He took a step closer. Rosales was his silent shadow, her turquoise eyes hard as flint while her hand inched toward her holster.
“All I’m asking is one life. In the scheme of eternity, it’s a tiny sacrifice. And in return, when I get my hands on the prize beyond those doors, I’ll be fighting for all of us. I’ll break the cycle. I’ll set us all free.”
“There’s one slight problem with your plan,” Nessa said.
“I’m listening.”
“I am, in general and always, disinclined to surrender.”
Ezra flicked his eyes to the side. Rosales gave him the ghost of a nod.
Then she moved, blindingly fast. Carolyn was standing the closest to her, and Rosales snatched her by the forearm. She yanked the woman off her feet, spinning her around, and hooked one arm around Carolyn’s throat. A pair of cards leaped to Daniel’s fingertips, crackling with power, as Marie raised her sickle and squared her footing.
Everyone froze, waiting for someone to make the first move.
“I’ll snap her neck,” Rosales said. “Someone’s going to die down here, and it’s you or her.”
Nessa thought about that for a moment. Then she shrugged.
“Fine,” she said. “Do it.”
Fifty
No one moved. Rosales’s arm tightened around Carolyn’s throat as she held the trembling woman in an iron grip. She squinted at Nessa.
“What?”
“Go ahead,” Nessa said. “Kill her. But might I suggest not being a complete idiot about it, and bleeding her into the chalice instead? That’ll account for one of the sacrifices we need.”
Carolyn’s mouth hung open. So did Rosales’s.
“What is wrong with you?” Rosales said.
“I’m pragmatic. I’m also a witch. Can I tell your fortune? You’re going to kill Carolyn. The moment you do, Daniel and Marie are going to kill you. At which point Ezra—helpless and alone—will be subject to my tender mercies, and when I’m done expressing my severe displeasure, what’s left of him will feed the chalice.”
She locked eyes with Ezra, and her voice dropped to a serpentine purr.
“Your fate is to suffer mutilation and agony at the hands of a tyrant,” she told him. “Did it ever occur to you, even once, that it might be me?”
Rosales shot him a look, uncertain now. “Boss?”
“Or,” Nessa offered, “here’s a much better plan. There are five eligible donors present. Five people can contribute, and survive, an amount of blood that would kill two.”
“It’s true,” Carolyn croaked, squirming. “I’m a writer. I research these things.”
“Let’s all bleed together,” Nessa said.
* * *
Outside the portal, Hedy had pressed her back to the olive angle of a tent just as headlights flashed over the water. A convoy rolled in, four long trucks with their beds shrouded under heavy tarp, and snaked to a stop along the shoreline. She scrambled back up the bluff like a panther, pressed flat to the cold desert stone.
She had watched Ezra and Rosales stride along the glass walkway, out over the lake, while technicians moved to man the abandoned control panel. They didn’t arrive alone. Men streamed from the truck beds with military precision, maybe twenty in all, bracing matte-black rifles. They took cover, some on bended knee, all eyes and muzzles trained on the shimmering gateway.
Their backs were turned to the real threat. Hedy and Gazelle spoke with their hands, and Gazelle passed down the command. The witches of the Pallid Masque, faces shrouded under ivory bone, spread out in the dark.
Hedy almost gave the command to attack. Then she froze. Something was wrong here. Something on the wind, like a distant and half-remembered spice. She locked eyes with Gazelle. Her knight felt it too. She raised one clenched fist to the others. Hold.
They waited. And watched.
Less than a minute later, one slow sweep around the clock, the night erupted in screams and gunfire.
* * *
Marie made the cuts. One shallow slice of her sickle’s blade, just along the forearm. One by one, the characters of the first story made their contribution to the angel’s meal, blood pattering into the bowl of the jade chalice.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Nessa murmured to Rosales.
“Do tell.” Her lips twisted in a snarl as she watched the slow procession.
“You’re thinking you should have grabbed Marie instead. That she would have worked as leverage over me. And you’re thinking about doing it right now. Or vice-versa, taking me to control her.”
