Blood of the Sorceress (27 page)

“Goddess, no...”

Ryan grabbed her shoulders, turning her to him, and she buried her head in his chest to hide the sight of all that blood, but she couldn’t stop the thoughts that flooded her mind. Was it Lilia’s blood? Was it Ellie’s?

The others were exploring the place further.

“There’s a cell back here,” Gus called. “I think your baby was here, Magdalena.”

That brought Lena’s head up, and she grabbed Ryan’s arm and dragged him over. Inside the cell, an empty baby bottle lay on the floor. Right beside it was a teddy bear, his unseeing eyes staring blankly.

Ryan frowned. “Honey, isn’t that—”

“The nanny-cam.” Lena let go of Ryan’s hand and grabbed the bear. “And it’s recording.”

“How the hell did it get here?”

“I don’t know. It was on the mantel last I— It doesn’t matter. We have to see what’s on it—fast. Beltane is only—” She looked at her watch. “Goddess, it’s only an hour away.” She looked around her. “And we have no idea where they are. Ryan I don’t know what to—”

“Easy. Deep breaths.”

She nodded, gulping air, calming herself again. “We need to see what’s on it.”

Gus looked at the hole in the ceiling. “If they’re not here, chances are that’s how they got out. Maybe they escaped.”

“Maybe,” Tomas said. “But if they did, it’s for sure those bastards went after them. Come on, let’s get back out and see if they left us a trail.”

They all headed up the stairs again, into the pitch black tunnel, and then along the tracks to the far end and back out into the brightening sunlight. “The grass is all beaten down over here,” Ryan said, eyeing the slope to the right of the tracks.

“It looks like someone went this way, too.” Indy looked downhill on the opposite side. “But the signs are faint. Look, there’s a broken stick, a footprint in the wet mud.” She turned, met her sister’s eyes. “A bare footprint.”

“Bahru,” Lena whispered, rushing forward. “He got Ellie out. He must have. And he got away from them, too. They all went the other way.”

“No,” Gus said. “See there? It’s another track behind your Bahru’s. Someone wearing shoes.”

Lena whirled and met Ryan’s eyes. “You have to go after them,” she said.

“We’ll all go.”

“No. No, listen to me. Listen to me, and please don’t argue. You and Tomas have to follow that trail and save our baby.” She gripped the front of his shirt. “I can’t go with you. I have to go—” She bit her lip, lowered her head. “I have to take this bear home and see what’s on the disc. I’ll take the car.”

“I’ll go with her,” Indy said.

Gus said nothing, but his eyes were following the path the larger group had taken.

“All right. Call and tell me what you find.” Ryan pulled her close and kissed her. “I’ll find her. I promise.”

“Hurry, Ryan.”

He nodded. Tomas and Indy exchanged a knowing glance as he hugged her close, and Lena heard her whisper, “I’m sorry. I have to—”

And his urgent reply, “I know you do. Be careful, dammit.”

“You know I will.” She kissed his neck, and then the two men broke away and dashed down the hill after Bahru and the baby.

Gus looked at the women. “If you two don’t mind getting home on your own, I’d like to follow this trail.”

“We’re all following this trail,” Magdalena told him.

He frowned, clearly puzzled. “But you just told your husband—”

“He never would have let her go after Sindar without him,” Indy said.

Lena took out her cell phone as Indy went on.

“But we have to go, Gus. And you don’t. This is our fight—one we’ve been waiting over three-thousand years to finish. But it’s not yours.”

He held her gaze steadily. “You’re wrong about that,” he said. Then he looked at Magdalena, who had pulled something out of the bear and was plugging it into her phone. “I take it you can access the camera footage from your phone?”

“Smart man. There’s a flash drive in the bear and a USB port— Never mind.” She tapped the screen, waited, then turned the phone sideways. “Here it comes.”

The two sisters stood close, and Gus shouldered his way in between them to watch the footage playing out on the small screen. A few seconds later Indy staggered away with her hand over her mouth and tears flowing. “Oh, God, Lilia,” she whispered. “Stay alive, baby sister. We’re coming for you.”

“You, too, Sindar,” Lena added, her tone deep and quivering with anger. “We’re coming for you, too, you murderous bastard. And this time you’re not walking away.”

