tug for emphasis. I tried to sort through what I was feeling, tried to isolate whatever sense made me reluctant to go up the stairs, but the more I tried to focus on it, the vaguer it became, until I wasn’t sure it wasn’t all my imagination.
“What is it?” Anderson asked when I just stood there.
“It might not mean anything,” I hedged. “But for some reason I didn’t want to go up the stairs. The feeling is gone now.”
I heard a sigh that echoed how I felt. I wished my damn powers would provide blinking neon signs instead of subtle, ephemeral hunches.
“It means something,” Anderson said, and I felt him changing direction and starting down the stairs.
When hunting monsters, even those in human form, the last thing I want to do is go exploring dark basements, but it looked like that was what I was going to have to do.
“I don’t like this,” I muttered.
“Just stay behind me,” was Anderson’s only reply.
During our search, we’d found two doors that opened on stairs leading down. Whether they led to two separate basements, or were two ways to the same basement, was yet to be determined. I didn’t feel any strong preference for one stairway or another, so Anderson and I chose the one closest to us.
There’s nothing quite like looking down pitch-black stairs to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, especially when you’re stupid enough to be descending them into the darkness. We’d been making our way through the rest of the house with the aid of the predawn light that filtered through the various windows, but we would have no such help in the basement. I hated the idea of lighting a beacon to let anyone in visual range know we were coming, but we wouldn’t have much luck finding Konstantin if we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces.
The constant pinging of my nerves was making me punchy, and I almost laughed as I thought that Anderson couldn’t see his hand in front of his face regardless. I swallowed the laugh and tugged my hand out of Anderson’s grip. I was holding the gun in my right hand, and there was no way I was putting it away to get my cell phone out of my pocket. Anderson made a small sound of protest.
“Flashlight app,” I hissed in explanation. I had my phone set to airplane mode so it wouldn’t make any inconvenient sounds that might give us away, but I supposed if I was going to use it as a flashlight, that was a wasted effort.
I worried for a moment that Anderson would try to veto the flashlight, but he had to know fumbling around in the dark wasn’t going to do us any good. With another sigh, he became fully visible again.
“Don’t suppose there’s any point in hiding anymore,” he mumbled under his breath. “Stay behind me anyway.”
It seemed to me like the person with the flashlight should lead the way, but I didn’t think Anderson was going to let me take point. Mutely, I handed him my phone, and he took it without comment. We continued down the stairs.
The light from the phone wasn’t exactly powerful, and the darkness of the basement was oppressive as all hell, even once we made it safely out of the stairwell. The stairs opened onto a somewhat puny gym, with a small collection of free weights and an ancient-looking treadmill. However, I smelled chlorine in the air, and sure enough, when we made it through the gym, the next door opened onto an impressive lap pool. The pool was big enough that my light couldn’t illuminate the far end of it, but when Anderson and I made a circuit of the deck, we still saw no sign of Konstantin. We peeked behind a couple of closed doors that turned out to be changing rooms, and then we found yet another stairway, this one leading even farther down.
How many freaking floors did this mansion have?
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled yet again. This stairway was far narrower than the previous one, the steps nothing more than bare planks. We weren’t going to be finding any fancy exercise equipment down there.
Anderson looked at me, and I shrugged. My instincts weren’t talking to me, and I had no idea whether we should continue down these stairs or go back up to the ground floor and try the other stairway we’d seen up there. We hadn’t