The Myth Hunters

“What the hell—” Oliver began in a whisper.

Kitsune grabbed the front of the jacket Larch had given him to replace his parka and hauled him along behind her once again.

Working her way out from behind the bar and then through the crowd, Jenny paused at the top of the steps that led down into the nightclub, making sure that they were following. But she didn’t wait for them. She went down the stairs. The band was blasting out an old Glenn Miller song, but there was a sitar player bopping along with the horns. At the bottom of the steps, Jenny turned hard left and made a beeline for a door that swung wide as she approached, disgorging a waiter with a tray that was loaded with plates of steaming food.

Jenny never reached that door. Instead, she stopped at another, on her left, that looked as though it doubled back underneath the bar. Oliver thought it was odd that he hadn’t noticed the door, like it wasn’t even there until Jenny reached for it. She glanced at them again and then disappeared through that heavy door made of wooden planks and iron bands.

“Wait, wait,” Oliver whispered, fighting the temptation to look around to see if they were being watched. “How do we know this isn’t some kind of trap?”

Kitsune’s upper lip curled back in a silent scowl.

Chastened, he said nothing more and strode with her to that door. When Kitsune opened it, he preceded her into the gloom beyond.

CHAPTER 15

As the door closed behind them Oliver felt the icy draft of Frost passing by and shoved his hands in his pockets, wishing for the warmth of Kitsune’s fur. The club had been so bright that it took his eyes a few moments to adjust, after which he saw that they were in a long, downward-sloping corridor. A bare bulb hung forty feet or so along, where it was clear the hall diverted to the left.

Backlit by that distant light, Jenny Greenteeth faced them in the corridor. For the first time, Oliver noticed how brutal her hands looked, with long talons and pale, translucent webs between her fingers. For a moment he was frightened of her. And then she spoke, and her voice was so heartbreakingly sincere he could no longer fear her.

“Kit, love, what am I supposed to do with you?”

“You might begin with a hug,” Kitsune replied archly.

Jenny shook her head, relief seeming to overwhelm her anxiety, and wrapped her arms around Kitsune, fingers plunging into the fur of her cloak. Oliver felt a strange pang of jealousy that made absolutely no sense at all. He was focused on getting home, on trying to repair the life he’d left behind, on easing Julianna’s worries. Or he should have been.

“I’d heard you were dead, Jen.”

The water boggart, Borderkind like Kitsune, smiled slyly as she stepped back from the hug. “Wishful thinking on someone’s part. I haven’t left the neighborhood. If the Hunters want me, they know where to find me.”

“They will come eventually,” Kitsune said. “No Borderkind are going to be spared. They’re killing Selkies. What is more harmless than that? But they’ve been slaughtered just the same.”

All the pleasure left Jenny’s features. “I know. There are a lot of us trying right now to identify all of the Hunters that have been sent out, and to figure out who’s behind it all. Officially, both Kingdoms deny any knowledge of the Hunt. Unofficially, we’ve heard from the inside that the kings are clueless, that neither of them ordered this.”

“Nor do they care, am I right?”

Jenny nodded, and the Borderkind shared a moment of kindred revulsion.

“What’s happened with you? What are you doing here? Did you have a plan?”

Oliver felt like a spectator. Neither of them really noted his presence with more than a momentary glance. But this was a reunion of friends, and he was willing to hold his tongue.

Kitsune smiled. “The Wild Hunt were after me again. The real thing, not these Myth Hunters.”

“Herne is such a prick,” Jenny spat.

“Oh, he’s getting a taste of his own medicine now, I’d think. While they were after me, the Myth Hunters went after them. The Manticore, I’d guess, from the smell, and some others as well.”

Manticore. Now there was a monster with whose legend Oliver was familiar. Just the word conjured images that raised gooseflesh on his arms.

“So, they actually saved you from Herne and his hounds?” Jenny asked, incredulous.

“Not purposefully, you can be assured. I was simply not their target that day. I wandered the woods awhile afterward and then found Frost and Oliver, and now, well, we’re all in trouble, aren’t we?”

At the mention of his name, both of the women looked at Oliver. Kitsune smiled, but Jenny appraised him doubtfully.

