Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

There was something strange about the statement, but Dan couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Something in the back of his brain wasn’t lining up. “Who’s Jacob? An alias of yours?”

  “My brother,” Finnoway replied casually. “Your witch of a mother ruined his life.”

  Dan let the papers fall out of his hands, not caring that they landed in jumbled disarray. Dozens and dozens of photos had been taken of his parents, all obviously from a distance, taken with a telephoto spying lens when they weren’t aware of it.

  “Wish I could say I was sorry.”

  His mother had stumbled onto the connection between Trax Corp. and Brookline, even if she’d been many years too late to stop the warden’s experiments. If only she’d known that Trax Corp. itself was a front, she might still be alive. Of course, he thought darkly, Dan had gone digging around in all the history, too, and even though he was paying the price for not learning from his mistakes, it was a comfort to know there was a part of his legacy he was proud of. The part that cared about uncovering the truth.

  “Something funny?” Finnoway asked, leaning closer.

  “You wouldn’t get it,” Dan murmured. He studied the Artificer. Finnoway looked so absolutely assured of his victory, it only made Dan want that much more to find some way to outsmart him.

  Sighing, defeated, Dan turned back to the folder. He held up a photo of his parents huddling under an umbrella. The city behind them was a blur of gray and brown. It was impossible to tell the location, but their faces were in focus. Evelyn leaned into his father, her head tucked under his chin. Finnoway had started yapping again, chatting to the Bone Artist who had returned with food, but Dan wasn’t paying attention. He was distracted by a tiny, bright crest on his mother’s jacket, red and white, a minuscule beacon.

  DUCATI.

  His heart leapt to his throat. He hustled back to the other side of the vault, ignoring the sandwich and soda that had been laid out for him on a small card table at the center of the room. Finnoway watched him with crossed arms, grinning a little as Dan breezed by, accurately guessing where Dan was headed.

  “Would you like me to get it down? You can say good-bye to your father in person.”

  Dan did his best to ignore the sting of that barb. “My father . . . Just my father. Why isn’t there a bucket for my mother?”

  That cool, charming smile of Finnoway’s faltered. It was quick and he tried to catch himself, but Dan saw it. Finnoway uncrossed his arms and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Their car crashed into a river. Her body was washed away.”

  “So you don’t have it,” Dan needled, returning to the card table. He took a seat on the stool provided and forced himself to take a bite of the sandwich. There might be a moment soon when he would need his strength. Chewing, swallowing, cracking open the soda, he crossed one leg over the other and played his one and only card.

  “You don’t have a bucket for my mother,” he said firmly, “because she’s still alive.”

  Dan waited for Finnoway’s incredulous laughter to subside before adding softly, “I want to trade up. Again.”

  “With what? What could you possibly have that I would want?”

  The Bone Artists milling about the vault gradually stopped what they were doing and turned their attention to Finnoway and Dan. One set down a tiny drill, dusting bone grit from his gloved hands before turning to listen.

  Dan took another bite of the sandwich and washed it down with soda. “She’s still alive,” he repeated, “and I know where to find her.”

  He’d realized what was off about the trial testimony. Maisie Moore had told him that his parents had died a mere week after Trax Corp. got shut down in the trial. It was the same year the Whistle folded, 1995. But Dan hadn’t been born until ’96.

  And that motorcycle. The Ducati jacket. The person stalking them across the country hadn’t been taking pictures for Finnoway. It was Evie, and he knew it now. But there was no way to prove to Finnoway that he’d seen her. And if he could—if he played this card and traded his debt in for hers—it meant his mother, who had evaded the Bone Artists for so many years, might finally be caught.

  He had to risk it. She’d abandoned him all those years ago. Really, he was repaying two debts in one. He hesitated to use the word deserve in this case, but maybe she really did deserve some kind of comeuppance for leaving him to whatever foster-family fate awaited him. Sure, he had gotten lucky with Sandy and Paul, but only after years of being made to feel like he wasn’t wanted. And if Paul and Sandy hadn’t taken him in, well—she might have doomed him to a much harder, lonelier life. Anyway, she seemed capable of taking care of herself. Finnoway might not actually best her, given her talent for evasion.

