Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1)

by Sonya Bateman

  Sadie’s form had disappeared almost instantly, but I could see filaments of light flickering on and off in her wake. They looked like glowing spider webs. For a moment I was too fascinated to be horrified.

  Then I realized that I was alone, and completely lost down here. I’d never find my way back the way we came—and I couldn’t follow her where she’d gone.

  If she didn’t come back, I’d stay lost forever.

  The twenty minutes or so it took for Sadie to return felt a lot longer. I’d almost decided to try going in there after her, anti-human spell or not, when she emerged from the dark with no warning. “All right, it’s clear,” she said. “Follow me.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.” She beckoned once and disappeared again.

  I drew a bracing breath, and stepped into the void.

  At least the ground didn’t drop out from under my feet. For a few seconds there was only the blackness pressing down on all sides—like a living thing, actively sucking the light from the world. It almost seemed to be pushing at me, trying to keep me back.

  Then the dark lifted like a fog, and I couldn’t help staring.

  It was another tunnel, but nothing like the cramped, crumbling passageways we’d traveled so far. Wide and well-lit, with a ceramic tiled floor and patterned stone walls, this corridor would’ve been at home in some gothic castle. The difference was dizzying.

  Finally, I realized that Sadie was no longer alone.

  Beside her was a man, for lack of a better word. Easily seven feet-plus tall and almost as wide, with stone gray eyes and powder gray hair. He wore shapeless gray clothing and no shoes. Even his skin was ashen and nearly gray. Overall, he looked like he’d been copied and pasted into the world from an old black-and-white movie. Frankenstein’s monster made real.

  The monster-man stared at me, expressionless as a statue—one that looked capable of crushing my bones if he wanted to.

  And I suddenly felt much too human for this place.

  “This is Grygg,” Sadie said. “He’s the gatekeeper. He just wanted to make sure you weren’t dangerous.” She turned to the giant man and smiled. “Grygg, this is Gideon. He’s not dangerous.”

  Grygg the gatekeeper took a step toward me. A very heavy step. “What is your purpose here?” he said in a voice like a rockslide.

  “Er. Information,” I said. “She’s taking me to see…uh…”

  “Taeral,” Sadie supplied.

  “Yeah. Him.”

  “The Unseelie?” Grygg ground out. “And you are human.”

  “Yes.”

  A reedy, rustling sound came from the gatekeeper. Eventually I decide he was laughing. “Well. If it’s the Unseelie you want, you may pass,” he said. “But you should reconsider this audience, human. It may be your last.”

  “My what? Hold on a minute.”

  Grygg lumbered past me, shaking his massive head. “I must seal the passage. Goodbye, human.”

  With that, he vanished into the black fog of the tunnel entrance.

  I glared at Sadie. “What the hell’s he talking about?”

  “Nothing. You’ll be fine.” She turned and started walking, then glanced back at me. “You coming?”

  “No. I’m reconsidering.”

  She sighed. “I told you the Unseelie are nasty,” she said. “Everyone knows it. But I promise, you’ll be okay. He won’t hurt you when we tell him what you are.”

  “Yeah, that’s great. But what if I’m actually not a—”

  “You are.”

  I hesitated another minute, and at last gave in and started after her. Whether or not it was true, Milus Dei was still looking for me. I had to know what to do about that. “What is…uh, Grygg, anyway?” I said.

  “He’s a golem.”

  “Oh.” Like I was supposed to know what that was. But right now, I wasn’t going to ask. Things were already crazy enough. “This place is unbelievable,” I muttered.

  She smirked over her shoulder. “This is nothing. Wait’ll you see the market.”

  “Market?” I caught up with her reluctantly, brow furrowed. “I thought we were going to meet this Taeral guy.”

  “We are.”

  The corridor brought us to a large opening full of shadows and low light. Sadie held a hand up just before we reached it. “Watch your step,” she said.

  Why died on the tip of my tongue as I came up beside her…and looked down.

  She smiled at my stunned expression. “Welcome to the Hive.”

