Buried Secrets (25 page)

“I know,” Zack said, smug. “You mentioned it.”

Jo was too dizzy to laugh. Instead, she said, “Fine, then.”

Zack grinned. “Fine.”

“So kiss me.” Well, maybe she wasn't
that
dizzy. And Zack complied without argument.
Definitely
better than painkillers.

Ashley Vanderveer said, “That wound doesn't look like something mouth-to-mouth's going to help, Zack.”

“Hey, Vanderveer,” said Zack pleasantly toward her, though his dark, intense eyes continued to smile at Jo. “Bite me.”

“Sorry. Jo's too good a friend for me to move on you.”

Jo laughed at them both, happier at this moment—bleeding, surrounded by mummies and ashes—than she'd been in years. “Go help Cecil do the manly stuff.”

Zack kissed her once more before he obeyed, but that was okay. If he ever started obeying her immediately, he wouldn't be Zack. The man she'd been waiting for. The man for forever.

True, they hadn't talked about it. But she knew it anyway. Instinctively. Maybe magically. As surely as she knew that margaritas were the perfect drink, that people were meant to take care of each other…and that resisting that help was just one more way of dying a little.

Jo had no intention of dying again, not that way, for a long, long time.

 

Ashley cleaned and stitched up Jo's laceration, feeding her painkillers and antibiotics. Cecil took pictures and film footage of the entire chamber, building theories. And Zack…

Zack got some plastic sacks from the back of the Bronco and filled them with shards of pottery and ashes from the big urn, just in case Sirus had been telling the truth. He didn't carry them far—just out of the cave's shadows and into the sunny desert, where he could let the Texas wind carry them away to wherever they needed to be. But he couldn't leave them.

He wouldn't want Gabriella's remains trapped with those of the man who'd ultimately killed her. He assumed the families of the others would—if they could know about this—agree.

It felt strange, watching the last of the ashes blow off over rocks and sand. After all these years, it felt…ended.

Almost.

When he went back inside, Jo was drinking a snack-box of
fruit juice—to replenish lost blood, he guessed. He watched her, more grateful for her than he'd ever hoped to be again in his life. No endings without beginnings, right?

Between sips Jo asked Cecil, “So Sirus was killing people for two completely different reasons?”

“Exactly,” Zack's partner said, studying yet another symbol painted on the wall. Cecil was going to have months of fun, deciphering some of this. “First, it seems he needed souls with a great deal of energy, human batteries for his magic. That's where the Life Force Clubs came in. I suppose he had disciples on the lookout for students who were interested in immortality and who had very strong auras, like—oh! Hullo, Zack.”

“Like Gabriella,” Zack finished for him, standing in the doorway. They could talk about her. “And those other kids I just carried out. If he had help, we've got disciples to go after.”

“They shouldn't be too difficult to trace, now,” Cecil assured him. “Assuming he left them alive. Cut off the snake's head, and the body—rather, what I meant to say…”

Ashley came to his rescue. “So the people who worked for him used magic to help kill students and steal their bodies.”

“Which they either sent to him and then cremated, or more likely, cremated and then sent to him. Between owning their remains, and the pledge of their souls, he could apparently summon them at will. Like…incorporeal slaves.”

Zack reloaded his pistol with regular rounds, just in case he got the urge to,
oops,
shoot Sirus's body a few more times.

Ashley was packing away her medical supplies. “But that was just the students. How about the other people? The evil people?”

“Ah, yes.” Cecil had kept a wide berth from the mummies, but now glanced nervously toward them.

Zack said, “He probably put out some kind of call for evil—maybe on a psychic level—so real lowlifes found themselves all of a sudden wanting to visit Almanuevo. Once they got here, I guess he did what he could to convince them to die.”

“You mean he killed them?” asked Jo.

Ashley said, “It's pretty hard to kill someone magically, but an unethical practitioner can stack things against someone.”

“
Nudge
them,” said Zack, remembering Sirus's word.

Ashley nodded. “It sounds more like…encouraged suicides. Brent Harper drinking out on those rocks was just stupid. Kathy Hurd, the one who abused her children, was out all day in the desert, without water, before dying of heat stroke. The fellow last night had a heart condition, but he'd been exercising for hours. To call it murder is too easy. But their evil responded.”

“At which point,” Cecil finished, “Sirus used Voudun powers, or something like, to reanimate them long enough to get them here. Then he began the mummification process, which not only preserves the body but—”

“Different aspects of the soul,” finished Jo, nodding.

Zack said, “Especially their hatred. That's what he used to trap the innocents in whatever dimension he had them, behind that mirror. They couldn't get through the hatred.”

“Until we broke it.” Jo, still sitting on the floor, met his gaze. She'd said she loved him, too. He believed her.

No way had they finished fighting this kind of darkness. But it sure helped to have a secret weapon like theirs.