  For leaving.

  “She’s been following me and my friends for days. I’ve seen her at least four times now. Today, even.”

  That wiped the smile off Finnoway’s face for good. He took three menacing steps toward Dan, lording over him with his height and his cold, chiseled face. “How is this a bargain?”

  Swallowing proved a challenge, especially because Dan hated the next thing he had to say. He would take his chances, and now so would she. “If I show you where to find her, you’ll agree to stop hunting me. You’ll get me out of this bogus murder charge, and you’ll leave my friends alone, too.”

  He could see the Artificer weighing his options, chewing the inside of his mouth as his bright green eyes searched Dan’s face for the truth.

  “You’re bluffing,” Finnoway finally said.

  “If she was dead, you would have her here,” Dan replied. “She’s been trying to reach out to me. I just didn’t realize it until now.”

  The room went frigid. Nobody moved or spoke, and Dan’s hand burned with pain. He could hear the faint drip-drip of a distant faucet counting out the seconds as Finnoway made up his mind.

  “Where is she?”

  Dan finished the sandwich, taking an unsteady breath. He had bet correctly—his mother was a bigger prize than the warden’s blood. Sure, Dan was related to her, but he hadn’t ruined the family business or Jacob Finnoway’s life, and apparently the strength of the grudge overrode his valuable DNA.

  “You’ll tell me right now!” Finnoway bellowed it in Dan’s face, the façade cracking for an instant before Finnoway collected himself, leaning back and tugging on his tie. “All right, Daniel, we’re bargaining. So bargain.”

  Time. He had bought himself time. He wasn’t so sure about the cost, but he could worry more about that later. If he lived.

  He didn’t know if he was trusting Oliver, his friends, or his theoretically still-living mother to save him. But he was desperate here, and his odds aboveground were better than they were down here. He did trust Abby’s plan. If nothing else, even if he didn’t survive, a new crop of journalists would rise to try to take the Bone Artists down.

  “Take me back up. I want to see my friends and tell them I’m okay, then I’ll bring you to her. You don’t have to take the cuffs off. I won’t run.”

  Finnoway snarled down into his face. “Maybe I underestimated you. You’d sell out your own mother?”

  Dan nodded, slowly, fighting a tremor in his chin. “She left me. All this time she was gone, I didn’t know if she was dead or just didn’t want me. But now it doesn’t matter. I choose my new parents and I choose my friends. I choose the family I made. I choose me.”

  Dan had never been so relieved to see sunlight in his life.

  There it was, just a few slivers of it peeking from beneath the final door to freedom, and it filled him with hope. Even if he survived, there was the minor, itsy-bitsy matter of him facing a murder charge with evidence stacked against him.

  But for now, he was alive. And after everything, he trusted deep down that his friends wouldn’t abandon him to his fate.

  The alley, smelly and damp, was a welcome reprieve after the stifling air of the Bone Artists’ Catacomb. Dan glanced down toward Rampart Street, seeing Finnoway’s Rolls-Royce there, alre
ady running and waiting for them. He glanced desperately in the other direction, but the motorcycle was no longer there. Onto the next phase in his last-ditch improvisation.

  The two assistants were at the car, ready to intercept Dan from Finnoway, preventing any chance of him running.

  “If you’re lying,” Finnoway whispered in his ear, clinging hard to his back, “I will keep you awake as I remove your bones one at a time, starting with the rest of your fingers.”

  Dan flinched.

  Finnoway chuckled and wrangled Dan toward the backseat of the car. “Maybe I’ll let Briony handle it.”

  The car blocked off the entrance to the alley, and if Dan didn’t duck inside soon, the assistants would probably cram him in using force. He didn’t think those ladies would hesitate to use the weapons he saw outlined beneath their blazers. He scanned the sidewalk on the other side of the car, peering into the coffee shop he’d seen the other night, hoping someone, anyone, would see him and notice something odd was going on.

  Come on, please. . . . Someone please be there.

  But there was nobody. He went limp, scrambling to think of how he was going to get out of this.

  “Dan!”

