Wood, Fire, & Gold

by Jackson, Pam

  Hot tears flowed down her cheeks, and she screamed out for Clay again and again, until finally, Eberstark silenced her with another heavy hand to her face. She went limp and her knees buckled, but Eberstark held her up and gagged her mouth tightly with a piece of dry wool—most likely his hat. Her vision was hazy, and she felt herself almost vomit from the dry gag. She was weak, and her limbs felt cumbersome—she was losing consciousness and felt her eyes involuntarily closing. She tried to stay alert, but the pain from Eberstark’s crushing blow to her face was too much. Her body went limp, and she let go of the fight.

  Chapter 24

  The smell and taste of coppery blood mixed with stale earth filled Clay’s nostrils and mouth. He suddenly began to cough violently, making the pounding in his head feel more like a seismic event than a busted cranium. He placed his palms against the solid floor and felt the sticky, warm goo of his own blood pooling next to him.

  “Fuck!” he blasted out the curse and shook his head.

  He opened his eyes wider, trying to adjust his vision, and sat up slowly. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. Then he suddenly remembered Andie’s terrible screams and the large form of Luca Eberstark as he had violently pushed her into the glass breakfront. Clay had desperately tried to move to protect her, but his body had shut down. After that—the high-pitched ringing in his ears was all he could remember.

  He stood unsteadily and touched the back of his head to evaluate his wound. Fortunately, his skull was still intact, but his scalp was wet and sticky with coagulating blood. He looked at the broken wooden stock of the Brown Bess rifle and was thankful that the wood was decayed from sitting in a damp cave for hundreds of years. Head wounds often looked much worse than they were, and he was grateful for his hard noggin.

  He turned in silence and searched the cavern for Andie. He knew she’d been taken by Eberstark, but he needed to be sure she wasn’t hurt, or worse—dead. He tried his best to hold back his aggression and anguish, but the difficulty of knowing Andie was gone while simultaneously trying to handle this situation tactically was whittling him down. He desperately tried to expel any thoughts of his sweet Andie being beaten and bruised—or, hell no—raped by that fuck head Eberstark. He tamped down the urge to vomit up the acidic bile and blood burning in his throat and continued his search of the cavern.

  He found his backpack and thigh holster staged dramatically on the corner of the dining table. His Colt 1911 had been removed from the holster and placed next to it. Upon inspection, he saw that the magazine was missing and there was one round still chambered. Eberstark’s sick way of letting Clay know there was no way out except through a single bullet to the brain.

  “Fuck you! And when I find you, I’m gonna fuck your shit up but good,” Clay swore as he holstered his Colt.

  He was going to kill Eberstark and then hunt Tivoli down and kill him. This ended here. No more bullshit—just pure vengeance.

  Clay searched his backpack and found most of his gear gone, including his knife. At the bottom of the pack he found a single fluorescent glow stick. This was another insulting fuck you from Eberstark. The candles would soon extinguish, leaving darkness in the underground space, and the dark solitude would eventually wear more on Clay’s sanity than on his physical health. Eberstark clearly was suggesting that the single round left in Clay’s weapon would put an end to his anguish.

  He looked over the room for more candles, but instead, he noticed that the Atros Fallis was missing. Clay ground his teeth together and exhaled a low curse. Now that Eberstark had Andie and the Atros Fallis, he would hand them both over to Tivoli. Andie was a worthless asset to Tivoli, and now he could kill her at his will.

  Clay made his way out of the large room and back into the small antechamber that Andie and he had entered from the top of the hill. He tried to push the metal hatch open, but it was secured shut. It felt as though a heavy weight had been set on top of it to keep him from escaping. Eberstark had taken precautions so that Clay would have no means of escape, and now his situation was looking more hopeless by the second.

  Shit! His head ached like a motherfucker and the candles were starting to burn out. His only means of escape was an immovable hatch; with every second he was stuck down here, Andie was closer to being lost to him forever. The thought of Andie under Eberstark’s control stirred a dark, aggressive rage, and he knew that was a dangerous and unreasonable place to go—he needed to pull his shit together and cowboy up. Finding another way out of this cave was his only priority at this moment.

