by K. J. Emrick
Addie took the huge flashlight out of Godfrey’s hand as they went into the short spur tunnel. It was more smooth rock here. Nothing to see but stone, and more curving stone.
It took them only a few minutes to find her, right at the end where the tunnel widened out into a little grotto. The floor of the place was almost flat, the ceiling low over their heads. A few watertight plastic crates sat against the back wall, full of what-nots and things Addie couldn’t even remember.
There were no lights strung here at all. In the beam of the flashlight they saw Maria lying on her stomach, her face turned away from them, her legs tangled over themselves, her arms tucked underneath. She wasn’t moving.
“Is she…?” Godfrey started to ask, before his voice choked off.
“She’s alive,” Willow promised him. She’d felt the same signs of life that Addie had with her magic. If they looked carefully, they could see her breathing. Maria wasn’t dead.
At least, not yet.
The sisters knelt at her side and put their hands on her back. They didn’t need to discuss what they were doing. Calling on their magic, they willed a sense of healing into Maria’s body. They could feel the strong beat of her heart. They could feel the lazy way the air went in and out of her lungs. They could also feel the lump still rising at the back of her neck from where she had been knocked unconscious. She had bled, but not much. The danger was in how she was slipping away into a coma. Their magic was slowly drawing her back.
Addie scrunched her eyebrows together. It was getting harder to call on her magic. Each new spell was making her weaker, but that wasn’t what was bothering her at the moment.
There was something wrong with Maria’s wound.
She probed it for magic, thinking maybe the guy in the red shirt—Alan, or whoever—had used magic to strike Maria down. There was no trace of it.
Still, there was something strange. She put a little more Essence into the spell and it traced over the shape of the wound. That was it! The shape was almost… circular. The welt was very distinctive and must have come from a very unique weapon. She felt over it gently with her fingertips, and when she did, Maria moaned and stirred awake.
“Ow…” she groaned.
Addie and Willow helped sit her up, taking it slow and easy to give her time to orient herself. They had found her, and thanks to their magic she would be fine. There was no reason to rush now. She winced with each movement and finally settled herself cross-legged on the hard rock floor.
Both cats sat watching her with typical feline disinterest, but Addie could tell even they were worried. Maria’s hand went to the back of her head, to the wound there, but then she hissed and pulled it away again.
“Ow, ow, ow! What happened? Did a rock hit me?” Her eyes opened wide in alarm. “Is the tunnel collapsing? Are we going to be buried down here?”
“No, we’re not,” Willow said, in a voice that was laced with a calming bit of her Essence. “Shh. You got dragged away from us in the dark. Do you remember?”
“I—” She looked like she was going to start panicking once more, but another few words from Willow—and her magic—eased her mind again. “Yes. I do. I remember the lights going out. I remember someone taking ahold of me from behind, and there was a hand over my mouth. Oh, Dios mio, somebody attacked me!”
Which Addie and Willow already knew, but it would be good for Maria to put her fractured memories back together at her own pace. It was also likely that Maria had vital clues to who the attacker really was. Addie put her suspicions aside for the moment. Anything Maria could tell them would help.
Either it would pin Alan for these crimes, or it would clear him.
Addie said a little Irish prayer that it would be the second one. That didn’t mean she wasn’t keeping one eye on the far end of the grotto.
“Maria,” she said, “do you remember anything about the person… the man, I mean, who attacked you?”
“No. No, I can’t.” Maria shook her head slowly, wincing as it tugged at her injury. “The man was behind me. All I know is it couldn’t be one of the people in our group. It wasn’t Chase, and it wasn’t Godfrey. They were both in front of me when this happened. Purity and you guys, too.”
They heard Godfrey blow out a relieved breath. Addie hadn’t ever considered him a suspect in this to begin with. Whoever attacked Maria had also killed Evelyn. Godfrey had no motive for either. There was a strong chance that he was falling in love with Maria. It made no sense for him to do this.
