A blast of cold air billowed up the tunnel from the chamber behind us, and the sound of falling water slowly stopped. The silence that followed gave me a strange sort of relief. Hope, too. The light brightened as Annalise climbed into the tunnel behind me.
“That won’t hold for long.”
We kept going.
I sent the ghost knife upward—trying to match the angle of the stairs—in a cylindrical path about three feet across, keeping it spinning as fast as I could. The edge of my spell could cut through anything, but if ten tons of rock fell onto the flat face of it, it would be trapped.
So, I kept it moving, even though my concentration was starting to fray. Was my brain fuzzing out because of stress? Because there wasn’t enough breathable air? Adrenaline washing out of my system? What difference did it make? I concentrated on the feeling of the ghost knife passing through rock and stone, trying to keep the spell going.
And then it was out, moving through air. I could feel it cut free, just as I’d expected. I called it back to me, making it pass through the tunnel I just dug. When it was in my hand again, I staggered backward a step. The waterfall splashed onto the water in the chamber again, and by the light of Annalise’s exposed skin, I saw the ripples it made flooding up into the tunnel. There were little chunks of ice floating in the water.
Rock and gravel slid toward me, and I pushed it by, forcing it into the tunnel behind us. I was hoping the opening ahead would have a light, but I could only see more darkness.
Annalise shoved by me. “Let’s go.”
I went, scrambling up the slope on my hands and knees. Once or twice, my shoulder brushed the top of the tunnel, and I felt the rocks shift dangerously, but I bulled through, trying not to imagine what it would be like to try to breathe at the bottom of a pile of gravel.
I realized that Annalise was pulling well ahead of me, and I let my fear urge me forward.
Where was my anger? Where was my rage? Yeah, I was reeling from the explosions, darkness, and rising water—I was scared out of my fucking mind, to be honest—but I had a right to be furious, too. Milton Fucking Hardy tried to kill me, and he didn’t even have the decency to act like a sneering creep when he did it.
Something was off, and I hated myself for not working out what it was. Like Hardy, I’d opened my mind to one of those “Originals,” as he called them, but unlike Hardy, I’d bailed before we could get started. The weird, alien creatures he’d called zealots had pulled us both back through time, but they’d done something to Hardy. I didn’t know what it was, but I was glad that I didn’t let them do it to me. Because they fucked him up somehow.
How else could I explain a guy who tried to kill us but figured he would fail, so he hoped maybe we’d like to join Team Fucking Hardy when we survived? How, exactly, did learning the deepest secrets of magic make him forget how people worked?
Then I was out of the rubble from the explosion. Annalise’s hand clamped down on my arm and she dragged me up the stairs. Seconds later, I was sprinting behind her, imagining one last shift in the rock that would crush the life out of us at exactly the moment we thought we were free.
I called my ghost knife to me and slipped it into my pocket.
Voices sounded in the distance, and Annalise’s body light winked out. The stairs trembled as her falling-upward spell ended and several tons of stone shifted and fell behind us. We stumbled up the stairs toward the swinging flashlight beams of panicked security and maintenance workers.
“He used bombs, Ray,” Annalise said to me before our supposed rescuers came around the bend in the stairs. “Bombs. What the fuck.”
They took us up the stairs and tried to steer us into an office. They wanted to get us checked out by a doctor. They wanted to take statements from us. They wanted to fill out incident reports. They insisted it was company policy. They told us we had to sign insurance waivers. They blocked the door and asked us to be reasonable.
Personally, I would have told them that Milton Hardy tried to kill us, just to sow a little chaos into the guy’s power structure. Most wouldn’t believe it, probably, but a few of them might. I wanted to undermine the asshole any way I could, to make him easier to reach.
Annalise had other ideas. She said we were not going to answer any questions and that we were getting out of here before they tried to kill us again. When she headed for the elevators, a security guard stepped into her way. She took hold of his arm, told him not to make a mistake that would cost him and his company more than they could pay, and he let her move him aside. If the way she grabbed him caused him any pain, he hid it well.
There was a camera on the elevator, so we rode in silence. We stepped into the loading-dock area just in time to see the outside doors sliding shut and a six-pack of Ten Bar security guards standing in our way.
Annalise identified the head of security for the facility who, unlike the black-clad tactical Ten Bar assholes, was wearing a blue short-sleeved button-up shirt with an iron-on badge over his heart. She marched up to him and said, “We’re leaving. If you hold us here against our will, we’re going to sue the company and you, personally. You. Think about it. Will your employer’s lawyers protect you, or will they throw you under the bus? Because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be living in your house either way.”
He didn’t like that but he didn’t want to show it. “The police—”
“Are coming. I’m sure they are. But you aren’t the police and they can contact us through our lawyers. But holding us here at gunpoint? That’s a fucking felony.”
That was all it took. The head of security sighed, and a few seconds later, we were outside again.
Night had fallen. Lauren Woo and her little electric cart were not waiting for us, and there were no delivery trucks for us to steal—or ask for a lift. Annalise marched across the courtyard and up the dirt ramp toward the underground parking garage.