“All of this fuss over you?” she said, and then rolled her eyes. “Well, at least it distracts them from the Borderkind for a while.” Jenny glanced around and then frowned, baring her fangs. “Where is Frost, anyway?”

“Here,” came the voice of the winter man.

Jenny shivered as though his tone chilled her more than his presence. She turned and all three of them saw the eddy of wind and snow that constructed itself into a familiar face, a form of shadow and ice.

Frost stared at Jenny Greenteeth as though he was not quite sure if he could trust her. Kitsune had been so quick to do so that Oliver felt ashamed by how easily he had gone along with that.

“The Grindylow told Kitsune many Borderkind had gone underground. We must speak to them immediately, those that we can reach. And we must find a Mazikeen. I owe a debt to Oliver, whom you’ve just met, and it must be repaid quickly— for his own sake and for ours. And I would discover what is being done about the Hunters.”

Jenny smiled and executed a formal bow. “At your service, my lord Frost. When Grin said underground, he meant it literally. And Amelia’s has always opened its arms to the lost and the fugitive. Just down this way.”

She pushed past him and led the way down that corridor, which had wood and masonry and slabs of granite in its structure. At the hanging lightbulb— which gave off enough heat to mist the air around it when Frost passed by— Jenny took that left turn.

Oliver paused and would not continue, staring back up the way they’d come at the door.

“What is it?” Kitsune asked, suddenly closer to him than he’d realized, her breath warm on his neck.

“Isn’t this a little conspicuous?” he asked. “I mean, the whole club could have seen us come in here. If this is where the Borderkind are hiding out, it isn’t exactly safe, is it?”

Frost glanced at Jenny, icicle hair swaying, crackling, mist rising from his eyes. “There are Mazikeen here, yes?”

She nodded.

The winter man turned back to Oliver. “They are sorcerers. If this is where they have chosen to hide, they will have put a glamour on the door. No one will see it unless they know what it is they are looking for.”

Oliver remembered that he hadn’t noticed the door until Jenny had pulled it open. He was not entirely convinced, but if Frost wasn’t worried, he supposed he had to have faith.

They continued downward, the corridor turning yet again and the walls becoming more rough-hewn as they descended. If his sense of direction was functioning, he thought they’d come back to a point where they were directly beneath the nightclub stage, though they must be quite deep, for there was not even the most distant whisper of music. And still Jenny Greenteeth led them on. Another hundred yards or so and they reached a new door, this one entirely cast from iron, with the sort of wheel latch that Oliver had seen on submarines in old movies. Jenny opened it, waited for them all to pass through, then closed it tightly behind them.

On the other side was the sewer. The stink hit Oliver immediately and his stomach lurched. He pulled the collar of his shirt up and covered his nose and mouth, but made no complaint. This was the way they were going. Whining about it would accomplish nothing.

Light filtered in through gratings a hundred feet or more above. The walls were stone and every fifty feet was a complex archway, complete with decorative stone carvings and statuary. Oliver was both amused and impressed that anyone would make such an effort to build elegance into the sewer system. It looked like ancient Rome down there in those vast tunnels, echoing with dripping water. There were walkways on either side, and in the center a river of diluted filth.

Dry wings fluttered in the shadowed eaves where the light from the gratings did not reach. Oliver peered into the darkness but could see nothing. The stench of the place had him disoriented, though he kept his face covered and breathed through his mouth. As they walked through the sewers, he thought of the catacombs beneath Paris that he had always wanted to visit but never found the time.

Jenny Greenteeth led them along the gently curving tunnel, all of them careful to keep to the walkway above the effluent waste burbling below. For long minutes they followed her, turning several times into estuaries that led off beneath other neighborhoods. Oliver thought that in reality they had not come far at all from Amelia’s, but it seemed an eternity to him down there, nearly suffocated in stink.

When Kitsune paused in front of him he nearly collided with her and imagined the two of them careening off into the sewage. She clutched his arm to steady him and only then did he see what had made her stop. Less than a minute before they had crossed a narrow iron walkway above the trickling river and then turned into a right-hand tunnel that was significantly smaller than the cavernous and elegant hall they’d traveled to that point. The ceiling was perhaps fifteen feet high, with shafts up to much smaller gratings at ground level far above, and there was much less light. The noises that came from the darkness seemed not those of rats or other vermin, but of the shifting shadows themselves.