For a brief time she had considered that Chase Abbott might be a suspect. He and his wife Purity had obviously known Evelyn Collins before this trip, and they hadn’t been on very good terms based on the scathing comments each had thrown back and forth. When they found Evelyn dead, that had been her first thought.
Not for long, however. The man in the red shirt was to blame. They had to find out who that was. Obviously, he’d struck again.
It wasn’t one of the people in our group, Maria had just said, and that confirmed Addie’s suspicion.
“Maria, please,” Addie prompted. “You’re a reporter. You must remember some sort of details about the man.”
They could tell Maria was thinking about it even as she let them help her to her feet. She held onto Willow’s arm when her legs proved to be too wobbly for her to stand on her own. “Um. He was taller than me, I remember that.”
Addie nodded, but that didn’t help much. Maria was a very petite woman, and her attacker being taller than her didn’t exactly narrow anything down.
“I also think,” Maria said, pausing to catch her breath, “that I saw a red shirt.”
Which fit with what Addie already knew, so that was another clue that wasn’t all that helpful. A man in a red shirt.
“Anything else?” she asked hopefully.
Maria pursed her lips. “No, nothing. I’m sorry.”
Addie tried not to be too disappointed. With the power to the lights off, and Maria in fear for her life, they really couldn’t have expected even an experienced journalist to remember much about—
“I mean, except for the horse.”
Willow had been picking up Godfrey’s flashlight from the floor, but now both sisters stopped and stared at Maria.
She looked back and forth between them. “Didn’t I mention the horse?”
“No,” Willow said flatly, “you most certainly did not mention a horse.”
“Oh. Sorry. There was a horse here just before I got hit on the head. I couldn’t see it very well because the lights were off, but there was definitely a horse. I guess my brains are still a little scrambled. That bump to my head… it was like getting hit with a steel bar! I feel better now, somehow. I think I’ll be all right.”
Addie wasn’t so sure. There was no way that Maria had seen a horse down here in these tunnels. It was impossible enough that a man had found his way down here somehow to attack them all. The idea that he’d brought a horse in here with him was just… crazy.
Of course, Addie had seen a little animal or creature of some sort running alongside the man in the red shirt, but that certainly wasn’t a horse. It wasn’t any bigger than a dog. Lots of magically trained people had animal familiars. Belladonna Nightshade had kept Domovyk as a familiar for a long time, for instance, before he defected to their side. Lots of different animals were used as familiars, for that matter. Cats, dogs, birds, lizards, and yes even horses, but in this case, Maria had to be wrong. There was no way there was a horse running around down here.
If nothing else, they all would have heard the sound of hooves echoing off the tunnels.
It had to be a hallucination caused by her concussion, and nothing more. Which meant everything else she said about her attack might have been fabricated by her injured brain, too. So they were back to square one. The guy could have been seven feet tall, for all they knew, or he could’ve been a whole two feet standing on his tiptoes.
Yup. Right back to square one.
Which meant it still
might be Alan.
“Has anyone seen my pack?” Maria asked, rubbing at her forehead. She looked pale, and Addie was concerned that maybe she was hurt worse than they realized. “Oh! And my phone. Where’s my phone? I need that phone. My life is on that phone.”
At the edges of the flashlight beam, Godfrey picked something up from the floor. “I think I’ve got it. Yes, here it is. Well. What’s left of it, I suppose.”
He brought it over, held carefully by the edges, and showed it to them. The screen was smashed. The hard plastic backing was cracked and warped. There wasn’t going to be any fixing that.
“My phone…” Maria’s voice was full of despair. “Oh, no. Oh, no! All of my photos and my videos were on that. Everything from this trip. It’s gone. All gone.”
“You don’t save it automatically to a cloud server?” Godfrey asked.
“There’s no signal down here,” she reminded him sadly. “There’s no way to upload anything. It’s all gone. It’s just… gone.”
