The Taste of Night (23 page)

It saw, or sensed, the screwdriver in my hand, and dodged my stabbing motion, barreling into my body, flinging my arm wide. Our howls mingled as he latched on to my bicep this time, and I head-butted him before he could rip it open. He snapped at my face once, twice, saliva dripping to pool on my chest, and I backpedaled, lurching into a defensive position again.

“Bring it, you mangy, flea-bitten prick!” His ears flattened at the growl in my voice. This time I waited until he’d committed, his jaw plunging precariously close to my unguarded neck. I took a risk, one that would cost me a hand if I judged wrong, and let my fist disappear into that great mouth, felt the barbed teeth skimming the soft skin at my wrist, then wrenched the screwdriver upright, lodging it between the lower jaw and palate. Eyes bulging with pain, the dog’s frenzied growls snapped off into whimpers and I fled around the workbench, knocking it over before barreling through the remains of the shattered door and out into the relative freedom of the hallway.

Whimpers followed me. No wait, I thought, tilting my head. They were growls.

No, they were whimpers.

And growls.

Forcing myself to turn slowly, like the moon circling the earth, I shifted my attention back down the hallway and into the living room. Where another dog inched slowly forward, head lowered, eyes bright.

Fresh out of screwdrivers, my left arm still throbbing from the first dog’s assault, I lunged for the next nearest door. Almost human in their outrage, cries sprang up in the hallway. I pulled the closet door shut behind me, and stood shaking in the dark as ramming, accompanied by furious howls, escalated outside.

I fumbled for the light above my head, my hand shaking so violently the string slipped through my fingers twice. Finally I snapped it on with a quick jerk of the cord, and blinked in the unrelieved wash of the bulb. Sucking in a deep breath, I held it before slowly forcing it out. The dogs could scent my fear in the air, and it drove them into further frenzy. I straightened my mask calmly enough, until it sat firmly on the bridge of my nose again, yet my heart skipped a beat when I started taking inventory, eyes falling to my left arm.

So that’s why it hurts so much
, I thought, studying the
saliva and blood-coated limb. The bones were miraculously intact, but a flap of skin the size of a baseball fell open when I lifted my arm, exposing muscle, tendon, and a vein that had somehow escaped assault. That pumped merrily along like a beautiful string of red licorice. I was grateful, but it wasn’t something I especially needed to see.

Using my right hand, I unhooked my utility belt, letting the pouches slide onto the floor before securing my left with the thick leather. It was awkward, and took a bit of time to fashion something both secure and flexible, but it gave me something concrete to focus on, other than the numbness that was quickly shifting into agony. By the time I finished, my hands had stopped shaking, and the dog had ceased beating at the door.

It would never look the same again, I thought, with real regret. Wardens left scars; they were as deadly as conduits in this way, though perhaps Micah could smooth over the worst of the damage with another extensive surgery. Provided I lived long enough to undergo one, I thought, flexing my fingers. Meanwhile intermittent whines and scrapes at the door broke the otherwise eerie silence.

I leaned back, cursing my stupidity. I should’ve waited to confront Joaquin outside his lair. Now the element of surprise had been wrenched from my grasp by fur and teeth and glowing eyes, and that gave me a reason to snarl. Joaquin would love the idea of me squirreled away in his closet, anticipating his return in the hours before my death, and I’d just decided I’d rather be a chew toy than provide him with any such satisfaction when the wall behind me shifted.

I jerked upright, my first thought,
Earthquake
. That, or they were detonating something at the nearby nuclear test site, though I quickly realized neither of those things would’ve caused this wall alone to move. I whirled, flattening my palm against the drywall where my head had been resting, and pushed. Nothing. I pushed again, lower this time, putting all my weight into it. There were no corner seams that I could see, no markings to differentiate the wall
from any other.

I pivoted to face the door, and leaned back again.

This time, when I felt the wall shift, I went with it, pushing with my weight. Apparently I didn’t know my own strength. The top of the wall flipped backward while the bottom scooped me up, like a seesaw extending the length of the closet.

In retrospect, it would’ve been a simple thing to let the panel fling me back, my legs arching overhead so I could somersault off the platform before the wall swung back into place. Instead I panicked, stomach lurching as my limbs flew out, a leg nearly getting wedged between the ceiling and the opening created by the pendulum’s motion. I bent my knees just in time, but the movement threw me forward, and I slid from the tilted entrance into a heap on the floor, head first.

