Betwixt (41 page)

The wickling’s last word left Moth cold. What did Viv know about being a mother?

“So why is Bleek hunting Neve? Shouldn’t he be after Ondine?”

Raphael frowned. “He doesn’t want to procreate with Ondine. He wants to
be
her. Or he wants to figure out a way to make one like her. A new creature, half fay, half mortal, all powerful and without
the ticking time bomb that inhabits us common changelings. We’re just cups, Moth. Just holders for something greater. Our
time here is limited. Ondine is the thing itself. Think about the power that she has wrapped up inside of her.”

He stopped. Moth studied him: older than he should have been, afraid and weak. A wickling. Yes, that was Raphael.

“Bleek certainly has. That’s what he’s doing with Neve. It must be. He’s going to try to do what Viv did. At least that’s
what I think he must be doing. But he needs a ringer to accomplish it. No one can effect the change without a ringer.”

Did Raphael know about Nix? For some reason Moth decided against telling him.

“After she has the baby he’ll try … to get rid of her. I don’t know. I thought I knew Tim. I don’t.”

That’s where it ended. The whole sordid tale. With Neve in the tunnels, right where Moth was heading.

He had offered Moth a bed, to catch a few hours of sleep before the next day — it was four
AM
when Raphael sipped his last bit of coffee — but Moth had begged off, saying that he had to get to the tunnels. He had to
stop whatever Bleek was doing. Raphael stood and showed him to the door.

“Do you know how to get in?” It was the last thing he had asked, and it seemed trifling to Moth after the early morning revelations.

“No.”

“The door under the Burnside Bridge. Sometimes it’s locked. Whether that’s an impediment is up to you. It always was for me.”

It always was for me.

Walking along the Willamette River in the half-light of dawn, Moth understood now what the older man had meant. Raphael hadn’t
had what it required to enter the limina. Not physically, but psychologically. He couldn’t kill his own son, no
matter how evil Bleek was. But Moth was different. He’d proven it to himself earlier, when he’d threatened to end Morgan’s
life — and his own — to prove to Nix the reality of the ring.

He scanned the dark underside of the bridge for the door, eking out of the shadows a handleless rectangle of solid metal.
Below him, the diffuse light of dawn coated the misty river like an aura, and a phrase popped into his head:
Ignis fatuus.
Foolish light. The glow that led wanderers, seeking what they thought to be a lantern, to a quicksand death in swamps. Science
said it was created by the spontaneous combustion of marsh gases, but superstition supposed the lights to have another cause:
fay. Legend had it that they lit the lights — swamp gas, will-o’-the-wisp — to lure humans to their death.

Wasn’t that what fay had always done? Lured humans to them for their own use, for their own needs? A few died, yes; but, otherwise,
weren’t they very careful? Moth looked above him at the lightening sapphire dome of the sky. Wasn’t it all in service of something
higher? Weren’t they taking humans somewhere better? Wouldn’t she lead them?

He let the girl’s intelligent, searching face fill the spaces where the shadows deepened. Now that he understood what Ondine
really was — a goddess of sorts, half human, half something else — a cover had been pulled back on a dark well Moth knew was
his own soul. He wanted Ondine to topple into it. He wanted her under his control, under his wing. Viv must have
wanted that with Raphael. Even, in his own screwed up way, Bleek must have wanted that, too, with Neve.

Matters of the heart. Viv had told him the emotions of humans were present in all fay. It was left over from before the change.
It could not be helped. Was this tremor, this disturbance, something like love?

You must commit yourself to the exidis before you’re allowed in. It is not enough merely to “want” to decide. You must actually
make a decision. You must relinquish all possible futures save the one to which you commit yourself.

Moth stepped back from the door, disoriented. Was that Viv he’d heard or a memory of her speaking? Then Raphael’s face, looking
at him, and away.

The sun had almost risen.

Ondine. If she was what Raphael said she was, she would only help him.

