Page 78 of In the Pursuit of Haven
“Of course, but…”
That’s when Jessie got shoved up against the bar. Zak immediately jumped to action. “Call the police,” he shouted to one of his servers.
Jessie twisted around. One of Hunter’s biggest men stood in front of him. Gideon! “Where do you think you’re going?” Gideon bellowed down at him. “I told you we’d come after you if you ran.”
“Hey!” Zak shouted. “I don’t want trouble in my bar.”
“Nobody asked you,” Gideon shouted. He slammed Zak backward. Zak fell into me. The bottle I’d been holding broke against the counter. I screamed. Whatever had been inside clattered against the ground, spinning while the bar erupted into fists.
Abby jumped over the counter to get out of the way. Clearly, she’d been in this situation before. “Roxy,” she shouted. “Come on!”
Not before I found whatever came out of that bottle. I ducked down, searching the floor past the moving legs.
Hunter shouted out over the noise: “Guys, guys, guys,” he said. “We can talk about this calmly.”
He got punched by a patron, some guy named Billy who’d grown up with us. Jessie and Zak were busy trying to bring down the giant, but of course it only made Gideon angrier.
A strange cylinder spun against the ground. Seeing it was the thing that had fallen from the splintered bottle, I snatched it up. There were strange Masonic symbols on its wooden surface.
I scrambled to my feet, avoiding the crush. My hands found Zak’s back. “Where’s the way out?” Zak wordlessly grabbed at me. Jessie was at his side in an instant as we dashed for the back, but instead of the exit leading to the alleyway, Zak was taking us to the chimney. “Look, I don’t usually show people this… but these guys mean business.” Ducking under the weathered bricks, he shoved at the back and opened afreaking secret door. It led to stairs.
“Just take your first right and it’ll let you out in the alleyway two blocks down,” Zak said. “Don’t go anywhere else or you’ll get stuck down there forever. You understand?”
I nodded.
“Jessie!” Zak grabbed his friend’s collar and shoved him. “Don’t tell anyone about these smuggling tunnels. You understand? They don’t exist as far as you’re concerned, and if Davey gets wind of this…?”
Jessie fought his way free. “He won’t hear it from me.”
“Good, because there’s no romantic reason they exist—it was only used for unloading shipments, and now it’s great for storage. That’s it!”
“Yes, yes.” I would be halfway down the stairs by now, except for how dark it was down there. After the crypts, I wasn’t eager to get stuck in a small space again. We really needed the flashlight feature from our cellphones already.
As if reading my mind, Zak rummaged through a drawer and tugged out a compact flashlight. He pushed it into my hands.
“Keep an eye on my sister,” Jessie shouted out to Zak.
“I’m already on it.” He shoved the door shut behind us, leaving us on the cold stairs. My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t quite feel my hands. Jessie was right! Things were getting real weird. Too bad we’d been sworn to secrecy—Abby would be fangirling at the proof that these tunnels were real.
Poor Davey was about to be proven right again… behind his back.
Chapter Twenty-One
My hands went to Jessie’s arm while I tried to figure out our footing. I swept the flashlight’s beam across the floor, seeing that we were walking through a page from history… from many centuries ago.
The architecture was far different from the clean lines of our modern buildings. There were lots of bricks, some of them whitened by time. Worn boards and heavy beams added to the stone structure above.
Jessie was so tall, he had to duck to avoid hitting the ceiling as we sifted through the rubble of cement and dirt. The further we traveled, the more I could see that certain entrances in the corridor were closed off with heavy boards.
There used to be quite the sophisticated network of smuggling tunnels down here.
Derby, you scoundrel!
We reached a junction with three passageways splitting off in different directions.
Marks and notches were scratched against the walls, in what could only be a complicated system of underground street signs.
“We go to the right,” Jessie said. Somehow he remembered Zak’s directions in all this chaos.
