Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(64)
I look back over my shoulder. The stairs behind us are empty except for the Jaa’yaalóolii Dine’é doorman. And he’s staring right back at me, eyes cold and calculating, all of his earlier timidity vanished like it never was. Shivers ripple down my spine and my instincts whisper threat. I was expecting the Shalimar to be strange. I wasn’t quite expecting it to be full of monsters.
I turn back to Kai, lean in close to talk. “So this medicine on my eyes cuts through illusions?” I ask.
“Yes. Normal ears are the illusion.”
“The monsters hiding in plain sight,” I murmur. And here we are, walking right into their den.
We reach the bottom of the stairs. I squint into the darkness before us, the colored lights offering only a hazy illumination of the depths beyond. The music still thumps deafeningly. My stomach roils. Suddenly, going in there feels like the wrong thing to do. I stop Kai, hand on his arm.
“What are we walking into, Kai?”
Kai doesn’t respond, already absorbed by something in the darkness I can’t see.
“Kai.”
He comes back to me. Blinks slowly a few times. “Just remember to keep an open mind. And don’t be surprised if you see some strange stuff. It’s going to get weird.”
“Weird” doesn’t quite do the Shalimar justice.
Logic tells me we are underground. I know we came through the doors, walked down the steps. We have to be at least twenty or thirty feet below ground. But the ceiling of the Shalimar stretches far into the dark of a starry desert sky at least a hundred feet above my head. The logic-defying ceiling should make the place feel expansive, but instead it feels claustrophobic, and I can’t shake the knowledge that we are deep below the surface.
We’re in a long warehouse-like room that stretches for probably a hundred yards into the distance. I can’t see clearly where it ends, just a hazy suggestion of a far wall. The space isn’t nearly as wide as it is long. The whole place is maybe half as long across, and the walls are painted to resemble the courtyard of the motor inn from upstairs, circa 1950. But it’s all two-dimensional, like the cutouts of a Hollywood set—there’s a fake lime-colored motel room complete with fake door that doesn’t actually open, and next to it an equally fake diner interior with red vinyl barstools and neon jukebox, with paintings of smiling girls in bouffants and poodle cuts on the walls. All flat and strangely disconcerting. Long tables, the white plastic kind my nalí used to buy at Walmart, are set up around the perimeter of the club, and stationed behind every third or fourth one is a bartender doing a brisk business in agave tequila and cactus beer. In between the bar stations, merchants have set up tables filled with various goods and are shouting over the ever-present thumping bass music, hawking their wares with enthusiasm. I see everything for sale. Old dissected electronics, their guts spread across the tables in wires and motherboards. Piles of clothing, much of it looking like it’s used or handmade. There’s a table of weapons, most of them knives or things sharpened to act like knives, but I also see a locked case against the wall that holds firearms. They’re arrayed on a glass shelf and next to them are magazines of ammunition. Just to the right of the weapons dealer is a young woman selling cedar bundles and leaf-wrapped tobacco, and farther down from there I see a kid offering dented cans of Campbell’s soup and pinto beans, stacked high in pyramids, behind a hand-scrawled sign that says ALL TRADES WELCOME.
But it’s not the black-market shopping or the physics-defying dimensions and otherworldly atmosphere that makes me glad my guns are within reach. It’s the customers.
With Kai’s medicine on my eyes, the children of Dinétah, stripped of all illusions, become the stuff of dreams. Or nightmares.
Many of the clans I recognize. Ats’oos Dine’é, the Feather People, are easy to spot, their feathered bodies covered in the grays, browns, and whites of hawks. Others have more elaborate plumage, showing reds and yellows and blues. All have a third eyelid that moves horizontally across staring eyes. By the bar sit two Big Deer People, huge three-point antlers rising from their heads. They wear wide buckskin skirts and their feet peek out from underneath, dainty black hooves. A man wearing a patchwork fur coat and rummaging through a pile of random car parts can only be Rabbit clan, the ears and oversize teeth unmistakable.
A couple cross in front of us, drinks in hand. They’re robed in elaborate costumes, the woman sheathed in a pale pink dress covered in rhinestones and towering stiletto heels. The man has on a white zoot suit like something out of an old gangster film. Where they could have found such clothes, I have no idea, but considering the clothes Clive came up with for Kai and me, I shouldn’t be surprised. But it’s not what they are wearing that has me gawking. Both the man and woman are skeleton gaunt, their skin stretched too tight over bones, cheekbones jutting forward obscenely. Their hair is lank, their bodies so thin their fancy clothes hang off their withered frames.
“Dichin Dine’é,” Kai says when he sees me staring. “Hunger People.”
Kai guides me toward a long kidney-shaped bar. A few patrons, mostly women but a few men, too, stare as he passes. I can see their eyes taking in his handsome face and assessing the wealth in jewelry he’s wearing. He doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does, he ignores it well. I move a little closer to him, rest my hand on the hilt of my knife until the avaricious eyes catch me watching and turn away.