Kitty’s Big Trouble (13 page)

I knelt closer to the safe, putting my nose right up to the steel. A trace of Grace’s human scent lingered on the handle and combination dial. I even stuck my head inside the safe and took a few deep breaths, hoping to catch a trace of the artifact itself. I only smelled more steel, more dust. If I’d had to guess what had been here, I’d have said it had always been empty. Scary magical items should smell like something, shouldn’t they?

“Find anything?” Ben said.

I shook my head. “You want to try?”

I stepped aside and let him go through the same routine. After a moment of searching he muttered, “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“Let me,” Cormac said, moving toward us around the bodies. He carried the hurricane lamp and its golden halo of light from the storage room with him. We got out of the way and watched.

He took some kind of stone from his pocket, keeping it partially hidden in his hand. It had something magical to it, no doubt. Since his release from prison, he’d replaced his collection of guns with amulets and talismans.

If he was using magic, it meant Amelia was probably in charge now, which made me bristle. It didn’t matter if Cormac seemed all right with the arrangement. I didn’t like the idea of him being used.

He passed the amulet over the safe as if it were some kind of Geiger counter.

“What’s he doing?” Anastasia asked, moving next to me.

“He’s kind of a wizard, I guess,” I said.

“Kind of?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

She glared unhappily.

Straightening, Cormac pocketed the stone amulet. “Something magical was there but it’s gone now.”

“I don’t suppose it left a trail?” I asked. He shook his head.

“It’s a trap,” Anastasia said. “This has all been a trick, and I fell for it—”

“I’d just like to point out that we’re not the ones lying dead on the floor,” I said. “If this is a trap we’re not the only ones who got stuck.”

The silence drew on as we contemplated that unpleasant thought. Once again I started pacing, as if that would make the corridor larger, as if a way out would appear before my eyes. My shoes, coated with blood, started sticking to the floor. The stench of blood was making it hard for me to think.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Find Grace and start over.”

We moved forward, back the way we’d come until we reached the intersection.

“Left,” Cormac said, before I could ask if anyone remembered which way we’d come.

“I knew that,” I muttered.

We turned and went on, strung out in single file in the narrow hallway, which my imagination was making narrower, and darker. This section seemed to go on a lot longer than I remembered.

“Aren’t there supposed to be stairs here?” I said. “I remember there being stairs.”

“Did we take a wrong turn back there?” Ben said.

“It wasn’t wrong,” Cormac said.

“But there were definitely stairs.”

Finally, we came to the next intersection. But this one didn’t branch off at right angles as the others had. Instead, the hallway split in a Y. It may have been my imagination, but the stone seemed to give way to dank earth, as if the passage left the city and continued on in wild, underground tunnels. I smelled dirt and mulch coming from the way ahead.

I stated the obvious. “We haven’t been here before.”

“So we took a wrong turn,” Ben said.

“This is much, much more than a wrong turn,” Anastasia said, her voice muted and anxious. She stood outside our small circle of light and her features were shadowed.

I faced her. “Do you know something or is that just more doom and gloom?”

Cormac said, “It’s that we can’t get out of here without Grace leading us. She’s got the key to the place. Until we find her, we’re stuck.”

Chapter 9

I
BACKTRACKED, LETTING
the others follow me as they would, until I came to that first intersection. Or what should have been that first intersection, the one that led to the closet and the storeroom where we found the nine-tailed fox. The light was almost nonexistent now, and I was seeing the place through wolfish eyes. Maybe that was why I didn’t recognize it. I couldn’t have taken another wrong turn. I heard the others come up behind me, stepping softly, breaths echoing against the stone. The light from Cormac’s lantern pressed forward like a wall.

Crouching, I took in the smells. I caught the other werewolf pack, their maleness and foreignness; their ill intent in hunting us, all musky and sour, full of adrenaline. I took in our own smells: the chill of the vampire, Cormac’s human warmth, the familiar scent of Ben. I thought I even caught a hint of Grace—a trace of what her store smelled like, retail scents of cardboard packaging and money overlaid with the smoke from her candle. But when I tried to follow it, her trail vanished, as if she had simply taken off from the spot and flown away.

There should have been pools of freshly spilled blood, its odor wafting through the tunnels. I only smelled the drying blood smeared all over Ben and me.

I pressed my hands against the rough brick. It was hard not to feel as if the walls were closing in on me, or imagine unseen gazes of otherworldly spirits drawing closer, the skittering of movement growing louder. It was beginning to sound like laughter.

“What have you gotten us into?” I said to Anastasia. Growled, rather.

“You knew the risks,” she said.

The risks being that
something
completely unexpected and bizarre would happen? Okay, then. “‘It’s Roman, he’s taking over the world,’ you said. ‘Okay, I’m on the way,’ like I’m some kind of superhero. When am I going to learn?” I started marching, following the wall. It couldn’t go on forever. “There’s got to be a way out of here.”

“Kitty,” Ben called, and I stopped. That was all he had to say. Taking a breath, I calmed myself.

Anastasia sounded tired when she said, “I called you because I don’t have anyone else to turn to. Not anymore.” She was supposed to have her protégé and her servant, Gemma and Dorian. But she’d led them into a trap and gotten them killed.

She’d done the smart thing, bringing a guide here to make sure we had a way into and out of whatever magical cubbyhole this was.
I
was the one who’d chased Grace off—for her own good, of course. From a certain point of view this was my fault.

Pointing fingers wasn’t going to get us out of here.

