Kitty in the Underworld

Chapter 18

SAKHMET AND Enkidu were right, I’d mostly gotten used to the silver, like I’d gotten used to the darkness-induced headache that never really went away.

The couple must have had their own space in the tunnel system, and they could have stuck me in that holding cell, but they didn’t. Sometime later, they returned to the antechamber, as if together we might feel safer. A surrogate pack or pride. Surrogate for me. Enkidu and Sakhmet already had the kind of pack Ben and I had—our pack of two, I used to call it, when we’d first hooked up, before we’d returned to Denver and taken charge of the pack there.

Sakhmet brought a small drum with her, a bowl shape on a stand that tucked under her arm. It must have been one of the drums I’d heard my first day here. The two of them sat together, and she played softly while humming a melody I couldn’t make out. The drumming was slow, off-rhythm, sounding a little like water rushing in a creek. Soothing. Her gaze distant, she seemed to play for her own comfort. To dispel some of the anxiety that had settled over us. Enkidu watched her, smiling vaguely. His arm settled over her shoulders.

It was a lullaby before bedtime. A way to bring peace before trying to sleep. After maybe twenty minutes, she set the drum aside, and the two of them curled up together. Enkidu wrapped his arm around his mate, she nestled against his body, and he nuzzled her head, breathing in her scent and kissing her above her ear. Eyes closed, she smiled, an expression full of calm and pleasure. I got the feeling she didn’t much care what happened, as long as she and Enkidu were together. I’d felt that expression on my own face often enough, when Ben held me like that and kissed me just to kiss me.

I had to stop thinking about it before I started crying.

Kumarbis and Zora might have been pleased as rock stars at how their rituals were going. But the three of us were fighting instincts, struggling against a tension that made us want to bare our teeth and growl, howl, or roar. Our beasts wanted to flee.

We dozed off, then sat up suddenly, looking at the tunnel leading to the ritual chamber as if we expected to see something there. Hard to sleep, when we felt like we ought to be standing guard.

My thoughts turned. Antony couldn’t stop Roman. What chance did we have? I was desperate for Kumarbis and Zora to know what they were doing. How much trouble would it save, to defeat Roman, here and now? Maybe we’d still have Roman’s puppet master to deal with, but the general and his army would be gone. It was what I and my friends had been fighting for these last few years.

Sakhmet pulled away from Enkidu, found a bottle of water, and sat calmly, drinking. I watched her, and she stared back with eyes that had gone golden, hypnotic. A lion’s eyes. I could see the shape of her lion self in her gaze. I suddenly wanted to see her like that, a sleek tawny creature with a flicking tail and alert ears, taking in everything.

“Can’t sleep, either?” she asked. I shook my head. “I have food.” Plastic crinkled, as she pulled over a grocery bag. Enkidu sat up, rubbing his eyes.

The three of us ate together. Real, human food this time. Sort of. More like camp rations, the deli sandwiches and PowerBars they must have kept packed in a cooler all week. I ate because I had to, not because I was particularly hungry. The food tasted like dust, and my mind drifted to the memory of that deer haunch, rich with blood. Prey. Run, hunt, kill. That would make everything better.

Sleep was one of the mind’s defenses against the unknown, depression, despair. Since sleep had stopped working, I turned to my other defense: talking.

“How does it feel?” I asked around a half-chewed mouthful. “Being this close. Everything you’ve worked for is about to happen. Must feel strange.”

“It’s just another day,” Sakhmet said softly. She ate daintily, dabbing the corner of her lips, licking a crumb off her finger. Focused on the task at hand, unmindful of the surroundings.

She and Enkidu sat next to each other, knees touching, but otherwise closed in on themselves. Nervous, anxious. They had the air of animals who’d been caged for a long time. Were their animal sides telling them to run, like mine was? We were all ignoring our instincts, being here. Maybe that anxiety was the power Zora needed to harness.