She was more upset by that than she had been by being attacked. Or maybe, Addie thought, it was a combination of everything going on that made tears burst from Maria’s eyes. She fell into Godfrey’s arms and he was there to hold her without any hesitation. He passed the phone off to Willow, who cradled it in the palm of her hand, turning it over to give it a good look.
Addie gave Maria a moment, knowing how scared and upset she must feel, but they had really used up all the time they had to stand around here. The caverns were still damaged, and distant rumbles were still sending vibrations under their feet. They had to keep moving until they were out and safe.
Until they were away from the man in the red shirt. Or until they could identify him. Catch him. Stop him.
But then Willow looked up from Maria’s smashed phone. She looked at Addie with an expression that said she needed to talk. Privately.
“Uh, Godfrey,” she said, “take Maria back, and catch up with Kiera and the others. We’ll be along in a moment.”
He stared at her blankly, looking down at Maria, and then at his flashlight in Willow’s hand, and then over his shoulder at the passages behind him. “You want me to take her back… and leave you here?”
Addie was glad the dim lighting hid her smirk. So nice of him to be worried for the two girls, since he was this big, tough, spelunker-man. “I appreciate your concern for us, but we’ll be fine. Go back to the passageway and turn right. From there it only goes in that one direction, so you won’t get lost, and we’ll only be just a moment. Besides. We’ll have our cats with us.”
He nodded, although he really didn’t look like he was believing anything she was saying. Especially when she mentioned the cats. “All right. Uh, I’ll need my flashlight back if you two are staying behind. You have one of your own?”
Addie turned Willow around and reached inside her pack for her flashlight. It was small, and it was pink, but the light was bright enough to satisfy him when she turned it on. “We’ll be fine. Tell Kiera we’ll be right there.”
He nodded, still looking like he thought this was a bad idea, and then he turned himself and Maria around to walk back to the main passageway.
When they were gone, Doyle pushed a breath noisily through his nostrils. “Don’t like that bloke much, gotta tell you. Think maybe he did this to Maria?”
“No, I don’t,” Addie told him. “I can’t be sure who was in the tunnel with us after the lights went out and who wasn’t, but I think he genuinely cares for Maria.”
Domovyk hummed at the back of his throat. “He was one to find cellphone. Like he knew where it was, tak? Even with cat’s eyes, I could not see it lying there in the dark.”
That was a good point. “Maybe he tripped over it, or something,” Addie thought out loud. Then she shook her head. Willow had obviously figured something out, and she needed to hear what that was before they knew anything for sure. “All right, sis. What is it?”
“Look at this,” Willow told her, and held Maria’s phone up for her to see. “The crack in the phone… something was slammed into it pretty hard but look at the shape.”
Addie stared at the smashed screen. The glass was broken in a very specific shape. The top and the bottom of the screen were pretty much untouched but from side to side was a curving line pressed right into the phone. The casing was bent around that curve. The glass was cracked along that curve. A curved line, about half an inch wide.
It was a very familiar shape, but Addie couldn’t quite place it…
Willow traced the line over the splintered glass with one finger, careful not to actually touch it. “Know what it looks like to me?”
“No. What?”
“Well, didn’t Maria just tell us she saw a horse?”
“Phbbt,” Doyle mocked. “Horse. Yeah, right. Although I do…” He sniffed the air. “I do get a smell of something in here…” He sniffed again. “Pretty faint…”
“Yes,” Domovyk said with a sarcastic twist to his whiskers. “I told you to take bath more often.”
Doyle glared.
Addie ignored them as they continued to bicker, and instead she looked closer at the damage to the phone. A horse? She didn’t get the connection at first.
When she did, it was plain as day.
The shape that had been smashed into Maria’s phone wasn’t just a curve. It was a loop. Like the front curve of a horse’s hoof.
Now she understood what she had felt when she’d traced the edges of the wound at the back of Maria’s skull. She’d thought it had been a broken circle she was feeling. Instead, it was the same horseshoe shape they saw here. Addie could just imagine the killer putting the phone down on the floor of the grotto. She could picture clear as day as a hoof stomped on the screen of the smartphone to destroy it.
