Spelunking Through Hell: A Visitor's Guide to the Underworld (InCryptid, Band 11) - Softcover

McGuire, Seanan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0756411831 ISBN 13: 9780756411831

Verlag: DAW, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Seanan McGuire's New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated urban fantasy InCryptid series continues with the eleventh book following the Price family, cryptozoologists who study and protect the creatures living in secret all around us.

Love, noun:
1. An intense feeling of deep affection; may be romantic, filial or platonic.

Passion, noun:
1. A strong or barely controllable emotion.
2. Enthusiasm, interest, desire.
3. See also “obsession.”

For Alice Price-Healy, finding her missing husband isn’t just a mission: it’s an obsession, the thing she has willingly given up every other aspect of her life to pursue. And after more than fifty years, she finally has confirmation that he might be alive out there. She may even have a direction. Now, if she can just keep herself from getting killed before she reaches her destination, she might be able to finish her seemingly endless quest.

All she wants is a happy ending. That’s the only thing the universe has never wanted her to have.

Fifty years of running through dimensions without a lot of concern for making friends has left her with more enemies than allies, but she’s still got a few places to turn, including Naga, the professor of extra-dimensional studies and giant snake-man she met when she was seven, Helen and Phoebe, the Ithacan satyrs, and Cynthia, the owner of the Red Angel Tavern.

Where she can’t turn is to her family, back on Earth and tired of her dimension-hopping obsession. They wrote her off as unreliable long ago, and are unlikely to join what looks like one more wild goose chase.

But is it? Or is this the time Alice finally brings Thomas home to stay?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Seanan McGuire lives and works in Washington State, where she shares her somewhat idiosyncratic home with her collection of books, creepy dolls, and enormous blue cats.  When not writing--which is fairly rare--she enjoys travel, and can regularly be found any place where there are cornfields, haunted houses, or frogs.  A Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula Award-winning author, Seanan's first book (Rosemary and Rue, the beginning of the October Daye series) was released in 2009, with more than twenty books across various series following since.  Seanan doesn't sleep much. 

You can visit her at www.seananmcguire.com.

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One

 

"I only ever made one choice that wasn't for the sake of my family, and I'll pay for it until the day I die. Doesn't mean it was the wrong choice. Just means that sometimes the right thing can hurt like hell."

 

-Enid Healy

 

The Red Angel, a bar of somewhat disreputable character

just outside Buckley Township, Michigan

 

Now . . . and Then

 

Normal people aren't supposed to rip holes in the membrane that separates dimensions. That petty pleasure is reserved for sorcerers and umbramancers and the various forms of cryptid who have managed to evolve a more symbiotic relationship with the stuff. For a human like me, it's a violation of the laws that supposedly govern the natural world, and it comes with a price.

 

I fell through the doorway I had opened on Helos-Helos sucks, don't go there if you have any choice in the matter, it's never a good vacation destination, no matter what your travel agent says-severely injured and hoping for nothing more than a quick, easy crossing. Instead, I found myself hanging by one hand from a very familiar tree branch.

 

I grimaced. I remembered this. Of course, I remembered this; what was the point of tormenting me with intensely vivid flashbacks from my own life if I didn't remember them? This was the summer of 1950, about four years before Thomas Price arrived in Buckley. I was twelve years old. I had returned home from summering with the Campbell Family Carnival less than a week before, and my father was already making me regret coming back. So I had done what I always did when home felt too confining for me to live with. I had fled to the Galway Woods. Like my family, they loved me. Unlike my family, they didn't want me to be someone else. They liked me exactly the way I was.

 

Unfortunately, loving me didn't mean they wouldn't hurt me. I had startled a peryton nesting in the higher branches of one of my favorite climbing trees, and it had lashed out with its hooves, knocking me from my perch and leaving me dangling.

 

As soon as I let go, I was going to break my right leg. I'd spend the next six hours alone in the Galway Woods, trying not to cry so the sound of a wounded animal wouldn't attract any predators too big for me to deal with, trying not to move so I wouldn't pass out from the pain. I'd be half-delirious by the time my grandmother found me and carried me home. Like I said, flashbacks. But being here before didn't mean I could do anything differently, and no matter how tightly I tried to hang on, I was going to fall.

