Dance By Midnight (13 page)

He gave me a withering look. "I forget how you usually make this shit up as you go along."

DELiLAH

Mike went in first, then me, then Sam. Grey remained outside, having given me the best excuse not to go.

I escaped from there. Why in the hell would I want to go back in?

True dat.

Unfortunately for me the further in we went, the more possible it was for me to hyperventilate. I was freak'n terrified and kept my arms and legs firmly tucked into the bus. The closer we got to where I thought I was held, the more concentrated the charred smell became.

"Dags…does this look like it did when you were here?"

"Yeah." Our voices echoed against the walls. "It's exactly the same."

She didn't say anything.

"Why do you ask?" I asked.

Sam still didn't answer me and her silence just set off a dozen more internal alarms on the doom meter for me. When the changeling took me here, I couldn't see where the light had come from. But now it flickered and danced over shadows from lit torches along the rounded sides. The further we went, the dimmer those torches became until they were burned to a crisp. I could make out what remained of their stands, oddly deformed fingers that jutted out from the side.

The only light we had was what came in behind us and elongated our shadows. I did notice how the light coming in, once we were inside, would lead anyone to believe the sun was bright in the other world. When in truth I knew it was closer to three in the morning.

After a few minutes we reached the crossroads where I'd been tied to a chair. There wasn't a chair left, or the ropes. There was something else missing as well.

"Dags…I thought you said there were piles of faerie dust here…" Sam moved along the side. She held out her hand, blew into her palm and a blue and white light appeared in the center, about the size of an orange. She tossed it into the air where it stopped just below the dark, scorched ceiling and expanded into a flat disk. The diffused light illuminated the entire area. It wasn't as bright as the mini-sun she'd used before and reminded me of moonlight. "Because I don't see any."

I moved around in a circle, giving the floor a much harder look. "Neither do I."

"You sure this is where you were held?" Mike moved opposite of Sam and then looked at me.

There wasn't anything discernible about this particular junction. Nothing on the walls, or the floor, that told me this was
the
spot where I'd been tied up. The memory was still hazy from waking up and being disoriented at the time. The only clear memories I had were of pain, fear, and running the hell away. I stood in the center and tried to remember if I'd turned left or right on my flight out of the Cairn.

"Shit," Sam said in a low voice after watching me. "You can't remember can you?"

"No." I held out my hands. "Sorry for being freak'n scared out of my mind. I wasn't mapping out the tunnels in case I needed to return. I planned on never showing my face here again."

"Well, you said you could see the light at the end of the tunnel from where you were tied down, right? So I say we keep moving away from the light and we might hit another one of these junctions."

"Uh…Sam." Mike had moved away from us to the tunnel on our left. I could see him several feet in. "You gotta see this."

I followed Sam to the left into the tunnel. He motioned for us to turn around—and when we did, we were looking down the tunnel we'd just entered in front of the light. Physics wasn't one of my strong points, but I knew the basics of position. I knew that if you turned left off a hallway, when you looked back, you'd either see a blank wall which would be the opposite wall of that hallway, or you'd see whatever had been facing the left turn. In this case, we should have been looking at the right-branching tunnel. Or in this case, I should have been able to see the cross tunnel with Sam's little moon suspended in the air.

But I didn't. I saw a tunnel. Period.

"This sucks." Sam moved toward the light and abruptly disappeared.

"Sam?" Mike jogged forward just as her upper half popped up on the right side of the tunnel.

"Yeah?"

He stopped. "Are you in the tunnel we came in?"

"I think. Come toward me."

We both walked toward her and I was sure we turned right, heading back out of the tunnel—

But it never felt as if we'd actually turned right. As one we turned back, with the tunnel's end behind us, and faced three branching tunnels.

"This is fucked up. If we head down any one of these tunnels, we're going to lose track of where we've been because where we've been doesn't look like where we think we've been."

The sentence didn't make a hell of a lot of sense on its own but I understood what he was getting at. I ran a hand through my hair and pulled it off my forehead. This was bad. No, it was worse than bad. But now I understood the legends about people saying they got lost in Faerie. Hell, I doubted they ever made it to Faerie itself 'cause they got lost in the Cairn.

Mike held up his gun. "We've got to check down one of these tunnels and find some dust."

I looked down each of the other three tunnels. The fastest way to do this was to split up and cover each tunnel at the same time. But that also meant isolating each of us, which also put each of us at greater danger and unless we could be sure of the direction we were going, then all three of us could get lost. The spell I'd commanded was only meant to guard from the influence of this place, not shield from any kind of attack.

And though there was nothing obvious I could see that would attack us, I didn't want to take chances.

"I know what you're thinking," Sam said. "And the answer is no."

"We can't split up." I turned to her. "Not all three of us. It's too dangerous."

"That might be, but you should take a look at yourself. You're paler now than when we walked in here. I see dark circles under your eyes and you're moving a bit slow. You keeping us protected is taking its toll on you. We gotta do this quick." She held her mini-sword in her hand. "You stay here with Mike while I check a hundred steps down that left tunnel. After a hundred steps I'll turn around and walk a hundred steps back. When I do, I should bump into you even though it looks like I'm heading down the tunnel."

"Right, and we'll still be able to see you, like we did before."

I nodded with Mike. Sounded like a good plan, but I wanted to do the exploring. I was immediately voted off the island and Mike told me to sit and rest. I did sit up against the wall entrance to the left tunnel when Sam started out. Mike and I watched her, and waited, and then just as she became a shadow in the distance, she started getting bigger again until she turned the corner and nearly ran over me. "Oh! That's so weird that you're there and I can't see you."

