It took them forever to reach the bottom. Not because they had particularly far to go—the seemingly endless drop ended up being only about thirty feet—but because Marci’s pace down the ladder was only slightly faster than glacial.
Julius didn’t blame her in the least. This place looked like a pit into the abyss even to his eyes, so he couldn’t imagine what it must look like for her. It didn’t help that the ladder’s metal rungs were strangely pitted, like they’d been etched with a strong corrosive. Some rungs had actually rotted through completely, forcing them to cling to the ladder’s edge and slide down to the next solid foothold. But though Marci’s breathing sped up to almost hyperventilating every time she had to skip a step, she didn’t complain, and she didn’t stop.
By the time they finally reached the bottom, Julius had decided he was going to regain his ability to fly if it killed him. To add insult to injury, the climb hadn’t even gotten them anywhere. The ladder let out on a wide cement platform beside what looked like an artificial underground lake. Justin, who’d gotten there way ahead of them, was already pacing the edge, his growling audible even in his human form. “There’s nothing here!”
“This must be the spillway overflow,” Julius said, shining Marci’s flashlight, which he’d carried down the ladder in his teeth, directly into the murky water in a futile attempt to see how deep it went. “Somewhere for all the excess water in the system to collect until it can be pumped out and treated.”
“I don’t care what it is!” Justin yelled. “It’s not mages. That stupid Cosmonaut led us to a dead end!”
“Kosmolabe,” Marci corrected sharply, snatching the aforementioned golden ball out of her bag again. “And it’snota dead end. According to this, our mages are right there.”
She pointed at the water, and Justin threw up his hands. “What? Are you saying they’ve got a low-rent Atlantis down there or something?”
Marci made an irritated sound. “Imeanton another level.”
“I don’t think there is another level,” Julius said softly. “If this is where the water’s resting, then this is probably as low as it goes.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Marci said, walking toward the water’s edge with a huff. “Let me look.”
Julius caught her sleeve before she’d taken two steps. Now that they’d reached the bottom of the pit, the cold, oily pressure was stronger than ever. He wasn’t quite sure if it was the natural magic of this particular place or something more sinister, but there was a lot of it, and he didn’t want any of them getting closer than was absolutely necessary.
“Come on,” he said, tugging Marci gently back toward the ladder. “Let’s get out of—”
“Incoming!”
Julius fell into an instinctive crouch, while Marci jumped a full foot in the air. They both whirled around to see Justin standing at the lake’s edge with his sword in his hands, and Julius’s breath caught. He’d only seen a Fang of the Heartstriker out of its sheath once before in his life, and never up close. He didn’t have a chance to gawk, though, because at that moment, the water in front of Justin exploded.
Chapter 8
His first thought was that a bomb had gone off. The lake, which up to this point had been silent and smooth as a polished stone, erupted like a volcano, sending water surging up in long, black streams. It wasn’t until the streams opened their mouths to reveal perfectly circular rings of razor-sharp teeth that latched on to his brother, however, that Julius realized what was actually going on.
“Justin!”
But Justin was already sweeping the curved, wickedly sharp blade of the Fang of the Heartstriker down, slicing through the mass of black, wiggling shapes like they were made of tofu. The toothed heads kept biting even after he’d separated them from their bodies, though, so Justin was forced to retreat, jumping back to where Julius and Marci were sheltered against the wall.
“What the—” His words cut off in a bellow as he ripped a clamped jaw off his arm.“What’s with the snakes?”
“They’re not snakes,” Julius said, leaning over to look at the head in his brother’s bloody hands before Justin flung it away. “I think they’re sea lampreys.”
“Ugh,” Marci said. “You mean those things with the flat mouths and the rings of teeth that latch on to you and suck your organs out?”
“I never heard of them sucking organs out,” he said as he helped his brother pry another severed head—which did indeed have a hinged jaw that opened to form a perfectly flat, round ring of sharp teeth—off his leg. “They’re an invasive species to the Great Lakes. I’d thought Algonquin had kicked them all out, but clearly these found a way back in.” He grimaced at the basketball-sized head in his hands and tossed it back into the churning water. “They’re not normally this big, though.”
Marci gave him a funny look. “Are you a lamprey fan or something?”
“I studied them in my New Ecosystems of the Great Lakes class,” Julius explained. When this only seemed to make her more confused, he added, “I have a bachelor’s degree in Applied Ecology from NYU Online.”
Marci’s mouth fell open. “You’re anecologist?”
“Try professional student,” Justin said with a snort, brushing the blood off his body like another man might brush off dirt. “If it’s online, undergrad, and useless, Julius has it. He also has degrees in Pop Culture, Art History, and Accounting.”
“Accounting’s not useless,” Marci said.
Justin ripped the final lamprey head off his shoulder. “It is if you don’t have any accounts.”
“I like learning things,” Julius said irritably, though that was only a half truth. Hedidfind school interesting, but the sad reality was that online classes and gaming had been the only things that kept him sane and connected to the outside world during the years he’d spent hiding from his family’s plots. Also, being in school had been a great way to keep his mother off his back, at least until she’d realized he was studying things that interested him instead of properly draconic topics like how to exploit the legal system or become a titan of international finance. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why there’s a lake full of super-sized lampreys below Detroit.”
“Well, if there was a lake of super-sized lampreys anywhere, it would be here,” Marci said. “This place is Ground Zero for weird.”
