Isobel, sweat soaked and panting, turned her face towards me, and she smirked and said, “Hello there, little voyeur. Want to come out and play? I’ll share.”
There was blood leaking from her nostrils.
“Play with us, Quinn.”
And my stomach rumbled.
Suddenly, all those candles flared in unison, and the room grew much, much brighter. Painfully bright to my eyes. I instinctively shut them, but not before I saw the shadow looming over the twins and Hera Snow, the shadow of something both voracious and infinitely impatient. Yeah, I shut my eyes, but not before I saw it, and not before it saw me.
Bring me back, I prayed to Charlee with two e’s. Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing back there, you fucking make it stop and bring me back, right fucking now.
Not yet, he replied. I apologize, but we’re not finished yet.
There’s more.
What was. What is. What’s coming.
What might come.
The garret room broke apart around me, the world collapsing into splinters and shards, spilling me ass over tits back into the void. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and down the goddamn rabbit hole with you, Quinn Alice.
For a time, there was nothing at all.
Nothing.
That was nice. I’d have gladly spent several eternities drifting in that limbo, if it meant I’d be spared any more visions of the twins’ depravity.
But you know what they say about all good things.
I heard the mutterings of ghouls.
And I smelled incense—myrrh, vetiver, frankincense, turmeric—cloying smoke from smoldering braziers.
And once again I found myself in some subterranean place, but not the narrow tunnels hollowed out beneath Mount Auburn. This was somewhere cavernous, a veritable goddamn underground cathedral stretching away on all sides, its ceiling so far overhead not even my fancy undead eyes could find any trace of it.
I’m in the belly of the world.
No, whispered Charlee. But you’re in its maw.
I was crouched on my knees, my clothing in rags, the clothes I’d taken off the girl in City Hall Park only hours before. My hands and face were bleeding from dozens of fine cuts, paper cuts, razor cuts. My magical mystery tour was taking a toll on more than just my mind.
When I breathed, my breath fogged.
Before me was a wide dais carved from rough ebony stone shot through with veins of scarlet crystal. There must have been two or three hundred ghouls crowded into the cavern, a grunting, restless mass of muscle and fur, all of them jostling for a spot nearer the edge of the dais. They snarled and spat curses in their guttural excuse for a language. Here and there, skirmishes broke out. I saw one big silverback motherfucker, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, pop the skull of a scrawny ghoul who’d shoved him—inadvertently, I think. I mean, the brute just literally popped the little guy’s head in his hands. Then he licked his gnarled fingers clean of brain and gore and went back to watching the dais. They were, all of them, waiting on something. And I supposed that Charlee and B had seen to it that I was waiting, too. There was another dustup, not ten feet from me, and it ended in a spray of blood and the victor dancing with a garland of intestines draped merrily about his shoulders.
In the three long years since my untimely death, I’d smelled a lot of rancid shit, but nothing that quite compared to that gathering. I didn’t care what B’s boy had said; judging from the funk, I was lodged firmly in the world’s goddamn descending colon.
Where is she, B? Where’s Selwyn in all this?
Patience, kitten.
The twins appeared on the dais—just appeared—and, as they say, sports fans, the crowd went wild. A howl rose up from the throat of every ghoul in the place, and you didn’t have to be wise in the ways of the hounds to know it was a joyful noise. The crowd surged forward, and I heard bones crack. Bodies were crushed to pulp against the sides of the black dais, and talons scratched desperately at the edges of the stone. But not one of the ghouls tried to climb up onto it. They wouldn’t dare. There were rules here, and the price for breaking them would, I suspected, be worse than being squashed and trampled to death.