Oh, he knew alright. “Do you know how I did it? How I can do it?”
“Yes.”
“I cut you back at the house, I saw the blood. That says I can hurt you.”
“Did you kill me? Do you see any cuts on me now?” Roman lifted his shirt, his toned body showing no signs of injury of any kind. “I cannot die.”
“What are you?”
Roman’s brow creased and his eyes hardened, their wonderful blue darkening to near black. The softer side to him had dissolved. Now he looked pure evil again.
The two of them stared at each other, Eliza’s mind racing through her options. Could she conjure up this telekinetic power of hers now, and knock him out? Even just stun him long enough to untie her legs and make it to the door? “Why can’t I use my telekinesis against you? How can I even do it?”
“You really have no idea, do you?”
“I don’t understand anything that is happening. You want to know why I came back to the house to help you? Because I thought you had the answers. Was I wrong?”
Roman eyed her. “You know, you are a very rare breed. I’ve only ever met one of your kind before.”
“What? A woman?”
Roman smiled. “Jeez, at least the last one knew when to keep her cocky mouth shut.”
Eliza didn’t quieten. “Kidnap her as well, did you?”
“Let’s just say an unforeseen stint in prison put paid to my plans.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
Roman stood and walked to the window behind her. Eliza wanted to turn in order to keep an eye on him, but the pathway to the door was now clear. Yes, she wanted answers, but she also wanted her freedom. She dropped the rope and reached for her feet. Her stomach cramped under the movement, but it didn’t slow her in yanking the bind from around her ankles. Behind her, she heard Roman turn, but she didn’t look back. She jumped up from the chair and bolted towards the entrance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The air hit Roman’s face, the crisp, clean freshness like a shot of adrenaline.
The morning sun crawled into the sky at a lazy pace, and for as far as he could see, dew-covered terrain glistened under its golden glow. He’d always thought a sunrise to be a magnificent view no matter where he may be when he saw it. However, this morning it was the fleeing figure of Eliza that demanded his attention.
The rain had long since stopped, yet burst riverbanks still gushed down upon the valley below and the already sodden and drenched fields did little to soak up the excess water. Every stride Eliza slid across the mud saw the ground swallow her shoeless feet.
It was an amusing sight to Roman, and broke up the monotony of being cooped up in the cabin for the last hour. Every step tested Eliza’s balance, her slender body jerking and reacting to each uneven rock and prickly weed she encountered.
“Eliza, there’s nowhere to run,” Roman called. He really didn’t want to follow her, but to think she would stop upon his command and return without a fight was hoping for the impossible. He stepped from the cabin door. “Are you really going to make me chase you?”
Eliza didn’t look back, continuing to clamber across the moors in her pointless bid for freedom.
Hell. She was going to make him go after her. If she tripped and started bleeding again, he’d kill her himself.
He began to walk, his leisurely pace soon turning into a slow jog. The wet ground also squelched around his boots, but they were sturdy footwear made for the outdoors, and the grip, although still unsteady, far outdid Eliza’s. She turned and saw him, her eyes widening, and sped up, her feet slip-sliding across the mud like she was skating on ice. She showed spirit, he’d give her that. He liked that.
“Come on, Eliza. You know you’re not going to outrun me.”
Eliza glanced over her shoulder. Her foot whacked a rock and she sprawled to the ground, landing face-first in the mud.
Roman slowed to a casual plod. He didn’t want to laugh – he was angry, after all, but as Eliza glanced up at him, mud caked across the right side of her face, clumps of hair wrapping her face and neck, Roman smiled. “You did notice the cabin wasn’t equipped with a bathroom, right?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mr. McKenzie hung up the phone.
He knew his wife had been listening to his conversation, and she confirmed this by quickly popping her head around the kitchen door.
“Who was that?” she said, donning the innocent voice he’d heard her use countless times when conning the milkman out of an extra bottle of milk.
“I need to pop over to Eliza’s house.”
“What for?”
