by Jenn Stark
“There’s only one way to find out,” I muttered. “Let’s go find Roland.”
21
With Simon’s device to guide us, we made good time, scaling the tall steps of the ruins with relative ease and working our way through the crumbling structures that still remained. We ended up at a large, partially intact stone building that had withstood the ravages of time and the scant attention of excavators. It gleamed like a mottled pearl beneath the wash of moonlight.
There was only one problem, though. It was empty.
“He’s here, or somebody is, I’m telling you,” Simon said, fiddling with his device. Even from a few feet away, I could see the glow of a life-form on his tech. We were right on top of the guy, but there was nothing in this roofless building but walls, windows, and a doorway, and the shallow indentations in the ground that indicated that maybe there had once been some sort of pool or bath in the room.
“What about your other beacon?” Nigel asked. “Your bad-guy indicator?”
“It’s not visible in this view. One sec.” Simon said. He widened the scope of the device, then squinted up the mountain. Way up the mountain, until his head was focused high above the horizon. He chuckled a little grimly. “Okay, someone is screwing with me. According to this, my beacon is on the actual moon. Like the thing up in the sky. Very funny.”
“I’m getting kind of tired of this particular game, yeah,” I muttered. As I spoke, I opened my mind, reaching out to the one person I knew would be paying attention at this point, even if he had been distracted before. I felt the touch of the Magician like a balm against my senses almost immediately, a flood of reassurance, but also interest. Scholarly interest. The kind of interest that did not always bode well for me.
“I would like to see this hand played out, Miss Wilde,” the Magician murmured in my mind. “Simon is right. There is great power being wielded here to cloak the obvious. Such shadowy efforts could well be the province of the Moon. She has waited a long time to reveal herself. I would have her do it on her own terms if possible.”
That’s all great, I thought right back. But we didn’t just break land speed records to get here in advance of all the other hunters to sit around on our hands and lose our advantage. That doesn’t make any sense.
“Understood, but perhaps a better way of looking at it is that you were brought to this place early for a reason, and your advantage would best be leveraged by gathering whatever intelligence you can and shoring up your position, not to liberate the treasure before anyone else gets there, which would only delay the ultimate battle.”
Except I’m a big fan of avoiding the ultimate battle, I argued. It seems to me if you scuttle out of a place before your enemies arrive, you win.
The Magician didn’t respond to that before Simon spoke again. “We’ve got some movement.”
I slanted him a hard glance. “Other hunters?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s Roland’s life force, or the life force voted most likely to be Roland’s. He’s not alone anymore.” He studied the basin beneath us. “There’s something here, something we’re not seeing.”
“Okay, everyone.” I peered around, once more on edge. “Spread out, survey the stones, see if there’s been anything etched into them, whether ancient or relatively new graffiti.”
As I issued this guidance, my hand dropped to my own pocket, and I quickly withdrew three cards. The first didn’t surprise me—the Moon again checking in, maybe to tweak me a little, maybe just to remind me of what the end goal was here. The next card gave me more pause. It was the Hermit. As usual, I took the card at face value, discounting its larger meaning for me personally, or its positioning within the Arcana Council. The Hermit of the Council was, after all, my father, but it wasn’t like we were tight. I hadn’t even known the man had existed until barely two years earlier, and given that the Hermit’s job took him beyond the realm of the human world to guard the veil between the realm of the gods and Earth, we didn’t have a lot of together time.
I glanced skyward a little, wondering what precisely he was doing now, or what he thought of all the turmoil the Council was currently experiencing. Hell, he might not even be aware of said turmoil. One of the many benefits of working remotely.
The third card was the Ace of Cups. A cup overflowing with water, symbolizing a new beginning, a creative wellspring, hope in the future. Too bad I wasn’t feeling particularly hopeful right now.
“How far away are the other hunters?” I asked Simon, and he obligingly checked his device.