Rosales’s empty fingers twitched. “And?”
“And you should look at the big picture. We have no idea what’s waiting beyond those doors. Might be the prize Ezra’s dreaming about, or it might be death incarnate. Killing one of us means you have to kill all of us. Which leaves you, standing alone with nobody but Ezra for company, and I don’t think he’s much of a fighter.”
Nessa rolled up the left sleeve of her blouse.
“Our odds are better if we all stand united. There’s time for a reckoning after we get inside.”
Rosales ran her tongue over her teeth.
“Fair,” she said.
“Now give me your blazer.”
Rosales arched an eyebrow. “What?”
“Bandages,” Nessa said. “Obviously.”
Rosales sacrificed her jacket, shredded in strips to form makeshift tourniquets. The others sacrificed blood. Daniel was the last in line, wincing as he leaned over the chalice.
“Just for the record,” he said, “that’s twice I’ve gotten cut up for you two. And I’m not even supposed to be here.”
His complaint was swallowed by the rasp of stone upon stone. Then a hollow, thunderous boom, like an ancient mechanism slamming into motion. He jumped back from the doors. Unseen chains rattled, spinning and spooling.
Nessa’s eyes, fierce and bright, met Marie’s. They stood side by side.
“Here we go,” she said.
The hairline crack running down the angel’s body grew. Then it split, breaking in half as the cathedral doors yawned open. A gust of hot, stale air washed from its cavernous depths, carrying the scent of sandalwood.
Then silence.
They moved as one, by unspoken accord. Their phones lit the darkness, casting narrow beams along the heart of the cathedral. An aisle ran between mammoth pews, everything molded from a single unbroken piece of jade stone.
“Who was this place for?” Marie said, voice soft as if she was afraid to disturb the stillness. “Going from the size of these seats, they must have been…twelve, maybe fifteen feet tall, easy.”
Dust danced along the beam of her light, the pale rectangle tracing frescoes on the vaulted walls. Faceless humanoid figures knelt in supplication, making offerings to great wheels that flew and burned in the heavens above.
The procession went deeper, in silent awe. Then Marie realized the prickling at the back of her neck wasn’t a brush with divine grace. Her cop senses were firing on overdrive. One member of the party wasn’t marveling at the art. Rosales was watching Nessa, dragging her heels to hang back on purpose, and her hand was inching toward her shoulder holster.
Rosales froze as the tip of Marie’s sickle tapped against the back of her neck.
“Uh-uh,” Marie said. She plucked the revolver from Rosales’s holster. “I’ll hang onto this for you.”
“I don’t need it,” Rosales whispered. “You’re all looking a little pale from bleeding out. A little shaky, maybe? Little slow on the draw?”
“Test me and find out.”
She didn’t push it. She doesn’t have to, Marie thought. If they did as we expected, there’s a whole company of mercenaries waiting topside for us.
And if Hedy did as we expected, they’re already dead.
Upon a riser at the head of the cathedral, instead of an altar, a coffin stood. It was a casket of glistening jade, engraved with writing that ringed the surface of the open-lidded box, and
more elaborate frescoes. Three mighty and faceless figures stood like immortal judges before a burning sun. Nine more figures cowered, small and twisted and broken, in a pit of flames at their feet.
The explorers gathered around the coffin, standing on tiptoes to gaze at the giant within.
The corpse was so mummified, withered by the ravages of time, that it was impossible to tell what it looked like when it was alive. Human, perhaps. Humanesque, but standing twice as tall as any man, with three-fingered hands and an Easter Island skull. Cobwebs thick as gray felt nestled in the long slits of its eyes and nose, a mouthless and sexless twin to the carving on the cathedral doors.
Chains and manacles carved from bright, smooth sapphire bound the corpse’s wrists. And within the collapsed cavern of its chest, ribs snapped and fallen like the broken bars of a cage, nestled a brass bell.
“This is Hebrew,” Nessa breathed, her fingertip tracing the words along the rim of the coffin. “Well, almost. Sort of. I can pick out words here and there, but some of these…there are letters that don’t exist in any Semitic language I’m familiar with.”