Mr. McKenzie glanced up. He walked towards his wife and gently held her by the shoulders. He was not a religious man. Not anymore, anyway. He never prayed, not even when his daughter lay dying of leukemia, and he never attended church. So it seemed reasonable to assume he wouldn’t believe that ancient myths or folklores had any element of truth to them.
But, Mr. McKenzie was a believer.
Not in just any old tale. For instance, he didn’t believe in fairies and leprechauns, nor that a pot of gold lay buried at the end of a rainbow. He believed in something bigger. Power. Not the kind found by being a politician or the CEO of a global company. This power was invisible. Supernatural. And it came from only one place: Heaven.
Thirty years ago this power had taken his darling daughter, and the years that followed tormented him further by snatching work colleagues and friends in any manner it saw fit: burnings, drownings, cancer. Some went quick like his Aunt Mable. An aneurysm dropped her to the floor like a sack of spuds, and she hadn’t known what hit her. But the others… Their anguished screams drilled into his head and took months, sometimes years, to simmer and fade from his memory.
Like every child born today, the tale of the Crucifixion had played a big part at school. Mr. McKenzie made lollypop-stick crosses in Sunday School, and learned about an amazing man who rose from the dead, actually convinced that resurrection happened to everyone. The first he realised there was no life after death was three years later, when his mother and father died in a car accident. Mr. McKenzie attended their funeral, not crying like every other grieving relative. After all, he wasn’t sad. His parents would resurrect in three days. He planted his much-loved crosses into their newly covered graves, went home with his aunt and uncle, and waited for his parents to rise and come find him.
It never happened, and it was left to his aunt to explain to a frantic eight-year-old boy how death really worked. To Mr. McKenzie, Heaven caused painful deaths worse than Hell itself could ever conjure up, and now it was payback time.
After the deaths of his parents, Mr. McKenzie looked further into the story of the Crucifixion, convinced he had missed something or done something wrong. For years he read, spending much of his spare time in the religious section of the local library, and when that didn’t answer his questions, he begged his aunt to take him into the city so he could scour their larger reference libraries. All roads led him back to the same thing. Jesus only survived because he was the son of God. This angered Mr. McKenzie. All this time, he’d thought of God as a good man. But it was painfully obvious he was selfish and more evil than Lucifer himself.
So Mr. McKenzie hatched a new plan, a simple plan: to break into Heaven and rescue his parents.
By this time, his aunt and uncle had enlisted the help of a top London clinic. Every Saturday, Mr. McKenzie was driven two hundred and fifty miles – far from the Cornish village gossips – so he could sit with psychiatrist Edward Pope for sixty minutes and ‘talk.’ Although reluctant at first, Mr. McKenzie explained his dilemma. In return, Mr. Pope nodded and scribbled notes into a crisp new notepad. He became the only person Mr. McKenzie trusted. And it meant Mr. McKenzie spent most of his weekends in the English capital.
Edward Pope was the perfect listener, and fascinated with Mr. McKenzie’s determination to break into Heaven. For six years, he quietly lis
tened while Mr. McKenzie prattled on about his plans to destroy God’s sacred home and rescue his parents. It wasn’t until his seventh year of attending these sessions that Mr. Pope introduced him to another man, well-dressed, in pleated slacks and a woollen cardigan rolled to the elbows. The doctor went on to describe how this man wanted the same as Mr. McKenzie, and that he knew how to get into Heaven and obtain the power needed to destroy it.
That was the day Mr. McKenzie met Davis.
Mr. McKenzie looked into his wife’s eyes. “Remember I told you that one day I may need your help with something?”
“Is this it?” She could hardly mask her excitement. “Is this why we’ve been keeping an eye on the grandmother and Eliza all these years?”
