from Persephone was hard. I guess I hadn't realized how comforting her presence had been. I could have used some of that comfort as I stood in front of the iron grill and tried to squint into the darkness beyond. I couldn't see anything except the indistinct shape of a huge dark room. The basement of the creepy unfortunately-not-abandoned building. Great. Heath is down there, I reminded myself, grabbed the edge of the grill, and pulled. It opened easily, which I took to be evidence of how often it must be used. Again, great. The basement was not as awful as I'd imagined it would be. Stripes of weak light filtered between the barred, ground-level win dows and I could clearly see that homeless people must have been using the room. Actually, there was a lot of stuff left from them: big boxes, dirty blankets, even a shopping cart (Who knows how they managed to get that down there?). But, weirdly, not one homeless person was present. It was like a homeless ghost town, which was doubly weird when I considered the weather. Wouldn't tonight be the perfect night to retreat to the comparative warmth and shelter of this basement, versus trying to find someplace warm and dry on the streets or smush into the Y? And it had been snowing for days. So, realistically, this room should be packed with the people who had brought the boxes and stuff down here to begin with. Of course if scary undead creatures had been using the base ment the desertion of the homeless folks made much more sense. Don't think about it. Find the drainage grate and then find Heath.
The grate wasn't hard to find. I just headed for the darkest, nastiest corner of the room, and there was a metal grate on the floor. Yep. Right in the corner. On the floor. Never, in a gazillion years would I have ever even considered touching the disgusting thing, let along lifting it and going down there. Naturally, that's what I had to do. The grate lifted as easily as the outside "barrier" had opened, telling me (again) that I wasn't the only person/fledgling/human/ creature who had come this way recently. There was an iron lad der thing that I had to climb down, probably about ten feet. Then I dropped to the floor of the tunnel. And that's exactly what it was--a big, damp sewer tunnel. Oh, and it was dark, too. Really dark. I stood there for a while letting my night vision accustom itself to the dense darkness, but I couldn't just stand there for very long. The need to find Heath was like an itch beneath my skin. It goaded me on. "Keep to the right," I whispered. Then I shut up because even that little sound echoed around me. I turned to the right and started to walk as quickly as I was able. Heath had been telling the truth. There were lots of tunnels. They split off over and over again, reminding me of worm holes burrowed into the ground. At first I saw more evidence that homeless people had been down here, too. But after a few right-hand turns, the boxes and scattered trash and blankets stopped. There was nothing but damp and dark. The tunnels had gone from being smooth and round and as civilized as I imagined well-made tunnels could be to absolute crap. The sides of the walls looked like they had been gouged out by very drunk Tolkien dwarfs (again, I am aware that I'm a dork). It was cold, too, but I didn't really feel it.
I kept to the right, hoping that Heath had known what he was talking about. I thought about stopping long enough to concen trate on his blood so that I could hook into our Imprint again, but the urgency I felt wouldn't let me stop. I. Had. To. Find. Heath. I smelled them before I heard the hissing and rustling and actu ally saw them. It was that musty, old, wrong scent I'd noticed every time I'd seen one of them at the wall. I realized it was the smell of death, and then wondered how I didn't recognize it earlier. Then the darkness that I'd become so accustomed to gave way to a faint, flickering light. I stopped to focus myself. You can do this, Z. You've been Chosen by your Goddess. You kicked vampyre ghost ass. This is something you can definitely handle.