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Chapter One Hundred Eighteen

LUNA

The door leads directly to a stairway down.

“Do you hear that?” I ask at the bottom, taking his hand.

He stops and listens for what’s scaring the shit out of me. The squeal of brakes, or the whistle of wind through a narrow opening, or the screech of birds.

“Screams,” he says, looking at the ceiling.

“Weird screams.”

“Hunger.”

We listen, and now I remember that sound. I heard it in the liminal. It’s starving vampires.

Then they’re gone.

“Vibes are so off,” I mutter as he walks cautiously down the hall.

I expected a maze built to confuse knife thieves.

What I get is warrens made for people to do secret business.

Utilitarian spaces that have lost their utility.

Blank places with details hinting at forgotten history.

Rooms that whisper purpose and shout emptiness.

They are ends in themselves, disproving the maze theory—doorless dead ends with no way in or out.

“What are you looking at?” I ask him in a dusty room with a single desk and child-sized chairs circling a low table.

“You look beautiful.”

“I’ve never worn orange in my life. I feel like a perp.” There are no exits from this room. Dead end. We go back into the hall. It slopes gently down. “That’s short for ‘perpetrator,’ like someone who did a crime.”

He peers into the last room before the end of the hall. “You didn’t invent slang, darling.”

The slope gets less gentle, turning into more of a ramp.

The hall ends in a T. Two choices. We look right and left. One slopes down, one slopes up, but there’s no sign that says, THIS WAY TO THE KNIFE.

The screams start again.

I shudder. “They’re far, right?”

“I think so.” He swallows, looking behind him, then ahead. “This is deeper than I thought.”

His hand isn’t just cool, but slick with sweat. I didn’t know he even had a functioning sweat gland.

“And there’s more.” I tap my heel. There’s a metal floor grate where the halls meet. “I don’t know what could be down there.”

I point my light on the grate, but what light the darkness doesn’t eat is just shining on dull gray stone. It either goes on forever or my light is dying.

“We should keep going.” I start moving, but he’s frozen in place. “Are you okay?”

“It’s fine.”

It’s not. He’s checking both ways as if crossing the street.

I shine the light right, and it’s just hallway into darkness. I shine it left and it’s the same except for the hundred toothpicks poking my palm. There’s a possibility that the valence I’m feeling isn’t the knife, but we have nothing else to go on.

“This way.” I point at the down-sloping hall.

Carmine draws an arrow in the dust on the wall, then follows.

After an hour, he’s still drawing arrows, thankfully, but he’s also looking up and behind us more often, breathing as if he’s nervous.

The starved screams don’t get any louder or softer. They’re everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We don’t talk about them. We know where we’ve heard them before. The bridge vampires can’t be here. It’s not possible.

At another T, there’s another grate. I shut out the screams, put my back to the end of the hall, and hold my hands out in each direction, waiting for the tiniest pinprick from either side. He checks cobwebs at the tops of the walls as if something is coming from above.

“This way,” I say.

“Down again.”

“Yeah. Why do you keep looking at the ceiling?” I ask.

“I never told you how I was made.”

“No. You never did.”

“I will.” He stops and backs against the wall. “Not now.”

“But it’s freaking you out.”

He smiles, then pinches sweat off his upper lip. “It’s better to have you here. I was with a Strega then too.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t know it at the time, but the way she smelled in that sewer, like sweet pastries…” He drifts into silence, eyes on my neck. “Your scarf.”

“It was strangling me. You had to rip it off, remember?”

That’s when we hear the tap-tap-tap . The air moves.

A voice echoes down the upward side of the T, saying, “Uh! Uh! Uh!”

Carmine gets in front of me. He’s shaking. I grip his jacket.

“What is it?” I say into his shoulder, shining my light into the dark hall.

Nothing appears, but the tap-tap-tap s get closer.

“Footsteps, maybe.”

“Ruh! Ruh! Ruh!” says the voice.

“Who could it be?”

“My love , I don’t have a lot of power left,” Carmine says. “You need to be ready to fight. I don’t know what I’ll be able?—”

“Ruh! Ruh! Run!” Laro comes into the light at a full gallop. The screams of hunger rise in a wave. “Run!”

No more words are necessary. We both turn and run.