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35

LA GROTTE

N ick vanished as soon as the car stopped.

He snapped the door release, umbrella out, sunglasses over his eyes, hat and jacket covering most of the rest of his bare skin. He was already across the street at an unnervingly gliding run before the rest of us had even gotten our seatbelts off, much less managed to climb out of the car and go after him.

I watched Nick leave us with what must have been panic on my face.

“It’s all right.” Black laid a brief hand on my arm. “It’s all right, doc. Let him go.”

“But last time––”

“We’re right behind him,” Black cut in warningly.

I hesitated, then nodded.

He was right.

Nick wasn’t stupid. He’d scout ahead. He’d only go forward if it was safe. Otherwise he’d wait for us. He wouldn’t risk Jem. He wouldn’t do anything to risk Jem, so he’d wait for the rest of us to join him. He’d wait until he knew for sure we could stop him.

I hoped.

“Come on, doc,” Black murmured. He squeezed my arm, then released it.

For the first time, it hit me wasn’t using his mind.

I knew why. We were being shielded by infiltrators back in San Francisco, but Black didn’t trust that would be enough.

He thought it might not be enough, not against Jem.

I pushed the thought from my mind. I yanked on the latch of my own door, pushed it open with a booted foot, and climbed out to land on the sidewalk. I’d just adjusted my gun and holster under my jacket, making sure they were tucked away and out of sight, when I spotted a group of four people walking across the road in our direction.

I knew at once they were seers.

They walked like seers, with that strange, animal-like quality that was nothing like how vampires moved, but equally foreign to how most people moved through the world.

I couldn’t help the relief that washed over me when I saw Yarli’s face, and Manny’s next to hers where he held her hand tightly in his.

I walked straight towards them, practically met them in the center of the road.

I noticed only then that they had Luce, one of Black’s human soldiers, with them, along with Pavel and Wendy, both seers who’d been recruited from the refugees of Old Earth. All three of them had been part of the team Black sent out to finish erasing any sign of seers and seer tech in labs and governments throughout the world.

It wasn’t the entire team, of course; it wasn’t even a quarter of that team. Presumably, the rest of them were out there, still doing their job.

“We saw them go in,” Yarli said at once.

“And Nick, just now,” Manny added calmly.

Black, who’d joined us, nodded. He glanced at Ace, who pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and began texting.

I assumed he was telling Nick what Yarli just told us.

I wanted to hug Yarli, and Manny, and Luce, for that matter… and even Pavel and Wendy, who I didn’t know very well… but now wasn’t the time.

As if to emphasize that point, horns blared at us where we blocked part of the street. Jax, A.J., and a few others held up hands peacefully to the honking cars, but we’d already started to get out of their way. We walked quickly, moving in the same direction Nick had gone.

A tall white fence with warning signs all over it blocked our view of the hill.

Alisha had just sent all of our phones a map of the area, including the visitor center and small gift shop for the national archeological park, and the blocked off opening to the cave.

I took a screenshot as soon as I got the notification and opened it up. I stared down at the map long enough for my photographic seer’s memory to kick in and record every part I thought we might need.

Then I closed my phone and shoved it in the back pocket of my jeans.

I already knew they’d gone inside the cave.

It didn’t occur to me until later to question how I’d known that, or why I’d been so sure.

None of us spoke as we passed through the gate at one end of the white fence.

A heavy padlock lay on the dirt just inside, the metal cut in a violent tear, even though the bar had to be nearly an inch thick. Somehow I doubted it had been Nick who’d done that; I wondered if it had been Dalejem, or if it had been broken like that before he got here, too.

Our group remained unnervingly silent.

A few people clapped Yarli and Manny on the shoulders, or touched their hands or arms in hello. Manny and Yarli did the same in return, as did Luce and the two other seers.

But no one really spoke.

The silence felt heavier now, like it contained and carried a lot more.

I glanced at signs pointing up the walkway that led to the visitor center.

