Proof of Life (The Potentate of Atlanta #4) - Hailey Edwards Page 0,91
They didn’t have a handy-dandy shadow to taste the magic and report back like me.
Moments later, Ambrose returned and waved me deeper into the building.
Normally, he would have stabbed me in the brain to share his findings. “What is it?”
Again, I doubted myself. I had almost—no, I had killed myself, temporarily, to gain entrance. For what?
Placing his palm on the wall, he glanced back to make sure I took the hint.
“You want me to touch it.” I did as he instructed. “Okay, now what?”
A frisson of power sped through my hand where it touched the wall, and it rippled, wavered, as if I had dipped my fingers into a still pond and disturbed its surface. “What is it?”
An elegant shrug rolled through Ambrose’s shoulders.
That was helpful. “Any idea why I can’t see through it?”
He spread his hands wide.
“They know I have the sight,” I realized. “This is like the glamour Liz used at the clinic.”
For them to switch it up, I must have proven myself too adept at locating their safe houses and allies.
Frak.
Maybe I should have been a smidgen less competent.
“For what it cost me, I’d hoped to get more use out of it.”
Ambrose made an encompassing gesture, a question, and waited to see what I would decide.
“We don’t have much choice,” I told him. “We can’t go in blind.” I stood back. “Strip it down.”
Rubbing his hands together, Ambrose did that. He punched his hand through the illusion and yanked it out in curling ribbons he slurped like spaghetti noodles. The bond between us hummed as he filled his stomach, and the excess spilled over into me, better than a shot of espresso.
The illusion shattered into a million points of light that blinded, and the insidious whisper that I was in the wrong place, that I had come to the wrong conclusion, evaporated along with it.
“That was one heck of a compulsion.” I rubbed my forehead as my thoughts finished clearing. “It didn’t hook me, exactly, but not for lack of trying.”
Given more exposure, I would have bent to its will, decided I was wrong, and left without looking back.
The space hidden behind the false wall gobsmacked me, and my jaw scraped the poured concrete floor. Except, it wasn’t concrete, or a floor at all. It was a yawning maw that stretched from corner to corner, a good twenty feet across, and this was the cusp.
“Goddess,” I breathed, then wished I hadn’t sucked in the sulfurous mist lapping across my ankles.
A staircase made of oxidized metal spiraled down, down, down until it vanished from sight. It touched on multiple floors, allowing residents stairwell access. Hundreds of individual doorways nestled in tidy rows like apartments. Their chiseled stone façades reminded me of the Lycian tombs of Turkey.
The sentiment pulled me up short.
Tombs.
“What the frakking hell is that?” I turned to Ambrose. “Can you tell if anyone is home?”
The shadow gave a definitive nod, and knowing coven milled below us gave me the willies.
Mostly because I couldn’t see them.
“Bring the others.” I stood watch at the rim. “We’ll need all the backup we can get.”
Ambrose zipped past me, on his way to Midas, the only one who could see him to decipher the message.
Pulling out my phone, I snapped a dozen photos and forwarded them to Bishop.
This was not good. This was so very not good. This surpassed the realm of super not good.
The coven had an underground city with the capacity to hold hundreds of families by my count.
Had they built it? Had they slaughtered its original inhabitants and claimed it? Or had they done worse?
A vibration in my palm had me checking my phone for updates.
>>Get out of there.
>We’re closing in on Liz.
>>Check the first picture.
I did as he said, and I almost swallowed my tongue. I stumbled back, smack into Midas. “Run.”
“What?” Scanning the area, he settled his focus back on me. “What’s wrong?”
“Run.” I took his hand and dragged him. “Ford, get her out of here.”
Scooping up Lisbeth, which cost him seconds, he ran after us. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”
“Get in the truck.” I shoved Midas in, climbed onto his lap, and slammed the door behind me. “We need to go now, now, now.”
Ford jogged to his side, dumped Lisbeth onto the bench seat, then hopped in and cranked the engine.
Heart a frozen lump in my throat, I waited a good ten or fifteen miles for it to thaw.
“What happened?” Midas pulled me close. “What did you see?”