  The opening was the start of a stone staircase, wide and winding down to a vast platform. Stone columns weathered with age rose from the edges of the platform and disappeared far above into darkness, like some forgotten Greek coliseum buried underground.

  The platform held a small city.

  It took a moment to realize the “buildings” were poorly built stalls, sheds, and tent-like structures. Mounted torches and smaller flickering lights cast an orange glow across the area. There was no particular arrangement to the ramshackle collection. Irregular, twisting passageways wound through the stalls—some leading to other passages, others ending abruptly or narrowing into nothing.

  The handful of figures moving down there appeared human. For the most part.

  “Let’s go,” Sadie said, and headed down the stairs.

  I followed her without saying anything. Not that I didn’t have questions—I just had so many, I didn’t know where to start. This wasn’t my world. It was hers, and theirs. The Others.

  But when we reached the platform and I got a closer look at the patched tents, the makeshift fires and sagging clothes lines, the hardened survival atmosphere that lay over the place—the depressing signs of the nomadic, outcast lifestyle I’d grown up with, familiar as my nightmares—I kind of felt right at home.

  Anywhere that felt like home was the last place I wanted to be.

  Sadie led the way down a wide main artery, and then through a bunch of twists and turns. The structures changed the further in we went, degenerating from rough but workable wooden buildings near the outside of the makeshift city, to little more than lean-tos covered with cloth and tents draped with layers of ragged material.

  Someone or something watched from one doorway with a milk-white blind stare and cackled softly as we passed. A deep shadow at the end of a crowded alley of tents held three or four pairs of gleaming yellow eyes, riveted on me in unison.

  In another place, a covered stall, a figure seated on a stool slouched near the back in shadows, head turning to follow our passage. The figure leaned into the light—revealing a nightmare of a ruined face, covered with scars and puckered holes that made one eye bulge and showed a few rotting teeth through the side of his jaw.

  I didn’t scream, but it was damned close.

  “What the hell was that?” I whispered harshly when we were past the stall.

  Sadie didn’t even break stride. “Bogeyman.”

  “Come on. The bogeyman is real, too?”

  “Not the bogeyman. A bogeyman. One of many,” she said. “Bogeypersons are a species.”

  “Right.” That was the other word she’d said the first time we met. A politically correct term for the bogeyman. “So where’s Bloody Mary and the guy with the hook hand that kills hitchhikers?”

  “Oh, they eloped to Hawaii.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Nope.” She looked at me, fighting a smirk. Then she laughed. “Okay, maybe a little.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “All right, I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.” She slowed and looked around briefly. “Here,” she said, ducking to the right between a stick-built shack and a splintery plywood shed. “Taeral’s place is close.”

  I followed through a narrow, fabric-draped corridor. At the end was a roughly circular clearing ringed with large stones. The tent in the center was bigger than most of them down here. It looked sturdy enough, in terms of not ready to fall down. Two tall torches blazed on either side of the cover
ed entrance. Markings like the ones on Sadie’s fairy bag were scrawled on the door flap, in something that looked a lot like blood.

  The walls of the tent were made with layers of scraps, ragged flaps and grungy sheets of canvas, and a rank odor hung in the air surrounding the place. It smelled like a bar had burned down.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Taeral’s place.”

  “Cozy, ain’t it?” She hesitated a few seconds, then strode across the clearing.

  I walked after her. “Do we knock, or—”

  “No.” She threw the door flap back and plunged inside, and I heard her shout, “Taeral! Where are you, you lowlife, miserable Unseelie drunk?”

  That did not sound like a great way to get the attention of a dark magic fairy who demanded body parts as payment.

  My entrance wasn’t as enthusiastic as hers. I lifted the tent flap gingerly and ducked beneath it, coming up in a small, dimly lit space stuffed with clutter. Stacks of books and old newspapers, piles of boards, rickety shelves stuffed with bottles and vials and containers. There were even a few scrolls shoved among the junk, tied with crude strips of leather.

  I found myself hoping none of them were the Scrolls of Gideon.

