“Soon,” said the man.

Their footsteps faded off down the hall, leaving me and the mouse alone in the dark. I started to ease the door open, to look after them, and froze as I realized that it wasn’t that dark anymore.

The wall behind me was glowing. Nothing that glows—apart from stars on a ceiling, or glow sticks at a rave—has ever been a good thing.

Well, crap.

Seventeen

“The difference between a last stand and a Tuesday afternoon is all in how many bullets you had at the start.”

—Frances Brown

Somewhere below the Crier Theater, woefully underprepared for whatever’s about to burst through that glowing wall

THERE WAS TIME TO RUN: I was at the door, and a step would see me in the hall, putting more distance and some barriers between me and whatever was coming through the wall. But there’d be nothing to stop it from following me out, and more, something that could pass through solid stone might be the answer to the question that had been gnawing at us all. Where were the bodies going?

I was about to find out.

“Get down,” I hissed, pulling the pistol from the small of my back. The mouse obeyed without hesitation, tiny claws digging into me as it ran down my front. The light from the wall got brighter. I tensed, readying myself for whatever happened next.

The light began consolidating into straight lines, one about seven feet up from the floor, the others descending from its ends. I realized what it was a bare second before the middle went black and someone stumbled into the room.

The semi-spectral door continued to glow, but it wasn’t enough for me to see what I was aiming at. I took aim anyway, clicking off the safety with a swipe of my thumb. The newcomer straightened, head snapping toward the sound. Then it spoke, calm and clear and far more collected than I was feeling at the moment.

“Verity Alice Price, if you shoot me, your father is going to tan your hide.”

“Grandma?!” I started lowering my gun. Then I stopped, eyes narrowing, and took more careful aim. “Prove it.”

“For your sixth birthday I got you a ballerina Barbie and a bear trap. A real bear trap. No bear, though. Your mother thanked me for the thought, but said a real bear would have been a bit much, given you were no bigger than a whisper, and she didn’t want you getting eaten.”

“Grandma!” This time I clicked the safety back into place before lowering my pistol and shoving it into the waistband of my yoga pants. “Are you hurt? What are you doing down here? How are you down here?”

“Can I ask one?” For the first time, I heard the weariness in her tone. “Where is down here? I’ve been trying every door and egress charm I had on me, and most of them opened on dimensions you don’t want to visit. I was down to my last three options. If this hadn’t worked, I would have needed to go back to Naga for another set, and that could have taken months.”

No one in the family really understood how Grandma managed her particular brand of dimensional transit, not even Mom, who sometimes joined her on her journeys. (Mom used a more traditional blend of door-opening herbs, supplied by a Letiche she’d known since college.) Uncle Naga was involved. The rest was more than she’d ever been willing to tell us.

“We’re in the subbasement of the theater, behind a set of hidebehind illusions,” I said. “I got a map from those ghouls you’re renting the garage from.”

“How did they—”

“The theater was built on the top of their old home, and Adrian didn’t bother to fill in the underground levels. I don’t think he realized most of them were here. Not all the rooms are on the map, and some of the ones that are have illusions blocking the door.”

There was a prickling on the front of my shirt as the Aeslin mouse accompanying me ran back up to my shoulder, clung, and jubilantly cried, “Hail and welcome! Hail to the return of the Noisy Priestess, who was missing, but not on Pilgrimage!”

“Hello, mouse.” Alice managed to inject a note of warmth under the exhaustion in her tone. “Thank you for helping my granddaughter look for me.”

“It was an Honor,” said the mouse, virtually vibrating with joy.

The light from the wall guttered and went out, leaving us in darkness. There was a pause before Alice asked, “Do you have a flashlight?”

“No, but I have a door.” It had been long enough since the footsteps in the hall had passed that I wasn’t worried about running into their owners—and if I did, well. I wasn’t outnumbered anymore. Even exhausted, Alice was worth her weight in pissed-off badgers.