Page 35 of Can't Bite This Feeling
She stares at me, wounded and fierce. “You should be.”
“Okay, I’m terrified,” I admit. “But Rapha’s down there. And he’s being pulled apart piece by piece. If I can get to him, if I can remind him who he is, what we mean to each other, I have to try. Please.”
Alice’s eyes brim with conflict.
Finally, she exhales through her nose and turns to Gordy. “Where?”
“The old reading cellar,” he says. “Behind the Romance stacks.”
“Of course it’s behind Romance,” Alice mutters.
She disappears behind a curtain and returns with a small silver charm on a black cord. “Protection spell. It won’t stop Lucifer, but it’ll keep his little distractions from getting their claws too deep.”
She places it around my neck and presses two fingers to my forehead, whispering a word I don’t catch. “That’s for clarity. Hold onto your truth down there.”
I nod, holding back tears. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she mutters. “Just come back whole.”
Gordy leads us through the cramped back hallway behind the Romance section. The floorboards creak beneath our feet, and the scent of old paper and honey-wax candles lingers in the air.
“I don’t evenwantto know what’s leaking out of this rift thingy,” Alice mutters as we descend a narrow spiral staircase. “And if anything has nested down here, demon, ghost, or goblin, I’m blaming you, Gordy.”
He offers a sheepish shrug. “I was panicking. You were stone.”
“Andthiswas your solution?”
“I was desperate.”
She huffs but says nothing more.
We reach the cellar floor, and the air shifts. It’s colder here, denser somehow, like the pressure of the earth has a pulse. Old reading chairs are draped with sheets. Forgotten tomes line the dusty shelves. A cracked mirror leans against one wall, its surface fogged with age. And in the far corner, beneath a threadbare tapestry of a weeping willow, the floor glows faintly like moonlight caught in a puddle.
Alice stops, her mouth a grim line. “There.”
I step closer. The shimmer pulses as I near it, and the space beneath the tapestry begins to ripple. Gordy nudges the fabric aside, revealing a shallow depression in the stone floor about the size of a doorway. The air above it quivers, invisible and yet not.
“It doesn’t always show itself,” he says softly. “But when you want something badly enough…”
“It listens,” Alice finishes, her voice brittle.
I stare at the shimmer, heart pounding.
Gordy hands me a folded scrap of paper. “Names,” he explains. “Call them in order if you get in trouble. They owe me. Probably.”
I smile, barely.
Alice hesitates, then wraps her arms around me fiercely. “Don’t let him forget you.”
“I won’t,” I breathe.
Then I step forward.
The shimmer parts like water, cool and biting as it clings to my skin. I feel it slide over me, inside me, as if tasting my fears and memories. I don’t look back.
The Below welcomes me with velvet-dark shadows and perfume-thick air. Heat rises from the cobblestones beneath my boots, and above me, lanterns glow with unnatural fire. Laughter echoes from the alleyways, low and hungry. A sign swings on black iron hinges nearby:
Welcome to the Below.All sins accepted. No absolution required.
