I crashed to the floor after a drop of only about ten feet, rolling away from the opening as it slammed shut above me. “What the hell is this?”
An irritated voice floated out of the darkness. “It’s not like you shouldn’t have expected booby traps. It’s an old house. Filled with deceivers. Traps are what they do.”
I turned sharply, then turned again, trying to see in the darkness. I lifted my hand, and the typical blue glow of my magic barely created a puff of smoke.
“That won’t work either,” sighed the voice. “I swear, you people should do your research. You really think Lara is that smart? She’s not. She merely inherited smart systems. Anything below the level of the main house is deeply and heavily warded against any magic of any type. Even that belonging to the Justice of the Arcana Council.”
“Who are you?” I demanded. But I had a bad feeling I already knew. The silence that followed my question wasn’t encouraging. “You’re a dead person, aren’t you? This little trap is where people are sent to die.”
“Technically there is an exit,” the voice defended itself. “I simply was already compromised when Miranda dumped me here.”
“Miranda?”
“Miranda Green, 1942’s version of Lara Drake, only nowhere near as pleasant. She’d discovered these subterranean corridors early in her reign and used to lock servants down with two days’ worth of food and a flashlight, because the rumor was there was a way out to an exit corridor. Only a few made it out, though, and they were stone-cold insane by the time they managed it. Once she went through an entire season of staff members, she decided it was a good enough place to dump people she wanted to be forgotten. I was one of those people. My name is Oliver Malloy. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Can I see you?”
“Sort of.” A shift in the darkness, and a pale shaft of light eased out from behind the rock. It was barely enough illumination to discern features, but the figure was a short, slender man in a loose-fitting suit. He was crushing a fedora in his hands, and he seemed the soul of innocence.
“Why did she send you down here?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “And for that matter, why was I? Lara was already gone. Who had the controls?”
The apparition merely stared at me.
“You can’t handle more than one question at a time, can you?”
“It’s a question of civility, really,” Oliver sniffed defensively. “You can’t expect me to keep up with a train of thought that is constantly jumping the rails. No one knows the value of slowing down.”
“What is this place, anyway? Some kind of basement?”
I looked around the room, my eyes slowly adjusting to the limited light of Oliver’s glow. I’d expected it to be a cave system, but it didn’t smell like a cave. It smelled like concrete, mildew, and rat dung.
Oliver remained quiet, and I backtracked, refocusing on him. “Do you know what this place is?”
“Certainly, though I haven’t been out of this room, unfortunately. I cracked my head almost immediately. Always was a little too clumsy for my own good.” He sighed as I waved my hand at him. “Civility, civility. No one has time for a proper story. But it was an underground system of rooms needed for the original structure on this property, before the witches bought it. A sanatorium. When patients died, they needed a way to transport their bodies out to sea without anyone seeing them, and then there were some examination rooms down here too. For the noisier residents.”
I stared at him, horrified. “You’re kidding me.”
“Not at all. When the land was acquired in the late 1800s, the passages were filled in, or so it was said. But there were still the rumors of witches disappearing during high celebrations, or trespassers dispatched and no one ever knew the wiser.”
“And you?”
He smiled sadly. “I had the misfortune of being a witch in love with Miranda Green, at a time when it proved not to be convenient for her anymore. She dropped me down here to tuck me out of sight when her primary lover showed up unexpectedly, and—like I said. I’m a bit klutzy.”
“She killed you?”
“In her defense, she didn’t mean to. And it wasn’t like I could lobby a protest. I was dead.”
“Did she know that you became a ghost?” I rubbed my bicep where the Eye of Horus itched with a flaring heat. I wasn’t really sure how many dead people I could take in a single day. Especially not dead people at a sanatorium. Those had to be extra dead.
“I’m not a ghost. I can leave at any time.”
Oliver’s response brought me back to the more pressing issue: getting out. “You can? Then why are you here?”
He shook his head, and I flung out my hands in exasperation. “Come on! That technically wasn’t two questions. Why are you here if you aren’t actually a ghost? Why would you—” I cut myself off before I could double down on the question.
Oliver continued to twist his fedora. “Because you summoned me. That’s the strength of the Eye of Horus that Death provided you.” He smiled a little dreamily. “Ah, Death. Had I known she existed, I would never have fallen for Miranda. She was a real dame when she came to collect me.”
