by S. M. Reine
Cage squirmed down where he’d made more room in the bag, and not a moment too soon. Brigid stretched out a hand to touch the ley line faster. Cage felt the world opening around them, followed by eternity squeezing in on him, smashing his ribs together and sucking the breath from his lungs. He was wrung out like a dirty sock in soapy water. He was going to break.
And then…pop!
Phaethon Bay vanished.
Chapter Eight
Once they arrived in Barcelona, Brigid never opened her backpack and Cage didn’t try to escape. She walked a winding cobblestone road overlooking the Gothic architecture of Spain while Cage poked his nose out from underneath the rain fly. His senses were enhanced, as all shifters’ were, so he got a lot of local information by sniffing the air.
Barcelona was nothing like Phaethon Bay. It was a much older city, having existed many hundreds of years before Genesis, and magetech hadn’t taken over yet. People drove normal cars here, and they rode normal bicycles. The sky didn’t sing with magical advertisements. There wasn’t a constant zing of weather magic, nor did the hyperloop blast through downtown.
Here, there was only clear sky, warm wind, and normal people wandering around.
The food smelled great. Cage wanted so badly to climb out, shapeshift into a human, and eat his way through the bakeries. Unfortunately, Barcelona’s mundanity meant that it also did not have shifting stalls in public spaces like Phaethon Bay. A naked shifter walking around in his human form would cause quite a stir.
For now, the best place to be was Brigid Byrne’s bag.
She settled in at a coffee shop, putting the bag in a chair beside her. He drank his fill of her sight.
Brigid Byrne, after so many years…
Damn, she’d only gotten prettier. The unruly little hairs along her hairline that always made her look as though she were surrounded by static. Her dimpled chin. Her straight nose and thin lips. She was pretty but no-nonsense, wearing only just enough makeup to tint her blond eyelashes and eyebrows to match her slightly darker hair.
But even now, alone in a relaxed environment, her eyes were sharp. She was probably casing the joint. Planeswalking had gotten her to Barcelona on time, but that hadn’t gotten her a pass into Shadowhold. Brigid would need to steal one.
She’d have no trouble pickpocketing a traveler. Brigid remained the best thief Cage had ever known.
Brigid and Cage had been young when they first met, with Brigid fresh out of the Academy and Cage having just left his parents’ house. She’d been eighteen. He had been twenty-two. Still, she had already been a better thief. Both had been hired by different parties to raid a tomb, and Brigid got there first.
It was lucky that Cage had lost to Brigid, since the tomb had been cursed. Brigid would have boiled to death if he hadn’t saved her with a neutralizing charm. It hadn’t taken them long to sleep together after that, and Cage had been in love long before he bust his first nut inside her, pun intended.
Looking at her now, more than a decade older with the scars of experience to show for it, Brigid looked more ethereal to him than any angel he had ever seen.
He wanted so desperately to know everything happening within that brilliant mind of hers. He wanted to kiss her, and please her, and be whipped by her, and have all that fun they used to have.
It was that kind of thinking that got him in trouble every damn time. The kind of thinking that made him leave his keys where she could steal them, or his cash, or occasionally his entire apartment.
Now they were officially enemies. They were working for the same grab again, and if Cage didn’t get his shit together, she was going to win a second time.
He wanted this job so much more than he wanted Brigid.
A shiver rolled down his squirrel spine as he remembered her fingernails on his cock.
Okay, maybe he wanted the job almost as much as he wanted Brigid.
She reached for her backpack, and Cage jerked his nose back under the rain fly. Shit. Shit. She’s gonna see me.
Her bag was halfway unzipped at the top. He squeezed himself inside, praying that she needed something out of one of the smaller pockets on the outside.
Through the zipper, he watched her hands approach. Her fingertips were callused because she fiddled so much with her belongings. The cuticles were bitten. Her nails were short. She was about to feel a furry squirrel in her bag and punch him.
“Hola.” A man had stopped beside the table.
