We walked around the corner from the passage of death and Curtis opened what probably passed as the front door of the structure by waving his staff and calling out another phrase. Beck insisted on throwing in a few pebbles to make sure the floor really existed before we chanced our hides down a steeply sloped dark tunnel. Bella lit the way with a globe of light drifting several feet above our heads. From the outside, the pyramid looked absolutely monstrous. Each stone slab underpinning the structure stood about a story tall and probably took a team of mutant elephants to pull it into its assigned slot. Or maybe they'd done it with magic. From the inside, the place felt cramped even though the tunnel was easily wide enough for two semi-trucks to drive side-by-side.
Our steps echoed down the long sloping corridor, accompanied by the occasional clatter of pebbles as Beck picked them up and tossed them ahead.
"You really don't need to do that," Curtis said. "Pokito is a master of illusion. He's using a reveal spell to make sure we don't blunder into anything."
Beck took a long look at the small, thin sorcerer who, to this point, hadn't uttered a word. "Fine with me, dude. But if I fall into a pit of acid, I'm gonna be pissed."
I almost smiled at the thought.
A creepy, dreadful sound interrupted my amusement. The sound I'd heard my first night in the dead city above. The sound of whispers, as if a crowd of invisible people waited ahead down the corridor and were speaking in hushed tones. Elyssa shuddered. I felt every individual hair on my neck stand up straight in an attempt to pluck itself from my skin and run for the hills. Beck took some pebbles and threw them into the pitch black ahead. Their scattered flight made no difference. If anything, the susurrus seemed to gain volume. Or maybe we were just getting closer to the source.
The walls of the tunnel ended with hardly a warning and Bella's light was just a bright stain in what felt like a yawning void all around us. I looked back to the tunnel mouth. Ahead, I could see nothing but tight-set stone slabs on the floor. A thin layer of dust and debris lay on them, disturbed only by a few scuffs here and there. Elyssa knelt next to one of the scuffs and motioned Beck over. I approached uninvited to see what was so marvelous.
"Hard-soled shoes." Elyssa traced a black mark. "Maybe dress shoes."
"Who'd be lurking down here in nice shoes?" Fausta said.
I thought back to the shadow people and wondered if one of them had left the mark. "The shadow people who attacked me in the city had on clothes and shoes. I assume they'd leave marks like anyone else." But thinking back on my close encounter, I remembered only the tattered remains of rotted clothes hanging from their sallow frames. I hadn't exactly focused on their footwear.
"There are other marks," Fausta said, looking to the sides and pointing at very slight scuffs in the dust. "Whatever made those marks wasn't putting a lot of weight on the ground."
"I suggest we follow this trail," Curtis said, kneeling down and examining the marks.
"If this is anything like those muddy footprints up top, they'll probably lead us into a death trap," I said. "Maybe we're better off not following them."
Curtis pursed his lips and nodded, as if deliberating internally. "You could be right. I'm going to send up a flare to give us a better idea what to expect. Then we can make a decision."
The whispers continued around us, unabated. I shuddered, almost certain what lurked in the pitch beyond. I gave Curtis a nod. He whirled his staff above his head in a couple of tight circles before slamming it down and shouting a word. A dim pellet of light streaked upward, hardly bright enough to see, much less illuminate our surroundings. I'd just lost sight of it when a loud boom echoed and brilliant white light blossomed into fiery display about a hundred feet over our heads.
This dude totally thought he was Gandalf.
Whispers turned to screeches as the light caught darkly shimmering figures unaware. Dozens of shadow people blurred away into the edge of darkness, black smoke roiling from their skin where the light hit it. Their sounds of inhuman agony scraped my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. One of the creatures must have been hiding right at the edge of Bella's light. It had the form and shape of a woman with long, distended fingers, blackened and clawed, only inches away from where Elyssa had squatted to peer at the scuff marks. If she'd moved a hair more, that thing might have gotten her.
The intense onslaught of light froze the shadow woman in place like a current of electricity. The light burned away the shadow in a brilliant light show, sucking smoky tendrils from her body while her mouth remained locked in a rictus of agony. The scream was unbearable. I pressed both hands to my ears in a desperate attempt to block off the wall of sound. Her ragged cry cut off. The black wisps of shadow were gone, leaving only pale skin and rotted clothing behind. The woman's eyes locked onto mine. Her gaze seemed to soften. Maybe because her pain was gone. Maybe her humanity returned. I didn't have time to figure it out before her eyes glazed over, as if a gray mist had infected them from the inside, and she slumped to the floor in a lifeless heap.
