Bewitched (Betwixt & Between #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,17

the right designer, it would make a fantastic mass grave. Or a dungeon for a serial-killer. Or even a summer lair for Shelob. Moving the light off Ruthie, I bounced it around the cave. “Does this lead somewhere?”

Her slippers silent on the dirt floor, she drifted toward me.

“Have you ever been down this deep?”

She scanned the cavern. “Defiance, until a few days ago, those stairs ended at the basement.”

I stilled. Considered how my day was going. Backed up and planted my foot on the last step. The vines, the six-month stint in suspended animation, the fact that my dead grandmother was alive again I could handle. But stairs that magically appeared overnight and led to a cave underneath a house I’d just inherited from a witch? Nope.

“This was not here,” she continued, oblivious to my mental breakdown that would be talked about for generations to come. “At least not that I know of.”

I backed up another step. It creaked beneath my foot.

“I think it leads all the way to the waterfront. Do you hear the waves?”

And one more for good measure.

Like Ruthie had suddenly caught some of the fear I’d been projecting, she turned toward me. “Defiance, yes, go back upstairs. Hurry.”

She did not have to tell me twice. I turned and flew up the stairs, stumbling and scraping my shins more than once, until I got to the very top. Only then did I realize I was lost. And dying. I hadn’t done cardio in months, and that was before my sabbatical snooze.

My breath wheezed in and out as I tried several of the doors, pushing as hard as I could to get in. None of them would open. Probably a good thing. Knowing someone could sneak into my room at night was disturbing as Dante’s hell.

At the end of a very long hall, I came to yet another set of stairs that led up, but I was already on the top floor. The second floor. So how did that work?

I reconstructed Percy from memory. The main section was round with six black gables that formed a circle. The front door, and the bay windows on either side, faced the street. Another section, square but just as stunning, was attached on the right, shorter when one considered the gables. Did Percy have an attic above to even out the dungeon below?

I turned on my flashlight and took the stairs slowly, because . . . that cardio thing, as the steps shrunk and narrowed more than the rest. They groaned and squeaked under my weight, ripping up my self-esteem and handing it back in the form of one huge-ass complex. Twenty stairs later, I emerged inside a round, windowless room with the same salty shiplap and wood floor.

Gazing up, I turned full circle. A high, pointed ceiling topped the room that coned down to meet six doors. They were evenly spaced, creating a perfect ring around the common area. The distressed wood had seen better days, and the floor creaked when I walked across it, but it was solid like the rest of Percy.

The doors were rather small, as though meant for a child. I tried each one of the vintage doorknobs, all of them locked. The keyholes proved it would take a skeleton key to open them, which I did not have. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland,” I said to absolutely no one.

I tried again, this time using a different technique. After checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was looking, I lifted a hand and drew a symbol on the door closest to me.

Light burst out of the lines I’d drawn, radiating bright and hot.

Pressing my hand to the door, I pushed that light past it and into the room and scanned the area with a searching energy. At first, all it found was a vast nothingness. Far too vast to simply be a room.

Then something scratched. Scratched my energy. Scratched me.

I pulled the energy back, but the thing’s claws sank in. It buried its teeth and wouldn’t let go. My eyes flew open as I tried to pry my hand off the door. It wouldn’t let me. Keeping me glued to the spot, it catapulted toward me. A darkness, cold and angry. I felt it rocket through space like a cannon. I struggled to free my hand, and it let go without warning a microsecond before it slammed into the door.

I stumbled back, tripping on my own feet, and covered my face with my