4

INSIDE THESE WALLS

Dru had never felt particularly comfortable in the candle lit expanse of Salem’s enormous lair. It was smelly, gloomy, and surprisingly claustrophobic for being the approximate size of a Romanesque cathedral. But her discomfort stemmed mostly from Salem’s snarky presence and unpredictable behavior.

He, however, was now silently sprawled in an undignified black-clad heap on the wooden floor a few feet away. Meanwhile, she was lying on her belly, grasping Greyson’s hand, the fingers of her other hand shoved into the circle of creepy-looking artifacts and wrapped around the big amethyst crystal. She was still charging up the defensive ring, but in a minute that wouldn’t make any difference. She was a sitting duck.

The ghost surged back to full strength. Its night-black tentacles grew thicker and twitchier. The dark pits of its eyes turned toward her, full of malice.

Dru swallowed. “We can’t fight that thing.”

“And we’re fresh out of chairs.” Greyson’s red gaze scanned left and right. “Nothing left to hit it with. Salem’s spell pretty much cleared the place out.”

Every option looked bad. If she stayed here, the tentacles were sure to get her. If she let go of the crystals and fled, the protective circle of artifacts would eventually fail, and the ghost would break through. That would almost certainly mean the end of the world.

Dru hesitated, uncertain what to do even as the ghost peeled itself off the wall and bore down on them. But she was flat out of alternatives, except for one.

Grab the apocalypse scroll and run.

Not a great plan, but it was the only one she had.

She looked up into the heat of Greyson’s glowing eyes. “When I say ‘Go,’ grab Salem and follow me. Okay?”

He nodded once. No hesitation. But as the ghost’s shadow tentacles convulsed and swelled overhead, Greyson’s clenched jaw told her what he thought of their chances.

Dru had no time to worry about letting him down. She turned her attention to the amethyst crystal in her grip. Magical power hummed down her arm and into the nine crystals arranged around the circle, reinforcing the invisible defensive shield woven by the artifacts. Salem had obviously put a ton of work into carefully arranging each one of them to maximize their effectiveness. As far as sorcery went, it was a kind of poetry, or sculpture.

To get the scroll, she had to knock all of it down like a line of dominoes.

With a groan of effort, she struggled to reverse the direction of the flow of power through the crystals. It was like trying to push a parked car. It didn’t budge. She fought against the circle, driven harder by the terror of the eyeless ghost and its grasping tentacles. But the magic in the circle was meticulously crafted and solid. Even with help from Greyson’s power flowing through her other hand, she felt like she was accomplishing nothing.

Just when she could push no harder, she broke through. An invisible shudder ran through the circle, and the floor trembled under her feet. A dangerous whining sound whipped around the circle, making Dru’s hair stand on end. The air wavered.

One by one, the crystals around the circle went up in a blinding flash and exploded. Hot chunks of rock, sizzling with foul smoke, shot in every direction. The artifacts in the circle—ugly masks, wickedly curved daggers, brass figurines in distorted poses—all shook and tipped over, each one colliding with the next. Crackling magic crawled over them, sending up fountains of sparks along with plumes of toxic green and yellow smoke. With sharp pops and sizzles, the magic spell disintegrated.

Dru reached into the campfire-hot air inside the circle and plucked out the scroll. Oddly, it was icy cold and smooth in her hand.

About twenty feet beyond, a small oval crystal lay on the floorboards, glinting in the lights of the dying spell. It was her golden sunstone. If she could get to it, she could use it against the ghost again. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had.

She glanced at Greyson. “Get Salem! Go!”

He leaped into motion. The moment he let go of her hand, the spark of magic between them broke, and she suddenly felt alone again. She turned and leaped for the sunstone crystal, overwhelmed by the feeling that she was about to lose Greyson forever.

But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t look back to make sure he was safe. Because he wasn’t. None of them were.

The artifacts in the circle behind her died in spasms of multicolored light, illuminating the cracked wooden floorboards in disorienting flashes. But the sunstone gleamed. Right there.

She stooped and snatched it up, willing it to life in her palm. Hot sunshine spread out between her fingers, lighting her skin red. Somewhere behind her, the ghost screeched in dismay.

Greyson ran past her with Salem thrown over his shoulder like a sack of lawn clippings. He snatched her hand and pulled her along. The crystal’s glare surrounded them, illuminating the tumbled debris that had landed along the periphery of Salem’s powerful spell. Beyond lay the back end of his cluttered apartment.

“Come on!” Greyson said, climbing over debris. “The front door’s blocked. We have to go out the back.”

