47

SO MOLLY’S SHADOW ACTUALLY TURNED OUT TO BE PRETTY AMAZING …

Hey, shadow bitch,” I called up while I reloaded my shotgun.

“John, it’s me!” Molly’s voice said, and said it just the way Molly would, too. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’ve got this all wrong. I’m not some shadow thing. The shadow thing took my place—you left it back in New York.”

“We know; that’s why we’re here to rescue you,” Sig said. “Come on down here and give us a hug.”

“I’m serious, Sig!”

Seriously trying to mess with our heads, maybe. It didn’t matter how unlikely what the shadow thing was saying was; if it could insert the tiniest little doubt in the backs of our minds, we might hesitate or freeze up at a critical moment. “So, you’re alone?” I asked, wishing I’d brought some grenades. The shadow bitch was probably wishing the same thing.

“Some skinwalkers were holding me prisoner, but then they started pulling some Help me, I’m melting! number.”

The Wizard of Oz. She was even referencing movies the way Molly and I did.

“Some four-armed things ran past me too,” the shadow bitch continued. “But they weren’t very bright.”

Apparently, she thought we weren’t either. I had made a connection with the real Molly and followed her in a dream. Even if I hadn’t, there was no way Sarah and a Fisher King would have been fooled by some kind of wraith. I angled the shotgun up between the cracks in the railing and fired blind. Something metal rang off a stairway rail while the shadow bitch uttered a profanity I’m pretty sure Molly never would have. Then the Uzi it had been aiming downward while hoping to get me to peek upward bounced off another rail and clattered to the stairs below me. I was already up and moving around the next bend in the staircase before the echoes had died down.

Molly … I mean, her shadow, darted through the stairwell door to floor ten even while she yelled my name. She wasn’t dressed like Molly had been. She was wearing a mask made out of a bull’s skull and dark robes. Don’t ask me what religion or anti-religion that was supposed to represent. That whole thing about the Devil having horns isn’t biblical. It came about while the early Christian church was trying to convert the Greeks and Romans and Celts by demonizing gods like Pan and Mithras and at least half a dozen others whose avatars or ceremonies involved goats or bulls.

The shadow bitch was bleeding.

We followed Molly’s double, shadowing the shadow. I suppose all the small aches and pains were still there, but I wasn’t feeling them through the adrenaline spike. When we reached the landing of floor ten, we saw that floors eleven and up had become somewhat problematic. Ice was everywhere. The individual stairs of the stairwell were gone, obscured by a thick slope of ice. The walls were covered in ice. The next landing was covered in ice. A mist that seemed to be moving around a little too much to be lifeless filled the space between the floor and ceiling, and there was an unnatural absence of sound.

More ghosts, probably. Drawing on energy, including heat and sound, to manifest something unpleasant. And don’t ask me if we were really in a land of the dead, or a book version of the land of the dead, or if the book had created some shunt that allowed real ghosts easier access to our plane, or replicated those effects, or what the practical difference between any of those options would be, because I never did manage to figure that one out, or care.

I decided to follow Molly’s shadow, at least until I found the adjacent stairwell on the other side of the building or another set of elevator doors or a window. Trying to fight whatever was in that stairwell while making my way up a steep slope of ice didn’t seem like it would end well. The sound of Molly’s shadow retreating was in my ears while I thrust the door open and angled the shotgun sharply to the left and fired to clear the doorway.

“I thought we were going to try to take her alive,” Sig said while I held the door open with my foot and thumbed two more shells into my shotgun. I could smell blood coming from floor ten. Lots of blood, fae blood, iron-rich and fresh. I could smell fear stink too, and pain sweat, and voided bowels and bladders. What had been going on in there?

“These particular shells are loaded with blessed salt,” I said. “They won’t kill a normal human being, and anything else they do to that thing, I’m pretty sure it needs to be done.”

The sound of the shadow thing’s footsteps was getting farther away, and there was something odd about their quality, muffled and resonant at the same time. I kicked the door open and peeked around the entrance, but you know that saying about being ready for anything? It’s a crock.

I was facing the walls of a maze. Said walls were made of thin white stone the color of office cubicles, and those walls reached from the floor to the ceiling. Maybe the maze went with those rat associations that John Dee 2.0’s mind had made earlier, or maybe the son of a bitch’s imagination had conjured up a literal corporate labyrinth.

“This feels different,” Sig said. “Like something’s keeping the spirits out on this floor.”

