Chapter 14

AN HOUR LATER me, Greg, and Rabbit were standing outside the back of the Charlotte transit center in the parking lot of what used to be Eastland Mall. “Are you sure about this, Rabbit?” I asked, looking around.

Rabbit knelt by a manhole cover and grunted as he wedged a big screwdriver under the lip. “I’m not sure about anything except that this thing is heavy as shit. You wanna give me a hand, or just watch my asshole fall out?”

“As appealing as that sounds, I think I’ll pass,” I said. I nodded to Greg, who bent down, threaded two fingers into the hole in the center of the manhole cover, and pulled it up just enough to slide over. A puff of dry, dusty air escaped, and I caught a whiff of the same dried sewage smell that lingered over Julia’s body. “That smells like almost the same thing, but not quite.”

“All the abandoned sewers smell the same,” Rabbit said. “They all smell like cow patties and red dirt.”

“You’re a poet, Rabbit. Wrong, but poetic. There are slight differences in the smell of Morlock City to the rest of the sewers. And the more abandoned places smell drier, less funky.” I gestured toward the hole in the ground. “You first.”

“Why do I have to go first?” he whined, sitting down on the ground and dangling his feet in the hole.

“Because if it’s an ambush I don’t want to be the one to spring it,” I said, leaning down and shoving him forward into the hole.

“You’re an asshole!” Rabbit called out as he fell. “Ow! Shit!” He tossed up a solid stream of profanity when he hit the bottom, so I knew he wasn’t hurt too badly.

I looked over to Greg. “Well, if it’s an ambush, Rabbit’s in on it.” I drew my Glock and jumped down the hole feet-first. The fall was a little more than I expected, a good twelve or fifteen feet. I bent my knees when I landed and pitched myself forward into a roll, coming up with my gun pointed out in front of me. I did a quick scan around us, and as far I could see and hear, Rabbit was the only other person down there. “Clear!” I yelled up to Greg. “It’s further down than I thought. Use the ladder.”

“I have to use the ladder, idiot. It’s the only way I can—oof—put the lid back on.” He did just that, sliding the manhole cover back in place and descending the ladder to join us.

“Okay, Rabbit. Where are we going?” I asked.

“I got no idea, man.”

“What?” Greg grabbed Rabbit’s elbow and spun him around. “What do you mean you have no idea?”

“I mean I don’t know, man!” Rabbit tried to yank his arm free, but Greg locked his grip in, making the smaller vampire wince. “Ow! Let go of me!”

“Not until you tell us what you mean,” I said. “Why don’t you know how to find this asshole?”

“Did you morons miss the part where I said Alexander hates you because he thinks he should be in charge of everything? Well, he hates anybody he thinks of as your flunky, and that means me. He didn’t think much of me before Lilith’s goons murdered everybody, and he always just assumed he’d run things if anything ever happened to Alexis. Since I’m the one running Morlock City, that’s another strike against me in his book. If he’s the one down here, he’ll hate me for real now.” Rabbit glared at Greg, then me.

I nodded, and Greg released Rabbit’s arm. “Fine,” I said, “but you’re running point. If he hates me as much as you say, then I’d probably be even more poorly received than you.”

“Okay, but that brings us back to the original question—which way?” Greg turned around in the tunnel a couple of times, then looked back at me.

“That way.” I pointed off to my right. “That’s where the mall was, so if he’s under the old mall, that’s where he’ll be. Rabbit, you first. I’ll cover our backs.”

“Nah, you get in the middle,” Greg said.

“Why? You want to protect me all of a sudden?”

“Not a bit, but you’re such a gangly bastard that you can shoot over either of us, so put us in the front and back, and you’re still effective. But if I’m in the middle and something sneaks up behind us, you’re gonna get your head ripped off before I can get around you to save our asses.”

I didn’t bother to argue with him, just pointed down the tunnel. Rabbit started walking, drawing a pair of long daggers from somewhere in the jumble of hoodies, cargo pants, and long jacket he wore. I had my pistol, and Greg brought up the rear with his pistol-grip Mossberg twelve-gauge. We moved through the pitch black like a trio of shadows flowing along the ground, needing no light to see, even in the pitch black of the sewer.