Enkidu studied me, like he was always studying me, glaring just shy of a challenge. Trying to intimidate me or watching for when I tried to run for it—it hardly mattered. I could only fake trying to relax while he was around.

I focused on Sakhmet instead. “What are you guys going to do when this is over?” I asked. “You have a home someplace? You want to settle down, start a farm, whatever? Or are you staying with them?” I nodded to the exit tunnel, where presumably the others slept in some branching tunnel.

She looked at Enkidu, but because he was busy staring me down, she wasn’t able to catch his gaze. To silently ask him the same question.

“I don’t know that we’ve thought so far ahead,” she said, her smile thin, thoughtful. Feline, even.

“Come on,” I prompted. “What keeps you going? What do you two talk about when no one else is around? There has to be more to you than this.” This. Hiding out in a mine, following a vampire and his magician minion. Kidnapping werewolf queens at the vampire’s behest. I let the silence hang, hoping she would fill it. But they weren’t radio people and didn’t have the aversion to dead air that I did. I was about to say something teasing, to get a reaction from her, when she finally spoke.

“I’m not sure we expect to survive this,” she said. So fatalistic and at peace with such an outcome that she hardly expressed sadness.

Funny, I’d been thinking the same thing.

I said, “Dux Bellorum, vampires like him, would make werewolves slaves. They think we were made to be soldiers in their army. You sit here, you tell me we’re fighting Dux Bellorum. Then why aren’t you any better than foot soldiers in Kumarbis’s army? Cannon fodder, really.” I turned away, huffing in disgust.

“We believe in the war,” Enkidu said. “We make sacrifices.”

“I want to go home,” I murmured. I had allies, I had friends. If I was going to be making sacrifices, I wanted it to be for them.

Sakhmet’s smile was sad. “You’re lucky, to have a place you belong.”

I’d managed a few bites, but I wasn’t hungry, even though I should have been. The bits of sandwich were only making my stomach more upset. I wrapped the remainder of the meal in its cellophane and set it on the floor. Took a long drink of water because I knew I needed it, not because I felt thirsty.

“Wake me up when the party starts.” I went a few steps away, curled up, and pretended to sleep.

When I tried to sleep, I thought of Ben, and had to fight tears. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my head. Wished I had a tail to tuck around myself. Wished for a lot of things.

I heard the sound of wrappers crinkling, trash being gathered up and taken away. Enkidu and Sakhmet didn’t speak, but I imagined them brushing hands, shoulders, exchanging glances like longtime couples did. I tried to breathe slowly, regularly, but I probably didn’t fool them into thinking I slept. Still, they didn’t bother me.

Eventually, the pair of them curled up again, and they did sleep. Who knew how long they’d been sleeping on stone floors, without plumbing or lighting, eating sandwiches out of plastic or hunting the odd deer. This was their normal, why shouldn’t they feel safe? And they had each other. No matter what happened, they’d be all right, because they had each other.

Me, I had something I had to do.

I went into a crouch, breathed softly, waited. Glanced at the wooden slab of a door, and crept toward it. My bare feet didn’t make a sound. I got all the way to the tunnel door without waking them, which encouraged me. I could keep going.

They left the door open this time. Finally, I had earned their trust. Plan B had worked after all. I waited and listened, but Sakhmet and Enkidu maintained their steady breathing. I hadn’t woken them.

I explored some of the branching tunnels and side rooms I hadn’t had time to see before, searching for the storeroom I hadn’t found last time. Wherever they kept their water, food, and supplies. Tranquilizer gun. And, I hoped, my shoes and my phone. Wedding ring. Maybe Kumarbis kept a diary somewhere that would lay the whole story out in sensible terms. Wouldn’t that be swell?

It would probably be written in Phoenician, which wouldn’t help me at all. Amelia, she would know Phoenician. God, I even missed Amelia. She’d be able to talk sense into Zora, if she were here.