I felt exposed out here. Serrac’s people had tried to kill us several times, and it still hadn’t sunk in that my spell-wrapped body held up under gunfire. Annalise simply kept moving forward, sometimes on trails and sometimes directly through the landscaping, in the general direction of the parking garages.
According to my phone, it was just after eight o’clock at night. The buildings around us, including the round one with the glass walls, were still more than half-lit, because why would people leave work at the end of the day when they could stay and work more?
We found a set of stairs set into the side of a shrub-covered hill and hurried down like we were rushing to catch the subway. Signs directed us to the section where we parked, and I was relieved that Annalise’s van was still there. Within a few minutes, we were back out on the road.
I looked around at the ripped seats and general mess. “Boss, what are the odds that they put a tracker or a bug or something in this van?”
“Pretty fucking high.”
“What do you want to do about it?” Were we going to be switching cars again? Hitting the rental place with a new credit card? It annoyed the shit out of me that I was even thinking these thoughts. I had never felt so boxed out by the other assholes the society sent us after. Even Charles Hammer, who was surrounded by an entire community that loved him and wanted to protect him, had felt more exposed than Serrac and Hardy did.
Annalise’s only answer was to glare at the road ahead and tell me to turn right.
We hadn’t eaten in hours and I suddenly felt ravenous. I looked at Annalise, about to ask her to choose a drive-through place, but I recognized that fixed and angry expression. She was not going to agree to detours now, not in this mood.
And a part of me was glad. Honestly glad. I wanted her anger and certainty. I wanted to breathe it in and make it my own so I could keep pushing forward and get this job done.
We came to a winding hillside road that lifted us above the city lights. As we drove, the houses became fewer and more spread out, then they vanished behind walls and hedgerows. The gates became taller and more forbidding until we finally reached a street with only one gate in the middle of the block, with tall, well-watered hedges around the outside, and a stone wall with razor wire on top just behind that. As we came near the gate, I saw a booth with a guard in it.
“This is it,” Annalise said. “Take this corner and find the nearest transformer.”
I turned right onto the claustrophobic side street, which was only one lane wide and hemmed in by security walls on both sides.
I slowed way down. “Right there.” I pointed toward the telephone pole on the corner, and Annalise popped off her seat belt, opened the door, and stepped out while the van was still moving.
“Hurry up and turn right.” She slammed the door.
I stepped on the gas, making the underpowered engine rev as I zipped around the corner in this big, lumbering, top-heavy van.
Then I heard the impact, and I glanced in the rear view just as the street lights winked out and the telephone pole, now only lit by intermittent sparks and flashes, toppled behind me.
The van rocked as Annalise hopped onto the back bumper and rode to the next corner. I pulled against the curb and shut off the engine.
Annalise climbed onto the roof of the van, and when I opened the driver’s door, I stepped up onto the seat and joined her.
“If we’re quick, we can fuck up the electronic security system and the security company will think it’s the transformer. That should give us time to deal with the guards before they call the cops.”
Deal with? I was sure she didn’t mean that the way it sounded.
There was nothing to see over the wall, probably because this part of the city had just been plunged into complete darkness. I took out my ghost knife and threw it, slicing through the razor wire. The coils tightened and hung over the far side, leaving a gap for us to climb through. Annalise jumped from the van to the edge of the wall, dropping through to the other side.
I didn’t know if I could do that, too, but what the hell. I should give it a try. My spells hadn’t given me anything like her incredible strength, but maybe they were growing in power just like that golem flesh spell. I stepped back, then strode forward and jumped for the wall.
I’d imagined myself clearing it completely but I didn’t come close. I hit the top edge of the wall with my stomach, then hiked myself upward to seesaw over the wall into the yard beyond.
Before I’d met Annalise, I’d have barely cleared the sidewalk with a jump like that. It would have been a stretch to catch the lip of the wall with my fingertips.
I wasn’t just growing tougher. I was growing stronger, too. And maybe it didn’t make logical sense, but where my weird healing and invulnerability made me feel like a monster, an increase in my strength was an absolute fucking thrill. More of this, please.
Annalise hissed at me and we crouched in the shadow.
I’d expected a big manicured lawn with a tennis court, maybe. Or a little pond with flowers around it and fat orange fish in the shallow end.
What I found instead, barely visible as my eyes adjusted to the starlight, was a miniature amusement park. There was a twelve-foot-high Ferris wheel, a short loop of roller coaster tracks, and an eight-horse merry-go-round, plus two or three other little somethings in the shadow of the big stone wall that I couldn’t make out. If a billionaire like Hardy wanted to spoil his kids, he wouldn’t do it with a big swing set and climbing gym. He was going to be an asshole about it.
The yard looked empty. We sprinted for the back door.
I followed Annalise over the little earthen hills with the roller coaster tracks on them, then vaulted the safety rail at the base of the wheel, then we were at the back door. I slid my ghost knife through the deadbolt latch while Annalise yanked the security keypad off the wall, then hung it back in place. It would look like it had no power until someone touched it and it fell to the patio cement.
Then we were inside, closing the door behind us.
The stink hit me immediately, and I was glad we hadn’t stopped to eat.
There were dead bodies here.