  “Sonofabitch! Wait a second ... that’s it!” Clay remembered Katherine Onderdonk noting in her diary that Claudius had appeared to her suddenly, ‘from out of the shadows.’ There had to be another passageway that Claudius had used to enter the cavern to surprise Katherine.

  Clay ran back into the large chamber and began searching the walls for a hidden door or compartment. Nothing, fucking nothing.

  Then, following his instinct, he began to look beyond the furnishings and clutter of the room. He looked at the shape and angles of the man-made space and observed a deviation along the rock wall. There it was—a smooth, natural inward curve at the back face of the cave. It started at the floor and continued to the vaulted curvature of the ceiling.

  Clay strapped his thigh holster on and grabbed the last glow stick from his backpack. He walked to the natural part of the rock wall and followed the inward curve with his hands. The sudden updraft of air let him know there was another chamber somewhere below. The candlelight was diminished in this far corner of the room, so he snapped the last glow stick and used the dull, green illumination to examine the airshaft. At the floor was a narrow opening that led down into another chamber. The darkness of this shaft swallowed the green light almost entirely, but it was better than entering the hole in complete darkness. He dangled his feet into the hole and didn’t feel the rough surface of ground beneath him. This was a good sign—the space below was large and could be a tunnel—a way out. But it also could be a deadly 50-foot drop into sharp stalagmites.

  His only choice was to drop the green glow stick into the abyss to gauge its depth.

  “Shit, here goes nothing.” His stomach clenched knowing he was literally throwing away his last, and only, source of light.

  Jackpot! The green stick hit the rock floor several feet below him, and he could faintly make out the dimensions of another adit leading down a rock-wall drift. He managed to squeeze his mass through the narrow opening and landed hard on the rock floor. He picked up the glow stick and stood. In front of him was a worn hemp rope with knots tied into it for hand and foot support. It was dangling from an iron hook hammered into the rock roof of the adit. Clay grabbed at the frayed rope, testing its strength in case he needed to climb back up.

  “Ah, so this was how Claudius was able to move into and out of the cave without Katherine noticing him. Pretty slick, Claudius—pretty slick.”

  Clay moved along the wall of the narrow, horizontal drift and saw natural craggy rocks jutting from the walls and ceiling—this part of the cave was undisturbed and had not been excavated with man-made tools. Claudius must have discovered it while excavating the crypt above for his den.

  As the space began to open wider, Clay felt that he was heading down a gradual decline into a colder and more open space. It ended at a large body of water that filled the floor of the cave.

  “FUCK ME! Really?” A dead end, and to add insult to injury, the glow stick was almost depleted. Clay approached the water with the dwindling light from the glow stick, but he couldn’t make out the depth of the pool from such little illumination. He searched the area for another adit, but found none, just the still pool of water flooding the space of the hollow.

  Several minutes passed, and the glow stick was completely extinguished, leaving Clay at the edge of the pool in total blackness. His eyes took a few minutes to adjust, and pure silence filled the chamber. Clay wondered how this passageway was formed and what Claudius used it for. It had
to be the secondary entrance that Katherine wrote about in her diary, as there was no other entrance or exit besides the small antechamber.

  Clay rubbed at the back of his neck in deep thought, resisting the temptation to touch the nasty gash on the back of his head. Suddenly, he noticed something heavenly from the pool of water. It was a faint glow of light illuminating the bottom of the pool. He smiled and let out a deep, roaring laugh that echoed off the walls and down the long drift. “Claudius, you magnificent bastard! You freakin’ genius!”

  Chapter 25

  Clay reached down to feel the still water of the pool—it was frigid. If he were to dive into this underground grotto and toward the light, he’d have to take a deep breath and swim as fast as he could before the ice cold water gave him hypothermia.