Focus. I needed to focus. I didn’t want Amelia and Cormac here, I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.

I paced, nose working, searching for a useful trail. I still didn’t know where Kumarbis’s … crypt, for lack of a better word, was. Not that I wanted to find it, but wouldn’t it be just my luck to find out he was sleeping with my phone under his pillow?

I stood quietly, listening as hard as I could, my nose flaring for the scent of my phone, my stuff, me. But cell phones didn’t leave nice trails to follow. The four of them had been living here for a long time, weeks probably, before they’d brought me here. Their scents were pervasive, and following any trail became impossible.

But I heard a tapping. Occasional, artificial. Not animal claws on stones, nothing like a footstep. Someone was typing on a keyboard. A computer, here?

I followed the sound.

Past the cell where they’d kept me, a tunnel curved to the left and sloped gently down. The ancient rails of the old mine cars were just visible. One of the battery-operated LED lights sat on the floor of the juncture and cast a faint white light, just enough to keep people from stubbing their toes. The light caught flashes in the wall, chips of quartz or ore.

Kumarbis’s chill, bloodless scent was stronger here. I’d probably find his cave farther down. Before that, though, the tunnel branched. A side chamber forked off, and at the branch, I smelled Zora. Another light marked the turn. I crept forward, as quietly as Wolf and I knew how, crouched at the rocky corner, and leaned around to look.

Zora, lit by another of the lamps, worked at a laptop. I wondered how the hell she was powering it, until I saw the stack of battery packs and a solar-powered charger piled against the wall. She’d come prepared to work without a wall to plug into.

But what was she doing on her battery-powered computer? Googling for new ritual techniques, I might have thought, but we were in the middle of nowhere, where she couldn’t possibly have an Internet connection. Maybe she had a magical Internet connection.

That sounded ridiculous even to me.

She had her back to the tunnel opening, but was too far away for me to make out any details on the screen, which was turned at exactly the wrong angle.

She’d eaten something as well—a sandwich wrapper and empty bottle of water sat against one wall. An air mattress and a couple of blankets lay piled against the opposite wall. She had her own little cozy den. This was where she’d been spending her nonritual time—with her laptop. Doing what?

Along with the laptop she had a small pad of paper and a pencil, and she scratched notes on it every now and then, drawing diagrams and symbols. She’d chew on the end of the pencil, stare at her drawings, type a few words, read what she’d typed. Back and forth, working intently on her project.

Did I even need to ask what her project was? It was all of this. She was less than a day away from the most important ritual of her life, the culmination of all her plans. She was studying. I almost felt sorry for her.

While I watched, she must have finished, or grown too frustrated and tired to continue. She put the pad and pencil into a document bag, closed programs, powered down the computer. Last thing she did was yank a USB thumb drive out of the back of the laptop and close it up in a kind of box she wore on a chain around her neck. One of the many amulets she wore. This was a little bigger than a matchbox, made of pressed tin and inset with polished stones. Like a saint’s reliquary. Only instead of bones, it held the thumb drive, close at hand.

She kept her spells on that thumb drive. A twenty-first-century wizard, with her searchable, electronic spell book. Who would have thunk?

I didn’t want to draw her attention, now that she wasn’t focused on the laptop. Quickly, I backed out the way I’d come, slipping quietly up the passage to the main tunnel. She didn’t follow, and she didn’t make any more noise. She must have curled up on her little bed to get some sleep, so she’d be at her best for tonight.

Maybe I was the crazy one. They all knew exactly what they were doing, and I was flopping like a beached fish.

Didn’t matter, I still wanted to find my phone. Maybe Zora had it under her pillow.

I traced my way back, praying I wasn’t lost, that I remembered the curving tangle of tunnels right. I headed the direction I thought was out, and was reassured when the tunnel I’d picked started sloping up. There, I took another unexplored turn, and found the stretch of tunnel where they stored their food.

