Chapter Twenty-six
Shaky, I fumbled with the satchel's zipper to find the map and orient myself. It was cold, and I pulled my hat lower as the acidic wind pushed the hair from my face and I scanned the image of a dim wasteland glinting under the red-smeared sky. I half-expected to see the ruins of my church, but there was nothing there. Stunted trees and twisted bushes rose between hummocks of dried grass. A red haze glowed from the bottom of the clouds where Cincy would have stood, but here, on this side of the dry river, it was mostly sad-looking vegetation.
Trent wiped his mouth with a hankie he then hid under a rock. His eyes were black in the red light, and I could tell he didn't like the wind pushing on him. He didn't look cold, though. The man never got cold, which was starting to tick me off.
Squinting, I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and focused on the map. The air stank, and the scent of burnt amber caught deep in my throat. Trent coughed, quickly stifling it. David's duster shifted about my heels, and I was glad I had it, wanting something between me and the greasy-feeling air. It was dark, but the clouds reflecting the glow from the broken, distant city gave everything a sick look, like the light in a photographer's darkroom.
Arms wrapped around my stomach, I followed Trent's gaze to the twisted vegetation, trying to decide if the red-sheened rocks hiding in the grass were tombstones. Amid the trees was a large, shattered slump of crumbling stone. With a lot of imagination, it could have been the kneeling angel.
Trent looked down at the faint tink of metal at his feet. Bending for a closer look, he thumbed a penlight on. It glowed a sickly red, and I cringed at the revealing light, then leaned so our heads almost touched for a better look. In the scuffed grass was a tiny bell, black with tarnish. It wasn't solid, but made of decorative loops that brought to mind a Celtic knot. Trent's hand reached, and in a wash of adrenaline, I gave him a shove.
"What in hell are you doing?" I all but hissed as he glared at me, and I wished I had hit him hard enough to knock him on his butt. "Don't you ever watch TV? If there is a pretty sparkly thing on the ground, leave it alone! If you pick it up, you're going to release the monster, or fall through a trapdoor, or something. And what is it with the light? You want to tell every demon this side of the ley lines where we are? God! I should have taken Ivy!"
A surprised look replaced Trent's anger. "You can see the light?" he said, and I snatched it from him and clicked it off.
"Duh!" I exclaimed in a whisper.
He yanked it back. "It's a wavelength that humans can't see. I didn't know that witches could."
Slightly mollified, I backed down. "Well, I can. Don't use it." I stood and watched in disbelief as he flicked his light on and belligerently picked up the bell. It tinkled faintly, and after knocking the dirt from it, he jingled it again. I could not believe this. Putting a hand on my hip, I glared at the red glow hovering over the broken city miles away. The pure sound was muffled, and he tucked it in a little belt pouch.
"Freaking tourist," I muttered, then, louder, said, "If you've got your souvenir, let's go." I nervously stepped to the more certain dark of a twisted tree. It had no leaves, and it looked dead, the cold, gritty wind having scoured all life from it.
Instead of following, Trent pulled a paper from his back pocket. The penlight came on again, and he shone it on a map. A red glow reflected up on his face, and furious, I snatched the light away again.
"Are you trying to get caught?" I whispered. "If I can see it, and you can see it, what makes you think a demon can't?"
Trent's silhouette grew aggressive, but when the distinctive rustle of something small pushing through grass at a run rose over the soughing of wind in the trees, he closed his mouth.
"You had to ring the bell, didn't you?" I asked, pulling him into the shadow with me. "You had to ring the damn bell." I shivered in David's borrowed coat, and he shook his head in disdain.
"Relax," he said over the rustling of the closing map. "Don't let the wind spook you."
But I couldn't relax. The moon wouldn't rise until almost midnight, but the ugly glow in the sky made everything look like a first-quarter moon was shining. I stared at the heaviest glow, deciding that was north. The memory of Ceri's map swam up, and I turned a little to the east. "That way," I said as I tucked his light in my pocket. "We can look at the map when we find some broken buildings to hide the glare behind."
Trent tucked the map into his pocket and shrugged his pack over his shoulders. I nervously shifted my bag to my other arm, and we started out, glad to be finally moving if only to warm up. Grass hid the low spots, and I stumbled three times before we'd gone thirty feet.
"How good is your night vision?" Trent asked when we found a reasonably level swath that ran exactly east to west.
"Okay." I wished I had brought my gloves, and I hid my hands in my sleeves.
Trent still didn't look cold as he stood before me, his cap making his outline radically different. "Can you run?"
I licked my lips, thinking of the uneven footing. I wanted to say "Better than you," but quashing my irritation, I said, "Not without breaking something."
The red haze from the clouds lit his slight frown. "Then we walk until the moon rises."
He turned his back on me and started off at a fast pace. I jumped to keep up. "Then we walk until the moon rises," I mocked under my breath, thinking that Mr. Elf had no idea of the situation. Wait until he saw his first surface demon. Then he'd put his little scrawny elf ass behind mine where it belonged. Until then, he could find the dips in the grass and snap his freaking ankle.
