City of Souls

gust rustled my hair, like the heat coming on in an old house, and I glanced straight up to find a passage narrow enough to admit only one body at a time.

“And for my next great feat…” I leapt to the opening just as I’d done at Master Comics earlier that day. Yet the distance lengthened while I was in flight, and I yelped in surprise, barely catching the edge’s lip with my elbows. Shoulders straining under my weight, I grunted and pushed myself straight, glyph fully powered. I then found myself eye level with another concrete wall. It was studded with only one feature: a safe’s dial.

Looking closer, I breathed a sigh of relief. The signs of the Zodiac fanned around its center, and I flipped it so the Archer glyph lined up with the raised arrow, then yanked hard. There was a tumble of internal locks, and something growled deep inside the tunnel. Then a jagged seam began working its way down the wall, altering direction before moving vertically again to flip on itself with a depthless creak, ending where it began. I pulled on the dial, the seam took on hinges, and a tiny doorway swung open.

A rough-hewn shelf held a wrought-iron stand pinching a primitive, and burning, candle.

“What the hell?” Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.

Lifting the iron base to move the simple candle aside, I looked for a spring underneath. Maybe its removal would cause the wall to shift and open. Nothing happened. Thinking then that the wooden backing was false, I pushed, but it too remained intact. I wiped at my brow. Man, there was a lot of heat coming from one sole candle.

So no spring catch, I thought, and no lever. No other obvious purpose to the box. I blew out a hard breath, and the candle wavered…which made me wonder how it’d been lit in the first place. There were no matches or lighter, no person to perform the action, and no wax running down the long taper. So When? joined the question as to How? “Think, Jo,” I said under my breath.

Well, obviously I had to take some sort of action. Something definitive that would ferry me from this world into Midheaven. Was I supposed to sing Zane’s stupid song? Feeling like an idiot, I cleared my throat and gave it a try.

Beneath the neon glowing bright here

Lies a land of starry skies

Look below, dear, not in the middle

And kill the rushlight in two tries.

“Oh.”

Rushlight. That was an old-fashioned word for a candle made of a plant, and grease or wax. One like the taper I was currently holding. Gingerly, like it was a snake writhing in my hand, I returned it to the rough-hewn shadow box. Gazing at the bright flame, I took a deep breath and felt my heartbeat thrum irregularly. Deciding it was probably best not to tempt the second try, I leaned forward and blew with all my might. Nothing happened.

Oh, God. Did that mean I only had one try left to me?

I blew again. Same results, but nothing else happened either. A third time…and no fucking charm. What was going on?

Finally, I was so annoyed and antsy about the whole situation that I grabbed hold of the candle’s iron stick and with the taper only an inch from my mouth blew again.

Darkness attacked. My released breath was yanked from my chest, burning nausea rising with it. Blindly, I grabbed at my throat, but my mouth wouldn’t close, and the outline of my glyph began tingling madly, like something with lots of legs was eating away at it. Oxygen bled from my mouth and pores, sucked from white and red blood cells so that I felt like a withering husk, dehydrated and dizzy.

Then the process flipped so suddenly I was encased like a brick in a kiln while unseen tendrils of smoke arrowed back into my mouth, prying my throat wide. Individual needles of pain splintered along that soft passageway, shredding my larynx and voice box, murdering my ability to scream. I didn’t know what was worse, the literal breath-taking or the invasion of something foreign soaking into my bloodstream, muscle, tissue, and bone. Whatever it was, it was miasmic. The sulfuric stench of rotten eggs forced an inhalation, injecting me with a noxious, polluting drug. My nausea rose.

Then the air I was straining for pumped back into me, burning cold against the coppery tears like tiny icicles of blood were embedded in my throat. I staggered backward to hit my head against something hard. The sense of all physical matter being voided out lessened, my dizziness abated, but I still couldn’t see. If not for the solid stamp of earth beneath me, I would have thought I’d passed out. Then the air gradually took on layers, and the smoke walling me in lessened.

I ran my tongue over my teeth, gritty, my mouth filled with a sandpaper scratch. I couldn’t smell the festering poison anymore, but it was pumping in my veins, and that scared me more than the sightlessness or the stolen air.

As the haze lessened degree by degree, a light formed directly across from me. Please not another candle, I thought as it sharpened into a bright yellow eye. It acted as a hypnotist’s pendulum, controlling my focus until the rest of the room-and I was now standing in a room-came into view. When it did, despite the breath having just been stolen from my body, my mouth fell open again.

I knew I was missing a million little details, but was so overwhelmed by what appeared to be an old western saloon that it took a moment longer to note the bartender blinking back at me. I did, however, notice the green felt tables fanning to my right, if only because they were the only truly familiar things in the room. Less familiar? An ornate door with a scrolled gilt handle and glossy red surface adorned with stylized coils and whipping bands-cones, balls, wedges, prisms, geometric bands, and disks-all overlapping each other in writhing detail, though I had no idea what any of it meant. It stood out not only for its lavish detail but for its splash of color, and the rim of light halo-ing its perimeter. Because even though the smoke was thinning, everything else was washed in a sepia haze.

I turned my attention back to the bar where the light I’d seen was revealed to be the reflection of a pagoda lantern attached to the wall behind me. The oval mirror showcasing it had a twin, like eyes holding my outline in their unblinking gaze. A third mirror, rectangular and centered between the first two, was split by an antique brass cash register, while a long bar sat before that, white towels pegged at each end, and spittoons spaced evenly along the base. A brass foot rail shone as brightly as the polished bar, matching the paneled oak crisscrossing every inch of wall space, giving the simple room an opulent feel. I glanced up at a ceiling of beautiful pressed tin, each intricate square cupping a constellation. Fans twirled lazily overhead, and an elegant staircase on the left rose to a split hallway.

I tried to shake the feeling of being watched. Hard, since my warrior’s mind calculated almost two dozen men in straight-backed, unpainted chairs, who stopped cold as they stared directly at me. I had a sudden, desperate hankering for a six-shooter.

“Well…” I cleared my throat and resisted the urge to tip an imaginary hat. “Howdy.”

Despite being born and raised in the Sierra Nevadas, at the southernmost tip of what was known as the Silver State, what I knew about the era where saloons had proliferated across the West was confined to Hollywood bastardizations of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. I thought I’d been in over my head when I woke up to discover I was a twenty-first century superhero veiled in my sister’s fleshly body. But at least then I’d had a cultural rope to grab onto and regain my equilibrium…and I don’t mean a lasso.

There was nothing in this nineteenth-century-style saloon that looked vaguely familiar. Even the people were the sort that looked out at you, unsmiling, from black-and-white photos…like long-dead relatives with hard lives that leeched their personalities from their leathered skins. Ironically enough, it was the flash of a photographer’s bulb that snapped the silence from the room, blinding me once again. Vulnerable, I braced for assault, but the worry dissolved under the trickling keys of a piano intro.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I muttered to no one, rubbing my eyes and squinting in the direction of the music.

Oh, many secrets does this girl have

And she hides them in the light

But the darkness may have the last laugh

Because her temper has a bite.

I was as surprised by the subject of the song as at the way it ended…or didn’t. The piano player, a reed-thin man with a bowler hat, long fingers and a hook nose, cut off the jaunty song as abruptly as he’d begun, withering into himself like a skeleton sinking into his swivel stool. I raised my brows, waiting for some other random weirdness to occur-might as well get it all out at once, right?-and it obliged me in the form of a saloon girl