“A precursor tongue?” Ezra asked. “Deep Six is ancient, and this place stood on the ocean floor before the facility was built over it. No telling how long it’s been here.”
Nessa leaned in close, shining the beam from her phone across the letters as she tried to read the inscription.
“‘Here rests…sleeps?’ Then a name, I think. Too many letters I’ve never seen before, can’t make it out. ‘First of the three faithful thrones. Through his’…” She tapped her fingernail against the jade. “Act? Offering? It’s a compound word implying some kind of mighty deed or a sacrifice. ‘Through his act, evil is removed from the world and the nine kings of man are defied.’”
In the corner of Marie’s eye, Rosales’s face went tight.
“‘Let this…light?…remain shrouded. Let wisdom keep her face concealed, and no man seek her where she rests.’”
Nessa looked up. On the other side of the coffin, Marie met her gaze.
“Wisdom’s Grave,” Marie said.
“This isn’t it,” Nessa said. “But it might point the way. Let’s see…can’t read this bit here. Then…‘leave what you have found. To disturb this…reliquary? To disturb this reliquary is to invite damnation.’”
They stared in silence. No one moved.
Then Nessa leaned over the edge and reached inside. Her hand slipped into the dead creature’s chest. It emerged coated in bone dust and clutching the copper bell. A cascade of spidery runes clung to the faded metal, seeming to twist and move of their own accord.
“I was damned at the moment of my creation,” Nessa said. “I am not afraid. And I will not be judged.”
The sapphire manacles snapped open. The chain clacked as it twisted toward Nessa like a rattlesnake. Marie didn’t hesitate. She lunged in and grabbed it as the others jumped back.
The chain bucked in her grip, writhing, the manacles snapping at her face like a pair of starving mouths…and then, seemingly appeased or tamed by her touch, they fell limp. She slid the chain into her mirror bag and gave it a gentle, uncertain pat.
“We should go,” she said.
No one argued. Nessa cradled her bell, fingertips stroking the engraved sides like she could read the runes by touch. Ezra gave her an uncertain glance.
“That would be better in my hands,” he said. “Nothing has changed. I’m still the man with the resources and the reach to save us all.”
“And I’m still the woman who’s deciding if she’s going to let you live or not,” Nessa replied. “Keep walking.”
He didn’t argue, and Rosales held her silence. Marie wasn’t surprised. As far as they knew, they had backup waiting on the shore, and enough guns to take whatever they wanted.
Her suspicions were confirmed as they emerged from the cathedral. The lift was whirring at the end of the tent corridor, coming down, and Ezra broke into a smug grin.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider?” he asked.
Marie had a hard time not smiling herself. It’s Hedy and the others, she thought. They took care of Ezra’s mercs, and they’re here to back us up.
They were both wrong.
The wire cage rattled open and Savannah Cross stepped onto the seabed. She looked different from before, broken and disjointed, her zigzag spine jutting against her charcoal rags with every erratic footstep. A suit of jet-black armor stood behind her. It was baroque, curved, styled like an ancient samurai’s war gear, and glistening wet. Marie didn’t realize what she was looking at until the visor peeled open with a belch and human eyes—fixed with abject horror and set into a burn-scarred face—peered out from within. She remembered those eyes.
“Jesus, it’s Scottie Pierce,” she breathed. “What did you do to him?”
“Made some necessary repairs. He doesn’t talk anymore. I like him better this way myself. Don’t you agree?”
Scottie extended his arm. A groan echoed from inside the armor as a long, curving blade grew from his wrist. It was a katana forged from glistening darkness, its blade drooling rivulets of ink onto the ocean floor as he stepped from the lift.
“He’s been eager to see you again, Marie.” The spine-arms jutting from Savannah’s mutated back clacked together, quivering over her shoulders in anticipation. “As for me…ah. Professor Fieri, there you are.”
“Dr. Cross,” Nessa replied.
She handed the bell to Marie, who slipped it into the mirror bag. Then she cracked her knuckles.