Mr. McKenzie smiled at his wife. His aunt and uncle had frowned on him when he’d returned from London one year and introduced her as his new bride. He’d neglected to tell them he’d met her at his doctor’s office, just as he neglected to disclose that her short-lived stay in the mental ward when she was a child was because she’d been discovered inflicting torture on the neighbour’s pets. Further investigation uncovered she had in fact suffered terrible sexual abuse at the hands of her dominant father – a figure, it turned out, she couldn’t live without and a role Mr. McKenzie now filled. “Yes, darling, this is why.”
Mrs. McKenzie clapped her hands, a little squeal escaping her lips. “What do you want me to do?”
He opened a small door, which led under the stairs, and brought out a rolled sheet of blueprints. “I have to go up into Eliza’s attic, and I need you to keep an eye out. Do you think you can do that?”
“Oh yes. Can we go now?”
“Yes. We can go now.”
Mr. McKenzie crossed the small lane, closely followed by his wife, and strolled up to the front door as if the only thing he had on his mind was a good cuppa and a cosy chat with the young neighbour he’d watched grow since she was born.
He didn’t bother ringing the doorbell. No need. He had a key.
Inside, the hallway looked as though a tornado had torn through it, and upon further examination, he saw the living room and kitchen mirrored it. Makeshift boards he’d nailed to the window after Billy had asked him to secure the house let in just enough early-morning light to see the aftermath. It looked grim. Smashed furniture piled against the far wall, broken glass swept in to the corner but not completely out of sight, and what looked to be blood staining the Egyptian rug his wife had loved so much he’d had to go out and get her one for herself.
He turned from the destruction. His wife remained by the door, peering out at the street through the spy hole. She was, if nothing else, dutiful. “Wait here and alert me if anyone comes.”
Mrs. McKenzie nodded, enjoying her task far too much, but it pleased Mr. McKenzie to see her like this. Firstly, because her eagerness and loyalty lowered his chances of getting caught, and secondly – and probably more important than the first – Mrs. McKenzie was a joy to live with when she was happy.
He left her spying through the door and bound up the stairs two at a time to the first floor. Two of the three bedroom doors were closed, and a tapestry rug ran the length of the corridor to the far end, where net curtains draped a large window. Framed paintings and photographs hung mismatched along the wall, the missing two closest to him replaced by an outline of dust. Mr. McKenzie peered past the open door, it suddenly dawning on him that he hadn’t checked with Davis as to whether Eliza was expected to return home again.
It’s in the attic, was all the butler had said, and from that statement, Mr. McKenzie had just assumed the house would be empty.
The four-poster bed was made, and on the dresser was a clutter of makeup, face creams, and perfumes. Packing boxes, some flattened, the rest half empty, had been discarded along the far wall. Mr. McKenzie tiptoed to the second room. The floorboards creaked beneath his weight, and he winced. If Eliza did return home, what excuse could he use to explain his creeping around her house? I thought I saw someone inside? I thought you may need help? No, they were lame, and if he couldn’t convince himself, how the hell was he supposed to convince her?
Ah, he had it. The truth. Your brother asked me to secure the house. Perfect.
He grabbed the door handle, this time with complete confidence, and twisted. Like the floorboards before, the door groaned as it opened, but he didn’t care. He had an excuse to be here now. The drawn curtains made it harder to see than the last room. More half-empty boxes, an easel, blank canvases, and, hanging on a hook behind the door, a blue pinafore he recognised as being Eliza’s grandmother’s.
After checking the third room and seeing it was exactly the same as the first, an empty bed and no sign of Eliza, Mr. McKenzie headed towards the second stairwell. It was narrow, probably no wider than two feet, with a heavily painted cream door at the top. The attic. A cold breeze escaped under the door, and he blinked away the dryness. With a sweaty palm, he gripped the doorknob and twisted.
The door wouldn’t open.
Mr. McKenzie turned the handle again and nudged his shoulder against it, gently at first, then with an impatient shove. The door flung open and Mr. McKenzie tumbled forward and into the path of a pale, ghostlike face. Even though pushing sixty, Mr. McKenzie’s reflexes were that of any twenty-year-old. He punched the palm of his hand against the hardness of a chest, and the threat in front of him tumbled to the floor. He searched for the light switch, saw it against the doorframe, and quickly lit the room.
