Rock unlocked the door and we stepped inside a wood-paneled room that looked like a gentleman’s club from an old movie. Carved tables sat in front of leather chairs and books lined the floor-to-ceiling shelves that ran along three of the four walls.
There was even a bar at one end of the room, although the glass bottles behind it were dusty, the mirror silvering.
I was about to ask what the fuck we were doing in the defunct chess room in Aventine’s administration building when Neo walked over to one of the bookshelves, searched the titles, and removed the one of the books.
He stuck his hand inside the space left behind and a low beep sounded from inside the walls.
The bookshelf clicked, popping out from the wall until it protruded a couple of inches past the shelves next to it, and Neo slid the bookcase to the side to reveal a door.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Hawk muttered.
Rock threw Neo the ring of keys and Neo used one of the keys to unlock the door.
He opened it and the chess room was hit with a blast of cool air.
The smell was familiar, a hint of stone and damp that I recognized from the Hunt in the tunnels under Blackwell Falls.
Neo pocketed the keys and stepped into the yawning darkness beyond the open door.
I don’t know why I looked at Rock. Neo obviously expected us to follow him.
Rock lifted a hand toward the open door. “After you.”
34
HAWK
We followedNeo down a spiral staircase into a large underground room. Neo made no effort to turn on the lamps that rested on long library tables, but I spotted a couple of old computer terminals, some filing cabinets, and shelves lined with cardboard file boxes.
We crossed the room in the dark, over carpets whose patterns were only faintly visible, to a large steel door that Neo unlocked with his never-ending key ring.
The smell of wet stone and dirt grew stronger.
Neo reached through the doorway, flipped a switch, and a series of electric torches flickered to life on the walls of a long tunnel that stretched into the darkness.
“What the fuck?” Jagger said behind me.
“The Rooks are having a party,” Neo said, stepping into the tunnel. “If we want to access their records room, this is the easiest way to do it without getting caught. And trust me, we don’t want to get caught.”
I stepped into the tunnel behind Neo and heard Jagger fall in behind, Rock behind him.
“When was this built?” I asked as we walked.
The tunnels under Blackwell Falls were constructed to ferry alcohol during Prohibition, but was far as I knew Aventine hadn’t opened until well after that.
“Fuck if I know,” Neo said.
“You’ve never used them for anything?” Jagger asked.
“We used them to fuck around some when we were in school,” Rock said. “Stage raids on the other houses, steal their mascots, freak out the Queens, shit like that.”
Somehow I had the feeling the original members of Aventine hadn’t used the tunnels to fuck with the girls on campus.
We followed Neo so long I’d started thinking he was fucking with us. We passed more than one door in the tunnel, all of them steel like the door that had led us here from the chamber under the chess room.
The tunnels curved and bent — sometimes they even seemed to double back on each other — but Neo seemed to know where he was going and eventually we stopped talking.
I thought about Cassie while we walked, about the weird turn of events that had Jagger and I here, in the tunnels under Aventine, searching for clues about who killed Cassie’s parents when Cassie hadn’t even won the fucking Hunt.