Brigid’s hands withdrew.
Cage let out a quiet sigh of relief.
“Hola. Como estas?” Brigid replied. When had she picked up a Spanish accent? She sounded fluent, and weirder still, she didn’t have the muffled voice from her jaw injury. She’d picked up several new tricks.
“Bien,” the man said, and that was the last of the conversation that Cage could follow because he did not speak Spanish. He did speak body language. He could see that the man was hitting on Brigid. He fantasized about the man trying to open Brigid’s bag only to find an explosion of murderous squirrel inside. Cage would rip out this Spaniard’s fucking throat if he put a finger on Brigid Byrne.
Their conversation continued for a long time. Too long. Brigid giggled in a way that was totally unlike her, touching the man on his arm and batting her eyelashes. It actually made Cage feel better to see her flirting in such a fake, obvious way. If Brigid was actually flirting, she’d steal his car, drive it off a bridge, and send pictures.
God, he missed dating her so much.
If she was flirting like that with this guy, then he was her mark. Cage wasn’t remotely surprised when the man walked away with what he must’ve thought was Brigid’s phone number, while Brigid tucked an envelope into the side pocket of her bag. She had gotten the pass from him. Cage hadn’t even seen her hands moving. She was amazing.
She shouldered the bag and left the café with Cage. She dropped her drink in the trashcan on the way out, without having actually ingested anything. She took a swig from a hip flask instead, judging by the sound of water sloshing inside metal.
That looked a lot like paranoia. Paranoia was new for Brigid.
She had planeswalked to a location near the door to Shadowhold. Cage had heard it called a door, but what he saw when he surreptitiously peered over Brigid’s shoulder was actually an old rail station. It still had the giant clock surrounded by elaborate gothic bas reliefs, but it didn’t use a standard twelve-hour face anymore. They marked time differently in Shadowhold. At this moment, it was Second Tuesday, and would remain so for the next hour.
Brigid got in line to enter. Cage only needed a quick glimpse to see that there were bio-scanners, and they’d register Brigid’s extra cargo in her backpack. He needed to split.
He slid out from under her backpack and weaved under the crowd.
A man leaped out of his way with a cry of surprise. Once he raised the alarm, others yelled too. Someone called him a rata, which sounded suspiciously like rat. He’d take time to be offended later.
At the moment, he was scrabbling up the rear side of a statue where nobody could see him and hauling tail across the roof in search of a hole. Cage didn’t have to look far to find one. This building must have been built before World War II, and it looked like nobody had cared to tend to it since Genesis.
Cage paused above the hole in the roof and tilted his head in both directions, ears cocked, every sense open for signs of magic.
His fur lifted with a faint humming.
Those were wards. They’d fry him into a squirrel kebab if he jumped through.
The hum was the same as the first note in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” It was the only reason he recognized it—an auditory mnemonic device. An octave lower would have indicated a passive ward. This one was active, meaning there would be crystals controlling it.
He wrapped his agile fingers around a roof tile and ripped it free. He chewed through one layer of plywood before finding it: a quartz the size of his squirrel brain, which was connected to
the wards.
Cage ripped it out. Tossed it off the back of the roof.
The humming vanished.
He crawled through the hole without getting fried.
The air was stuffy in the rafters. The scent of sweaty bodies packed into a tight queue mingled with a brimstone tang. Cage hung upside-down over the queue waiting to get into Hell on Earth, so he could smell them all: witches, demons, shifters, even a sidhe or two.
His eyes weren’t as good for gathering information, but he could see well enough in the darkness. It was more industrial inside the train station than he realized. There were an awful lot of pipes, some grumbling engines, a few large pistons lined up along the wall. The floor was punched with metal rivets.
It’s an elevator, he realized. The front half of the room was a line, and the back half was an elevator. It was how they would allow a single wave of people to enter Shadowhold, and then allow that wave to return in the evening.
He had to get onto that elevator.
