from a dead body. I had to tell myself she wasn’t dead, not really.
The room was small, cozy with the six of us in it, with unadorned stone walls and a cold floor that felt like slate. We might have been in a concrete basement or a castle dungeon—it was all the same. And we were here until sunset.
“Kitty, you gave me a fucking heart attack back there. Don’t ever do that again,” Ben breathed. I grabbed his hand and pulled myself close to him, and he wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me to him. His body felt like a blanket. Pressing my face to his shoulder, I took a deep breath of him. He smelled of sweat, grime, and exhaustion. It made me hug him harder.
“You okay?” he whispered close to my ear.
I started to shake my head, then didn’t. It wasn’t like he could do anything about it. “I love you,” I murmured instead.
“God, I love you, too.”
“You still have that chalk?” Grace asked Cormac.
He fumbled in his pocket a moment and handed it over. With it, she started writing on the walls—the door first, then moving clockwise around the room, stepping over the vampires’ bodies. She made a column of Chinese characters on each wall.
As she drew the final line of the last character, the remaining bits of it disintegrated in her hand. She brushed her hands together, wiping the last of it away.
“Is that some kind of protection spell?” Cormac asked.
“No,” she said. “They’re prayers.”
And on that cheerful note … The corridor outside remained silent, and the room seemed safe.
Grace turned to me. “The pearl—you got it,” she said, dragging me from my warm cocoon of Ben.
I finally had a chance to look inside the bag we’d fought so hard to get. I held it out as if it contained snakes. Poisonous snakes.
“That’s it, huh?” Cormac said. “Why don’t we have a look.”
We all sat on the floor and gathered round.
A button flap closed the sack. Carefully, I unfastened it, opened it, and reached inside. Nothing snapped at me, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had. My hand touched a rectangle of cool stone, which I drew out and set on the cloth.
It was a rough tablet of polished jade, pale swirling white and gray in its depths. A half dozen Chinese characters were carved into the flat surface. Beautiful, it would have been at home in a museum display. It seemed so innocuous.
“That’s it?” I said. I didn’t mean to sound disappointed.
“You weren’t expecting an actual pearl, were you?” Grace said.
I shrugged. “You know, maybe, yeah.”
Cormac moved closer to study it. “It’s not a thing, it’s a spell, isn’t it? Worked into the stone, made permanent.” He was stroking his chin, as if he was getting ideas. Amelia was probably loving this.
“Does it really work?” I said.
“I’m thinking it does,” Cormac said. “You notice the coin Henry was wearing?”
“I noticed he was wearing one,” Ben said.
“I’m thinking he already made himself a batch of the things,” Cormac said.
If only I had a few dollars in my pocket, or maybe a granola bar. My stomach growled, still hungry despite tea and cakes with the goddess. It must have been close to breakfast.
I said, “Does anyone have something to eat? Granola bar maybe?”
“Don’t tell me you’re hungry,” Cormac said.
“No. I want to try something.”
He pulled a Power Bar from an inside breast pocket of his leather jacket—a jacket with very deep and infinite pockets, apparently—and tossed it to me. I managed to catch it without fumbling. Small victories …
I put the jade tablet back into the bag, along with the Power Bar, and closed the flap.
“What are you doing?” Grace asked.
“I just want to see if this is worth all the effort we’ve spent on it,” I said.
“You can’t—” she said, horrified. I stopped her with a glare.
“So. How long does it take to work?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea how it’s supposed to work.”
“What do you know about it?”
“The magic that made it is lost. That’s why everyone wants it so badly.”
Too curious to wait and unable to keep my hands off it, I lifted the flap of the bag. Which was filled with Power Bars. I scooped them out, all of them, at least a dozen, which made an impressive pile on the floor. Then I just stared at them, afraid to touch them, because they couldn’t be real, could they?
“Okay, that’s weird,” Ben said. “Isn’t there something in the law of physics that says this should be impossible?”
“Yeah,” I murmured.
Cormac said, “Might be some kind of dimensional door or pocket. It got the mass for it from somewhere.”
“Huh,” I said. “Anyone have a twenty? A fifty?”
“No,” Grace said, scrambling forward to yank the bag away from me and hug it close to her. “No screwing around. This is serious.”
Oddly enough, I felt better, because this had all been worthwhile. We couldn’t let Roman have this. We couldn’t let anyone have this.
“Don’t tell me you’re not even a little bit tempted,” I said, poking, just a little. Grace rolled her eyes at me.
“Don’t try it with any cash until you know you’re not going to end up with a stack of twenties with the same serial number,” Ben said.
“You’re all ruining my fun,” I said. “So. Is anyone hungry?” I gestured to the stack of Power Bars.
No one was.
* * *
BEN PICKED a wall—well away from the corpselike vampires—and sat against it, huffing perhaps a little more dramatically than he needed to. I curled up next to him, pulling my legs close and snuggling against him, more wolfish than I usually was. I was tired, and I needed the comfort that the warmth and scent of my mate’s body gave me. He draped his arm across me and sighed.
Across from us, Grace sat, hugging the bag with the pearl close, propped against her own bag, looking particularly young and lost. Cormac took off his jacket and handed it to her. Accepting it, she smiled thinly and used it as a blanket.
Next to Ben and me, Cormac sat with his back to the wall, within view of the door and the vampires, the loaded crossbow propped on his bent knee. He seemed to be waiting for an invasion. He wasn’t going to be getting any sleep, either.
I nodded at the crossbow. “Do you really need that? Roman’s not going to show up for a while.”
“What do we do when those two wake up hungry?” He nodded at Anastasia and Henry.
