Chapter 142

The light at the end of the tunnel looked unattainable. Jo wasn’t sure how she would get down below the ground where the light seemed to be coming from. She wasn’t quite there yet, but the closer she got, the brighter the light was. It still didn’t look like an opening, though.
At the edge of the light, Jo stopped and looked down at the ground. It looked just like the rest of the tunnel. The ground was black, sharp, rock, just like everything else around her, but it was also glowing.
It didn’t make any sense.
Lifting her foot, Jo kicked the black rock. It didn’t budge. It felt the same as the ground she was standing on. She thought maybe there was some particular place she could step that would cause the ground to open up. She moved forward, pressing her feet around the edge and then in the center. It was difficult to feel a difference between the tunnel where the light was absent and this new area that was glowing beneath her feet.
“How the hell am I supposed to get down there!”
The answer came with a whoosh, and suddenly, Jo found herself falling through the floor. She landed with a thud in a heap on a floor that seemed to be exactly like the one she had just been standing on, the same sort of floor she’d been walking on for hours, except this one wasn’t glowing like the hole she’d just fallen through.
Looking up, Jo couldn’t see the soft glow above her either. The ceiling looked the same as it had when she was in the other tunnel. In fact, there was absolutely no way to tell she wasn’t in the same place she’d been the entire time, since she’d walked through that portal.
But she wasn’t in the same place. The fall had left both of her hands scraped and bleeding and her hip hurting from where she’d landed on the sharp ground. And it had let her know she’d been transported somewhere else. There was a different feeling about this place, a different aura altogether that told her she was not exactly where she had been before, not at all.
Standing, Jo took a look around and absently wiped her hands on her pants. They stung, but they’d heal fast enough. Even the sharp rock the tunnels were made of couldn’t hurt a Hunter for too long.
It did seem odd, though, that the rule that only Vampires could kill Hunters was suspended in here… For that matter, most of the rules about death didn’t count in this place. Anyone could die--even someone who’d been through the Blue Moon Portal.
So why were her hands already healing?
It was a question no one could answer. Something told her, if Christian was there, and she were to ask him, he’d have a response. A made-up one meant to make him seem smart.
Jo walked along, pulling her gun from her holster where she’d tucked it when she was tending to Zane, and kept her eyes open for the monsters she’d been encountering in the tunnels above. There was no reason to believe they wouldn’t be down here, too.
The tunnel was just about as long as the ones above her. She headed down it toward what she assumed was the central hub. She fully expected everything down here to be a mirror image or exactly the same as how it was above her.
The question of how she was supposed to get back to that alternate set of tunnels once she found her mom was not something she would allow herself to dwell on, though. They’d sort that out later.
Checking her IAC, she saw that the signals she had been getting from the rest of her teammates had faded to the same small little blips of light that she’d been seeing from her mom for the past hour or so.
But her mom’s was different now. It was much stronger.
Jo decided to try and communicate with her. “Mom? Can you hear me? Are you there?”
She was greeted with nothing but radio silence.
It wasn’t that surprising. She hadn’t expected her mom to say, “Well, hi, Jo! I’m right here.” That would’ve been nice, but not practical.
Eventually, she reached the central hub. She didn’t see or hear any monsters. In fact, the entire level of tunnels seemed to be practically void of any noise at all. In the other set of tunnels, there’d always been some sort of noise in the distance. Whether it was the steps of the monsters or just the noise they made echoing in the distance, Jo really wasn’t sure, but it was sound. Here, she wasn’t even hearing her own footsteps.
She could hear her heart beating, though, and her breathing. Both were erratic. She was scared, and it had nothing to do with monsters or not being able to get out of the tunnels.
She thought it was just about time for the portal to open. She knew it did so on its own every six hours. She’d heard it a couple of times while they were walking around before, but it was impossible to time because there simply was no consistent time here. The clock on her IAC was pointless. It still moved, but it was arbitrary. If she counted in her head to see the length of seconds it took for the clock to change, it was different every time. Her entire perception of time was off.
Still, she hoped that, if the portal opened down here, that would be a way she could get out and get back home.
Once she found her mom.
Standing in the central hub, Jo took a look around. Which way should she go?
She used the blip on her IAC as a guide, deciding to try and walk toward it. Doing so was difficult because the IAC wasn’t four-dimensional like the tunnel was. At the moment, it was really only two-dimensional. If her mom had had on video, it might’ve been three-dimensional, but that wasn’t the case.
Nevertheless, she turned to her right and tried to walk in the direction she thought would lead her to Cadence Findley McReynolds.
The urge to call out, to see if maybe her mom would be able to hear her voice if not her IAC call, was overwhelming, but she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself if there were monsters down here. If they were having the same trouble hearing sounds that she was, they might not even know she was there.
Following the IAC blip seemed to be making the spot larger. So… Jo continued to walk in that direction. It led her across the center area and past most of the tunnels.
That was when Jo realized where it was taking her. It was a door--in the same position as the door to hell had been above them. Did that mean this door also went to the same place? She wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of going to hell….
But what if her mom was in there? She had to go then, didn’t she?
Jo thought back to the dream she’d had. She’d been walking down a tunnel that had looked a lot like this one. Her mom had been encapsulated in some sort of a cell at the end of the tunnel. Surrounded by light--not darkness.
Jo placed her hand on the door, wondering if there was any way to tell what was on the other side without opening it.
Of course, there wasn’t. With a deep breath, she pulled it open, looking inside and seeing nothing but darkness. She surveyed the ground around her feet to see if there was a way to prop it open, but she didn’t see anything that could be scooted in front of it.
She decided to take her belt off and use that to wedge between the door and the jamb so that it wouldn’t close all of the way… just in case. She took her knife out of her belt and shoved that in a pocket. There was nothing else of value on the belt, so if she never got it back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Once she was sure she could get back out again--assuming nothing moved her belt, Jo stepped inside.
It was even darker here than it had been out there or in the tunnel above them. She didn’t think she would’ve even been able to see her hand in front of her face if she’d been human. The blip on her IAC was stronger though. “Mom? Can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
Jo kept walking.
This place was different. It wasn’t full of tunnels, nor was there a central hub. It was just one long tunnel that shifted slightly in one direction or another as she followed it.
Jo continued to walk for what seemed like a very long time. Nothing changed. The portal didn’t open. No demons popped out and tried to kill her. She neither saw nor heard anything for what might’ve been hours; it was impossible to tell down here.
She was beginning to contemplate going back. What if she got lost in here? She’d never find her way out, and she’d be just as lost as her mother. That’s definitely not what her mother would want….
She wasn’t going to do that, though. She’d keep walking for however long it took. She needed to find her mom.
The blip wasn’t getting any bigger now, but then, it was about the size she would’ve expected it to be if she knew where her mom was, and she was just a few steps away.
And then… she saw it. Off in the distance, so far away, it was just a pinprick. But she saw it just the same.
It was a light--a glowing white light just like the one that had led her to this level.
Either it was a re-entry to the tunnels she’d originally come from, and all of this had just been an experiment in fruitlessness.
Or it was the light she’d seen before… in her dream… and her mom was up there ahead of her.
Jo began to run.