City of Souls

9

My parting words to Vanessa sounded a lot more hopeful than I felt, both because I didn’t want her worrying and because the question still remained: How was I to find Midheaven? All I had was a mishmashing of cryptic advice that, even together, still didn’t form a complete picture. Yet with nothing else to go on, with no certain means of finding Skamar, and my troop leader’s directive still weighing on my shoulders, I had no choice but to leave the security of the warehouse and keep searching. So after a shower and a quick bite to eat, I did what I’d always done when feeling restless and lost. I put on my steel-toed boots and began walking.

Okay, so first I drove. Right out to the military base, where chicken wire and sensors and cameras would serve as backup to my wanderings. Sure, none of it could actually stop a Shadow attack-Nellis’s best hotshot flyboys couldn’t do that, not in their biggest plane-but even the Light normally avoided attracting attention of this sort. We didn’t like our body heat showing up on anyone’s electrical charts, and we certainly didn’t like to be caught on camera. Tonight, however, it was the lesser of two evils. The Shadows wouldn’t be expecting it, and the only thing the Air Force would pick up on was a lone girl, hands shoved in the pockets of her own bomber jacket, hunched against the wind as she walked down the street.

What the hell did “walk the line” mean? I wondered, boots clanging across a metal grate. Stay in line like a good little girl? Surely not. Warren wouldn’t waste his breath telling me that. Restless, I tapped on a metal lamppost and kept thinking. Okay, so what about Zane’s ballad, then?

“Beneath the neon glowing bright here…lies a land of starry skies…” How could there be stars underneath Vegas? That didn’t make any sense. I kicked a rock from the road as I crossed the street, watching it sail over the street until it disappeared down a sharp embankment. Oops. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if the base’s camera had caught that. Lone girl or not, I shouldn’t be able to kick something with that density as easily as a soccer ball. Switching direction, I followed its trajectory to what looked like a bike path next to the nearest housing development. The homes had to be a good fifteen years old, but they clearly had a home association, because the common greens were pristine.

Look below, dear, not in the middle…

“The middle of what?” I muttered, lowering my eyes to the ground, following the gravel path as I slipped into the darkness. It was safer near the base, but the darkness of the bike path soothed me. I shook my head and sucked in a crisp breath of early winter and smog and mildew from the nearby drainage ditch.

And froze.

Then I leaned over the railing that lined the walkway and gazed twenty feet below where a scrubby and poorly landscaped embankment gave way to an underground tunnel. No, I thought, correcting myself. Not a tunnel. A pipeline that fed runoff away from the city.

I didn’t know about a land of starry skies-maybe that was Midheaven itself-but if the city, and where I was standing, was considered the middle, then the storm drain leading underground could be considered below.

I ducked under the railing and half slid, half sidestepped down the embankment. I knew about the drainage system, of course. Fifty miles of serpentine concrete running water out of the city to the Las Vegas Wash. Las Vegas actually sat in a bowl rimmed in mountain ranges, and received a good deal of runoff from those jagged peaks. Unfortunately, we usually received it all on the same day. We had an annual monsoon season that could effectively flood the baked desert floor within minutes, so the underground system had been designed to rush these floodwaters from the surface streets into the scattered inlets dotting the valley.

The water department was constantly improving the drains, and though it was certainly better than when I was a kid-when the Charleston underpass regularly claimed the lives of the brave, unwary, and the just plain idiotic-every once in a while things that were washed away never turned up at all. Sometimes people were never seen again. And here was an inlet. Beneath the neon. A line, I thought, smiling to myself.

I began to walk it.

Twenty feet below the surface streets, I stood cradled in the curve of a tunnel that was eight feet in diameter and held a darkness so complete I’d have been blinded if I only possessed a mortal’s sight. As it was, I could barely make out the shape of the slick, slanted walls, and unwilling to touch them for guidance-and even more unwilling to stand in a complete vacuum-I willed the glyph on my chest into a steady but muted glow. Cobwebs larger than my entire body hung in elegant tatters from mildewed concrete walls, and smells I’d already identified as algae and waste lay in a barely moving stream at my feet.