16

B
ahru had hiked the Himalayas with Ryan’s father. He’d traveled the Amazon by boat and explored the wilds of Peru. Ironic, then, that he would find himself lost in the relatively tame woods of upstate New York. And yet lost was precisely what he was.

Worse, someone was following him. He’d paused twice to cuddle Ellie close and listen. And he’d heard them very clearly, the even, stealthy footsteps of a human being. Animals didn’t walk that way, one, two, one, two. A deer would take a few rapid steps, then a couple of slow ones, then stop to sniff or to graze. A rabbit would scamper. A chipmunk would scurry. A bear would lumber and crash. A human kept his rhythm, one, two, left, right.

The baby was fussy. He’d been carrying her through the woods for forty minutes, and he was no closer to finding his way home. Sooner or later he would have to emerge onto a road, wouldn’t he?

Ellie squirmed in his arms and wrinkled up her face. He recognized the expression. She was gearing up for an all-out wail. Jiggling her in his arms, he whispered, “There, now, Ellie. You have to keep quiet now. We’re playing hide-and-seek.”

She opened her eyes, gazed at him briefly, then squeezed them closed again and opened her mouth. He gave her his knuckle to circumvent the cry, and she frowned and looked cross-eyed at it while gnawing it curiously.

A twig snapped, and Bahru looked around fast.

A man in black, wearing a ski mask over his face, emerged from the darkness of the forest. And then, almost making Bahru gasp in surprise, another appeared off to the right, this one wearing a plastic Halloween mask. A skeleton. How imaginative.

“Hand over the baby now, old man,” said the first. “You can go on your way. No one will bother you.”

“No one but my conscience,” Bahru said, taking a backward step.

“You can’t outrun us. And you can’t fight us. Give it up.”

“I can out-will you, though.”

“Out-what?”

“If your faith were the size of even a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there.’ And it would move.” Bahru sank to the ground, folded his legs and locked his arms around Ellie. “Unless, of course the mountain had faith, too, and said to itself, ‘No force on earth can move me.’” Closing his eyes, he willed himself into a deep state of meditation, visualizing himself as a stone mountain and Ellie as a pebble safe within his depths. He heard no more, though he knew the men were speaking, shouting at him, giving him orders, and Ellie had begun to cry. He ignored everything, because he was a mountain. And mountains were not upset by noise.

* * *

“What the hell?” Ryan whispered. “What are they—”

Tomas gripped his arm, probably to keep him from rushing forward, and pulled him back into the cover of the dark forest. “Let’s just see what’s up first, see how many there are. We have to do this right. We can’t mess it up.”

Ryan knew his friend was right, but every instinct in him was screaming at him to save his daughter, save her
now.
Instead, he forced himself to stand still and stare into the tiny glade, dappled by sunlight that spilled in tiny patches and pools through the trees above, where Bahru sat on the ground with the baby in his arms. She was crying loudly, and two thugs dressed all in black and wearing masks were pulling on Bahru’s arms, but they couldn’t budge him, couldn’t pull Ellie from his hold.

Bahru didn’t flinch. His eyes were closed, and he wore an expression of utter serenity.

Ryan shot Tomas a look. “There are only two of them. Can we get my daughter now before they hurt her?”

Tomas nodded. “You go around to the left, I’ll go right, we’ll count to ten and we’ll come at them from both sides, all right?”

“All right.” As soon as he was in position he counted quickly and then just sprang. He saw Tomas race in from the opposite side, but after that he couldn’t see how his friend was doing. He had his hands full with a skeleton-masked thug who had arms like steel and a right hook like a freight train. The thug pounded Ryan in the face, and he flew off his feet before hitting the ground. He started to get up again, but the thug hit him again, and then again, driving him back down each time. This guy was strong as an ox. Why the hell hadn’t he been able to move the old guru’s skinny arm away from Ellie?

Ryan scrambled to his feet, ready for more, and the brute was looming over him, about to deliver it, when the baby squealed. Ryan looked her way, and saw her flailing her arms and giggling, when she’d been squalling a few seconds ago. And then something in his peripheral vision grabbed his attention. He scrambled backward just as a huge branch came crashing down right at him. The skeleton saw it, too, but too late, only an instant before it flattened him to the ground, leaving him pinned and helpless.