  From somewhere in the depths of the tent, Sadie shouted, “Come on, Taeral!” Something rustled and fluttered sharply, like she’d whipped a handful of newspapers into the air. “It’s way past noon. Drag your lazy ass out here and do some business.”

  I hurried toward the sound as fast as I could—which wasn’t very fast, since I had to wind my way through stacks and jumbles of crap. Finally, I came to another room, with nothing in it except Sadie and a large mound of papers and cardboard boxes with a pile of rags on top.

  She spared me a quick glance. Her eyes were full of rage. Then she turned and kicked the cardboard mound. “Get up!”

  “All right,” the rag pile muttered. “Keep it down, you mangy cur.”

  The rags stirred, and a grimed hand eased out from beneath the pile. It felt around gingerly.

  With a snort of disgust, Sadie grabbed a half-empty, corked square bottle of brown liquid from the floor and pushed it into the hand.

  “Perfect. Thank you.”

  Gripping the bottle like a talisman, the hand reached up and pushed the rags aside. The figure sitting up slowly had to be Taeral. He looked human. Swarthy and blue-eyed, with a shoulder-length tangle of black hair and a cold, wicked slant to his smile. No wings, no pointy ears—some fairy. He was also shirtless, and covered with tattoos remarkably similar to mine.

  But there were no tattoos on his left arm, because it was made out of metal and gears all the way to his shoulder, where it fastened with a leather harness. A silver clockwork arm. Long and spindly, spider-like, with extra joints in the fingers of the hand.

  I guessed fairies weren’t completely invincible.

  “So.” Taeral’s voice was cracked and guttural, a broken scrap of sound. He wrenched the cork from the bottle with metal fingers that clanked and wheezed as they moved, and drank deeply. “Where have you been? I’ve not seen you in weeks.”

  “Busy. And I didn’t know you cared, Taeral.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good, because I’m not telling you.”

  His eyes narrowed, and then he sighed. “Fine. What do you want now, little lap dog? Something to make you invisible, give you more speed, more strength? The deepest, darkest secrets of Milus Dei?” He laughed harshly and took another long drink. “Still fighting them, when you should be running.”

  Fighting? I made a burning mental note to question Miss Running-For-My-Life about that later.

  Her lip curled as she produced the bottle she’d brought. “Something to prime the pump,” she said, placing it on the pile in front of him. “And I don’t want anything from you, Unseelie. He does.”

  Taeral followed her gesture. He did a double-take, as if noticing me for the first time. The disdain on his face twisted into anger. “You’ve brought a stranger to my home?”

  “Relax. He doesn’t know the way,” Sadie said. “Do you think I’m that stupid? And besides, even if he could find the Hive on his own, he can’t get in. He’s human.”

  There was a blur of motion. I blinked, and Taeral was in front of me with a knife to my throat. “I despise humans,” he snarled. “Give me one good reason not to kill you.”

  Sadie stepped forward angrily. “I’ll give you one,” she said. “He’s the DeathSpeaker.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “You lie,” Taeral said roughly. “That’s not possible.”

  I glanced down at the knife. It was made of dulled gray metal, big and curved with a serrated edge, held firmly in his clockwork hand—and way too close to my skin. So much for Sadie’s insistence that I’d be fine. “You know, people keep saying that,” I said. “Well, Others say it. The dead guy disagreed, but I’m pretty sure he was human.”

  “A dead man spoke to you?”

  I would’ve nodded, but I didn’t feel like bleeding. “I thought he did. Hell, maybe I’m just going crazy, though,” I said. “I work with dead people every day. It’s my job.”

  “Your job.” He shook his head slowly, and at last lowered the knife. “You are not the DeathSpeaker. You can’t be.”

  “Hey, that’s great news,” I said. “How about you tell that to Milus Dei.”

  Just when I thought the pissed-off fairy couldn’t get any angrier, he proved me wrong.

  “They know of you!” he roared, drawing the knife back as if he meant to strike. “How? Did they send you here? By the gods, if you’ve anything to do with them I’ll cut you to pieces and scatter your filthy human carcass to the winds!”