“Ouch,” I said, my neck making adjustments that would’ve made a chiropractor cringe. I untangled myself, rose carefully, and felt for my conduit as I looked around. There was nothing to see…literally. I felt my eyes widen, I felt them blink, but the void was as complete as if I’d been dumped into a black hole. Joaquin could’ve been standing inches from me and I’d have never known.

That thought, plus a healthy dose of paranoia regarding a third dog, forced me into action. I might be blinded, but I had no intention of returning to that closet, or the set of razor-sharp teeth waiting for me beyond that. Using the wall as a guide, I took a step forward, then another. With the third came a telling rustle in the air. Of course, it registered too late. As I shifted my weight forward, the floor dropped from beneath me, a gaping mouth upturned to swallow me whole. I freefell, arms pinwheeling as I plummeted, ambushed yet again by something I didn’t know.

I was beginning to feel picked on.

It wasn’t a long fall. A child could’ve managed it in a playground. But I had no idea how far this rabbit hole went, so when the floor reared up seconds later, the impact jarred
my bones and I crumpled like a wadded-up paper doll.

“Ouch,” I said again, really meaning it this time. Pushing myself up with my good arm, I held the other lightly to my forehead. Pissed-off fireflies danced before my eyes, and I watched with a shiver of alarm when they coalesced into two slim lines, like they’d been giving their marching orders by the U.S. military. My head screamed, and my arm took up the echo in a pulsing beat, but I sent up a silent prayer of thanks once I realized the lights weren’t just a trick of my battered brain, but a path leading deeper into this residential underground.

I hadn’t found Joaquin, I thought, taking a cautious step forward, but I’d somehow stumbled upon something he valued enough to keep hidden behind attack dogs, secret passageways, and a simpering urban veneer. So I followed the glowing snake of lights along its subterranean path, not looking back as I traced the twisting coil deeper underground.

My eyes gradually grew used to the dim underground, and I could make out shapes and symbols along the smooth walls, like the hieroglyphics of a lost tribe long before the written word came into existence. Some characters I knew, others I recognized by sight but still didn’t understand, and more were entirely new to me. Though they made no sense to me, I knew enough of Zodiac mythology to figure they probably told a story the deeper they progressed.

Deeper, it turned out, didn’t mean lower. As my attention returned to my footing, I was surprised to feel the path shift again to the earth’s surface. Into the mountain, I thought, suddenly realizing why Joaquin had chosen this location. I increased my pace, and after one more S-curve the footlights ended. I paused outside a carved entrance covered by velvet curtains so heavy and black, I’d have thought I was about to fall into another void if I hadn’t seen the edges. Taking a deep breath, I drew the curtain aside…and stepped into the most gorgeous room I’d ever
laid eyes on.

“Well, look at that.” Ignoring the fact that it was an underground cavern, everything looked like a scene right from
Architectural Digest
. Well, if
AD
crammed their “best of” issue into one room, that was. There was no rhyme or reason to the stash; Art Deco chairs with bright orange seat cushions held court next to statues of African kings. A vintage Asian china service was displayed primly on a tortoise-patterned tabletop, while a gold-leafed floor lamp sent soft light blooming across a makeshift vignette of white ceramics and glazed coral. And that was just one corner of the jam-packed room. Elsewhere, Oriental rugs draped the dirt-packed floor in vibrant patterns, and a gigantic bed loomed dead center, where a giant oak headboard and a virtual mound of bedding rose in a luxurious wave of stripes and prints and color. And then I looked up.

The ceiling was made from the desert floor, though centuries of baking in the unrelieved sun couldn’t keep out the shell-backed, shiny-skinned, and multilegged vermin that had survived the ages as well. Snakes and lizards, wasps and worms, and vinegaroons—a particularly foul cross between a spider and scorpion—festooned the ceiling like living chandeliers, macabre creatures twisting in the lamplight, their movements played out on the walls in triple size.

Desert predators, all of them. It didn’t matter how much gilt was in this room. This was still Joaquin’s home. And he, I thought, watching a snake fall headfirst from ceiling to floor, was the largest predator of them all.

