by Ted Dekker
The brown book lay still, smudged with Miranda’s blood. Alucard stood by the table, breathing steadily. The worms squirmed slowly above. Johnis stood in his shackles.
A silent flash of light appeared over the book, and Miranda stood next to the table again, wearing a smirk. “Works for me.”
She pushed the brown book aside and pressed her finger against the green one.
Again, a wink of light swallowed her.
Alucard grunted.
The woman reappeared. Still smiling.
“The black one,” the Shataiki growled.
Miranda brushed the green book aside and pulled the black one closer. She shoved her finger against the cover.
Nothing happened.
“Cut yourself!” Alucard said.
Her finger was no longer bleeding. She snatched up the silver knife they evidently kept for this very purpose and cut her skin again. Red blood seeped from the fresh wound.
She smashed it against the cover.
But Miranda did not vanish. What Karas had told him was true: shed made a duplicate book and hidden the original. Today her effort paid off.
Alucard snarled and rushed the ten feet to Johnis. His claw squeezed around Johnis’s neck. Unable to breathe, much less scream, Johnis could only clench his eyes against the pain.
“Where is the fourth book?”
The beasts breath was hot and wet.
“Give me the book!”
“Killing him won’t help us!” Miranda said. “Let him go.”
Alucard held him for another five seconds, then relaxed his grip. He backhanded Johnis with enough force to throw him backward several feet.
He landed on his side, struggling for breath.
“Where is it?” Alucard repeated.
He would die before he told them. Now it was only about stalling to give Silvie more time. Johnis coughed. Blood wet the stone by his hand. Alucard had damaged his throat. He lay on the dungeon floor, broken.
Hopelessness came, like an avalanche in the night, thundering down on him from overhead. He was going to fail. This beast was far too powerful to stop!
There was only one play left for him.
“He doesn’t know,” Alucard said. “Kill him.”
“No,” Johnis gasped. “I do know!”
Miranda stooped beside him and traced his cheek with her knife. “Of course you know. Karas would tell the chosen one. You know. And we know where Silvie is headed. We don’t need her; Karas will suffice. One word and Silvie will die.”
“Don’t … You can’t harm her!”
“This is a waste of time,” Alucard snarled. “Lock this useless slab of meat up. Cut off his leg and show it to her. If she still doesn’t cooperate, kill her and work on the little runt.”
“No, I can take you to the book.”
“Or lead me astray.” Miranda’s knife lingered just beneath his jaw. “To buy your little lover more time?”
It occurred to Johnis that Miranda always spoke as if it was she, not Alucard, who should be dealt with here. As if she, not the beast, held the true power in the room. At least in her mind.
“Just tell me,” she said.
“I can’t. But I can take you. If you don’t get the book, kill me. But leave Silvie. You have me! What can you gain by taking her now?”
“Plenty.”
Miranda smiled, drawing the knife across his cheek. Then she nicked him. “Don’t flirt with the illusion that you’ve bought yourself more than a few more hours of life. It’s all going to end soon.”
She turned her back on him and spoke to Alucard. “I have reason to believe that the other three books may be in the buried monastery.”
He grunted softly. “We’ll see. Bring me her book.”
aradise sat in the valley directly below the helicopter. A sleepy-looking village with only one paved street that she could see.
“Hardly the kind of place you’d expect to be the epicenter of the struggle between good and evil,” Silvie said.
“I think that’s the point.”
Since there was no place to land a jet in Paradise, they’d flown into a town named Grand Junction, then switched to the helicopter Karas had arranged.
“There’s something you should know, Silvie,” Karas said, staring at the town below them. “I’ve been debating whether to tell you because I’m afraid that they will stop at nothing to get the information from one of us if they take us. I already made a mistake in telling Johnis.”
“What are you talking about?”
Karas looked at her. “My book, the one Miranda took, was a copy. Mine is hidden in Paradise. I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. But Miranda only has three books, not four.”
Silvie didn’t know what to think about the prospect of her trusting Johnis, but at the moment she didn’t feel the need to dwell on it. There were more important matters at hand.
“Fine. It’s safe, right? Probably the safest place for it right now.”
“Unless Johnis—”
“He wouldn’t. And Miranda may have pieced together what we have about the other three. We should test our theory first and return if we find them.”
“Or we could hide my book again to protect Johnis.”
“We have to see if there’s a lair,” Silvie snapped.
“Okay. To the canyons.”
The helicopter floated over Paradise, then headed into the canyon lands to the south. A wide, white-faced gorge had been cut from the mountain. They flew down into it and pulled up near the box canyon at the end.
“Where?”
“There.” Karas pointed to a cliff on her side of the helicopter where a landslide had taken down a hundred yards of the canyon wall. “They used explosives to implode a monastery built into the cliff face. A real shame. Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep this place hidden.”
A small cabin had been built among the rubble, but this didn’t strike Silvie as the kind of place they would find the books that had caused them so much trouble.
“Take ‘er down,” Karas signaled the pilot.
They landed a hundred feet from the cabin and ducked out from under the spinning blades. “Wait for us.”
Karas led Silvie through an unlocked cabin door, into what looked to be a long, deserted room with two doors leading farther in. They quickly checked the two rooms: nothing obvious.