A couple of coolers sat against the wall. Opening their lids, I found them packed with snow and ice from outside. They kept a few sandwiches relatively cool. One cooler was empty. A cardboard pallet of bottled water was down to the last four bottles. They were running out of supplies—their time here was coming to an end.

After the food came a few large plastic storage bins. One of them was long enough to store a tranquilizer gun and the gear that went with it. I pulled the bin out, snapped the lid off, found the gun—a compressed air-powered rifle, plastic cases with darts tucked inside. A few people around here I’d like to use it on, just on principle. Not that it would change anything. I thought about dragging it to the ritual chamber, an extra line of defense against Roman in case something went wrong. But in the end, I decided it probably wouldn’t help. A mundane weapon, in a battle stretching more than five thousand miles around the world? I left it in place.

Another bin held batteries, rope, a battery-powered drill, a few extra camp lanterns. And there, tucked in among the various bits and pieces, were my sneakers. And inside my sneakers, my phone and wedding ring on its chain.

I put the chain over my neck, tucking the ring under my sweater, grabbed my phone, and ran. Would it still have a charge, would I be able to get any reception, and if it did—what would I say? When I reached the sunshine at the mouth of the mine tunnel, I stopped. Gratefully took in a lungful of sparkling mountain air. Bright, brilliant freedom.

Run, and never go back.

Wolf wanted to howl. I tipped my head back, let my nose flare. I could howl for an hour. But I didn’t. Wolf had to understand about making a sacrifice, taking a chance so the pack—so Ben—could live. But I had to at least try to tell him what was happening. About what had happened to me.

“Please work,” I murmured, turning on the phone, waiting, waiting—and the screen lit up. They’d turned it off when they’d taken it, and that had saved the battery. The little green battery icon was close to empty, but it still had some juice left. I was just glad it hadn’t been left on all this time. More howling in my chest, tightening my gut. The screen showed missed calls and text messages. Yeah, I just bet. I didn’t have time for that.

I scrolled through to find Ben’s number, hit the text command—hesitated. Make it quick, make it clear. What to say? I had too much I needed to say, and I froze. He’d never forgive me for this.

My least favorite news stories were the ones about how someone is in a horrible situation, knows they’re about to die, but has enough time to call a loved one and say good-bye. An expedition leader trapped in a storm on Mount Everest. Passengers on a hijacked airplane. What do you say in that situation? What can you possibly say? I breezed past those stories because they started me thinking about what I would say, and I could never come up with anything. Is “I love you” enough?

I wasn’t going to die. I was going to get out of this. That was what I’d say, I’d tell him I was going to get out of this.

Im ok. battling evil. i hope. see you soon. I love you.

Send, send, send. I resisted punching the button over and over. Instead, hand trembling, I watched the animated thingy turn, and finally text appeared: message sent.

I held the phone between my hands, clasped prayerlike, and brought them to my forehead. Please, let the message get through, please let him understand. I prayed to the gods I knew: Xiwangmu, random fairy queens, and maybe even God—Rick’s God, the one that had inspired him to do good for five hundred years. Not the God who would damn him for what he was. Too many gods to choose from, and I didn’t know if it would do any good, but it couldn’t hurt.

The sun was setting. Four, five o’clock maybe. Darkness would fall soon, and the gang would gather for the next ritual. And something would happen. One way or another, something would happen. I watched for a long time. The slanted light turned the crystalline winter sky silver. The ice in the air stung my nose, but it didn’t hurt. It felt clean. I couldn’t seem to breathe deep enough, to take it all in. Or maybe I thought I could store the air and continue to breathe it when I went back into the mine, into the stone. I could already smell the dense, brimstone stink of the torches.

I’d think about this clean winter air instead.

I left the phone sitting on a clear space of rock. Maybe Ben would find it. This would be the last night in the old mine. By tomorrow, this would all be over, and it would all seem worthwhile. I hoped.