  He just prayed to God that the light at the bottom of the pool was daylight streaming in from the outside and not his mind playing tricks on him as a result of him getting hit with an eighteenth century rifle. And if he did manage to swim out—where would he end up?

  Damn it! Just embrace the suck! Do it, man.

  All these questions were making his head hurt even more. Before his thoughts could stray to Andie being tormented by that sick bastard Eberstark, Clay took a deep breath and dove into the water. He didn’t even bother to remove his boots or his holster and gun. If he survived this cold plunge, he was going to need his boots and a weapon to find Andie. He hoped his 45 wouldn’t be rendered useless after being underwater.

  The freezing water cut through his body like a thousand knives. He wanted to shout out in pain, but he held back, knowing that if he released the precious air that filled his lungs death would surely be imminent. He kicked his legs with full force, diving toward the bottom of the pool and the light. His muscles ached and his arms began to feel heavy and sluggish. His body was losing heat by the second, and even a degree or two could mean the difference between life and death.

  The light at the bottom of the pool was becoming wider and brighter; his eyeballs ached from the frigid, murky water. But closing his eyes was not an option—not when he had no damn idea where this stream of light was going to lead him. As he kicked and pushed his body through the underwater portal, he finally entered an open body of water where full sunlight poured into the pool from above.

  Tiny bubbles rushed past his face as he blew out some of the air that was pounding in his lungs. He sluggishly stroked to the top of the pool, where he met his worst nightmare. With blue, freezing hands, he touched a layer of ice lining the surface. He pushed with numb palms against the rigid barrier, but he knew that even the thinnest layer of ice would be unyielding under a push from his weak, frigid hands. Without leverage under him to help him break the ice, he would be trapped and drown like wounded harp seal.

  His mind raced, and he felt his head spin as his vision faded. He was beginning to black out, and he knew he only had seconds to escape.

  Fuck me! This can’t be happening!

  He quickly remembered his Colt and tugged with what minimal strength he had to release it from its holster. He began smashing the butt of the gun against the ice to crack it, but his strength was diminished and his body began to convulse from the icy water. He felt his mind begin to separate from his body, and he knew his time was just about up. He needed to break through the ice before his body shut down.

  He had flashes of memories of his childhood and his cousin Sean’s drowning—the vision of Sean’s head lifting from the icy, murky water, his arms flailing wildly as he took his last breath of air before dipping below the surface. “Don’t be a Mary.” Clay heard Sean’s patronizing voice blasting him for refusing to go onto the ice. But this time, Clay felt the words as a command to regain some strength and save his own ass. Swim, you big pussy ... get your ass out of the water!

  Then Clay heard the melodic voice of Aksana calling to him, begging for Clay to end her pain. He was close to death; these visions of the deceased meant he would soon join them.

  He thought of Andie: a flash of her wet, swollen lips parting from his own after he had kissed her deeply. Her beautiful smile and wild eyes met his mind’s eye, and he mustered up some inner, savage strength. He began slamming the butt of the gun harder and harder against the ice. Finally, he felt the release of the ice, and he pushed his hand through the jagged opening to feel the heat of the afternoon sun.

  And now the hard part.

  With every muscle twisting and twitching in his body, he pushed through the shattered ice layer and gasped fresh air into his burning lungs.

  He felt half dead, but he kicked and stroked through the broken ice with leaden limbs until his boots touched the muddy muck of the shallow edge of the pool. He pulled himself onto the shore of a cattail-lined meadow and rolled onto his back, letting his chest heave with fresh, cool air.

  Now he needed to get his shit together; he couldn’t linger here on the snowy ground. He was still vulnerable to hypothermia shutting his organs down, so movement was paramount, and getting dry or making a fire to warm his core temperature wasn’t an option. The clock was ticking, and he needed to find Andie before she was handed over to Tivoli. His blood began to boil with the thought of the cruelty she’d already endured from Eberstark’s heavy hand to her beautiful face. Clay felt the killer in him recovering—this just might be what he needed to warm his frozen limbs. Nothing beat the blaze of pure adrenaline coursing through his veins to fire him up to get the job done.

