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“Maybe she’s in the hotel,” Marla said doubtfully. “Maybe there’s a basement?” Some
sorcerers thrived on desolation, and pyromancers often favored sites of arson for their
lairs. But that didn’t explain the wording of Dalton’s printout, the words in crisp laserjet
Helvetica: “Bethany. Tenderloin Station. Underground.”
“Or maybe the real entrance is down there,” B said, pointing to a bit of the cracked
sidewalk to the left of the boarded-over double doors.
Marla looked, and the opening revealed itself to her like an optical illusion resolving.
B’s gifts as a seer were proving more and more valuable. There was a stairway there,
leading down into a recessed rectangular opening. The stairs and walls were the same
color and texture as the surrounding sidewalk, which explained part of the illusion, but
there was clearly a patina of magic laid over the scene to make it truly indistinguishable
from the surrounding street. Marla peered down into the subterranean entryway to a
concealed door whose outlines were only faintly visible, the delineation of its edges
blurring into the form of sidewalk cracks.
“I think that’s our great ingress,” Rondeau said, and Marla nodded, stepping down the
stairs carefully—even staring right at them, they seemed to blur and dissolve beneath
her feet. The stairs went down about seven feet below street level.
“Freaky,” Rondeau said. “It looks like you’re sinking down through the concrete, even
though I know the steps are there. As soon as I blink, though, it slips out of focus.”
“I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be concealed,” B said. “It’s clear as air to me. I
wonder how many things I walk past every day that are supposed to be hidden?”
“There’s no telling,” Marla said, and thought again how hard it must be for B, a being
of perpetual twilight, Mr. In-Between, uncomfortable among ordinaries and unknown
among sorcerers.
Marla went to the door, placing her hand against it, cold rough stone against her palm
and the equally rough pads of her fingertips. She felt around the outlines of the door,
looking for a catch, and found nothing. She stepped back. “B,” she said, “do you see a
way into this?”
B came down the stairs, his brow furrowed, and brushed past her to examine the door.
He smelled of damp grass and black tea, a strangely pleasant combination, and for a
moment, looking at his face in profile, Marla saw beyond the weight of grief and recent
years, past his padded armor of layered thrift-store clothes, to the magnetism he tried so
hard to disguise, an attractive quality that had first made him into a minor movie star
and that now drew ghosts and visions to him. Marla seldom had time for romance, and
even more seldom lamented that fact, but seeing B’s beautiful profile—the corona of his
so-much-eclipsed sun—gave her a brief pang of longing.
And, of course, he was gay. It was just as well. The last thing this trip needed was
another complication, even an incidentally pleasant one.
“Huh,” B said. “There’s, like, a habit hanging in the air here.”