“You aren’t a hedge witch,” Levi said softly, staring at me with a mix of awe and fear on his face.
“No. I’ll explain later,” I said. I wouldn’t. I had to leave Wylde, like, yesterday. It wasn’t safe here anymore.
But first I’d go down into those steam tunnels with them and see if we could find Ezee. If there were more traps, well, what was a little extra magic. Samir wouldn’t be here in the next hour.
I hoped.
“Come on. Let’s go see what’s down those steps,” I said, getting to my feet.
Levi unzipped his hoodie and handed it to me. I pulled it on over my ruined shirt and felt like crying. My friends were good people. I was going to miss them like crazy. But I’d rather miss them than get them killed.
“Gamers in steam tunnels. This always ends well,” I said, trying to smile.
Neither of them smiled back.
The steps led down into a tight corridor. The clamminess increased, and as we moved carefully forward, the air took on the faint scent of decay.
The corridor branched. Levi sniffed and motioned to the right. Even I could tell the smell of dead things was stronger that way. We didn’t speak. My head started pounding and it was difficult to breathe as the stench escalated.
The tunnel terminated in a round room that had probably held more mechanical devices for moving warm air around the place fifty or a hundred years ago. Now it just held a room out of a B-movie horror flick.
A huge pentagram was drawn on the floor in what looked like brownish paint but was probably dried blood. On a metal shelf to one side was an assortment of dried herbs, a couple ritual daggers straight out of a Kit Rae catalog complete with gem skulls and extraneous spiked bits, and a few books about magic. The books were bunk, new-age and totally harmless. Yet somehow this guy and his flunkies had managed to raise a lot of power. On the other side of the pentagram was a desk with a few papers strewn across it and beyond that another door.
“Oh god,” Harper moaned. She’d walked over to the desk and stood with her arms wrapped protectively around herself.
I moved to where I could see past her and the desk and found the source of the dead animal smell.
Two wolves were crouched there, both frozen like Rose, snarls on their faces. They were far too large to be real wolves, I realized. They had been shifters. One was rotted away, bones clearly sticking out in yellowed contrast to the grey fur. Its eyes were gone, only dark gunky sockets remained.
The other wolf was in slightly better shape. Its body was emaciated, looking like a creature out of a Humane Society commercial but even worse. Patches of its fur had come off and I could count its ribs and just about every other bone in its body. Its dark brown eyes were still there, staring up at us.
“I think Ezee was here,” Levi whispered, coming up beside Harper and I. “I can faintly smell him.”
“They are dead, right? Not like mom,” Harper said. I wasn’t sure she was talking to me, but I put my hand gently on her shoulder anyway.
“That smell certainly says so,” I said. I looked down at the desk. “Hey, is that a map?” Maybe we’d finally caught a break here.
“Yeah. That’s a map of the Frank near the Wylde river region here.” Levi bent over the map, tracing the lines. “Guess he got out in too much of a hurry to take it. Wonder what this writing is.”
I studied the writing. “Sanskrit?” I guessed. “It’s notes about the full moon hitting zenith and some kind of conjunction with Jupiter. Those lines there that look random? Those are ley lines, I think. He’s mapped out a node of power there. That can’t be good.”
“How many languages do you speak?” Levi was staring at me again.#p#分页标题#e#
“All of them.”
“No, seriously,” he said.
See? Even when I tell the truth, no one believes me. What’s the point?
“Is mom going to end up like that?” Harper said. Her eyes were locked on the wolves.
“No, Harper, geez. Don’t even think like that. We’ve uncovered a huge lead for Alek, right?” I gave her shoulder a little shake.
“The full moon is tonight,” Levi said.
“We have to find Alek,” I said. “Come on, that guy is long gone and I don’t want us lost down here. We know where he will be. Bring the map and stuff.”
“Are you sure they are dead?” Harper said, refusing to be pulled away as Levi gathered up the papers on the desk.
Oh for fuck’s sake. I swallowed the words and walked around the desk, breathing only through my mouth as my eyes watered under the assault of the bodies’ acrid smell. I bent and put my hand on the head of the wolf that was less rotted out and summoned up my magic again.