Nearby, Tomas was duking it out with the second thug. Tomas’s lip was bleeding, and one eye was swollen nearly shut. Ryan looked around, spied a brick-sized rock, picked it up and hurled it, only belatedly thinking he might miss and hit the ex-priest.

Fortunately he didn’t. The rock hit the thug squarely in the back of his skull. He dropped like an anchor, hit the ground and didn’t move again.

Tomas met Ryan’s eyes, wiping the blood from his upper lip. “Thanks.”

“De nada.”
Ryan rushed to the baby. She squealed and burbled at the sight of him, as she always did. Then he knelt to shake Bahru out of his...whatever.

“Hey, holy man, it’s Ryan. We’re here, it’s okay. You and Ellie are safe.”

Bahru’s eyes opened slowly, and his lips curved in a smile. “I know we are.”

He unlocked his arms, and Ryan took the baby, hugging and kissing her, flooded with so much relief that his knees were damn near weak with it.

But his joy was short-lived. It skidded to a halt when he heard Tomas talking to the thug underneath the fallen limb. “Where is Sindar taking the witch? Tell me, or I’ll leave you under there to die.”

“Someone will find me—”

“Yeah, come hunting season. That’s in the fall, pal. This is spring. Where did he take her?”

Closing his eyes, the man shook his head, refusing to talk.

“Fine. We’ll do this the hard way, then.” Tomas stepped up onto the branch, increasing the pressure on the man’s chest. “You gonna tell me now?” he asked. And then he started jumping up and down, driving a gasp of pain from the main each time he landed. “How about now?”

“Tomas, for the love of God...”

“This guy was gonna kill your kid, Ry. Don’t forget that.”

Ryan handed the baby back to Bahru, then walked over and calmly jumped onto the log beside Tomas. “Shall we?” he asked.

“You bet.” And this time they both jumped, then landed hard.

The thug cried out, his face twisting into a grimace. “All right, all right. He’s taking her to the top of Black Rock Gorge.”

Ryan frowned at Tomas. “What the hell is—”

“It’s a hundred-foot chasm with a rocky, shallow creek running through it. The cliff at the top is a popular spot,” Tomas said. “Students die there every freaking year. Suicides, accidents and pure idiocy.”

Ryan went cold as he stared into Tomas’s eyes. “He’s going to throw Lilia off the damn cliff,” he said, shifting his gaze down to the man under the tree. “Is that what he’s planning?” The man didn’t answer fast enough, so Ryan jumped again. “Is it?”

“Not just her. All three.”

“Over my dead fucking body.” Ryan leapt to the ground and went to take the baby from Bahru again. “Come on, Bahru. We need to get back to the truck, and I can’t leave you here alone.”

Bahru scrambled to his feet, and Tomas fell into step behind.

“Hey! Wait!” shouted the trapped thug. “You can’t just leave me here.”

“I’ll call from my cell and send help!” Tomas shouted back.

“After we save our women,” Ryan added.

Ryan glanced up at Bahru as they made their way through the woods. The old man was looking weary. Ryan met his eyes. “You saved my daughter,” he said. “You wouldn’t let them take her without you, would you?”

Bahru lowered his eyes, trudging on. “Demetrius is the true hero. He risked his life to get us out. Sacrificed it, perhaps.”

“And that thing you did just now,” Ryan went on. “How the hell could two guys that strong not manage to peel your scrawny arms from around my kid?”

“Because I believed they could not.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Ask Lena.”

“Lena,” Ryan said softly. “I’ve got to let her know the baby’s all right. Look, when we get back to the tunnel, I want you to take my truck and drive the baby back home. Stay there with Lena and Indy, okay? Tell them we’ve gone after Lilia.”

“I do not drive,” Bahru said softly.

“Try believing you can.” Ryan said it with a teasing smile, and Bahru smiled back at him. “Thank you for saving Ellie, Bahru. I’ve been unfair to you for a long time now. That’s over.”

Pressing his hands together, Bahru paused to bow over them.

And then they were walking again, and Ryan was holding Ellie in one arm and dialing his phone with the other. He called the house, expecting Lena to answer.

Only she didn’t.

His eyes widened as he realized his mistake. “Dammit, Tomas, I think they went after Lilia and Sindar on their own.”

Tomas nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what they did,” he said slowly. “And we had to let them. Because this is their deal, and because we had to save Ellie. But now...now we’re going after that sonofabitch, too, and he is going to be sorry he ever met our women. Ever.”

