Feeding Frenzy (The Summoner Sisters Book 1) (21 page)

“And I’ll be damned if you ever see anything worse,” I tell him lightly.  “Come on.  I’d like to see sky again one last time before I become Hades’ altar girl.”

“Yeah, might as well finish it.  Can’t get worse, right?”

I wince.  “Man…why would you say that?”

“Say what?”

“Why would you dare the universe like that?  I don’t even have any salt to throw.  Here.”  I knock on the wooden practice knife.  “That will have to do.”

That makes him laugh a little.  I go back to Lia, who is wiping her eyes and taking deep breaths.

“How you doin’, chica?” I ask her.

She smiles weakly.  “I think I wish I’d taken your advice and picked an irrational fear.”

“It’s a bear, always being right,” I joke, shaking her gently by the shoulder.  “About ready to get the hell out of dodge?”

She fishes the diamond sun out of her pocket where she had stored it.  It’s really dimmed significantly.  “We better shake a leg, if we want to,” she says.  “I guesstimate we’ve got about three hours left.”

I nervously look up, expecting to see spiders again.  Instead, I see the endlessly spiraling stairs.

“Good, I feel like a nice jog, don’t you?” I tease.

“I feel like a nice
drink
,” she responds dryly, cracking her neck.  “Onward and upward.”

We begin climbing again.  I let Lia take point this time—I want to be able to watch her.  I don’t know what her big fear is, but it apparently rocked her pretty hard.

The salt from my tears dries on my skin and stings my parched lips.  I keep my right hand on the wall to keep from trying to rub the dryness off my face—it would only irritate all of the scratches and bruises more.  I focus on the rough stone against my fingers, and the way I can feel the constant bend of the staircase rising up slowly but invariably towards freedom.

It’s not long before our heavy breathing and the scrape of our shoes on stone are the only sounds in our world once more.  It feels like the tower’s stories are growing a little shorter, which I take as a good sign that we’re getting higher, if chthonic architecture functions at all like its terrestrial counterpart.

“What’s that?” Lia asks into the silence.

“I didn’t say anything, chica.”

“It’s not funny!” she yells.

I furrow my brow.  “You okay?”  I look around carefully as I approach her, looking for the source of her discomfort.  I won’t be surprised by another
daimon
again.  I don’t see anything, so I keep walking up to her.

“No!  Stay back!”  She begins running up the stairs.

“Lia!  It’s me!”  I chase after her, and then I feel it.  I can hear whispers in my parents’ voices.  “It’s for the best,” they say.  “It’s not forever.”  I look around, but my parents are not here, of course.  The floor is roiling around me, like I’m walking on an earthquake.  I look behind me at the detective whose face is now morphing as I watch, becoming Gregor’s asymmetric mug.

“I’m sorry, Gregor,” I say to him remorsefully.

The figure opens his mouth, but no words come out.  Then it reaches for me.   I try to run, but it grabs my hand and pulls me back down the stairs.

“What the hell!” Detective Kline says to me when the world stops writhing.

“Must be another
daimon
,” I mutter, thinking hard.

A second later, Lia comes back down the stairs at the same pace she had ascended them.  She lets out a soft “oof” as she runs into my elbow and blinks at us.

“How did I get here?” she asks.  “I was almost at the top!  I could see sunlight.”

Then it dawns on me.

“Mania,” I mutter.

“No way,” Lia moans.  “This can’t be happening.  So we’re not almost there?”

“Who’s Mania?” Kline asks.

I start laughing.  “Sorry.  It’s not funny.  It just sort of is.  Mania is the demon of madness.”

“How’s that funny, exactly?” he inquires.

“Oh come on,” I say to the cop.  “You don’t see the irony in having to overcome
madness
in order to get out of this place?  We’re clearly already in the pit of insanity as it is.”

“If you think that’s funny, I believe that you’re insane, at least,” Lia retorts.  “How do we kill it?”

I double over laughing.  “You don’t!” I crow.  “You can’t
kill
madness.  You just push through it.”

“Is it affecting you right now?” she asks me dubiously.  “Because that’s pretty far from humorous.”

