The Underground City
THE UNDERGROUND CITY
Book
2
of the Lily Harper series
HP MALLORY
Book 2 of the Lily Harper series
By
HP MALLORY
Copyright © 2013
by H.P. Mallory
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Friend t
he Characters from the Lily Series on Facebook!
Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble, Chapter One
Also by HP Mallory:
THE
JOLIE WILKINS SERIES:
Fire
Burn and Cauldron Bubble
Toil and Trouble
Be Witched (Novella)
Witchful Thinking
The Witch Is Back
Something Witchy This Way Comes
Stay Tuned For The Sinjin Sinclair Spinoff Series!
THE
DULCIE O’NEIL SERIES:
To
Kill A Warlock
A Tale Of Two Goblins
Great Hexpectations
Wuthering Frights
Malice In Wonderland
For Whom The Spell Tolls
Eleven Snipers Sniping (Novella)
THE
LILY HARPER SERIES:
Better
Off Dead
The Underground City
THE
PEYTON CLARK SERIES:
Ghouls
Rush In
Once Haunted, Twice Shy
This
book is dedicated to the memory of one of my dearest friends, Anastasia Hahalis.
Anastasia,
your gentle smile, your contagious laugh, your magnanimity and your sympathetic nature will never be forgotten. To have known you was a gift in and of itself. The joy and love with which you enriched our lives will continue living in those of us who were lucky enough to have called you our friend.
Sleep
well, my beautiful friend.
Music, When Soft Voices Die
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music,
when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Acknowledgements:
To my husband: Thank you for always being there for me. I love you.
To
my mother: Thank you for always being the first set of eyes on my books!
To
Delilah Crespo: Thank you so much for entering my “Become a character in my next book” contest. I really hope you enjoy your character!
To
my beta readers: Evie Amaro and TJ MacKay, thank you for all your input and your help!
To
my editor, Teri, at
www.editingfairy.com
:
thank you for an excellent job, as always.
To
my personal trainer, Al, thanks for making your character so easy to write!
“New
torments I behold, and new tormented around me, whichsoever way I move, and whichsoever way I turn, and gaze.”
– Dante’s
Inferno
It took me a moment or two before I could accept that Tallis Black was standing in my living room. Tallis, who was a two-thousand-year-old Celtic Druid, didn’t belong in my house, or, for that matter, in the city of Edinburgh at all. No, he should have been in the depths of the haunted forest, where I’d first met him. Why? Because Tallis wasn’t civilized.
Well,
civilized or not, I basically owed Tallis my life. He’d accompanied me on my first mission to the Underground City, a mission that certainly would’ve been my last if not for Tallis’s brawn and brains. I’d been forced to go on the mission in order to retrieve a soul who was mistakenly placed in the Underground City during a Y2K glitch. Although Y2K hadn’t affected the natural order of things here on Earth, it most definitely affected the afterlife. Souls who were meant to go to the Kingdom (think of Heaven) were instead incorrectly routed to the Underground City and vice versa.
As
a Retriever employed by Afterlife Enterprises, the government of the hereafter, it was my responsibility to find those lost souls in the Underground and restore them to their proper places. And to say I needed Tallis’s help was pure understatement. As a newly appointed Soul Retriever, I had no training on how to defend myself against the creatures of the Underground. Nope, instead, I was basically tossed into the deep end, which translated, meant I was battling demons. Given my lack of preparation, I was more than sure that Afterlife Enterprises assumed I’d have no chance in hell of surviving the Underground. Well, they’d been wrong. Courtesy of Tallis.
“Okay,
yoze, I’m out,” Bill, my short, squatty roommate declared before starting for the front door of our lavish apartment. He gave Tallis one last discouraging glance, making it known to all that Tallis was not to touch me. It didn’t matter that Tallis had never displayed the slightest interest in doing so in the first place. “My belly’s ’bout ta eat itself!” Bill finished as he closed the front door behind him, leaving me alone with Tallis.
Bill
was my guardian angel, although I couldn’t really say he was much of a guardian. It was on his watch that I’d been killed in a car accident a few weeks earlier simply because he’d been too busy “getting it on with a chick” (his words). His attention should have been focused on me, while I was driving in the rain, and paying too much attention to my cell phone. Bill was also an alcoholic, now in recovery and, as such, he was required to wear a monitor which equated to a narrow, black band around his wrist. The thing was supposed to alert Afterlife Enterprises if Bill ever strayed from the straight and narrow.
