Page 66 of A Breath of Life (Shadowy Solutions #4)

Diem

T he hallway beyond my prison was dank and empty.

The cloying scent of a century-old damp basement stung my nostrils.

Paneled walls with sporadically placed sconces and doors ran in one direction.

The other direction was unlit, quickly vanishing into a black hole after a couple of dozen feet, where the last sconce in line didn’t reach.

A memory stirred. The sconces. I’d seen them before.

A threadbare runner, the color of arterial blood, ran the length of the concrete floor. It, too, tugged at a lost thread buried deep in my brain.

Tallus turned confidently to the right, toward the lit section of the hallway. I assumed he knew where he was going, so I followed.

Around a bend, we came to a concrete staircase.

Tallus took the stairs two at a time, and I hustled up behind him.

As we approached the top, a heavy thud sounded, like someone or something had crashed into it.

The door vibrated on its hinges. Tallus startled and nearly tumbled down the stairs, but I caught him against my chest, stabilizing us with a planted shoe on the next step down.

Another thud, like someone was throwing their body against the door, trying to break it down. “The lock won’t work,” someone yelled. “Help me.”

“I did that.” Tallus grinned over his shoulder. “That was me. I fucked up the reader. Well, Costa did, but whatever. He shouldn’t get all the credit. I helped.”

Another crash. Louder, heavier, stronger. More than one person.

I held Tallus in place. “We can’t go this way. Is there another way out?”

“I don’t know. Joshua’s map was incomplete.”

We didn’t have a choice. More voices erupted beyond the door. Someone shouted to another to shoot the fucking lock. In the distance rose the faint yet familiar wail of sirens.

“Down, Tallus. Hurry.” I tugged his arm.

“What if this is the only way?”

“The police are coming. We’ll hide.”

“We can fight. I’m feeling scrappy. We can take them.” He feigned stabbing the door.

“They have fucking guns, and we have knives. Scrappy or not, you will lose.”

“Costa disarmed the Bishop. We don’t know that anyone else has a—”

Someone shot at the door, and Tallus yelped. “Retreat. They have fucking guns.”

We raced down the stairs and along the hallway in the other direction, past other mechanically locked doors, past the room where I’d been held, and into the unfiltered dark beyond the reach of the sconces .

Behind us, more gunfire sounded before the raised voices of several men told me they had breached the door and were hustling down the stairs.

“Shit,” Tallus squeaked. “They’re after us.”

I didn’t get the sense they were. I suspected the encroaching sirens had alerted them to an imminent police raid, and they needed to flee.

If that was true, then there was an escape route somewhere in the basement.

Running in the dark with no sense of direction proved dangerous.

I collided with a wall before realizing we had met a corner.

A dozen yards down another length of hallway, the floor vanished beneath my foot.

Without warning, I tumbled into the unknown.

My stomach lurched like I’d crested a particularly nasty hill on a roller coaster and plummeted down the other side.

Visions of an endless stairwell jolted my brain.

This was it. I was falling to my death. A concrete slab awaited me at the bottom of this drop, and I would surely crack my skull in two.

I braced for impact.

The fall was short-lived, however, and I landed with a jarring crash, tumbled forward to my hands and knees, skinning my palms, and knocking my head against a wooden obstruction so hard I saw stars.

In the next moment, Tallus landed on top of me with an oof . “Jesus fucking Christ. Are we dead?”

“Almost.” I groaned and got to my feet, helping him stand. Blindly reaching out, my fingers searched the wooden surface, discovering a door. I located the knob, expecting it to be locked.

It wasn’t. When I opened it, a waft of cool, damp air laced with a rich, earthy aroma hit me in the face. The space beyond could have been anything, and I was reluctant to step forward despite the uproar behind us .

I fumbled for the Bishop’s phone. Since it was locked, it wouldn’t allow me access to the flashlight app. I had to continuously hit the power button to bring up the password screen.

It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to see another set of stairs beyond the door. Leading down.

“Oh, fuck me,” Tallus said. “We aren’t going down there.”

Behind us, the men seemed to be occupied. Perhaps they had come to destroy evidence of crimes. Either way, we couldn’t remain motionless. They weren’t on our tail yet, but I suspected it was a matter of time before they headed this way.

“We are. Come on. We have to go fast. Don’t fall.”

