5th Pentagram: The sequel to the #1 Hard Boiled Mystery, 9th Circle (Book 3 of the Darc Murders Trilogy) (Book 3 of the Darc Murder Series)

by Hopkin, Ben

  Luckily he wasn’t a hunter. That would’ve been a nonstarter for Katy. She’d never gotten over watching Bambi as a kid.

  And wow, was Kyle good between the sheets. She felt her skin flush as she thought about last night. It had been a long time since she’d felt wanted as a woman, but Kyle was making up for lost time.

  Looking up ahead, she saw that they were entering a large clearing that was surrounded by five large trees, almost evenly spaced. She jogged to catch up and almost got a branch in the face that had been bent back by the officer in front of her.

  “Hardy!” she yelled up at him. “What the hell! Watch what you’re doing.”

  “Ah, shaddap, ya pussy.”

  “That’s sexual harassment, Hardy. I’ll have your badge,” she joked.

  “Hey, I got ya sexual harassment right here,” he said, spinning around and grabbing his crotch.

  “Classy.”

  She was about to say something about his obvious lack of heritage when Hardy tripped over something and fell over backwards. His limbs flew out in every direction, and Katy couldn’t help but think he looked like a clumsy starfish.

  And then a bright white flame ignited in front of her, burning her retinas and forcing her to look away. But the afterimage engraved on her eyes included something else. Some kind of dark rectangle…

  Her world exploded in a flash of superheated light and sound. There was only one thought that flitted through her mind.

  At least Jake would still have his father.

  * * *

  The last thing in the world that Officer Tom Forrester wanted to be doing was trudging through a forest right before dark on a chilly October evening. He’d never been the outdoorsy type, much to the chagrin of his step-dad, Craig, who made it a point to go out hunting some kind of horned animal at least twice a year.

  The chill in the air, the snap of twigs breaking under his team’s feet, the uncomfortable feeling that you couldn’t see what was coming from more than ten feet away… all of it brought back memories of trips spent trying to convince the half-drunk Craig that his step-son wasn’t a total wuss. Not really times Tom wanted to reminisce about any time soon. He blew out a breath, watching it mist in the air in front of his face.

  At least he mostly liked his team. There were some good guys in this group. Well, all of them, really, except for his new partner, Officer Stick-up-his-ass Harper. Harper. At least his name was apropos. He liked to harp on pretty much anything he thought was out of line. Which seemed to be pretty much everything.

  “Officers, we are starting to veer off of our east-west line,” Harper called out, his nasal tone cutting through the dense foliage.

  “Aw, shut it, Harper. We’ve got to get around the trees somehow, don’t we?” one of the other officers yelled back. Tom couldn’t agree more.

  Was the captain trying to punish him for something? Why saddle him with the one guy on the force who thought of getting a discount on donuts at the local bakery as some kind of a bribe? Tom wasn’t dirty, but according to Harper, he might as well be.

  Even his partner’s speech pattern bugged Tom. Who talked like that? These were men you risked your life next to. Call them something other than Officers.

  Didn’t matter.

  One more hour or two and they would be out of here. Then he could head over to Rachel’s place, see if she’d let him in. It’d been weird between them ever since her roommate had come on to him when they’d all been out together at a bar. He hadn’t done anything about it, but he hadn’t told Rachel, either. Figured he didn’t want to ruin her relationship with her roommate.

  Great idea. Too bad the roommate had gone and confessed. And somehow in her “confession,” Tom had come out looking like a total two-timing asshat.

  It was fine. They’d been together for three years, and even Rachel knew that her roommate was batshit crazy. It might take a while, but they’d figure it out.

  Peering ahead into a clearing of trees, Tom thought he might be seeing something. A form spread out on the ground… some kind of a…

  “Hey, guys!” he called out. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  It was a man, naked and spread eagle on the ground. Tom rushed forward to get a better look, when his foot snagged on something. A root, maybe? He tumbled forward and lifted up his head just in time to see the world ignite in a nightmarish chiaroscuro of extreme white light and sharp black shadow.