Since
Bill was employed by Afterlife Enterprises and I’d died before it was my true time to go, they’d offered me the option of living again. The alternative was spending the next hundred years in a place called Shade, which was a lot like Limbo—a place which offered a whole lot of nothingness. It was sort of like a holding area for souls before they could move on to the Kingdom. In Shade there was nothing to look forward to, although there was also nothing to be frightened of. I imagined it was comparable to taking an open-ended vacation in Lancaster, California. Needless to say, I’d opted to live again. But as with most things in life, or in this case, the afterlife, beware the small print. My choice to live again required that I become a Soul Retriever. My full job description?
Enter the bowels of hell and rescue any misplaced souls found there, being very careful, in the process, not to become one, yourself
.
Along
with my new line of work, I’d also had to choose a new body, seeing as how my old one perished when my soul had. The new body was the one fractionally good thing about this whole cluster f#%*. I went from being an overweight, unattractive, pale, plain redhead to an absolute knockout. While still maintaining my red hair, I now had large, round, green eyes, framed by inky black lashes. My face was a lovely oval with very high cheekbones that led down to a pouty mouth, and ended with lips like Cupid’s bow. And my body? I was five foot eight, with stork-like legs and 34 D boobs, that were surprisingly real even though I was thin. Yes, I had the body that some women would kill for. The kicker of the whole thing, however, was that my body still didn’t feel like it was mine. And I wasn’t sure if it ever would.
The
best part about this whole Soul Retriever business was that I was again alive and I was beautiful for the first time ever. The bad part, no, make that, the worst part, was that I couldn’t contact anyone I knew from my previous life. And that was the sticking point because I’d been incredibly close to my mother and best friend, Miranda. Afterlife Enterprises were very strict and clear about making sure that all attachments to former family and friends were broken forever. And I guessed it made sense—I mean, how could I explain the new me to my mom or Miranda? They’d never believe it. In general, I tried to avoid thinking about my mom or Miranda because the end result was an overwhelming sadness that wouldn’t do me any good. Things were how they were. Salman Rushdie got it right when he wrote:
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
“Um,
have a seat,” I said to Tallis as I glanced around my apartment, noticing all the moving boxes that littered the floor. Luckily, my dining table had been one of the first pieces of furniture that Bill and I, well, make that
I,
assembled. We’d recently moved into a townhouse and were still in the process of unloading the furniture I’d ordered using the relocation allowance provided me by Afterlife Enterprises. There were some other benefits to being an employee of Afterlife Enterprises—I had a company-supplied Audi A5, a constantly full bank account, and a plush pad.
“Thank
ye, lass,” Tallis answered in his thick Scottish brogue. Taking a seat at my table, he dwarfed both the chair and the table. That was because Tallis was enormous and quite easily the largest man I’d ever seen. Standing at nearly seven feet tall, he was like looking up at an ancient redwood. Well, that is if a tree could have incredibly broad shoulders, bulky pecs and abs that were so defined you could trip over them. Tallis’s face wasn’t half bad either. Although I considered him “rugged,” he was nonetheless handsome. Well, handsome might be too feminine a word to describe him. There was nothing feminine about Tallis at all. “Striking” would probably be more descriptive. His face was comprised of a chiseled, square jaw, a masculine nose, and piercing navy blue eyes. His full lips, in the rare instance that he smiled, parted to reveal very white, very large, but straight teeth. Having short, black hair and a tan complexion, most women would have considered him a looker except for the scar that ran down one side of his face and bisected his cheek. It started at the tip of his eyebrow and ended at his jawline. His scar only hinted at the hard life he’d led. Some people might have considered it a blemish, but to me, it embodied everything that was Tallis.
“So,
going back to my training,” I started, hoping to focus on the task at hand because Tallis had a way of making me anxious. Tallis had just arrived on my doorstep to remind me of my sword training which I’d completely forgotten about. Tallis was, by nature, a bladesmith—someone who forged swords from hot iron. He lived in the Dark Wood, a place that existed in its own plane, somewhere between Earth and the Underground City.
“Aye,”
he interrupted, nodding. “Time is wastin,’ lass. Ye require skill an’ knowledge on wieldin’ yer blade.”
“Okay,”
I answered, biting my lip, as I glanced around my house. “Um, so are we going to practice here?” I was trying to imagine a place inside my smallish apartment that would lend itself to sword play.
