Karen Chance: Embrace the Night

The older ghost preened slightly. "We see everything that goes on around here. The things I could tell—"

"So, if there were hidden passageways, you'd know?" I asked, as Pritkin found my wrist. A moment later, the map was snatched out of my hand. "Still not leaving," I told him.

"Oh. You're after the thing, aren't you?" the younger ghost asked.

I decided not to wrestle Pritkin for the map, which wouldn't be dignified. It also wouldn't work. "What thing?"

"The thing with the thing." He waved a negligent hand. I was starting to suspect that if you died stoned, your ghost stayed that way.

"Could you be a little more specific?" Before he could answer, there was a strange sound from outside, a dim, high-pitched whine. I felt a hand on my back, viciously shoving me to the ground. Then Pritkin was on top of me, crushing me into a fetal position while things exploded and rained fire all around us.

Red and violet spots danced behind my tightly clenched lids for several long moments. There were minute tremors in the ground, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, and my skin prickled with leftover energy. When I cautiously opened my eyes, I saw starlight seeping in from a gaping hole in the roof and clouds of disintegrated stone in the air.

Pritkin was on his feet again, firing at the mages, who fired back, gunshots echoing off the high, close-packed monuments like firecrackers. Most of the time I thought he was a little too quick to opt for the shoot-it-and-hope-it-dies solution. Other times, like when someone was trying to make a colander out of my head, it seemed okay.

"Over there," the younger ghost offered, pointing to the right. "Come on." He slouched off, ignoring a nearby snaky pathway in favor of a shortcut across the tombstone-littered grounds.

"One of the ghosts knows where the passage is!" I told Pritkin. He looked surprised and I scowled. Just because I didn't know seven ways to kill a guy with my elbow didn't make me completely useless.

He looked like he was about to argue about the wisdom of trusting random spirits, or possibly my sanity. But the mages accidentally did me a favor by sending a spell that exploded with a massive crack against a nearby chestnut tree. The burning trunk fell over, taking half the crypt with it. Luckily, it wasn't our half.

"Come on, then!" Pritkin yelled, grabbing me by the hand and starting off, as if this had been his idea all along.

"This way!" I dragged him after the ghost as a fresh haze of bullets rattled off the rubble behind us.

I found it hard going: the soggy soil sucked at my shoes with every step and the rain made it almost impossible to keep the flickering, pale image of our guide in sight. But Pritkin, damn him, slipped through the granite obstacle course like he'd laid it out himself. "How are you doing that?" I demanded the fourth time I knocked a knee into a very hard tombstone.

"Doing what?"

"You can see!" I accused.

"Here." I felt a hand against my cheek for a split second, and Pritkin mumbled something. I blinked, and suddenly everything had a weird, flat, grainy look to it, like bad TV reception. Leaf shadows moved over his face as a gust of wind shook a tree, spattering drops of rain on us, and I could just make out the edges of that familiar scowl.

"Why didn't you do that before?" I demanded.

"I thought you were leaving before!"

"Do you two want this or not?" the ghost asked, hands on insubstantial hips. He'd stopped in front of the image of a bored-looking woman leaning on a tombstone. Enough moss had grown over her granite gown that it was practically green. Green and slimy, I discovered, after the ghost directed me to tap her knee three times. Nothing happened.

"Now what?"

"You have to say the magic word."

"Please!"

He laughed. "No, I mean a real magic word. To get the statue to move out of the way."

A spell exploded in the branches of an overhanging oak and a bunch of burning leaves dropped around me, threatening to set my hair alight. "What is it?!"

"Don't know." The ghost shrugged negligently. "It's not like I need it."

"What's the problem?" Pritkin demanded, sending his whole arsenal of animated weapons at the advancing line of dark shapes. His knives swooped and danced, striking sparks off their shields with every pass, but it didn't look like they were slowing our pursuers down much.

"The ghost doesn't know the password!"

Pritkin shot me his best edge-of-murder glare and muttered one of his weird British swear words. I don't think it was the open sesame, but the spell he cast with his next breath worked almost as well. The statue split straight down the middle to reveal a gaping cavern.

Inside was as dark as a well, just a black hole silhouetted against the electric sky. I pulled out my flashlight and clicked it on, but it barely dented the darkness. Even worse, there were no stairs, only an iron-rung ladder descending into a claustrophobic tunnel carved into solid rock.

"I've seen many treasure hunters go in," the older ghost commented, having floated up beside me, "but few come out again. And those who do are empty-handed."

"That won't happen to us."

"That's what they all say," he murmured, just as a spell burst overhead. I shoved the gun and flashlight in my belt, grabbed the first rusty rung and half climbed, half slid to the bottom. Pritkin followed practically on top of me, and as soon as we were both down, he sent a spell back up the tunnel that caused a cave-in.

It blocked our pursuers, but it also cut off what little light there was. Once the rumble from the falling rock stopped, we were in dead silence and utter darkness. Apparently even enhanced vision needs something to work with, because I couldn't see a thing.

I clicked the flashlight back on. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I yelped and stumbled back a step. The thin beam didn't show much—it was like the dark down here was hungry, eating the light almost as soon as it left the bulb. But I wouldn't have minded seeing even less. Along every side of a long corridor were bones arranged in patterns all the way to the low ceiling. Water had seeped in from somewhere, and a lot of the skulls were crying green tears and growing fuzzy green beards. It didn't make them look less creepy.

"The catacombs," Pritkin said, before I could ask.

"The what?"

"The Parisians started using old limestone quarries as underground cemeteries a few hundred years ago." He took the flashlight and pointed it at the map, frowning. "I didn't think they extended out this far."

"How far?"

"If these tunnels connect to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers." He started shining the light here and there. I wished he'd stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making the faces seem to move. "There have been stories of catacombs under Père Lachaise for years, but I thought they were merely rumors."

I stared at a nearby skull. It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs, and was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be grinning. "They look pretty real to me."

The flashlight picked out a glint of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The golden circle I revealed wouldn't budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out of a snake that was chowing down on its own tail. "The ouroboros," Pritkin said, coming up behind me.

"The what?"

"An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity."

"Like a cross?"

"Older." He shone the light around some more. "The Paris coven must have created their own catacombs, possibly during the Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred and their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have been one way of preventing that."