Warren needed to sleep occasionally, though the way he felt made it seem as if he hadn’t. It had been more like passing out for short periods. And at times he got consumed by what the excavation revealed. The structure was roughly rectangular, sixty feet wide by another hundred feet long. It was, so far, at least nine feet high, but the digging hadn’t reached the bottom yet.
“I don’t know that either,” Warren answered.
“Hasn’t she told you?” Naomi asked, referring to Lilith.
“She hasn’t been around much.” Warren hated admitting that because it made him feel vulnerable so far outside of London. He’d never enjoyed big, wide open spaces. He didn’t have agoraphobia exactly, but he knew where he belonged.
“Why hasn’t she been around?”
“I don’t know.”
Naomi frowned suspiciously. “It seems like there’s a lot you suddenly don’t know.”
Ruefully, Warren admitted to himself that there was a lot he suddenly didn’t know. “Well, that’s one thing I know.”
The zombies continued digging. They still didn’t have any shovels or picks, but they made do with broken branches, rocks, and even their own bones. It was possible that they would have been farther along if they’d actually had tools, but the zombies worked tirelessly. They never got fatigued and continued chopping and hacking into the ground through the night. Every now and again, when Warren was asleep or distracted, one of them wandered off, never to return.
“Have you tried to get in touch with her?” Naomi asked.
“Yes.” Warren tried to mask his irritation, but he didn’t think—according to Naomi’s icy stare—that he succeeded.
“Did you do anything to make her angry?”
“No.” Warren took that back. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“What did you do?”
“Pretty much the same thing you’ve been doing. Asking a lot of questions about this.”
Naomi didn’t say anything, and Warren wondered if she made the correlation. The chuff, chuff, chuff of the zombie’s makeshift tools kept cutting into the ground.
“Who would construct a building,” Naomi asked, “and not build a door?”
“Maybe it’s on the end we haven’t uncovered yet,” Warren suggested.
“Do you know why anyone would build something that big with only one entrance?”
“One entrance would make it easier to control.”
“And why put it so far out here? Alone?”
“For all we know,” Warren replied, “there’s a whole city buried out here.”
“We don’t know a lot, though,” Naomi replied coldly, and she walked away from him.
Warren didn’t mind her inattention to him because it allowed him to focus on his own questions. He believed that Lilith wouldn’t have brought him all the way out in the middle of nowhere just to have him dig up a building with no entrance.
In earlier frustration, he’d had the zombies try to break through the stone walls, but they hadn’t been able to do it. He’d even tried using the arcane forces at his disposal but hadn’t had any luck. So far, the building remained impenetrable.
Warren slogged through the ditch. The melted snow had accumulated under the zombies and turned to treacherous mud.
Writing on one of the walls caught his attention immediately. He couldn’t help wondering how long the wall section had sat there uncovered and no one had drawn his attention to it.
The writing was some kind of pictograph. Beautiful people and garments adorned the wall. Warren held his torch closer and willed himself to read the images on the wall. Simply gazing at them hadn’t made any sense.
Nearly all of the images were of the woman, and several scenes bordered on pornography. Whoever the woman was, she’d had great appetites for nearly every wanton thing ever done.
“Once you learn to read the language, the inscriptions become simple.”
Feeling the heat of someone’s breath on his cheek, Warren turned and found Lilith standing beside him. She looked the same as she always did, but she seemed to have more color. Then Warren realized he’d felt her breath on his cheek.
He reached for her automatically, simply trying to put a hand on her shoulder. When his hand met the space her body seemed to occupy, his hand sank through her, but he felt the heat of her and a small resistance.
“Do you know the language?” Warren asked.
“Yes.” Lilith smiled. “I was the one that invented it.” She leaned closer to the pictographs. “The writings are beautiful, aren’t they?”
“They are,” Warren agreed. “They seem to focus on one woman.”
“Me.”
Warren hesitated and checked again, but he didn’t see the resemblance. The woman in the pictographs could have been anyone. “You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. All men see me as they wish to see me.” Lilith looked at him. “Your own desire created the image you see before you.”
“Does that mean you’re not real?”
She smiled at him. “There’s still so much you don’t understand. I’m real, Warren. As real as that hand I gave to you. But you aid in my realness. You help give me form. Without you, I would be just a dream.”
Warren didn’t ask any more questions about that particular topic because it was too confusing. He concentrated on the building.
“Who built this?” he asked.
“I ordered this building built.”
That surprised Warren only slightly. His imagination had already gotten days ahead of him.
“Why?”
“I needed some place to wait.”
“To wait?” Warren directed his torch at her. “To wait for what?”
“Isn’t that apparent? For the Hellgate to open.” Lilith walked farther along the ditch and continued her study of the pictographs.
“I don’t understand.”
“Once the Hellgate opened, I didn’t have to wait anymore.”
“Why did you wait?”
“Because humans couldn’t tap into the arcane energies in the world enough. And because there wasn’t enough arcane energy here to begin with. It had all been diffused as humans stepped away from it and embraced science.” Lilith frowned and said science as if it were something disgusting.
“Humans have always been able to tap into arcane energy?”
Lilith smiled at him. “Of course. You had