  His heart stopped, his heels skidding out on the pavement. He whipped his head up to see Abby and Jordan sprinting toward the Rolls-Royce from across the street. A horn blasted, and both of them stumbled back, narrowly avoiding the front bumper of a truck that sped down the road. Dan felt Finnoway’s grip give on his cuffs and then felt a hard, round barrel poking into his lower back.

  “Tell them to turn around and leave, or I’ll shoot. It’s silenced, and your body will be in the car and driven away before anyone’s the wiser,” Finnoway warned, one hand on Dan’s left shoulder, the other digging the gun into his back.

  Dan opened his mouth to shout to his friends, but a pop and a crack rent the air, loud enough to echo above the noises of the city. A bullet buried its way into the bricks of the building immediately to their left. Dan tried to follow the sound, dragging his eyes up from Jordan and Abby to the roof above the café. A young man’s silhouette blazed against the wan afternoon clouds. Oliver and his rifle. So he was intent on making good on his promise. His friends had all come for him.

  Dan couldn’t see Sabrina, but he had a feeling she was somewhere else, maybe hidden, and hopefully armed with more than the baseball bat.

  We’re all going to jail, he thought wildly, excitedly, imagining the police cars that would arrive any second to respond to the gunshot. The funeral home was already on their radar from the supposed break-in. Dan tossed his head, trying to signal Oliver to stop before Finnoway ended him.

  “Just turn around!” he shouted to his friends, going still when he heard Finnoway cock the gun pressed to his back. “Don’t come any closer! Tell Oliver to stop firing!”

  A crowd began to gather in the coffee shop across the street. Dan could see the scared faces pressing up to the window, a few customers on their cell phones or holding on to one another.

  Jordan and Abby hesitated in the middle of the street, then seemed to sense Dan’s urgency and carefully backed up to the sidewalk. There was just a road separating them, but they couldn’t have felt farther away. Dan froze, helpless. If the police didn’t get here now, he wasn’t sure how he could get them all out of this alive.

  If any of them was going to die, though, it should be him. He’d meant what he said to Finnoway in the Catacomb. Jordan and Abby really felt like family to him, only deeper because they were the family he’d chosen. And if he died now, all those faces in the coffee-shop window would see Finnoway lose his temper, and it would be too big, too messy to cover up.

  “Get in the car,” Finnoway roared, stabbing the gun harder into Dan’s lower back.

  He moved inch by inch, watching a shadow appear next to Oliver on the roof, then take form. Even from his spot on the ground, Dan could make out the rough, terrible shape of the person’s rabbit mask.

  “No!” Dan shouted. “Oliver!” He spun to face Finnoway as best he could. “You said nobody would get hurt! I told you to leave my friends alone.”

  A visible sweat had broken out on the Artificer’s face, his calm demeanor shattered. He let out a hoarse laugh and prodded Dan again. “I lied.”

  Dan had never watched someone fall like that—slow at first but then all at once, picking up speed and barreling to the ground so fast there was almost no time to blink between fall and impact.

  Someone screamed, a woman, and Dan lost sensation in his arms and back. He knew the gun was there, ready to fire, and he knew Oliver had just tumbled three stories to the pavement. He heard the cry and the dry crunch of Oliver’s body meeting the ground, but nothing else seemed real or important in that moment.

  He threw his weight against Finnoway, hard, ducking down and smashing his head into the man’s sternum. Something cracked under his skull, not his bones but Finnoway’s, and he heard the click-clack of the gun skimming across the paving stones. Someone was shouting again, screaming, and he felt Finnoway’s sweat slide across his skin as he pushed and pushed.

  Pain exploded in his back, again and again. But the feeling was gone, and he shrugged off the hurt, rearing up and throwing himself at the Artificer again. He was blind, crazed, but maybe that was what he needed now.

  Dan tumbled with Finnoway, first onto the hood of the car, then into the street. The blows at his back stopped, but now he could feel the aches creeping in. He was on his knees, half-tangled with Finnoway, who scrabbled onto his back, trying to push Dan off. Dan didn’t feel strong, but he felt desperate, and the constant screaming and blood rushing in his ears only fortified that feeling. He tried to crush Finnoway down into the pavement. There was no plan anymore, no reason, just a terrible urge to watch this bastard’s skull crack open on the road. He managed to slam his knee into the man’s stomach, his wheeze of surprise coming just as Abby’s voice broke through the roar in his ears.

