Sun chuckled. “You’re a funny guy, you know that?”
Cormac handed it over.
After that, all I could do was hold my hand out. “Sir, it’s been an honor.”
I wasn’t sure he’d shake my hand. But he did, flashing me his grin. “Good-bye, Kitty Norville.”
I climbed the ladder, about twenty feet to street level. It seemed like we should have been much farther underground, for all the darkness and weirdness we’d encountered. We should have been in another world entirel
y. Yet here we were. Ben came up right behind me—I could feel him, sense movement close to my feet. Finally, up came Cormac. When he was off the ladder, he swung the grate closed, then stomped on it a couple of times for good measure. He might as well have muttered “Good riddance.”
We were in an alley. The night was still early, and the street a few yards away was busy—cars passing, pedestrians walking in clusters heading for dinner or an evening out. Restaurants were still open, though other stores had closed the grilles over their fronts. Traffic flowed, and a car radio playing very loudly passed by. The noise, the sights—the astonishing normality of the scene—was jarring. Part of me was still in the tunnels, waiting for mythological creatures to appear.
The five of us looked at each other, bemused. Had it really happened? Or had we been standing here all night?
Grace walked to the end of the alley and looked out, tentative, as if she wasn’t sure that the world we’d emerged into was the same as the one we left. But she turned back to us, smiling. “We’re right at the store. And Chuck didn’t come in to open. Of course.” She sighed. “I gotta get going.”
“Just like that?” I said. “After all … that? You just go to work?”
“What else am I going to do? Somebody’s got to open the store.”
“Kitty likes to debrief over coffee,” Ben explained.
“What’s there to say?” she said.
I sputtered, because I couldn’t get all the words out at once. “I need to know what happened down there. I need to know what all that magic was, and who those people were, and where they come from, and what’s it all mean, and what’s going to happen to Anastasia, and what’s going to happen next—”
“You think I know all that? I got roped into this, just the same as you. I can’t explain it.”
“You have a better chance than any of us.”
She stepped close to me, her jaw set, and her words were fierce. “You expect me to be able to explain all of Chinese culture and mythology and folklore to you in a couple of hours? China isn’t a culture—it’s hundreds of cultures. I don’t speak the same version of Chinese as half the people in Chinatown right now. Every religion that came into China got incorporated. What’s the point in talking about God? We have hundreds of them, and they all have their own temples, their own stories. Sun Wukong is a Buddhist hero. Xiwangmu is a Taoist goddess, but they both end up in the same story about the Monkey King stealing the Elixir of Immortality from her. And there are stories about her way older than that, so I don’t know where she comes from. Now that I’ve met her, I see she’s got a little bit of all those stories in her. Hundun is part of an old story that got wrapped up in a Confucian parable. I’m not the person who can explain all this. I inherited some tricks and spells and a set of keys and a bunch of promises my ancestors made. I didn’t think I was ever going to have to use any of that, then it all shows up to bite me in the ass. What else you want me to say?”
Like I expected her to be a sage dispensing wisdom. Like even if she did explain it, it would all make perfect sense. But she was right—it didn’t matter how much explaining she did, it would never make the kind of sense I wanted it to.
“Maybe I just need to talk it out to make sure it all really happened.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed, shaking me a little. Completely unconcerned that I was a werewolf. Unafraid of monsters. “It really happened,” she said. “Now, go home. You still have a life. We all still have a life.
“Call me at the store later if you still want to talk.”
She hopped off the sidewalk and crossed the street during a break in traffic as though she couldn’t get away from us fast enough.
“Now what?” Ben asked.
I frowned. “I can’t decide what I want first. Dinner, a shower, a bathroom, or a really stiff drink.”
Cormac dug into his pocket, but instead of drawing out some magical implement, he held his cell phone. “Now it works. Figures.”
I tried mine. Eight o’clock. Was that all?
“May I borrow it?” Henry said, hand out to Cormac. “I can get us a ride.” The vampire, so pale he almost glowed, was leaning against the wall. He looked tired—he’d had to work to draw the breath that allowed him to speak.
Cormac didn’t seem inclined to hand anything over.
Henry’s lips parted, showing the points of his fangs, and he stepped toward Cormac.
Cormac held the polished stake in his hand; he’d kept it hidden under his jacket all this time. When Henry moved, the hunter raised it so the point of it rested against Henry’s chest, ready to plunge it home. Henry stopped. I held my breath, but Cormac didn’t strike.