It Happened One Doomsday (23 page)

If so, did anyone—or any
thing
—live there in the netherworld city?

As Greyson carried her along, she kept searching the horizon, straining to pick up any details. “There's so much we don't know. I need to get back to the shop and research the causeways. I never took those old myths seriously before, but if I was wrong about them, I could have been wrong about any number of other things, too.”

He ran onward several long strides before he looked down at her again, the angles in his face softening. “You're not so bad yourself.”

That wasn't what she meant, but the compliment was still irresistible. She blushed, thankful that the light was probably too dim for it to show.

She tightened her arms around him. He smiled at her, making her feel as if a warm glow surrounded them.

But the moment was broken as Greyson came to a sudden stop. Rane stood stock-still in front of him, blocking the way. “Put her down,” Rane ordered. “From here, we walk.”

Past Rane, in the distance, the yardstick-straight line of the causeway arrowed into a dark mass that dominated the horizon. An island of black rock rose above the ocean of mist and blotted out part of the eerie lights in the sky.

Greyson gently set Dru down. She winced when her feet touched the ground, drawing a concerned look from him. “I'm okay,” she reassured Greyson, although she wasn't.

Greyson started walking, and Dru moved to follow him, but Rane held her back.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Rane flashed a carnivorous-looking smile. “Just you and me?”

“We need to keep moving,” Dru said.

But Rane didn't seem to hear her. Instead, she said to Greyson, “Go ahead. We'll catch up.”

He shot Rane a long, unreadable look, then turned to Dru. She nodded, not altogether willingly.

“Five minutes,” Greyson said, tapping his wrist. “Then I'm turning around and coming back.” Grudgingly, he walked away down the bridge.

Dru watched him go, fuming. She was fed up with Rane's oxlike blundering. She drew in a breath to say something, but Rane beat her to it.

“What do you think you're doing?” Rane asked in a fierce whisper, throwing off Dru's train of thought.

“What?” Dru whispered back.

“Don't ‘what' me. You're going all googly eyes at each other. Five more minutes and you two would've been locking lips.”

“No. Absolutely not.” Dru yanked her arm free of Rane's grip. She held up her empty hands before her, defensively. “It's not what it looks like.”

“Oh no?” Rane moved her head side to side, as if she were sparring in the ring. “You don't think you're playing with fire here?”

“If you're talking about me and Nate breaking up, if you're worried about some sort of rebound—”

“Oh, I freaking
wish
that was it.” Rane gave her a hard look. “While you're spending all that time gazing into his dreamy eyes, you notice anything funny? Like, I don't know, the evil red glow of a demon from the fiery
pits of hell
?”

“Well, yes, of course. His symptoms are still present.”

Rane paced in a tight circle, fists working the air in front of her. “It's not like he has a cold, Dru. He doesn't need NyQuil. He has a
demon
inside him. Just like the ones back there.” She pointed in the direction of the fortress, now too far away to see.

Dru folded her arms. “And I'm going to get the demon out of him. Somehow.”

“Maybe you can't see this with total clarity.” Rane stopped pacing and faced her head-on. “I've spent my life protecting people. Protecting my friends. From being hurt by monsters, creeps, and freaky-ass demons. I don't know if you've noticed, but he hasn't been getting any better. He's getting worse.”

“Once we make it back to the shop, I can—”

“No.
If
we get back to the shop. At this rate, that could be, like, never. Real soon, that thing inside him is going to take over completely. And when it does, he could kill you. And if you're in his arms, it wouldn't be too hard.”

Dru wanted to argue with Rane. But everything she could think of just sounded like an excuse. Deep down, she knew Rane had a point.

Rane moved to put her hands on Dru's shoulders, but Dru stepped back, out of reach. For a split second, Rane looked hurt. “I'm just telling you, D, because you're my best friend. And the last thing I want, when it all hits the fan, is for you to have your head on crooked because you think he's such hot stuff. I want you to be ready.”

Seething anger boiled up under Dru's skin. “Ready for what?” she asked, biting off the words.

