I kept pushing against the burning power that was invading me, despite the pain, but my thoughts were getting cloudy with my rising panic.
Finally, I forced the strange current back out, and the foreign thread dislodged from my skin. I continued my assault, forming a ball of earth magic that I used as a shield. I crawled toward the wall using that shield to drive the magic back before I rammed it all into the mortar and bricks with a final surge of power.
A loud rumble shook the walls around me, and I froze, dropping the current of earth magic I had been tethered to. By pushing the magic back into the wall, had I caused a surge somewhere else? As much as I feared being responsible for a tunnel collapse, I was too drained to do anything about it, and I pressed my forehead against the rough bricks and tried to relax my rigid and spasming muscles.
I flopped back against the hard stone wall, breathing hard, and slid down, totally whipped. My hand felt like it weighed a ton as I lifted it for inspection. I was relieved that my skin was intact and only faint green sparkles of magic seemed to dance along the surface of my fingers. When I could breathe, and I felt reasonably sure that my muscles would respond, I pushed myself to my knees and dusted off my pants with jerky motions. I waved away Ka’Tehm’s concern with a weak smile.
My phone buzzed.
“Princess!” Majeedah said when I answered. “You might want to call for backup. The ground under the Vatican is shaking and there’s a big fire down there.”
Since there was a chance that had something to do with my recent actions, I grunted an unintelligible agreement to Majeedah.
Getting into the Vatican wasn’t going to be as easy as the church I was standing beneath, and I certainly didn’t want to repeat what had just happened. I looked down at Ka’Tehm, who raised one shimming blue paw in the air and waved at me.
I wheezed into the phone, “No problem. My backup’s with me right now.” I hoped my voice sounded stronger than my knees felt. I gave a forced smile to Ka’Tehm and pointed at him. He blinked slowly and I swear he was laughing.
I hung up the phone and texted Kai.
Going to check out the Vatican. Nearly lost a hand, but all good now. One down, a million to go. Let me know if you hear of any buildings collapsing or power surges.
I stood there for a moment, staring at my phone and hoping for an acknowledgement of my message. My phone stayed silent and I felt a ripple of sadness.
At least he’d know where to collect my body.
Chapter 13
I took a taxi to the back gates of Vatican City. My hand and arm were still plagued with random muscle contractions, but those diminished as my exhaustion increased.
The small opening in the wall that surrounded the Vatican was the only way one could drive a car in, and then only if you lived or worked there. Since Vatican City is an independent country, the Swiss Guard manned the border, and I doubted they’d stamp my passport at that hour of the night with no questions asked. The cab slid to the curb and I got out, shouldering the pack that contained my magical back-up in one swift motion because I still only had full use of one hand.
I had no plan, but getting the lay of the land was always the first step. I strolled by the gate, noting the Swiss Guard. I had no interest in trying to get by those guys. I kept walking, following the wall like I was just out to see Rome after dark.
A black luxury car slowed down next to me, and my adrenaline spiked. I heard the window whir down, and I slid my gaze to the front fender of the vehicle. I judged the distance to the guardhouse and figured a decent scream would bring some attention if I were going to be abducted. I drew in a lungful of air, ready to make some noise.
“Psst.”
I lifted my eyes and looked at the face that peered out of the car. Peter Picenzia.
Psst? Seriously? I bit my lip to hide my smile and walked toward the car.
“Get in the back,” Peter whispered, resting his wrists on the steering wheel.
I looked at him and decided I could probably take Peter in a fight, and besides, I was just too tired to keep hoofing it. I pulled open the back door and slid in behind him.
“How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I’ve been circling the wall for the past twenty minutes, hoping you’d show up. Majeedah said she’d send you right over.”
“What happened?”
“Another fire - this time in the necropolis beneath St. Peter’s,” Peter said, stepping on the gas a little too hard. The car lurched forward. I grabbed onto the front seats to keep myself from squashing Ka’Tehm and discovered only one of my hands was reliable. I rolled over sideways, overcompensated, and hit my face on the side of the passenger seat.
