“I just need to check off this one last thing,” I said, staring hard at Peter’s address before closing my eyes. I’d never been to that particular area, so I had zero mental image to work with, but I’d been getting better at moving through the city, and I needed this to work. “It won’t take long,” I promised, trying my best to sound confident as I pulled the door open, reaching out to the city at the same time to ask for passage.
I clearly hadn’t been giving myself enough credit. Even with only an address to go by, the magical portal opened immediately, letting me into—not the brightly lit cubby packed with vending machines that I could still see through the door’s smudged glass—but a quiet, well-lit street sheltered under a ceiling of higher-than-normal Skyway bridges.
Smiling at my unexpected success, I hurried through, shutting the door quick before anyone on the street behind us noticed, or decided to follow. The racket of Rentfree vanished the moment the door closed, as did the door itself, leaving us standing in a small park across the street from an older but still charming block of townhomes.
“Where are we now?” my father asked, looking up at the night sky, a triangle of which was visible through a gap in the Skyways above our heads. Probably why there was a park here.
“Uh…” I replied, squinting at the swoopy, almost-too-elegant-to-read letters on the metal sign. “Looks like Laurel Grove.” I smiled at the cluster of well-maintained, uniform-but-just-different-enough-to-have-character townhomes. “Looks like an old boom community. Nice to see one that’s been kept up.”
My father arched a smoky eyebrow. “Boom community?”
“Thirty years ago, before the DFZ woke up and took back her city, there was a real estate explosion in the Underground,” I explained, striding across the park’s trimmed grass toward the street. “A bunch of developers came in from the US and Canada and started trying to gentrify the areas under the richer parts of the Skyways. This was back before the city moved around all the time and you could actually plan where you wanted a community to be. They built dozens of these compact luxury communities priced for people who wanted the Skyway lifestyle but couldn’t afford the rent. Business was booming until the DFZ kicked Algonquin out and seized all the land. With nothing left to sell, the real estate moguls fled, the rich people went back up to the Skyways, and all the units they left behind became housing for the Underground’s middle class.”
My father looked more skeptical than ever. “The Underground has a middle class?”
“Of course it does,” I said, insulted. “We might not be anyone’s dream location, but we’ve got managers and shop owners and office workers just like everywhere else. Those people have to live somewhere, and developments like these are pretty nice spots.” I smiled over my shoulder at the obviously well-loved play equipment in the park behind us. “Really nice, actually. I don’t get to go to places like this often.”
“Because they’re so rare?”
“Because they don’t come up at Cleaning auctions. The waiting list for places this nice is usually a year or more, and people patient enough to wait that long for a quality apartment generally don’t skip out on their rent.”
My father scowled. “How do you know so much about this city? Is it part of your priesthood?”
“No, it’s part of living and working here for years,” I said with a grin. “The DFZ isn’t all death arenas and tourist traps. There are nice places and normal people too.” And man, after tonight, it was damn good to remember that.
We crossed the quiet street without incident. When we were safe on the opposite sidewalk, I pulled out my phone to see which of the neat little townhouses was Peter’s. I was sure Laurel Grove didn’t meet my father’s definition of “nice,” but I thought it was charming. All of the developer’s luxury signifiers like decorative tile and ornate metalwork were long gone, but the buildings themselves looked sound and well lived-in. There were bikes on the sidewalk where kids had abandoned them and free-standing sunlamps people had put up so they could grow gardens even in the shadow of the Skyways. The whole place just reeked of wholesomeness, and while that wasn’t normally my scene, I was loving it after the violent depravity of the arena.
“It is…quaint,” my father admitted as we walked toward the townhouse whose number matched the one on Peter’s address. “Though it hardly looks like the sort of place a professional curse-breaker would do business.”
“Oh, Peter’s not a professional curse-breaker,” I said quickly. “He’s a priest of the Empty Wind.”
Yong stopped in his tracks. “You’re going to the home of a death priest?”
I opened my mouth to launch a full-throated defense of Peter’s profession but thought better of it at the last second. There was nothing to defend. Peter was the priest of a death god, and proudly so. If he wasn’t ashamed of it, why should I be?
“He’s my friend,” I said instead. “And an experienced Shaman. He’s actually the one who sent me to Dr. Kowalski, and he knows a lot about curses. He’s also someone I trust, so don’t say anything mean.”
My father looked offended by the very thought. “I am never uncouth.”
I rolled my eyes and opened the iron gate that separated Peter’s little yard from the sidewalk. The area inside was just big enough for a foot-wide strip of grass and a tiny tile patio, but there was a glass wind chime tinkling musically and some decorative glazed pottery placed at thoughtful intervals to make the cramped space more colorful. There was also a rangy orange cat lounging on the mat in front of the door, putting to rest any worries I might have had about this being the right house.
Peter answered his door like he answered his phone. I’d hardly finished pushing the ancient doorbell’s