Rane gave her a long, stern look before she answered. “Look, as the demon takes over, he's going to get destructive, out of control. Dangerous to everyone around him, including you and me. When that happens—not if,
when
—then someone has to stop him. Permanently.”

Dru turned away, not believing she was hearing this.

“That's what I do, D. That's my existence. I take down the forces of evil before they kill people. And what sucks is that I know you're falling for this guy. And I don't want to do this.” Rane took a deep breath and blew it out. “But if I have to, I will.”

Dru shook her head in denial. She could still save Greyson.

She
knew
it.

Couldn't she?

29

THE ONLY EVIL YOU CAN TRUST

They caught up to Greyson a few minutes later. But at his questioning look, Dru just shook her head. No one spoke.

An open cave waited beyond the end of the causeway, its wide mouth a pool of impenetrable darkness. As they approached it, Rane rolled her shoulders and popped her neck, obviously itching for a fight.

Dru glanced over at Greyson, who squinted apprehensively into the cave, his red eyes glowing.

“See anything in there?” Dru asked him, breaking the silence.

He shook his head slowly. “I don't like this.”

“Agreed. You're not the only one getting the heebie-jeebies here.”

“I don't know about
heebie-jeebies
,” he growled. “I just don't like it.”

Dru pulled the still-glowing vivianite out of her purse and held it before her like a candle. Warily, she stepped off the causeway onto the uneven black ground. When they reached the cave opening, she leaned one hand against the rough stone. “Well, it doesn't look like anything—”

Before she could finish, a powerful wind swept out of the cave, buffeting her. The vivianite flashed with inner radiance, and an even brighter light flared from the cave.

A sudden sensation of movement tugged at her, threatening to pull her off her feet. Magic shuddered through the blinding light around her, trying to take them somewhere else, deeper into the netherworld. Somewhere vast, ethereal, terrifying.

Her first impulse was to back away, but the magic was too strong. If she couldn't resist it, she realized, then she had to control it somehow.

Take us home
, she thought. But without any chance to prepare, she had no idea how to get control of the magic that assaulted them.

“D!” Rane shouted over the wind. “Do something!”

Instinctively, Dru reached out for Greyson. He swept her up with one arm, holding her close as the brilliant light and wind blasted over them.

“I've got you,” he said in her ear. The howling wind nearly drowned out his voice, but his touch was enough.

Instead of fighting the vortex of magic trying to pull them into the cave, Dru cleared her mind and focused her thoughts on where she wanted to go. Not deeper into the netherworld, but back to The Crystal Connection. Back to Denver, or even to the Rocky Mountains that overlooked the city. Back to someplace safe.

Take us home.

The rushing energy threatened to blot out her thoughts. It pulled at her hair, plucked at her clothes. A dizzying sense of movement swirled around her. She blinked away tears, able to see nothing beyond the blazing bright energy.

Take us home!

The vivianite grew warmer in her hand. The more she focused on going home, the hotter it became, until it burned brighter than the energy whirling around them. Caught in the currents of magic, she fought for control, and the resistance gradually melted away. A rushing sound filled Dru's ears, painfully loud.

Without warning, the brilliant magic released them, leaving them in darkness. Dru sagged against Greyson, blinking in a futile attempt to get rid of the spots in her vision.

In the thick silence left behind by the dying wind, Rane said, “So you guys still with me?”

“Yes,” Dru and Greyson said in unison.

“Good.” Rane pushed past them in the dark. Something thumped, hollow. “Huh. Some kind of wall up ahead. Wood, feels like.”

“Okay.” Dru tried to find her bearings. “Before we break anything, let's find out if—”

The sharp crack of splintering wood interrupted her. A jagged beam of light illuminated Rane and her fists as she smashed her way through into daylight.

“Or, we could just break things,” Dru muttered.

Rane tore open a section of wood-plank wall and stepped through into sunlight, exposing a faded metal sign fastened by rusted nails to a wooden barrier that had been weathered silver by the elements. A skull and crossbones leered from the center of the sign, surrounded by block letters:

STAY OUT! STAY ALIVE! ABANDONED MINES ARE DEADLY!

