All Things Wicked by Karina Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

fault.
    Alicia’s words floated through her mind. She doesn’t know?
    Of course she did. Everyone knew how Caleb Leigh had turned against them.
    “Move it,” he whispered, then vanished around the corner. His shadow danced across the walls, a wicked flicker in gray and black as she hurried up the stairs, wincing with every creak and groan of rotting wood.
    The room was empty of all but Caleb, crouched by a fire pit hastily dug in the center of the eroded floor and circled by broken slabs of mortar and concrete. He rose, features expressionless as he studied the gaping hole that was all that remained of one wall. His fingers glistened, damp from the drink he’d dipped them in, and he gestured at the abandoned mug by his feet. “He’ll be back,” he said brusquely. “Drink’s still warm. Grab that light and let’s go.”
    “Can you—” She swallowed as he tipped his head toward her, his mouth tight with impatience. The firelight painted everything over in radiant orange, colored the lurid bruises marring his face into vivid welts. Purple and red and angry and so raw, it hurt to look at. She squared her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
    “You’re concerned?” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t be. Let’s go.”
    It wasn’t as if they had much of a choice. Still, his casual dismissal stung, and she turned away before he noticed her disappointment. And her exhaustion.
    She found the flashlight he indicated, discarded on an end table whose finish had long since peeled away to a cracked, gray shell. She palmed it neatly, watched him pick up a rough denim jacket discarded on the floor. He slid it on, and if she hadn’t been watching, she would have missed his flinch.
    So he did actually feel pain. Only human, huh?
    Yeah, right.
    He strode out through the jagged hole, buttoning the jacket as he went. Shadows lapping at his heels, the devastated tomb swallowed him as completely as if he’d walked off the face of the world.
    With a last frown at the yawning black void that had been their prison, she hurried after him.
    Shapes rose alien and menacing in the shadows cast by the campfire’s orange flicker. It seemed that her footsteps clattered in the pressing silence, that every inhale and exhale rasped and echoed back at her until it became a rickety hiss of sound and motion. She caught herself holding her breath as she stepped over the slimy, moss-ridden stones of what had probably been some kind of street or sidewalk. It was impossible to tell now.
    Fifty and some odd years of neglect had only aggravated what a world-changing earthquake and massive flooding had started.
    To look at it now, it was hard to imagine the chaos, the sheer hell that had overwhelmed a once-thriving city. Five decades had worn the worst of the cavity to a dull edge, helped along by industrious rich people who had built a new city right on top of the half-eaten ruins of the old. They’d planted a few thousand columns, paved over the whole damned thing. It was a solution, of sorts.
    A Band-Aid.
    The lucky ones got to live within the walls of the new metropolis. Rumors and stories whispered of the unlucky ones, the people trapped outside the new city’s walls to be hunted down, torn apart by the things that existed between the remaining cities of the world.
    She didn’t know what was true, she’d never been outside the guarded walls. She’d never met anyone who had. She knew there were other cities, and that heavy transports moved between them—how else could goods be imported in?—but that was all she knew.
    As far as she could tell, it was all anyone down in the layered city was allowed to know.
    Old Seattle existed somewhere in between the real world and the old. It was a cesspit of forgotten legacies, secure behind the city walls and all but alive with history and, she’d always felt, malicious hunger—dying to feed on the corpses of the unwary.
    The coven lost witches every year to the ruins. Carelessness, sheer rotten luck; it didn’t