Going back to the Krog tunnel in the darkness had given me the shakes—I kept imagining Transomnia or werewolves or whatevers were going to jump out at us at every moment. But Cinnamon just swaggered through, all the way from the well at Wylie down through the sewer tunnels, tail switching, long, clawed hands at the ready. But when I pried open the door to the stairwell, even she quailed.
“Wheeew—stinks, I won’t lie to ya,” she said, turning her head, though for me the garbage we’d just crawled over coming out of the well had smelled ten times worse. “Rot and rats and weres and… vamps and… other things.” She stared back into the darkness, and then looked at me. Her irises had widened to huge, eerie ovals, making her seem alien—but her voice was still Cinnamon. “Not too late to find out you’re a were-chicken, is it?”
“And you?”
“I’m a weretiger,” she said proudly. “I soaks bullets up like sugah. Not scared of nuthin. But if you chicken out, naturally I’d go with ya— like, to protect you, o’course.”
“O’course,” I said, turning on my Brinkman five-cell. “Lets—”
She reached out with her impossibly long, clawed fingers and snapped the flashlight off. “Save the bats on your club,” she said. “Your eyes will adjust. Just stay behind me, K?”
“K,” I said in resignation, following her down into the dark.
In the blackness, the journey down the stairwell was even scarier than it had been with Spleen and his yellow fluorescent. The cinderblock shaft faded into the darkness until it was just a rough presence around us, a grimy touch that occasionally brushed my shoulder as I bumped down the narrow switchbacks.
“For the love, keep quiet,” she hissed. “Clumping like a cow.”
I pulled out my cell phone and thumbed the screen twice, creating a ghostly nightlight that gave me enough to see the floor. She was right, my eyes were adjusting, but there was just no light at all here for me to pick up. Finally we got to the bottom of the stairs and exited into the wider, vaulted tunnel where Spleen had first taken me to see Wulf.
“Great,” Cinnamon said sarcastically. “Doesn’t think to mention I’ll hafta track through water. By the way, could you tattoo my name on my pet jellyfish? Thanks.”
“Don’t think so,” I said, shining the light around. “They only have one outer cell layer.”
“Zactly,” she said.
I stared at her. “That’s pretty smart for an illiterate uneducated werecat.”
“One of the house weres is a librarian,” she said. “She’s been sneaking me audiobooks.”
“Fast,” I said.
“Whatever. You looking for that?”
She pointed, and I turned to see the boat. “Yes. We’ll take it to the landing where I last saw Wulf—and then you take over.”
“Okay, DaKOta,” she said, in the same singsong voice, but quieter than normal. She kept looking around the tunnel abruptly, twitching her nose and tail, as if she was hearing things. When I asked, she shrugged it off. “Just night noises. Fuck! Let’s get this over with.”
We boarded the boat, and I rowed us awkwardly out into the tunnels. I’d forgotten how much a maze they were. We had to go through at least half a dozen turns, each tunnel getting smaller and narrower and older. Glowing phosphorescent mold curved over the walls, and occasional runes provided weak light, but it was very difficult to see. Every once in a while a surge of air washed back over us, confusing Cinnamon’s nose until she admitted she was completely turned around. I was growing more and more confused myself—my memory of the waymarks Spleen had used grew fuzzier until I started to fear we were lost.
“It’s the fucking House of Leaves down here,” I said, flashing my light into the bottom of the boat like Cinnamon taught me, so the beam wouldn’t kill our night vision.
“What?” she asked, eyes tracing over the ancient masonry.
“Sorry,” I said. “I doubt that one’s coming to audiobook.”
“Whatever. This shit supposed to be from the Civil War?” Cinnamon said. “No ways they built all this just for the fucking Civil War. It was over in, like, five years—”
“Don’t know much about history,” I said, “but maybe they built it after that.”
“Shit this old?” she said. “You believes that?”
“I have no fucking idea,” I replied. “I just think we’re lost—”
And then the tunnel abruptly widened up, into a vast, dungeonlike vault built from huge, rough-hewn blocks of stone. Only now could I see that Cinnamon was right: No way was this Civil War