The asphalt path rose gently towards a higher point on the base of the rocky mountain, shaded by a small forest of trees. It wove leisurely in looping switchbacks, past displays detailing the history of the caves, finds by the excavation teams, images of what the valley looked like during various Ice Ages and between them, timelines of the evolutions of homo sapiens, drawings of local predators and prey.

We were walking fast.

Everyone had a hand on a weapon.

That sick feeling I’d had in the car hadn’t lessened.

It had gotten worse.

My anxiety grew more intense the longer we walked, the closer I got to the top of that sloping walkway. Rather than slowing me down, it pushed my legs faster. My fingers clenched around the handle of my gun on one side, curling tightly into a fist on the other. My mouth felt dry and locked shut around my teeth and tongue.

I was sweating, but it wasn’t hot.

I glanced around at the others and saw expressions on their faces and in their eyes that seemed to mirror what I felt. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I didn’t want to know why we all seemed to sense the same thing ahead.

Whatever it was, none of us seemed happy to meet it.

We reached the top before I’d found my way around those thoughts and feelings.

My lungs heaved, but I wasn’t tired. I definitely wasn’t out of breath in the usual way.

I glanced at Black, and found him watching me, a taut look on his face as he looked me over. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought he wanted to send me back to the car. He didn’t say anything, though, and a few seconds later, he looked away.

The next time I looked at him, he was checking his gun’s magazine, then the gun itself.

We paused when we got to the top.

Alisha scanned quickly for alarms at the front of the building.

“Nothing,” she pronounced.

She pointed to a door to our right, painted blue and surrounded by flower beds on either side, filled with blooming tulips and rose bushes.

“With no one here, the most direct way to the tunnels is through the gift shop,” she said, manipulating a virtual key where it hovered over her tablet. “The archeologists had a different way in, of course… from a parking lot on the other side. But that’s the side that caved in. There’s no way to get through there now.”

Jax and Kiko cupped their hands on the glass, looking inside the building.

“It’s empty,” Kiko commented.

“It’s clean,” Alisha told us a few seconds later. “No signals are leaving here at all. It looks like they had a basic alarm set-up at one point, meaning just a loud bell, not connected to anything else… but even that must’ve been disconnected, or it would be going off.”

She motioned towards the door.

I noticed then that it stood partly open.

None of us were surprised.

The handle on the door had been broken, as had part of the wooden frame, which was splinted along the white-painted edge. It looked like it had been kicked in. Again, I doubted it had been Nick who’d done that.

This place had been left open, waiting for us.

Waiting for Nick.

Possibly even waiting for Jem and the girl.

Jax walked up to the door first. He pushed in the wooden panel, and held it open while the rest of us filed in ahead of him.

We walked through the small gift store decorated with various rocks and tiny pick axes and stuffed animals and postcards and books and keychains, and into a small museum filled with interactive exhibits. A plastic neanderthal-looking man crouched in one corner, frozen in place where he appeared to be sharpening a wooden spear.

The door behind the museum counter also had a broken handle, although a spring lock kept it closed.

Mika opened that one, and we all filed through ahead of her and Ace. We found ourselves in a long, tunnel-like hallway with a white-painted arch at the end. Beyond that, all I could see were rough walls made of dripping rock.

We all got inside, and the door swung closed.

Everything was dark.

It went really, really dark––darker than any moonless night above ground.

Before I could pull out my phone and mess with the flashlight app, sparks rose in front of me in two places, then in two more places behind me. Those strange, greenish-blue torches the seers used ignited the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cave-like tunnel. I didn’t know much about how they worked, but I knew they used organic tech, like the headsets. The Old Earth seers called them yisso, or sometimes, organic torches.

They lit up every face and every section of the tunnel around me.

Everyone’s faces turned discolored and sickly, but I could see everything in surprising detail, down to a segment of cave wall that had been mounted and labeled on the tunnel wall.

The white-painted arch stood starkly visible up ahead, now writhing with green and blue, fire-like trails from the torches as we approached.

Black went through first, with me close behind.

We only walked maybe six more yards, when a metal walkway, like a small suspension bridge, appeared out of the pitch black.

