Page 74 of Truthfinder’s Promise

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Jensen didn’t know what Meredith was doing, but he didn’t like it. Her face went pale and he felt the unpleasant buzz of Aspect flood the room—the spell’s Aspect, not hers. It was reacting to pain, as it had when she’d been stubbornly tapping her bandaged finger against her leg. Except she wasn’t doing anything now. She wasn’t moving, wasn’t physically hurting herself.

The spell buzzed along and the sarcophagus lid began to move. Slowly at first, then it picked up speed. Centimeter by centimeter, the lid rotated on an invisible axis.

He didn’t understand what she was doing until the tears slid silently down her cheeks, and he wanted to interrupt her but he didn’t. Because they needed into this room—he needed into this room—and he hated himself a little for standing there and letting her continue to relive whatever memory she held that could cause her enough pain to fuel her mother’s spell.

When he could no longer look at her, he looked down into the space revealed by the opening lid. It was…just like the interior of any coffin. Maybe three feet deep and covered in pristine white satin, but at least mercifully empty. The lid shuddered to a halt, the sound something makes when it hits a stop, but Meredith didn’t open her eyes.

“Hey,” he said softly. She didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to hear him. He rubbed his hands gently up her arms and she startled, her hands curling into fists before recognition lit her eyes and she relaxed. He lifted his hands and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

“Shit,” she mumbled.

“You okay?”

She hesitated. “Not even close. Ask me again in a decade. Did it work?”

“Yeah, but…” He stepped aside to reveal the very normal-looking interior. Well, normal-looking for a final resting place, he supposed.

Meredith didn’t seem surprised. “She did want to be buried in it.” She stepped around him, feeling along the edges of the satin interior. Her fingers slid into the dip between two of the satin pillows and then she lifted out a three foot section of the interior.

The piece had a flat wooden base covered in white satin, cut precisely to rest on the one-inch-wide ledges that ran along the inside walls of the sarcophagus.

“I know you don’t need me to tell you this, but your mother was one fucked up human being.” He peered into the opening, shifting his eyes enough to make better use of the light that filtered down the stone staircase she’d revealed. He could see fairly well, but even wolf eyes couldn’t see in the absolute darkness of enclosed spaces. He didn’t relish the thought of climbing down in total darkness into a magical room created by a woman who’d been of arguably questionable sanity. “Wish we’d thought to bring a flashlight.”

Brightness flared in his peripheral vision. A sphere of pure silver light the size of a baseball floated in the air at eye level. He grinned. “Nice parlor trick.”

“Oh, you wanted tricks? You should have mentioned that earlier.” The globe of light shifted color, flashing from blue to yellow to green, then back to silver, picking up speed between transitions until it looked like a disco ball.

He laughed. “Do you do kids’ birthday parties?”

“Goddess, no.” She shuddered in mock horror and the sphere returned to a pure silver.

Meredith led the way, the steady silver of the witchlight illuminating a ten foot radius around them. She still had the slightest smile on her face. How was she smiling in this place? When was the last time she’d done Aspect just for fun? Spent it frivolously to make someone happy? Had she ever done that?

The stairs went down fifteen feet into the earth. A light hum buzzed along her skin, growing more intense the further they went, like she stood too close to a powerful electrical line.

She doubted her mother would have put electrical in this place, a belief confirmed when she reached the bottom of the stairs and the witchlight caught on the primary node of an illumination web. They’d fallen out of fashion in modern times, because it was easier to be on the city’s electrical grid than it was to retrofit a house with illumination webs. And really, what was the point when they had to be constantly primed with Aspect that could be better spent on other things?

However, if someone needed light in a place they didn’t want Null electricians barging in and out of, illumination webs were totally the way to go. She sank a chunk of Aspect into the primary node. The buzz she’d felt upon entering the stairwell grew stronger, as if responding to the use of her power.

The primary node lit and her Aspect traveled down the transmission lines carved into the wall, lighting the secondary nodes. Sphere after sphere sparked to life as her Aspect ran the course of the spell framework in much the same way electricity ran through wires.

Soft white light bathed the room. Meredith had privately been fearing a dank, dusty room with earthen walls and cobwebs everywhere, the place perhaps running rampant with spiders and the skitter of other things that liked to lurk beneath the ground. Layered into this unpleasant imagining had been a few rickety bookshelves or old chests holding items of a questionable nature.

She should have known better than to think her mother would ever lower herself to enter a space of that nature. No, the floors, walls, and ceiling were all of the same smooth marble stone as the floor in the mausoleum above, and she felt the preservation spells—fading now that no one had been by to renew them with Aspect—that kept away bugs and dust.

No rickety bookshelves or ancient chests disgraced the pristine atmosphere. Sleek podiums ran the room in neat rows, the glass display cases atop them holding items as if this were an exclusive, private museum.

“How did your mother build all this without anyone realizing it was here?”

“Elemental Aspecter with an earth affinity, most likely. A high-level Elemental could excavate it in a few hours. They would have handled the marble work too.” After which Savannah had probably killed them to leave no trace of her super-secret room, but Meredith didn’t mention that.

“Is it, uh, safe to walk around?”

Meredith smiled. “Yes. The room isn’t booby-trapped, if that’s what you’re asking. As for what’s inside the cases? That’s going to be a little bit trickier.”

“Do we need to open them? We have the location.”