I cocked my head, listening to the pressing silence in this underground tomb, realizing that was exactly what this could be. If something went wrong down here, chances were nobody would ever find me. I’d remain deep underground, sealed beneath the hillside, Joaquin’s home marking my grave. But I couldn’t return the way I’d come. Even if I could vault up the pitch-dark incline back onto the platform at the false closet’s back, there were still the dogs to consider. And
Joaquin’s return was growing imminent. Maybe he’d hole up in the Shadow sanctuary, passing along with the dawn into that reality. That would give me at least twelve hours to figure a way out of here.

But, looking around, I didn’t think so. The ornate bed told me he slept as much down here as he did upstairs—probably more. Why share a street and a neighborhood with others when you had a mountainside all to yourself? And Joaquin was a loner. He preferred to work alone, live alone, kill alone. Besides, the lights had been left on. I don’t care how forgetful or apathetic, nobody left the home fires burning if they were going to be away more than twenty-four hours.

And, I thought, pushing through the room, nobody as cautious as Joaquin had a bunker without a secondary escape.

The crunch of hard little bodies sounded beneath my boots as I crossed the dirt-packed floor. I jerked back heavy wall hangings, looking for hidden doors, and lifted rugs for trap doors that led even deeper. Dusty carcasses of roaches and abandoned snakeskins littered the undersides. “Sweep it under the rug” was apparently a maxim Joaquin took literally.

As I straightened, my eyes flitted to the far wall, where a large black curtain matching the entrance was fixed like an inkstain over the carved earthen walls. When I yanked it back, however, I had to pause before my feet would move in the right direction.

Joaquin might have spent his downtime in the previous room, but this was the one he loved. Starkly different from the first, almost Zen-like in its austerity, it had a simple wooden trestle centered and spanning six full feet, and a candelabra picketed at each end. None of the wall hangings or adornments I’d woven my way through, in what I now realized had been a small antechamber, were evident here. Instead, the garish lights were replaced by thick black tapers, set at precise distances apart, none currently alight. This floor was bare too, but stamped firm and worn smooth
with use and time, and obviously great care. The most startling thing, however, were the crevices pocking the bare walls, like eye sockets following my every move.

I tucked the curtain behind a wrought-iron wall sconce, picking up the scent of champa as I ventured further inside. For a moment I thought I was standing in the world’s largest wine cellar. It was certainly cool enough. And, I thought, looking up, the surface creatures hadn’t breached this section of the mountain cavern. Spotting a gold-plated lighter on the table, I picked it up and put it to the taper closest to the door, then lifted that eye level to peer into one of the cylindrical holes. Visions of tarantulas and rattlers filled my head. No way was I blindly sticking my hand in there. But the holes didn’t contain bugs, and they didn’t house wine.

I slipped my hand inside one and came out with a stack of papers, puzzled until I lifted the front page to the light, and read the heading there.
“Twilight Alliance,”
I said aloud, my finger tracing a drawing of two Shadows grasping forearms. I frowned, pushed it back into its slot, and pulled out another. This one was called
Black Fire
and featured a Shadow agent named Quentin Black, a pyromaniac who liked to send the fire department into fits every spring by torching distant areas of the valley simultaneously. A third depicted a woman who seduced mortal men into doing her bidding—theft, rape, murder—then set them on the paths to their own suicides directly thereafter.

They were Shadow manuals, rows and rows of cubbyholes filled with them, some two and three to a crevice. I spotted a ladder with a rail that slid along the perimeter about fifteen feet up. Joaquin’s own private Shadow library, I thought, as Regan’s words at our initial meeting shifted through my head.

He likes to be the first to read the Zodiac manuals
.

“So Joaquin has himself a little hobby,” I muttered, opening a manual. A scream, followed by a harsh, rattling laugh, bounded from the pages. But was it more than that? Because a setup like this seemed excessive for a mere hobbyist. I
knew collectors who kept their comic collections in plastic sleeves and behind glass cases…but in underground mountain chambers in a cathedral-type setting? That didn’t just border on strange, it tipped into full-blown obsession. An obsession, I thought, putting the manual back, that Joaquin either didn’t want to share or didn’t want anyone else to know about. Interesting.