the amulet, and the silver pentacle began to glow with a gentle, blue-white light. “Yeah. The Manhattan Project was run out of the tunnels here until they moved it to the Southwest. Plus the town kept sinking into the swamp for a hundred and fifty years. There are whole buildings sunk right into the ground. The Mob dug places during Prohibition. People built bomb shelters during the fifties and sixties. And other things have added more, plus gateways back and forth to the spirit world.”
“Other things?” Murphy asked, gun steady on the darkness below. “Like what?”
“Things,” I said, staring down at the patient, lightless murk of Undertown. “Anything that doesn’t like sunlight or company. Vampires, ghouls, some of the nastier faeries, obviously. Once, I fought this wacko who kept summoning up fungus demons.”
“Are you stalling?” Murphy asked.
“Maybe I am.” I sighed. “I’ve been down there a few times. Never been good.”
“How you wanna do this?”
“Like we did the vampire lair. Let me go first with the shield. Something jumps out at us, I’ll drop and hold it off until you kill it.”
Murphy nodded soberly. I swallowed a lump of fear out of my throat. It settled into my stomach like a nugget of ice. I prepared my shield, and the same color light as emanated from my pentacle surrounded it, drizzling heatless blue-white sparks in an irregular stream. I prepared myself to use my blasting rod if I had to, and started down the stairs, following the tracking spell toward Georgia.
The old brick stairs ended at a rough stone slope into the earth. Water ran down the walls and in rivulets down the sides of the tunnel. We went forward, through an old building that might have been a schoolhouse, judging by the rotted piles of wood and a single old slate chalkboard fallen from one wall. The floor was tilted to one side. The next section of tunnel was full of freezing, dirty, knee-deep water until it sloped up out of the water, went round a corner where the walls had been cut by rough tools, and then opened into a wider chamber.
It was a low-ceilinged cave—low for me, any way. Most folks wouldn’t have been troubled. Three feet from the doorway, the floor dropped away into silent, black water that stretched out beyond the reach of my blue wizard light. Murphy stepped up next to me, and the light on her gun sent a silver spear of white light out over the water.
There, on a slab of stone that rose up no more than an inch or two from the water’s surface, lay Georgia.
Murphy’s light played over her. Georgia was a tall woman—in high-enough heels, she could have looked me in the eye. She’d been stork-skinny and frizzy haired when I met her. The years in between had softened her lines and brought out a natural confidence and intelligence that made her an extraordinarily attractive, if not precisely beautiful, woman. She was naked, laid on her back with her arms crossed over her chest in repose, funeral-style. She took slow breaths. Her skin was discolored from the cold, her lips tinged blue.
“Georgia?” I called, feeling like a dummy. But I didn’t know of any other way to see if she was awake. She didn’t stir.
“What now?” Murphy asked. “You go get her while I cover you?”
I shook my head. “Can’t be as easy as it looks.”
“Why not?”
“Because it never is.” I bowed my head for a moment, pressed my fingertips lightly to my forehead, between my eyebrows, and concentrated on bringing up my Sight.
One of the things common to all wizards is the Sight. Call it a sixth sense, a third eye, whatever you please; around the world everyone with enough magic has the Sight. It lets you actually see the forces of energy at work in the world around you—life, death, magic, what have you. It isn’t always easy to understand what I see, and sometimes it isn’t pretty—and anything a wizard views with his Sight is there, in Technicolor, never fading—forever.
That’s why you have to be careful what you choose to Look at. I don’t like doing it, ever. You never know what it is you’ll See.
But when it came to finding out what kinds of magic might be between Georgia and me, I didn’t have many options. I opened my Sight and Looked out over the water to Georgia.
The water was shot through with slithery tendrils of greenish light—a spell of some kind, just under