The wind was a constant push, and my ears ached with it. My head slowly bowed until I had to force myself to look up and past the ever-moving shadow of Trent's back. He kept a constant motion just above my comfortable pace as he ghosted forward with a minimal amount of movement through the waist-high grass and past the occasional tree. Slowly I started to warm up, and watching him, I started questioning my decision to wear David's long leather duster. My legs were protected from the dry ache of the gritty wind, but it set up an unnerving hush against the grass that Trent's jumpsuit barely touched.
Things were no better when we left the grass behind and slipped under the canopy of a mature, twisted forest. The ground vegetation was sparser, but now there were tree roots. We passed what might have once been a lake, currently covered in a thick bramble, the thorns lapping the edge of the forest like waves.
I finally called for a halt when the trees gave way to chunks of concrete and occasional patches of thick grass. Trent stopped his unrelenting pace and turned. The wind was a cool brush against me, and breathless, I pointed to what looked like a crumbling overpass. Without a word, he angled to a slump of rock underneath.
Hand on my side and my thoughts on the water and energy bars Ivy had packed for me, I followed, sinking down beside Trent on the cold rock and glad for something solid behind me. I'd been fighting the feeling of watching eyes since we found the forest. The sound of my satchel's zipper was a striking point of normalcy in the red-smeared existence around us, with its greasy wind and heavy clouds.
Trent held his hand out for his light, and I gave it to him. He turned away to study the map as I scanned the terrain behind us. There had been a twisted silhouette at the dry lake, the vaguely human-looking figure furtive and fleeting. Trent's cupped hand hid much of the light, and his red-tinted finger traced our probable path from where we arrived to where Ceri had indicated the demons had their access to their database. Why it wasn't in the city bothered me, but she had said they had put it on holy ground to prevent demonic or familiar tampering.
The map Ceri had sketched had an eerie feeling of familiarity, with an undulating line indicating the dry river and marks showing where old bridges crossed. It looked like Cincy and the Hollows. Why not? Both sides of reality had a circle at Fountain Square.
Turning away, I dug in my pack. "You want a drink?" I said softly as I brought out a bottle, and when he nodded, I handed it over. The crack of the plastic seal shot through me, and Trent froze until he was sure the wind was still blowing and the night was still.
In the ugly red light, his eyes were black when they met mine. "Guess what's on the patch of holy ground they store their samples on?" he said, tapping the map and Ceri's star.
I looked at the map, then past him to the crumbling remains we had yet to venture into. In the nearby distance, glowing in the early moonlight, were spires. Really familiar spires.
"No...," I whispered, tucking a curl back behind an ear. "The basilica?"
The wind ruffled the edges of the map while Trent drank, his throat moving as he downed the water. "What else could it be," he said as he tucked the empty bottle into his sack. The sound of sliding rock jerked him straight, and my pulse pounded.
Trent clicked off his "special light," but there not a hundred feet away in the sickly red haze was a twisted, hunched silhouette - staring at us with arms hanging slack at its sides. Its feet were shod, and leggings rose past the thin shins. An elbow-long cape fluttered in the cold wind. It turned a bare head to the east as if listening, then back to us. Waiting? Testing? Trying to figure out if we were food or foe?
A shudder rippled over me that had nothing to do with the steadily dropping temperature. "Put your map away," I whispered as I eased to my feet. "We need to move."
I thanked God it didn't follow.
This time, I was in front, tension making me almost glide through the ruins as Trent lagged, tripping on sliding rock and swearing when he slipped as he struggled to keep up with my fear-driven pace. We didn't see any more surface demons, but I knew they were there by the occasional rock slide. I didn't question why I found it easier to navigate the sharper shadows that the red moonlight made on the ruins than the natural slump of tree and grass. All I knew was that our presence had been noted and I didn't want to linger.
My first glimpse of the moon shook me, and I tried not to look again after my first, shocked stare. It had become a sickly, red-smeared orb, bloated and hanging over the broken landscape as if in oppression. The moon had always looked silver the few times I had opened my second sight and gazed into the ever-after from the security of my side of the lines. The clear glow of our moon must have been overpowering the red-smeared ugliness I was looking at now. Seeing it with my feet really on alien soil, coated with red like my soul was coated with demon slime, brought to a sharp clarity just how far from home we really were.
We fell in and out of a slow jog as the terrain permitted, traversing the broken, slumping buildings and the occasional line of trees showing where boulevards once were as we went deeper into the remains of concrete and frost-rimmed lampposts, heading for the spires. I started to wonder if the thin, hunched figures that were becoming increasingly bold were elves or witches that hadn't crossed over. Escaped familiars, perhaps? They had auras, but the glow was loose and irregular, like torn clothing. It was as if their auras had been damaged from trying to live in the toxic ever-after.
Worry tightened my brow as we wove through twisted metal that might have once been a bus stop. Was I poisoning myself by being here? And if so, how come Ceri was okay? Was it because she hadn't been allowed to age while a familiar? Or maybe Al had kept her healthy by resetting her DNA to the sample on file? Or maybe she never came up to the surface?