Well, she would know. I went in, trusting Sig’s words and trusting her to keep me in her line of sight. I had it in my head that I would follow the Molly smell straight to the shadow thing, but the shadow must have been over each twist and turn and path of the maze several times, confusing the scent trail like a fox. I inhaled deeply, and the air was so dry that it stung my sinuses. Could you make stone walls out of moisture molecules and dust motes if you sucked enough of them out of the air? I could hear Molly farther ahead, but that didn’t mean there weren’t wrong turns and dead ends between us, and the multiple bends and angles were messing with echoes.

The shadow thing spoke to me low enough that Sig couldn’t hear it, and it had given up on trying to convince me that it was the real Molly. She doesn’t love you, you know. Sig. She’s never gotten over feeling guilt for the way her parents died. She only picks men that it won’t hurt too much to lose. Her lovers are a way of punishing herself.

I found a dead body at the first fork. It smelled like a half-elf. The half-elf’s ears looked human, probably because of plastic surgery, and it was dressed like an ordinary office worker. The body was lying facedown in a pool of congealed blood that had poured down from a slit throat. Normally, I would have suspected it of being some kind of undead, but Sig had said there were no restless spirits in there. And hell, I probably would have had a similar reaction to an office job myself.

She went straight from a loser like Stanislav Dvornik to you, Molly’s voice continued. Doesn’t that tell you something? She doesn’t love you; she just doesn’t want to be alone, and you’re the kind of train wreck she thinks she deserves.

My body was covered in a lot of cuts and slices, and I rubbed my left forearm hard enough to leave a spot of dried blood on the white wall. I didn’t have a ball of thread to unwind if I took wrong turns and confused my own scent trail, or bread crumbs to drop, but bloodspots five and a half feet off the floor that smelled like me would do. A horizontal smear to indicate I’d come this way unimpeded. Two drabs or dots to indicate the passage led to a dead end.

The other me doesn’t love you either, Molly’s voice whispered. She’s the kind of idiot who can’t help picking up any kind of wounded animal she finds along the road, even if taking care of them is gross and inconvenient. You’re one more burden to her.

I didn’t respond. The shadow thing’s hearing probably wasn’t as good as mine, and I didn’t want to give away my location. Instead, I retraced from a dead end and went west and found part of a collapsed desk with a laptop and printer dumped on the floor. A big yellow coffee mug had shattered when it dropped.

It was almost possible to visualize how the maze walls had sprung up. The desk was in fragments, but it wasn’t as if it had been shattered. Most of it was just gone, not cleanly sliced, not missing bite-shaped chunks, just … gone. The same held true for the office equipment that had spilled out of partial drawers. Half a stapler. An anonymous black stub of plastic. The desk’s molecules must have converted while the level was reassembling. There was a picture of an awkwardly smiling family of three still taped to the maze wall where a cubicle slat must have transformed or expanded beneath it, the woman holding a small girl in a way that suggested forcible restraint as much as a hug.

Choo and I talk about you as if you were a mad dog; did you know that? Deep down, we wonder if you’re going to turn on us someday or get us killed.

Had the people who worked on this floor been normal people who had no idea where they were working? Or was it just that even minions had families, mortgages … wait a minute … the knights hadn’t gotten up there yet. Who had killed these people? And why?

I found another body whose throat had been slit. This time, the sleeves of its suit had been hiked up enough that I could see ligature marks on its left wrist. It had been bound before it had died, and it had struggled against those bindings hard. But why remove bindings after killing someone? Was it that important to cross their arms over their chest so that they made an X? A junction or a crossroads? To spread its feet so that the entire body made a Y. An X and a Y. Male and female symbols together?

We know you don’t really care about us, any more than you care about Sig. You’re just in love with the idea of being in love. You’d convince yourself that you loved cardboard cutouts of people if they’d let you call them your friends.

Why was the shadow trying so hard to distract me and get me to go after it in a blind rage? What had Ben said? Molly knew how I thought, and her shadow knew that I was the one who was the most familiar with lots of different kinds of lore. What was it that it didn’t want me to think about?

You’re just a dog that’s been kicked too many times, and when you’re not biting, you’re crawling around, whimpering for someone to love you. Anybody who takes you in does so out of pity.