“I’ll try to unsee that,” I muttered. I thought back to the dead guy I’d met earlier. Had I actually summoned him? He’d simply seemed to be there… I frowned, vaguely remembering my spoken question. What had I asked? And what had I said to bring Oliver back from the dead?
Either way, it didn’t help.
“Why’d Lara deep six me?” I asked, staring at the ceiling.
“Not Lara,” Oliver countered. “I doubt Lara knows of those particular controls, even in her own office. A woman entered—oh, I’m not even sure when. Time…” he sighed, seeming to become slightly less substantial.
“Focus, Oliver. It’s important.”
“It’s just she was so…indistinct…” he faded some more, and I gave up.
“Scratch that question. How much do you know about what’s going on upstairs? I have to get to wherever their high celebration room is.”
“Ah! Yes, that I know” Oliver turned his gaze upward as if he could see through brick and earth. “In my day, there were two gathering points, one that was beneath the open sky, but you wouldn’t use that. It’s too cold outside. The other was in the center of the building, a solarium. Quite beautiful, in fact. The rays of moonlight would shine down on the gathered coven, bathing their bodies in silvery light. There was a center area, directly under the glassed-in ceiling, that was the focal point for the celebrations. Three full circles of seating surrounded that, though the chairs were not built in, so there may only be the daises remaining. The whole area before you reached the seats was about, oh, perhaps thirty feet in diameter.”
“Big space.”
“Needed to be, for all the witches. And the witches were truly glorious, particularly the women.” He sighed happily.
“Poetic. Do you know if that still exists?” I hadn’t been anywhere in the building but the main ballroom and Lara’s study.
He looked at me mournfully. “I do not.”
“Then how exactly are you helping me?”
“The spirits you summon are intended to give you whatever you don’t have. Sometimes it’s answers, sometimes merely…” He shrugged, making his light beam dance. “Illumination.”
“Well, light isn’t going to be that much use if I can’t take you out of this room,” I muttered. “And if I can’t use my magic, I can’t poof…wait. Let me at least try to do that.” I concentrated hard and felt my body warm up, but there was no spontaneous combusting. “How is it that magic is so dead down here? This is a serious liability.”
“It’s supposed to be,” Oliver said. “The sanatorium wasn’t meant for ordinary souls, but witches. Some very powerful, some very insane by the time they ended up here. Their combined magic made this place very special, but some grew to be too unruly. The coven got together and created a dampening spell to ensure anyone on this ground—specifically in these halls—couldn’t summon their abilities. Anything given to them, tools and wands and hats—those would work. But no organic magic. It was a precaution that lives on.”
“But how am I supposed to…”
And then I got it. The cards. There was a reason I never left home without them.
I reached into my pocket and pulled three cards free, sidling closer to Oliver so I could see them. Then I frowned.
“Eight of Pentacles, Five of Swords, Queen of Swords,” I murmured, staring at the cards before looking around again. There were three doors out of this room, each looking much like the next. “If you’re not actually tied here, do you know where they would take the bodies out?”
“No, but I know where they took mine out, if that’s of any help.”
“Well, it can’t hurt.”
“That one,” he said, pointing to the far door. I considered it, then looked at the cards again. They remained useless. “Does that, uh, go to a library, by any chance? Or maybe a—” I cut myself off before I could ask the second question.
“It does not,” he said. “It actually leads to a dead end, if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase. I don’t remember anything after that part—I was fading in and out. They had to break out the maps and retrace their steps.”
I looked again at the Eight of Pentacles. It showed a man working at a table, hammering on disks. Traditionally, it was considered the card of apprenticeship and study, but I guess it could also mean someone studying a map. I headed for the far door, then at the last second, turned around. “You’re not scamming me, are you, bro?”
Oliver was gone.
“You know, this is a particularly useless gift if you’re going to give me ghosts who can’t actually help me,” I muttered to the hidden Eye of Horus. It may have rolled its eye. I couldn’t tell through my shirtsleeve. Instead, I set off.
Once through the door, I tried my magic again, but there was nothing. I had no interest in feeling my way along the cold, slimy walls, but I wasn’t without resources. I pulled my phone out and swiped it on. It flickered to life, but I could see the charge was already down to twenty percent. And there was no connection this deep underground. Still, it was enough to see by, and that was really my main goal.
I continued to try to figure out the cards. Eight of Pentacles—a man, apprentice working at a work desk, hammering out disks. Several of them already done and hung on the wall. An armory? A workshop?