  He rolled to his side and painfully coughed out some water. His sight was slowly returning, and he focused on the icy pool of water where he’d just broken free. He blinked hard to refocus on the sight before him, and to his amazement, he was staring at the miserable tract of land that had disturbed him for all these years—Black Tar Swamp.

  This was the awful place where he had felt the first pain and heartache associated with the death of his cousin. The wretched swamp that had swallowed Sean was the same murky pool of water from which he’d just emerged. Sometimes, fate is sick and twisted.

  He managed to get himself on his hands and knees, and he holstered his Colt. If he didn’t start searching for their tracks in the melting snow soon, he would never find Andie.

  He ran to the other side of the swamp and started up the hill to the opening of Claudius’s secret den. Figuring that Eberstark had taken Andie out of the cavern the same way they went in, Clay thought he could pick up some fresh boot tracks in the snow and mud at the top of the hill.

  As Clay pushed through the snow and up the hill, he began to break a sweat. Sweating was just as bad as being in that frigid pool of water. Being wet in the cold temperature was a recipe for death—but he had no choice. His priorities were saving Andie and killing Eberstark. Nothing else mattered; his strength, will, and competence were all he had to rely on now.

  He reached the top of the hill, where he eyed a boulder sitting on top of the iron hatch door to the entrance hole. Clay snarled at the sight of it and searched the ground for boot tracks. Then he saw it—two sets of tracks; one, a wide boot, and the other, a narrow impression that had the look of drag marks.

  Clay knelt down and touched the narrow drag marks and noticed bright crimson drops of blood alongside the marks.

  Christ almighty, she’s hurt and bleeding!

  A deep swell of rage and anger moved within him, and he knew he would kill every last one of the bastards who were responsible for causing Andie’s pain. Eberstark, Tivoli, and that terrorist piece of shit who had started this entire nightmare, Vincente Ospina. They would all die screaming if Andie was harmed in any way.

  He examined the direction of the tracks in the snow and followed them down a narrow deer path that was less steep than the more direct route Andie and he had taken to the top of the hill. Another patch of crimson blood was visible, but this time there was more of it, and there were signs of a struggle. Mud had been kicked up, and distorted footprints circled an imprint of a small body.

  Clay’s eyes burned like lasers into the snow,
and he looked beyond the disturbed area. Here, he recognized only one set of large and deep boot impressions. Andie was hurt and immobile—Luca Eberstark was now carrying her.

  Clay closed his eyes and winced, feeling Andie’s pain and helplessness. He growled out another curse and felt the sick, agonizing twinge of failure spasm through his gut. He’d fucked up; he had let his guard down in the cave because he couldn’t resist having his dick inside of her.

  Epic fail. The sweetest joy he’d ever tasted was now hurt, bleeding, and most likely unconscious due to his lack of discipline.

  He shook off the shivers that were rising on his damp skin and raced down the path, following Eberstark’s boot tracks. He would not stop until he found his angel—dead or alive. And either way, hell was about to be unleashed.

  Chapter 26

  The pins and needles feeling in Andie’s hands was now bordering on aching numbness. Using Andie’s shoelaces, Luca Eberstark had retied her hands tighter than his original restraint. His first attempt had failed, and Andie was able to get a hand free to scratch a nasty gash into the side of Luca’s ugly face.

  After that incident, Eberstark had removed Andie’s makeshift gag and struck her with his open hand, causing her lower lip to split and swell. Her scarlet blood splattered into the stark, white snow cover, and she was relieved to think that if Clay was alive and could escape from the cave, he might be able to follow her blood trail like bread crumbs through the woods.

  The awful thought of Clay alone and half dead, lying in that dark cave, brought her to tears. She swallowed the lump in her throat and thought it was best not to think about anything except a means of escape so she could get back to the cave to help him. Even the Atros Fallis, which Eberstark had zipped up into his coat, could be passed on to whomever wanted that cursed thing—she only cared about Clay. Please be alive, please.