 

My fingers were already slipping. I bit my lip, tensing in anticipation of the pain to come, and let go.

 

How long the flashbacks last is shaped by how thick the membrane I've pushed through was. The wall between Helos and Earth is pretty thin, which meant I wouldn't be here long. It was still long enough to feel the impact with the ground, and the sickening snap of my tibia breaking.

 

I blacked out briefly, and then I was crashing through a window. Great. Welcome back to the present day.

 

The location hadn't changed much. I was still in the Galway Woods, or close enough for zoning laws: the Red Angel is technically outside the tree line, but only barely. Cynthia was behind the bar pulling a drink for a river hag with algae in her hair when I smashed into the bar and rolled across the floor, a tangle of cut skin, broken glass, and bruises. I couldn't see myself, but I know my body well enough to be pretty confident in saying that I didn't look good. If anything, I probably looked like somebody's grandmother's meatloaf right before it went into the oven.

 

A few drinkers flinched at the sound of breaking glass, their attention flicking more to the damage to their favorite-and in many cases, only available-watering hole than to the woman now lying on the floor, but once they'd confirmed nothing else was coming through the window, no assailants or human police or anything else that might bring down the mood, they turned their attention to me.

 

I was pretty sure Cynthia was shouting my name and rushing toward me, but my head was ringing like a bronze church bell, ears filled with distorted static, and I couldn't hear a goddamn thing. I also couldn't move. I wasn't in the flashback anymore, but my right leg still felt broken, and judging by the shooting pains in my calf, it was some kind of spiral fracture, one that had split the skin in multiple places. That meant I was probably also bleeding even more than I'd realized. Dammit.

 

Cynthia had reached me, seeming to move in jumps, like a bad stop-motion animation. That wasn't a good sign. Her voice was starting to become audible, intermittently, mostly drowned out by the ringing.

 

"-pened to-can you-bleed-okay?"

 

"Sure, Cyn," I said, as cheerfully as I could manage through waves of pain and shrieking sound. Consciousness seemed like too much to ask of me in that moment, and so I closed my eyes and let myself pass out, slipping into the soft, welcoming dark.

 

 

 

 

I woke up on something soft. Not a bed. There's a distinct feeling to a bed, a sort of flattened-out smoothness that's at least semi universal. This was lumpier, formed of multiple layers piled up on top of one another. I opened my eyes, looking up at a ceiling choked with dusty cobwebs, and pushed myself upright, confirming the nature of the surface beneath me in the process.

 

Furs and sheets of birch bark, all piled up in a heap about as high as my waist, occupied fully half the room. Looking around, I guessed we were probably in one of the storerooms at the Red Angel. The place seems to have a virtually unlimited number of them, most unused. Either Cynthia's mom was wildly optimistic about how many humans would want to drink at a cryptid bar when she built the place, or the nonhuman population of Michigan used to be a hell of a lot bigger.

 

I was honestly willing to bet on a combination of the two. Even when humanity isn't actively hunting down and killing the competition, we have a nasty tendency to push them out and eliminate them through attrition, if nothing else. We're kind of assholes that way.

 

And I, an asshole, had done enough woolgathering for one . . . day? Evening? Afternoon? There were no windows, and massive blood loss always throws off my sense of time. I groaned and flopped back down in the furs. I could have lost days. I didn't have days to lose.

 

My name is Alice Enid Price-Healy, and despite what my family will try to tell you, I am not a widow.

 

Sixty-five years ago, my husband, who wasn't my husband at the time, just the man I was ridiculously in love with, sold his future to the crossroads in order to save my life after I'd been attacked by a rare kind of venomous serpent called a Bidi-taurabo-haza. Their venom is always fatal, and their victims literally rot alive before sloughing off of their own skeletons. There wasn't time to come up with a miracle cure for something that no one's been able to defeat in centuries, and so he did the only thing he could, and traded himself to keep me from dying.

 

Four years after that, we were married, and we got almost five years together, time to create two beautiful children and pass our genes to a whole new generation of cryptozoologists who've done an astonishing job of carrying on my family's mission to protect the cryptids of the world. Our time ended when the crossroads came to collect, pulling Thomas through a rip in the fabric of the world as we knew it, leaving me alone with our babies and what few allies I had managed to make and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DAW
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0756411831
• ISBN 13: 9780756411831
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland