by Dale Mayer
Rocked by that suggestion, she settled back on her heels and nodded. “In a way, that would also make sense. Maybe he knew about something at the site. Maybe taking it there triggered something. Maybe it was a piece of energy from here that started something there.”
“We’re grasping at straws with these theories.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said gently. “Maybe this was all accidental, and nothing could have avoided it. Maybe one of your friends took this piece of metal from Pompeii, as a keepsake. Maybe he didn’t intend it to cause any kind of destruction. What if he had been in Pompeii years ago—before the Mayan dig—working here, and found the piece and kept it as a memento? Then took the piece to work on the Mayan dig with you ten years ago.”
He stared at her in growing alarm.
She studied him, and then she knew. “That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it? One of the four men who died ten years ago at the Mayan dig had been in Pompeii earlier. And he removed the metal pieces, taking it to the Mayan ruin and, for whatever reason, started a cycle of cataclysmic events. Maybe adding the carving to the spot himself either on his own or under the influence of the mask? Someone had to as it’s not there in both photos. There wasn’t a Mayan mask at all. It was part of the Pompeii masks. That’s why you never saw the mask there.”
His mouth opened and then closed.
She whispered, “Who was there with you at the Mayan site who had been in Pompeii before that?”
He closed his eyes, shook his head and whispered, “Jeremiah. My other partner, Jeremiah.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she frowned. “you said Hunter rescued you. That only the two of you survived.”
“That’s correct,” Sebastian whispered. “Jeremiah died at the ruins.”
She frowned up at him. “No. How could that be? Isn’t that the man I met?”
He opened his eyes and stared at her steadily. “Yes, absolutely it’s the man you met.”
She took a step back and shook her head. “Then you have to be wrong,” she said, “because the man I met wasn’t dead.”
“Jeremiah is definitely dead. You were speaking with his ghost.”
Chapter 22
Lacey stared at Sebastian, swallowing hard as her mind wrapped around what he said. “I know you believe he’s a ghost,” she said slowly, wondering if maybe he was the one off his rocker.
He gave her a lopsided grin. “I’m not crazy,” he said. “Sweetheart, I was there with him when he died.”
“But he looked like flesh and blood, sitting right beside me,” she whispered.
“He does, doesn’t he?” Sebastian said with a gentle smile. “It doesn’t change the fact he is no longer on the Earthly plane.” He held out his hand containing the small black metal fragment.
“So how old is the site buried in the Mayan ruins?”
“Dates back to about 900 AD.”
She studied the piece. “How could an energy from 900 AD live long enough to care about a piece of metal from its Mayan ruins that’s now here in a Pompeii ruin, in the twenty-first century? Answer? Because it doesn’t. It’s all part of the same Pompeii ruin.”
“For that, I have no explanation,” Sebastian said slowly. “This is all very confusing as it is, but, right now, we have to protect this piece and I think your sketches and the mask itself.”
“But the mask is gone. So is the piece of the second mask safe here?” she asked cautiously. She glanced around at the secure underground space he had built. “You have one guard injured. How many others are as well?”
Pocketing the piece of metal, he walked to a wall panel, pulled it back to show a monitoring system of other rooms. Grimly they studied each monitor as he counted four other men down.
She shook her head. “This is terrible.”
He tapped one of the screens as black energy filled the room in view. “It’s in there.”
“It?”
He slid her a sideways look. “Either the mask or whoever is part of the mask.”
Her breath sucked back against her throat. “That is a scary thought. Where is that room located?”
“Down the hall,” Sebastian said, while the two of them looked both ways.
The hallway had several men collapsed on the floor.
In her heart of hearts, she knew some were dead. Whatever was going on here, it was too deadly to leave alone. There was no immunity here. “What if you gave it that piece you’ve been carrying around?” she asked.
“I have no idea what would happen. It could be good. It could be very bad.” Sebastian grabbed her hand. “I want you to stay here. I’m going after it.”
She looked at him and shook her head. “I think you’re missing a very important factor here. I can control that mask. At least when it’s on, I can take it off. I don’t know about any of these other people. And I think it is after that piece in your pocket,” she said, motioning to his leg. “It might decide to attack you to get it.”
The secured door slammed open as the words fell from her lips. She jumped closer to Sebastian as one of the guards staggered in, blood pouring from a head wound. She raced to him as he cried out, “The mask … Don’t know what happened but the mask got loose.”
Grim-faced, Sebastian nodded, helped the man to sit on the couch, while Lacey checked his head wound.
“What about the others?” she asked urgently. “Are they alive or dead?”
He stared up at her, his eyes haunted. “I don’t know how they can still be alive,” he whispered. “It looks like they’ve been butchered.”
She shot Sebastian a look.
He nodded. “Yes, that’s the same as what happened at the Mayan site.”
She nodded, checked the head wound while the guard pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket. She used that to put pressure on the bleeding area and said to Sebastian, “We have to go after it.”
The guard grabbed her arm. “You can’t,” he said urgently. “It will kill you too.”