Tallis
laughed a deep rumbling sound, which I found very attractive. Then he shook his head. “Nae, lass, there is naethin’ here that would pose a threat to ye that ye would have ta defend yerself from,” he answered. “Nae. We practice in the wood.” He was referring to the forest where he lived. The same one that was rumored to be haunted and alive in its own right. The same one which could swallow up your tracks in the snow simply because it wanted you to lose your way.
“Great,”
I said with an unconvincing smile. “One small problem though,” I started as I remembered having to drive all the way to Peterhead, a good two hours from Edinburgh, where Bill and I lived. From there, we’d managed to access the Dark Wood by entering an old shack which conveniently turned out to be a portal into the forest. “Peterhead isn’t exactly close,” I finished, thinking my training would have to be fairly regular in order for me to progress at a decent pace. The last thing I wanted to do was drive to Peterhead repeatedly. I still wasn’t used to driving on the opposite side of the road.
Tallis
nodded and reached inside his jeans pocket. He produced an iron blade, which was maybe two inches long. He handed it to me, and I accepted it, running the pads of my fingers over the marks on the blade where Tallis had pounded it into a serrated point. “Ye will use this blade ta cut yer way inta the wood,” he answered as if his response made an ounce of sense to me.
“Um,
what?” I asked, looking up at him and shaking my head to let him know I was lost.
“The
blade will clear the pathway ta the wood,” he added. Seeing my still concerned expression, he continued. “Ye simply hold the blade in the air, where ye want ta place yer pathway, an’ then ye coot down. The blade coots the air in half, revealin’ the wood.”
“So
it cuts right through thin air?” I asked, dubiously. I should have known better though. I wasn’t sure if it was because Tallis was a Celtic Druid, or two thousand years old, or because he was possessed by the ghost of an ancient warrior, making him immortal, but Tallis possessed magic. He could do things that defied science—like healing himself. Well, and cutting portals through thin air.
“Aye,
’twill coot right through the air, lass,” he answered matter-of-factly.
I
glanced down at the blade in my hand and rotated it. As I studied it, I wondered how Tallis had imbued it with such magic. I didn’t get the chance to inquire, however, because the front door suddenly burst open, exposing Bill who was balancing on one leg. The other leg had, presumably, just kicked the front door open. His arms were full with two large, white plastic bags. He also balanced two cups, of what I imagined was soda, beneath his chin.
“A
lil’ help’d be nice!” he growled out as I lurched forward from where I’d been leaning against the bar in the kitchen. I grabbed the two drinks from beneath his chin as he released a pent-up breath and I closed the door behind him. “Thanks, Conan,” he remarked with raised brows at Tallis, apparently ticked off that Tallis hadn’t made a move to assist him. To say the two men were as compatible as water and oil was an abject understatement.
Tallis
didn’t say anything, but I caught the corners of his lips lifting a bit. Apparently he found the whole situation amusing. Bill plopped the two bags onto the kitchen table and untied them. He pulled out a Styrofoam clamshell container, which he placed in front of me. “Chicken Tikka Masala for you, nips,” he said, handing me one of the beverages. “An’ a Diet Coke, since you’re wantin’ ta keep your bod ‘do me’ worthy.” Then he handed me something wrapped in aluminum foil. “And the garlic naan, which you love so much, but makes your breath smell like ass.”
“Thanks,
Bill,” I said with a reluctant smile.
“An’
butter chicken for me,” Bill continued. He placed the dish in front of his empty seat, which was next to me and across from Tallis. He set the other beverage in front of himself, as well as the only other package of naan. Then, reaching back into the plastic bag, he presented Tallis with the last dish. “An’ this is Alpoo Mater or some shit I can’t pronounce. It’s vegetarian,” he added, smiling wickedly at Tallis.
“Bill,
you know Tallis isn’t vegetarian?” I asked, frowning at him.
“’Course
I know, bubble-butt, but the dude needs ta go on a diet,” he explained with a shrug. It was a ridiculous thing to say. Tallis probably had less than 6 percent body fat, while Bill must’ve been pushing 30 percent. “An’ that’s the reason why Conan doesn’t get a drink neither,” Bill continued, facing Tallis. “Empty calories—they go right to your hips.”
Tallis
frowned at him, but didn’t say anything. He simply opened his container and reached for one of the plastic forks, which Bill had taken from the bags. Tallis took a small bite of what looked like potatoes in some sort of curry sauce. Really, Tallis’s quiet appreciation for the food was the best revenge. And based on Bill’s ensuing frown, Tallis’s approach was working.