  Suddenly I was just as furious. I’d had it with these Others threatening me, when I never asked to be dragged into this. “I don’t know shit about them,” I shouted back. “That’s what I came here to find out! They want to kill me, and I have no idea why.”

  His expression froze, and he stared at me. But he wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  “What?” I glanced down and caught a glimpse of silvery light.

  The pendant was glowing under my shirt.

  Before I could react, he snatched the cord around my neck with his normal hand and yanked the stone free. “Where did you get this, human?”

  Out of pure, furious reflex, I snagged his wrist. “That is mine,” I said, barely recognizing my own voice. The same deep, rumbling tone I’d used years ago with my brothers. “Let go.”

  His eyes widened. “You are—”

  “Damn it, let go!”

  “I can’t,” he said with a slight tremor in his voice. “You have to let go first.”

  “Fine.” I loosened my grip. A little.

  His fingers shifted, and the pendant bounced against my chest. Just behind me, I heard Sadie gasp. Maybe she’d figured I was a dead man when I touched him—but I wasn’t going to die today.

  “Thank you.” I shoved his wrist away. “And if you ever touch it again, I will find a way to destroy you. Dark magic fairy or not. Understand, Taeral?”

  I had no idea where this outburst was coming from. Somehow I’d ignored the fact that he had a knife pointed at me and wasn’t afraid to use it. But a cold, unfamiliar part of me didn’t care. The stone was mine, and I had to keep it safe.

  I’d promised.

  Taeral stared for another moment, and then closed his eyes slowly. His arms fell slack at his sides. “You should have stayed with the hunters, boy,” he rasped.

  My blood ran cold. “What did you say?”

  He ignored the question and turned away, trudging toward the cardboard pile to stow the knife somewhere. “That stone belonged to my father,” he said. “The markings engraved in the silver, the runes… Ciar’ Ansghar. Our family name.” He made a weary gesture. “And there’s only one way it could have come to you.”

  “Hold on,” Sadie said. “Didn’t you say that your father—”

  “You stay out of this!” His anger returned as he whirled t
o face her. “You’re the one who brought him down here,” he said. “He never should have known of this world.”

  “Hey. Fairy.”

  The fierce blue glare shifted to me, and for a second I thought I should’ve listened to Sadie about calling him that. But my mouth just kept on running. “Why the hell did you mention hunters? You don’t know a damned thing about me.”

  “Oh, I know you. Gideon.”

  Damn. I was positive Sadie hadn’t gotten around to actually introducing me. How did strangers keep guessing my name?

  “You touched me. Many Fae are psychic to some degree,” he said, as if I’d asked the question aloud. “But I’d not needed the whisper of your thoughts to know you.”

  “You’re insane,” I said. “Anyone ever told you that?”

  His eyes dulled and he looked away. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said. “But first, I require payment.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not giving you a tooth. Even if you are a fairy.”

  “Fortunately, your teeth are worthless to me.” One corner of his mouth hardened in a smirk. “I want you to fetch me a body.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Any body in particular? Because I know where there’s loads of them, but I’m not sure they’d be too happy with me borrowing one from the morgue.”

  “This body is not in any morgue.” He paced to the wall and waved a hand, and part of the fabric vanished, revealing rows of cubby holes with various objects in them. After a brief inspection, he took out a rolled paper and shook it loose to reveal a detailed map of Central Park. “It’s buried here,” he said, tapping a small red X at the heart of the North Woods. “Bring it to me.”

  I frowned. “A body buried in the woods. I’m pretty sure it’d take me a year to find it,” I said. “Who is it, and how do you know it’s there?”

  “Never mind that.” He rolled the map again and held it out to me. “She’ll help you find it,” he said, waving a hand at Sadie. “Right, pup? She’s a nose for these things.”

  “Oh, you’re hilarious, Taeral,” she said. “No way in hell. I’m not going to the park.”

  “You will go. Or I’ll gut you with a dull blade, right before I rip your head from your pretty little shoulders.”