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there?”
    “The underground city,” I said.
    He glanced one last time at the sodium lamps overhead and took his first hesitant step, testing the stair for stability. I lit the way for him so he didn’t fall and break his neck.
    “It looks more like a pit than a city,” he said when he was halfway down.
    “Lesson one. Things are rarely what they seem down here, Cameron,” I said as I followed him to the bottom, crouched to avoid smacking my own head on the low ceiling. The cellar doors closed behind us on one of Lee’s set time springs. As soon as theyclicked shut, the metal lock whirled back into place and the metal strips hissed shut, sealing away any residual lamplight from outside.
    The cellar ceiling was only five feet high. The room was originally built to hold slabs of salted ice, so height hadn’t been an issue. Two people could fit, but without much manoeuvring room. There was also no obvious way out except back up the way we’d come. Claustrophobia at its best. But Cameron seemed to be holding it together. Too tall to stand, he crouched by the foot of the stairs as I turned the penlight on the far brick wall of the cellar and reached out to tap the barrier one last time. Four times in less than an hour? I was in for one hell of an Otherside hangover tomorrow.
    I took a good look at each brick, searching for the one that glowed with Otherside. Unlike the lock outside, the symbols on the brick wall rotated on a constant basis. The only way to know which one to push was to tap the Otherside and scan them all. Again, great security since only experienced practitioners could tap the barrier back to back like that. Pushing the bricks by trial and error was a bad idea. Think cave-in.
    Now where the hell was it?
    Cameron had started to fidget, so I began talking while I scanned to distract him.
    “There’s a public entrance to the underground in Pioneer Square. The ruins of the old Seattle are nice down there. All spiffed up for the tourists.” Or so I’d heard; I hadn’t set foot in the tourist section of the underground since the late nineties. “But that’s not the part we’re heading to.”
    “This doesn’t look like an entrance to anything except someone’s basement,” Cameron said.
    “That’s the idea.” At last I caught the gold glow of an etched Chinese dragon on one of the bricks—one of the four symbols Lee used to mark the passageway. Holding the penlight in my mouth so I could use both hands, I put my back into pushing on the brick.
    Almost immediately, large gears somewhere behind the wall began to grind and Cameron almost tripped over himself backing up to the stairs as the sound of large metal plates colliding rangthrough the cellar. The room began to shake as the wall rattled against the mortar.
    “Don’t worry, it’s supposed to do that,” I shouted. Not surprisingly, it didn’t have the calming effect I would have liked.
    At last, bricks separated down the length of the wall and cold air seeped out, filling the cellar. The gears kept grinding until the wall was fully retracted, exposing the passageway.
    I shone the flashlight down the tunnel, taking note of all the dust in the air. I shook my head. “Lee needs to get someone to sweep this out.”
    I did up the collar of my jacket as far as it would go to ward off the chill and stepped inside. Not for the first time, I was glad I’d never told Aaron about this place. Aaron might be sympathetic to the paranormal, but I wasn’t sure how far that would stretch now that everything to do with permanent zombies was illegal.
    Cameron was halfway back up the stairs. “Come on,” I said. “The tunnel ceiling is higher. You can stand straight and not hit your head.” I started down the passage.
    “You’re out of your mind if you expect me to follow you in there.”
    I glanced over my shoulder. Cameron was glaring at me, his arms crossed over his body as if that would protect him from whatever was in here.
    I shrugged. “You