  Right before a blossom of white heat hit the back of his skull, Tom saw the imprint of dark black curved lines. It was the afterimage of what the burning lines had imprinted on his sight.

  From what he could tell, it looked like the flame had turned a sharp corner.

  Strange.

  Fire wasn’t supposed to do that.

  * * *

  There was a thud that Trey felt in his chest and then the ground seemed to move a bit underneath him.

  “What the…?”

  A searing white light was moving toward them at an angle, tracking its way through the forest, igniting everything in its path. And by everything, Trey meant every single thing. Even the greenest of the trees was igniting under the heat from that blaze.

  Darc spotted the light and one word fell from his lips.

  “Move.”

  Trey spun around, grabbing Mala’s arm. “Everyone back the way they came. Now!” He sprinted through the forest, pulling Mala along as best he could. Well, pulling may have been the wrong word. He was attached to her, certainly. Who was doing the pulling was up for some amount of discussion.

  “The hell was that?” yelled Sanchez, one of the uniforms from their group.

  “What did I say about asking me questions?” Trey snapped back. There was no way of knowing how far they needed to go to be safe and he didn’t want an extended conversation stealing the breath he needed to keep his legs pumping up and down.

  “We need to warn the other teams,” Mala panted. Sanchez heard and lifted his radio up just as another explosion rocked the woods.

  “Shit!” he cried out as he ducked his head. He barked into his handset, “All units, pull back. Pull back!” Turning back to Trey and Mala, he spoke again. “We’ve got to get firefighters in here. Look at it! The whole place is going to light up. What is that?”

  “Thermite,” came the answer from Darc’s direction. “And water will cause it to explode.”

  “Wait,” Trey inserted. “Is that what’s going on over there?”

  “It is an 86.3 percent probability that there are receptacles of water encased in metal along the path of the thermite.”

  “So, like, water bombs or something?” Trey peered out into the gloom of the forest. Every so often, he would catch a glimpse of white-hot flame peeking in between the branches and trunks of trees. What was more disturbing was the orange-yellow glow that was starting to accompany it.

  He pulled out his cell phone. Maybe the firefighters couldn’t do much without having access to water to put out the blaze, but Trey was going to give it a shot, regardless.

  A squawk came over Sanchez’s radio. A voice issued out from the handset, sobbing, “We’ve lost three of our team! They were caught in the blast. Came out of nowhere.”

  “Two from ours,” came another. “We’ve got a body here. The whole place is on fire!”

  “Get out,” Sanchez called back, his tone rising in panic. “Get the fuck out of there!”

  Trey looked over and saw Darc staring at him. There was no expression on his partner’s face, but he knew exactly what the bald detective was thinking.

  “It was the right decision, Darc.”

  “Was it?” Came the response. And damned if Trey didn’t have an answer for it.

  Then Darc got an expression on his face. One that Trey had seen too many times before. His head cocked to the side. His fist clenched.

  Dammit.

  “He’s about to move, people,” Trey called out to the team. “I don’t know where he’s going or what he’d going to do, but it’s going
to happen. Real fast.”

  Trey just hoped that it wasn’t going to be in the direction of the fire.

  * * *

  Mala was standing next to Darc, trying to catch her breath, when the bald detective darted off in the direction of the fire. Even the warning from Trey hadn’t prepared her for Darc to do this.

  He was running directly into the forest, the red glare from the fire rimming his darkened profile in hellish light. And now Mala was faced with a choice. Should she follow after him into the inferno, or wait until it was all finished and try to pick up the pieces left over?

  Before she even registered she was making a decision, it was made. She was sprinting through the undergrowth, trying to keep pace with a man who from all appearances trained for marathons. At least she was wearing flats today. Trey was always complaining about Darc’s speed; now Mala understood why.

