Immortal Twilight Read Free Page B

around the edge of the circle, and beyond its lip was a second circle of steel, this one much thinner than the top, reminding Milo of a sink plunger sitting in a drain. In the center of the circular “lid” was a handle, a simple bar like the kind you might find on a fire door, next to which was an inset panel that showed six interlinked cogs. The workings were black with dirt.
    “Move these,” Jake muttered, running his hand over the cogs, “to open that. Simple.”
    “Looks like a door on a submarine,” Milo opined as Jake worked the cogs, testing how they interacted. “You know what you’re doing, right, Jake?”
    Jake looked up at him with that winning smile he used on the ladies. Milo always liked that smile; sometimes it meant he’d get laid, too, if he kept quiet while Jake worked his charm. “Hey, ’course I know what I’m doing. Just need to think it through a little, that’s all. Why? You in a hurry?”
    Milo laughed. “Heh-heh, not me, Jake. No, sir.”
    Jake worked the combination for a few minutes, figuring how each part affected the others until finally he heard a click and knew he had the door unlocked. His old man was a jugger—a safe-cracker—and he had shown him the tricks of the trade. Mostly, it was down to patience and a steady hand; that’s what Jake’s old man had told him.
    “You want to give me a hand with this?” Jake asked, working dirt from the ridge around the sunken manhole.
    Milo leaned down, and in a few minutes the two of them had the door free, wrenching it out of the ground with a groan of ancient hinges. The door pulled out a few inches before folding back on a sliding mechanism. The mechanism jammed a couple of times, but Jake used a little canister of oil to work it free, and Milo’s brute strength did the rest.
    Below, it was dark, and Jake played his tiny beam over the gaping hole, running it back and forth until he saw what appeared to be tiled floor beneath. Looking down there reminded Milo of the old wishing wells his late mom had taken him to sometimes, and he laughed. “Want to make a wish, Jake?” he asked.
    Jake glared at him, muttering something under his breath. “I’ll go down first,” he said, “and you follow.”
    “I dunno,” Milo said. “Looks like a big jump.”
    “That’s why I’m going first,” Jake told him. “You’re good for a lot of stuff, Milo, but you’ve got the agility of a brick, I swear.”
    Milo didn’t argue, but that was mostly because he didn’t understand. Besides, Jake always went first—that was their arrangement.
    * * *
    I T WAS A DROP of twelve feet to the floor, not a lot for a tall man like Jake, and once he was down there he saw the ladder-style rungs that worked up the curved side of the wall. Milo followed, clambering like a monkey to reach for the rungs as Jake speared them in the spotlight of his flash.
    They were in an alcove, a tight square room with barely enough space to hold two grown men, a little like the narthex lobby of a church. Milo’s shoulders brushed against the wall as he endeavoured to give Jake “room to think.” There was no door to this area, which was delineated purely by a short flight of steps that led down into a lower tunnel. Jake peered down the steps, listening carefully to the echoes. There was no reason that anyone should be down here—hell, that combination lock on the door above them had been sealed for centuries—but it didn’t pay to get reckless.
    Jake couldn’t hear anything coming from the narrow tunnel, so he led the way along it with Milo dogging his heels, the little penlight illuminating the careful brickwork of the tunnel in a tiny, moving circle.
    “What do you think is down here?” Milo asked eagerly.
    “Your grave if you don’t button your lip,” Jake warned him in a whisper. “Keep it down, okay?”
    The brickwork was neat, creating a low arch that ran along the full ceiling of the tunnel, finished in a sandy yellow color. There were markings on the