The ladder led down a long ways, far longer than I expected it to, and by the time I found myself standing down below on a walkway, I had just about given up hope of it ever ending. I quickly stepped to the side and switched on my flashlight, scanning the area. Nothing in sight, though I did see a pile of rat droppings. The tunnel didn’t look like a sewer tunnel, though, and it occurred to me that we’d been off about our assessment of the area. For one thing, the floor was cobblestone in some areas, wood in another.
Once the others were down, I lowered my voice and said, “This is no sewer. No wonder it was an iron ladder. What is this place?”
Chase flashed his light around. The walkway ran both right and left, and there was an alcove right across from us. In the alcove were crumbling boxes, an old wooden chair, and a smal table.
A row of shelves lined one wal of the niche.
“Crap. I don’t believe this.” Chase stepped over the crumbling wal that exposed the cubbyhole.
“I know where we are.”
“Where?”
“It’s part of the underground Seattle tunnel system that was abandoned when it began caving in.”
In the early days of Seattle, the city had original y been built a lot lower than now. After a horrendous fire in 1889, the city streets had been rebuilt one to two stories above the original streets. For a time, customers would climb up and down ladders between the original buildings and the newer sections of the city, but eventual y, al of Seattle sprawled across the higher levels, and although the subterranean network remained hidden and unused, it was stil a viable network of passages beneath the city.
“I thought the Underground Tour stopped a number of blocks away,” I said.
Chase shook his head. “It does. The tour only covers a smal portion of what was the original underground city. There actual y used to be a series of nightclubs down here—not in this area in particular, but running the length of the tunnels. But they closed up one after another as the structural integrity of this area weakened, and eventual y most of the areas were abandoned, forgotten and hard to get to. I had no idea the tunnels ran al the way into the Greenbelt Park District, but that makes perfect sense.”
A chil ran up my spine. This city was getting spookier by the second. Memories of The Night Stalker flashed through my head. Delilah loved Darrin McGavin, and I’d had to break it to her that he was dead.
“So what’s that cubbyhole? That’s too smal to be a nightclub.”
“Some of the shops had basements that became part of the whole underground scene. My guess is that it once belonged to a shop now buried. We’re on a lower level than the regular underground Seattle. We’re in the sub-basement area. I real y had no clue the tunnels spread out this far, or this far belowground.”
I looked right and left. “Which way should we go?”
“Which way leads into the heart of the Greenbelt Park District?” Camil e asked, pul ing off her gloves and tucking them in a side pocket of her skirt. “Since we think the kil er is nesting there, it only makes sense to go in that direction.”
“True. Let me see . . .” I glanced around. “If this tunnel runs north-south, then we want to go north, which would be . . .” Turning to the right, I nodded. “This way. Let’s go. Marching order same as when we descended the ladder. Camil e and Morio, keep a good watch on our backs.”
As we headed down the walkway, Camil e coughed. “The air’s dank here.”
As we headed down the walkway, Camil e coughed. “The air’s dank here.”
“Is it breathable? Are you going to have trouble?” I wouldn’t have to worry, but the rest of them would.
“Yes, we can breathe, but there’s a lot of mold down here, I can tel that right away. Watch for viro-mortis slimes. This would be the prime place to find them.”
As if on cue, my light caught something clinging to the wal to my right. I jumped back as we saw an indigo patch of ooze sliding along paral el to us. The creature sparkled in a pretty, jel ylike fashion, but that was as good as it got. The indigo viro-mortis slime was deadly.
“It can sense our body heat,” Camil e said, wrinkling her nose. “Just don’t touch it or we’l al be in trouble.”
Sometime back, Delilah had gotten a green viro-mortis slime attached to her hand and we had to have Smoky freeze it off. He wasn’t with us now, and the indigo varieties were far more poisonous. The creatures acted a lot like the Blob—growing as they enveloped and assimilated their victims. Being digested alive by a living pile of snot was not my idea of a good time.
