Chapter 18

18

GAbrIEL

W e set off early the next morning. Isabella had stayed at the manor for the evening, running through plans and tools to use with myself and Evangeline. My housemates had all offered to help, but it wasn't worth the risk. According to Evangeline, Nanny Murk was completely blind but had incredibly sharp hearing. Even with vampiric stealth, more people would mean more noise.

Isabella had the forethought to loan Evangeline a clean shirt, which I had extremely mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, the sight of Evangeline in my sweater had been both stunning and enough to nearly kill me, and on the other, we were going into a sewer, and I didn't want to inflict that on a silk mohair blend. It was probably for the best that I wouldn't be distracted by the sight of her in my clothes while we tried to focus on an extremely dangerous situation, although the shirt Isabella had given her wasn't that much better. It was black, with long sleeves and a high neck that should have been modest, but it was also skintight and printed with dark, reflective patches that made her look as though she was moving through dappled sunlight.

"Remember," Evangeline said as we walked along an empty sidewalk. "We might have to adapt on the fly, so stick close. I know you can be all sneaky, but so can Nanny Murk. I'll use the sound-muffling spell every now and then, but I have to focus to keep it up, so I can't cast anything else while it's active, or it'll end."

"Can you signal me so I know when you're about to cast it?" I asked. "If you need to focus, then I can take the lead and try to make sure nothing throws you off."

Evangeline flashed me a quick, brilliant smile. "It'll be pretty clear when the spell settles around us," she said. "But I can definitely give you a heads-up."

"What exactly is she?" I asked her. "I was so focused on planning, I forgot to ask for the details."

Evangeline's mouth set into a grim line. "She was a witch once," she said. "But that was a long, long time ago. Nobody knows for sure how old she actually is. Witches who use dark magic for too long get…corrupted. It's like it's some sort of parasite, and most of them tend to burn out when it starts eating away at them. Whatever the fuck she is now, she's strong enough that the magic hasn't killed her yet. Last time I faced off against her, I was a pretty young witch. She almost destroyed me."

I refrained from pointing out that she was still fairly young. Most humans didn't enjoy that, at least when they were young enough to be braced against being treated like a child. Besides, it felt odd to think about the fact that I was almost nine centuries older than her.

"You're stronger now," I said instead. She flashed me a grateful look. Apparently, that had been the right thing to say.

"She might be stronger, too," Evangeline said. "C'mon, this is the spot."

She'd stopped at a manhole cover. I braced myself and bent to pull it open.

"Ladies first?" I joked.

Evangeline snorted. "Such a gentleman," she quipped as she climbed down the ladder.

I followed her down, sliding the manhole cover closed after me.

The smell wasn't as bad as I had been expecting. It was far from pleasant, but to a human nose it might have just seemed mildly pungent. For me, it was hard to ignore. The air was cool and sulfurous.

Evangeline lit up a ball of magic and sent it floating above our heads. We were in a large tunnel, round and tiled. A few feet of grayish water flowed sluggishly along the bottom, but we were standing on one of the ledges that ran along each wall. The sound of water droplets plinking down into a puddle off in the distance echoed toward us.

"It's not far," Evangeline said. "This part of the sewer system is pretty close to the old caves."

"I've read about those," I said. Our footsteps reverberated in the dark tunnel, bouncing back at us over and over again from the curved walls. "Apparently, a pair of naiad siblings had a competition to see who could use their water to make the most elaborate tunnels and impressive carvings."

"I didn't know that," Evangeline said. "But I sort of figured it was something like that. The first time I explored that area, I found this huge cave with a big carving on one wall. It looked super serious and important, so I copied down all of the runes and translated them when I got back home."

"What did it say?" I asked.

"Faaredvalis is the superior twin, and the other guy—I can't remember the name now— but apparently his strongest power is farting in his sleep." Evangeline shook her head. "I spent hours trying to find reliable naiad translations."

"Sometimes I'm quite glad that I'm an only child."

Evangeline laughed. "You and me both."

The tunnels met and parted in intersection after intersection. I was completely turned around, but Evangeline seemed to know exactly where we were going. Soon, we reached a tunnel walled off by a locked grate. The tiles of the walls in front were plastered with warning signs, and DO NOT ENTER appeared at least a dozen times.

Evangeline stepped forward, reaching out to the lock, but I put a hand on her arm.

"Let me," I said. "There's no point in you wasting your magic this early."

I twisted the padlock apart with one sharp tug, and the door swung open, creaking loudly on its heavily-rusted hinges.

"You're gonna want to watch your step," Evangeline said. "Like, even more than you usually would in a sewer."

"Noted." I could feel a mass of dark magic nearby, but the sheer amount of it was clouding my senses. Trying to pick out individual magical traps would be like trying to identify a faint perfume in the middle of a spice market. I felt a bit like I'd been blindfolded and then asked to navigate a maze.

