“We’ll do our best. And Rita? Thank you for bringing us down here. I know that made you nervous. You’ve been a lot of help.”
She gave me a wavering smile, not one of the ones that took years off her age. “You’re welcome.” She looked at Morrison a moment, shrugged and said, “Nice to meet you, Captain,” in a voice that suggested she’d probably lost her mind, but at this point was just going with it.
Morrison lifted his right front paw, quite solemnly, in an offer to shake. Rita’s expression transformed, laughter running through her, and she shook his paw before climbing the rope ladder with more lightness than I’d expected twenty seconds earlier.
“Well,” I said when she was gone. “Anybody bring any silver bullets?”
Billy and Morrison turned identical glowers of exasperation on me and, chastised once more, I led the way through the tunnels in search of a werewolf.
The Sight hadn’t burned out my visual receptors or my brain when I’d used it in the Market, so I was cautiously willing to press it ahead of where we crawled and walked, hoping I’d get some sense of what lay ahead. Mostly I got a sense of open spaces beneath the city that I was sure no geological survey could be aware of. Or maybe all earth was riddled with pockets of emptiness and tunnels that sometimes went nowhere and sometimes connected; I had no idea. Unless given some kind of extenuating reason not to, like a sinkhole suddenly opening up, I tended to think of ground as solid. Still, apparently Robert Holliday’s science report hadn’t mentioned anything about tunnel-riddled bedrock beneath Seattle, so the fact we were working our way through non-old-city tunnels boded peculiar, if not ill. “Hey, Morrison, can you smell anything down here that isn’t us?”
I peered over my shoulder as I asked, and got his nose-wrinkled expression of distaste in exchange. I took that as a yes. “Anything female?”
Morrison stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel, giving me an excellent wolfish glare. Billy backpedaled, trying not to trip over him as I spread my hands in self-defense. “What? Are you telling me you don’t know what girls smell like?”
His nose wrinkled again, this time so delicately it looked like deliberate refrain from commentary on the smell of one particular girl, i.e., me. I turned back to the path, muttering, “I had no idea dogs were so expressive,” and actually felt the snap of his teeth as he just narrowly missed biting me on the ass. I bet anything that meant “Wolves aren’t dogs.”
Evidently I’d put an idea in his head, though, because he pushed past me, head extended long and low as he scented the air. His ruff fluffed up and he glanced at me, then paced forward just slowly enough that we could keep up. I ducked through stretches of tunnel that Morrison fit through more tidily, Billy a few steps behind me, and we caught up to our boss at the mouth to a narrow natural cave dripping with water.
The brindle wolf stood at its far end, one paw lifted in a classic attentive pose. Morrison stood in exactly the same position, neither of them looking certain as to what to do next. I felt like a wildlife photographer who’d accidentally come across the shot of a lifetime, gold wolf and silver examining one another in a primal size-up. Then Tia wagged her tail in a blatantly come-hither sweep and leaped into the darkness at the cavern’s far end.
Morrison whurrfed, a noise that was nothing at all like a human response to anything, and my stomach turned to lead. “Oh my God, Morrison, don’t you dare.”
He whurrfed again, then darted forward at a pace we measly humans couldn’t hope to match, disappearing after the werewolf.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Why…” Billy’s voice sounded dreadfully thin and hollow, like he knew the answer to the question he was trying to ask, but hoped against hope I might have a response he liked better. “Why would he do that…?”
“It could be that he can keep up and we can’t, so he’s forging on ahead to keep tabs on her.” It was the most harmless explanation I could come up with.
Sadly, Billy didn’t believe it any more than I did. “You have to go after them before—before something awful happens.”
I was pretty sure “something awful” loosely translated as “before Morrison bangs a she-wolf,” but I wasn’t nearly man enough to say it aloud, either. I just stood there, arrested by the potential horror of the situation unfolding somewhere ahead of us. Billy nudged me and I flinched. “I can’t just leave you here. And I’m not even sure I can shift without…” I waved a hand, attempting to encompass vague but terrible things with the gesture.
“Joanne,” Billy said, firmly, “if you don’t haul ass after them and stop Morrison from mating with a werewolf, obliterating Seattle with too much magic use is going to look like the preferable alternative once he’s human again.”
He was right, but I shook my head and jolted into a jog. “No, not unless I have no choice. We can catch up. How does this crap end up happening? I’m trying, Billy, I’m really trying to get things right, and my best efforts still end up with Morrison chasing a piece of ta—”
Billy burst out laughing and I threw a smirk over my shoulder at him as we ran for the far end of the cavern.
Nearly an hour later we’d squeezed through more tight spaces, damp stone and slippery earth than I’d imagined could exist. There were spurs going off all over the place, some too narrow to fit through, others far more wide and inviting than the areas we’d squished through. If it weren’t for the paw prints leading us, we’d have been hopelessly lost, and as it was I had no concept at all of how far we’d come. Billy, behind me, panted as heavily as I did, which made me feel equal parts better and horribly guilty. We’d sloped down through most of our travels, and however deep we were, it was warm enough to be this side of muggy, and I wished I’d left my sweater behind. Not enough to take it off: it cushioned me against the rock spurs and the occasional fall, and didn’t tear as easily as Billy’s magnificent, ruined suit. I was going to have to learn to sew to make him a new one.
“Do you even know what direction we’re headed?” he asked for the third or fourth time.
I bared my teeth at the darkness beyond the flashlight’s reach, and said, patiently, “Not really, no. All I know is these aren’t natural caves and tunnels.” I’d said that as many times as he’d asked, but the repetition was almost better than the silence. There was nothing quite like a zillion tons of earth pressing down to give a girl a proper sense of mortality. And that was from someone who’d been stabbed, hanged, skewered and squished enough to make Jean Grey look like a piker.
Of course, answering made me dwell on the aforementioned unnaturalness. It was increasingly clear to my damaged Sight that the areas we squeezed through were new formations. Concerningly familiar silvers and blues ran through them, mostly in vertical spikes, like someone had taken a giant wedge and hammered it into the earth, then rucked it back and forth a couple times to open spaces where there hadn’t been any before. There were other colors, too, colors I recognized as remnants from the coven I’d worked with briefly. Mostly, though, the lingering impression was of me. One Joanne Walker, shaman extraordinaire, who had rearranged Seattle’s topography most of a year ago, apparently far more thoroughly than I’d realized.
Since the city hadn’t collapsed in a giant sinkhole, I wasn’t too worried about the modifications to its underpinnings. What I was concerned with was why anyone would bother going this deep into the altered earth. I couldn’t come up with any reasons I liked, since an hour’s fast walk through muck and stone was a bit much for privacy’s sake. Of course, it probably wouldn’t take a four-legged wolf nearly that long, which thought I didn’t much care for, either. Morrison could get in a lot of trouble in an hour. I tested my magic again, nervously, and felt it still sparking like a volcano waiting to go off. Volcanoes under Seattle would be bad.