This trip to the Pit was very different from the last time Julius had been here.
It was still terrible, of course. Even the boiling magic that swelled up to cover the city wasn’t enough to overpower the deathly, oily feel of the DFZ Underground’s most polluted magical wasteland. Instead, the two mixed, forming a noxious amalgam that reeked of old decay, motor oil, and fetid lake water. In fairness, though, that last one was probably more physical than magical thanks to the five-foot-deep layer of dirty floodwater that currently covered the Pit’s silted floor.
“Lovely,” Marci said, holding her nose as Julius flew them in. “And here I thought this place couldn’t get any worse.”
“At least it’s not as dark as before,” he said, looking up at the Skyway ceiling, which, like all the other overpasses in the city, was now laced with cracks letting in light from above. Mostly the orange glow of the fires that were springing up all over town, despite Algonquin’s flood, but light was still good.
“We have to end this,” Marci muttered, her fingers clenching on his feathers. “At this rate, there’ll be nothing left to save.”
“No argument here,” Julius said. “But what are we looking for?”
She sighed against him. “No idea. The last time I saw her, the DFZ couldn’t make up her mind between smallish human and giant rat, but since spirits are just sentient magic, that doesn’t mean much. She could be anything, but I have a feeling we’ll know her when we see her.”
Julius hoped so, because right now, he couldn’t see much of anything. The last time he’d been here, the Pit had looked like a flattened, abandoned suburb buried like a body under the thickest part of Algonquin’s elevated city, which made sense since that was exactly what it was. As the first victim of Algonquin’s flood, the Pit—or Grosse Point as it was known in those days—had never really recovered.
While the rest of Detroit had been either rebuilt or built over, this place had been sealed up like a tomb, covered with Skyways and locked in the dark like a dirty secret. Nothing had been improved or changed. Even the silt from the first flood was still here, lying like a blanket over the broken streets and the foundations of the houses crushed by Algonquin’s wave, making it looked like the suburb was at the bottom of a dark and unpleasant sea.
The illusion was only made stronger by the new layer of water that covered everything. But while there were streams of water falling from the broken Skyways overhead, Julius didn’t think this flooding was from the wave earlier, or even from the river’s flood before that. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he felt certain that this water was from before that, the fallout of some earlier disaster.
It smelled old, he decided. Old and very strongly of lake. He was trying to figure out if that was important or not when Marci yelled out.
“There!” she cried, pointing.
Once he saw it, Julius had no idea how he’d missed it. Even in the Pit’s strangely thick darkness, it should have been impossible to miss the giant pile of trash rising from the lowest point of the Pit’s bowl-like landscape.
Pile was the wrong word, he decided as they got closer. This was a tower, a leaning column twenty feet in diameter made from busted cars, washing machines, bricks, drywall, outdated computer parts—all sorts of nonsense.
The sideways-tilting stack went all the way from the Pit’s flooded floor to the ceiling of the broken Skyways thirty feet overhead, connecting the ground to the city like a giant root. Not being a mage, Julius had no idea what that meant, but the structuredefinitelyhadn’t been here before.
“Is that our target?”
“Nothing else it could be,” Marci said excitedly, pointing at the rusted hood of one of the cars at the bottom of the pile. “Set down there. Ghost’s already headed inside to check it out.”
Even for a death spirit, going inside a giant pillar of mysterious trash that might be the heart of an enraged spirit sounded like areallybad idea. Julius didn’t even want to get near it. Now that they were closer, he could actually feel the thing pulsing with the same magic he’d felt roaring through the city. But this was the whole reason they were here, so he sucked it up and landed where Marci had pointed, setting down on the edge of the car’s bumper like a bird landing on a windowsill.
An extremelydisgustingwindowsill.
“Ugh,” he said, lifting his feet. “It’s all slimy. Like that time we walked through the storm drain.”
“Itdoesfeel slimy,” Marci said, hopping off his back to touch the car for herself. “Weird. I wonder if that’s from the flooding or something else?”
Given how creepy this place was, Julius’s money was onsomething else. He’d felt more of Algonquin’s magic than any dragon should at this point, but while her lake water was cold and clammy and unpleasant in the extreme, it had never felt polluted. This stuff felt like the filthy magic of the Pit turned physical, and the more Julius thought about that, the less he liked this whole situation.
“I don’t think this is a good place for the spirit of the DFZ to be.”
“Me neither,” Marci agreed, walking across the car hood to stand in front of the wall of debris that formed the pillar. “I’ve noticed that Mortal Spirits seem to be highly influenced by emotions in their magic. Remember back in Reclamation Land when Ghost got all huge and scary? It was because he was channeling the anger of everyone Algonquin had killed. I wonder if the same thing is happening to the DFZ? I mean, she was already pissed at Algonquin, but this is the place where the wave first crashed down. Not a good memory.”
“Definitely not,” Julius said, covering his nose with his wing. “The magic smells awful.”
“Really?” Marci turned around with an excited smile. “You have to let me study how you smell magic sometime!”
The demand was so like her, it made his heart clench. It still didn’t feel real that Marci was back, alive and smiling and asking to study him. It really was a miracle, and perversely, that bothered him. As happy as he was, she was too important for him to just accept all of this on faith. The whole idea of mortality was that no one came back from death, and while he was used to Marci doing the impossible, it never came without a cost, which begged the question, what had Marci paid? What had she suffered or promised or given up to return, and how could he help her? He was working up the courage to ask when she went still.
“What?” he asked, instantly alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, scowling. “Ghost was just in the middle of telling me something, and then he stopped.”
“Do you think something happened?”