“When did it start?” I asked a little louder than I intended judging by the small jump Peter couldn’t hide.
“About twenty or so minutes before Majeedah called you. I heard the fire in the Basilica went out, though.”
“I know,” I said, meeting Peter’s gaze in the mirror.
Peter nodded. “When I heard the flames just vanished, I hoped it was you.”
“Is there anything unusual about this fire?”
“Well, it’s in the Vatican, so there’s that. It’s bigger than the others, but there’s nothing around it that gives us any clue about its purpose. It’s in the Tomb of the Egyptians, and it’s just burning right in the center of the floor. There’s no obvious fuel, and it’s not damaging anything.”
“Is the fire department on the scene again?”
Peter’s eyes got wide. “Heaven’s no! We can’t have people thinking there’s magic happening in there!”
No, we definitely didn’t want that. “How do you know about it?”
“One of our people inside called.”
“Our people?” I asked.
“A member of one of the families. He’s fallow.” Peter said in a pitying tone.
Fallow, as in magically barren. I wondered why everyone in Rome wasn’t considered fallow. “How can I get in?”
Peter grinned. “Get on the floor and stay out of sight. I’m going to drive you through the gates.”
I tried not to laugh at how absurd this was, but I slid off the back seat and tucked myself around the hump on the floor. I shut my eyes and cast what I hoped was an invisibility spell. It had worked in the past, but any movement on my part would break the enchantment. I realized I was too tired to move, and the floor of Peter’s car was amazingly comfortable. I fell asleep almost instantly, but the minute the car stopped, I cast the same spell again, just to be sure.
I listened to the halting English of the Swiss Guard, winced at the overly chatty responses of Peter, and breathed a sigh of relief as the car slid inside the boundaries of the Vatican. The window whirred up, and Peter gave a nervous laugh.
“Well, that was certainly the first time I smuggled a woman into the Vatican. That’s going to be a great story if I can ever talk about these things. That’s the downside of this line of work; there are so many things you never get to tell people at cocktail parties and such.”
I could imagine Peter, a drink in his hand, regaling everyone who would listen with stories about his adventures.
“Stay down until I park,” Peter added, pulling me back to the moment. I could see him darting furtive glances in the rearview window and wondered how anyone thought he’d be a great inside man with his nervous energy and gift of gab.
Then again, that was pretty judgy coming from a woman who electrocuted herself with magic on a disturbingly regular basis.
The car stopped, and Peter shut off the engine. Something hit against my spell, and I forced my eyes open and pushed myself up to find an amulet dangling from between Peter’s fingers. “Put this on. I’m going to get out and walk to the left. After a few minutes, climb over the seat and follow me. Hopefully, nobody will notice me getting out of the car twice.”
I took the amulet and draped it around my neck as Peter exited the car. I counted to twenty, dragged myself into the front, and
opened the driver’s door. As I shut the door softly, I noticed Peter’s face reflected in the car window. I gave a slight shudder because looking at a different reflection in the mirror is disorienting on the best of occasions.
I staggered through the deserted parking lot, glancing around at the low buildings and keeping to the deep shadows. I was sure I walked much slower than any bow-legged man well into his fifties, but I’d had a rough day.
We met at the corner of a building. I followed Peter silently as we skirted around the city, heading toward Saint Peter’s Basilica through a series of narrow alleys with deep shadows. Peter unlocked a door with a large skeleton key and slipped inside a dark building a few hundred yards from the church.
“I can get you into the necropolis, but you’re on your own after that. We can’t afford to have me compromised.” He held out his hand, and it occurred to me that he wanted the amulet back. I took it off and slipped it into my pocket.
“I’ll give it back when I’m outside the gates,” I said, giving him a challenging look. There was no way I was going into the necropolis without something to make my exit a little easier.
