Sweet Little Lies

Chapter Thirty-Five

"I'll be late tonight." Tai told Astrid over the phone.

He could practically picture her cute little pout. "What are you doing?"

"Some work stuff."

That was what he always said. They never talked about that part of their lives. The first time they really had was earlier in the week, after his meeting with Styles. At first, the last thing he wanted was for her to think he was using her for information. Then, it became more of an invisible wall between them. The thing that kept them from being open about their relationship.

So, she never asked to clarify where he came from or what he was doing, and when she got a phone call in the middle of the night, he didn't question why she had to leave. Although, he figured out quite early on that the Malone's used her skills to patch up people. She had stitched him up a few times after a particularly rough fight at The Hollow.

"When are you thinking?" She asked.

Mentally, he calculated how long it would take. "Maybe ten?"

"I'll keep dinner warm."

He smiled, "Thank you, love."

"Be safe." She whispered after a long moment.

"I always am." He told her.

It was the best promise he could make.

An hour later he was in the tunnels. He had entered through the catacombs under the temple, walking past old skeletons and graves. Many in his family considered this place haunted, a bad omen to any who walked its path.

Tai thought that was fucking stupid.

He was a weird kid, preferring to make friends with the monsters under his bed, and wink at the shadows as if they were actually ghosts. In his little kid brain, he figured if he made them into friends, companions, he would also take away their power to scare him.

Now, he realized it was because he somehow knew that fear was an emotion you could control. You didn't have to give into the terror, or believe what your mind was trying to convince you of. Tai couldn't remember the last time he had felt fear racing through his bones. It surely wasn't in these tunnels. These were his second home.

The walk to the business sector took less time than it would have above. Blossom street was surrounded by high traffic roads on all sides. There was no one to get in his way down here. Well, except for the rats.

One scuttled before him, the light shining on him for a split second. He opted to use a flashlight tonight, instead of his infrared goggles. Those were a bit too full on, and in all honesty, a little embarrassing to use. He looked like a fucking tool.

He reached the south end of Blossom street and started walking north. There were more skitters, a steady drip of water coming from down the long hallway, but nothing out of the ordinary. He wasn't far enough down, though.

The location Styles had shown him was more difficult to get to. There was only one way in through the tunnels, then the doorway to above.

Shining the flashlight down a corridor, he saw it caved in, broken stone and dirt blocking the way through. There were a couple of tunnels that were unusable. During the early twentieth century, when the city was the epicenter of a war, bombs had leveled this area, causing the cave-ins.

After, Queenstown had rebuilt a majority of the buildings over this section, unknowingly blocking several entrances to the tunnels. Even the one used for housing prisoners of war, allowing experiments on them from wack job scientists, like they were trying to bury their darkest secrets.