Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(30)

“Keep what, exactly?” Granuaile asked. “What was this all about?”

“Souls. The demon barker wanted to move up in the underworld, and this was his scheme. Make people willingly choose hell and then kill them.”

“But how could they possibly get away with it? I mean, look at all those poor people. Nobody noticed?”

“This was likely the first time they tried it on a large scale. On the heaven side of the tent, they have an imp slapping a memory charm on people as they walk out. Keeps them from searching for their friends when they don’t come out, and when they finally realize they’ve lost their friends, their memories will tell them they couldn’t possibly have lost them here. By the time missing-persons reports actually get filed, the carnival is on its way out of town. The ghouls would have stayed in this chamber and eaten until all the evidence was gone, and you know how it goes—no body, no crime. The mass disappearance would get explained as an alien abduction before somebody suspected a mass murder underground.”

“Well, we’re not just going to leave them all here, are we?”

I surveyed the ruin and shook my head. “No. Their families deserve closure. The elemental can move their bodies to the surface for us when the coast is clear.”

“Okay.” Granuaile returned her attention to the portal. “So if you lifted that cover right now, we could jump into hell?”

“Or something could jump out, yes. And it would drain a lot of power from the earth while it was open. We can destroy it pretty easily, though.”

Binding like to like using the energy of the earth, I fused all the salt crystals so that they lifted from the ground and met above the iron cover, forming a ball. I let it go and it dropped onto the cover. The salt had rested in shallow troughs traced by a finger, so I erased those as well by smoothing out the ground. I checked the circle in the magical spectrum to make sure it was safe before moving the cover. There was no telltale glow of magic anywhere around it, and the cover could be broken down and reabsorbed into the earth.

“Kick the cover a bit for me?” I asked. I doubted I could make it budge in my condition. Binding spells, by comparison, were simple, since they used Amber’s energy, not my own. Granuaile pushed the iron disc a few inches with her foot, and the ground underneath remained satisfyingly solid. The ball of bound salt on top rolled off. Satisfied that the situation couldn’t get any worse, I informed Amber that the portal was destroyed and asked her to create a path to the surface for us. As we watched, the earth itself created a stairway leading up from the base of the nearest wall.

I cast camouflage on all three of us, since appearing dressed in blood in the midst of a carnival might incite some comment. We emerged behind a row of gaming booths, and the stairway closed behind us. We took a moment to reacquaint ourselves with what fresh air smelled like. The voice of the carnie running the milk-bottle booth was taunting new marks.

“Be right back,” I said, and left Granuaile and Oberon to check on the tent, though I couldn’t muster much of a pace. Still, I saw that the hulk at the entrance was gone and that someone had called the police. The exit was manned by officers too, and there was no trace of the little imp girl or the people inside who’d served as the bearded lady, the three-armed man, and so on. The police clearly hadn’t found any bodies yet or they would have been doing more than simply closing the exhibit. Any report the police received would have been for the imp whose neck I’d snapped—a mundane affair as far as they knew. No one who had seen the supernatural had survived except for us. The imps who’d escaped would have to be hunted down as a matter of principle, but they didn’t have the power to reopen a portal by themselves. We could afford time to recuperate and think of how best to proceed.

I returned to Granuaile and Oberon behind the game booths and dissolved our camouflage, since we were alone, and if someone spied us, they wouldn’t see the blood right away in the dark. Granuaile was squatting down and staring at the ground, arms resting on her thighs and hands clasped between her knees. All around us, oblivious carnival goers continued to seek entertainment. The lights and sounds of the midway, bright and alluring before, now grated on my nerves. We couldn’t be amused by those rides anymore. I squatted next to her in the same position.

“I told you once what choosing this life could mean for you personally, but those were just words,” I said. “Now you know.”

Granuaile nodded jerkily. “Yes, I do.” She was trembling all over, coming down from the adrenaline and perhaps entering shock now that the enormity of what had happened was settling in.

“But you did well in there,” I said. “Thanks for the assist.”

“Same to you.” Granuaile’s lip shook and a tear leaked out of her eye. “I didn’t have time to think. My mom could have been in that room.”

“Yes. I’m relieved she wasn’t. Great time to go on a cruise.”

She wiped at her cheek and sniffed. “But somebody’s mom is in there. Probably some people I know too.”

“That’s most likely true. But we couldn’t have saved any more than we did. You do realize that we definitely saved some people tonight by shutting that down? Probably hundreds, or even thousands, if they planned to keep doing this in other places.”

“Yeah. But I can’t feel good about that now. I’m thinking of all those we didn’t save.”