I stepped off the elevator. Compared to the beach-party atmosphere of the second floor, the atmosphere here was night and day. It was cold, and instead of vibrant tropical faire, I was treated to a wasteland of gray brick and gothic architecture with a tall ceiling, scattered with bright splashes of red.

A catacomb. How quaint.

Whatever battle took place here dyed the image, spattering its cliche-but-reserved creepiness with grindhouse red, bodies and trails of blood soaking into the ground. Judging from the bodies, the only time I’d seen this many monsters in one place was during the transposition.

“Looks like we missed the fun.” Talia heeled at my side. While her tone was calm, her hackles were raised, the beginning of a growl in her throat.

“Fan out. Look for casualties.” I murmured.

Audrey got vertical, moving cautiously at first, scaling the wall effortlessly with her vines until she hung from the ceiling, traversing it with spider-like grace. Talia went the opposite direction, moving at a silent jog. I almost told her to slow down until I saw her pause at a corner, carefully peek around it and move on.

I bent down, staring at the multitude of footprints at the entrance, stupidly hoping King’s Ranger came with some sort of innate tracking ability. It didn’t. I tried to count them, but there were so many going both directions it was impossible to get a solid headcount. Someone who’d lived in a rural area might glean more. Even with my enhanced Perception, the most I could nail down was that the footprints were probably human. Or at least, humanoid.

I left a little room for doubt as they drastically ranged in size. There were footprints big enough for me put both feet together and stand in the center of them, and some small enough—

Wait.

I leaned far down, putting out a hand to catch myself. There was a small set of footprints in the mud, heading deeper into the catacombs. Too small.

Human Adolescent. Between nine and fourteen. filled in the blanks.

I frowned. Highly specific deductions were par for the course with the title, even early on. It could divine a sidearm a civilian was carrying from the bulge in their waistband or outline in their clothes. Shame it couldn’t do the same with a User’s inventory, but the point was, it probably wasn’t wrong.

Which begged the question. Who the hell brought a kid in here?

Tyler and the Adventurer’s Guild weren’t the type to use child soldiers. The Order was capable of it, but there wasn’t a kid in the three-man squad that came up here. The woman with them had a kid—unless she’d pulled an American Sniper and carried around a fake baby as a prop—but unless she’d been feeding it something nasty, admittedly a real possibility with all the dodgy magic in play, the kid wasn’t with them.

Which meant either some ballsy kid made it up to the tower’s 28th floor, or there was a third party in play.

I grimaced. I needed to pay more attention to peoples’ shoes.

There was a looping shadow on the ceiling, and I nearly reached for my dagger before I sensed Audrey, sending me feelings of calm and serenity.

Audrey dropped from the ceiling and landed with a wet plop, wiggling gleefully in the mud, stopping only when she noticed my expression. “Problem?”

“I’m guessing from your reaction, the floor is empty?” I said, attempting to tamp down my irritation at the ruined tracks.

“Many dead biters.” Audrey confirmed.

“Anything taste good?” I asked idly, watching Talia slink her way back. From her expression she didn’t share the plant summon’s cheer.

“Biters always taste worse than foragers.” Audrey said it like it was common knowledge.

Talia gave the plant a pointed look. “Feasting on the fallen is best reserved for after we know we’re safe. I nearly tore you open.”

“You tear open.” Audrey stuck a vine at me. “He bring back. My turn to tear you open.”

I looked between them, confused. “You guys ran into each other?”

Talia stopped snarling at Audrey long enough to look at me. “As dungeons go, it’s rather small. All vampire corpses except the body of a human I didn’t recognize that looked like it was here for a while.”

“Was it a kid?”

“No, he was man sized.” Talia cocked her head.

“Any sign of the ripple?”

“Few possibilities, none I wished to risk sticking my head into, considering the situation we just escaped from. Why did you ask about a child? I can’t imagine a child surviving in here.”

“Tracks at the door. And I feel the same way, but why do you?” I was curious to hear her reasoning. I didn’t have the most generous view of humanity but Talia’s view was more brutal than mine.

“Because what this floor lacks in size, it makes up for in cruelty. Considering the number of bodies I’d wager a guess the vampires were all hiding in the crypts lining the wall. More nefarious, the circular layout creates a perpetual flank. It’d be next to impossible for a small group to get through without being surrounded. A child would last minutes, if that, before they were picked off.”

A chill went through me. The Order’s Group were likely the first to go through. Meaning they dealt with an upper-level ambush and came out unscathed.

Talia approached the tracks, circling them once before she bent down over a singular small track Audrey missed, nostrils flaring in a precautionary sniff. Not satisfied, she bent down further until her muzzle was nearly pressed to the mud. Then huffed.