Peter hesitated in a way that made me think he was sizing up his chances against me. I’m not a fool, and I know I’m no match for a man in a physical confrontation, but magic was another matter entirely. Every instinct in me told me to back up, but I did the opposite and widened my stance, leaning toward Peter just slightly and trying to look imposing.
The intimidation worked, and he nodded reluctantly. Turning on his heel, he hurried down another dimly lit corridor, and we entered a large kitchen that looked like it was last renovated in the 1940s. Past the wooden countertops, he turned toward a smaller door and shoved it open.
“This is how the workers brought out the debris when they first excavated the tombs,” Peter said, his voice pitched higher with nervous energy.
I’d read everything about the original excavations of the necropolis beneath St. Peter’s, and I'd wondered where they put the tons of dirt and rubble they had cleared. Now I had an answer.
I’d had fantasies about being part of that team, and my current clandestine mission made me smile. The necropolis excavation had begun in the early 1940s. It had been undertaken in utmost secrecy, with the workers only permitted to carry out their duties at night so none of the visitors to the basilica would hear the noise or know what they were doing. With World War II in full swing, the Pope had a good reason to keep the dig a secret because nobody knew what valuable discoveries might be made in the underground tombs.
Following in their footsteps gave me a little shiver of excitement that almost made me forget the pain that still lingered in my entire body. Almost.
We wound down the stairs and walked through dark corridors for what seemed like miles. My muscle cramps were subsiding, and the nausea was almost gone, leaving an empty feeling in my stomach where butterflies were beginning to gather.
“We’re about to cross over to the area beneath Saint Peter’s,” Peter whispered.
I swear I felt the air change as we left the larger complex of Vatican City and entered a dark tunnel that the Vatican archaeologists had excavated. I’d visited St. Peter’s many times; had walked the marble floors of the church, awed by the gilding and art that made the center of Catholicism such a spectacular sight that no visit to Rome was complete without it. The tunnel, though, was so much more thrilling for me. Peter stopped and unlocked another gate.
“Go down the stairs and turn right. You’ll come to a metal gate that leads down the back corridor of the necropolis.” He pressed a key into my hand. “Follow it and look for a small set of stairs on your right. They are pretty well hidden, Dr. Cerasola. When you go up those stairs, you’ll enter into the tomb of the Valerii; the exit on the other side of the tomb will take you into the central corridor through the necropolis. Turn left. The tomb you’re looking for will be hard to miss.” He said the last words with a hesitation that wasn’t comforting, but I didn’t need his directions.
“What if the fire department shows up?” I whispered.
“Everyone who knows it’s happening has been dealt with. If the fire department shows up, the jinn will bolt, and then we’ll be back to square one.”
“We?”
“La Gilda.” His tone was more self-assured, but there was something in his gray eyes that told me Peter was up to his eyeballs in something bad.
“Huh,” I said, narrowing my own eyes at him. I wanted him to know that I knew he was hiding something. “Right. A fire starts in the necropolis, and the only ones who know about it are a fallow member of a magical family and a fake cardinal who happens to work for La Gilda. Convenient.” I shook my head and snorted a little laugh. “What’s La Gilda really looking for?” I asked.
Peter’s eyebrows knitted together. “Someone to make the jinn stop.”
In a pig’s eye. Whatever La Gilda wanted, I was pretty sure I now wanted it more just because they were hiding something. Besides, the cloak and dagger thing was getting on my nerves.
“Gotcha,” I slid the key into the metal lock and opened the gate. “I’ll be in touch,” I said, slipping through the door.
Chapter 14
The stairs were in surprisingly good shape as I descended into the depths beneath the basilica. Safety lights had been installed on the low ceiling, but they weren’t lit. The last time I’d taken the tour, I noticed the lights were on a motion sensor, and the next group blinked on ahead of the tour, probably to conserve electricity and discourage people from lagging or wandering around by themselves.