She smiled down at him. “It’s after me, remember?” She didn’t know that for sure because, in her mind, that piece Sebastian had was maybe what it ultimately wanted. But how this all fit together, she didn’t know.
Sebastian looked at her, clearly hating the idea.
She stared up at him and said, “You know there’s no other way.”
He gave a clipped nod and reached out a hand.
She reached back as she told the guard, “Keep applying pressure. We’ll be back.” And she dashed out into the hall with Sebastian.
Once their door had been breached, chances were the mask was on its way toward her. She bent down and checked the guard at the desk. He was alive but unconscious. She couldn’t see any visible wounds. That, at least, meant he wasn’t going to bleed to death.
At the far end of the hall was yet another fallen guard. Sebastian checked him, raised his gaze to her and shook his head. Her heart sank. Somehow she’d still hoped maybe they could get out of this with just a few casualties. But now that there was one confirmed death, it was a completely different story.
He motioned at the door in front of them. “It should be in there. That’s where we put it when we first arrived.”
“But these men on the floor in the hallway may mean it’s not there anymore.” She shrugged, reached for the doorknob and pulled on the door. It was unlatched, so it opened easily. As she stood in the open doorway, she could see the glass case was shattered and empty.
Behind her a voice roared. “It’s not gone.”
She spun to look at yet another of the uniformed guards. He held a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. The knife dripped with blood. He tucked the gun into his waistband, shifted the knife to his right hand and stared at her.
Her gaze was locked on his face and the mask that covered it. She could feel the claustrophobia reaching up to choke her. The feeling of having that mask on, not able to get it off, remained with her. That sense of suffocation, of wrongness. “How do you like the mask?”
she said in a conversational tone. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?”
The man just stared at her, his eyes hot, feverish. She hadn’t had the mask on very long, and Stefan had helped her get it off. What would have happened if it had stayed on longer? Would she have ended up looking like this man? Acting like this man?
She took a step toward him.
He held the knife in a ready-to-attack position.
“Have you tried to take it off?” she asked.
He stared at her and shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he growled. “It’s fantastic. It’s all-powerful.”
She sighed. “So you have psychic abilities then?”
He waved the knife around. “I don’t have any psychic abilities. But I’m happy to gut you regardless.”
“Not in the market for a death today,” she said, studying the mask. “Mask, are you sure you want to be with him and not with me?”
An odd silence hung in the air. The man grabbed the mask, as if to hold it on his head. “You can’t take it from me,” he roared. “I’ll kill you first.”
“And why would you kill me?” She backed up ever-so-slightly. “Why do you want to hurt me?”
The man looked confused, but he was in some kind of a rage, running on primitive emotions, desires, not thinking clearly.
She studied the mask. It glowed or was it her seeing the energy of it? “What’s the chance that, if you don’t have psychic abilities, you have to keep the mask on until you’re vanquished? Maybe the mask fills you with bloodthirst. The mask, instead of making you stronger with your psychic abilities, maybe it makes you enraged instead?”
She heard Sebastian sucking in his breath. “That’s quite possible,” he said. “It might also explain why they had to imprison those with the mask. But you managed to get the mask off your face.”
She nodded. “Because I am psychic,” she admitted for the first time. “And it’s a mask geared for people like us. So this guard possibly has some unknown powers, or maybe the mask had few options and thought this man would give it the best chance of survival.”
“I think you’re giving it more human consciousness than it has,” Sebastian said. “I don’t think it has the ability to make cognitive decisions.”
“No,” she said softly. “It’s running on instinct. It’s in a negative position. It needs power. It’ll take negative power if that’s its only option. And, from the looks of the guard in front of us, I’d say that’s what he’s producing.”
“Hence the attacks?”
She stepped a little closer, Sebastian grabbing her arm.
“Mask,” she whispered out loud but spoke stronger in her mind. “Come to me. I have the energy you want. I have energy that feeds your soul, not this nasty negative energy that hurts everyone.”
Sebastian, realizing what she was doing, squeezed her arm. “You have to be careful. Just because you got it off once, doesn’t mean you can again.”
“My choices are limited.” Her full attention was on the mask again. “Mask, come to me,” she said with an air of authority.
In front of them, the mask slowly dissolved, like a series of metal plates receding before it disappeared into a black energy. The guard stared at them for a moment before falling to his knees, then flat on his face to the floor.
She motioned to the guard. “Sebastian, check him out.”
“No,” Sebastian said, his voice hard. “Look.”
The darkness slunk around her feet, going higher and higher up her body until it totally encompassed her, except for Sebastian’s hand connecting the two of them. The dark energy kept gyrating around where his hand was, as if trying to find a way to separate her from him.
“Don’t let me go,” she cried out.
The mask formed around her face and then locked in tight. She opened her eyes to stare mutely at Sebastian. She took several long, slow, deep breaths, hating the claustrophobic feeling, but it wasn’t new this time. She’d been here before. She could do this. She took several steps forward, still hanging tight to Sebastian’s hand.
