The Angel Stone: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

thegardens. She let the shrubs go wild. Fed by the primal magic coming from the door to Faerie, they spread into the woods, growing into a dense, twisting bramble that perfumed the whole town in summer.
    Or at least it had. When the door to Faerie was closed, the woods were blighted. Flowers died on the vine, and now their leaves hung yellowed and dry, like scorched paper. The bare branches resembled bones in the moonlight. Ducking under a low arch, I felt as if I were passing through the skeletal jaws of an extinct sea monster …
    At least, I hoped extinct. The bare limbs creaked and moaned around me, and the dry leaves chattered like gnashing teeth hungry to devour me.
Your fault, your fault
, I imagined the shrubs muttering. I’d been unable to stop the nephilim from closing the door, and now the woods were dying. I was almost relieved when I came to the cave.
    Almost
.
    The cave still freaked me out a bit. The entrance was a narrow cleft between boulders. I had to take Ralph out of my backpack so I wouldn’t crush him. He scurried into the narrow opening before me. I followed, turning sideways and pressing my back against damp stone and feeling my way with fingertips along the slimy rock—there just wasn’t room to hold a flashlight—until I found the notch that signaled the …
    Drop
. As usual, I missed it and plunged headfirst into the cave, landing on my knees in the dark. For a moment, as I scrabbled in my bag for my flashlight, I thought I heard a scraping sound, but when I fumbled the light on, the shadows shrank back too quickly for me to make out their shapes. Only Ralph remained, crouched by my side, his eyes big in the beam of my flashlight.
    “It’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure myself as I aimed theflashlight around the tunnel. “They’re probably just bats.” I counted to a hundred. When I was sure nothing was coming, I turned and followed Ralph into the tunnel that led to the campus. As dirt floor gave way to tile, and stone walls to cement, I breathed easier—or as easy as I would ever breathe twenty feet underground.
    When I reached the first crossing, I stopped and took out my compass and map. The map was hand-drawn by Soheila. She’d been in the tunnels before 1959, which was when a senior named Dolores Maynard had disappeared in them. Liz had them closed then, so that no students would stray into them again. She’d had all traces of them erased from campus maps and memory of them expunged from the memories of all mortal students and faculty. A wealth of campus lore had persisted about the tunnels, though. As Soheila had explained to me, no spell could entirely destroy a memory. Erasing a memory from the conscious mind simply drove it deeper into the subconscious, where it became lore, which, it turned out, was how most urban legends got their start.
    Since she was not mortal, Soheila remembered the tunnels, and she had suggested we use them to move about the campus, unobserved by the nephilim. The map was sketchy and incomplete (by her own admission, Soheila and her succubi sisters had lousy senses of direction), and every time I ventured into the tunnels I worried that I would stray into one of the unmapped sections and vanish like poor Dolores Maynard.
    Who, I had learned last spring, had evaporated into steam and taken up residence in the heating pipes.
    I shook that thought away and concentrated on the map. Soheila’s note had said to meet her beneath Main Hall. I traced out the most direct route, trying to choose tunnels I’d been in before, but I hadn’t traveled this far in the tunnel systemyet. I’d gone only as far as Fraser, where there was an entrance to the tunnels through Soheila’s office closet. But Main was on the far north side of campus, and some of the tunnels leading there were sketched in with dotted lines—Soheila’s code for
unexplored
. In one of them, Frank had scrawled
Here be dragons!
next to a cartoon of a ferocious fire-breathing beast.
    Very