“Just leave it be, and watch what you touch.”
As we headed along the tunnel, I kept my flashlight sweeping from side to side. The fact that there were viro-mortis slimes around meant that we probably had to watch out for other nasty creatures. Al sorts of denizens hung around in the dark, waiting for the next unwary traveler to come along: ripe pickings for dinner.
More boxes and another cubbyhole to the right. I briefly shone my light in the niche, checking it out, but once again it looked like a long-abandoned basement. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and in some spots moisture had worked its way down the wal s to leave trails of mold
—the regular kind—and mildew.
“The city should come down here and clean this crap up,” I muttered.
“Who’s going to pay for it?” Chase said. “Seattle is having budget woes as it is. No, I have the feeling most of the city doesn’t even know this place exists. It isn’t common knowledge that the underground sections comprise more than just what’s shown to tourists on the little jaunt that’s offered.”
The soft cadence of water flowing caught my attention. “Sewer?” I asked after a moment. The others listened, and then Chase shook his head.
“No, sewer wouldn’t make that kind of noise. Underground stream, perhaps.” He paused.
“What’s that? Over there?”
I turned my flashlight to the direction in which he pointed. Another cubby, but this one had something else in it. A cleft in the rocks that made up the sides of the tunnel beckoned.
“I don’t know. Let’s take a look.” As I crept over to the alcove, I motioned for everyone to be silent. The cleft wasn’t as wide as a passage, but definitely wide enough to go single file. I flashed my light down the blackened passage but couldn’t see a thing. “Shal we try it? Just be very careful not to brush against the sides, which means try not to trip or stumble.”
As I entered the narrow passage, I hoped it wouldn’t go on for too far. I didn’t want to get lost in a maze beneath the city streets. Camil e hated close quarters, and I knew this wasn’t easy on her.
The darkness closed in around us as we continued on, and the only spots of light were the muted beams of our flashlights. I kicked the floor ahead of me as I stepped, scooting loose pebbles to the side so the others wouldn’t twist their ankles on them.
“The air here is thick,” Camil e said from the back. “How much farther, can you tel ?”
I squinted in the dim light, trying to gauge how far we had to go. “I don’t know, but—wait . . .” Up ahead, the cleft ended in a turn to the left. I peeked around the corner. The opening led to a large room. “You’re in luck.”
As I stepped into the brick chamber, I immediately began scoping out the area. The others filed in as I took in the man-made cavern. It was a good fifteen feet tal , and as wide as our house, it looked like. There were dark maws opening at regular intervals around the periphery of the wal s, and I began to realize this was just a hub in a large tunnel system.
“Damn, look at this. We could so easily get lost down here. What the fuck went on in this freak city?”
“As I said, there was a fire back in the late 1880s. It destroyed over twenty-five blocks of the city.
What you see down here are the remains of the original city streets and buildings—” Chase ducked. “Shit! Spider! Crap,” he said, brushing something off and stamping on it.
We spread out in the room.
“What do you suppose this was? An intersection?” Morio flickered his light at his feet. Wooden slats, broken and rotted through in places, lined the floor.
“Probably a little market square or something,” I said, as a sudden gust blew by. “There’s no wind down here, is there?”
“Not that I would think,” Vanzir said. “Why?”
“Because if it wasn’t a breeze, then something just flew by me and jostled my elbow.” I was about to explore one of the side tunnels when another gust hit into me, only this time it was square in the back and hard, like hands shoving me forward. “Who the hel is that?” I whirled around.
Camil e shrieked and went sprawling to the floor. “Fuck! Somebody just knocked me down.”
She scrambled to her feet.
“Quick! Back to back!” I rushed over to her side and the five of us formed a circle, covering our backs. “Who’s there? What do you want?”
But there was just a loud echo as laughter ricocheted off the wal s. And then, our flashlights went out and we were plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER 13
“Motherfucking pus bucket! What the hel —” Vanzir’s voice echoed in the darkness as our unseen assailant took a swipe at me.
