“So the gate requires a sacrifice?” Stuart asked.
“I do not believe so,” Father Donnelly said. “It is not common knowledge, but records I unearthed in the Vatican library reveal that Marcus Curtius was able to seal the chasm through a blood-letting. But once his blood worked such magic, he was reviled and tossed bodily into the closing chasm.”
“Nice,” Allie said. “Save the world, get punished for it.”
“So this means that human blood will close it. One of us has to get close to the portal and, what? Smear it with blood?”
“There will be a center of power,” Donnelly said. “There will be ancient drawings indicating hell. Eric will be familiar with them from his
alimentatore
training.”
“All right. So that makes Eric useful.”
“He is more than useful,” Donnelly said. “He is essential.”
“What do you mean?” Allie asked.
Donnelly looked at her. “Does she know what happened when her father was a child?”
“I know what you did to him,” Allie said, lifting her chin. “You and his parents.”
“But you do not know why,” Father Donnelly said.
“You were trying to create a fighter with demonic instincts and strength.”
“In part, yes. More than that, we were trying to prepare for this day.”
“Eric is essential,” Stuart murmured, repeating Father Donnelly’s words. “Curtius was like Eric. That was how he knew what to do. How he knew that it had to be him.”
I looked at Stuart with surprise and approval—and at Eric with shock. “Curtius was bound with a demon as well?”
“As Curtius lived before the birth of Christ, we cannot be certain of much. But documents within the Vatican indicate that he was so bound, yes. A hybrid.”
“And since you wanted a hybrid in your arsenal, you created Eric,” I said. “You bastard.”
“There is always a price for good,” he said.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked Eric. “You’ve got a blind spot now . . .”
“I’ll be fine,” Eric said firmly. “I’ve been training—learning to compensate. And,” he added wryly, “I seem to have a knack for defending that side.”
“A benefit of his hybrid nature,” Father Donnelly said with something like pride in his voice. Honestly, I wanted to smack him.
“Wouldn’t that have left with the demon?” I asked.
The priest raised a shoulder. “There are mysteries, Kate. And some we shall never know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eric said, pushing back from the table to stand. “The bottom line is that I’m going in, blind spot or not. If my blood will end it, then I’ll end it.” He met Father Donnelly’s eyes. “Where exactly am I going?”
We stood in the dark
outside the famous Roman Forum, watching as the tourists traipsed around taking pictures and posing and generally being unconcerned about the end of the world.
“You’re going under,” Father Donnelly said.
“Under?” I asked.
“In 2006, archeologists discovered a tomb beneath the forum. The Vatican participated in an expansion from that dig, and we discovered a necropolis beneath that tomb. Based on the etchings—and the fact that the center of this necropolis is directly under the Curtius chasm—I believe that is where the gate has begun to open.”
“Will we be able to maneuver?” Allie asked. “I mean, hell is oozing out, right? It’s going to be, like, what? Bile and grossness?”
“I don’t know,” Father Donnelly admitted.
“And you’re not going to find out,” Eric said. “You’re staying up here with Father Donnelly and Stuart and Mrs. Micari.”
“I’m coming,” Stuart said.
“The hell you are,” I retorted. “If something happens to me, I am not leaving Timmy without a parent.” I glanced at the black sedan in which Timmy slept, watched over by one of
Forza
’s drivers. “And you know damn well you aren’t field ready.”
“Sorry, pal,” Eric said. “She’s right. You’d be a liability, not an asset.”
Stuart didn’t look happy, but to his credit, he didn’t argue.
“
I
am an asset,” Allie said. “And I’m coming.”
“Alison Elizabeth Crowe,” Eric said, “we are not having this argument.”
“You’re right,” she said. “We’re not.” She took a step closer to him, then poked him in the chest. “You know what, Daddy? You left. Walked away. And you’re back now, and that’s awesome and all, but guess what? You don’t get a say anymore. Mom does.”
A muscle twitched in Eric’s cheek and I tensed, afraid that his temper was about to boil over. To his credit, he pulled it back. “Your mother will say no,” he said slowly. He looked at me. “Won’t you?”