I walked a few feet toward the tunnel’s heart, then looked back over my shoulder. I was supposed to wait for Skamar. Warren had said she would tell me how to “walk the line.” Then again, the troop was weakening, and a little girl was dying. I couldn’t exactly wait around for some diva thought-form to make an appearance. Besides, I wasn’t even sure this was the entrance I sought. If it was, then I’d gotten lucky. If not, I’d lose nothing by searching it. Right?

It was eerily still the farther I ventured in, the concrete corridor frigid as the city winked out behind me and the familiar dropped away. Unable to see even an inch in front of my face, I sent an extra pulse to strengthen the glyph on my chest. Seventy-five feet beyond that, the tunnel shrunk so that, hunching down, I felt buried alive. Sound was dampened, air thinned, vision blocked, and it was with a start that I realized I was the one doing the burying.

A hundred feet in, though, I began a steep vertical rise, like those winding staircases found in European castles. “Dammit,” I muttered, and began to climb. Apparently I’d just gotten lucky.

I climbed so long I had to be well above street level by the time the tunnel sloped and swirled again. This time it angled deeper than seemingly possible, as if the concrete had accidentally been spilled there. Though there was no water this deep in, the surface was slick with algae, and it was uncomfortably warm, even humid. A sourceless gust rustled my hair, like the heat coming on in an old house, and I glanced straight up to find a passage narrow enough to admit only one body at a time.

“And for my next great feat…” I leapt to the opening just as I’d done at Master Comics earlier that day. Yet the distance lengthened while I was in flight, and I yelped in surprise, barely catching the edge’s lip with my elbows. Shoulders straining under my weight, I grunted and pushed myself straight, glyph fully powered. I then found myself eye level with another concrete wall. It was studded with only one feature: a safe’s dial.

Looking closer, I breathed a sigh of relief. The signs of the Zodiac fanned around its center, and I flipped it so the Archer glyph lined up with the raised arrow, then yanked hard. There was a tumble of internal locks, and something growled deep inside the tunnel. Then a jagged seam began working its way down the wall, altering direction before moving vertically again to flip on itself with a depthless creak, ending where it began. I pulled on the dial, the seam took on hinges, and a tiny doorway swung open.

A rough-hewn shelf held a wrought-iron stand pinching a primitive, and burning, candle.

“What the hell?” Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.

Lifting the iron base to move the simple candle aside, I looked for a spring underneath. Maybe its removal would cause the wall to shift and open. Nothing happened. Thinking then that the wooden backing was false, I pushed, but it too remained intact. I wiped at my brow. Man, there was a lot of heat coming from one sole candle.

So no spring catch, I thought, and no lever. No other obvious purpose to the box. I blew out a hard breath, and the candle wavered…which made me wonder how it’d been lit in the first place. There were no matches or lighter, no person to perform the action, and no wax running down the long taper. So When? joined the question as to How? “Think, Jo,” I said under my breath.

Well, obviously I had to take some sort of action. Something definitive that would ferry me from this world into Midheaven. Was I supposed to sing Zane’s stupid song? Feeling like an idiot, I cleared my throat and gave it a try.

Beneath the neon glowing bright here

Lies a land of starry skies

Look below, dear, not in the middle

And kill the rushlight in two tries.

“Oh.”

Rushlight. That was an old-fashioned word for a candle made of a plant, and grease or wax. One like the taper I was currently holding. Gingerly, like it was a snake writhing in my hand, I returned it to the rough-hewn shadow box. Gazing at the bright flame, I took a deep breath and felt my heartbeat thrum irregularly. Deciding it was probably best not to tempt the second try, I leaned forward and blew with all my might. Nothing happened.

Oh, God. Did that mean I only had one try left to me?

I blew again. Same results, but nothing else happened either. A third time…and no fucking charm. What was going on?

Finally, I was so annoyed and antsy about the whole situation that I grabbed hold of the candle’s iron stick and with the taper only an inch from my mouth blew again.

Darkness attacked. My released breath was yanked from my chest, burning nausea rising with it. Blindly, I grabbed at my throat, but my mouth wouldn’t close, and the outline of my glyph began tingling madly, like something with lots of legs was eating away at it. Oxygen bled from my mouth and pores, sucked from white and red blood cells so that I felt like a withering husk, dehydrated and dizzy.

