Authors: Margaret Ronald
“Maybe.” I didn’t quite know what had been done to him, though, and the difference in the scent was all I had to go by. The sizzling intensified, and I looked away, toward the closest patch of blood. Rena held the flashlight so that it cast a shadow both of Deke and of his entrails, long black streaks across the brick floor. I squinted, and for just a second, caught a thin line of smoke rising up at the edge of it, as the blood charred and burned away into powder. The metallic scent sharpened, like the gasoline scent in the bridge house.
I’d want to go out like a Viking, me. I’d go properly.
“Rena—” I backed away from Deke’s body, but Rena was too close. She’d gotten closer to the body but
hadn’t noticed the change at her feet, the line of smoke racing inward and gaining speed. I caught the first spark of gunpowder (faint but real, and the last mark of Deke’s burnt magic I’d ever encounter) and took that as my cue to tackle Rena away from the body.
“What the hell—” Rena began. I fumbled for her face and managed to get my hand over her eyes just as the room went incandescent white. I caught my breath and held it, not for the oxygen but to keep the scents away. It didn’t work: burnt feathers and cloth and the foully simple scent of what Deke had become all blazed up in one second of cold brilliance. There was no answering
thump
of combustion, no spark catching at me as the bridge house fire had; this was Deke’s fire and Deke’s alone.
Even with my eyes shut tight, the afterimages still blinded me. Rena groaned and shoved me off her with both hands. “Goddammit,” she muttered. “Your magicians and their cavalier attitude toward evidence—” She sat up, blinking, her vision returning at the same slow tempo as mine. After a second, she spat a curse I’d never heard before and snatched up the flashlight, directing its beam to the empty hook. “He was just here, right?” she demanded, the beam shaking so much it practically strobed the room. “I didn’t just imagine that—that body—”
“It was how he wanted to go,” I said, getting to my feet. “If he couldn’t—if he didn’t have a better death, then at least he had this.” Small comfort; no comfort, really. But I could understand the need for it in that kind of despairing situation.
“Fuck,” Rena said in a small voice. “Crazy sand ladies I can take, even the creeps out on the water, but this …”
“He was here,” I reassured her, and she exhaled and stilled the flashlight with both hands. I bent and touched the ground again. “He was here,” I repeated.
Nothing was now left of Deke save a heap of gray ash, slowly sifting down to the spot where his guts had
been. Still blinking from the flash, I crouched next to it and sniffed. Tar and the tang of fireworks, magic and, somewhere, Roger. “Here,” I said, and reached into the ash, the heat of it sliding over my fingers like Maryam’s sand and dissipating much more quickly than real heat would have. “There’s a grate here … looks like the lock melted, if it was ever there.” I put both hands into the ash, shifted my weight, and pulled. A plain iron grate about two feet wide, stained with rust and now shiny patches where the flare of Deke’s pyre had burned through, slid free with a ferrous groan.
Rena came to help, and we set the grate down together, wincing in unison at the clang. She shone the flashlight beam into the pit below, revealing a line of rungs stretching down. “Sewers?”
“Doesn’t smell like it.” Besides, the grate and the rungs themselves didn’t quite look like the rest of the fort; not just newer than the 1850s architecture but with an institutional austerity to them. “But Roger’s scent leads this way.”
For a moment both of us had the same visual image—Roger, leaving Deke to hang, pulling the grate closed behind him along with a few loops of his guts—and though my stomach lurched again, I didn’t throw up this time. Rena just nodded; either the dead bodies she’d seen over the course of her career had made this easier, or she was just better at setting it aside. “All right,” she said. “I’ll bring the light; you follow me.”
“You sure?”
“I’m the one with the gun, Evie. I go first. You can, I don’t know, do something with that bat.”
“Something” turned out to be tucking it halfway under one arm and half into the pocket of my coat, so that I could almost use both arms. Rena just turned off the flashlight entirely and descended in darkness. After a moment, and as I was swinging down onto the first rungs, I heard a quiet “ah,” and a thump. “I’ve hit
bottom,” she said, and switched the flashlight back on. I dropped the last few feet when the bat started to slide out from under my arm, and ended up dropping it anyway. The clatter didn’t echo, but the sound still seemed to go on a lot longer than it ought to. I picked up the stupid thing, then turned and saw why.
