side was nothing but a small desk, left to the mercy of time. Passed the gates was an area little more than a twenty foot square.
Against the back wall were two sealed elevators, set side by side, and a door with a sign above it, claiming it led to the stairs. Taped with warning stickers and caution tape, the signal lights broken and dim, the elevators looked like sleeping giant eyes. Even if the power hadn’t been out, I’d have passed.
With a sweaty hand, I yanked open the stairwell door. An ear-splitting squeal shrieked from the hinges and echoed down the stairs. If Karra didn’t already know I was there, she certainly did then. I growled and leaned inside, my gun out in front of me. Expecting company to rush up to greet me, I waited a few minutes but didn’t hear anything. I thought that surprising.
Committed in my mind, trap or otherwise, I started down the stairs. Two levels later, my footfalls thudding over-loud on every step, I reached bottom. A closed, reinforced metal door with no window greeted me. Beside it, protruding from the wall were two loose wires I assumed once belonged to an intercom system; the speaker and control panel long since gone.
Trapped in the tiny stairwell, I felt exposed. If there was a trap to be sprung, I was in it asshole deep. Rather than wait and see my cynicism proven true, I grabbed the knob and gave it a twist. It spun easily and the door cracked open. A bitter scent crept to me from the hall beyond. Part antiseptic, part decay, it stung my nose and tickled my throat. While not quite the level of sniffing a rotting corpse, the smell was unpleasant.
Ignoring the smell, I stepped into the hallway noting the sudden chill. That wasn’t a good sign. With no power to the air conditioners, and the weather outside warm, there were only a couple of likely reasons for such an obvious drop in temperature; magic or spectral entities. I ruled out magic as my senses weren’t hitting on anything. That left ghosts.
I hate ghosts.
While most spectral entities were limited in power and influence, God’s disappearance impacted the in- between world as much as it had the rest. Trapped in limbo, usually by sheer force of will, souls which retained a weak connection to the mortal plain became what we call ghosts.
They can interact with reality in minor ways, moving a lamp, manifesting images and sounds, but are otherwise incapable of reaching out of Limbo. After time these souls would weaken, their focus and determination fading as existence dragged on, and they’d drift off to their rightful end.
With God gone, the boundaries between the worlds had thinned, their limits tested by the rampant magic use of battling angels and demons. To top it off, supernatural beings that once had their roles defined-angels to Heaven, demons to Hell, humans splitting the difference-have been able to circumvent the end. Upon death, no longer immortal in body, angels and demons have willed their spirits to continue to exist, escaping to Limbo to avoid destruction.
Once there, the industrious few have been able to take advantage of the tenuous boundaries and manipulate energy in the real world, generally causing havoc similar to most of the poltergeist stories you’ve heard. Even worse, there were some that broke through the barrier and returned as beings of pure energy: revenants.
Those were the scary ones, entities of magic and will with no physical shell to contain them.
Fortunately, it didn’t take a ghost of that level to set a chill in the air. Any average everyday spook, like those found fluttering about scandalous institutions like Gailbraith, could drop the temperature by ten degrees easily. I hoped that was all it was, as a revenant under the control of a necromancer would be a serious threat to my anal fortitude.
Aware I was spooking myself, I pushed my shivers away and continued down the hall. The first room, the door missing, the room in shambles, was empty. As was the second, third, and fourth, each in similar states of jumbled disarray. The fifth, however, located down a long, barren hall, looked promising. The door, while open, seemed maintained, its hinges still wet with oil.
I glanced inside, staying low and out of sight as much as I could. Rows of unpadded white benches, like stadium seating, were set on a decline. A line of stairs split them in half. At their end was a low wall with an aluminum frame, which looked as though it were intended to contain a window. The shards of shattered glass lying on the floor confirmed my thought, a sparkling line along the base of the wall. Beyond that was a second room, empty but brightly lit by four-pronged lights set high on mobile arms. A quiet hum vibrated the floor, no doubt from a generator powering the lights.
My brain kicked in, remembering what Lilith told me about the place. I realized then the room was a surgical theatre. I shuddered, wondering what kind of people sat on the benches watching as the doctors harvested the organs of their patients. Raised in Hell, I’d seen a lot of things people would call cruel, but regardless of the stories you’ve been told about demons and devils, humanity is by far the most vicious and brutal, the most uncaring, of all of God’s creations.
Too sensitive to the plight of humans unable to defend themselves, my own mother murdered without being given a chance, I had a weak stomach for the things that happened in places like this. I narrowed my focus, to avoid taking in too much, and made my way down the concrete steps. At the wall, I hopped over and dropped the ten feet into the room. Tiny shards of glass crunched beneath my feet.
On the floor, out of sight from the room above, there were two plain backpacks stacked in a corner, just left of a closed, windowed door. I crept to the packs, staying clear of the window, and examined the bags. Uncertain of what I’d find in them, I was sure it’d be something nasty, something I didn’t want to see.
I was wrong.
Packed neatly inside the bags were a few cans of food, an overnight kit, and a small variety of women’s clothing and undergarments. If the lights weren’t confirmation that Karra was here, the clothes were. They carried her scent. Not that I was sniffing them or anything.
You can’t prove it.
Certain of her presence, I resisted the urge to pocket her panties-or do anything else with them-and went to the door. It swung open to reveal another wide hallway. The sides were cluttered with hospital beds, soiled sheets still draped over them. There was a set of closed doors at the end of the hall. While there were no lights, the bright glimmer of those from the operating room filtered through the window of the door I’d closed behind me. My vision degrees better than that of a normal human, I could see without any problem.
On guard, I walked toward the double doors, my eyes darting all over the place. It was my nose, however, which picked her up first. Just as the subtle fragrance of her tripped the warning bells in my head, she was on me. I spun, willing my voice to call out her name, but she struck me before the word formed.
A thin red gash appeared, trailing a line across the back of my gun hand and down the length of my forearm. The searing agony of the magical blade hit me first, followed almost immediately by the cold, rigid numbness of the poison.
Out of instinct, all thoughts of why I was there banished from my mind, I tried to shift the gun to my other hand. A second, silvery slash of Karra’s blade across my left bicep ended my attempt. My pistol tumbled to the ground as my hand lost all function, the other arm fading fast. Armless in an instant, she’d taken away any chance at effective offense, so like a rabbit on race day, I bolted.
My foot hadn’t even landed from the first step when a slash horizontally across the backs of both of my legs cut my run short. Snarling, I went down in a heap, face first. Pain welled up in a geyser, then eased almost as fast. I flopped around like an upended turtle. A strong hand latched onto my shoulder and rolled me over. I looked up to see Karra’s masked face. Even with her features covered, she didn’t look happy to see me.
“We need to stop meeting like this.” My mother always told me I could charm the stink from a skunk. It was a long time before I learned she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
Karra let loose a long, drawn out sigh, her eyes swirling red around the brown.
“I thought I told you to stay away.” Though anger hardened her words, she spoke quietly, melodiously. Unlike when we’d spoken earlier, she did nothing to mask her natural speech pattern. While I couldn’t place it, there was something familiar about her voice.
I stared at her, trying to discern the features behind the mask, having no success. “I can’t. You have to know that.”
She growled. Despite the circumstances, I had to admit, it turned me on. She knelt beside me, the point of her sword coming to rest sharp on my chest. That cooled things off a little bit.
“If you won’t leave off willingly, I’ll have to take matters into my own hands.”
An ugly, cold feeling settled over me. I’d come there thinking whatever had kept her from taking my life the
