got there without bleeding to death in some gutter along the way.
Why was she
She trudged ahead, south one block down Webster Street, east one block along Golden Gate Avenue, and then zigging back south. If she kept going, they’d end up in the Mission District.
The sun broke through the fog and painted the streets with lines of light and shade.
Eliot drifted into the shadows to stay unnoticed.
Jezebel mirrored his steps, clinging to the darkness.
Eliot let her get a bit ahead as he waited to cross busy Van Ness Avenue, and then hurried just as the stoplight changed.
As he set one foot into the street, however, it felt as if he plunged into warm running water. It didn’t slow him as normal water would, but it felt very different from the space he’d been in.
As he crossed back onto the sidewalk, the sensation vanished.
Eliot stopped and looked around, perplexed.
Then he spotted the difference: The crosswalk was in sunlight. . and he stood once more in the shadows.
Although the fog softened everything, the edge where light met dark was razor sharp to his eyes.
Everyone on the sidewalk went out of their way to step around the shadows, like they were too cold. None of them looked at Eliot either as he stood in the shade. They strode past him, ignoring him as they did Jezebel.
Eliot stepped into the path of a girl walking a Yorkshire terrier.
The tiny dog’s head snapped up and it barked, startled, at Eliot. It hadn’t seen him.
Eliot had an urge to kick the miniature canine. He didn’t like dogs.
“Sorry,” Eliot whispered.
The girl smiled and moved on, jerking the dog along-not really wanting to interact with him, but at least
Eliot slinked back into the shadows.
Weird.
He could live with weird, though; he had for a while. And today he preferred to be in the shade. To be unremarkable. Invisible almost.
He followed Jezebel like that for another block, keeping to the dark, and then they turned onto Hyde Street.
She was headed downtown. Buildings towered over them and the sidewalk was red brick. The people here had to enter the shadows (or end up walking in the street), and as they did, they shuddered, pulled up their collars, and sped along to the next patch of sunlight.
The only exception was a velvet black cat that sat on a trash can, watching Jezebel, him, and then its amber eyes locked back on to her-crossing in front of, and almost tripping, her.
Jezebel hissed at it.
The animal hissed back and scampered across the busy street-ignoring traffic-making it to the opposite side.[40]
Jezebel watched it go, then walked fast, turning onto Market Street ahead of him.
Eliot followed, but Jezebel was gone.
There was a bus stop, but there were people still waiting. There was a theater she could have ducked into. And just in front of it, stairs that angled under the street: A BART station.
That had to be it.
He hurried down the steps into a vast open space well lit with flickering fluorescents. There were token vendors, automated turnstiles, bike racks, and information kiosks directing people to all the places the Bay Area Rapid Transit system could take them.
It was deserted.
There were three escalators to the next level. One had an OUT OF ORDER sign and yellow warning tape draped across it. The tape dangled, torn.
Eliot went to it and saw the escalator was still. It was dark down there.
He took a deep breath-not quite sure he was doing anything remotely smart, but knowing he couldn’t stop now. He crept down the motionless escalator. The edges looked disturbingly like metal teeth.
He emerged onto a wide hallway. Only every fifth fluorescent light overhead was lit.
Eliot’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. A yellow stripe divided the white tiles where people were supposed to wait well away from the sunken tracks of the BART train.
As above, there was no one here on this level. No train, either.
And still no Jezebel.
Had he made a mistake and lost her? Jezebel could have spotted him and broken that tape on the escalator to throw him off her trail.
A single black dot caught his attention. It was tiny, but obvious on the white tile. It called to him, sounded like a perfect note plunked in his mind.
He glanced once more down the platform and then crept to the spot.
Eliot reached out and touched it. The spot was liquid, tarlike-half-congealed. It smelled of vanilla and cinnamon and rust.
Blood.
She
The question was, where had she gone?
She hadn’t been so far ahead of him that a train could have come, picked her up, and left without him hearing.
He spied another drop of blood. This one was by the tracks.
His gaze continued, and he spotted a third drop on the far side of the train tracks. . right under a shadow. The shadow looked just like the dozen others on the far side of the train tracks. . only it fell
Eliot moved to look at it from another angle.
It looked like any other shadow, translucent, and flickering with the same frequency as the lights. Only there was nothing between it and the light to cast it.
This shadow fell directly between two concrete squares, and as Eliot turned his head back and forth, he caught a glimpse of more: a darkness that stretched beyond the flat plane of the wall.
A doorway.
If that’s where Jezebel went, he’d follow. Maybe she was hurt and had crawled in there to rest or hide from more of those things that had jumped them in the alley outside Paxington. Or maybe she had gone in there like some wounded animal to die.
Eliot held his breath and listened for any rumble that might indicate a train. He heard only his heart thudding.
With extreme care, he crept past the yellow safety line. Eliot then eased over the edge onto the channel with the train tracks.
He swallowed and gingerly stepped across the electrified third rail-pressed himself against the cool concrete by the fake shadow.
If a BART train came by now, he’d get pasted.
Eliot inched to the shadow. So close, it was easy to see how it extruded deeper into the wall, a passage that sloped at a steep angle. There were stairs and handrails. He twisted closer to looked straight into it; there was a flicker of amber light at the end. . a very long way down.
He hesitated on the threshold.
Some part of him screamed that if he went down there, he wasn’t coming back. Ever.
As surely as he knew this could be a one-way trip, though, he also knew Jezebel needed him. Like every daydream he’d ever had: The hero charged in to save his lady in peril, no matter what.
More realistically. . he knew Jezebel-or more accurately, the part of her that was still Julie Marks-was the key to unraveling the Infernal plots circling about him. She still cared for him. She was still his friend. . and possibly, hopefully, more.
