I packed a small black backpack with flashlight, compass, spell book, and Ralph. Then I crept out the back door and headed into the woods.
A hundred and twenty years ago, when Silas LaMotte had built a house for his wife, he named it Honeysuckle House after her favorite flower and planted honeysuckle shrubs all around it because she loved the scent. But his wife had died a few months after they moved into the house, and in the years that Silas’s daughter, Dahlia LaMotte, lived there, she’d been too busy writing her romance novels to worry much about the gardens. She let the shrubs go wild. Fed by the primal magic coming from the door to Faerie, they spread into the woods, growing into a dense, twisting bramble that perfumed the whole town in summer.
Or at least it had. When the door to Faerie was closed, the woods were blighted. Flowers died on the vine, and now their leaves hung yellowed and dry, like scorched paper. The bare branches resembled bones in the moonlight. Ducking under a low arch, I felt as if I were passing through the skeletal jaws of an extinct sea monster …
At least, I hoped extinct. The bare limbs creaked and moaned around me, and the dry leaves chattered like gnashing teeth hungry to devour me. Your fault, your fault, I imagined the shrubs muttering. I’d been unable to stop the nephilim from closing the door, and now the woods were dying. I was almost relieved when I came to the cave.
Almost.
The cave still freaked me out a bit. The entrance was a narrow cleft between boulders. I had to take Ralph out of my backpack so I wouldn’t crush him. He scurried into the narrow opening before me. I followed, turning sideways and pressing my back against damp stone and feeling my way with fingertips along the slimy rock—there just wasn’t room to hold a flashlight—until I found the notch that signaled the …
Drop. As usual, I missed it and plunged headfirst into the cave, landing on my knees in the dark. For a moment, as I scrabbled in my bag for my flashlight, I thought I heard a scraping sound, but when I fumbled the light on, the shadows shrank back too quickly for me to make out their shapes. Only Ralph remained, crouched by my side, his eyes big in the beam of my flashlight.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure myself as I aimed the flashlight around the tunnel. “They’re probably just bats.” I counted to a hundred. When I was sure nothing was coming, I turned and followed Ralph into the tunnel that led to the campus. As dirt floor gave way to tile, and stone walls to cement, I breathed easier—or as easy as I would ever breathe twenty feet underground.
When I reached the first crossing, I stopped and took out my compass and map. The map was hand-drawn by Soheila. She’d been in the tunnels before 1959, which was when a senior named Dolores Maynard had disappeared in them. Liz had them closed then, so that no students would stray into them again. She’d had all traces of them erased from campus maps and memory of them expunged from the memories of all mortal students and faculty. A wealth of campus lore had persisted about the tunnels, though. As Soheila had explained to me, no spell could entirely destroy a memory. Erasing a memory from the conscious mind simply drove it deeper into the subconscious, where it became lore, which, it turned out, was how most urban legends got their start.
Since she was not mortal, Soheila remembered the tunnels, and she had suggested we use them to move about the campus, unobserved by the nephilim. The map was sketchy and incomplete (by her own admission, Soheila and her succubi sisters had lousy senses of direction), and every time I ventured into the tunnels I worried that I would stray into one of the unmapped sections and vanish like poor Dolores Maynard.
Who, I had learned last spring, had evaporated into steam and taken up residence in the heating pipes.
I shook that thought away and concentrated on the map. Soheila’s note had said to meet her beneath Main Hall. I traced out the most direct route, trying to choose tunnels I’d been in before, but I hadn’t traveled this far in the tunnel system yet. I’d gone only as far as Fraser, where there was an entrance to the tunnels through Soheila’s office closet. But Main was on the far north side of campus, and some of the tunnels leading there were sketched in with dotted lines—Soheila’s code for unexplored. In one of them, Frank had scrawled Here be dragons! next to a cartoon of a ferocious fire-breathing beast.
Very funny, I thought, taking the tunnel to my right. It was narrower than the one I’d been in and lined with wide steel pipes that were covered with rust and peeling paint. Previous tunnel explorers had left their marks on the walls: a long-nosed Leroy was here, several hearts with initials, and a scrawled Help me! My English teacher has read too much Poe and buried me alive behind this wall!
I followed the twisting route until I heard voices. I stopped and listened.
“I’m just saying he didn’t seem so bad. The man was a Jets fan, after all,” a man’s voice, which I recognized as Frank Delmarco’s, said.
“He wasn’t even a man,” replied a lilting female voice that could only belong to Soheila Lilly. “He was an incubus, and it’s in his nature—our nature—to be pleasing. He probably told you he was a Jets fan to win you over.”
“Nah, I can always tell a real fan. Besides, he had no reason to win me over. And when we were on our way to the door that morning, he told me something …”
I held my breath, eager to hear what Bill—clearly whom Frank was talking about—had told Frank. They’d gone together to find a way of unmasking Duncan Laird on the morning of the summer solstice, but then Bill had stepped between Duncan and me and taken the lethal blow meant for me.
“He said that if anything happened to him, I should tell Cal—”
“I don’t want to know,” Soheila cut Frank off. “Whatever protestations of love he made—however real they might have seemed—make no difference. He’s gone. Callie needs to get over him.”
“But that’s just it. He may not really be gone. He said …”
In my eagerness to hear what Frank said next, I stepped forward—and tripped. My flashlight clattered to the ground.
“What’s that?” I heard Soheila cry.
“It must be Callie.”
“Frank, don’t. You don’t know it’s her …”
But Frank was already barreling down the tunnel, like one of his beloved football players, ready to tackle an unknown foe. You had to love Frank—but if he was keeping Bill’s last message from me, I was going to throttle it out of him.
“I’m fine, Frank,” I said, scrambling to my feet and shining the flashlight at him. In black turtleneck, jeans, and beret, he looked like a special-ops agent. “I just fell.”
“Jeez, McFay, could you be a little more careful?” he huffed. “You scared Soheila.”
I heard a musical laugh behind Frank as Soheila came into view. If anyone could make urban guerrilla camouflage look chic, it was Soheila Lilly. She was wearing tight black leggings, which clung to her every curve, tucked into tall lace-up boots. Her silk turtleneck was just a shade off black—aubergine, I thought, although it was hard to tell in this light—and worn under a black leather jacket. Her abundant dark hair fell in luxuriant waves around her face, and the beret Frank had given her was tilted to a rakish angle. Whatever she wore, Soheila emanated a seductive charm. Whenever she laughed, the air around her rippled with the scent of cardamom and cloves, reminding me that she had once been a wind spirit, before the desires of humans had shaped her into a beautiful woman. For thousands of years she had fed on those desires, becoming a succubus who needed the human life force to survive, until she had fallen in love with a human, whose returned love had made her partly human. When Angus Fraser died, Soheila had sworn off feeding on humans, using Aelvesgold to maintain her life force. But now that she was cut off from her source of Aelvesgold, she would inevitably grow weaker. I noticed that even though it was warm in the tunnels, she looked as if she was freezing. Still, she smiled as she said, “I think Frank was just looking for an excuse to come to your rescue, Callie.”