Camil e let out another yelp. “Something scratched me and man, it stings.”
“Enough of this.” Morio let out a growl and began to grow into his ful demonic form—eight feet of youkai-kitsune, a cross between gorgeous man and dangerous fox with claws that could eviscerate a buffalo. As he shifted, he muttered something under his breath and there was a loud flash in the room and then, slowly, in the inky void, I began to see shapes around us.
Discorporate figures, black silhouettes surrounded by a faint green aura, fil ed the room. There must have been ten or eleven, circling us, no features showing—just shadow men, darting around us.
“What are they? Ghosts?” Camil e breathed slowly, but I could stil hear the tremor of her voice.
“Not ghosts,” Morio said. “I don’t real y know what they are.”
Chase let out a low sigh. “I can see into them. They’re . . . they’re little bits of evil, incarnate in shadow form. They have no real consciousness, but they’re hungry for our life force.” His voice was distant, as if he were a mil ion miles away.
“Chase?” I felt Camil e shift as she turned in his direction. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t know, but I just do,” he whispered, sounding afraid of his own voice. “We need some light.”
Morio mumbled and foxfire lit the room with a neon glow. The effect was eerie—the shadow men circling us, a globe of green light hovering over us.
“So, what do we do about them?” I stared at our opponents. They could obviously hurt us, if they’d knocked Camil e to the ground and managed to almost shove me off my feet. And now, in the light of the foxfire, I could see that Camil e was bleeding from a long scratch down her arm.
“You okay?”
She glanced down at it and shrugged. “Yeah, unless it turns out to be poisoned. I’ve been hurt so many times that I feel like I’m constantly wearing a big red bul ’s-eye on my back. Let me try a blast of Moon magic.”
“Shit, just don’t backfire. We don’t want to spread too far apart here.”
With a nod, she raised her hands and closed her eyes, focusing. I surreptitiously stepped to the side. Although the death magic she performed with Morio usual y went right, her Moon Mother magic stil backfired a good share of the time. One backlash was al it took.
As she summoned her power, one of the shadow men suddenly let loose and raced for me. I raised my arm to block his high kick and was surprised when he slammed into me hard enough to knock me off my feet.
“They’re tough!” I somersaulted backward, rol ing easily to my feet. As I came up in a crouch, the shadow closed in on me, and I could hear a faint snarl on the wind. It slashed out with one darkened hand and hit me in the gut, a razor-sharp slice cutting me deep above the bel y button. I jumped back and it kept on going, tumbling over itself as I threw it off balance.
As it went down, I decided to see just how corporeal it was and stomped on its back, landing dead center. My boot met solid flesh. “These things have to take form to attack us!” I jumped on its back with both feet, landing as hard as I could. The creature let out a huff and flattened to the floor.
Then, before I could do anything, it vanished.
Camil e held out her hands toward four of them that were congregating around her. “Eat this, suckers!”
Maybe not the most elegant of spel s, but a bril iant flash came forking from her fingers, the lightning striking al four, branching out in the cavern with a concussion that shook the wal s and floor. The creatures vanished, sizzling.
Morio raced forward and two of the shadow men engaged him. They swiped at him and blood trickled down his side. He caught them in his massive hands and the next thing I knew, they were howling and trying to get away, but he began to squeeze the shadows together and their screaming grew louder. There was a loud slurping sound and they vanished like bubbles popping.
Stepping out in front of us, Vanzir held out his hands. “Let’s see if these motherfuckers have anything to feed on.” He closed his eyes, and pale snakelike tentacles emerged from his palms to barb themselves into the shadow men. Vanzir could feed on life energy. If these creatures had any form of life.
It occurred to me that whatever spel Morio had cast was al owing us to see into the astral—
which made sense if we could see the auras of our enemies. Vanzir’s tentacles weren’t visible in the physical realm.