Addie could also picture Maria being struck in the back of the head with a kick from the hind leg of a horse. It would have made the exact pattern Addie had felt while sending healing magic into Maria. No wonder she’d been knocked unconscious.
Was the attack just to get to Maria’s phone? Why in the name of all things Irish would anyone want to destroy her phone that badly?
Not for the first time, she really wished that Lucian Knight was here. Her boyfriend would have seen things she hadn’t, and probably would have figured this all out already with his keen police officer mind. Addie was sure there was something she was missing here. A few things certainly weren’t adding up.
For instance, the person who killed Evelyn could have killed Maria, too. They’d had plenty of time to do that if they wanted. One more stomp from that horse’s hoof—gruesome as that was to think about—and Maria wouldn’t be here to be held in the arms of big, strong Godfrey Huffington.
So why didn’t he take the time?
Oh.
Curse her Irish eyes. It was as obvious as the freckles on her face.
“You all right, sis?” Willow asked her. “You’re looking pale, and it’s not from the flashlight.”
Doyle pressed up against her ankle, obviously worried about her too, even if he was too aloof in his cat ways to say so.
“I’m fine,” Addie said, a little more harshly than she’d intended to. “Really. I am. I’m just tired. I’ve used up a lot of my magic being down here.”
“You have to be careful, sis. You won’t have time to rest down here.”
With a shrug, Addie rubbed her forehead. “I could just take a dip in the Well of Essence, I suppose.”
Willow’s face became unexpectedly serious. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Look, I’m okay. As long as we don’t get into any magical throw downs with the likes of Belladonna Nightshade, I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah. That trick you did to save you and Kiera when the Passages fell down on your heads… that was pretty brave.”
Addie would have to mark that on her calendar. That was two heart-felt compliments from her sister on one day. She and Willow were close, but their sisterly bon
d wasn’t all lovey-dovey like that. “You would’ve done the same, Willow. I just need to rest for a while once we get out of here and then I’ll be right as rain.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I’ll tell you something else I’m sure about. I know who the killer is now. I just don’t know what he’s doing down here.”
“What? You got all that from a broken cellphone?”
“Not exactly.” Addie picked up the phone out of Willow’s hand and turned it over. “There were a few other things, too. Do you think you could pull any of the information off the phone’s SIM card?”
Willow looked offended. “Of course I can. Electricity and magic go hand in hand. Technologically speaking this phone is scrap, but I’m a witch. I can transfer all of her data off there and onto my phone, right down to any naughty pics she’s got stored in a private folder.”
“We don’t need nude selfies. Just the video and photos she took today, here in the caverns. I think I know what happened.”
“You gonna let me in on the secret, sis?”
“And rest of us?” Domovyk asked.
Addie nodded. “I’ll tell you on the way back to Kiera. She’s going to need to hear all of this, too. She’s not going to believe what we’re about to tell her. Doyle, Domovyk, run ahead for us. Tell Kiera to hold up where she is.”
The tunnel rumbled under their feet.
“Unless the whole place comes down around us first, that is.”
Chapter 7
Kiera had gotten pretty far along with Chase and Purity before the cats caught up to them. It took Addie and Willow several minutes more to find them down the tunnel. Both of them were lost in thought over what Addie had said to Willow. It was the only explanation, even if neither of them wanted to believe it.
One thing was for sure, and both of them agreed on this one point. This had the stink of Belladonna Nightshade all over it. Surprising the cats hadn’t gotten a whiff of that back in the grotto.
The group of everyone was up ahead in the middle of a long slow curve. From here they couldn’t see what was up ahead, or what was behind them for that matter. Addie remembered this tunnel from the few times she’d been here. There was nothing ahead of them. The next turn they would need to take was in a branching of tunnels that were all sealed with doors and magical spells.