Page 4 of Spelunking Through Hell

The memory of those five years has carried me through the last fifty, because I’ve been looking for him almost since the night he disappeared. Mary had been able to convince me not to follow him through the rip while I was pregnant, but that state had only lasted for another month, and once the baby was outside me and breathing on her own—breathing and screaming, which was Jane’s favorite pastime for the weeks we spent together—I’d handed our children off to my best friend, Laura, my sister in all but blood, and I’d run.

I’d run for every door I could think of that might take me to the world where he was lost and looking for me. I’d run for sorcerers and rumors of sorcerers, for routewitches in their tatty campers and for trainspotters in their boxcars, and I’d come uncomfortably close to my own crossroads bargain, only to be pulled back from the edge again and again by the ghost of my babysitter, Mary Dunlavy, who knew her employers wouldn’t treat me as kindly as they’d treated Thomas.

And then I’d found my answer. The stupid snake cults hadn’t been so stupid after all. They—

The sound of a door opening snapped me out of my woolgathering, and Cynthia came into the room, carrying a plastic tray that looked like it had been stolen from the Buckley High School cafeteria while I was still a student there. She smiled thinly at the sight of me.

“I wondered if you were going to wake up any time soon, or whether this was the time I got the dubious pleasure of calling your family and asking them to come collect your corpse from my stockroom,” she said, walking over to me and putting the tray down.

We were alone, and she wasn’t taking any measures to hide how intensely inhuman she really was. She had a fairly ordinary face, pale and lovely, with sharp Nordic features that would have made her a hit in any singles bar in the country, if not for the long cow’s tail that extended from the base of her spine and swished idly near her ankles, and the fact that she had virtually no internal organs. Her back looked like it had been scooped out, revealing an empty, flesh-lined shell where most of her body should have been, and it was a sign of how comfortable she was with me that she was wearing a low-backed top that allowed that cavity to air out.

Her hair was a shockingly vibrant shade of red, and that should, I suppose, have been a hint of what her species eats, but it still took a surprisingly long time for us to convince her to trust us enough to answer some basic questions about huldrafolk biology. They’re plants, essentially, specifically an extremely sophisticated and advanced form of pitcher plant, and like most meat-eating plants, they absorb their prey. Anything Cynthia can stuff into the cavity of her back, she can consume. Blood for the bloodthirsty usually works out in the end.

“How long was I out?” I asked. My leg didn’t hurt; it hadn’t since I’d woken up. I glanced down. And there was no break. The skin was perfectly smooth and unblemished. That either meant I’d been unconscious for six months, or I’d been awake enough at some point to activate one of my tattoos. Please, please, let it be the latter.

“About six hours,” she said. I sagged in relief. Cynthia either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She continued, “After you broke my window—and don’t think you’re not paying for that—you bled all over the damn floor and passed out cold. What the fuckhappened, Alice? You’re not usually that easy to get the drop on.”

“You know I got confirmation that Thomas isn’t dead?”

Cynthia nodded, a wary look in her eyes. She’s known me since I was way too young to be drinking in her place; she’s been running theAngel long enough that she knew my grandparents and still talked about them fondly when she got a few drinks in her. Wariness made sense. I’ve known for a long time that most of the people I love think I’m crazy, chasing a dead man across dimensions like it might actually change things, and I don’t hold it against them. Maybe Iama little crazy.

You don’t spend more than fifty years doing the same thing even when it doesn’t work if you’re not at least a little crazy. And given the alternative, which is a world where the crossroads killed my husband and I ruined my relationship with my children for nothing, I don’t mind being slightly off my rocker. It’s the best option I have left.

“Well, I know he’s out there, but I don’t know where heis, and the universe is pretty big, even if I’m just talking about the parts of it I can get to. I’m sure there are layers of reality I can’t access.” The ones occupied by the dead, for example, are pretty solidly closed off to the living. I’ve been trying to find a way into the twilight that Mary and Rose sometimes refer to for more than thirty years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way it’s possible is to die—something I have no interest in doing.

“Okay,” said Cynthia, in a “get the fuck on with it” tone.

“This means revisiting a lot of dimensions I’ve tried before without any luck and using them to springboard into less friendly realities. And some of those people know me at this point. I was passing through a world where my rep is... let’s call it ‘colorful,’ and I got jumped by a gang of assholes who wanted to prove themselves by taking out a pan-dimensional bounty hunter.”

So yeah, that’s what I do with myself, and it’s part of the reason my own daughter can’t stand me. I was raised to prize conservation above everything else, to believe it was my duty to pay back the debts my family had incurred through generations of service to the Covenant of St. George by helping nonhuman intelligence thrive in a world that was all too often set against it, and then as soon as shit got hard, I picked up my mama’s six-guns and started killing things for money.

That’s a massive simplification, but when you’re talking about fifty years of dead ends and fruitless decisions, fifty years of lonely nights and too much alcohol, a little simplification is essential, or we’d be here all day and I’d never get anything done. Earth is mostly exempt from my extracurricular activities, since it’s the one place I know Thomasisn’t, but everywhere else...

It’s not endangerment or oppression when the person you’re bringing to justice is not only a criminal but a member of the dominantspecies, and worlds where the humans won—where people whose greatest superpowers are “endurance” and “breeding like rabbits” even managed to survive long enough to build a civilization—are punishingly rare. So yeah, I mostly hunt what we’d think of as cryptids, because off Earth, cryptids are what you get. Or aliens, I guess.

The nomenclature has never been entirely clear, to me or to anyone else. Finding common language was hard enough on me and Thomas, and he was a British immigrant while I was the granddaughter of same. We could still never agree on what we were supposed to call a damn cookie.

Cynthia looked disapproving, as she always did when I mentioned my current profession. At least her judgment was less “how can you hunt and sometimes kill intelligent creatures” and more “how can you waste that much meat.” I like people with simple priorities.

“And what, they got the jump on you? Sloppy work, Healy. That’s not how you impress the people.”

“There were fifteen of them,” I protested. When she looked amused, I shrugged and added, “There’s about five left at this point. They were good. I’m still better. The only thing they had on their side was scale. Fuckers were seven feet tall.”

Cynthia looked grudgingly impressed. “How’s your leg already better?” she asked. “It was busted all to shit when you came through the window, and you had enough glass in your skin to qualify as a kaleidoscope.”

“Nice one,” I said. “I’m stealing that.”

Grabbing the bottom of my shirt, I hiked it up to just below the band of my bra. Cynthia made a sour face.

“Put thoseaway,” she snapped. “I’m not a human-fucking pervert and I don’t need to see that.”

“Tits are staying in the bra, I promise,” I said, and spread my fingers over the bare patch of skin at the base of my rib cage. “This was a very nice tattoo of a comfrey plant with its roots wrapped around a bone. Specifically for fractures. I must have woken up enough to activate it at some point.”

“And then passed out again?”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely. I’d lost a lot of blood, and my body had probably cannibalized something I was going to miss later in order to replace it. Which explained why I felt like I could mug Cynthia for the contents of that tray. “Healing is hungry work, whether or not you’re awake while it’s going on. What did you bring me?”

“Nothing that exciting, so don’t get too excited.” Cynthia pushedthe tray closer, so I could see what was on it. A bowl of clear, yellowish soup with spots of fat floating on the surface, recognizable and somehow appealing despite that; two slices of buttered toast; a neatly peeled boiled egg. Hangover food, the lot of it. I raised an eyebrow.

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