Free Fangs for Nothing (Vampire Hunting and Other Foolish Endeavors) by Adrianne Ambrose Page B

being maintained for some reason. Unfortunately, the flash wasn’t strong enough to give me a clue as to what was at the end of the passage. “Weird,” I mumbled to myself.
    “What are you doing down there?” Rini called to me.
    “Just checking it out.”
    “What’s it like?” Xander asked.
    “I’m not sure yet,” I called back. “I’ll tell you in a minu te. I’m going to go take a look.”
    “Wait for me .” Xander stood up from where he had been crouching on the steps. “I’m coming down.” He headed toward the gap in the silk.
    “Yeah, me , too.” Rini started to follow him.
    Xander turned to her. “No, you should wait out here. I mean, I’m sure it’s fine, but if we disappear or something, we want someone on the outside.”
    Rini crossed her arms and gave him the stink eye. “Oh, a nd it should be me who stands around waiting just because I’m the girl. Right?”
    Xander was caught off guard for half a second. “Come on, Rini. You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “ Then how did you mean it?”
    This threw Xander for several seconds. He was used to girls doing everythin g he said without question. All girls except Rini, that is. He should have been accustomed to Rini being obstinate, but for some reason, he wasn’t. “I just…” he started, “…wanted to go see what Sherbie is looking at, and I said for you to wait here without thinking. I didn’t mean it because you’re a girl or anything. I’m sorry.”
    Rini softened . “Okay, well… I guess that’s acceptable.”
    Speaking cautiously so as not to fall back into the giant metaphorical hole he’d just climbed out of, Xander added, “I’d like to check out this tunnel with Sherbie. What would you like to do? I mean, there might be something cool down there, but it also might be safer to stay here.”
    “There’s no way I’m sta nding here while you guys get to go have an adventure,” she said in her most fully actualized feminist voice. Then she cracked a grin. “Let’s check it out.”
    The combined bluish glow of our three cell phones improved visibility a bit. We were able to move forward without the fear of running smack into a wall or falling off a ledge, but more than four feet in the distance, and everything was cloaked in pitch black. My heart was beating like a drum. I kept having a horrible feeling that someone or something was going to lunge out at us from the dark. I don’t know why I was so nervous; it was just a hallway, like any one you’d use to access an older subway or train station. It had obviously been renovated sometime since the Cleveland streetcars stopped running in the 1950s. The walls and floor were clean and cobweb free. There was no peeling paint hanging from the ceiling. “Maybe the city’s going to start up the streetcars again or something,” Xander wondered aloud as we moved hesitantly forward.
    As the steady thub, thub, thub of the Goth band’s party music began to fade, it was replaced by a new sound. Something rhythmic but definitely not modern. Classical, I guessed. The further we moved along, the better I could hear it. There was the sound of violins and horns and timpani. “Do you guys hear that?” I said in a voice just above a whisper. I had no idea why I was whispering, but it felt like the right thing to do.
    “Yeah,” Xander replied in his regular voice. “It sounds all Mozarty.”
    “Shhh .” Rini shushed him. “Somebody’s down here.”
    “So?”
    “So,” she hissed, “whoever it is, they obviously don’t want us down here, or they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble trying to make it look like you couldn’t get in.”
    “Oh,” Xander said in a much more subdued tone. “I get you.”
    We got to the end of the passage , and it opened up into a large room, which must have been the main entrance to the station. The ceilings were sky high, and there were carved wooden benches along the walls. Multiple large doors and tall, Art Deco windows were