Jenny had paused, but at first Oliver did not see the door. He realized that like the one in the club, the Mazikeen must have enchanted it, for when she reached out to knock softly on the echoing metal, it resolved itself in his vision. At the edge of the stone ledge perched Frost like a spider carved from ice, his hair strangely jagged, daggers instead of icicles. He stood as though prepared to lunge at the door.

They waited. Oliver’s stomach roiled as though it might finally revolt at the stench. There was no sound from the other side of the door. When a response came, it was not from that iron entry, but from the shadows above them.

“Who goes there?” a gruff voice asked, thick with an accent of the Far East and punctuated with a snicker.

Frost twisted toward the voice with such speed that he seemed to slice the air. Kitsune bared her teeth but did not dare try to catch a scent in the sewer; Oliver had not thought of it, but knew the stink must be agony for her.

“Gong Gong, love, there’s no time for games,” Jenny said, brow creased in annoyance. “Enough rubbish. We’ve kin here, in trouble and on the run. They need our help and soon enough we’re sure to need theirs.”

Another rasping snicker drifted from the darkness, followed by the sudden beating of wings, and a shadow drifted down from the others. The creature was reptilian, its hide black as crude oil, with tassels of gray beard upon its chin and a tuft of silver hair on the crown of its head. It had a narrow body, almost serpentine if not for the four limbs with their deadly-looking talons and the charcoal wings jutting from its back. Its eyes were as gray as thunderheads, and sparked as if those clouds were pregnant with lightning.

Gong Gong was a dragon.

Three feet high.

At the end of its tail was a puff of hair the same silver as that of its head, not unlike a well-groomed poodle.

Oliver chuckled. Even through the shirt over his mouth, the sound was audible.

It snarled at him. “Kin? That’s human.”

Jenny moved to defend him but Kitsune was already there, sliding between Oliver and Gong Gong, her fur cloak brushing against him. “Our fate is ’twined, Black Dragon of Storms. He is not kin, but still we’re bound.”

Frost pointed a sharp finger at the little creature and a swirl of chill wind brushed through the tassels of his beard. “Waste not a moment more, cousin. The enemy’s clock ticks away the minutes until our end.”

Gong Gong sneered at Oliver, glaring up at him with those lightning-flecked eyes. “Monkey,” he muttered, then marched to the iron door and scraped a talon across it, tapping so softly Oliver could not make out the rhythm.

It scraped heavily open, and a sudden gust of icy air swept out into the sewer. Frost shuddered at its touch and stood back a moment, letting it caress him. A smile touched his razored lips.

Gong Gong and Jenny went in first and Kitsune followed. Oliver waited on Frost, concerned that something might be wrong with him. But then the winter man nodded to urge him forward.

“Black Dragon of Storms?” Oliver asked in a whisper.

The winter man’s blue-white eyes narrowed. “That was foolish, what you did. Never take the unfamiliar lightly, no matter how it appears. Heed that advice, or your life will be forfeit the next time. You were lucky.”

Oliver blinked. “Lucky?” he whispered. “He’s three feet tall.”

Frost glared at him. “He is not always so small.”

The winter man went through the door and for a moment Oliver forgot that he was alone in the sewer tunnel. Then the shadows seemed to whisper again and he took a quick, anxious glance around before hurrying after Frost. Once he was on the other side, the door swung shut of its own accord.

More Mazikeen magic, he thought. And what does that mean, the little shit’s not always so small? How big could he get? He wondered what it meant to be the Black Dragon of Storms, what kind of power that entailed, and decided he would heed Frost’s advice and do his best not to piss Gong Gong off any further.

Beyond the door was a platform and then a circular stairwell of the same iron, descending downward. Gong Gong’s wings made a sandpaper rasp as he took flight, eschewing the stairs and gliding down ahead of them instead. Jenny and Kitsune followed, though the fox glanced back to check on him, which lent Oliver some comfort. Frost paused and stared a moment at the iron door they had come through.