“Something you don’t recognize?”

Talia slowly shook her head, eyes still fixed on the tracks. “More like it was never here at all. No scent at all.”

“Could be too old.”

“Track hasn’t been walked over. It’s at least somewhat fresh.”

“What does lack of scent mean?”

The wolf summon gave me a grave look. “Either a being highly versed in stealth—which begs the question of why they were sloppy enough to leave tracks—or someone particularly powerful.”

An uncomfortable idea proliferated in the depths of my mind. As it hardened into suspicion, I pulled up my direct messages and fired off a query to Kinsley.

Well, that confirmed why communications had been such a clusterfuck. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to center myself.

“What is it?” Talia asked.

No point in holding it back.

“There’s a chance my brother is in there,” I finally said.

Talia took a long time to respond. “That’s… bad.”

If anything, that was an understatement. Not that he was in danger. If Ellison was being truthful during our cryptic conversation, he probably knew exactly what he was walking into, which put him one over on the rest of us. The problem was I didn’t know what he wanted or what he was after. But I could guess. He’d killed Waller without hesitation, taken a shot at me in the apartment lobby. I’d spent a decent time in denial on the latter point. Just because he was running his own game didn’t make him hostile, maybe he was helping me sell it, making it look good for the cameras.

But the longer I mulled it over, the less likely it seemed.

His power was lethal. Waller and the massacre at the cathedral was proof of that. And maybe he knew I had and expected me to dodge, but that was a gigantic risk for a small payoff. The opposite of how Ellison preferred to operate.

There was a reason he was being so cagey with information. I couldn’t imagine working against him, especially with Iris’s safety in the balance as he alleged, but if something about Ellison’s “Plan” was too horrible to stomach, I had to admit it was possible. My best guess was that he tried for a batman gambit. The lobby and feds on my ass presented an opportunity for a free shot. Either he killed me or helped sell it. If I survived, his plausible deniability was intact.

Either outcome worked for his purposes.

“Squeeze that fist any harder and you’ll break it.” Talia warned.

I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. Slowly, I uncurled my fingers and let my hand hang loose at my side.

“If our paths cross, should we consider him hostile?” Talia asked gently.

I shook my head. Then shook it again.

“No.” My voice was raw.

“Very well,” Talia said. She knew me well enough by now that she was aware how sensitive this was. She didn’t push as she had in the elevator, but she also didn’t move. Just waited expectantly.

“If Ellison’s here, there’s a good chance whatever’s happening inside the ripple is crucial. That’s the rub with other people knowing you have future knowledge. Downside, he probably knows we’re coming. And if our paths cross,” I repeated her wording numbly. “There’s a good chance he’ll approach us. He’ll probably seem friendly. May even want to cooperate.”

Talia bared a smile. “Which of course, we’ll reject.”

“No.” I muttered. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the only reason he hasn’t come at me again is because it hasn’t been convenient. Ellison’s about the long game. Always has been, even to a fault. Blinds him on the here and now. Right now we’re not worth dealing with and it needs to stay that way. The more oblivious he thinks we are, the better this will go. We play along. For now. Which is why I need you both to be eyes in the back of my head. Don’t make it obvious, but I need at least one pair of eyes on him at all times.”

A heavy silence hung between us. Talia spoke the words I didn’t want to consider.

“And if his entire reason for being there is because this ripple presents another opportunity to ‘Deal with us?’” Talia asked. “What then?”

I ignored the question. Not because she was wrong to ask, but because I couldn’t bring myself to answer. Instead, I walked around her, treading deeper into the catacombs, stepping over vampire bodies strewn all over the circular path. The carnage was the definition of overkill. Some corpses had gaping holes large enough to see through, while others were literally ripped apart.

Something ate one vampire from the head down, leaving only a torso with a bouquet of severed entrails. I looked closer and found thousands of tiny bite marks.

Audrey insisted it wasn’t her handiwork. Which meant we had something new to worry about.

The ripple was in the bed of an empty sarcophagus large enough to be a giant’s last resting place. It looked around a foot deeper on the inside than it was on the outside, and when I lowered a loop of rope into it, the rope fell straight through.

I fixed the rope to an iron loop on the wall that looked like it secured a prisoner’s manacles. Keeping in mind that this was apparently a resting place for vampires, I tried not to think too far into it. It was probably just window dressing.

With anticipation and nausea warring in my stomach, I lowered myself down into the sarcophagus.

As soon as my head cleared the ripple, there was a chorus of malignant screams. A long scroll of text popped up before I could so much as look down.