“We’ve all got our crazy, huh?” she said, smirking at him. “Me, I don’t know where the magic comes from. My grandma taught me. She came over from China right after World War II. I’ve got a brother and sister, but she picked me to teach, and it didn’t matter how much I argued, I knew she was right. Just like she was right about leaving China, because I’m not sure she or the pearl or anything she knew would have survived the Cultural Revolution. When the vampire handed me that slip of paper, I just knew. I don’t know what kinds of magic you’re used to. This is just my family’s magic and it’s been around for a long time.”
“The Chinese practice ancestor worship,” Cormac said. But I was pretty sure it was Amelia this time. Her words, her phrasing.
“No—we honor our ancestors. That’s different. Just who the hell are you?”
Cormac nodded into the darkness. “What’s in there?”
Glaring at him, Grace said, “This thing she wants, you can’t just put it in a safe or a bank deposit box. So you make a door to someplace else. That’s what this is.”
“That’s not encouraging,” I said.
“At least we probably won’t get attacked by mercenary werewolves here,” Ben said.
Grace looked at us. “She wasn’t kidding. There really is someone after the pearl.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Night’s not getting any younger,” Cormac said, and walked through the doorway.
The rest of us finally followed, and Grace closed the door behind us. On the back side of the door hung a length of paper showing several Chinese characters painted in broad ink strokes.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
“It’s a blessing,” Grace said. “To protect whoever passes through the doorway.”
“‘Abandon every hope, ye that enter…’” Ben murmured. I elbowed
him.
I couldn’t see much, even with a werewolf’s eyes, so I tried to scent danger. But I didn’t know what I was smelling for. The air here didn’t smell exactly wrong. But it didn’t smell quite right. Decades of incense saturated the brick walls. The place was still, but it didn’t seem empty.
A set of wooden stairs, worn shiny by years of traffic, led down. Anastasia waited about ten steps along.
“You decided to join me?” she said. Her face emerged, illuminated by Grace’s candle, pale and shadowed.
“We have to keep moving,” Grace said. “Come on.”
“How far is it?” Anastasia said, letting the young woman into the lead.
“It’s still a ways.” Grace went on, holding up her lantern, a sphere of light.
Ben, Cormac, and I, the pack of three, stuck together behind the others. About twenty steps further, the stairs finally reached a packed dirt floor.
Ben said to Cormac in a low voice, “When she said ‘a door to someplace else,’ what exactly did she mean?”
“Like Odysseus Grant’s box,” I said. Odysseus Grant was a Las Vegas stage magician. Except that he was also really a magician, and he had a box of vanishing that was actually a doorway. I’d caught a glimpse of where it led to—a dank, musty swamp full of strange smells and things that slithered. I had no interest in exploring that place further.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Ben muttered.
This wasn’t that place, but the principle seemed the same, which was enough to make me nervous. I felt eyes staring at me, but couldn’t guess from where.
I had to fill the silence. “Grace, these tunnels— I thought they were just an urban legend.”
Ahead, her voice muffled by the brick walls surrounding us, she said, “It’s just that not many people know how to find them.”
We came to an intersection. Grace turned left, and we followed. Then came another set of stairs down, only four steps this time, and another intersection. We turned right. I wondered if I ought to be leaving bread crumbs.
Grace stopped at another wooden doorway, gray and weathered even though by all appearances it had always been indoors. This door had another scroll nailed to it, a yellowed length of paper with more Chinese characters painted in a column. Another blessing for protection? Or a warning? Grace set the lantern on the floor, took another key out of her courier bag, and unlocked the lock.