Page 151 of Empire of Shadows

Her companion stopped a few steps later. He tilted his head, carefully focused and listening. Ellie did the same, tuning her ears to the layered sounds of the night which surrounded them.

There weren’t many. The air had gone uncomfortably still. Not even the pines were whispering. There was only a very distant murmur of the water from the stream back at camp, and something else that just scratched at the corner of Ellie’s awareness. Her mind identified the sound a moment later—as a ragged, uneven breath.

Ellie whirled toward it. She pushed through some scrubby underbrush with her lantern held up before her.

The glow spilled across the source of the scream that had brought them there.

One of Jacobs’ guards lay spread-eagled on the ground, starkly revealed in the light of her lantern. His eyes were wide and white in his blood-splattered face as they stared blankly up at the motionless pine branches overheard.

Flowers muttered a curse and made a quick sign of the cross.

“Who is it?” Ellie asked, instinctively lowering her voice in the face of what lay before them.

“Rhynie,” Flowers said darkly. He picked up the man’s discarded rifle and swung it across his back.

There were wounds in both of Rhynie’s shoulders. The rents in the fabric of his shirt revealed the torn skin beneath… but it was the two puncture wounds in his forehead that had clearly been the reason he had stopped screaming.

The twin holes were each about an inch wide. They were terribly deep and red.

“What could possibly have done this?” Ellie whispered roughly as her stomach twisted.

The answer slid into her mind in an echo of Adam’s joking voice as he reported Padre Kuyoc’s words from the night before.

There are monsters there that bite people’s skulls.

The memory—coupled with the horror that lay before her—sparked a quick, cold fear.

But there is no such thing as monsters, Ellie reminded herself firmly.

“He didn’t shoot,” she pointed out, swallowing thickly.

The sound of a rifle discharge would certainly have been audible from where she and Flowers had been sitting.

“No,” Flowers agreed, scanning the darkness around them with his rifle ready in his hands. “He did not.”

Something whispered against the back of Ellie’s neck—an abrupt breeze which tickled the fine hairs there. A strange sound brushed at her ears from beyond the shadowy undergrowth behind her. It was a familiar sound, and yet so out of place that she struggled to fix it in her mind.

Her attempts to do so were quickly drowned out by the crashing, hurried arrival of more men from the camp.

Jacobs appeared first. He moved far more quickly and quietly than the companions who emerged from the shadows behind him. Ellie recognized Bones, the expedition foreman, with two more of the armed guards. Dawson trailed along at the rear, looking around himself nervously with his shoulders hunched.

The professor startled with a barely contained squeak as Adam stepped silently from the trees beside him.

Staines hurried in his wake, carrying his rifle in his hands.

“I told the bakra to stay in the camp, but he doesn’t listen to me,” Staines complained. “How do I know if I’m supposed to shoot him for that?”

Jacobs ignored him. His eyes flashed thoughtfully from Ellie and Flowers to the corpse.

“Coming through. ¡Abran paso!” Velegas ordered. The tracker pushed past the two guards who had arrived with Jacobs and now gaped at their fallen colleague with drained faces.

Velegas knelt down at the dead man’s side. He whipped a clean handkerchief from his pocket and touched gently at the wounds.

“More light,” he ordered.

Ellie realized that she was the one with the lantern. She moved in closer, turning up the wick to provide him with more illumination.

Velegas frowned under his gray mustache.

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