  An engine screamed furious and metallic in the distance.

  “Dan! Dan, look out! Go!”

  Dan glanced up from Finnoway’s rumpled and dirtied shirt to see the single bright light of a motorcycle racing toward them. Black. The rest of it was black. That single light flew toward them in a blur of midnight steel.

  Finnoway seized his chance to pin Dan to the ground. He reached behind him and pulled out a knife, his face its own terrible mask of many years of rage.

  He moved to strike, but Dan rolled hard to the left, toward the curb with Abby and Jordan. He was still riding out the last of that momentum when he heard the quick pop-pop of tires colliding with bone and flesh, and the collective gasping shriek from everyone in the street.

  He didn’t want to turn and see what was left of Finnoway. It wouldn’t be something he wanted to carry with him. The pain surged up in earnest now, his whole body spasming from the blows he had taken. Abby and Jordan were lifting him up out of the gutter and into a kneeling position, holding him aloft just long enough for him to smile faintly at the disappearing rider, a burst of engine smoke obscuring her escape.

  “Dan? Can you hear me? Dan?” Abby shook him roughly, but his light was going out.

  “Dan? Someone call an ambulance. Dan! Please, someone help us. . . .”

  A small, soft hand held his, squeezing him back to life. Dan blinked once, twice, letting the blue-white haze of the hospital room come into focus gradually. His head fell to the right, buoyed by a heavenly soft pillow, and there he found Abby, tucked against the hospital bed with her palm cradling his. His right palm. Some of the bandages had been removed and lessened, he saw with a thick gulp, and they showed more clearly the outline of his missing finger.

  “Am I going to prison?” he wheezed.

  That brought a relieved round of laughter from the trio gathered around his bed. Uncle Steve stood at the foot of the bed, out of his robe and slippers and looking healthy except for a few fading bruises. “Finnoway was waving a gun in the street like a lunatic while one of hi
s pals pushed a teenager off a roof. That’s not something you can cover up with a few bribes,” Steve said, winking. “But I think you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I had a good feeling,” Dan whispered. “The motorcycle was a nice touch, though.”

  “Hit-and-run,” Jordan said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Not sure if there’s such a thing as a lucky hit-and-run, but I’ll take it.”

  “How did you know where to find me?” Dan asked. “I thought you would all be at the police station.”

  “The Metairie Daily,” Abby said, “if you can believe it. When I called them in a panic, they thought I was a crazy person. But not long after that, they got an anonymous tip from a ‘trusted source’ who said to call us, said you were being held under the old funeral home. We came as fast as we could.”

  Thanks, Mom.

  “Police raided the building,” Abby told him, stroking his hand gently. “I don’t know if the Bone Artists are gone for good, but I’m sure the story will run in the papers soon. I bet Maisie’s coworkers are eager to give her memory some peace,” she said. “And Finnoway himself is dead.”

  “And Oliver?” Dan braced for the answer. He had no idea if a fall like that was even survivable.

  “They’re not sure if he’ll walk again,” Jordan said, leaning onto the bed just slightly behind Abby. “Again, not sure if you’d call that luck, but . . .”

  “I think I’m glad he’s alive.” Dan nodded, realizing the weightlessness in his body was from the IV hooked into his arm. Whenever that stopped, he had a feeling his back would ache for weeks and weeks. “And I’m really not going to prison?”

  Part of him couldn’t believe it. He didn’t think he was capable of murder, but Finnoway’s setup had been so ironclad—and Dan’s mind had been so scattered lately—there was a moment there when even he had believed he’d killed Tamsin.

  “Some of his ‘employees’ were bending over backward to rat on him and avoid getting charged as accomplices to his crimes,” Uncle Steve said, leaning onto the metal bedframe. “We’ll see how long it takes for the police to figure out how deep Finnoway’s influence goes, but it sounds like he’s done this sort of thing before.”