The stairwell beyond the door led into an underground where concrete walls hugged a narrow passage leading fuck knew where.

The walls seeped moisture, and when I touched them for balance and guidance, I found the furry slime consistent with moss and mold.

The floor beneath our feet was packed earth.

A sudden vision assaulted my brain, and I remembered the feeling under my shoes on the first night I’d been taken captive. We’d gone this way. The smell. The cold. It was all right there in my memory.

As though confirming my suspicions, the men’s voices drew closer. “Hurry up,” one of them said to a companion.

We went as fast as was feasible down an invisible corridor. Tallus stuck close to my side, fingers tightly fisted around my bicep.

An undetermined distance from the bottom of the stairs, we met another flight, this one going up. I pushed Tallus to go ahead of me. Our pursuers were catching up. Before we ascended, the bright beam of a flashlight appeared at the far end of the passage we’d traversed not a moment ago.

Tallus hustled with more energy than he usually exhibited for anything cardio—particularly stairs. Despite our new office’s location on the second floor of the building, he insisted on taking the elevator. Every. Single. Time.

It might have been adrenaline or fear, but I was more apt to believe it was the drugs racing through his bloodstream. He was amped and getting worse by the minute. I needed to get him to safety before he did something reckless.

Going up in the dark was far easier than going down for some reason. We reached the top and were greeted with a similar door, only this one had a steel plate and padlock threaded through a loop, keeping it shut.

“Shit. Motherfucking shit,” I hissed.

I shone the screen light over the door’s surface, but it was solid.

Tallus grabbed the lock in his fist and yanked with a ridiculous display of force as the tendons at his neck strained.

It would have been comical under normal circumstances.

Who did he think he was? The Hulk? To his surprise—and my own—the lock popped open, and Tallus tumbled against me with the momentum.

“Whoa. Did you see that?” He stared at his hands like they were magical.

“It wasn’t locked.”

“Yes, it was.”

Now wasn’t the time to argue. We got lucky. The end. Before Tallus decided he’d grown magical powers and faced our foes with his bare hands, I took the lock from him and chucked it on the floor before grabbing the doorknob and yanking it open.

A bone-shivering creak sounded, and I cringed.

We didn’t have time to be quiet. I shoved Tallus into the room and stumbled after him.

We landed in a dusty chamber. An exit sign above another door washed the room in an eerie red glow.

Overflowing boxes of battered hymnals, an empty cast iron votive stand, two broken pews, and other religious detritus occupied the small space.

A six-foot-tall bronze cross was balanced in the corner.

The paint that had once vivified the face of a suffering Jesus peeled and flaked with the passing of time.

“Holy shit. We’re in the church,” Tallus said as I closed the door and unsuccessfully searched for a dead bolt.

“Opening the lock was a miracle. A gift from the big guy upstairs. He’s watching out for us, D.

He’s protecting us. Do you feel it? Motherfluffer.

I never wanted to owe god. We’ve never really been friends. Do you think—”

“Shut up, Tallus. You weren’t blessed with superhuman powers. The lock was open. Help me move boxes. I can’t bar the door, and they’re following us.” I dragged the biggest box of hymnals I could get my hands on in front of the door.

Seemingly eager to fulfill the task, Tallus grabbed another and added it to the top, then another and another with the quick, jerky movements of an adrenaline high. The boxes wouldn’t hold long, but it would buy us enough time to get away.

Hopefully.

When he darted off to grab another, I snagged his hand and yanked him toward the glowing exit. “Enough. Come on. We have to find a way out.”

He ran, once again overtaking me, head on a swivel.

The church basement was lit with enough soft light that he shouted with excitement the moment he swept around a corner.

“Here. Here. Stairs. I found stairs.” His wide grin was out of place. It would have been more suited to a carnival or an amusement park, not a race out of a building while being chased by men who wanted to kill us.

Tallus took off like a shot, and I hiss-shouted for him to stay with me .

At the top, we found ourselves in the back wing of a church.

The parish office was on the right, its door open.

The lights were out, and I noted a desk, a filing cabinet, and a shelf of what I guessed to be parish literature inside.

No one was around, quiet as crickets, save for the sounds of men trying to breach the door we’d blocked.

If they didn’t know we were a few steps ahead of them before, they did now.