Talk about a ghost from the past. I hadn’t given Eddie Ray a second thought in years, not since before Willow and I had snuck out of Blackwater in the middle of the night to save her ass from Franco’s wrath.
How the hell had Eddie Ray ended up in a place like this? What were he and Natty doing together?
None of it made any sense. This whole thing was one shitstorm after another. “Shh!” I lifted my finger to my lips, signaling Griffin to stop. I cocked my head just so, not bothering to ask the question out loud. Griffin knew what I meant: Did you hear that?
She listened too, and then frowned an It’s nothing frown back at me.
She was wrong. It definitely wasn’t nothing. I hauled ass toward the not-a-noise, warning myself not to get my hopes up.
“Simon . . .” There was a waver in Griffin’s voice, something I’d rarely ever heard. It was dark as hell, but Griffin wasn’t the scaredy-cat type. Even spooked, I knew she’d never stand for being left behind.
I heard her boots crunching along the passageway and the flashlight she held swept across the trash all around us. I barely noticed; my concentration was zeroing in on something else.
A mewling . . . a low, almost imperceptible yowl.
Whatever it was—a cat . . . a dog maybe—it didn’t sound at all like Kyra. Had some animal gone and gotten itself trapped below these ruins?
It sure as hell wasn’t Ben’s dog, that much I knew. He’d left Nancy back in his truck. He hadn’t wanted to, but no way was I letting that spastic mutt anywhere near this place; she would have given us away in a second, with all her jumping and running around. We might as well have let her come though; her constant howling had been a dead giveaway, even from behind the truck’s closed windows.
That’s what this sound reminded me of, a muffled howl.
Not willing to take the chance of running into some feral animal, I held my gun at the ready. I wouldn’t be proud of myself if I was forced to shoot an innocent creature, but if it came down to it or me, I chose me.
“There,” I whispered insistently to Griffin. “That! Did you hear it that time?”
When I looked over my shoulder at Griffin, her face was cast in an eerie veil of shadows. She held her position, straining to decide if she had heard it or not. Maybe, her expression told me. I don’t know . . .
Keep moving, I answered with a head nod and this time she followed because she wanted to know too.
Then she grabbed my arm.
We were close. The whimpering sound was on us all at once, louder, and clear enough to leave no question. Griffin shifted the beam of light so it scaled the walls. She used it to search for a doorway, a window, some means of access. Then she let it hover over piles of garbage while I kicked at them, looking for an animal caught in the wreckage of this place.
Whatever was making the sounds was nearby. So nearby it should be right here, where we were standing. Yet . . .
There was nothing. Just Griffin and me and rubble for as far as we could see.
I kept moving, thinking we’d misheard, miscalculated. It was farther down. But after several steps the sound faded, got more muted, and I realized we’d passed it.
Even before I said anything, Griffin had already turned to go back.
“Here,” she said, stopping at the same spot we’d been in before. She secured the flashlight under her arm as she used her fingertips to explore the wall. “We must’ve missed it.”
While she probed, I pounded, thinking I might dislodge a hidden door or something.
The sound came again. We were in the right place, and the thing, whatever it was, wanted to be found. It grew louder, more insistent.
“No, Griff. Christ. It’s right here.”
That’s when we realized there was a hatch of some sort cut into the floor itself. A trapdoor. The handle was flush with the ground, making it almost unnoticeable in the dark. If it hadn’t been for the sounds coming from below us, we’d have missed the damn thing entirely.
“You sure about this?” Griffin asked, when a long keening moan reached up to us.
“Of course not. But we’ve come this far, haven’t we?”
The hatch screeched when I lifted it—the kind of nails-on-a-chalkboard sound that made your skin prickle.
Griffin aimed the light from the flashlight into the hole. It was darker down there, infinitely more sinister. The stairs going down looked as if they’d been hand carved into the dank earth itself—hard-packed and uneven, a death trap waiting for one misstep.
“Ladies first,” I proposed breathily.
But Griffin was Griffin and no way would she back down from a challenge, joke or not. When she started toward the steps I grabbed her arm.
“Stop. I’ll do it. You stay here and . . .” I tried to think of a good excuse that didn’t sound like I cared what happened to her one way or the other. Finally, I ended with, “Just stay here.”
But Griffin . . . Christ, she was stubborn, and she was right at my back the entire way down the steps.
“Watch it!” I grumbled, when she almost shoved me over.