Page 5 of Spelunking Through Hell

“I didn’t have time to start drinking before I passed out,” I said mildly.

“Yeah, and I’ll fire up the barbecue now that you’re awake, but I wasn’t going to waste perfectly good chicken on my usual clientele. They never appreciate it.”

That wasn’t entirely true; Cynthia’s patrons who ate cooked food generally appreciated her barbeque. They just weren’t the majority. I could still understand why she hadn’t gone to the trouble. I pulled the tray toward me, trying not to drool like a starving wolf.

“Chicken would be great,” I said, proud of how level my voice stayed as I picked up the first slice of toast.

Cynthia, who’s seen me bounce back from some pretty extreme injuries and has a slightly better idea of what it costs than most people, watched with sympathy and sorrow in her face. “You’re going to stop soon, right, Alice?” she asked, voice gentle. “You’re almost done?”

“I know he’s out there,” I said. “All I have to do now is find him.”

She didn’t say another word as she turned and left the room.

I ate my toast and garlicy chicken broth and egg in silence.

Let’s get one thing straight right here: I am not a sorcerer. Neither am I a witch, or a medium, or anything other preternatural thing that it’s possible for humans to be. Most of them require a trace of magical talent or power, neither of which I possess. The only thing remotely special about me is a lot of training, and a bit of the Healy family luck, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but is never, ever boring. My mother had it, too—from what I’ve been able to put together, she’s the one who brought it to the family—and she still died alone, unwitnessed, in the forest that loved her almost as much as it loves me. Luck alone isn’t enough to save you. It never has been.

But the other thing I have is a remarkably high tolerance for pain, thanks to both genetics and a childhood spent running around the woods firmly convinced of my own careless immortality. I’ve been falling out of trees, breaking bones, and trying to shake off blood loss almost since I was old enough to walk, and when you learn to treat all injuries as a mild inconvenience, you can handle almost anything.

I also have—had—havea husband who figured out how to combine traditional tattooing techniques with his own sorcery to embed charms and protections in his own flesh, and I still have access to tattoo artists from another dimension, who have been able to expand and build upon Thomas’ work. Anything magic can do, we can put into a tattoo. It costs, of course, and it hurts like hell, but it alsoworks, and it means that a girl like me, who has the innate magical talent of a rock, can recover from a life-threatening injury in hours if I have tattoos containing the right spells and the mental acuity to activate them.

With my lunch done, I slid off the bed of birch bark and furs, relieved when my legs didn’t buckle. I still felt weak as a tailypo kit; I needed to eat something much more substantial before I’d have the strength to leave the Angel and resupply. I took a deep breath and wobbled out of the room, into the narrow hall that would lead me to the Angel proper.

The window had already been repaired, and all the broken glass swept away. There were no bloodstains on the floor, but that was easily explained; all Cynthia needed to do was take her shoes off and walk where I’d bled, and her hungry, hungry skin would pull every drop out of the weathered wood flooring. It’s convenient to have a vampire vegetable running the local watering hole, at least from the perspective of the cleanup crew.

Only a few seats were occupied, mostly by people who looked at me warily when I appeared. One young gorgon actually squeaked, his hand tightening on his beer bottle and his snakes writhing wildly around his face, all of them staring in my direction. I felt a little bad about that. My parents and my children dedicated their lives to repairing our family’s tattered reputation among the cryptid community, and me?

I’m the monster under the bed, even for the literal monsters under the bed. I’m the thing they ask their parents to check for in the closet before they go to sleep.

I slid onto an open seat at the bar, trying not to let on how much effort that little walk had taken, and looked around for Cynthia. She was nowhere to be seen. I frowned, resting my weight on my elbows. Normally, this would be when I called for one of the family ghosts. But I wasn’t in the mood to chat with Mary, and Rose is a bit more than I was really feeling up for. I didn’t even have any grenades, having spent or lost them all in my last encounter.

Grudgingly, I added a return to that nasty little shithole dimension to my list of things to do. Nobody gets the drop on me and lives tokeep bragging about it. My pride alone makes that unacceptable, and they had like half my gear. I needed it back if I wanted to go any further off the beaten path.

The list just kept getting longer. Eat enough to feel like I could handle a dimensional crossing. Go home to resupply and check the house. Check in with my employer. Get back to looking for my husband. For someone most people consider an unstable loner, I sure do wind up with a lot of obligations, and I don’t like any of them.

A door opened and closed, accompanied by the smell of barbecued chicken. I raised my head. Cynthia was walking toward me with another tray, this one piled with red-sauced poultry and a bowl of baked beans. She set it in front of me and stepped back, holding up her hands in protective surrender. I smiled at her.

“It’s always nice to see a woman who knows what she needs to do to keep her fingers,” I said, pulling the tray closer before grabbing a drumstick in each hand. “Thanks, Cyn. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Yeah, Healy, I know. Now eat up and get out. You’re scaring the customers.”

She wasn’t wrong about that. No one in the room looked like they were breathing, and most of them needed to.

So I ate up, and I got out.

Two

“Until Thomas came along, I wasn’t sure that girl was ever going to fall in love with anything the way she fell in love with the forest. Or that anything was ever going to love her back the way that forest did.”

—Mary Dunlavy

Leaving the Red Angel, to the relief of basically everyone inside, even as they try not to show it

Cynthia walked me tothe door after I finished demolishing my second lunch and wiping my hands meticulously with a towel. I wasn’t going to risk washing my hands in the Angel. There might still be blood under my nails, along with all the barbecue sauce, and while I didn’t mind making the occasional donation to Cynthia herself, she had some customers who might be willing to take the sink apart to get a bit of me for themselves. Not cool, and not something I wanted to encourage.

“Try to stay gone for a little while this time, huh?” she said, the warmth of her tone belying her words. “Or come back with Tommy. That asshole still has a twenty-dollar bar bill to settle, and that’s in 1950s money. He needs to pay me back with interest before he’s welcome to drink here again.”

“You don’t mean that.”

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