Gray concrete walls, veined with white where salt had begun to seep through, rose up on either side to a flat, low ceiling. The long, lightless space beyond stretched out farther than the beam could reach. “Looks like a tunnel,” Rena said, as if it were no more than another address, another crime scene. “Old army or navy work, I’d say.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” She pointed the beam to what looked like just a niche in the concrete with a shelf halfway up, and it took me a moment to recognize that there were wires coming out of the wall just above the shelf. “See? Phone hookups. It’s just a guess, but there were army and navy setups out here, during World War Two and after.” She ran a hand over the wall, starting down the tunnel. “That’s why Gallop Island’s closed off; too much asbestos from the old facilities. Makes sense that they’d add something to Georges as well.”
“Weird kind of sense,” I said, but I followed, baseball bat in hand. No wonder I’d had no sense of Dina outside the fort; she hadn’t needed to leave it in order to come and go.
The tunnel had one advantage over the halls above: no doors opening out onto darkened rooms. And I had the advantage that I could tell no one was behind us, so there wasn’t that problem—even if Rena did keep turning back and blinding me with the damn flashlight. We walked, still following the tunnel downward, as the walls got damper and more crusted with salt deposits, and the scent of heavy ocean water sank into my bones. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said at last. “There’s no way we’re still under the island, and it takes heavy magic to cause displacement on this
scale—I mean, I’ve only seen that once and that was the Fiana—”
Rena shook her head. “Who said you needed magic for this? We’re under the harbor now, Evie.”
“Under—” I admit it; I looked up, as if that’d show me the fish above. The ceiling didn’t look any different from the other concrete we’d seen up till now; maybe a little damper, but certainly no more than a plain slab. Not my ideal bulwark against a billion tons of seawater. “Can we maybe start moving faster?”
“What, you claustrophobic?”
I managed a laugh. “No, I just have trouble with enclosed spaces that have an entire fucking ocean outside them.”
Rena muttered something under her breath, then stopped, raising the flashlight. I didn’t have to immediately look to know something was wrong; the way we suddenly had a bit more ambient light was enough. “Shit,” she said, and hurried down the tunnel to where a slump of rock and slabs of concrete blocked most of the passage.
I paused, back where the light didn’t yet reflect. Something about the way it glanced off the rock seemed wrong—not seawater damp, but irregular in a way that didn’t match fallen rock. And the scent was wrong: not concrete, but a different kind of stone, too close to the thing that had been Deke. “Rena, stop!” I yelled, my voice rattling down the tunnel.
She stopped and turned back to face me—just as a hand shot up from the rubble and seized her wrist. The flashlight dropped and rolled away, sending crazy sparks in every direction, but not before I saw the fragmented rubble crease and shift into a weathered face, a beard no longer gray but stony, keen blue eyes.
“Oh, you’re a firecracker, aren’t you?” The flashlight was pointed away from Roger, but enough light reflected off the walls to show him ensconced in the broken slabs, not buried but part of them. Whatever had happened to Deke had happened here as well—
but where Deke had been shot and hung up like a hog before it changed him into something inhuman, Roger was still alert and alive.
Dina had turned on him. Or—no, this wasn’t the act of an imprisoned spirit against her captor. This had the sense of something done with love, even a kind of twisted, consuming love. I thought back to my assumptions about Dina, what she’d be like if healed, what I could expect from her. I’d been very, very wrong … and she and Roger had been well matched.
Roger’s other hand, gnarled and knotted like pudding stone on the shore, dropped something that clattered down beside the flashlight, and he reached up to touch Rena’s forehead, drawing a symbol I didn’t know. “Strong enough to get me out of here, maybe?” he went on.
Rena jerked away, but his grip was tight as a shackle, and her eyes went wide and glassy. The spark of fireworks drifted down the passage to me, sharp as a stiletto.
It wasn’t the only gunpowder smell, though. I ran over and scooped up what lay beside the flashlight.
My gun felt as if someone had rubbed cheap alcohol over it and left it in a freezer: cold and stinging. But it was still mine, and I still had decent aim, at least at point-blank range. I put the muzzle of the gun against the mass of rock where Roger’s wrist should have been and fired.