Luckily, Evangeline seemed to know what she was doing. We picked our way slowly down the tunnel, stepping over suspicious patches of sludgy gray-blue moss with tendrils that reached out to try to grab at our shoes. The sulfur smell was getting stronger now, more and more pungent with every step we took.

Abruptly, the nature of the tunnel changed. The smooth tile walls gave way to rough weathered limestone worn down by year after year of water flowing along it. It looked as though the walls had once had patterns carved into them, but now they were battered away, half-hidden behind stalactites.

A rat skittered along the ground of the tunnel in front of us. It got too close to one of the moss patches and was yanked in by sticky strings. The rat let out a few pitiful squeaks as the moss began to cover its plump gray body. Almost immediately, the moss completely enveloped the rat, and the squeaking stopped. The moss settled down, lying perfectly smoothly against the ground as if there had never been an animal trapped in it at all.

"I hate this place," Evangeline muttered. "I hate it so, so much."

"If you feel the need for a break, I'd love to get a sample of that moss to inspect later," I said. She shot me a look. "Or we could keep moving," I added hastily.

We kept moving.

There was light ahead of us, faint but growing stronger. It gleamed wetly off the pale stalactites, turning them the yellow-gray color of old bone. A few shreds of orange fabric were caught on one. The remnants of a high-visibility vest? I wondered what had happened to whoever had been wearing it.

We stepped out to the lip of the tunnel, and my breath caught in my throat. In front of us was a massive cave. The limestone walls and high arched ceiling were pale, standing out starkly against the pools of black water on the ground. Glowing mushrooms clung to the walls and the few dry spots on the surface, and small glimmering shapes flitted through the water. The formations of the stone made the place feel vaulted, as though the naiads who had started the place had once seen the inside of a cathedral and decided to recreate it from memory. Numerous tunnels let out into the space, their dark mouths seeming to leer at us.

A small cottage stood in the middle of the clearing. It was simply built, squat with a slanting roof. The wood had gone pitch black with age. With its cutesy, simplistic proportions and its coloring, it looked like a children's toy that had been charred in a fire. Its roof was speckled with more of the glowing mushrooms, its windows grimy and small.

The ground around the hut was covered with runes. Some were carved into the stone. Some were drawn onto stolen KEEP OUT signs. A few had been splashed onto the ground in what looked a lot like spray paint.

Evangeline nudged me and, once she'd caught my eye, placed her finger to her lips and raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She cast the quieting spell around us, and my ears popped from the sudden reduction of noise. I could still hear the faint sounds of splashing water and scuttling vermin, but they were much, much quieter within the bubble of her magic.

"The place is tiny. How are we supposed to get in without letting her know we're here?" I whispered.

"The house always lets visitors in," Evangeline said. "The trick is to keep it from tattling on us."

The feeling of dark magic was so thick and cloying around me, I barely even noticed the twin smells of sulfur and human waste anymore. Evangeline carefully made her way down the slope of the cavern, stepping around mushrooms and water-slick spots on the stone. When she was just a few steps away from me, my ears popped again, signaling I'd hit the boundary of her silencing spell, and I hurried after her.

The ground at the base of the hut was scattered with sticks, barbed wire, and large gray feathers. The hut itself sat at a slightly odd angle, as though its foundation was crooked. Up close, I could see the windows were mismatched, some of old, bubbling glass covered over with ancient newspapers, and some made of oiled parchment.

Evangeline tapped me on the arm, then pulled out her phone, typed quickly, and held it out to me.

im gonna drop the silencing spell so i can talk to the hut real quick, don't make any loud noises or sudden movements.

I nodded.

Evangeline twisted her hand through the air, and the spell fell away, making the relative quiet of the cave feel suddenly loud in its absence.

"Hello, hut," Evangeline said, curtseying to the dark wooden wall in front of her. I erred on the side of following her lead and swept a shallow bow. "My friend and I would like to visit your mistress, please. We have a request for her."

The hut shuddered, making the mushrooms on its roof send out a cloud of glowing spores as they bumped together. With a jerky, disjointed motion, it rose. My stomach lurched. I had heard stories of witches who lived in huts that ran through dark forests on chicken legs, but this made that seem sweetly whimsical in comparison.

Nanny Murk's hut unfolded to its full height, standing on dozens of pigeon legs. The entire space underneath was filled with scabby limbs as diseased and twisted as the unluckiest city bird. Matted, oily feathers were packed around the bottom of the hut, and I was deeply grateful I didn't have to see the point where wood met flesh. A thought rose unbidden to my mind: the image of a rat king, a roiling mass of rats whose tails had tangled together into an impossible knot.

The hut began to turn, a slow shuffling motion I tried not to look at too closely. It swung its door to face us. The door was made of old, scarred wood, flanked by round, mismatched windows that looked down at us like unsettling eyes.