"Mmhmm." I stood up and brushed myself off. "No dust?"

"None. It's like it was swept clean. Mike, you take the right tunnel and I'll stay here with Dags."

We repeated the process with Mike and after it he scratched his head. "No dust. Not even dirt. Just…burned tunnels."

I was starting to think maybe I'd burned the dust up as well as the Cairn. It was decided we'd all move forward, but we'd also leave one of Mike's copper pennies in the middle of the junction so we'd know that was the right way out.

The tunnel stretched out for what seemed like miles into the dark. And keeping my guard up for a long extended amount of time was exhausting. A few times I got a little dizzy.

"This isn't working. I say we go back, make sure we don't get sick and then summon a little Fae creature and shake the dust off of them. I'm thinking we can trap a Fae easy enough," Sam said. "We could walk around for days in here. There's got to be a map or something."

"I wouldn't think so if Dags burned out this Cairn, which is what it looks like." Mike looked up and around us. "My worry is, I think I'm seeing the exact same scorch pattern."

"What do you mean?" I didn't like that sound of that.

"Well, when I was a kid I used to imagine seeing faces in wood grain, or in concrete in the sidewalk, so I noticed patterns. And since we've been walking together, I've seen the
same
pattern repeat itself."

"What?" Sam turned to face Mike and her eyes widened. "Oh fuck."

I turned around as well to look at Mike, but my eyes slid off his shoulder and refocused on the tunnel behind him. Only there wasn't a tunnel anymore because it was pitch black. "Oh that's not good."

Mike glanced back and his shoulders slumped. "Oh damn."

"We need to get out of here." I moved quickly past him in the direction of where that light
should
be. I was seriously panicking. All those fears of being confined and tortured by a possessed Brendi Monster were scratching at the edges of my sanity. I heard their running footfalls behind me as we made our way down the tunnel, back the way we came.

But the further we traveled, the darker the end of that tunnel grew. Finally I stopped and they stopped behind me. It was light where we were, but behind us or in front of us was dark. "I…" I was way out of breath. "I…got a…really bad feeling…"

"No shit…" Sam panted to my right. She looked around. "So where is the light coming from? How is it we can see only where we are?"

"Maybe it's like the outer circle of hell, like in Dante's Inferno," Mike said, breathing heavy but barely breaking a sweat. "You know, where the souls that never knew God ended up—only it was dark except where they were because their intellect was what lighted the way?"

Sam and I stared at him.

He shrugged. "Sorry. It was just a thought." Mike looked around us. "Shouldn't we be seeing that little moon you made? I know we ran further than we walked, which means we should have found it."

This was bad. Badder than bad. I held out my hands. "If Mike saw repeating scorch marks, that means something like repeating textures, right? Or a repeating scene. Kind of like the old cartoons with the stock backgrounds? When the character ran and the scenery behind continued to repeat the same house and store?"

Mike smirked. "Yeah. It's freaky that you and I had the same thought."

"You give out some really weird analogies sometimes, Dags." Sam slipped her knife back into her belt.

"Yeah…I know. But that's not the problem. Either the Cairn is keeping us in the same area or something else is."

We looked at each other and caught our breath.

"Dags…you're looking thin." Mike put a hand on my shoulder.

"I feel it. We've got to get out of here."

He nodded. "We can find some other way to get dust."

"You want dust?" A melodic and somewhat sensual voice said from above us.

Mike's gun was in his hand, Sam's dagger was up and me—well I had my hands up into fists ready to fight whatever or whoever that was. I didn't think I'd win the fight, but I would go down swinging. I just didn't want to set fire to anything else while we were trapped in here.

None of us said anything. I assumed we were too afraid to answer.

Then, "I know you can hear me."

I looked at Sam and glared. She narrowed her eyes at me as if to say
Not me, you!
I cleared my throat but it was Mike that answered. "We're not happy about talking to a voice with no form. Care to show us where you are, and tell us who you are?"

"You promise not to kill me?"

Sam did talk this time. "We don't even know you. Killing's personal."

That…had to have been the weirdest thing I'd heard in the last ten minutes. Other than the disembodied voice.

Something moved in the shadows behind Mike. No…actually the
shadows
moved behind Mike. Sam and I saw it at the same time and she grabbed his belt loop and hauled him closer to her.

The shadows clinging to the wall, the ones making the scorch marks we'd seen, oozed and dripped, rose and then culminated into a pile in the middle of the tunnel. The walls no longer looked as if they'd been through a fire. In fact they looked like dirt, as if the tunnel had been hollowed out under ground. Roots, flowers and several underground springs appeared where the black smut had clung.

The burn had all been a lie?

"Oh god we're not in Kansas anymore," Sam muttered and pulled the two of us to her. Mike on her right and I on her left.

The black smut was both liquid and smoke as it moved and shimmered and formed itself into a seven-foot column. Then the column broke off four appendages that formed into arms and legs. The torso formed and then a head. Black smoke covered it one last time and when it finally cleared, we were looking up at the tallest drag queen I'd ever set my eyes on.

It was both male and female, with arms like Mike's and a face very similar to Sam's. The breasts were perfectly rounded with just the right amount of perk and the hips and legs were thin like Mike's but rounded like Sam's. The hair was black, as were its eyes and lips. The skin shimmered a ghastly white and when it smiled its teeth looked a lot like Brendi's had. All pointy and sharp.

"Is this better?" Its voice was deep and very manly.

Yeah…drag queen.

Mike cleared his throat. "And…who do we have the pleasure of addressing?"