“Detective, could you please handcuff me and Lia again?” I request, still grinning foolishly.

“How’s that now?”

“Mania will get us all twisted around.  It’ll be better if we can’t run away from each other.  You could end up going in circles like Lia did, and we’re very much out of time.”

“So…how do we get through, then?” Detective Kline asks.

“You follow me.  I’m pretty experienced in delaying going crazy,” I say with another light chuckle.

Lia catches the words I’m not saying.  “You sure that’s wise, Summer?  I would understand if this was sort of a lot for you, given…everything,” she says uncomfortably.

“Hell yeah it’s wise!  This is so much better than before.  I know there’s an end this time.  Totally different animal from last time,” I reassure her.

She looks like she’s not buying it.  I don’t blame her.  We’ve had some rough patches over the years—it’s sort of inevitable in our line of work.  Tell enough people you made friends with a gnome and have to save your sister from a purple faerie, and someone’s bound to raise a few concerns to the people with couches and small, white pills.

“Think of it this way,” I suggest.  “Out of all of us, I have the best track record of
not
going crazy.”

She looks at me suspiciously for a minute and then holds out her hand.  “Detective, cuff us.”

He hesitates, looking at us both like he thinks we don’t need any help from Mania to go mad.  He shakes his head as he gets out both pairs of cuffs.  “If you’re doing it, I am, too.”

“There you go, Kline!  Join the parade,” I say cheerfully.

“You’re a little bit too ‘up’ to be comforting,” Lia rebukes me.

“Sorry.  This is just hilarious to me.  Every time I have to drag you from some torment or other, someone tries to convince me I’m losing my mind.  It’s pretty poetic.”

“I guess…”  Lia snaps a little.  “I just don’t think it’s very funny.”

“Fair enough,” I respond.  “So let me get real for a second.  From what we’ve seen so far, Mania will mess with our perceptions.  You’ll see things, hear things and probably feel things that aren’t real.  Up will be down.  It will feel like we’re out.”  I drag on their handcuffs.  “This is real.  That is all that is real.  Okay?  Feel that.  Make ‘em a little too tight.  Feel that?  That will be what grounds you.  Focus on it, and keep going where it pulls.  Do that, and I can get us out.”

“How do you know?” Kline asks.  “How will you be able to know which way is up with no one pulling you, then?”

I smile grimly.  “Not my first rodeo, piggy.  I already know what my ‘real’ is.”  I grab the wall that I’d been tracing for the past couple hours.

He looks at me, uncomprehending.  “You’re truly crazy, aren’t you?  God
dang
it, y’all are escaped from somewhere and dragged me into something, didn’t you?  What did you give me?  Acid?  Shrooms?”

“Sorry, Kline,” I say.  “
You
don’t get to call me crazy.  I’ve seen and done things far outside of the bell curve for human normalcy, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean you get to write me off.  You’re not living in the bell curve right now.  So instead of giving me conditions, how about you just call me an expert?  You gonna trust the local expert?  Or wait for the actual manifestation of madness to eat you?”

“I guess it’s a little late to back out, now,” he mutters.  “All right.  Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Good man.”

We start marching back up the stairs.  The hallucinations return in force.  The ground wobbles.  I can see things in the corners of my vision that disappear when my eye turns to track them.  I keep my hand on the rough stone, my palm higher than my fingers.  “It’s not real,” I tell myself as my parents rematerialize to tell me something very similar, but with different connotations.  I step up and am racked with heaving sobs.  “It’s not real.”  The next step I’m laughing raucously.  “This isn’t me,” I tell myself, focusing on the stone.

My cuffed hand pulls back.  “We can’t go that way,” Lia’s pulsing mouth tells me.  “It’s blocked.”

I yank the cuff.  “Remember the anchor,” I yell, sending all my thought back to my hand on the wall.  We start moving forward again, inching along.  From Lia’s pocket, I can see the diamond glowing.  Looking at it is like trying to focus on one stone at the bottom of the ocean, but it seems to me that it’s fading quickly.