“Still several hours distant, unless they play the same Chutes and Ladders game we did,” he said. “They’re making progress, but only measured and steady. They’re not trying to haul ass to get here.”
“They can’t,” Emilio agreed. “The jungle takes back the trail as quickly as it can, and there aren’t a lot of hikers who make the trek. A handful a day, if that. And definitely not in the dark of night. The legends grow as quick as the vines out here, with many believing the jungle doesn’t want Choquequirao to be found. They’re building a road, so that may change. In short order, the jungle would be tamed.”
“I’d like it to be tamed a little bit more right now.” I scanned the floor with frustration, the shallow basin bathed in the shadows as moonlight struck the far wall.
Nikki called from the same area. “Yo, I’ve got blood over here, or something dark and rusty looking that looks a lot like blood. No way to know how old it is unless you’ve got something else up your sleeve, Simon.”
“I don’t, but let me see…” He moved over toward Nikki, while Nigel sidled up to me.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you consult the cards twice in a row so quickly,” he commented drolly. “Almost like old times.”
I grimaced. “It feels worse, though, doesn’t it? It feels like I shouldn’t be running quite so blind at this stage in the game. What’s the point of being one of the most powerful Connecteds on the planet if I still have to rely on the cards to help show me the way?”
He lifted a brow. “I think you’re asking the wrong question. How about instead, what’s the point of having a facility with the cards if you’re not willing to avail yourself of that pathway, regardless of your other abilities? If the universe has a message it wants you to receive, how else do you propose it gets it to you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. He did have a point, but something else was bugging me. “What if, though, it’s not the universe that’s trying to communicate on that particular frequency? That could get ugly pretty quick.”
He blinked, shooting me a more worried look. “Has that ever happened before?”
“Not really, no.” I shook my head. “Armaeus screwed with my cards once, forcing them all to appear in his image, but that was an illusion that lasted only a few seconds. Once I refocused on the cards, they returned to their original forms. I’ve never had anyone try to reach me through the cards. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen, though.”
“A lot of things could happen,” Nigel agreed, with his irritatingly British pragmatism. “The best you can do is prepare for the other possibilities, while not giving in to worry about them. Hedge your bets without folding your hand. And trust the cards until they give you a reason not to trust them anymore.”
“I’ve got nothing,” Simon announced from the other side of the chamber, straightening. I squinted over at him, realizing the room had grown brighter, the effect of the unnaturally luminescent moonlight hitting more surfaces of the smooth stone.
“Could be old, could be new, could be human, could be animal,” Simon continued. “I don’t have the equipment to test it, and I’m not getting any real sense from it one way or another.”
“It doesn’t feel like spatter to me, though,” Nikki said beside him, still squinting at a spot on the wall. “Not in the conventional sense. It’s a splash of blood, maybe, but more like a flick.” She flexed her fingers and snapped her wrist to show what she meant. “That could be the result o
f an attack, or it could be part of some sort of ritual. It’s hard to say.”
I nodded, but my gaze was still fixed on the gleam of moonlight as it brightened another row of bricks.
“You know,” I murmured, “the floor of this room is shaped sort of like a cup. And I just drew the Ace of Cups. And we’ve got some rapid moon action happening here, which makes me wonder…”
“You think it’s some sort of false floor?” Nikki asked, now studying the shallow dirt basin as well. Something that might be triggered by moonlight?”
“Maybe,” I hazarded. I squinted down, flipping open my third eye, which was useful for detecting the underlying circuits of energy in a given space, usually a surefire indicator of where magic was in play. Right now, however, all three of my eyes blinked in surprise. There was nothing here that I could see—no energy, no circuits. We’d encountered a magical dead zone out here in the middle of nowhere, on top of one of the most supposedly supernatural sites in all the world.
How was that possible?
Nigel squatted down, knocking a few leaves to the side. “Can’t exactly be a false floor, I don’t think,” he reasoned. “There’s too much debris here, blown in from God knows where. I would think that if the Moon triggered the floor to drop every night, it would be clear.”
