“Got it?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe,” I said, examining it. I pried the top of the base open from a notch at its center, finding what I was looking for, the familiar scrolled Belarus B etched into the cover of the book.
Caleb reached past me and grabbed the book from within the base, struggling to lift it in one hand. “Heavy,” he said. “It’s stone.”
“To keep it safe from the ravages of time,” I said, grabbing it back from him. “Like my great-great-grandfather’s master spell book. I can take care of that later.”
“We should go,” he said.
I agreed, fixing the by-then-empty base back under the church until I felt it lock into place. I slid it back on the shelf, leaning the books against it as best I remembered them, hoping I was leaving it the way we had found it.
Caleb grabbed my hand and pulled me down the aisle after him, gaining speed. Now that we had had the luck of finding what we had come for, neither of us wanted to press it further by staying a moment longer than we had to. Halfway up the main aisle, the gates ahead slammed shut of their own accord. I ran to them, pulling once more at the iron handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Is there a password to this?” I asked.
“Probably,” Caleb said, looking around. “Damned if I know it, though.”
“Do something!” I shouted. I shook the gate, the rattling of it echoing through the basement of the church. I didn’t care about the noise it made now, but only because another sound caught my ear—the burbling of water behind us. I turned and looked back past Caleb in time to see the stoup along the back wall erupt in an explosion of water.
Caleb spun around. “Oh hell,” he said. “I really hate those Witch and Bitch hags.”
What I thought must be a geyser bubbled up out of the stoup all the way to the ceiling before I realized it was something more than just that. An actual form took shape within it, resembling something that reminded me of one of those Chinese parade dragons. “What is that?”
“Not sure,” Caleb said, grabbing my arm as the creature charged us. He pulled me away from the gate after him as he darted down one of the other aisles. “Let’s not find out, shall we?”
I agreed wholeheartedly, running after him just as the creature hit the iron gate. It slowed as it passed through it, the solidity of its body working its way around the bars, but its head was already rearing around to come back through for a return trip. Caleb jerked my arm as he turned down a side aisle, and the creature fell out of my line of sight.
“We need another way out,” he said, coming to a stop. I slammed into him, turning to find ourselves at the back wall once more, with the broken stoup in front of us. The creature’s telltale sloshing noise, coming from somewhere behind us, grew louder with each passing second.
Was I supposed to fight the damn thing? How the hell did you fight water?
And I didn’t dare defend myself in the bowels of this unfamiliar church by rearranging any parts of the walls or ceiling to protect us. We were in the basement now—most of the architectural structures around us were probably crucial to keeping the building standing. The last thing I wanted to do was magic the wrong stone out of place and pull the entire building down on top of us.
The floor near the stoup, however, was another story. If there was water coming in, there was also a source for it, one that might be a way out. A mass of pipes leading away from the stoup drilled down into the floor, and I set my will against several floor slabs that lay just in front of them.
I breathed out the words of power once more, the weight of the ancient stones straining my will as I forced them up and out of the floor where they had sat joined for centuries. I rolled the bunch of them off to the side as I pushed my will into the stones beneath those, feeling the shift and grind of the ground beneath us as I did so. Dust and dirt fell away from the stones as they came fully free, and I tore them up out of the earth, feeling a bit of hope when a waft of air rose up out of the open hole.
“Get in,” I said, peering down into the darkness below. Light danced along a hint of water below, but the noxious smell of trash and something more foul arose, driving Caleb back as he approached.
“Is that . . . ?”
“Don’t argue,” I shouted. “Just get in!”
Caleb still looked hesitant, but the sound of the water creature was closer than ever. I didn’t bother to turn around, opting instead for shoving Caleb down into the hole before jumping in after him.
Once through, the light was not nearly as bad as I thought, allowing me to see Caleb crumple into the stream of sewage below us right before I landed on him. My boots caught him in the middle of his back, driving him fully underwater, which on the plus side allowed me to keep standing. I stepped off him onto the floor of the tunnel and stumbled away as Caleb resurfaced.
His hair was matted to his head, and he gasped for breath, using all of his energy to stand as quickly as he could, but even so, he was drenched in sewage. He looked ill, his eyes wide, and his mouth fighting not to gag.
“Are you kidding me?” he shouted. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry!” I shouted back. “What did you want me to do?”
“Not dump me into a river of sewage, for starters—”
Caleb didn’t get to finish his sentence.
The water creature poured down through the hole above us like a concentrated tidal wave. It splashed beneath the surface of the murky water and disappeared, the only movement that of the running sewage.
“I don’t know about you,” Caleb said, “but I don’t plan on drowning in a river of shit. You might want to get your spell book out.”
Caleb didn’t have to ask twice; my hands were already fumbling for my notebook as the stream of sewage erupted with the splash of the rising, swirling creature. The clear form of its body was now a dark and chunky mix, which I didn’t care to think about, but I’d be damned if I’d let that thing get ahold of me, especially in that form. The real question was what was I supposed to do?
“A little help here,” I called out while looking for anything helpful in my notes. “Liquid really isn’t my forte.”
The creature lunged for Caleb, and rather than trying to avoid it, he pushed forward, lunging through it. There was resistance in its body, but Caleb came through the other side of it wet but otherwise unharmed. The same could not be said of the creature, which fell into two pieces. As the two pieces of the monster fought to rejoin themselves, Caleb held up a vial filled with something gray.
“Liquid isn’t really your forte?” he asked, repeating me while upending the vial, the powdery concoction pouring out of it into the creature. “Unless it’s liquid stone.”
The color of its form shifted from its addition, and when I reached out with my power, I felt it connect to the writhing creature in front of me. The monster lunged, but I could feel the presence of stone growing within it as the gray of its form grew darker and darker. My will lashed out, and what had become a stone creature fell to my command, and I slowed it, and to my surprise, the mass solidified, crashing into the bottom of the tunnel. It shattered into several sections as it settled there, the twisted, tortured features of its solid face sticking up out of the sewage at me.
Caleb held up the emptied vial, tapping the last few flakes out of it.