* * *

Sindar made Lilia walk barefoot, her legs shackled with a length of chain he’d salvaged from the bomb shelter and her wrists bound together behind her with rough rope. It wasn’t an easy walk, up the steep, stair-like rock face. It was beautiful, though. The trees were green and sweet-smelling. Wild apple trees were awash in blossoms so fragrant the scent made her dizzy. It was almost too strong. The higher they climbed the more she relished the warm spring breeze. It was soothing somehow. And below—farther and farther below—a narrow creek twisted and bubbled and laughed over stones at the bottom of the gorge.

“We’re nearly there,” Sindar said to one of his men.

He was gleeful over what he was about to do. What a sick and twisted man he was, she thought. And then she looked at Demetrius, still lying unconscious on the mattress as the men who carried him struggled with his weight. So beautiful. So still. Was he dead already? He’d tried so hard to save her.

Yes, he’d done horrible things, but he’d more than made up for them. He’d given his life for Ellie, and for her, Lilia thought. And she loved him more than she ever had, which was saying a lot, because she’d already loved him enough to defy death and linger between worlds for thirty-five centuries.

“Are they coming?” Sindar asked one of his minions. Lilia stopped walking, her attention momentarily distracted from her beloved. “Are who coming?” she asked.

Sindar, who hadn’t been paying any attention to her, walked right up to her and clasped her chin in cruel fingers. “Your sisters, of course. We can’t have this party without them.”

She head-butted him, hard, and it hurt like hell, but when he fell on his ever-widening backside, she thought it was worth it. And the sight of blood spiderwebbing across his forehead gave her the most satisfaction she’d had all day. Then she turned and started running, back down the way she had come. He was not going to kill them. Not her and not her sisters. Not again. If they were following, she had to warn them.

“Stop her!”

She ran, rocks coming loose under her feet, the edge perilously close, and made it past several of his minions before one grabbed her. Dammit!

“Hold her for the rest of the trip. It’s not much farther. And answer my question. Are the others following?”

From several yards back a man shouted, “Yes, Master Sindar. The two witches have already reached the base of the gorge. And there’s a man with them.”

“What man? One of the husbands? Is it the priest or the prince?” Sindar asked, though Lilia was sure his thug had no idea what he was talking about.

“It’s an old man, sir. An old man with whiskers and a limp.”

Gus? It couldn’t be. Gus was in the hospital. There was no way he was hiking up a mountain with her sisters.

“Give me that!” Sindar snapped, waddling down to where his soldier stood and taking the binoculars away from him. “By Marduk’s teeth, it’s the bum from the alley. What is he doing here?” He handed back the binoculars. “No matter. He’s too old and weak to be a problem. Let’s get moving. We’re nearly there, and Beltane is only minutes away.”

Lilia tore her mind away from the puzzle of Gus’s presence and paid attention to Sindar once more. “What difference does that make, Sindar? Demetrius already accepted the final piece of his soul. Beltane means nothing now.”

“And this from a witch, no less?” Sindar sneered. “The cross-quarter date is a powerful time, harlot. I intend to make this sacrifice when the Veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, in hopes my beloved King will see and hear and know, and will finally be at peace. I want Balthazorus to know his disloyal concubines and the trusted friend who murdered him have paid the ultimate price.”

* * *

Just as she reached the base of the trail up the gorge, Lena’s cell phone vibrated. She’d long since turned off the ringer, even though the signal was spotty here. She didn’t want to give herself away to those bastards who had her sister. Pulling the phone from her pocket, she saw that it was Ryan, and her heart jumped into her throat. “Did you find her?” she asked without preamble.

“She’s safe. She’s fine. Bahru took her and the truck back to the house.”

A wave of emotion washed over her so powerfully that it took away her ability to speak. She tipped her head back, eyes closed, chest spasming.

Indy snatched the phone from her and pressed the speaker button. “Ry? Did you find Ellie?”

“Yeah, Indy. She’s fine. Bahru’s taken her home. What’s wrong? Is Lena all right?”

“Speechless with relief, I think. Thank the Goddess the baby’s safe,” Indy whispered.

“Why the hell aren’t the two of you at the house waiting for him?” Ryan demanded.