“Gotta go with Nigel on that one,” Nikki agreed. “It’s not like this cozy little cabin in the woods has a line of maintenance workers that comes in every day to sweep the floors. There’d be no reason.”
“Unless they are in service to the goddess,” Emilio said, his voice reverent. “If they kept guard over the sacred entrance to her underground realm, they could easily sanctify it every day.”
I started, glancing over to him. He’d been so quiet, I’d almost forgotten he was with us. But now our guide stood with eyes almost transfixed, his face tilted up toward the moon as its light gradually filled in the spaces around him. “Seriously?” I asked.
“I’m thinking no.” Nikki shook her head when Emilio didn’t respond right away. “Ain’t no six-thousand-year-old woman got patience for all that fuss every time she turned around. Even Eshe is getting lower maintenance these days, and she’s a baby by comparison. Plus, I’m not entirely buying the whole concept of an underground realm for the Moon. She kind of seems like somebody who would prefer the wide open spaces, you know what I mean?”
“Well, somebody’s down there, we know that,” Simon protested, waving his device at me. “We’ve got the life force formerly known as Roland, plus another dozen or so flickers that could be just about anyone, and that shows us that not only is there some sort of chamber right beneath us, but it’s got oxygen, and it’s got access from another location. So maybe the big reveal here is that we’ve pinpointed the guy, but we need to reach him via a more circuitous path.”
I shook my head, decidedly uneasy. Despite my momentary third-eye blindness, there was a reason for the Ace of Cups. There had to be. I joined Nigel at the edge of the basin, trying to peer across it, to make out any sort of crack or deformity. I didn’t see anything—no break in the rock, even with the brighter wash of moonlight filling it.
“This is stupid,” I muttered. There was a really easy way to test my theory out, so why was I hesitating? I was either right or wrong and the sooner we knew which way it went, the better off we would be.
I stepped off the edge of the shallow basin, taking the few quick strides required to get to the center. Nothing happened. I turned, my hands going out almost defensively as I expected chaos to rain down, but nothing shifted in the night. The sense of eerie stillness remained constant around us.
“Well, it was worth a shot.” I turned to stare up the mountain. “Maybe we just need to spread out and look for other cave openings? Or maybe…” I stopped, frowning, the image of the Hermit coming back to me.
“What is it?” Nikki asked, as always more attuned to me than anyone else in the room, with the possible exception of the Magician.
“He’s holding up a lantern,” I muttered. “Something bright and shiny. Is that all it takes?”
I shoved my hand into the pocket of my hoodie, then gestured for the others to join me. “If I’m going down and Roland needs our help, I’m not going down alone. And if I’m going to look stupid, I want you all here to tell the tale.”
The others quickly joined me in the shallow depression, and I paused for another second more, wondering if the added weight would trip the trigger, but nothing happened.
“All right, here we go,” I said, though I had a sinking feeling this wasn’t going to do it either—or a not so sinking feeling, as it happened.
I pulled the chunky opal-and-silver ring out of my pocket and held it high, not missing the avaricious intake of breath from both Nigel and Emilio. Once a hunter, always a hunter, I supposed. I stretched high, trying to turn the ring toward the moonlight, feeling a rush of wonder as it gleamed in the spectral light, taking on a fire of its own. That fire burst with the momentary brightness, then dimmed, leaving us all standing there feeling stupid.
Or maybe it was just me.
“Well,” Nikki said. “It was worth a—”
The dirt floor dropped away.
22
As we plummeted, I instantly knew something was wrong…mainly because we didn’t land within a few seconds.
Instead, the world exploded into a burst of sparks. The breath was sucked from my throat, and panic surged through me as my entire body seemed to catch on fire. Stars pinwheeled all around me, giving me the sense of getting sucked into a wormhole of pure, incandescent light, and suddenly I knew—knew where we were heading. All of us.
Not to Hell. Not the In Between.