The tunnel was huge, way bigger than anything that should have been under a mall parking lot, and it didn’t smell right for a sewer. “What the hell is this place?” I asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know,” Greg said. “I remember there being rumors of an aborted attempt at a subway back in the 50s. Maybe this was part of that.”

“I never heard anything like that,” Rabbit said.

“Me neither, but Greg’s the expert on urban legends. But wherever we are, this is no sewer,” I said.

“It also ain’t empty,” Rabbit said, pointing ahead. “There’s light up there.” He was right.

I looked over his head, and it was definitely brighter. We walked another fifty yards or so, and I put a hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. “Hold up,” I whispered, holding a fist in the air to signal Greg to stop. It didn’t work. He ran right into my back and almost bowled me over. So much for watching all those SWAT shows on TV.

“Why are we stopping?” Greg asked.

“That’s why,” I said, pointing at the walls ahead of us. On one wall, in foot-high letters, red spray paint shouted out “NEVER FORGET” while pictures and mementoes were stuck to the tunnel wall beneath the words. On the other wall, an arrow of black paint pointed ahead to a single word scrawled in the same black spray paint. “Sanctuary.”

“What the hell is Sanctuary?” I whispered.

“I have no idea,” Greg replied.

“I don’t know either, but I hear something up ahead. Sounds like people.” Rabbit put his knives away, straightened up, and started walking forward like he belonged there. I took a cue from the little Morlock leader and holstered my pistol. Greg slung the shotgun across his back, and we all walked toward the promised Sanctuary with our hands empty and palms open in plain view. We were presenting as little threat as possible. I just hoped trying to appear friendly wouldn’t get us killed.

We passed the rough memorial, with Rabbit trailing his fingers across several of the pictures, lingering in front of a tattered driver’s license and leaning close. I watched his lips move, but if he actually spoke, it was too low even for me to hear. He turned and looked up at me. “These are Morlocks.” He waved a hand at the wall, his dirty fingernails almost scraping the corners of some of the photos where they peeled off the wall. “All of these people. They’re dead Morlocks.”

I froze. There were literally hundreds of pictures on the wall. “Wait,” I said. My voice wasn’t much more than a whisper as the enormity of Lilith’s mass murder sank in. “There were . . . this many of them?”

“No, man,” Rabbit reached out and took hold of the front of my shirt. “There was that many of us. There were hundreds of us, man. At least five hundred scattered around the city. We didn’t all live in the tunnels. Some of us liked it better upstairs, at least at night. Then we’d just duck down into the nearest tunnel for the day. Or we’d hide in an abandoned building, or sometimes just rent a hotel room and sleep in the bathtub. But there were hundreds of Morlocks, Black. Hundreds. And that bitch killed us. She killed us all.”

He wasn’t kidding, either. I thought back to the vampires I’d seen in the tunnels just hours before. If there were fifty Morlocks left, it was a miracle. “Holy shit. I never knew.”

Greg reached forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault, Jimmy. Lilith was psychotic. You can’t beat yourself up for what she did.”

“Can’t I?” I didn’t look at him. I didn’t take my eyes off Rabbit, who looked up at me as fat pink tears streaked down his face. “If I’d kept my nose out of Lilith’s business, would she have killed all those people? Would she have even made her move against Tiram if I hadn’t gotten in the middle of them?”

“Maybe not, but if you don’t kill Lilith, we’re all true-dead right now, remember? She wasn’t just going to kill all the vampires. She was going to kill all the everybody. You had to take her down.”

I took a deep breath, trying to focus on the task in front of me. My fight with Lilith, for good or ill, was over. I couldn’t bring these Morlocks back, and I’d done all I could do to get justice for them. Now was time to get justice for Julia O’Connell. If I was going to be Master of this City, it was time to suck it up, own my past mistakes, and lead. “Yeah,” I said. “I took her down. And Tiram. And all her lackeys. Just like I’ll take down every son of a bitch that threatens my city from this moment forward. Now let’s go find out who thinks they need to singlehandedly repopulate the Morlocks of North Carolina, one innocent teenager at a time.”

I looked at Rabbit, and he nodded. His eyes told a long story, and I knew we still had some unresolved issues between us about my part in the death of the Morlocks. But for now, he was with me, and that was all I could ask for. I stepped past him, my long coat flowing out a little as I strode forward down the tunnel. The time for skulking and sneaking was past. The time to be the Master was upon me, and for maybe the first time, I was ready.