  And speaking of Trey, there he was, coming up alongside her. “Couldn’t let you two get all the glory and stuff,” he panted. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here. She couldn’t say she blamed him.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Who the hell knows?” Trey replied in between breaths. “It’s Darc. He doesn’t always take time to stop and give me a rundown.”

  They darted around a grouping of trees, and Mala watched as the fire spread to a nearby deciduous, which burst into a whirling mass of flame. Darc skirted the worst of the flame in that direction. He seemed to be looking for a way through the encroaching blaze lit by that burning white line.

  Fortunately for all of them, this part of the forest was almost to the climax stage of succession, meaning that there was less undergrowth in between the massive trees surrounding them. Darc was able to take a path through an area where the fire wasn’t blocking their way, although the air around them was heated to a point that it felt uncomfortable to breathe. He stopped for a moment, gazing into the encroaching darkness ahead of them.

  “Does he even realize we’re here?” Mala shouted at Trey over the roar of the flames.

  “I never know what he knows or doesn’t know. I hope so, though.”

  “Why?”

  Trey gulped in a breath before answering, choking from the smoke. “Because if he doesn’t, we might as well be dead.”

  Mala had experienced enough of Darc’s single-mindedness to know that he would stop at very little to solve a case. But lately that seemed to have been tempered by his growing relationship with Janey. And, to be honest, with her.

  But if he didn’t understand that they were following, it was possible that he would sacrifice them all in order to save others. It was the strangest form of selflessness Mala had ever encountered, and also one of the most seemingly genuine.

  That was all well and good, but Mala had to make it out alive, and she had no desire to do so without Darc in tow. And Trey, of course.

  “Can you get his attention?” she yelled at him.

  “I’ve never had much luck with it before,” he said. “Hold on.”

  Trey reached down and grabbed a pinecone, throwing it with what looked like all of his concentration at his partner. It went right past him. Trey gave Mala a wry expression and tried again. Even farther away that time.

  Mala sighed internally and grabbed a pinecone herself. She threw as hard as could, hitting Darc square on the back of the head. The bald detective spun around, spotting them both.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Trey and Mala exchanged glances. He didn’t know they were there. Not good.

  “Trying to help you, dude!” Trey yelled back. “Better question… what are you doing here? ‘Cause this does not seem like such a fun place to just hang out.”

  “There is a center to this triangle,” Darc responded, turning to stare back into the forest.

  “Triangle? What triangle?”

  Mala heard Trey’s question, but managed to figure it out before Darc said anything. “The thermite reaction Darc spoke of. It forms a triangle.”

  Trey whipped his head back and forth between Mala and Darc. “What…? How…?” He turned to Darc, then seemed to think better of it. He faced off with Mala. “How the eff did you know that?”

  “The line of burning thermite was approaching us from an angle. We heard over the radio that there were two more groups that had run into the same thing.” She shrugged. “I took a guess.”

  “Dammit all to hell. Fine,” he ran his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. “Okay, Darc. Where’s the center.”

  They rounded a tree and Darc pointed. There, in the middle of a cleared patch of earth, was a pattern of white light, crisscrossing the entire area. The intersecting lines created the image of a huge eye.

  But that wasn’t the most important part of the panorama. There, in the center of the circle that depicted the iris, was tied a naked man. He was lit in the garish light emanating from the thermite, and there were darker streaks on his face and torso. Dirt? Blood? It was impossible to tell from here.

  Mala gasped, horrified at what she was seeing. There wasn’t a lot of time for her to finish reacting, as Darc sprinted off toward the circle of flame.

  Following along behind, Mala felt herself pushed back by the extreme heat of the thermite reaction. How was Darc standing it? It felt like the skin of her face and neck were scalding as she got closer to the line.

  Darc hopped over the first row of thermite, the outer portion of the eye. As he did so, he must have triggered some sort of additional reaction, as a new set of white flames flared up in what would have been the white of the eye, forcing Darc toward the center iris, where the naked man had begun moaning in agony from the increase in heat surrounding him.