“Until we broke it,” Zack agreed, and offered his hand. “So, Sheriff. Ready to blow this place back to hell?”

She grasped his wrist. He clasped hers and drew her easily to her feet—or in this case, her
foot.
She was still favoring her bad leg, neatly wrapped beneath the now-slit blue jeans.

It would heal. They had time. As much time as anyone ever had, anyway. And the things they could do with it…

“To
what?
” Cecil's eyes widened when he understood. “But Zack, there are symbols from at least five different magical systems—so far—painted on the walls of this cave! Including a hieroglyph that looks like the one Jo found.”

“Which we should keep around because…?” Zack prompted, his arm tightening around Jo, and Cecil sighed.

“Let me take a few more pictures, anyway,” he said.

“Should we take any of the other bodies out?” Ashley had no qualms about looking over Sirus's mummification job. Maybe Jo wasn't the only tough broad around here. “Brent Harper's?”

While Jo, still leaning on him, examined the structure of the cave walls, Zack said, “Would you want to know
your
son had
been reanimated and mummified so a pseudo-Egyptian priest could use his evil to work bad magic on countless innocents?”

Ashley said, “Good point.”

Even with his help, it took Jo longer than Zack expected to set out the explosives—what she called a slurry compound, in gel-packs that looked like big sausages. She pierced the skin of the sausages with blasting caps attached to wires, then unspooled the lead wire behind her as they left the cave.

“We'll meet you at the truck,” Ashley suggested, hefting her economy-size first-aid kit.

“I'll help you carry that,” said Cecil quickly.

That left just Zack and Jo, settling themselves behind the sandstone boulder that had protected them on the way in, side by side. This time, there was no sandstorm or snakes. Just sunshine and blue sky and one hell of big life stretching out in front of them. It felt good to just take a breath.

As if Zack hadn't been really breathing for a long, long time. Weird thought.

“You know I'm not Catholic,” said Jo suddenly, as she opened the lid on the blasting machine she'd brought with her. It was the size of a car battery.

“Yeah.” It once had mattered that he marry Catholic, but a lot had happened since then. Now he just needed someone he could trust, right down to her soul—and that was definitely Jo. “You know I don't want to live in Mayberry, Texas, don't you?”

“I guessed that much.” She sighed. “But Chicago…”

Chicago was where he'd lived with Gabriella. Where his family thought his greatest dangers were simple criminals…or girls who weren't Catholic. They would adjust, of course. But it would be easier in short visits.

He said, “I always liked the sound of the northwest. Oregon. Washington. Someone's gotta need a sheriff, up there.”

“I could handle that.” Jo looked relieved as she attached the lead wire to the machine. “Not right smack in a city, though.”

“No more than two hours out of one,” he countered.

She kissed him. “If you like dogs, it's a deal.”

“I like dogs.” Overhead, a hawk circled in the blue sky.

“Hey, Jo,” Zack said, after another quiet minute.

“Huh?”

“Any reason why the cave isn't exploding yet?”

She looked into his eyes, searching them for something. If it wasn't already there, he didn't know how to fake it. But apparently she found it, because she smiled. And loved him.

“Not a single one,” she admitted. Then she pushed down one switch on the box, causing a little light to come on, and whispered off the count to herself—“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi”—and turned another switch.

For a moment, a breath, nothing seemed to happen. Then the ground shook. With a roar, dust flew over their heads as what had once been some kind of aberrant temple collapsed to become a grave to bury five evil mummies, a once-immortal necromancer…

And the wedding ring Zack had left behind.

Zack held Jo, curled protectively around her body, until the worst of the dust cleared. He loved the feel of her, warm and sturdy in his arms. He loved that she knew how to shoot, and fight, and blow things up. Her strength strengthened him.

When finally they both peeked, the wall of rocks didn't look all that different from before—except for the rubble where a cave entrance once stood. But he knew that, like their world, it was
very
different.

It was finally buried, and life could start again.

“I'm carrying you back to the truck,” announced Zack. He scooped Jo into his arms as soon as she'd put away her toys.

“Just this once.” Like she could have stopped him, the gimp. Then again, if any woman was tough enough…

But she also looped her arms around his neck, so she couldn't mind too much.

“Damned thing had better start,” he added, as he walked.

“It will start!”

“I'm buying you a new one anyway,” he decided, and casually added, “After we're married.”

Jo laughed. “Dream on.”

What?
When he slanted his gaze to hers in silent challenge, she added, “About buying me a new truck. I like my truck.”

So the marriage part, that was settled. “You actually mean to drive that hunk of junk up to Oregon? Or should I say, partway to Oregon, because it probably won't make New Mexico.”

“Or Washington, and it's not a hunk of junk.” When Zack rolled his eyes, Jo added, “Tomayto, Tomahto.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she leaned closer in his arms to cover his lips with a kiss. Good distraction. Then, leaning back in his embrace, she said, “Live with it, Lorenzo.”

He meant to.