He pulled a slender matchstick-sized pick Viv had given him to practice his mancing with and started to work on the lock.
A few deft turns of the hand and darkness enveloped him. Moth reached an invisible hand out and felt stone mixed with earth
at his side, and above him. He stomped the ground and a muffled echo sounded. He was on the other side of the door now, that
he knew. In the tunnels. He could not see his own arm in front of him, but somewhere, far off, a yellow light flickered. He
walked toward it. His journey had begun.

T
HE BAR PART HAD BEEN A CINCH.
Cake. Pie. Butter. Sunday morning coming down.

Morgan repeated as many synonyms for easy as she remembered from mornings at Krakatoa with Li’l Paul to keep her mind off
of the darkness that was closing in around her. Even Nix, only a step ahead, was hard to see. Back in the bar all they’d had
to contend with were the few customers still nursing the first of their morning beers and a nonchalant bartender who barely
acknowledged the two as they made their way semi-uncertainly toward what looked to be the toilets. From under a neon Coors
sign a man laughed and pointed at them, but Nix seemed not to notice so Morgan ignored him. Clearly the fine patrons of Danny’s
had seen this routine before and besides that, were drunk enough — or tired enough, in the case of the bartender — not to
care. And negotiating the bathroom, while a skosh fragrant, was straightforward. Nix sidestepped a dozing man leaning against
the wall, gave the all-clear sign to Morgan, and they both stepped
inside. There was a hatch in the floor of the wheelchair stall; Nix unlatched it, and together, neither looking back, they
descended a metal grate stairway. At first it was completely, utterly black, the densest black Morgan had ever seen, but a
pale yellow glow burned somewhere farther down and they followed it.

Morgan was certain they were not alone. The darkness was crowded, it seemed, with sounds. Metallic clanging and the plashing
of water, and then darker, lower, the scrape of something against stone, and a scratching wheeze she could only interpret
as human breathing.
Mooooorgaaaana.
Had someone just called her name? Like in the forest? No. She was scared, she told herself. Despite her bravado that morning,
she was scared. Though she had promised herself that she would be strong — what was Morgan D’Amici if not strong? — she reached
forward, terrified, to make sure Nix was still there. She felt his slender back, and before her next step hit the earthen
floor, his warm hand closed around hers.

Nix and she stayed linked, walking slowly through darkness, till they reached a brick-walled room, the shape and size of a
small building’s cellar. A single gas camping lamp sat in an alcove lined with rough-hewn wood, the source of the light that
they had seen upon entering the tunnels. It had the uneasy feeling of a place that someone had just left.

“Nix?” she whispered. “I don’t —”

She was about to utter something craven, something utterly
un-Morgan-like — she wasn’t sure what — when Nix thankfully interrupted her, pointer finger pressed first to her lips, then
to his own. She silenced. They weren’t to speak. He looked at her, and then away, at a different door from the one they’d
come through.

They were to go there. But how did he know? They were in the Shanghai Tunnels. Scary people came down here — looking for —
looking for what? Morgan tried to telegraph her thoughts to Nix but the boy only stared at her again, obviously waiting for
her to signal that she was ready to follow. She stopped, confused. Time had become loose, like a hangman’s loop, and she felt
light-headed and disoriented. She could feel the dead-endness of the place, its creepy history: shanghaied sailors and old
hookers and doomed loggers and dead Indians and suffocating Chinese railroad workers. She felt a strong urge to run but quelled
it. Humans were always wanting to do things they shouldn’t, she told herself, go places they weren’t supposed to be. It was
just like during the change, when she was a child, in the forest. That’s why she was scared.

She let go of Nix’s hand.

Why did they have to be silent? It couldn’t be for anything as simple as escaping detection. Was it something about those
wheezing sounds? Weren’t they just junkies looking to score? Weren’t she and Nix more powerful than them? Why didn’t they
have flashlights? And where was Bleek?

Morgan had done her duty. She had gotten Nix into the tunnels.
Now she wanted to go home. She stood up straight and nodded at him, but he only bobbed his head curtly and turned to walk
on.

That little bitch Neve. She got us into this.

