Page 96 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
Because she was going to save him.
An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Her own life in trade for his. Then maybe, finally, her soul would be free.
She would find out what his plan was, and do it herself.
Ember waited until Christian and Leander disconnected their call, then with shaking hands she slowly returned the phone to its cradle. She knew if he found her like this, he would immediately be able to tell something was wrong, so she forced herself up, climbing to her feet by dragging herself up the desk with arms like rubber, and walked unsteadily into the bathroom. She shed the sheet on the floor, turned on the water, and stood under the spray, not knowing whether it was hot or cold, if she was burning or freezing, because all her limbs had gone strangely numb under the crushing weight of her new resolve.
Save him.
Yes, that’s exactly what she was going to do.
Disappointment was not something Thirteen was accustomed to, but as he stood in the slanting, sun-dappled light of the unfinished Sagrada Família cathedral’s central nave, and stared up at the soaring columns, designed to look like a forest of trees rising from the floor to the vast, vaulted ceiling above, he felt its ugly sting, and was not pleased.
Today had not gone well.
First he’d been delayed at the hotel by a group of odd men who silently milled around the lobby like a swarm of restless sharks. He’d barely pressed through their sinister, black-clad bulk and made it to the street where he’d hoped to catch a taxi, when they’d exited the hotel en masse and shoved roughly past him into a cavalcade of black SUVs with dark tinted windows that pulled around the corner in a coordinated line and screeched to a stop at the curb. The line of bulky cars idled for a few more minutes, effectively blocking traffic on the narrow street, until another man appeared through the revolving glass doors of the hotel.
Thirteen narrowed his eyes at this new arrival. Big, bald, blinding white as snow on sunlight, he had burn scars on one side of his grim face and walked with a determined, rigid gait, as though in pain but trying not to show it.
Intrigued, Thirteen watched as the big albino climbed into the first SUV and drove away with the cavalcade following behind like ducklings following their mother, all in a row. He went back into the hotel and discreetly inquired at the front desk about the men who’d just left.
“Sacerdotes,” came the response from the clerk. “Desde el Vaticano.”
If those were priests from the Vatican, he was Mickey Mouse.
But he decided to investigate that later, and finally hailed a taxi to take him to his first stop of the day: the catacombs beneath the Església de Sant Just, one of the city’s oldest Christian churches, dating from the fourth century. Much smaller than those beneath Paris where the creatures he hunted once lived, these catacombs were darker and narrower and ultimately a bust.
That was just his first stop. There were many, many underground hiding spots on his list.
Over the past few days he’d explored the parts of the subway that had collapsed int
o a sinkhole and been abandoned. He explored the sewer system, the stone quarry, the archeological digs that exposed an ancient, subterranean Visigoth town. He’d searched three more churches, two cathedrals, and a castle, all rumored to have catacombs or large underground fortifications, but none of which did.
And now it was just before sunset and he stood empty-handed in the half constructed Sagrada Família with a knot of tourists chattering in a dozen different languages, and he was not happy.
He sighed and reached into his coat pocket. From it he withdrew a typed list, sent to him from the Chairman. There were half a dozen locations beneath those he’d crossed out so far, and the last one on the list looked interesting. Spanish Civil War bunkers, it read, with map coordinates beside it. He decided to try that one first tomorrow.
When he arrived back at the hotel, he was surprised to find the desk clerk he’d spoken to in the morning conferring quietly with two uniformed officers of the municipal police. Turning to another guest who had stopped near the door to stare at the pair of officers, Thirteen asked, “What’s going on?”
To which the guest replied with his upper lip curled in distaste, “Some sicko strangled an animal and dumped it in the pool out back. Apparently it had been floating there for days before the gardener found it, bloated as hell.” Thirteen knew the pool had been closed for the winter; the little sign on the front desk attested to that. The guest—a man in his early fifties, with short gray hair and the doughy paunch of someone who enjoys too much food and too little exercise—added, “Can you believe it?”
In fact, Thirteen had no problem believing it. People did all kinds of strange things. His curiosity piqued, he asked, “What kind of animal?”
With a quizzical look in his direction, the man replied, “A goat.”
Then he walked away, while Thirteen mused over the kind of person who would strangle a goat and dump it into a public pool. A sick person no doubt—but a goat seemed an odd choice. Why not a cat, or a dog, something a little easier to come by in the middle of a city, and definitely more discreet than a large, ornery farm animal?
He watched two animal control personnel in khaki coats transport a dripping lump covered in a white sheet through the lobby on a stretcher. The dark shine of a cloven hoof peeked out from beneath one edge, and it occurred to him that a goat was far more symbolic than a house pet. Dogs weren’t historically used as sin offerings, whereas goats…well, there was a reason behind the term “scapegoat.”
A biblical reason.
Two and two clicked together in his mind like a plug into a socket, and Thirteen smiled to himself, wondering when the “priests” would be arriving back at the hotel.
He’d love to have a nice chat with the albino.
A survivor of the Majdanek death camp in Poland during World War II, Ursula Adamowicz was a woman who had long ago been stripped of fear.
By the age of ten, she’d seen both her parents murdered before her eyes, had survived rape, beatings, starvation, and torture, and been forced to watch as thousands of her countrymen were systematically eliminated by such wonderful means as firing squad and burning alive. Once the camp was liberated in 1944, she went to live with a distant relative in Spain, but they were poor, and life was hard. Life had never been anything but hard for Ursula, and she didn’t expect it to be.