Something far crazier.
I turned midair and flailed for Simon’s hand, roaring at him incoherently. He understood enough that he pulled in Nikki and Nigel, and I caught Emilio, all of us huddling together in a human cannonball as we fell and fell and fell. When we finally crashed to the floor, I expected my heart would explode along with the rest of my body. But we’d made it. All of us. And no one had had to be spiked bodily to me to come along for the ride.
Maybe Armaeus had amped me after all, juicing me into full Uber-alternate-universe rideshare status. Or maybe your first trip to Atlantis was always the hardest.
“Sweet Mother Mary on a tricycle. That hurt,” Nikki groaned, rolling over to sprawl spread-eagle on the tile flooring.
I peered down, my mind too scrambled to make sense of what I was seeing smashed up against my cheekbone for a second. Tile?
Oh, yeah. Tile. The richly inlaid tiled floor of a civilization whisked out of existence, suspended in time and space. I rolled to my back as well and peered up at the pinhole light in the ceiling, dread gathering within me. It had been night when we’d fallen through, but the light that now shone down in a narrow beam was decidedly sunlight. How far had we actually fallen? And when all this was over, would I have enough strength to get everyone back home?
“We are dead, we are dead, this is Hell, we are dead,” moaned Emilio on the other side of the shaft of light, as he curled himself into a tight ball.
Nigel, at his side, nudged him. “Snap out of it, boyo. If we’re in Hell, we’re going to need everyone to help get us out.”
“But we can’t be in Hell,” Nikki managed from her sprawled position on the floor. “Sara and Simon are here.”
“It’s not Hell,” I began, but my words were barely a whisper, barely audible to me through the pounding in my brain.
Beside me, Simon sat up and peered around with definite interest. “You really think this is Hell?” he asked. “I would have expected it to be, I don’t know, warmer.”
He flicked on his device, but nothing happened, and he frowned at it, giving it a good shake. Everything about his demeanor expressed confusion.
“What the…?” he muttered. “This device is certified in three dimensions. Like, it should even work in the In Between.” He glanced up at me. “Maybe we are in Hell
.”
“We’re not in Hell,” I repeated, louder this time. “We’re…you know, first things first. Where is Roland?”
Simon waved his no-longer-blinking box at me. “I would love to be able to help you out with that question, but it seems I’ve lost my tracking device. So unless the cards have anything else to share with us, I think we’re out of luck other than what our own physical senses are willing to share.”
I rolled to my side and saw I’d dropped the opal ring in the fall. It now lay in the pool of sunlight, seeming to pulse slightly. I shimmied over to it, scooped it up, and hauled myself to my feet. If this was Atlantis, and I was almost sure it was, we needed to get moving. “It’s warm to the touch, but not as hot as it should have been given the fire show we just went through.”
“That was pretty radical, I gotta admit,” Simon said. He craned his neck to one side, then the other, stretching out the kinks.
“How is it daylight?” Nikki asked, abruptly sitting up and staring at the pinhole in the ceiling. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me we fell through that tiny little hole. Unless it’s like a mile up, and I’m not quite getting that sense.”
“Agreed,” Nigel said, standing and helping Emilio to his feet. The guide immediately started rocking back and forth, his mouth moving in some sort of soundless prayer.
“Okay, okay, let’s figure this out,” Simon said. “What do we know about Hell—”
“It’s. Not. Hell,” I said again, this time with enough finality that everyone shut up and looked at me—except for our traumatized guide. I pointed at Emilio. “Do you need to rest?”
“No, no, I am good. Very good,” he assured us hurriedly, as if he ran the risk of being left behind if he gave a different answer.
“The shaman told you nothing about this?” I asked him, and he shook his head.
“No. She said if the goddess smiled upon us and granted us entry into her domain, we would see riches untold and images not revealed to the human eye for millennia.” He shrugged. “But she was pretty drunk at that point. I didn’t think too much of it.”
