Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(35)

Stefan’s basement was very deep. I bet if I checked the original plans, this house didn’t come with a basement like this. I moved and something cylindrical that felt uncannily familiar rolled under my feet and followed the rest of the mess down to the floor. Maybe it was a cane or something else that felt like the walking stick. I was distracted from that by a high, whistling cry that hurt my ears, followed by a thundering crash from above, as if a body the size of a VW had fallen into something.

Beside me, at about the right place for the bottom of the stairway, I heard a sharp snapping sound that reminded me of the cracking of an ice floe on a Montana river in spring. The sound echoed throughout the house with an impact that hit my bones with a physical blow. Then the bookcase I stood on fell over, with me on top of it.

I scrambled over a mess of books and other things on the floor and bumped around until I found something to hide beneath and quit moving. My shelter might have been a low table or a high bench.

“Mercy?” Adam called out from above.

When I looked up toward where the doorway should be, I saw nothing. I’d known the light from above couldn’t illuminate the basement. I hadn’t realized that meant I couldn’t see the light from upstairs.

“Mercy?” Adam called a second time.

I didn’t want to answer him. My movement to my current location had been camouflaged by what I had to assume was the sound of the destruction of the stairway. If whatever called the darkness was also blinded by it, I didn’t want to make a sound and reveal my hiding place.

Too close to me, no more than ten feet away, something screamed, the sound starting in a register that I’d bet a normal human couldn’t hear—above the note a dog whistle makes—and then rattling down the octaves until my skin tried to crawl off my body.

Toward the end of the scream, I felt a very quiet click—and the basement was flooded with light. Adam and the goblin king, both battered and bleeding, stood where the top of the stairs should have been. I was right: I was in a large room, a library, roughly the size of the living room and kitchen above, but there was a hallway that led off to other rooms.

The stairs—or what I presumed to have been the stairs—looked like a pile of overgrown matchsticks that had been left under a sprinkler during a heavy frost. Or like the Fortress of Solitude from the old Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. All of that I took in peripherally, because first, I looked where the scream had come from.

A sturdy Stickley library chair had been pulled directly in front of the stair landing, which was still mostly intact, if white with frost. Crouched in it was a . . . well, a woman, I suppose. She was the same drowned-body color of the spider above, but her flesh looked too-soft rather than armor-hard, like the skin of a balloon that has been inflated too long.

She was thinner than a living human could have been, with pale gray hair that hung around her in long braids with small black beads woven into them. Her hands were abnormally long-fingered and black tipped—and she had six fingers on each hand.

Her eyes were solid black. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at—me, Adam and the goblin king, or Daniel, who was sitting on the ground directly between her and me. Maybe none of us or all.

In front of her, attached to the newel posts of the broken staircase as well as the wall behind her and the arms and legs of her chair, was a web woven in ice. Her lips twisted in an ugly smile as she reached out one finger to touch her web.

I could feel the magic form into something coherent as her finger neared the thread of her weaving. Out of time to plan or consider my actions, I simply bolted right through Daniel. I leaped into the middle of the web, and her finger touched me instead of it.



* * *



—

The snow covered the tops of my knees as the bitter cold slid down my lungs and tried to freeze my nostrils together. The tips of my ears and my fingers burned with the cold.

It was too bad I had somehow shed my coyote self. The fur would have done me a lot of good. As it was, my snow-covered feet and calves were significantly warmer than the rest of my naked body.

I stood in a vast empty field of snow. It was tilted just a little, like high mountain meadows sometimes are. On three sides, at a distance that was too far for me to see clearly, were great dark fir trees. I didn’t want to turn around to see the fourth direction.

I did, of course.

My bare toes touched the edge of a precipice over a deep hole as black as the snow I stood in was white.

“Be careful,” said Daniel, and I turned to see that he was standing beside me, leaning forward over the empty space.

He stretched out an arm toward the darkness, then turned to me and said, “Hic sunt dracones.”

Latin, I thought, not Italian. It took me a second and then I realized why the words were familiar.

I said it out loud. “Here there be dragons.”

He nodded. “Hic sunt leones.”

“Here there be . . . lions?” I said.

He nodded again. He spread his arms out, as if he were a great bird preparing for flight. His fingertips brushed my shoulder.

I took a slow step back. And then another.

“Hic sunt—” Arms still outstretched, as if he was planning on jumping, Daniel gave me a sad smile, then turned from me to face the chasm of darkness. In Stefan’s voice, he said, “—wolves.”

“Stefan?” I whispered, but my fear of the empty black was too much. I wanted to move toward him, but I took a third step away instead, forgetting that, in places like this, geography doesn’t follow the rules.