“How do we secure it?” she whispered to Sebastian. She could feel urges running through her. The vestiges of energy from the guard. She could almost see the visions as he had attacked his friends, killing two, mortally wounding another. She tried to cleanse away that energy, remembering what Stefan had told her: that love was the answer to all. She may have opened this door, but this mask had been waiting.
She didn’t know who had broken the glass case or whether the mask itself had done the damage, but it would take something very special to keep this black energy contained. Sebastian led her ever-so-slowly toward the room where they had originally placed the mask for security.
She could feel the mask warring with her. It was still on a blood hunt, the thirst of that violent energy rippling through its being. She kept pouring out love, purity, joy, happiness, anything to help combat the viciousness surging through her—remnants of its pairing with the guard.
Sebastian still hung on to her. The mask was telling her that he was her next victim, to reach out and take what she wanted.
That was the last thing she wanted—to hurt Sebastian. If this mask truly was one used for psychic abilities, it should know her. It should know she had the abilities and that she was of sweetness and light … And it should be easing back on the viciousness and the bloodthirstiness, though it was even now calling for more.
In the same room, Sebastian reached into his side pocket awkwardly—because it was on the side where his hand was holding on to hers—and pulled out the missing piece of metal, placing it on the table with the shattered glass tube. She stared at it, sensing the mask, wanting, gloating the piece it was after.
“It’s not part of this mask,” she whispered. “It’s part of the second mask.”
“What can it do with it?”
“I don’t know,” she cried out. “But it wants it.”
The mask tightened down around her throat and neck. She gasped.
Sebastian stepped in front of her. “Remember how you can control it. It had control of the guard, but you’re the one with abilities. You control it.” Still holding on to her, he brushed the busted glass off the pedestal and walked to a safe, unlocked it. “Maybe they were forged of the same metal,” Sebastian theorized.
She watched Sebastian, her breath heavy as anticipation coursed through her.
He pulled out a metal box. It looked like a minisafe. He opened it.
She saw it was empty.
He looked at her, looked at the mask, but didn’t say a word.
She whispered, “Put the piece of metal in the box.”
Surprised, he did as she requested. Almost instantly the mask began to detach from her face. As, soon as she could, she pulled it off and slammed it into the metal case, shutting the lid securely.
She looked up at Sebastian and said, “I heard the metal hit the inside of the metal box, so I presume it’s still in mask form.”
He nodded, his fingers busy closing the latches on the side of the box. “What do you think it wanted that metal piece for?”
“I think it belongs to the sister mask,” she said. “As if they’re a pair. Possibly separated a long time ago.”
He looked up at her in surprise.
She shrugged. “I don’t know what I know. All I can tell you is the words that keep coming out of my mouth.”
“Good enough,” he said. “It’d be nice to have all this recorded though.”
“It would,” she said, “because I’m not sure I’ll believe any of this afterward.”
With the box now secured, he replaced it inside the safe and locked it.
“Did anybody see what we just did?”
He shook his head. “No. I shut down the monitor to this room before we left.”
She took several long and deep breaths, staring at the safe. “Even now it’s calling to me. Asking me to free it.”
He gently led her from the room. As he stepped out, he locked
the door securely.
“We should clean up that glass,” she murmured.
“First off,” he said, “we have injured men to attend to.”
She walked back to find the one guard sitting up, holding his head.
His face lit up when he saw her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “I am. But several men aren’t.”
The guard’s face collapsed. “I saw him. I’ve never seen him look like that before. He had something weird over his face.”
No point in explaining. She checked his head wound, found the bleeding had slowed and said, “You need stitches.”
He brushed it off. “My brother is a doctor. I’ll go to him.” He got up and staggered to the door, looking around at the bloody devastation. When he saw Sebastian bent over one of the guards, he said, “I don’t think I care to do this job anymore.”
“Understood.” Sebastian straightened, then stepped away, pulling out his phone to make several calls.
Lacey sat on the couch the guard had vacated, her mind wrapping around all the details she’d just seen and felt. The mask had taken on such a bloodthirst within the guard that he had killed almost everyone around him. So many people had lost their lives because of that mask.
And yet, when she’d had it on, it was all about psychic abilities. It was almost as if there was no way to know how the mask would react until it was on someone. Though she didn’t think the guard was a bad person, the combination had been brutal, and, while wearing the mask, the guard had killed his friends.
Explanations would be a bitch.
Ten minutes later Sebastian walked into the room, relief on his face when he saw her. He crouched in front of her, reaching up to brush her cheek. “How are you?”
She gave him a sad smile. “Dazed, in awe and shock. But I will be fine.”
“Come on. Let’s get you home safe and sound.”
She gave a startled laugh. “After what I’ve seen tonight? I’m not sure there is any such thing as safe and sound.”
Standing, he tugged her into his arms and held her close. “I know the feeling,” he whispered. “It took me a long time after I came back from the Mayan ruins to understand what my new reality was. I’d always seen auras, but I had never seen the dead before. But, after that energy back then, and I think maybe because of Hunter too, it seems like I’ve seen nothing but, since.”