I turned the corner and immediately felt a difference in the air. It was lighter here, cleaner, I was almost certain. This had to be the way out. But my goal wasn’t to get out, it was to find wherever the witches were gathering in the rooms above me and get back to them. If I was dumped out on the grounds a quarter of a mile from the house, then even if I immediately poofed myself back inside, it might be too late.
Too late.
My brows lifted. Had my dumping here been intended not to take me out permanently, but merely temporarily? Or…no. It was far more likely that I wasn’t supposed to be dumped at all. Lara could have entered her office at any time during the day. She herself said she never invited people into her inner sanctum. She was supposed to enter, pour herself her habitual glass of wine, collapse to the floor—and fall through.
And no one would find her in time. Dead or incapacitated, she would be out of the picture.
So maybe I wasn’t the target after all.
But for that idea to hold, the killer couldn’t have been onsite, or at least couldn’t have been in a position of control onsite, near the inner sanctum. Otherwise, they would have known that Armaeus and I were with Lara at the time of her disappearance.
Who was behind this?
I peeked into the first door I saw, and winced. It was an empty room with a lone gurney pushed up against the wall. There was a drain in the center of the floor. Everything looked found-footage white in the ghostly light from my cell phone, but I didn’t want to look too closely. There were three other rooms exactly like that, then a fourth, then…
I grinned, counting ahead. Eight. Could it really be that easy?
Hurrying more quickly now, I reached the eighth room past the door and peeked inside. It looked exactly like the others, but, taking a deep breath, I entered. There were no doors attached to their frames in any of these rooms along this hallway, I reminded myself, so there’d be no one coming along to lock me inside. No doubt somebody’s attempt to render this place less creepy, but it only helped marginally.
I turned around, trying to find some hint as to what to do next.
There was no gurney in this room, and nothing in any of the drawers of the medical cabinets that could help. There were no windows, of course, but also no tools. No pentacles. I moved over to the corner of the room and boosted myself up onto the counter, then rested my head against the wall, thinking. There were no symbols on the floor, no symbols on the wall, no symbols on the…
I thought of the card and let my eyes trail up. The Eight of Pentacles depicted the man, his work station, and then eight pentacles extending up in a vertical line toward the ceiling. I frowned, staring at the ceiling. It…was stained, I realized. Which was super gross.
Beyond that, if it was stained, that technically meant there had to be something above the ceiling that could leak onto it.
Grimacing, I stood on the counter and braced myself against the wall, then reached up to the ceiling. It was made of drop panels, and the one that was looking exceedingly gross crumbled to the touch as I brushed against it. I wiggled it free and winced as more detritus came crashing down. This was definitely some sort of hole, but for what?
Then I saw it.
Covered in cobwebs and some indeterminate slime, a wooden panel rested about one foot above the drop ceiling. Holding my breath, I punched into the panel with as much magic-enhanced strength as I could muster, even halfway warded.
The wet and rotten wood didn’t break, but it definitely gave. Progress.
It splintered on the third punch, and by the fifth, it cracked clean through. I barely had time to crouch out of the way as wood, dishes, and something foul and white cascaded down onto the counter, leaving me staring. Had this been some sort of dumbwaiter system? Was I beneath a kitchen?
I kicked the pile of rubble off the counter, then stepped forward, peering up with the help of my phone light. And…there it was.
A ladder extended up the wall, the metal slats worn down into soft semicircular shapes. I had no idea where it led to, but it couldn’t get any more on the nose with my card than this. Those rings led upward, and upward was where I needed to go.
Of course, I immediately thought of the next card in my draw, the Five of Swords. That card depicted a young man on a field of battle, his combatants—whom he’d clearly bested—walking away from him, their attitudes one of defeat while his was one of smug superiority. Drawing the Five could mean any number of things, but its most usual underlying meaning was “be careful what you wish for.” You win, only to discover that winning wasn’t so much of a great idea.
Sort of like finding that your way out of a creepy sanatorium basement was up through a chute that smelled like death, body fluids, and spiders. I mean, hooray that this was undoubtedly the way out and—if the cards were to be believed—the fastest way for me to find the lost queen. But boo for all the spiderwebs.
Somewhere, deep in the house, a gong rang—loud enough for me to hear it all the way in the basement.
I held my breath and started climbing.