Undisturbed dust lay across the floorboards like a covering of snow. In the middle of it was the naked body of a female, her solid arms pointed towards the ceiling, her face holding the same plastic leer that had greeted him when he’d first come through the door.
Mr. McKenzie stared at the mannequin, then back towards the stairs. He straightened his shirt. Thank God his wife hadn’t witnessed that, and stepped forward, the soles of his shoes leaving a trail of footprints in his wake. It was sloppy evidence to leave behind, but by the time anyone saw it and put two and two together, he’d be long gone.
He reached the far wall and unrolled the blueprints. The real blueprints. Not the manufactured one that failed to show the additional room he now wanted. He ran his hands across the mortar. Loose bricks, probably untouched for hundreds of years, wobbled between the crumbling cement. Slipping a screwdriver from his back pocket, he scraped between the bricks, disintegrating the mortar to nothing more than particles of grit that sprinkled around his feet. In less than a minute, a brick fell clear from the wall. Mr. McKenzie dug around the edge of another brick until it, too, prised free.
He continued this for some twenty minutes, pulling bricks loose. When he was lucky, others tumbled away with it and crashed to the floor, sending clouds of brick dust into the air. Several times, Mr. McKenzie patted down his clothes and wafted the air clean so he could pull another brick free. Finally, darkness stood where the area of brick had once been. He grabbed the pencil torch he always kept handy for emergencies, and shone it into the secret room on the other side. Cobwebs and dust as thick as a woollen blanket covered unknown shapes and objects.
He stepped inside, immediately spotting the rectangular item he wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Eliza was surprised how easily Roman picked her up and threw her over his shoulder.
His arm wrapped her legs, securing them tight against his chest, and although she wouldn’t normally foresee her weight of eight-and-a-half stone as a problem for any man, especially one as defined as Roman, she did expect the added weight of her mud-soaked clothes to make some, if only a little, difference.
Roman made it back to the cabin in record time, as though he’d made the same trek many times before. The notion he had, and that Eliza may not be the first woman he’d held captive here, exacerbated her panicked state.
Roman kicked open the cabin door, and promptly dropped Eliza to the floor. He grabbed her arms, and no matter how hard Eliza squirmed, he r
e-secured the rope around her wrists within seconds.
“Do I have to attach these ties to something more solid?” He glanced towards the rusted stove just beyond the table.
Having her hands tied was bad enough, but shackled to the oven? Eliza would never be able to escape from that. She shook her head and averted eye contact, bracing herself for the cold threats of what would happen if she attempted to run again.
They didn’t come.
Instead, Roman grabbed her legs. Expecting her ankles to be re-tied, Eliza screamed and kicked out.
“I’m checking for abrasions,” Roman shouted. He wiped away what he could of the mud and dirt from the soles of her feet. Once he seemed satisfied they weren’t bleeding, he reached for her waist and lifted her shirt enough to see the stitched wound on her stomach was still intact. He left her alone after that, picking up the old rag he’d earlier wiped his boots with. He threw it down on the floor beside her. “Wipe your face.”
The rag landed by Eliza’s foot, the material hard like a dry chamois leather. It absolutely stank, and she declined to touch it. When his expression didn’t alter, she said, “Why are you obsessed with me bleeding?”
“Do you want the Shadow to find you again?”
Eliza shook her head.
“Then don’t bleed.”
“I’ve bled loads of times. That Shadow thing has never come for me before.”
“Well, the True Cross hadn’t started being assembled before, had it?”
Coldness numbed Eliza’s feet. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her tied arms around them, trying to distribute what little body heat she had left. “How long do I have to stay here?”
“I wouldn’t be so eager to move onto the next phase of this situation if I were you.”
“Why? Because my father’s butler wants to sacrifice me? Do you know how ludicrous that sounds?”
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