I thought of how much she’d grown up over the last few months. Of how hard she’d worked, how far she’d come. I thought of Father Corletti’s belief that she was ready to train, and how much she had helped inside the catacombs. I thought, too, of the fact that this might well be the end, and we needed all the help we could get. And, petty though it might be, I thought of how much Eric had hurt me by leaving.
I looked at Allie, then turned to her father. “No,” I said. “Her mother is going to let her come.”
I held Eric’s eyes, trying to silently convey to him that she was ready. That he needed to have faith in me and faith in our daughter. After a moment, he nodded. “Then let’s get moving.”
We put on the
Forza
-issued hunting vests—fully stocked with knives and holy water and all sorts of lovely gadgets and gizmos—and I said a silent thank you to Father Donnelly for bringing an official—and well-stocked—vehicle. Then we followed him away from the tourists to a construction site about two blocks away.
“The construction is a sham,” he said, nodding to a ramshackle shed that looked to be the contractor’s office. “The entrance to the necropolis is in there.”
I looked him over—and realized for the first time that he had no vest and no weapons. “You’re not coming?”
“I will if you need me, but I have no field training. I fear I would be a hindrance. But if you think that I would be a help, I will suit up.”
“No,” Eric said. “If this fails, you might be able to come up with an alternative plan. And, frankly, I’m not interested in watching Allie’s back and yours.”
“I can watch my own back, thank you,” Allie said.
“She’s ready, Eric,” I said. “And she’s older than we were when we started.”
“We don’t have time to argue about this,” he said. “So we’ll talk about it after we save the world.” He looked at me and Allie in turn. “Deal?”
“Deal,” we said in unison, then followed him into the shed. He had a penlight out, and he shined it around, finally landing on a trap door in the floor. Allie bent, then pulled it open. I peered in, following the beam of light along a ladder to a black pit of impenetrable darkness.
I bent down and maneuvered onto the ladder. “Ladies first,” I whispered.
They both nodded, and I started down. I’d pulled my own penlight out and I held it in my teeth. The anorexic light was insufficient against the soupy darkness, and the ladder seemed never-ending. I swear we descended for hours until finally—
finally
—my feet touched solid ground. Or reasonably solid ground, anyway.
“It’s . . . squishy,” I said, then shifted the light so that it shone at my feet. Immediately, I gagged. “Oh, god. I think it’s blood. I think it’s congealed blood.”
As soon as I said the words, I knew I was right. The scent wafted up from the ground, thick and coppery and cloying.
“Mom,” Allie said as she stepped off the ladder beside me. Her voice was choked, and I was certain that she was fighting not to gag.
“Pull your collar up and breathe through your mouth,” I said. “It’ll help.”
Eric stepped off next. “It’s only going to get worse,” he told Allie. “Can you handle it?”
She nodded, then yanked the collar down and breathed deep. “If you can, I can.”
“All right then,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We followed an ancient stone tunnel for at least three hundred yards. The air was stagnant and stifling. Blood rose up around our ankles. We slogged on in silence, and I didn’t know about my daughter or Eric, but I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have to walk all the way to hell before we had the chance to stop this thing.
Then, just about the time I saw a red glow in the distance, I started to feel a breeze.
“Where is that coming from?” Allie whispered.
It was a good question, and one I didn’t know the answer to until the birds swarmed—thousands upon thousands of squawking, screaming, fluttering crows, each with preternaturally wide wingspans, and each beating their wings around our heads, our bodies, our faces.
“Daddy!” Allie waved her knife in the air to no avail.
“Holy water!” Eric cried, spraying it out in front of him and creating a barrier between him and the birds.
Allie did the same, and I followed suit, and we pressed forward, fighting our way through the wall of crows that moved with us, kept at bay by the power of God and His holy water.
And then, as quickly as they had come, the birds vanished, each dive-bombing the floor and disappearing into the blood that was still rising around our ankles.
“Where did they go?” Allie asked, her voice a low whisper.
“Better not to ask questions you don’t want the answer to,” Eric said darkly.
“Look,” I said. Before, the birds had been blocking our view. Now I could see that the corridor opened into a chamber. It was empty as far as I could tell, but with some sort of cylindrical stone in the center. The stone was covered with markings, and the blood seemed to be leaking from tap holes near the bottom.
“That has to be it,” Eric said. “The center. The control.”