Then the process flipped so suddenly I was encased like a brick in a kiln while unseen tendrils of smoke arrowed back into my mouth, prying my throat wide. Individual needles of pain splintered along that soft passageway, shredding my larynx and voice box, murdering my ability to scream. I didn’t know what was worse, the literal breath-taking or the invasion of something foreign soaking into my bloodstream, muscle, tissue, and bone. Whatever it was, it was miasmic. The sulfuric stench of rotten eggs forced an inhalation, injecting me with a noxious, polluting drug. My nausea rose.

Then the air I was straining for pumped back into me, burning cold against the coppery tears like tiny icicles of blood were embedded in my throat. I staggered backward to hit my head against something hard. The sense of all physical matter being voided out lessened, my dizziness abated, but I still couldn’t see. If not for the solid stamp of earth beneath me, I would have thought I’d passed out. Then the air gradually took on layers, and the smoke walling me in lessened.

I ran my tongue over my teeth, gritty, my mouth filled with a sandpaper scratch. I couldn’t smell the festering poison anymore, but it was pumping in my veins, and that scared me more than the sightlessness or the stolen air.

As the haze lessened degree by degree, a light formed directly across from me. Please not another candle, I thought as it sharpened into a bright yellow eye. It acted as a hypnotist’s pendulum, controlling my focus until the rest of the room-and I was now standing in a room-came into view. When it did, despite the breath having just been stolen from my body, my mouth fell open again.

I knew I was missing a million little details, but was so overwhelmed by what appeared to be an old western saloon that it took a moment longer to note the bartender blinking back at me. I did, however, notice the green felt tables fanning to my right, if only because they were the only truly familiar things in the room. Less familiar? An ornate door with a scrolled gilt handle and glossy red surface adorned with stylized coils and whipping bands-cones, balls, wedges, prisms, geometric bands, and disks-all overlapping each other in writhing detail, though I had no idea what any of it meant. It stood out not only for its lavish detail but for its splash of color, and the rim of light halo-ing its perimeter. Because even though the smoke was thinning, everything else was washed in a sepia haze.

I turned my attention back to the bar where the light I’d seen was revealed to be the reflection of a pagoda lantern attached to the wall behind me. The oval mirror showcasing it had a twin, like eyes holding my outline in their unblinking gaze. A third mirror, rectangular and centered between the first two, was split by an antique brass cash register, while a long bar sat before that, white towels pegged at each end, and spittoons spaced evenly along the base. A brass foot rail shone as brightly as the polished bar, matching the paneled oak crisscrossing every inch of wall space, giving the simple room an opulent feel. I glanced up at a ceiling of beautiful pressed tin, each intricate square cupping a constellation. Fans twirled lazily overhead, and an elegant staircase on the left rose to a split hallway.

I tried to shake the feeling of being watched. Hard, since my warrior’s mind calculated almost two dozen men in straight-backed, unpainted chairs, who stopped cold as they stared directly at me. I had a sudden, desperate hankering for a six-shooter.

“Well…” I cleared my throat and resisted the urge to tip an imaginary hat. “Howdy.”

Despite being born and raised in the Sierra Nevadas, at the southernmost tip of what was known as the Silver State, what I knew about the era where saloons had proliferated across the West was confined to Hollywood bastardizations of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. I thought I’d been in over my head when I woke up to discover I was a twenty-first century superhero veiled in my sister’s fleshly body. But at least then I’d had a cultural rope to grab onto and regain my equilibrium…and I don’t mean a lasso.

There was nothing in this nineteenth-century-style saloon that looked vaguely familiar. Even the people were the sort that looked out at you, unsmiling, from black-and-white photos…like long-dead relatives with hard lives that leeched their personalities from their leathered skins. Ironically enough, it was the flash of a photographer’s bulb that snapped the silence from the room, blinding me once again. Vulnerable, I braced for assault, but the worry dissolved under the trickling keys of a piano intro.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I muttered to no one, rubbing my eyes and squinting in the direction of the music.

Oh, many secrets does this girl have

And she hides them in the light

But the darkness may have the last laugh

Because her temper has a bite.

I was as surprised by the subject of the song as at the way it ended…or didn’t. The piano player, a reed-thin man with a bowler hat, long fingers and a hook nose, cut off the jaunty song as abruptly as he’d begun, withering into himself like a skeleton sinking into his swivel stool. I raised my brows, waiting for some other random weirdness to occur-might as well get it all out at once, right?-and it obliged me in the form of a saloon girl appearing over the second floor’s shining brass railing.

