We reached a heavy iron grate in the wall. The foul sewer smell seeped out from it like a slap across the face. Griff stepped forward, braced, and lifted. The grate groaned, resisted, then gave way with a wet suck of rust and slime. Eamon muttered something under his breath that sounded like a prayer for his own sanity.
We climbed through and into a narrower passage, then up a set of stairs that shouldn’t have existed in a sewer.
Concrete gave way to tiled walls. The air was less foul this way, which was a nice change of pace.
At the top of the stairs was a metal door. It had no sign. No handle on the outside. Only a small slit at eye level.
I leaned close to the slit and whispered, “It’s me.”
A pause.
Then a voice echoed behind the door, young, flat, and remarkably unimpressed. “That could mean a lot of people.”
I smiled faintly. “My name is Tamsin Drake.”
Another pause. The sound of locks disengaging, one after another.
The door opened a handspan.
A girl stood there, maybe nineteen or twenty, shaved head gleaming faintly under warm lantern light. Her arms were inked from wrist to shoulder with symbols, names, and tiny drawings of wolves and ships and knives. Her eyes conveyed the kind of intelligence that belonged to someone who’d grown up reading rooms for danger before she could read books.
She looked me up and down, then looked past me at the men.
“Your pack got bigger,” she said.
“So did your attitude,” I replied.
Her mouth twitched with what could have eventually become a smile. “Mirae said you’d come sooner or later.”
She stepped back and opened the door wider. “Come in.”
We filed through.
The corridor beyond wasn’t the sewer anymore. It was a hidden space inside a broken building made of old wood with lanterns spaced at regular intervals. The air smelled faintly of herbs and smoke and fabric that hadn’t been soaked in filth.
“This way,” the girl said.
We followed her down a narrow hall that turned twice and opened into a larger space.
It was a ruin now, but it had once been a luxury hotel.
I could see it in the bones of the building, in the carved banister half-hidden under draped cloth, in the remnants of elegant wallpaper peeling off the mildewed walls, and in the broken chandelier hanging like a dead star above us. Someone had rebuilt the ground floor into a warren of rooms and passageways, each one lit and guarded and quiet.
The girl led us past a curtain and into a sitting room that could have belonged to a wealthy person two hundred years ago. Now it belonged to someone far more dangerous.
Mirae waited by the fireplace.
She was exactly as I remembered, elegant in a way that didn’t require jewels, pale hair pinned back neatly, skin smooth and unblemished. She looked to be in her forties, maybe, but with women like Mirae, age was more suggestion than fact. She wore a dark dress layered with a practical coat, and on her fingers were a number of heavy gold and silver rings.
Her eyes landed on me, just warm enough to be convincing.
“Tamsin Drake,” she began, voice unassuming. “I see that you’re still alive.”
“Mirae,” I replied. “I see that you’re still sitting in someone else’s ruin.”
She laughed quietly, like I’d told her something genuinely delightful. “You say that like it’s an insult.”
“It’s just an observation,” I answered.