"Please, hut, don't tell your mistress that my friend and I are here to see her," Evangeline said sweetly. "She surprises so many people, and we thought it would be nice to surprise her. It'll be like a party."

The house cocked to the side curiously.

"And every party has food," Evangeline said. "Gabriel, give me the stuff," she added out of the side of her mouth, not taking her eyes from the building.

I handed over the bag she'd picked up when she stopped for breakfast, and she undid the twist tie holding the clear plastic shut, then held out one of the smooth, round shapes inside temptingly.

"My friend and I brought a snack just for you," she said. "A whole bag of bagels. And they're a day old, which is even better."

The hut fluffed up its feathers—a motion that seemed to extend all the way up to some of its shingles. It unrolled a staircase from the base of the door as though it was sticking out a long tongue, which unfortunately implied that we were about to walk into its waiting mouth.

"Thank you very much," Evangeline said. She set the bagels down at the foot of the stairs, and we went up them together. When we reached the doorway, she pulled her muffling spell back up, and we stepped through into the darkness.

The inside of Nanny Murk's hut was much larger than the outside. The room we found ourselves in was larger than the entire outside of the cottage, and such a sheer volume of stuff filled it that the floor was barely visible. Narrow pathways led through the space, curving between dusty cardboard boxes and stacks of ancient books. On one of the heaps, a Jansport full of hair sat next to a large skull. The air smelled heavily of mildew.

We eased our way through the twisting maze, trying desperately not to knock anything over. When we found a relatively clear spot, Evangeline closed her eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, and then held out her phone to me.

i think i can feel the next piece of the artifact . its close to us.

Do you think it's in this room? I wrote back.

Evangeline shook her head and gestured for me to follow her. We pushed aside a musty curtain and stepped into a hallway that may have once been wide, but with all the junk in it, there was barely a foot of room to walk. Faint, atonal humming came from one of the rooms that let out onto the hallway. Seized by morbid curiosity, we both paused to look.

The room was a kitchen piled high with odds and ends. It had the sickly-sweet smell of rotting fruit, and it looked as though something had been nesting in the pot rack. The sink dripped arrhythmically, sending water trickling down a heap of red-stained dishes.

The witch stood with her back to us, working industriously at a counter. She plucked a few herbs from a chipped flowerpot and tossed them into a large mortar and pestle, grinding them up as she hummed to herself. She was tall and surprisingly broad-shouldered, although her back was hunched with age. Her hair was a hectic cloud of white, dusted with flour and several substances I didn't want to identify. A length of knotted string wrapped around several small bones and twigs had been woven into her hair and trailed down the back of her tattered gray dress.

She reached out a gnarled, bony hand and pulled a bowl closer to her. From it, she lifted a small limp body. It was a sprite—one of the tiny, relatively harmless fae that flitted around causing light mischief and hurling insults. They were pests but more useful than many people realized. Sprites kept magic balanced, absorbing stray dark magic, and converting it into wild, directionless energy, untethered but harmless. Although they came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, often changing their appearances just to stymie researchers, this one was mostly human-shaped, plump and cherubic, with skin the color of amaranth. Its transparent wings drooped down, brushing against Nanny Murk's mottled wrist.

The witch pulled a knife from her belt. It was wickedly curved, and looked extremely sharp. With a precise, practiced motion, she began to butcher the sprite, slitting its belly and scooping its guts into her mortar. The dark, soft shapes of the organs passed through her fingers one by one. Liver, kidneys, colon. Purifying organs, I realized with a jolt of horror. She was using the parts of the sprites that filtered out the dark magic; the parts where that tainted power would be trapped and concentrated down.

Nanny Murk hummed cheerfully as she ground the little fairy's organs into paste. The small body lay abandoned on the counter next to her, already starting to get the blurry transparency of a fae corpse on the verge of disappearing back into the flow of wild magic, collapsing in on itself like a deep-sea fish brought up to the surface too quickly. The witch poured something from a large stoneware jug into the mortar, mixed the concoction one last time, then lifted it to her mouth and began to drink.

Next to me, Evangeline was pale and wide-eyed, her lips pressed into such a tight, thin line that they'd gone white. I couldn't imagine I looked any calmer. Nanny Murk's persistent humming broke out into a full song, her high, raspy voice pronouncing the words as if they were part of some incantation.

"Deep into the inky blue, the frothing drowning crush…" she sang to herself, yanking open one of the dingy cabinets to reveal a dishwasher. "It steals the sailor's dying breath but gives him such a rush…" The witch began to toss things into the machine, apparently trying to identify them by touch.