  From what Mala could see, there was almost no way for Darc to get out of the trap in which he was now stuck. His desire to rescue the victim may have led to his own fiery death.

  And Mala would be right there, unable to look away while it happened.

  CHAPTER 15

  The logic pathways converged on the center, where the groaning man had now seen Darc. His cries were no more articulate, but they now seemed directed toward Darc, begging for his assistance.

  That assistance was becoming more and more challenging as the moments passed. Not only had Darc’s entry into the outer eye started a new aluminum thermite reaction headed inward, it began another moving in the opposite direction.

  Toward Mala and Trey.

  These new lines must have been buried beneath the surface of the ground, as Darc had not seen their distinctive mounding as he ran in toward the center. But the shallow burial was nothing that would impede the chemical reaction happening.

  The lines spread away from one another as they traveled outward from the iris of the eye. That would allow Trey and Mala to escape if they hurried quickly enough.

  “Move back! Find the points of the triangle. There will be other individuals trapped there,” he called out to the pair. The lines of thermite sped toward them. Mala’s expression was strange… it appeared set, as if it were carved in stone, and for a moment, Darc feared she would stay and be immolated. But moments later, she turned and sped after an already running Trey.

  Darc turned his attention back toward the figure on the ground.

  “Do not move. Do not speak.” There was no way to know what other triggers were here. The thermite reaction forced him closer and closer to the inner circle of the iris, where the man’s body was tied down to stakes. His arms and legs, like the others, were spread out, but there was no pentagram inscribed inside.

  Yet.

  That was the final trap.

  Allowing the green lines of light in his mind to trace his path, Darc ran and leapt up and into the center of the circle, flattening out his body just before he landed.

  Right on top of the man’s torso.

  Darc did what he could to spread out his body weight to keep the damage to a minimum, but still felt a snap beneath him as several of the man’s ribs broke. The figure’s breath whooshed out of
his chest, followed by an intense moan. Judging from the man’s contorted face and what had just occurred, Darc surmised the man was in pain.

  “Remain still while I release you.” Darc worked to free the man from the stakes driven into the ground. The cords around his wrists had been tied tight and were cutting off the circulation to the victim’s extremities. The flesh around the ropes had swollen, making it difficult for Darc to gain a purchase with his fingers. In addition, the man beneath him had begun to writhe, which caused his arms and legs to quiver. Darc would grab a knot and begin working on it, only to have it snatched out of his grip.

  “That is not still,” he stated through teeth gritted with strain. Finally, Darc managed to release one of the arms. The man immediately swung his freed limb around, flailing in his pain.

  His movements must have triggered the final trap. The lines of the pentagram began to be traced in the dirt by incandescent rays moving into the center of the circle.

  The logic lines warped, readjusting the timetable. It was impossible to free the man before the flame reached him.

  Darc had failed.

  Several options snaked their way through his consciousness. He snatched hold of one of them, grabbing the man by his shoulders and shaking him to gain his attention.

  “Who was your attacker?” Darc demanded.

  The man groaned and looked back at the approaching flame.

  Darc shook him harder. “Do you know who it was?”

  The man opened his mouth as if to answer, displaying a gaping hole filled with blood. The man’s tongue had been ripped out. He could not answer.

  The human life beneath Darc was soon to be snuffed out. Darc had not saved him, nor had he been successful in gaining additional information.

  Not only that, but Darc’s own life was now in serious danger.

  A rapid analysis of the lines of logic gave him one option. That option gave him an 83.2% chance of survival, but required him to leave this man to die an agonizing death. The choice was clear. Darc had to abandon this man.

  And yet, a bright white ray of brilliance shown in Darc’s mind, surpassing the radiance of the thermite reaction around him. He would not leave, but would do what he could to release the victim before the flame reached them both.