“There is no back!” Dru struggled to keep up with him. “There’s only one way in or out!”

Greyson dodged around a bookcase packed with curiously orderly rows of matching black and tan books, perhaps an old legal library. His red gaze cast about. “There has to be a fire exit or something.”

“Oh, sure. Does Salem strike you as the fire-code-abiding type? No!” Dru gestured at the unconscious bundle slung over Grey-son’s shoulder. Distantly, though, she did recall Rane once telling her that Salem had a secret door. At the time, Dru had thought it was a joke.

But that unusually tidy bookcase caught her eye. It was the only clean, orderly thing in this entire maze.

Before she could inspect it closely, the wailing ghost reached the edge of the sunstone’s light. Pinpoints of fire burned in the hollow pits of darkness where its eyes should have been. With a howl, it raised its long arms, fingers clawed, and again Dru got the distinct impression that in a previous life, it had been a sorcerer.

But ghosts couldn’t use sorcery in the afterlife, could they?

She had no time to analyze the situation. As dark tentacles flashed out toward them, she threw all of her weight against the bookcase, silently praying her hunch was right.

To her surprise, the bookcase came loose with a screech of old rusty hinges. It swung away from her into darkness, trailing cobwebs from its edge. Beyond lay a dusty, narrow spiral staircase leading down.

Greyson didn’t miss a beat. He pushed Dru inside as the tentacles whipped toward her. He tried to shove the heavy bookcase back into place, but a half-dozen of the tentacles had already wormed through the gap.

“Run!” he shouted.

Dru had no idea where the stairway led, except down. And Salem, being unconscious, couldn’t tell them anything. But still, it had to be better than here. She fled down the tight spiral stairs, following the golden light of the sunstone, her chicken-soup-soaked shoes squishing on the rusty metal steps.

Above her, Greyson put his shoulder into the bookcase and slammed it hard enough to make the wall shake. The tentacles recoiled for just a moment. He stormed down the steps after her.

At the bottom, the secret passage ended in a narrow, cobweb-covered door roughly assembled from stained plywood and two-by-fours. There was no handle.

Dru’s panic was nearly matched by her unwillingness to touch the web-covered, splintery wood. She summed up the courage to plant a soggy shoe against it. It didn’t budge. Just then, Greyson barreled down the tight stairwell and plowed shoulder-first into the door. With a crackle of fossilized dirt, it swung open.

Together, they rushed out onto the filthy ground floor of the abandoned building, which had apparently been some kind of factory in the distant past. Rows of rusty, riveted metal tanks stretched along one wall. Each tank was roughly the shape of a grain silo, and probably ten feet tall, built to hold hundreds of gallons of liquid. A tangle of valves and pipes connected them, tented with spiderwebs.

From the ceiling hung a cluster of rusty chains with links thicker than her thumb. They terminated in a wicked-looking metal hook big enough to hoist a whale.

Everything below head height, all the way down to the floor, was coated with indecipherable spray-painted graffiti and an offensively deep layer of grime. Even in the daytime, this place would have been nothing short of creepy. In the middle of the night, it was downright terrifying.

The nearest exit she could see was a side-by-side pair of doors, once painted a depressing green, now chalky and streaked with rust. Clutching the cold apocalypse scroll to her chest, Dru ran for the door. Above and behind them, the wailing ghost’s shadow tentacles obliterated the stairwell. Broken lumber, torn metal treads, and choking dust exploded from the opening.

Dru crashed into the big outside door and tried the knob. It wouldn’t budge. It was locked.

Greyson dumped Salem’s unconscious form onto the floor next to her and kicked the door. It rang out with a clash of metal against solid metal.

It didn’t give an inch.

Tentacles of darkness, each as thick as Dru’s leg, wormed their way out through the remains of the staircase and wriggled toward them. They were cornered. Greyson gave up on the door and picked up a length of rusty iron pipe, raising it like a baseball bat.

At that moment, Dru’s phone rang with a pounding hip hop beat, an instant reminder to never let Rane play with the settings on her phone. But all the same, right now, that ringtone was the most beautiful sound in the world.

“Rane!” Dru screamed into the phone. “Help!”

Rane was breathing hard, her breaths blowing into the phone. “The hell are you, cowgirl?”

“Downstairs! Somewhere! There’s a bunch of tanks!”

“Tanks?” Rane sounded flabbergasted. “Like…the army?”

“No! We’re by the green door!”

“Which one? They’re all green!”

Frustration burned through Dru like a physical pain. She didn’t know where she was. But there was a good reason she’d never been in this part of the abandoned building before. She had always wanted to stay out of trouble—which was exactly what she had found here.

