Jazz launched Brooks’s boot into the face. Nothing happened. “Just like I suspected,” he mumbled. The fog began to curl again and the face started to disappear. “Blood for the gods, open!” He launched my cane, smacking the face on the nose.
Slowly, the mouth opened, a huge yawn that revealed total darkness inside.
“Er… you sure this is a good idea?” I asked.
“You want to get to the Old World or not?” Jazz rushed up the stairs and put the boat in gear. We sailed into the mouth silently until we were covered in total darkness.
“Jazz?” That was Brooks.
He drew in a sharp breath. “I’m here, kid.”
As my eyes adjusted, I said, “This is the gateway?” My voice echoed like we were in a tunnel. A very cold tunnel that smelled like rotting roadkill.
Brooks wrinkled her nose and covered her mouth with her hand. The smell was sickening… like at the dairy farm back home, but mixed with raw chicken decaying in the sun. Then I saw why: in the dark waters below were bizarre-looking eyeless fish, as long as bull sharks and as bloated as puffer fish. Their pale flesh looked half-eaten, and chunks fell off as they slithered through the dark.
Whitish foam curdled on the water’s surface.
Brooks’s eyes were wide, trying to cut through the dark. “What do you see, Zane?”
“Looks like a tunnel.” I leaned over the railing. We were surrounded by rusted, corroded metal walls. “Or the hull of a wrecked ship.”
The space was so narrow, I could’ve reached out and touched the walls if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t. Creaks and groans echoed through the cold space.
“Why is it so awful?” I asked, trying to take tiny breaths to avoid the rotten smell.
“Hasn’t been kept up,” Jazz said, flicking on a flashlight. It looked a lot like the burning-flesh kind Brooks had lost in the volcano. “When the new gateways were built, these were forgotten. Death has a way of infesting whatever it touches.”
I looked up at Jazz. He was frowning, scanning me like I was some kind of lab rat. Like maybe he’d like to switch on the red beam and burn me up.
“What’s wrong?” Brooks said. Her face was half-hidden in the shadows.
“When I got the letter,” Jazz began slowly, “I thought there’d been a mistake. Then I got suspicious. Why would someone ask me to take them to the Old World? A place of the gods.”
“What’re you talking about, Jazz?” Brooks asked.
He began to hum that stupid song “The Days Are a-Comin’,” and a terrible uneasiness rose inside of me.
“Only gods can open the old gateways,” he said. “I’m not a god, and, Little Hawk, you’re not, so that leaves the two others on board. And something tells me it isn’t El Luchador downstairs.”
I opened my mouth to say something….What, I didn’t know.
Brooks shot me a look while Jazz continued to unravel my secret. “Your cane,” he said. “That’s what opened the gate.”
“How does a cane open an ancient gateway?” I asked flippantly, hoping Jazz might hear how crazy it sounded.
“By belonging here,” Jazz said. “By belonging to a god.”
I didn’t like the way he was considering me with his one eye. This had gotten out of hand. There were too many clues and signs pointing to me as a godborn, and I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone figured it out. I had to get to Ah-Puch, and I had to get there fast.
A flash of movement in the water caught my attention.
Slowly, like it didn’t want us to notice, the dark water began to rise. The foam bubbled and steamed.
“Jazz?” I looked over my shoulder at him.
“So,” he said, still stuck on me having the power to open the gateway, “what do you have to say for yourself? You some kind of god in disguise? What kind of game are you playing?”
“Uh, can we talk about that later? Because right now we’ve got a problem.”