A few paces behind us, Cormac had set down the lantern and by its light was drawing on the floor with a piece of chalk. Along with the amulets and charms, he evidently carried chalk in his pockets now, too.

I crept closer for a better look; the white lines of the chalk drawing stood out in the semidarkness, almost as if they glowed.

“Stay back,” he said, and I stopped. He had drawn a quick design, arrows and arcs, a couple of letters. It looked like scribbling.

“Will that help us find Grace?” I said.

“I don’t much care about Grace. I’m just trying to find a way out of here.”

“How long is this going to take?”

He ignored me and kept working. I started pacing because what else could I do? I looked back and forth down the corridor, wondering what was going to jump out at us. Ben was doing the same thing nearby. Our anxiety sparked across the space to each other, feeding each other. We were caged wolves.

“Kitty, calm down,” Anastasia said.

“We’re not safe here.”

“We killed them. They’re not coming back.”

“But what else is down here? Another one of those nine-tailed foxes? Or those guys could come back as zombie werewolves. What’ll we do then?”

“I hadn’t thought of zombie werewolves,” Ben muttered.

“There’s no such thing as zombie werewolves,” Anastasia said, and if you couldn’t believe an eight-hundred-year-old vampire about something like that, who could you believe?

“Says you,” Cormac said. I stopped and looked.

He set one of his silver daggers in the middle of the chalk design, stood back, and waited. After a breath or two, it trembled, all on its own, metal scraping against concrete. Slowly it turned, like a compass needle. The dagger’s tip passed one marking, then another. We gathered closer, watching to see where it rested—and if that would point to the way out. But it never rested. It rotated a full circle, wavered, reversed course and did the same in the opposite direction. Almost as if confused, it turned one way and the other, rattling harder, making more noise as it skittered on the hard floor. It seemed sentient, the way it searched and grew more erratic when it didn’t find its goal.

Corman finally stepped on it, trapping it. “It’s not working.”

I paced again. Cormac picked up the knife, dusted it off, and scuffed out the chalk marking with his boot.

“Now what?” Anastasia said.

“This was supposed to be your party, why don’t you come up with something?” Ben said.

“I just wanted the pearl. Chen was supposed to be here, the pearl was supposed to be here, I didn’t count on any of
this
.” She shook her head, squaring her shoulders and resettling her dignity. “We should wait for Chen. She’ll return to find us.”

“Not if she’s smart.” I stalked away from them, down the straightaway. “Even if we can’t find the same door there’s got to be another way out of here. We can’t just sit still and be targets.”

Ben and the others followed a few paces behind. I could sense them, the sound of their footsteps and the odor of their sweat, their anxiety. Anastasia had returned to her usual composure—cool, detached. I couldn’t read her at all.

Ahead, the corridor branched. I stopped at the intersection and waited for the others to catch up. “Well?” I said. “Left or right?”

“We could toss a coin,” Ben said.

“It hardly matters,” Anastasia said.

“Left,” Cormac said.

I glanced back at him. “Is this some kind of magical hunch?”

“Just a hunch,” he said. “The regular kind.”

“Why not right?”

“Turn right if you want to, doesn’t make a difference to me,” he said, expressionless as always. He held the lantern low in his hand. The light shadowed his face so it looked like a skull.

I kind of wanted to keep poking him until he got angry. Just out of curiosity, to see what he would do. Instead, I turned right and kept walking. When I glanced over my shoulder to see if the others followed, Ben smirked at me, the expression he used when he thought I was being irrational. But if it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, right?

And how had I ended up in the lead?

These tunnels seemed to go on an awfully long time without turning, breaking, or revealing any features. We were under San Francisco, there ought to be underground cables, water pipes, sewer lines. As long as we’d been walking we should have been under the bay by now. I shouldn’t have felt like I was in the stone dungeon of a medieval castle. I caught a faint whiff of incense. I tried to follow the trace of the scent, thinking it would lead us to a door, a room, anything but the maze of tunnels.

A break in the stone wall revealed a smooth plywood door. It didn’t have a lock.

Like other doors we’d encountered, this one also had a sign on it, a vertical length of paper with Chinese characters.

“What’s it say?” I said, looking back at Anastasia.

She studied it a moment. “It’s a warning.” As if she hadn’t expected anything different.

I snorted a short laugh. Of
course
it was a warning.

It was a pocket door, the kind that slid sideways into the wall, but it seemed to be spring loaded, or stuck, because I couldn’t get it open. I grabbed the fingerhold carved into one side and shook—it rattled in its frame as if jammed. Maybe I could wrench it loose.

After figuring out what I thought was the side that opened, I worked my fingers into the gap until I found the edge of the door. The door frame scraped my skin, but I also felt a sense of hope. I could do this, get it open, and get us all out of this place. Standing back and leaning over, I braced my legs and put my weight into pulling back on the door, shaking it hard every now and then to try to loosen it. When it budged a quarter of an inch, I grinned and pulled harder, until it jumped another six inches.

“Ha!” I announced in victory.

“Where’s it go?” Ben asked.

“Dunno.” I put my face to the opening; the hallway appeared to continue on in darkness. Ahead, a faint white light glowed. An emergency light in a room, maybe, or the exterior light over a doorway? A streetlight and freedom?

I jammed my shoulder into the opening to force it wide enough for me to slip through.

“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Ben asked, hovering. He put his hand on the wall next to me and peered over my head through the gap. “I can’t see anything in there.”

Exhaling, I flattened myself as much as I could, pushed against the door, and popped on through. I stumbled away from the gap.

“There, see?” I said. “No problem—”