Cage focused his vision—nearly as bad as a human’s—on the line for the bio-scanner. Brigid was still on the other side. He just needed to wait for her to pass through security, sneak back into her bag, and ride all the way to Arawn’s apartment. Let her do the work of breaking in. Cage would still make off with the Death Underpants, and he’d feel no guilt for it.
None at all.
Not even a tiny bit.
But when Brigid went through the security checkpoint, they stopped her. They took her backpack off the conveyor belt. A guard spoke with her, too quietly for Cage to hear them over the din, and then guided her out of the room.
Aw shit.
There went his ride.
His darting eyes searched the crowd. He needed someone else—anyone else.
A witch was about to get onto the elevator. She was carrying a huge suitcase with an open duffel on top. Her acid green eyes were fixed on the elevator.
Surely she wouldn’t notice a visiting squirrel.
Cage leaped between pistons, slithered under the barriers, and wound between the legs of the crowd without brushing a single shin.
He leaped into the duffel and landed with a poof in something soft.
Something soft that began thrashing and hissing and spitting.
A cat.
Claws slashed across his face, raking across his right eye. Blood blinded him. Cage chittered furiously as he leaped out of the duffel. He was no safer outside—a human hand snatched him out of the air by his tail, holding him as he thrashed.
“Krysa!” she shrieked.
She hurled him at the wall, then pointed, like she was target-hunting ducks.
A hex zapped from her finger.
Cage hit the wall, the hex hit him, and he bounced to the floor.
Unconscious. Again.
* * *
Cage had a great nap and woke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, literally speaking. Shifters didn’t change back if they fell asleep. He’d gotten knocked out and remained in his squirrel form.
Now, some indeterminate time later, Cage was waking up with a hell of a headache behind one of the elevator’s pistons. His skull couldn’t have been ringing any harder if the witch’s hex had pounded him with a giant cartoon mallet.
He rolled over behind the piston where he’d fallen, snarling at the ache in his head. The rusted rivets swam in and out of focus. It was darker than when he’d fallen asleep.
How long was I out?
Cage had to crawl up to the barrier to get a look at the back of the train station’s clock. It took an embarrassing amount of mental math to convert from Hell Standard Time to Barcelona’s time zone. And once he figured it out, shock made his heart splash down in his stomach acid.
It was eight o’clock at night.
The hex had knocked him out for the entire day—the one day each month where he could access Shadowhold. Now the elevator was about to leave for its second—and last—trip down to Shadowhold. If Cage went down, there’d be no way for him to get back.
On the bright side, Brigid hadn’t gone down on the first elevator either. She’d been pulled out by security. For now, the Death Underpants were still safely with Arawn. Brigid wouldn’t be able to get them for another month.
And neither would Cage, unless he went down right now.
Hey, at least Gutterman wouldn’t be able to murder him down there.
“Whoa, little guy,” murmured a gentle male voice. “How’d you end up back here?” One of the elevator staff had come behind the barrier, picking carefully through the pistons to find Cage. Some Good Samaritan was trying to help the giant rat that had gotten stuck in some musty corner.
As the employee bent over him, Cage spotted a badge swinging from his pocket. This guy had elevator access privileges. Superficially, he resembled Cage: a fair-skinned human guy with brown hair, though his was cut short in his ID photo.
Cage waited until the man gently slid his hands underneath the shifter’s furry body, before he attacked.
He headbutted the guard. Shifter skull cracked against human.
At least Cage wasn’t the one knocked out this time.
The guard dropped.
Chapter Nine
Funnily enough, “behind the pistons of an elevator to Hell on Earth” was not the weirdest place Cage had been forced to get dressed. That award went to backstage at the Oscars. He’d stolen a statuette on a whim. Not an easy heist, but totally worth it, since that meant he had some little naked golden guy in his office at the Museum.