That was the second time it had compared me to a dog. No, don’t think about that. That first body … I tried to track back mentally and figure out where it had been in position to this new body. Two bodies, and I could smell that there were more in the maze ahead. Both bodies I’d found had slit throats. Like sacrifices. At least one had been bound, then untied, then positioned here. Had it been carefully positioned? I was pretty sure John Dee 2.0 was a cunning man, and the shadow thing had been here long enough to get some instructions. If the shadow’s unholy mojo was as strong as Molly’s holy mojo …

The person you call Molly is the one that isn’t real. She’s a fake that you project all of your need onto. It kills her inside because she feels like that’s who she has to be for your sake. I’m who she really is, and I can’t stand you. You’re as alone as you ever were. It’s just pathetic that you don’t know it.

If her unholy mojo … oh, hell. I whispered to Sig, “Watch that left path for me.”

“What’s going on?”

“I think these bodies are making some kind of pentagram that we can’t see because of these maze walls. They’re sacrifices, and she’s trying to draw us in toward the center of them.” That’s why Sig couldn’t sense any spirits around us. A pentagram is basically a Star of David with a twist, a Solomon’s seal, a protective barrier designed to keep things out or keep things in. If they’re placed in a spot where the boundaries between dimensions are thin, things can be summoned inside them and contained there.

And if these bodies had been placed at specific points by Molly’s shadow for a specific reason, I didn’t want to leave them there. I grabbed the body by its ankles and pulled it back the way I’d come while Sig guarded my back.

I’d dragged the body maybe twelve feet when it began to thrash, a meat puppet being animated. The occult design that the bodies had been placed in really had kept the spirits from that place from messing with them, animating them. The same spirits probably would have been animating all of the knights and werewolves who had died, if knight armor didn’t have holy symbols stitched into its threadwork or encased in the plastic plates covering vital organs. Would have been animating the monsters we’d killed if those conjurations didn’t use up the same kind of energy that spirits use to manifest physical presences.

I dropped the corpse’s leg and my shotgun and drew my katana. It wasn’t all one motion, but it was so fast that it probably looked like it. I cut the body’s head off with a blessed blade, and it suddenly remembered that it was dead and stopped moving. Somewhere farther in the maze, Molly’s shadow started screaming. Not screaming words. Not screaming in pain. Just screaming out pure frustrated hatred.

I really had ruined some big occult surprise she’d been preparing for us. Maybe it would have made a better story if I hadn’t, assuming I would have survived to tell it. Maybe Sig could have sacrificed her life so that we could defeat whatever big boss the shadow had in mind. Then Sig could have made a nice speech right before dying. I could even eventually find somebody new to sleep with, and then Sig could come back from death in some contrived bullshit way, and we could wind up in a romantic triangle later.

But screw that. It was my life. I’d do what I wanted with it.

Now that the rite was broken, the first body I’d passed came running around the corner, but it was making noise and I wasn’t, and it wasn’t used to having a physical form again yet. I was waiting around a wall with my katana poised, and I took off part of its left shoulder and all of its head with one stroke. Then I was running back the way I’d come.

Sig was already removing a spear from another dead body that had animated and come her way. The runes carved into the haft of her battle spear were glowing. I smeared some of my blood on the corner of a turn and went past her, turned again, and wound up bouncing off a dead end when I couldn’t stop in time because I’d been moving too fast.

Stone walls might not a prison make, but they don’t care if they ruin dramatic moments either. And screw you, Richard Lovelace. Another two dots of dried blood, two turns, and suddenly, I saw something that changed everything.

A stairwell exit. Meanwhile, Molly’s shadow was still making noise farther in the maze. Pure evil or not, shadowlike or not, it had also inherited Molly’s lack of stealth. I turned to Sig and nodded at the exit. Mimed reading a book. Killing whoever was conjuring up all kinds of fresh hell out of nothing took top priority. There was no point capturing Molly’s shadow if we were killed by the next wave of made-up monsters. On one level, Molly’s shadow was the most important thing, but on another, it was a distraction.

Sig’s mouth tightened, and then she nodded toward the interior of the maze. She was going to make sure the thing that was part of her best friend didn’t get away first. That was probably for the best, tactically; Sig could handle any spirits that Molly’s shadow whipped into a frenzy and keep them off my back. Whether it was for the best or not, I wasn’t going to change Sig’s mind, and she wasn’t going to change mine.

So I listened carefully, made sure I didn’t hear or smell anything nearby, then handed Sig the shotgun with shells full of blessed salt, took her helmet off, and kissed her. I kissed Sig harder than I’ve ever kissed anyone in my life. I held on to her like I was trying to mash our bodies into one being. I kissed her like I was trying to drink her through my mouth.

Then I left her there.