“Where you need to be,” I said. “Be careful. Can you read the markings?”
“I can’t see them well enough.”
“Hang on,” Allie said. “I think there’s—yeah, here.” She’d been patting down her hunter’s vest, and now she pulled out a pair of tiny binoculars and passed them to her father. “There’s all sorts of cool stuff in this vest,” she said. “We totally need these at home, Mom.”
“First thing,” I said. “We get out of here and California still exists, I’ll personally oversee the vest creation.”
I expected Allie to laugh. What she did instead was scream.
I didn’t blame her. Like something out of a bad movie from the 1940s, a dozen animated skeletons were advancing upon us. “Their heads!” I called. “Slice off their heads!”
“They’re protecting the pillar,” Stuart said. “We need to clear them out before I can get to it.”
“You’re sure that’s it?” I called back as I lashed out with my knife and sliced off the head of an attacking, grinning skeleton.
“I’m familiar with some of the marks,” he said. “We can’t see it, but there will be a crevice on top to collect the blood—
my blood,”
he said. “And then that blood drains into the stone and runs down those veins. See the pattern?”
“Kind of busy now,” I shot back, as I lashed out at the two skeletons that were on me, a knife in each of my hands.
Eric moved in and thrust his stiletto through the eye socket of one, then ripped up sharply and pulled the skull right off the neck. With a flick of his arm, he sent it flying.
“Thanks,” I said. “Just three more. Two,” I amended as I watched Allie mow one down.
Eric and I each slew one of the remaining, and then we continued toward the pillar, Allie taking the lead.
“
Stop!”
Eric called, and both Allie and I froze.
“What?” I looked around. The skeletons were down. The crows were gone. There was absolutely nothing to fear in this chamber anymore—and I understood perfectly why that frightened him. Because you can’t fight what you can’t see, and that’s what makes the hidden the most terrifying things of all.
“The ground,” he said. “Look.”
Allie and I looked, and I saw that just a few steps ahead of us the texture of the floor changed. The blood still flowed from the pillar, but it followed a series of what looked like grout lines along a geometric pattern of tiles that formed a hexagon around the pillar. Each tile was like a pristine island in a sea of blood, and each was etched with a symbol I didn’t recognize.
“Do you know what it says?” I asked.
“A bit. It’s ceremonial. A dance, I think. A ritual dance around the pillar. Or to the pillar, maybe.”
“It’ll be booby-trapped,” Allie said. “Probably really nasty booby traps.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But what makes you so certain?”
I expected her to tell me about some obscure fact from her research. Instead, she rolled her eyes, reminding me that no matter what the circumstances, some things never change. “Duh, Mom.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
? That whole thing at the beginning when he’s trying to get the idol?”
I met Eric’s eyes, and despite the fact that we were surrounded by hell, the humor I saw there warmed me. “That’s our girl,” he said.
“Yeah. She is.”
Allie frowned. “So your blood goes down along the pillar, and then it makes some sort of magic, and
poof
, the whole thing stops?”
“That’s what I think,” Eric said. “And I also think it’s time to test that theory.”
“Be careful,” I said. “Whatever dance you’re seeing, you follow the footwork to the letter.”
He nodded, examined the floor, and started to head toward the pillar. At the first step, the crows appeared again—but they didn’t attack Eric. Instead, they launched themselves at Allie and me.
“Stay focused,” I shouted to him. “We’re fine.”
Fine
was a bit optimistic, but I didn’t want him worried or distracted. I didn’t want him falling. I’d seen
Raiders
and I didn’t want to see him getting impaled.
“The next attack will be on him,” Allie said. “It won’t be as bad as what will happen if he steps on the wrong stone, but it’ll be enough to try and trip him up. To
make
him step wrong, you know?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know. How do you? Can you read the etchings? The pillar?”
She lifted a shoulder. “It’s just what I’d do. If I was making up this trap.”
I scowled. Great. My daughter, the evil genius.
“See,” she said, as a dense fog began to build between our position and the tiled area. Soon, I couldn’t even see Eric anymore. But I had seen enough to know what he was battling. Specters. Noncorporeal demons who writhed around him, their appearance like mist, their visages the kind of horrific masks that make audiences in horror movies scream.