Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels 8)

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“I’m great.” I could barely see Derek in the darkness moving ahead of me. My imagination painted an avalanche of loose dirt dropping into the tunnel in front of me, burying me, getting sucked into my lungs . . . I tasted adrenaline on my tongue. Tunnels were never on my favorite list of things, but today my body was going into overdrive.

“Your pulse is speeding up.”

I just had to pick a shapeshifter. “Apparently dark narrow tunnels leading deep underground don’t agree with me.”

He wrapped his arms around me. I stopped. My heart was hammering against my ribs. What the hell was wrong with me?

Curran kissed my hair. His voice was a quiet warm whisper in my ear. “This isn’t Mishmar.”

Memories cascaded through my mind like a bucket of cold water dumped over my head. Being trapped in a tunnel filled with water, clinging to the metal grate, holding Ghastek’s head so he wouldn’t drown, running through the dark passageways while hundreds of undead chased us . . .

Curran’s voice cut through it, calm and reassuring. “We aren’t trapped. It’s just a hole in the dirt.”

I inhaled deeply, leaning on him. Breathing from the bottom of your lungs short-circuited anxiety, and so I breathed slowly, trying to get my exhales to last longer than my inhales, and stood wrapped in him.

My pulse slowed. The odd uncomfortable panic was still there, but it receded far enough that I could keep a lid on it. I squeezed his hand. “I’m good.”

He let me go and I pushed my way through, trying to speed up.

The tunnel narrowed. My shoulders brushed the dirt. Great. The anxiety hammered at me. I concentrated on my breathing, slow and deep.

A minute passed. Another.

Just keep moving. Keep moving. It will end.

It will end.

It felt like we’d been underground for eternity. It had to be at least thirty minutes.

It had to end . . .

How far did this damn tunnel go?

A hand rested on the small of my back and slid down.

“Did you just grab my butt?” I whispered.

“What?”

“Curran!”

“Yes?” I could hear controlled laughter in his voice.

Unbelievable. I sped up. “We’re tracking ghouls and you’re grabbing my butt.”

“I always make sure to pay attention to important things.”

“Sure you do.”

“Besides, if the tunnel collapses, I won’t get to do it again.”

“You won’t get to do it again anyway. I can’t even see Derek anymore. He probably heard about your butt-grabbing and decided to give us some space.”

“Maybe you just move too slow.”

Argh.

“You should try making more noise as you walk, too.” Curran suggested. “Maybe the ghouls will mistake you for a small underground elephant and run off.”

“When we get out of here, I’ll kick you.”

“You’ll try.”

The tunnel turned. A faint light illuminated Derek almost fifty yards ahead of me. He jumped down into the light. I double-timed it. A moment and I grabbed onto the edge of the tunnel’s opening. A large open cavern spread before me, its floor about seven feet below, illuminated by daylight streaming in through a hole in its ceiling. The ray of light fell onto a mangled vehicle sitting upright in the middle of the floor, its hood a crushed Coke can of a mess, its back up in the air. Derek was nowhere in sight.

A mangled black vehicle.

A sick feeling pulled at my stomach. I jumped down. The impact of hard ground punched the soles of my feet. The cavern stretched into a large tunnel to the left and to the right, too uniform not to be manmade. It just got better and better.

Curran landed next to me, silent like a ghost. It wasn’t fair that a man that large could move that quietly.

“MARTA,” I told him.

He frowned at me.

“Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. We just entered the Red Line.”

MARTA began in the 1970s and grew into a network of bus lines and heavy rail stations, some above ground, some under. In its heyday, over four hundred thousand people rode it daily, but the magic waves crushed it. The trains were the first to go. Not that many of them crashed, but magic spawned nightmarish creatures who enjoyed hiding in dark tunnels and grabbing tasty snacks conveniently aggregating on the platforms for them. People refused to go underground. The buses held out for a while, but finally the city threw in the towel. Now MARTA stations stood abandoned, their tunnels turned into lairs by things with sharp teeth.