I was the first one to approach her. My fingers probed for a pulse, but her skin felt ice cold and hard. When I pressed beneath the curve of her chin, the flesh cracked like sunbaked leather and flaked away. I jerked my hand back.
"She's dead." Nobody else said a word, not even Beck, as Curtis's flare began to dwindle and flicker to nothing overhead. I suddenly knew what I'd seen in that woman's eyes. I'd seen it before when I'd saved Stacey from hellhounds. I'd seen it when Elyssa had woken from her near death experience at the hands of vamplings. She hadn't been relieved because the pain was gone. She hadn't been afraid. This woman had been grateful. Thankful. For her, the long nightmare was over.
For us, it was just beginning.
"It—what—she?" Beck's mouth stopped moving. His eyes never left the corpse. Other fissures joined the first along the dead woman's pale skin, like cracks and veins in a marble statue.
"Fascinating," Curtis whispered in a low voice. "I didn't realize they could be killed."
"Killed?" Bella said in an incredulous voice. "I wasn't even sure they were real.""You didn't believe me?" I said, a hard edge to my voice.
"It isn't that, dear. I simply thought they were ghosts or shades, not corporeal."
"I don't suppose anyone took a look around while the flare was going, did they?" Elyssa asked, her eyes meeting mine and lingering with a questioning gaze that had nothing to do with the question she'd just asked.
Headshakes all around met her query. I couldn't blame anyone. The death of the shadow woman had been pretty hard to ignore. On the upside, we knew it was possible to kill the things, but you obviously had to catch them in enough bright light to freeze them. Those at the edges could still escape.
Curtis sighed and checked his staff. "That's not an easy spell. Give me a minute to recharge."
"I might be able to do it," Alejandro said.
"Yours isn't quite as good," Curtis replied. "Better let me do it."
Alejandro's eyes hardened, but he didn't argue the point.
Curtis's minute turned to five before he gave it another go. This time, the light was noticeably weaker and didn't last as long. It also didn't catch a single specter. Those things were smart. Or maybe they just had an acute animal instinct. In any case, I had a feeling they'd attack at some point and it wouldn't be pretty. But as long as Bella kept the lights on we had nothing to worry about, right?
I didn't feel reassured.
"At least the whispers stopped," Beck said.
It was true. I hadn't heard another whisper since the first flare.
Everyone gazed into the vast space Curtis's flare had lit. Massive square columns vanished into the darkness above. Somewhere up there, they probably supported the base of the pyramid. The sloped tunnel had brought us further underground than I'd realized, and I couldn't help but think about the Gothic school Maximus's vampires had converted into a barracks back in Atlanta. I remembered the crypt where they'd kept my father locked away and the horde of rotting vamplings. I wasn't sure which was worse—vamplings or these shadow people. At least I didn't have to put up with the awful stench here.
Despite our concerted scans, nobody spotted the other side of the room or another door for that matter. We talked in nervous, hushed tones for a moment before arriving at a consensus to simply move straight ahead.
"Maybe we should get a few more able bodies," I said before we embarked into the unknown. "It probably wouldn't take more than thirty minutes to run back up the ramp and snag a few from the picnic."
Curtis gave me a look involving pursed lips and a crinkled brow, clearly conveying his opinion on the matter. "I think we have things covered," he said. "Anyone else would just get in the way."
I mustered a confident look of my own and said, "I don't think the entire population of the town would get in the way in this massive place."
"We're good," Beck said, pshawing and shouldering past me.
I looked at Bella. She shrugged. "I am fine with what everyone else decides."
Alejandro, who'd been a bit sulky since Curtis's dismissal of his flare abilities shook his head. "Too long. We want to be finished while it's still daylight."
Elyssa gazed back at the tunnel mouth, now barely visible at the edge of the light from Bella's wand, but said nothing.
Fausta merely shrugged.
Pokito, who until this point still hadn't said a thing, opened his mouth, apparently thought better of imparting any mind-blowing wisdom, and closed his mouth again.
"Fine, just a thought," I said. I really didn't know what else to say. These people were older and more experienced than I was so maybe it'd be better just to let them lead away.
Curtis pointed to Bella. "We've got light." He pointed to Pokito. "He'll warn us of any illusory traps." He jabbed a thumb against his chest. "And I've had training as a battle mage."