“Focus,” I mutter to myself.  I grit my teeth and muscle my two accomplices up another step.

I repeat my mantra as I climb doggedly.  I’m getting seasick watching the world twist around me, so I close my eyes, limiting my scope to the only thing in which I’ve put my faith.  I’ve got the cut of the cuff on my left arm that reminds me why I’m fighting, and the rasp of stone on the right, centering me in the present.  I hold onto this tenuous lifeline with all of my willpower.

Suddenly, the hallucinations stop.  My emotions snap back into my control mid-laugh, but there is nothing in front of me.  The dim light that’s followed us along so far is gone, and we are plunged in total darkness; the complete lack of light one finds if one goes alone into caves and turns off their headlight.  It is heavier than the darkness in a room, more stifling than nighttime in a lightless desert.  I can’t sense a step, can’t feel more wall to guide me.  I begin to panic.  Without my anchor, madness will take over, sure as night follows day.  But then my sense of orientation returns, and I breathe a little trust back into my mind.  I haven’t let go of my anchor.  It’s still there.  If I can’t go forward, it must mean that there’s nowhere forward to go.

“Lia, I need you up here,” I say.  My sister is alternately whimpering and laughing at something, her unfocused eyes telling me that she’s still in the middle of Mania’s spell.  I pull her until she’s on the same step as me.  There’s very little room to do it, and our handcuffs make it even more difficult.

“Lia?  You back?”

“Saint Luke’s left testicle, that was an unpleasant experience,” she curses colorfully.

“I guess that’s yes, then?”

“I guess.  Where are we?”

“I think ‘out’ is somewhere around here, but I can’t be sure.”  I raise our hands to my head, searching for my lamp, but it’s missing.  I must have lost it when I ran away from Phobos.

“My lamp’s gone,” I tell Lia as she takes deep, calming breaths of her own.

“Mine’s cleverly in my pocket,” Lia replies with a frustrated huff.  “The diamond was plenty before our manic episode.”

“Gotta get Kline up here, then.  He should have a flashlight and the key to our cuffs.”

“Okay.  We’ll have to disentangle a little,” Lia strategizes with a last shake of her head to clear the spell.  “I’m going to send you back down a couple steps so we can make room for Kline, who can unlock me.  I’ll get some light and then pull you back up.  Good?”

I swallow nervously.  This will really mess up my anchor.  I’ll have to turn around, which means I’ll lose contact with the wall.  I’ll have to trust Lia with my fragile sanity.  Well, she trusted me with hers.

“Yeah.  Yeah, that’s good.  See you in a few.”

I take a step down, and she pushes me another, back into the voices and roiling floor.

I stay there, for how long I can’t be sure.  I listen to specters that followed paths I didn’t take, and words uttered a lifetime ago that still haunt me to this day.  I relive decisions that could have gone so differently, sewn together with disproportionate emotions.  I keep telling myself that this isn’t right, but I have nothing around me now to help convince myself otherwise.  And then my wrist tugs.  I fight it for a moment, expecting a trick, but it is insistent.  Two different hands catch me as the three of us teeter precariously at the top of the stairs.  My hand and Lia’s are still cuffed, though she and the detective are free of each other.  Her head lamp is on, and his flashlight is out, but all it shows is earth and stone.

“No!  No!  This can’t be real!” I moan.  “I refuse to believe it ends like this!”

Lia fishes her diamond out of her pocket.  “Shit!” she curses.  Its light is almost faded, a slight blue sheen replacing what had been bright as the sun.

I look around us frantically.  Beyond us, in the black wall, I see a faint light.  “Hey, turn off your lights, quick.”  They do so wordlessly, heeding the urgency in my voice.  Without the unnatural shadows their lamps create, I can see a small sliver of early evening sun outlining what appears to be a door, mirroring the subdued light of the magical stone.  I laugh and point.

“Push!” I cry.

Lia and Detective Kline throw their full weight into the doorway, while I stabilize them.  It budges.  We all shout with relief and push again and again, until a narrow sliver of the door is cracked.  I can see sky and better, smell fresh air.