“Rematch?” Savannah asked.
“Quite.”
Fifty-One
Scottie bellowed like a bull trapped in a furnace as he charged, whipping his glistening sword back, powdering the skeletal coral to pale dust under his boots. Rosales met the challenge. She ducked inside his reach and plowed into him shoulder-first. They crashed together, and he stumbled back—then grabbed her by the neck and effortlessly flung her aside. She flew, hit the seabed, and tumbled on her hip.
Savannah already had the sinuous words of a chant on her tongue when a playing card, crackling with white-hot energy, sliced into her rags. She hissed, staggering back. A second card drove itself into her chest, then a third…and then Daniel’s fingers riffled across his empty palm.
“Shit,” he said.
Scottie ignored the fallen bodyguard and came at Marie like a juggernaut. She ducked under his swing, droplets of ink spattering and sizzling on the stone. Then she spun around and opened fire. Rosales’s revolver bucked in her hand, spitting out round after round. The bullets ricocheted off Scottie’s armor, barely cracking the shell, glancing and sparking in all directions. Her hammer clicked on an empty chamber as he threw a gauntlet-fisted punch.
She felt one of her ribs crack. Something was cold and wet inside of her as she flew off her feet, landing hard on the rough stone. She couldn’t draw a breath, couldn’t do anything but move on pure instinct as his sword whistled down, throwing herself out of the way.
Rosales was up and moving again—away from the fight. “Boss!” she shouted at Ezra. “Get to the lift, now!”
Nessa curled her fingers in a ritual gesture and lashed out with a torrent of raw power. Savannah did the same. Their energy collided, hooked, snapping together like a pair of puzzle pieces.
“No little tricks,” Savannah hissed. “No swarm of owls, no playmates to conjure. Just your strength against mine.”
Her wrists bent. The wave of energy flexed, swelling, as it hit Nessa like a sledgehammer and knocked her to her knees.
“And we already know how that ends,” Savannah said.
Daniel ran in and dragged Marie to her feet. Scottie’s sword sliced the air as she scrambled back. Daniel circled him, trying to steal the monster’s attention, and Marie darted in with her sickle high. The curved blade came down on Scottie’s shoulder, angling for what looked like a gap in his armor. She grabbed the hilt with both hands and wrenched it with all the strength she had
left.
The sickle snapped. She clutched the haft, nothing left but the useless nub of a broken blade, as Scottie’s forearm crashed across her chest and sent her sprawling to the ground. Before he could finish her off, Daniel threw himself onto Scottie’s back. He clung to his shoulders, unarmed and desperate, legs flying as Scottie tried to thrash him off.
Nessa’s face glistened with clammy sweat. She tried to get one of her legs under her, to push herself up, but Savannah’s magic was a tidal wave of calculated force. An invisible fist crushed Nessa’s lungs in a slow, relentless, and brutal grip, squeezing out every last drop of air.
Marie clambered to her feet, wincing as her broken rib twisted like a knife. Nessa wouldn’t last another minute. Neither would Daniel. Her weapons were lost and she didn’t know how to save either one of them.
Then she did.
She turned and ran. Savannah’s giddy laughter chased her footsteps.
“Look at that,” she said to Nessa. “In your hour of need, your own knight abandons you. You are truly, utterly lost. Just give it up already.”
Scottie hurled Daniel up and over his shoulder. He slammed down on his back, hard enough to knock the wind from him and leave him stunned, writhing on the seabed. Scottie looked around, eyes fierce, hunting for Marie. When he didn’t see her, he turned his mad-eyed gaze to Daniel and stomped toward him.
Nessa managed a thin smile.
“You’re an imitation witch,” she gasped, “with an imitation knight. Marie never gives up. She’s just doing what she’s good at.”
“Which is?”
Nessa’s gaze flicked over Savannah’s shoulder.
“Changing the rules of engagement.”
Scottie loomed over Daniel. The shadow of his boot heel fell across Daniel’s face. Just before he could bring it down, a sound caught his attention.
Engines.
Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2) Page 35