In a muted world of sepia tones and scratchy grays, she was saturated color, almost blinding in her brightness. She smiled down at me as I rubbed my eyes again, not moving, just letting the shock of her appearance amidst so much gray sink in. None of the men, I noted, could take their eyes off of her either. The only thing to rival her brilliance was that steady orange glow circling the bright red door next to the bar.

A world ruled by women.

Hitching a hip onto the left-hand railing, she crossed her arms beneath what these people probably referred to as her bosom.

“Sleepy Mack, I could just kiss you.” Her laughter rang over the sunken room as musically as the piano had moments before. “I mean, finally. A new fuckin’ song.”

The slumped piano player didn’t respond, his hands drooped lifelessly over his knees, the dusty bowler hat tipped low over his eyes. I finally moved-Yay, me-twisting to find another solid wall behind me. Gilt frames with oil paintings of women in various states of undress were interspersed with old-fashioned oil lanterns, but the small box with its candle and the tunnel leading back to modern-day Vegas was nowhere to be found.

I did, however, spot the cause of my earlier blindness. A nineteenth century daguerreotype camera sat next to me, a shiny box front and wooden tripod so pristine that my dormant photographer’s heart went boom-boom. But anger rose along with my covetousness-two sins for the price of one-because the camera had clearly been set there for the purpose of catching people as they entered. I thought of what I knew about fairy tales, the way myth derived from fact and vice versa, and suddenly didn’t like that someone had snapped my photograph at all. Some cultures believed capturing a person’s image also enslaved their soul. I turned my head and narrowed eyes back to the bartender, and had the satisfaction of watching wariness overcome his handsome features as I headed his way.

“I want that picture back,” I said, pounding my fist on the bar, though I shot a nervous glance at the red door, instinctively edging away from it. By now another woman had joined the first at the top of the stairs, and two more were heading out of a room as resplendent as they were-shimmering, shining, tasseled, bright, and alive in a way nothing downstairs was. Catching the direction of my gaze, a Latina with heels even sharper than my tongue swiftly pulled the door shut behind her, while the rest leaned in various states of repose along the railing. Eyes were shaped, lashed, and lined from corner to corner, black kohl apparently a girl’s best friend over here, while lips fighting with nails to sport the greatest sheen. It was a rainbow-hued array of fringed and beaded and silken clothing, jewels sparking off their ears and fingers and arms, and even from the shawls pulled about their shoulders.

I wiped my brow with my free hand, unable to keep from comparing its ashen hue with the vibrancy and life perched above me. It was steaming hot down here, so maybe in this world color rose instead of heat.

Because the women above didn’t look hot. The few holding fans were clearly doing so for effect, feathers swaying with the casual flick of their wrists, shots of light from bright gems gleaming from bone handles and gold wrist straps. There was nothing on or near them that wasn’t adorned. Even Cher and Suzanne, using their entire feminine arsenal, couldn’t compete with the show above.

I returned my attention to the bartender, who calmly reached over and lifted my hand, polishing the shining bar top beneath with his pristine white rag. “Been a long time since we had anyone come through that entrance, miss.”

His voice was a sweetened drawl, and the “miss” melted me somewhat, so while I removed my hand from his grasp, I was careful not to touch the bar. He smiled his thanks. He was dressed in traditional barman garb, the collar on his white shirt pressed beneath the black vest, his white apron spotless. I didn’t look, but I would have bet that his shit-kickers were polished to a glossy sheen. His hair would have been fashionable in my world if not for the handlebar mustache above his goatee and the generous helping of pomade slicking back the honey-blond strands. Honey blond, I thought grimly, if he hadn’t been living in an achromatic world.

“My picture?” I demanded, holding out my hand. Meanwhile I sniffed, trying to scent out if he was Light or Shadow, for me or against, but I came up with the mental equivalent of a blank chalkboard, a big void, but even less than both of those things implied, because the molecules I inhaled were empty. I drew back, even warier.

The bartender shrugged. “All first-timers to the Rest House have their images taken. How ’bout a drink? First one’s on the house.”

The Rest House? I tilted my head. “And that’s secret agent language for what?”

