She hesitated. “Larissa.”
“Okay, Larissa,” I said, wasting gas—my own gas, which was pretty much the second hard lesson you learned when you bonded urtuku: Wasting your own gas was fucking suicide. “There isn’t time to have a conversation. Whatever happens, stick right next to me. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
A series of expressions passed over her face, one after the other. Then she frowned. Then she nodded. “All right, burro.”
I nodded and spoke four Words. There was the slight snick of bolts being thrown.
“What the man?”
“Come on,” I whispered, squatting under the trap and slowly putting my shoulder to it, then lifting it up. I paused and glanced at her. “Be quiet.”
“Fuck you,” she whispered. “Tell me to be quiet like I haven’t been locked in a fucking basement for three days, drinking runoff? Babaca.”
I nodded, shouldering the trap all the way up and poking my head up. I had a distinct flash: The last few years of my life ever since I’d refused to bleed the girl in Hiram’s apartment, ever since he’d angrily cast me out—If you will not do as you are told, if you will not do as you must, then you are wasting my time!—was a steep downward line on the graph.
The trap led up into an interior room, an empty drywall cube without furniture or windows. It was dark; the only light was leaking in under the only door, outlining it in gold. I palmed my shard of glass and pulled myself up, the scrape of my shoes on the scuffed wooden floor sounding incredibly loud. I rolled onto my belly and dangled my arms down into the black square of the trap until I felt the girl’s hands slip into mine. She weighed nothing, so helping her up into the room was easy. She scrambled to her feet and crouched there, animal-like, her big eyes wide and white in the gloom.
I rolled onto my feet, fingered the shard of glass—my sole asset in more ways than one—and crept toward the door.
It wasn’t locked. I cracked it open and was momentarily blinded by the bright golden light provided by several kerosene lamps, the sort you took on camping trips or kept in abandoned mines or . . . fucking hell serial killer murder houses.
They hung from nails on the walls, providing a flickering, greasy light that my eyes worked overtime to downgrade from painfully bright to barely bright enough. Well-lit, Larissa looked even worse. She was bone-skinny and covered in bruises, her torn clothes hanging off her, and she was younger than I’d thought, just a kid. I had a brief flash of canvas sneakers with pink marker doodles all over them, and I resisted the urge to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder.
The hall was narrow, with white beadboard walls and wide-plank floors under a well-worn, filthy red runner. Under the oil smell of the lamps it smelled like mothballs and peppermint. I remembered my ancient granna’s house, where I’d been taken exactly three times as a small child when Mom and Dad were still trying to make it happen, when Dad’s frequent disappearances and my frequent kidnappings at his drunken, palsied hands were in the future. Always too fucking dark, always stuffy, as if the windows had never been opened. The smell of that ancient house had risen from the grave to assault my nose once again.
There was a door on our left and stairs on our right. There was a door in front of us as well—based on the placement, it was the main entrance, but someone had taken the precaution of nailing six planks across it, along with a slab of plywood over the glass.
“There is no way we go upstairs,” Larissa whispered urgently. “There is no way. Can you open the door? Like you did with the trapdoor? With your magia?”
I shook my head. I was studying the Wards that had been laid on the front door in addition to the physical barriers. They were dense; I’d never seen work so complex. The Wards Hiram had shown me had been simple and straightforward; he’d never gotten around to teaching me anything sophisticated. It would take me hours to parse through each twist and turn in the patterns, and even then I wouldn’t know how to begin untying the threads.
Larissa offered me an unimpressed grunt.
I turned my attention to the door on our left. No Wards there. It wasn’t even locked, the knob turning easily in my hand. As I cracked it open, music and voices could be heard, distant and muffled. Before us was an unoccupied sitting room lit by a fire set in a massive stone fireplace on the opposite wall. The windows in the front had been boarded up—and Warded. A trio of large comfortable-looking leather chairs ringed a coffee table, where a decanter of whiskey, an old-fashioned water siphon, and several large crystal tumblers had been set.