Unlike at the Oscars, Cage managed to shapeshift without getting spotted. He only felt slightly like a jackass stealing both clothes and badge from the Shadowhold Gatekeeper. Cage looked fantastic once he was fully dressed. Even the mundane staff of Shadowhold dressed up in elaborate costumes, and Phil Germanotti was in black linen, wrapped with leather cords. Cage wrapped them tightest around his forearms, calves, and waist, giving the illusion of a more sculpted—dare he say, heroic?—physique.
When he emerged into the light, nobody seemed to care how great he looked. The security guys were tired; they didn’t lift their heads when he swiped his badge to get onto the elevator moments before it descended. It was hard to keep hyped without a hype man. Cage shuffled his feet all the way to the elevator’s rear corner.
A month without Vex’s compliments was gonna suck.
It took a long time to get from the surface of the Earth, in Barcelona, down to the chthonic wonder of the world. The shaft outside the elevator had been painted with murals to entertain people on the way down, but Cage wouldn’t have minded an in-flight movie. Standing on an elevator platform for an hour was dull.
His company wasn’t dull, though. He was surrounded by demons who’d been playing tourist on the surface. Shadowhold demons looked a lot scarier than most who lived among society, like the Vexes. Cage’s company ranged from having eight spindly legs with clicky beaks, to human-like creatures with weird fangs, and all the way to monsters with severed limbs that never stopped oozing blood.
The one stand-out was a mousy human woman with thick glasses. She wore an oversized sweater and tattered black leggings with combat boots. Shopping bags hung off of her shoulder. She played spider solitaire on her phone.
“Colleges in Spain must be pretty hardcore,” Cage said.
She looked up at him, startled. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry.” He flashed his most charming smile, showing his stolen security card to her. “I’m Phil. I figure you must be heading down for an internship or something, right? Young lady like you?”
“Young lady? Oh! My glamour!” She slapped her forehead. “I can take it off now. Thanks for reminding me.” She tucked her phone into one of the shopping bags before taking her glasses by the arms. She removed them.
The glamour fell away, showering off her body like a waterfall over rocks.
The skeletal figure revealed wasn’t that of a demon, but a revenant—an unusual subspecies of vampire. The only reason Cage recognized her was b
ecause she was Charity Ballard, featured in the dossier provided by Silverclaw Cult.
She was a desiccated corpse stretched to three meters in height. Her guts flopped limply inside her exposed abdominal cavity. Her fingers were hooks. Charity was the wife of Arawn, heir to the Pit of Souls, and owner of the Death Underpants.
This revenant could get a husband and Cage was still living the bachelor life. Dating was so weird.
“You must be Charity Ballard,” he said, offering a hand. “Honor to meet you.”
“Thanks, Phil. Are you on security for the base station this month?”
That sounded like a legitimate reason for him to head down on the night elevator with the demons. “Yup. Definitely.”
“Stay safe,” Charity said, offering him a smile that would have looked shy if not for all the brittle yellow teeth rotting inside her skull.
The elevator shuddered to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. Looking up, Cage could see barely a quarter kilometer of the path carved into the rock; it was too dark beyond that. He felt as though he were somehow standing at the bottom of the ocean. The weight of the shadows made it hard to breathe.
Gates rattled open as soon as the elevator settled. Cage had expected the door to open near him, but it was on the far side; he had to wait for the other demons to step out into the city before he could make his exit. Once he was off, he stepped out of the way and waited, tucked in the shadows behind a cupola. His gaze flicked over the city—what little he could see from the elevator’s base station, which was on the higher end of the cavern, which sloped deeper still into the earth on the far end. Dripping water echoed behind him.
Some of Shadowhold’s buildings were gothic, like the older buildings in Barcelona. Some of it was more Catalonian, angular and gloomy. All of it was squatter than it should have been. Like the city was perpetually ducking under a low doorway.
They were so far under the surface of the Earth that Cage felt deaf. He was so used to hearing everything—from the rustle of grass a kilometer away to an airplane’s engine over the mountains—that having nothing to hear beyond what he could see disturbed him. There was nothing but dripping fluid and a ceramic rattling, almost like skeletons dancing.