The shot rang down both ends of the tunnel, louder than a thunderclap and a lot closer. Worse for me, though, was the sudden stink of hot stone and blood and shattered flesh that rose up from the wound, and though Roger’s mouth opened in a roar I couldn’t hear a thing. Rena pulled away, crumbled stone falling from her wrist, and the stink of whatever magic he’d tried to work on her faded like mildew in sunlight.
“Bitch,”
Roger said, almost amiably, and though my ears were abused from that shot I still heard him
as if we were having a conversation out on the pier.
“And I don’t suppose you’d volunteer to give me some of your life either? Figures.”
Rena, stunned but still herself, caught my shoulder. She pointed to him, mouthing something, but the ringing in my ears was still too much. “I don’t know what happened to him,” I said, or tried to. Rena shook her head and cursed—I didn’t need to be a lip-reader to understand that.
“What happened to me is that my alliance got a little uneven.”
He chuckled, the sound like stones rattling together, and in the back of my mind I wondered how I could hear him. Was it because he didn’t quite have lungs anymore, because in some way this wasn’t speech but the words of the stone he had become?
“Perhaps she thought we’d become a little too close—after all, I couldn’t expect her to associate with me now that she was whole again. Women,”
he added, grinning like a split boulder,
“always wanting to change you.”
I raised the gun a second time, but to no effect. He’d used up most of clip taking potshots at Deke. I put the safety back on and tucked the gun away in my salt-stiff holster, then nudged Rena. She hadn’t stopped staring, horrified, at Roger, and though I knew she couldn’t hear him, I thought the expressions on our faces must have been similar. I pointed down the tunnel—we’d have to climb over what had once been Roger’s feet, but there was a way through—and handed her the flashlight.
“And you thought,” he went on, the laughter now rattling stones loose above him, “that it was only wholeness she needed, that she’d be all better and kind and no more a monster if she was all put together again! My Deino, my Enyo, my Persis, my lovely, lovely gray lady …” He shivered, or would have, and even pressing against the wall to get away from him I felt unclean. “Almost worth it, to have ended like this, touched by her. But kindness? Oh, puppy, it doesn’t
work that way. My allies are never less than monsters; no one else is worth bothering with.”
“Except for Deke,” I said, and even though I still couldn’t hear my own words, I could feel them in my throat.
Roger’s head turned with a creak.
“Cam,”
he said, and now I could see that the mess I’d made of his arm was spreading, a stain like dry rot eating away at him. Or perhaps it was just a stain, just blood loss, that made him sound almost dreamy.
“Do you know, he kept coming back to me? Always so scared, always needing a protector … and I was his good friend. Just like a puppy, coming back every time …”
“And you killed him,” I said, and Rena looked back at me. Her hearing must have started to return.
Roger nodded, and his face creased into something like a landslide, like a scar on the side of a mountain.
“Yes,”
he said, and the last breath passed out of him. I waited a moment, till what was left of him wasn’t even anything like a body. Maybe, if I looked long enough and discounted what my talent told me was real, I could find a few rocks that, from a certain angle, looked like a man.
Rena nudged me, then pointed ahead. I shook my head, not understanding. She turned the flashlight off and then back on, and I finally saw what she meant: the passage beyond Roger was not quite pitch-black. Somewhere ahead, a little light had faded the dark. I hurried ahead, clutching the baseball bat.
The tunnel ended in a room little better than the one back in Georges; big, square, and with a step down to another grate, though this one smelled only of water, foul and black with the corrosion of years. A few forlorn wires stuck out of the walls, similar to the phone hookup at the far end of the tunnel. This couldn’t have been a radio room; we were too far away from any signal for that to work. But it had been similar. I imagined Cold War troops down here, listening for submarines that never bothered to attack Boston,
passing cups of strong coffee … okay, maybe the coffee was a stretch. But somehow imagining it helped.
On the opposite side of the room, steps led up to two separate doors, black metal smeared with rust and hanging off their hinges. I started for one, then stopped, cursing, as my jacket caught on an exposed tangle of wires. Rena, though, pushed the closer door open.