Could that…thing have killed him? Snapped his neck like this?
It was a possibility. Perhaps this guy had been a guard, watching for trespassers. Ballis—or whatever he turned into—had killed him quickly and rushed on.
Candace stood, shining the penlight around the scene. Well, she’d come here to see what Ballis was up to, and now had a potential homicide on her hands. Double reason to follow and question him, either as a suspect or a witness. Should she call for backup? Normally, considering the dead body on her hands, that would be a no-brainer, but requesting backup meant potentially drawing her fellow cops into the strange web in which she was tangled.
Better not.
Steeling herself, Candace walked along the dank corridor quietly, trying to watch her feet, hoping the man she followed was far enough ahead he couldn’t hear her shoes crunching on the dried leaves that had blown in to rot inside the brick sarcophagus of a church. She also hoped she wouldn’t step on any rats or mice or huge spiders nestling in the leaves.
Can’t believe people seek out abandoned buildings to explore. Ugh. Not my idea of fun.
The corridor led down into what she assumed must be the kitchens where the fire had started.
If there’s any place ghosts would lurk, this would probably be it.
Some of the women in the kitchen hadn’t made it out in time, from what Candace remembered. Not only was the notion incredibly sad and creepy, but knowing the fire had begun here, rendering this lower part of the structure potentially less stable wasn’t exactly comforting.
Dogged determination pushed her on. She’d started this. She was going to finish. She had no idea if she were walking into an ambush, although it didn’t seem likely. Ballis had no reason to suspect she was here or that she was following him, and if someone else waited in the gloom Ballis would run into them first.
However, if she hadn’t been trailing him closely enough to see where his feet had kicked up a path through the leaves, she would’ve been stumped. The vast kitchen/dining hall area stopped at a seemingly blank wall. Of course, the darkness broken up by only her pen light made it difficult to discern anything, but the trail in front of her scuffed through the dirt and the leaves looked too wide to have been made by Ballis alone, meaning he might be trailing somebody else. Also, some of the bricks in the blank wall were gone, revealing an opening.
Stooping before it, Candace used her light to examine the space. A door, cunningly concealed in the bricks. A layer of bricks, maybe on the top quarter or so, fixed to a metal door. She reached out and pulled it mostly shut to see what it would look like closed.
Clever.
She wondered if the parishioners at this church had even known the secret door was here. The lines of the door were jagged, fitting into the mortar between bricks. The lines would be nearly imperceptible.
Why is this here?
Only one way to find out.
Hoping Ballis was far enough ahead that he wouldn’t notice her light, she stuck her arm, then her head into the opening. Dank, chilly air wafted up from below. The penlight barely pushed back the gloom, but she could see a metal ladder attached to the wall. The bars were pockmarked and pitted. No telling how old the thing was. Maybe original. Patches of rust colored the metal, giving the ladder an ancient, rickety look.
Did he actually climb down this?
He had to have, unless he was concealed in the shadows, waiting to jump her. If so, he certainly could’ve done it by now while she was examining the fake door. The space opened to the ladder and then went down. There was nowhere else to go. No other doors. The only entrance seemed to be the stairs from the corridor where she’d descended, and what she’d discerned as maybe former bathrooms close to the stairs.
He had to have gone down this. If he did it and survived, I can too.
But did she really want to?
Prickles of unease fired her skin, churned in her gut.
No, she didn’t. She really didn’t.
On the other hand, she’d come much too far to back down now.
Rising, Detective Ewing shoved her gun into its holster and stuck the penlight between her teeth. Carefully, she stepped into the opening, grabbing the cold metal ladder with both hands, praying her slick palms wouldn’t slip. Her seeking toes found purchase on a lower rung.
She was descending into the gloom, into whatever waited beyond.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“What time is it?” asked a woman to my right, quietly.
Like most of the people here, she wore dark, muted colors. I couldn’t tell if it was so they could sneak in and out of this place easier, or as part of a group identification, or because whatever was going to happen involved some type of ritual that they felt demanded the somber attire.
Elia—Nosizwe—glanced at the watch on her wrist. The gold shone against her ebony skin.
“It’s nearly time,” she replied. She tilted her chin towards a group of hulking brutes standing nearby. “Get the Stones.”
Moving together, the men walked over to a flatbed on which were two lumps covered with a sheet of thick cloth.
My heart was beating triple time in my chest. My mouth felt dry as cotton. Were these the fabled Stones of Fire? Would I see them at last? Although, with no glasses, it was hard to actually see anything.
All of the people in that fire-lit cavern crowded in closer as the men rolled the flatbed cart a little closer. They didn’t remove the sheet, however. Nosizwe took that honor, drawing it off in a single, dramatic flourish. Beneath, from what I could tell, were two large stone tablets, resembling every artist’s depiction I’d ever seen of the Ten Commandments tablets, except way bigger. Scrawled across their surface were scratches and scribbles that I gathered must be the ancient language of whatever, whoever had created the Stones.
“Here they are!” the entertainer announced loudly enough to be heard over the excited murmurs, the scattering of applause, the pounding of drums probably coming from someone’s phone, hooked up to a portable speaker. “The Stones of Fire. We’ve gathered for one purpose tonight—to see if our theory is true. To see if the guardian’s blood will unlock the Stones.”
“And if it does? Sean still has his Stones. He still has Ballis, himself,” pointed out an older man who hung back on the fringes, watching the whole thing with a grim expression.
Nosizwe hissed, turning to him with flames in her eyes that would have frightened me.
“If these Stones awaken, their magic is ours. We use that magic to destroy Costas and take his Stones. Maybe then we’ll be able to piece together enough of the Stone’s message to figure out the rest of the inscription. We might have enough to unlock the door to the other realms with only these four. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But right here, right now, we see what we can do.”
“At the very least, unleashing the magic of our Stones will give us an edge over Costas,” suggested one of the guards who’d dragged me here.
“It’s still an experiment. It might not work at all,” refuted the same man who’d spoken up earlier.
“And if it doesn’t? What is the loss? Her life?” Nosizwe pointed at me and laughed, but the humor was fierce, ugly. “I’m willing to take that bet. Aren’t you?”
The lone dissenter stared at me, and through the blur I thought I saw pity. I held his eyes with mine, silently begging, pleading. In the end, he shook his head and looked away. “Do what you think is best. They’re your Stones,” he said, his tone mild as he capitulated to his leader.