There were three low, primitive doors leading in three directions. The one they had come in by, which Morgan knew was behind
her — she resisted the urge to turn around and run back toward it — and two in front of them, one on the right and one straight
ahead. Neither were marked, or suggested any kind of different destination from the next, but Nix stared at each in turn,
as if judging, weighing, walking down the length of the corridors beyond with his mind. He reached for the one on the right,
and as he walked through it Morgan wondered what had made him choose. She was tempted to make him stop and explain his decision
— to tell her why he knew in a way she didn’t, couldn’t — but just as quickly as they had entered the dully lit room, they
exited, and darkness swallowed them whole.

She held back now, conscious that Nix must have sensed her cowardice. Only the day before she had jumped at the opportunity
to follow him, thinking it would get her closer to Bleek, thinking that it would provide her with some opportunity for power.
But the labyrinth of the tunnels and their stubborn, unplumbable darkness offered nothing — and terrified her. Who would find
her if she died down here?

She felt a dull clotting in her throat. She should have at
least told K.A. where she was going. At least K.A. should have known.

When we get out of this, I’m going to — I’m going to neutralize that conniving little crack. No way is she dating K.A. and
…

Morgan let the poisonous clouds fill her head, walking quietly and swiftly toward what she could see was the next light. Where
Nix was taking her, who knew, but if Neve got out alive she was going to make that little strung-out whore pay.

Dumb cow. She probably wanted everyone to come looking for her. She’ll probably be pissed that K.A. isn’t here. But then,
she’s probably fucking Nix, too.

She entered through yet another low doorway on the right and stood alone. Nix must have taken a step beyond. She reached her
head back out past the doorjamb, then chastised herself because she wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. Hearing
light steps, she called the boy’s name. She had gotten farther behind than she intended.

“I’m back here,” Morgan half whispered. “I’m back here, at the room.”

More scuffling, closer. He was heading back and would be angry that she’d spoken. She was glad she’d called, though; she wanted
to speak again but didn’t dare. She looked behind her. A wooden table sat in the middle of the room, another lantern upon
it. So these rooms — they were occupied. Morgan wondered
what they had been used for in the old days. What unspeakable things had happened here?

Long chains lay on the shadowy floor, and were those … cuffs? And that thick, dark substance smearing the top of the table,
was that —

Not down here. Not down here.

She couldn’t help herself. “Nix,” she called, and moved toward the door. No one answered. No hand covered hers.

Morgan picked the lantern up by its handle and once again approached the doorway, intending to hold the light out into the
dusky passageway. Earthen walls were illuminated, still bearing the jagged scars of where they had been hacked out by picks
and shovels and hands a hundred and fifty years before.

The steps ceased. She raised the lamp again, closer.

She saw the blood first, blooming raggedly across the girl’s midriff, an apron of smudgy brown. Like a painter’s smock, Morgan
managed to think before she stepped through the doorway, pale and glassy-eyed and utterly silent, her skull shining through
matted fine blond hair. The girl was dirty; the sundress she wore was smeared and splattered, and a strap hung like a broken
petal off her shoulder. In the glare of Morgan’s lamp, she stopped. She pulled her parched lips back. Her teeth glinted and
a sticky pearl of saliva welled at the right corner. It was only when Neve lifted her frail, bruised arms and lunged toward
her with a sudden violence that Morgan finally allowed herself to scream.

O
NDINE WAS THINKING OF
R
APHAEL.
“The last thing I make before I die will be a hole,” he’d said in a lecture she and her mother had once gone to in New York,
the first time she’d ever seen him. She’d tittered a little at first — it sounded porno-graphic — until she realized he was
talking about a grave.

Raphael made things — holes, cairns, oceans, mountains — with computerized wood and water and mud and stones, and colored
pigment, and shadows and frost, and then printed his creations with digital ink, on huge LED canvases, in tortuous linking
combinations that Ondine could only imagine came from the machinations of a computer never put to sleep. Tiny things moved
among the patterns, all interspersed with a tepid yellowish light. The result was a mirror to this world of despicable and
eerie flatness. All Ondine could think was: I’m glad I don’t live in there. And: I wonder what does.