Blood Engines(61)

 

They walked past liquor stores with iron grates covering the windows, past peep shows, bail bond emporiums, and pawnshops without number; past vagrants who didn’t even bother panhandling, heaps of reeking trash, broken glass, and cigarette butts, and alleys that smelled of wine and urine. They reached the corner indicated in Dalton’s directions, an intersection dominated by a burned-out building that had once been a residential hotel, to judge from the faded sign. The walls of the building were intact, but the first-floor windows and doors were boarded over, while the second-story windows were broken, and opened onto fire-blackened walls. There were bas-reliefs of mythological creatures on the walls above the highest windows—gryphons, unicorns, and other beasts so faded by weather and vandalism that they could no longer be identified.

 

“Nothing here,” Rondeau said. “No train station anyway.”

 

“Maybe she’s in the hotel,” Marla said doubtfully. “Maybe there’s a basement?” Some sorcerers thrived on desolation, and pyromancers often favored sites of arson for their lairs. But that didn’t explain the wording of Dalton’s printout, the words in crisp laserjet Helvetica: “Bethany. Tenderloin Station. Underground.”

 

“Or maybe the real entrance is down there,” B said, pointing to a bit of the cracked sidewalk to the left of the boarded-over double doors.

 

Marla looked, and the opening revealed itself to her like an optical illusion resolving. B’s gifts as a seer were proving more and more valuable. There was a stairway there, leading down into a recessed rectangular opening. The stairs and walls were the same color and texture as the surrounding sidewalk, which explained part of the illusion, but there was clearly a patina of magic laid over the scene to make it truly indistinguishable from the surrounding street. Marla peered down into the subterranean entryway to a concealed door whose outlines were only faintly visible, the delineation of its edges blurring into the form of sidewalk cracks.

 

“I think that’s our great ingress,” Rondeau said, and Marla nodded, stepping down the stairs carefully—even staring right at them, they seemed to blur and dissolve beneath her feet. The stairs went down about seven feet below street level.

 

“Freaky,” Rondeau said. “It looks like you’re sinking down through the concrete, even though I know the steps are there. As soon as I blink, though, it slips out of focus.”

 

“I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be concealed,” B said. “It’s clear as air to me. I wonder how many things I walk past every day that are supposed to be hidden?”

 

“There’s no telling,” Marla said, and thought again how hard it must be for B, a being of perpetual twilight, Mr. In-Between, uncomfortable among ordinaries and unknown among sorcerers.

 

Marla went to the door, placing her hand against it, cold rough stone against her palm and the equally rough pads of her fingertips. She felt around the outlines of the door, looking for a catch, and found nothing. She stepped back. “B,” she said, “do you see a way into this?”

 

B came down the stairs, his brow furrowed, and brushed past her to examine the door. He smelled of damp grass and black tea, a strangely pleasant combination, and for a moment, looking at his face in profile, Marla saw beyond the weight of grief and recent years, past his padded armor of layered thrift-store clothes, to the magnetism he tried so hard to disguise, an attractive quality that had first made him into a minor movie star and that now drew ghosts and visions to him. Marla seldom had time for romance, and even more seldom lamented that fact, but seeing B’s beautiful profile—the corona of his so-much-eclipsed sun—gave her a brief pang of longing.

 

And, of course, he was gay. It was just as well. The last thing this trip needed was another complication, even an incidentally pleasant one.

 

“Huh,” B said. “There’s, like, a habit hanging in the air here.”

 

“Like a nun’s habit?” Rondeau said.

 

“No, no, I mean a routine, an action that’s been repeated so often that it’s left an impression in the air. I can feel it, like the memory of a movement, I think it’s…like…this.” He kicked the lower right-hand corner of the door, and as his foot moved Marla noticed the discoloration on that portion of the door, a spot kicked a thousand times, and when B’s foot connected, the door swung inward, revealing a rectangle of darkness that even Marla’s better-than-ordinary eyes could barely penetrate.

 

“Stairs,” B said. “Metal, spiraling down.”