“Yes,” agreed Asil. “But you say this as if it is a good thing.”
“Lots and lots of people agreed with me,” she said.
“Philistines,” Asil proclaimed grandly.
“Charles likes Johnny Cash,” she told him. Charles had been her gateway to a lot of music she’d once dismissed as old or hokey. Before Charles, her usual listening favorites were either truly classical—preferably with lots of cello—or whatever was current on the radio. Life with Charles had opened up her musical library considerably—and she had once thought herself thoroughly educated on the subject.
“Barbarian Philistines,” Asil corrected himself. “Johnny Cash was an uneducated, backwoods man with a deep voice. You are wasted on Charles.”
“Cash was a national treasure,” she said, starting to feel a little hot. “He took folk music, church music, and rock, and fused them into something that spoke to a lot of people. And I’m so lucky I found Charles that I must have been blessed by leprechauns in a former life.”
“You’ve never met a leprechaun, or you wouldn’t say that.” Asil gave her a superior smile before turning his attention to keeping the heavy SUV from sliding off the track when its right wheel hit a patch of soft dirt.
“I don’t want the traitor to be Wellesley,” Anna told him.
“Nor do I, chiquita.”
After a while, during which she went over their conversation in her head, Anna asked suspiciously, “Do you like to listen to Johnny Cash?”
“I enjoy Dolly Parton,” he said. “Now, there is a unique voice.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Anna said. “Do you like to listen to Johnny Cash?”
Asil sighed and gave in with such overt embarrassment that she knew it wasn’t an important issue for him—not that liking Johnny Cash was something to be embarrassed about anyway. “Only the good songs.” He glanced at her. “If you tell Charles, I’ll deny it.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Only if Charles asks me.”
Asil’s sigh, this time, was full to dripping with dramatic sorrow. “You shall be the death of me, Anna. The very death of me.”
And at that moment he made a sudden right-hand turn off the cliff. Anna grabbed the oh-hell handle, reminded herself that she was a werewolf and unlikely to die in most motor-vehicle accidents—especially since Asil’s Mercedes was less than a year old and came equipped with all sorts of airbags.
But the Mercedes didn’t fall, just continued down a very steep track for twenty yards and twisted sharply to the right.
“Looks like that erosion control Bran had put in here held for another year,” Asil said, as if he hadn’t noticed her panicked reaction. “Until five years ago, every summer Wellesley had to rebuild that road because the edge where we just turned kept rolling off down the cliff every spring.”
“You did that on purpose,” Anna accused him.
He grinned whitely. “Maybe. But it was fun, no?”
She huffed at him and wouldn’t give him a grin in return no matter how much she wanted to.
The big SUV rocked slowly down the rough track that ended . . . continued into a natural crack in the side of the mountain that was just big enough to swallow the Mercedes. Asil paused at the opening and blasted his horn twice. He paused for a count of five (because he counted out loud) and turned his lights on bright and continued down the track and into the heart of the mountain.
CHAPTER
7
The darkness was so profound that the lights of Asil’s Mercedes barely penetrated—or else there was just nothing to see. Anna saw a flash of reflective tape, and Asil’s slow progress drew to a halt.
When Anna started to open her door, Asil shook his head as he turned the engine off. “Wait up a moment.”
They sat in silence for a while, the lights of the car fading to off. Anna had gotten used to being able to see in the dark, and the stygian lack of light started to make her feel claustrophobic. And other kinds of phobic, too.
Finally, Anna couldn’t stand the silence anymore.
“So why are we sitting here waiting?” she asked him.
“Because if we get out before Wellesley acknowledges our presence, bad things will happen. Wellesley was once an ordnance sergeant.”
“A what?” Anna asked.
He snorted softly. “I keep forgetting how young you are. ‘Ordnance sergeant’ means that he blew up a lot of things with chemicals found around battlefields, farmyards, and nineteenth-century factories. He has this whole place—maybe the whole side of the mountain—wired to blow. Or so Bran told me once.”
“Okay,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Does it worry you that Leah sent you and me here together? She’d happily see us both dead. You more than I, generally, but not at the moment.”
“Not in the slightest,” Asil told her. “I am not destined to be blown to bits by a mad and talented artist. No artist would willingly destroy such a work of art as I am.”
There was a clicking sound, then lights turned on around them.
“Now we can get out,” Asil said. Which would have been more reassuring if he hadn’t murmured softly, “I think.”
Anna hesitated, but remaining in the car was unlikely to protect her if Wellesley did decide to blow them to kingdom come, so she got out. As she closed the door, she took her time looking around.
The entrance had been natural, but the track they’d followed in looked more like a mine shaft complete with hand-scraped timbers holding up the dirt ceiling and railroad track unmoored and piled up along the wall.
The place where they’d stopped had been widened so it could accommodate three cars. Presently it held Asil’s Mercedes, an elderly Jeep, a motorcycle, and a snowmobile—the last two occupying one space. The ceiling directly over the parking area was ten feet high, if it was lucky, and I beams supported giant concrete blocks that (hopefully) endeavored to hold the mountain off their heads.
A narrow and irregular opening just in front of the motorcycle drew attention to itself by being more brightly lit than anywhere else. Anna followed Asil past the motorcycle and into the opening, noticing that Asil seemed completely relaxed. If she were with anyone else, she’d have been reassured. But Asil had spent over a decade waiting for Bran to kill him—he didn’t care as much about safety as she did.
There was a small landing just inside the opening followed by a sort of winding stairway. This wasn’t a hand-carved work of art like she’d seen at Hester’s home. This was a round, mostly vertical tunnel with dirt sides and chunks of two-by-fours stuck into the earth at irregular intervals, more like a ladder than a stairway, really.