“Talk to me, D!”

But Dru was busy charging up the sunstone, lighting up the basement as bright as day. The tentacles struck at them like a nest of vipers. Greyson sidestepped and swung the pipe. It connected with a tentacle, knocking it back hard enough to fly back and dent one of the empty tanks. The impact boomed like a gigantic drum.

“Heard that,” Rane puffed. “Got eyes on the door. Stay back. Way back.”

“Why? What are you—” But the call ended, beeping twice. Dru stared at the phone, quietly finishing: “—going to do?”

A moment later, she had her answer. The double doors shook with a deep metallic BOOM that rang through the building, as if the mass of a dinosaur-killing asteroid had plowed into them. A cloud of dust burst into the air, peppered with flakes of paint and rusty bits of metal.

Greyson glanced back over his shoulder, looking worried. Even the tentacles paused for a heartbeat.

Another BOOM shook the building. The deafening noise echoed back and forth through the midnight-black depths of the abandoned factory. This time, the impact deformed the door as something outside hit it hard enough to punch a shape into the metal.

Dru adjusted her glasses and squinted. That shape looked an awful lot like the sole of a very large running shoe.

Remembering Salem, Dru grabbed him under the warm armpits of his black silk shirt and dragged him back as far away from the door as she could.

Greyson grunted as he fended off the tentacles. Mercilessly, they drove him back. More tentacles swarmed down the spiral staircase and joined the rest. Too many to fight at once.

A rapid clanging sound approached outside, like running footsteps, but metallic. With another earth-shaking BOOM, the battered doors flew open, now almost bent in half. They shrieked on tortured hinges and clanged off the wall on either side, gouging chunks out of the concrete.

Through the door marched Rane. Six feet tall and bulging with muscle, Rane’s entire body was composed of gleaming raw steel. With every powerful stride, the air rang with the sound of a sledgehammer striking concrete.

Rane bunched her fists and nodded her chin to Greyson. “Hey. ’Sup?” Then, without breaking stride, Rane marched up to the slithering tentacles and threw a devastating punch into the center of their mass.

The blow sent some of them flying back, while the rest whipped around her so fast they whistled through the air. Her forearms and waist were instantly wrapped in darkness.

“Rane! No!” Dru stepped forward, brandishing the sunstone. But it did nothing to drive off the tentacles. Instead, she could only watch in horror as Rane was bodily lifted up off the ground.

Behind Dru, through the open door, rolled a rumble like thunder, louder by the moment. Headlights washed across the run-down parking lot, briefly lighting up clusters of scraggly dead weeds. Hellbringer’s tires screamed with white smoke as the demon car slid to a halt. Its doors swung open.

Greyson had already picked up Salem, but he hesitated when he saw Rane in trouble.

Her metal body flashed in the light of Dru’s crystal. She scissored her legs up and clamped them around the rusted chain that dangled from the high ceiling. Twirling in the air, Rane swiftly wrapped the tentacles in the thick chain.

Then she dropped to the floor, heels banging on the concrete, and pulled at the tangled tentacles with both hands until they were stretched taut. Teeth bared, biceps bulging, she leaned back against the quivering tentacles until they snapped in half. The severed ends dissolved into boiling smoke.

She staggered back, thrown off-balance, and was about to jump back into the fight when Dru yelled, “Rane, no!”

“Don’t worry. I can take this thing!”

“First, help Salem!”

Rane glanced over, and her gaze lingered on Salem’s unconscious body. With obvious reluctance, she retreated to the door.

Worryingly, Salem didn’t stir when they flung him into the back seat. Rane ducked in next to him, making Hellbringer’s suspension creak in protest, and cradled Salem to her steel chest.

Right behind them, the ghost boiled out through the twisted metal of the double doors. Beneath the distant city lights, the thing glittered like moonlight rippling across dark water. All around it, the darkness writhed to life and came after them.

Dru jumped into the front seat. “Get us out of here!”

Greyson yanked the shift knob, dropping Hellbringer into gear. The engine roared like a beast unchained from the pits of Hell. The sudden acceleration crushed Dru into the seat.

As they roared away across the empty parking lot and down the road, the thing followed, slowly falling behind. The pit of its mouth opened wide and released a skin-crawling wail into the night.

It quickly dropped out of sight behind them. But it was still back there, somewhere. Dru had the sickening feeling that it wasn’t finished with them. If it was after the power of the apocalypse scroll, it would never give up, she was sure. She felt it to the core of her being. This thing would pursue them to the end of the earth.

Perhaps literally.