“No secret, ma’am.” He jerked his chin, indicating a point over my shoulder, and I turned, ignoring the cluster of people-all men, I now noted-still eavesdropping. One man, dark-skinned even outside the monochromatic room, rose from his seat so slowly it looked like he was floating in space. He pointed to the wall where my image, or eventual one, sat nestled among dozens of others. I took my eyes off it long enough to watch him float back to his seat, wondering exactly how long he’d been drinking.

I knew from my photography classes that daguerreotype processing took time, and the hot mercury vapor used to develop the images was highly dangerous to the photographer. But there was no photographer, and the image hadn’t been burned beneath a glass plate. It appeared directly onto a molding yellow piece of paper pinned to a giant board.

One with “Most Wanted” typed in bold across the top.

“Well,” I said, turning back. “It’s nice to be wanted, right?”

The bartender smiled amicably. “Everybody has one,” he said consolingly, but I’d already noted that. The entire wall was filled with posters, most with full images and agent names scrawled beneath. Many of the represented agents were at the gaming tables-all wearing, interestingly enough, the same clothing they’d been photographed in-though there were far more posters than players, pinned atop and sideways, some even on the floor. I wondered what had happened to the agents underneath.

And that’s when I spotted it, pinned to the top left corner of the board, hanging off the side, as if an afterthought. Not an agent, but the faded line drawing of a freckle-faced boy whose image Zane carried around in his wallet. Like many preteen boys, he’d been smiling uncertainly in the photo Zane had shown me. In this one he was screaming.

Jacks’s missing changeling.

Not alive. Not healed. And he hadn’t even been given the dignity of his name. All it said beneath the macabre drawing was, Mortal.

Bill mistook my gasp for one of self-concern.

“Don’t worry, your full identity isn’t revealed until you enter three times.”

“Let me guess,” I said, licking my dry lips, pulling my mind away from the changeling. I had to stay focused. New world. New rules. I looked at the musty men scattered around the room like litter. Clearly. “At which point I won’t be able to leave?”

And kill the rushlight in two tries.

“You catch on quick.” He smiled, and held out his hand this time. “I’m Bill.”

“I’m-” I caught myself just in time-caught his calculated look too-but shook his hand anyway. “Pleased to meet you, Bill.”

Bartenders, no matter how attractive, worked for the house. I shut my mouth and shoved my hands into my pockets, and he shrugged and turned back to his taps. That’s when I caught my reflection in the bar’s foggy back mirror. “Oh my God.”

It was me. Though reflected in soft focus, there was no mistaking the dark blunt bob ending just below my chin, the athletic rather than amative frame. I glanced back over my shoulder, blinking away unexpected tears, to find my poster also seemed to be taking on my old, my original, my true form. I looked down at the longer, more sinewy muscles in my arms, patted my legs-tighter, my nose-wider…I couldn’t help it, my breasts, smaller. Shoot, it was all I could do to keep from kissing myself.

“You’re in the Rest House…but also the Tenth House,” Bill explained, careful to stand aside as he slid an opulent glass in front of me. I curled my hand around it, surprised to find myself shaking so much the crystal cut against my smooth fingertips. Bill motioned to a picture pinned next to the bar, like a health inspector’s card, which I recognized as part of a natal chart, the Tenth House and Midheaven centered in its frame. “The house in astrology where deeds reflect your purpose and your true self.”

That’s why I was seeing myself now. Wiping my brow, I sipped thoughtfully. The room was like a steamless sauna, wicking moisture from my pores, but the drink helped. Its finish was cloying, not the traditional firewater I’d expected, but the aftertaste washed away with the next cooling sip. I took another and studied the rest of the room. “So why is everyone moving so slowly?”

Bill shot me that affable smile. “Maybe you’re just moving too fast.”

My movements, natural though they were, did make me stand out. While most of the men had returned to their games, their movements were molasses-slow. Others continued to stare at me, unblinking, and lifting cut crystal glassware to their lips or murmuring to themselves in unending monologues. I could practically track their gazes as they swung my way. Shit, UPS could have tracked them. And one man-black Stetson low, leather vest extended over his giant belly, dark eyes hard on mine-didn’t move at all.

The piano player might be catatonic, I thought, sipping again, but the rest of the room wasn’t far behind.

Except for upstairs. I lifted my eyes back to the women lounging against the banister, and as if she’d been anticipating it, the first began making her way down the stairs.

A world ruled by women.

And one of those rulers was headed my way.