Fear Her Wrath II: Crucible of Glass

Chapter 56

I waited on the rooftop across from the glassworks until almost 4 o'clock, then headed home. Final exams were coming, and I needed at least a little bit of sleep before school. Gabriel stayed until dawn, but nobody ever came to collect the mask.

I woke up to a text from Corrigan. The police had finally finished counting and authenticating the "donation" Glassface left at the Policeman's Ball. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of five-and-a-half million dollars—mostly in very large bills that hadn't been printed since the New Deal. That Marbrose banks kept bills in defunct denominations was an open secret—if you're in the business of laundering drug money, Salmon P. Chase is your best friend. Glassface must have been saving them ever since the bank heist. That—to me, at least—meant his final move was coming soon.

By the time school was over and I'd made it back to the glassworks, both Nika Artemesia and the mask were gone. Her coworkers were completely useless, and my usual underworld leads—Mickey the Mouth was getting a lot of beatings this week—weren't any help either. Only 12 hours had passed and already I'd broken my promise to keep her safe. Not exactly the kind of thing that was going on my vigilante resume. I was on my way home to mope when I got a text from Gabriel.

'I just got a message from a friend. Meet me at my place at 10. Don't bring your work clothes.'

I met him in the lobby of the Argosy at the appointed time, dressed slightly nicer than usual just in case this turned out be a date. Dorian kept looking at me from behind the check-in desk and grinning, which made me wonder whether I was the first girl who'd ever made a return visit after sleeping over with Gabriel. When Gabriel arrived in the lobby with a large bag slung over his shoulder, I was surprised to see him beckoning for me to join him in the elevator.

"I thought we were going out," I said.

"We are," he said. He turned to the thin, sallow elevator operator. "Take us as far down as this thing goes."

The man didn't so much as nod, but soon we were sinking down into the depths of the hotel, below even the storage rooms two floors below ground level. There was no light down here apart from the feeble bulb hanging from the elevator ceiling, and the walls started to look less like bricks and more like rocks and exposed earth. Eventually, we came to a stop in a dark stone passage maybe forty feet beneath the Argosy. Gabriel passed the operator the usual extravagant tip.

"C'mon," he said, taking a flashlight out of his pocket. "It's just at the end of this passage."

We'd walked only a few yards when I noticed a familiar sound in the darkness ahead of us—the trickling, dripping, and gurgling of slow-moving water against stone. As the elevator disappeared up the shaft on its long, slow climb back to the hotel lobby, we stepped out into a vast subterranean tunnel that enclosed an underground river—the abandoned sewer system built by Robert Bellamy more than a hundred years ago.

"I didn't know the Bellamy sewers had a landing here," I said.

"I think the hotel management had it put in specially," said Gabriel. "A lot of the residents prefer to travel this way."

He reached out and pulled a long rope that hung from the ceiling, and a bell—like that of a church, but not quite so deep—echoed through the tunnel. Being used to summoning the Psychopomp with a whistle, it never occurred to me that he might answer to other noises as well. After about 10 minutes of waiting—you can probably guess how we occupied ourselves—I heard the gentle splash of the Psychpomp's pole in the slow-moving water, and saw the old man and his small boat emerging from the darkness.

"Where does your journey end, soul of wrath and thieving bird?" he called.

His voice was eerie and hollow, and despite its familiarity, it still made me shiver.