I caught Evangeline's eye and pointed into the room questioningly. She shook her head and pointed farther down the hallway, and I nodded with relief. The dark magic radiating off Nanny Murk was rancid and oily, and I didn't want to get any closer than I absolutely had to. We turned away and crept down the hall, but Evangeline's elbow caught the edge of a stack of old wooden crates, sending a tiny bottle of dried seeds tumbling to the rough wooden floor.

We both froze.

Nanny Murk's singing cut off sharply. I heard the creak of her footsteps coming up behind us, but I didn't dare turn around in case I made enough of a sound for her to zero in on us. I heard the sound of sniffing, loud and oddly wet.

"Little rats," she grumbled to herself. "Little rats coming to visit Nanny, nibbling away at Nanny's things. Well, I'll make a snack for all those little rats, and then I'll make myself a lovely little rat pie. Crunch, crunch, tiny wee bones…"

Evangeline's chest was rising and falling rapidly, and she had her hand pressed over her nose and mouth to muffle her breathing.

We kept desperate eye contact as Nanny Murk turned away and shuffled back into her kitchen. "Time isn't holding up," the witch warbled over the clanking of crockery on metal.

Evangeline blew out a quiet breath, her shoulders relaxing a fraction.

"Fuck," she mouthed silently, but with a great deal of feeling.

I nodded emphatically.

We shuffled down the hallway sideways, excruciatingly aware of how close we'd come to disaster. Finally, we reached the room at the far end of the hall. The frame of the door was spiked with nails, and a string of charms dangled from each, forming a sort of gruesome bead curtain. We crouched, contorting ourselves through a gap in the odd decorations.

The room beyond might have been a study, or it might have been a trophy room. It was actually quite clean compared to the rest of the house, with enough clear floor space to see where the thick carpet of dust had wafted into dust bunnies. A large white table was pushed against one wall, cluttered with oddly shaped glass vessels and twisted roots. Crooked shelves covered every available inch of wall space, each loaded with morbid curiosities. Even the ceiling was being used for storage, with more of the strings hanging down to display baubles and trinkets.

Divide and conquer? I typed out on my phone.

Evangeline checked my screen and nodded, pointing at herself and then at the left side of the room.

I was grateful that the piece of the ascendancy array was at least in a room where everything seemed to be displayed in a single layer, as opposed to heaps and rickety piles, but the room was still overwhelming. It was frustrating, dusty work to pick through all the shelves, made all the worse by having to stay as quiet as possible. The first shelf yielded nothing useful. The second and third shelves were the same. Somewhere around the eighth shelf, I stopped counting. I found a pair of sharp, pearly fangs, clearly taken from a vampire. Shuddering, I set them carefully back down and wiped my hands on my pants, as if that would clean away the sense of wrongness. I licked over the sharp points of my own fangs, trying to settle my nerves. It didn't work, so I glanced up, blew out a quiet breath, then frowned.

Between the carved bone charms and stones with holes through their middles was a glint of gold hanging down from the ceiling. It was on one of the shortest strings, half-hidden by other trinkets. I padded over to Evangeline and pointed up at the glimmering metal. She followed the line of my finger and pulled a face.

I bent, holding out my hands in the universal signal for giving someone a boost, and she stepped into the grip. I lifted her easily, and she steadied herself with one hand against my head as she worked at the string. The smell of her magic was a welcome reprieve from Nanny Murk's unctuous stench.

Evangeline patted my shoulder, and I set her down. Beaming, she held out the piece of the array.

"Nice work," I mouthed, grinning at her.

Just as she had the first time we'd found a piece of the artifact, Evangeline went very still and rigid, her eyes gleaming gold. It only lasted for a moment, but for that moment she looked… regal. Divine. Statuesque. As quickly as it began, it ended, and she came back to herself, businesslike and ready to go.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," she mouthed, tucking the artifact into her jacket. She put one hand on mine, and the other on the portal pendant hanging around her neck. I braced myself for the lurch of teleportation.

It didn't come.

Evangeline frowned down at the pendant. She tried again, but nothing happened. Our escape plan was dead in the water.

Suddenly, there was a crash from the hallway, then another and another.

"Little rats!" Nanny Murk crowed. "Little rats taking Nanny's treasures!" She skidded into the doorway, panting and grinning, clutching a huge meat cleaver in one hand. It was the first time I'd seen her face, and I hoped it would be the last. It was pale and waxy, with loose skin hanging as though she'd been halfway hollowed out. Her eyes were simply gone, the sockets overlayed with concave sallow skin. Her teeth were jagged fangs the color of iron.

"I knew I smelled that rat before," Nanny Murk cooed. "The little hedge-witch who stinks of pretty flowers and old dead books. Robbed me, she robbed me, yes, she did, and she's back to do it again! Can't let her do that. Can't have that at all. Rat pie, yes, yes, and a broth with the bones."

Nanny Murk licked her sharp teeth with a leathery white tongue and charged.