I pulled the small flashlight from the pocket of my cargo pants and flicked it on. The walls were mortared brick, and the air was damp and cool. A musty smell lingered and tickled my nostrils. I listened but heard no sounds. Just to be sure, I put my hand on the bricks and tuned into the energy that flowed through the space. I felt no other humans, but I could feel that strange, ancient current I detected back in Beata Vergina. The current I now saw as my mortal enemy.
I headed toward the necropolis, trying really hard to ignore the fact that I was alone beneath the Vatican, working on a job with really vague details, and nobody knew where I was except Kai, who wasn’t responding to my messages.
I shoved those thoughts out of my head and concentrated on the task at hand. Find the magical fire, put it out, get the jinn to knock it off. It sounded so simple in my head.
Being alone with Ka’Tehm in the dark necropolis was almost comforting to me. I just needed to convince a pyromaniac jinn to find a new hobby or at least to set fires somewhere outside of the city. I had a nagging feeling my job wouldn’t end there, though.
The fact that La Gilda Maghi was running some sort of game was an irritation, but I couldn’t figure out their angle. They’d hired me to deal with the magical problems caused by the jinn, and it made sense that they were trying to conceal the true nature of the fires. When I added in my murky connection to one of the families and the possibility that someone might have thought far enough in advance to plant Peter Picenzia in the Vatican, I felt like the jinn was just the beginning. Did La Gilda suspect the jinn would eventually wind up at the Vatican? There was something I was missing, and my thoughts just kept snagging on that.
The corridor was beautifully excavated, with brick walls cemented with ancient mortar and a stone floor worn smooth by hundreds of thousands of feet over two millennia. The steps into the tomb were hidden, as Peter had warned, and if I hadn’t been swinging my light back and forth looking for them, I would have completely missed the narrow opening between the walls.
Unlike the staircase that led down to the necropolis, the ones that led into the tomb were not in great shape. Centuries of neglect and incomplete restoration efforts had left them a cracked and crumbling mess. The archaeology team that originally excavated the space had stopped because they feared for the structural integrity of St. Peter’s, so there were still many tombs that would probably never be unearthed. I stuck to one side
of the stone stairway, picking my way up carefully and trying not to be overly excited about where I was.
The Valerii tomb was one of the most opulent tombs in the necropolis, and I’d taken the tour a few times since my mom had moved to Rome. The walls were amazing examples of plasterwork and frescos. Small niches for cremation urns were framed by thin pillars and crowned with half shells on the domed tops. The marble columns would have cost a fortune, and the exterior bricks of the mausoleum used very little mortar, another symbol of the family’s wealth. I crept through the tomb, admiring the craftsmanship and feeling awed by the expense required to produce such a lovely space for dead people.
I dragged myself away from further exploration, lamenting the fact there was no time to savor it. Work frequently gets in the way of enjoyment. Yet, unencumbered access to the tombs had always been a fantasy of mine, so moving into the main corridor of the necropolis took a monumental effort.
Due to previous guided tours, I knew that the main corridor went past the back of the Tomb of the Egyptians. There was no purple glow that I could see, and if I had followed Peter’s directions, I would have never found the tomb. To get to the entrance, I had to turn off the main corridor and descend a short set of stairs. The tombs on the right side of the necropolis opened onto one passage, and the ones on the left another. That meant either Peter’s information was wrong because he’d never been down there, or he was deliberately trying to lead me elsewhere.
My mind raced with the possible significance of the flames being lit in that particular tomb. Not only was there a large picture of Horus, the Egyptian god of the dead, painted on the wall, but there were Greek and Macedonian elements in the tomb. One sarcophagus was decorated with Maenads and a Bacchanalia, while another was inscribed with the symbol of Vergina - a sun-like symbol with a rosette at the center and 16 rays surrounding it. That same symbol had been popular with Alexander the Great. It was stamped on coins from his empire and other relics from ancient Macedonia.
Resistant Magic (Relic Hunter Book 5) Page 12