I followed the light as Jax and Luce walked up on either side of us. They kept going until they’d ventured to the very edge of the rock floor.

They swung the torches in wide arcs in front and to each side, giving us glimpses of the much larger cave’s dimensions. To our right, the walls were too far away for us to make them out in any detail. Minerals glinted where the torches caused them to reflect green and blue light, and I saw what looked like a pool of water on the deepest part of the floor.

On the other side, the wall was close, jagged, covered in stalactites and stalagmites. It dripped with water and different-colored minerals where it hung over the narrow, metal bridge. The dry parts shimmering with more minerals, and I saw…

“Wait,” I whispered. “Stop there.”

Jax obediently halted the path of his torch.

Painted animals that looked like deer and horses roamed over the cave walls, running up them in an angle like they could fly. I sucked in a light gasp, following the progression with my eyes, seeing handprints and more symbols I didn’t understand.

“Cave paintings,” Kiko whispered from next to me, equally awed.

“We’ll look at them later,” Black grumbled.

He didn’t sound angry, more amused.

Black walked onto the metal bridge in front of us, holding the hand rails on either side. He stepped carefully at first, likely trying to minimize noise, then walked with more confidence. When he was maybe ten feet out over the cave floor, he looked back.

“It’s fine,” he said, voice low. “Sturdy.”

I nodded and followed him.

He’d let go of the railings by then, so I didn’t try to grab them, either. I’m not sure I could have reached both sides, anyway; the walkway was narrow, but had room enough for two people to walk comfortably side-by-side, even if both people were relatively large.

The bridge made whispering squeaks and groans, even with all of us walking as softly and quietly as we could.

Of course, it probably didn’t matter.

There was a good chance whoever and whatever lay ahead, it knew we were coming. If nothing else, depending on the dimensions of the cave, and the exact acoustics, they might have heard us talking to one another by the arch, or they might’ve seen the torchlight already.

The walkway curved gently to the right after we’d walked another twenty or so feet.

I continued to glimpse details on the walls. Quiet drips of water and more slime-covered rock formations followed us as we ventured deeper. More paintings and handprints, and small brown and black figures that looked like depictions of humans, also appeared once we’d walked around that first curve on the catwalk.

A second curve took us to the left.

A third curve took us back to the right.

A large rock formation swelled out over the bridge on the right side that time, and for the first time, we were hemmed in by the mountain on both sides.

That’s when I first heard it.

It sounded like… scuffling. Heavy breathing.

“Jax!” Black growled.

His voice sounded shockingly loud after so much silence.

Jax leapt forward to where Black continued to lead us.

I watched as the smaller seer swept the torch in arcs on both sides, and then over the mesh, metal floor. My eyes followed the torch’s path. That’s when I realized, the walls might have curved in towards us on either side, but we were still at least twenty feet above the ground, and probably closer to thirty, maybe even thirty-five.

I heard Black curse in rough Prexci.

I looked up at him, then followed his eyes back down.

He stood on the opposite side of the metal platform, and now the torches all pointed in the same direction. I sucked in a breath when I saw the view below the walkway.

Nick and his sire, Brick, were struggling near the rock wall.

Both had fangs out, eyes red.

Brick had blood on his mouth and running down his pale neck.

If Nick was injured, I couldn’t tell from the view of his black coat from behind, but he wasn’t moving like he’d been hurt.

My eyes scanned over the area near to them.

Jem was sprawled, half on his back on the ground, holding his throat, blood seeping between his fingers as he gasped. That had been one of the sounds we’d heard. The girl stood just in front of him, her hands clenched in fists, eyes wide as she watched the fight between Nick and his sire. She looked like she was trying to decide when and how to jump into the fray.

“Jesus,” Jax breathed next to me.

But my eyes saw jerking movement then, and I turned to my left.

Black had climbed over the railing. He now stood perched on the other side, gripping the metal with the very edge of his boots.

“Wait… NO!”

I lunged for him, but he’d already let go.