“I trust Anastasia. She wouldn’t hurt us.”
“That chick is batshit crazy,” he said.
I sat up. “You would be, too. And you’re one to talk, what with the Victorian wizard-lady living in your brain.”
Hugging herself, blinking through her glasses, Grace watched us. I settled back and promised myself I wouldn’t argue anymore. Much.
“It’s not like I can just get rid of her,” Cormac whispered.
“So she is possessing you. Holding you prisoner.”
“She saved my life,” he said.
The silence stretched. I would have appreciated a ticking clock. As it was, I felt as though we’d fallen out of the universe. Grace’s written prayers seemed to glow in the muted light of Cormac’s magicked quartz.
“What happened to you in there?” Ben asked. Meaning prison. What had happened to change Cormac so much in two years?
Cormac gave a short chuckle. “Place had demons.”
“Most people would think you meant that figuratively,” I said.
“Demons, gods—the world’s full of all kinds of shit,” he said.
“But Amelia saved your life?” I said, to confirm it in my own mind as much as anything. The more I tried to pry the story from him the more surly he’d get. But I wanted to be sure of that much.
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess I’ll stop bitching about her.”
I could see his wry smile, even in the semidarkness. “She and I both appreciate it.”
“I’ve just been worried about you,” I said.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said, matter-of-fact, instantly—like a defense mechanism.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
“Get used to it,” Ben said, amused. “You’re part of the pack.”
“The pack?”
I hesitated, then said, “Pack of three. That’s what I’ve been calling us. I figure we have to look out for each other.”
“Huh,” he said, settling himself against the wall, adjusting his grip on the crossbow. I kept waiting for him to say something else, but this was Cormac. The strong, silent type.
After another long moment, Ben said, “When they say they’re gods, they don’t mean literally gods, do they? They’re something else and they’re just calling themselves gods.”
Nobody said anything, until the silence itself seemed the answer.
Cormac said, “It’s a hell of a lot to take in.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “They can’t literally be gods, because that would mean…” I took a breath, swallowing a lump that was threatening my voice. “That would mean religion, everything they said in church—”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ben said. “People say all kinds of crap in the name of God, doesn’t mean they’re speaking for an actual higher power. It’s like you’re always saying, there’s real and then there’s real. There’ve been plenty of two-bit psychics who claim they’re channeling Cleopatra when they’re doing no such thing. That there may really be something out there just gives that many more people a chance to try to make a fast buck on big claims.”
“Ben, you remember that freak of a preacher your mom used to listen to on the radio?” Cormac said.
“Which one?”
“The one who said NASA ought to stop going into space because it was blasphemous trying to get too close to heaven.”
“Geez, yes,” he said, chuckling. “That was right after that guy who was all about how ‘God will call me home’ if he didn’t get a million dollars or something. No, I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with any capital G god.”
I squeezed Ben’s hand and settled his arm more firmly around me. “That’s the real power, you know. That televangelist got the money he asked for, did you know that? There doesn’t have to be anything magic there if you can use the concept to manipulate people.”
“But how do you know?” Ben said. “When Anastasia evokes a promise Grace’s ancestors made hundreds of years ago to scare Grace into helping her—how do you know there’s not really something there?”
“You don’t,” I said. “That’s why it works.”
Cormac sounded frustrated when he said, “But Grace’s got something going on, those two are really vampires, you two are really werewolves, I’ve got Amelia, and that Sun guy is not human.”
“We could talk ourselves in circles and still never figure it out.”
“It’s like running a race: you just keep your eye on the path in front of you,” Cormac said.
“What happens when you find yourself right back where you started?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
Grace had fallen asleep. She was huddled against the wall, wrapped in Cormac’s jacket, her breathing deep and even. I wis
hed I could sleep; Wolf wanted to pace. I tried to settle her—Cormac was part of our pack and keeping watch. Nothing could make Cormac not keep watch. We were as safe here as we’d been all night. Sighing, I thought maybe I could sleep for a little while.
Ben was playing with a strand of my hair, stroking the tangles out of it, curling it around his fingers, over and over. I looked at him. “You okay?”
“On what scale? At the moment, I’m okay. I hope I can still say that in six hours or so.”
I turned my head to kiss his shoulder.
Still watching the door, Cormac said, “Look, I want you two to know, if something happens and we don’t make it out of here—”
“We’ll make it out of here,” Ben and I said together.
“Damned optimists,” he said with a huff, rearranging his seat against the wall, adjusting his grip on the crossbow, and settling into silence.
We shouldn’t have interrupted him. I’d never find out what he’d been about to say.
* * *
BEN WASN’T going to let himself sleep, either. His muscles under me were tense. With all this vigilance around me, I should have been able to nap a little. But I’d drift off for a few minutes, then start awake, convinced I heard the sounds of battle right outside the door. Every time, Ben would touch me, comforting me.
I still couldn’t get over how much the two vampires lying against the far wall looked like corpses.
“Should have learned Chinese,” Cormac murmured, breaking the quiet. Only it wasn’t him, because he wasn’t looking at the door anymore; he was studying the characters Grace had written on the wall. “It was next on the list, after Arabic and Hebrew. But I never got ’round to it. I suppose I can, now.”
It sounded like Cormac, but as far as I knew he’d never harbored any ambitions of learning any foreign languages. I might accept what had happened, but I would never get used to hearing Amelia’s words spoken in Cormac’s voice.
“Amelia, I think we need Cormac here,” I said. “Just until we don’t need the crossbow anymore.”
He/she sighed. “I used to be reasonably handy with a crossbow. But you’re probably right.”
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