Dru was still trying to puzzle that out as Greyson ducked through the broken lumber and nodded to her.

Past the sign lay a wide tunnel sloping gently uphill, toward the scent of pine trees. The dry dirt underfoot was littered with loose rocks and pine needles.

Greyson helped Dru up the slope, and they emerged into daylight, surrounded by brown rocks and dense trees.

Blinking, Dru turned and looked back the way they'd come. An abandoned mine entrance gaped open behind them, but the dark shaft beyond descended away into the blackness, much farther than they had walked from the cave.

With a grinding sound, Rane turned human again. “Looks like the Rocky Mountains, all right. Did you do this?”

Dru shielded her eyes and took in the mountain landscape around them: endless ranks of pine trees, broken by jumbles of granite boulders and dry ground scattered with wildflowers. “I was trying for Denver, but hey, not bad, right?”

Rane looked around at the pristine mountain wilderness and shrugged. “I
guess.
If you don't mind more walking.”

“Ugh.” Wincing in pain, Dru pulled one shoe off her tender heel. She sucked in a breath at the blister underneath, practically big enough to have a life of its own. She sat down on a nearby boulder and fished Band-Aids out of her purse, but Greyson took them from her.

“Let me.” He knelt and gently lifted one of her ankles, then formed a makeshift bandage out of folded-up Starbucks napkins, using the Band-Aids to stick them in place.

Dru watched him work with a mixture of embarrassment and warm gratitude. “Guess I could've picked better shoes for this trip.”

He smiled. She tried to ignore the fact that he still wasn't wearing a shirt beneath his leather jacket, but she was in precisely the wrong position to look away.

He finished bandaging her other ankle, waited for her to get her shoes on, then pulled her to her feet.

“Thanks.” A sudden head rush made her feel a little dizzy, and she leaned against him for a moment.

He put a steadying hand on her back. Nothing more than that, but she was intensely aware of his touch.

Slowly, she lifted her gaze until she was looking up into his eyes. This close, their red glow sent a shiver down her spine. In the back of her mind, a little alarm bell went off. It would have been easy to blot it out, and she was strongly tempted to.

But she couldn't.

“Hey, hello?” Rane glared at Greyson's back. “Finished with your emergency pedicure yet?”

Dru backed away from Greyson, avoiding his eyes. “We should go.”

Rane shot her a warning glare, which Dru pretended not to see. She pointed downhill, toward a clear-cut strip through the pine trees. “That could be something.”

They set off and soon found an old gravel trail that had once been a dirt road, now overgrown with hardy grass and cactuses. It switched back and forth down the steep slope.

Once they broke out of the trees, Dru realized something wasn't quite right about the sunlight. It had an unsettling fiery quality, somewhere between a bloody red sunset and the ominous greenish-yellow sky that preceded a tornado. The wind picked up, carrying a harsh mineral scent, like rotten eggs.

Rane wrinkled her nose. “What the hell
is
that?”

“Hell. Literally.” At her baffled look, Dru explained. “Sulfur. You know, fire and brimstone? Hell on earth? The end of days? Guess this is what it smells like.”

“Long as it's not me,” Rane muttered, checking her armpits.

“We need to get back to the shop.” Dru turned to Greyson. “The other Horsemen are loose in the world, so it would make sense that the world is reacting to their presence. And I'm betting this is only going to get worse until we can cure you.”

He seemed distracted by something, but he nodded.

The trail finally ended at the weathered blacktop of a two-lane road, divided down the center by a broken yellow line, fringed on both sides by gravel. An old metal sign identified it as a Colorado state highway.

That lone proof of civilization made Dru crack a thankful smile. She almost sank to her knees in relief, and probably would have if Rane hadn't thrown an arm around her shoulders and shook her in triumph.

Greyson just frowned.

“Oh, lighten up,” Rane said to him. “Aren't you glad to be back?”

Greyson's eyebrows furrowed. “Something's coming,” he said quietly and lifted his gaze to the top of the next rise, where the blacktop road vanished over a crest.