Max took a sudden left turn. Talia was only a few paces behind him now, and she was getting angry. “Stop!” she snarled.
He had to. At the end of the short hallway was a dead end, a blank wall with no door, no poster, nothing. But he didn’t slow.
“Stop!” Talia cried again, now afraid he was simply going to brain himself like a bug on a windshield.
Max roared something she couldn’t understand and jumped through the wall, his body melting into the painted concrete and disappearing. Talia’s brain wrenched at the impossible, nonsensical sight. A blast of outrage singed her. Jumping through walls was cheating.
Just like Max to pull a fast one on his little sister.
So Talia did the only thing that made sense. She jumped after him.
Chapter 20
Talia expected she’d keep on running. That was the problem with leaping into the unknown. It was, really and truly, unknown.
Instead, she fell. It was probably only a dozen feet—nothing for a vampire—but she’d only just grasped what was happening when the ground leaped up to smack her.
Wham. She lay for a moment, stunned and hurting. Her skin tingled like she’d stuck her whole body into an electrical current. Was that the aftermath of some sort of magic spell?
Cold, damp ground. Outdoors? No. Wherever she was lying was mercifully bare of snow.
She got to her hands and knees and looked around. Her first instinct was to call out for Max, but common sense stopped her. He was hostile, and she was horribly vulnerable. It was completely dark. Not nighttime dark, which had enough ambient light for a vampire, but pit of Hades dark. Only a glimmer showed in patches of what seemed to be a ceiling. Where am I?
Skin crawling with nerves, she sniffed the air, trying to get some information about her surroundings. She could feel a slight movement of air, but city smells mixed with something musty and older. Almost sweet. Definitely stale. Somewhere in that cocktail was the stench of rat. The furry bastards were one of her few real phobias. A vampire sunstruck into her daytime sleep wasn’t safe in rat territory. They weren’t picky about whether or not flesh was dead.
Talia shuddered, getting quickly to her feet before she began to dwell on the thought. Her boots crunched on sand and dirt, but that was over something uneven but harder. Brick maybe. The sound was oddly muffled, as if it wanted to echo but the surfaces nearby were too close. Stretching out her arms, Talia felt nothing. Not that close, then.
Carefully, she moved toward the lighter patch of darkness ahead, pulling on her gloves as she went. Where was Max? There was no sign of him, not a whiff. Part of her was grateful, part pissed, part afraid. When had he learned to walk through walls? It wasn’t impossible—a simple teleportation spell was something a sorcerer could make for someone else—but it was entirely out of character. Hunters didn’t use magic. They were utterly against it.
Something is very wrong. Unease burned in her stomach. It was one thing that she was caught in a moral dilemma between ratting out her brother and turning in an attempted murderer, but magic made everything more complex.
Perhaps Hunters had started out protecting human villages and maybe they’d had the moral high ground once upon a time, but this was a different reality. To hate and kill someone just because they weren’t human—to hurt someone like Perry—was completely wrong.
Monsters were monsters until they were your friends. Talia’s beliefs had been changing for a long time, but this sealed it. Shooting Perry had made it personal.
And if the Hunters were using nonhuman powers? That was going from wrong to perverse. That was becoming the thing you despised in order to destroy it more effectively.
That’s just repulsive. What the hell is Max up to? And if he was around, her father and the rest of the tribe wouldn’t be far away. That meant all of Spookytown was in danger: Lore, Errata, Joe, and eventually Queen Omara. Omigod they’re here to stop the election!
Nonhumans getting the vote—that was exactly the sort of thing that would make the Hunters go crazy. Talia felt a surge of alarm, the rush of adrenaline making her still heart beat for a dizzying moment. But what did Perry have to do with it? Why shoot him? She might be glimpsing some of the picture, but she still didn’t have the whole thing.
Whatever. She’d found out something important, and she had to warn the others. If that meant her Hunter past was revealed, she’d have to suck it up. Talia balked at the thought, a surge of apprehension tingling through her. I have to do it. There are a lot of lives at stake.
Crap.
Talia had to get out of there and find Lore. But where was out? Wherever the spell had taken Max, she’d merely gone for a ride on the tail end of the magic—and apparently fell off along the way.
She stopped a moment, hugging herself in the intense darkness. It was really, really hard to pretend she wasn’t afraid when she had no cell phone, no idea where the heck she was, and no way to find out. Not fear. Don’t give in to fear.
Sunrise was just a few hours away, and she didn’t have forever to get someplace safe. She stood under the brighter patch of dark, craning her neck to see straight up. Her vampire’s eyes made more sense of it than a human could, but even she needed more light than this to get a clear picture. All she could tell was that the patch was a square broken into smaller squares, like a paned window. A very, very feeble light shone through.
Talia tried to rearrange her perspective, testing theories about where she might be. The hospital was northeast of downtown. How far might the spell have carried her? Just through the wall? Or miles away?
She saw motion above, a blur of light sweeping from left to right. Then she understood. Those were bus headlights. I’m under the street in Old Town. She was standing in one of the old service tunnels that used to run to the basements of the shops and hotels. Back then, coal was delivered to underground storage areas—not to mention slaves, opium, whores, and smuggled liquor. Talia had read a little of the town’s history on the Internet when she’d first arrived—Fairview had played its part in making sure the West was not so much won as partied into a stupor.
That little bit of research had paid off. She remembered that thick blocks of glass were built into the sidewalks of Old Town to provide light to the tunnels. Over the years, the glass had turned a deep purple color, but they still did their job, more or less. That’s what was overhead. The old glass bricks were letting a tiny glow from the streetlights shine down to her. Okay, score one for the history geek. Now, how the hell do I get out of here?
In the old days, the tunnels had been accessed through iron grates that opened onto metal stairways that led below street level. According to the Web site, most of those had been paved over for safety reasons. The best she could hope for was to find a door to some old building and use her Undead strength to break through it.
It looked slightly lighter straight ahead, so she started trudging in that direction. Her body temperature was always below normal, and now she was starting to feel the cold in a serious way. She wouldn’t die, but she could slow down like a lizard left in the fridge—and then there would be rats.
No mistakes. No delays. It was dark enough that she could walk by a door and not notice it, so she roamed from one side of the tunnel to the other as she went. Occasionally she felt a ripple of something pass by. Ghosts? She was no witch, but she could tell these tunnels weren’t empty. There was a presence besides the rats down there—and she really didn’t want to know more.
Talia picked up her pace, pushing her frozen limbs. She was heartened by the fact that the blocks above her seemed to be growing brighter, as if moving into a busier part of the downtown. She hadn’t gone far—perhaps eight city blocks—when she came to an intersection of sorts. The other tunnel was newer, lined with concrete. A sewer? A storm drain? Who knew? She liked history and old books. What she knew about modern city engineering could have fit on a credit card, but tunnel number two had a ladder about twenty feet away. Yes!