Karas switched on her battery-operated torch and ran it over the floor. “Okay, we’re looking for an opening that leads below the cabin.”
Silvie tried her own light. She might have been mesmerized by the contraption—fire sealed in this battery Karas referred to—but her mind was preoccupied with Johnis’s absence. “How do we know the lair is here, not buried under all the rubble?”
“We don’t.”
“Surely Alucard would have searched this place.”
“Not since all four books have been in this reality, he hasn’t.”
“How do you know? He could be down there right now, waiting for us.”
“Turkey, maybe. Or Romania. I doubt he’s here.”
“Romania?”
“Never mind. Come on.”
They searched the outer room first, covering every square inch on their hands and knees. The whole business was enough to soak Silvie in sweat. All she could think about was Johnis caged in a dungeon … or worse.
“We’re wasting time!” Silvie announced, standing. “What was that you said about Romania? This can’t be the right place!”
“I’ll take one room; you take the other.”
The other was a bathroom, and it took Silvie only a few minutes to convince herself that there was nothing remotely resembling Teeleh’s lair within a hundred miles of this place.
“Silvie!”
She dove for the door, slammed into its frame, and spun through, ignoring the pain that flashed up her arm.
“What is it?”
She saw what it was before Karas could answer. The wood-frame bed had been pulled to one side, and a trapdoor rose to rev
eal a dark tunnel beneath.
They’d actually found it?
“There’s a ladder.” Silvie dove for the hole and was halfway into the floor before Karas could stop her.
“Easy! I have the gun. I should lead.”
Silvie hesitated as Karas dropped past her into the earth below. They were in a small tunnel that ran perpendicular to the earth’s surface, not deep. It was an escape route freshly dug, not an ancient fortified tunnel like Alucard’s lair.
“This isn’t it,” she breathed, hurrying behind Karas, who scurried forward in a crouch, her gun extended.
No response.
They rounded a bend, following the light from their battery-operated torches. The tunnel ended at another ladder heading up. Light seeped through a square trapdoor about fifty feet above their heads.
“That’s it?” Silvie looked back. “We missed something! There has to be another tunnel!”
She spun and headed back, chasing the sound of her breathing now. Miranda was torturing Johnis in a land far away, while they wasted their time here beneath a cabin outside Paradise, Colorado.
“Silvie!”
She plowed on. The quicker they covered this search and left Paradise, the better. Nothing here looked like Teeleh.
“Silvie!”
She spun back. “What?”
“Do you hear that?”
Silvie heard her own wheezing. Her thumping heart. “No.”
“There, listen!”
Silvie held her breath and listened. Then she heard it, a very faint, high-pitched squealing sound that sent a streak of terror down her spine.
She studied the dirt ceiling. The walls. It seemed to come at them from every direction from far away. Her eyes met Kara’s, round like saucers. The squealing was louder now that they were perfectly still.
“What is that?” Silvie breathed.
“I … I don’t know,” She shoved her gun into her belt, leaned her ear close to the wall, and listened. “It’s …” But she didn’t know more.
Silvie drew her light slowly over the rough dirt walls. She walked farther down the tunnel. The sounds faded.
She walked back slowly. “It’s louder here. Something’s behind the walls. There has to be …”
Silvie suddenly saw the demarcation along the tunnel wall, rockier along a five-foot section between her and Karas. She stepped up and placed her ear between the rocks.
The squealing was now distinct, like the wailing of a million insects or lobsters, protesting their capture.
“You’re right,” Karas said.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She headed back down the tunnel. “But we’re going to find out.”
IT TOOK THEM NEARLY AN HOUR TO DIG THROUGH THE TUNnel wall using shovels from the helicopter. Silvie swung her spade, fighting to hold her frustration in check. It was clear that Johnis wasn’t here because the earth had been undisturbed for a long time.
The books probably weren’t here either. They couldn’t be so fortunate as to find them so quickly after arriving in the Histories. Then again, Karas had been searching for over ten years. She and Johnis had just shown up near the end of the search. Either way, something was here. The more they dug, the louder the squealing sounded.
“We should just use dynamite and be done with this!” Karas mumbled.
“Dynamite?” Silvie pried up on a rock, attempting to pluck it from the earth, but it remained stuck. “What’s dynamite?”
The rock suddenly rolled. Not toward her, but away. Into darkness beyond.
The squealing became a faint, but much clearer, high-pitched screaming. Silvie went rigid. The sound of the boulder rolling down a slope was unmistakable. It landed far below with a dull thump.
The squealing stopped.
Karas scrambled for one of the torches. Shone it through the hole. The beam revealed nothing but darkness. And an eerie silence.
“Teeleh’s lair?”
For the first time since landing in the canyon, Silvie felt a strong surge of hope. They’d certainly found something, and it could be Teeleh’s lair.
Which meant the Books of History could be here. And the Books of History were their only leverage now. Johnis’s life depended on what they found in this hole.
She dropped to her seat and kicked at the rocks surrounding the small hole. The wall caved as if the whole thing had been held up by a small toothpick. A small avalanche tumbled away from them.
Dust coiled.
Silvie grabbed her torch and crawled through the opening.
“What is it?” Karas asked from behind.
“A staircase. I … I don’t know.”
She eased out onto stone steps spiraling into darkness. No walls on either side or ahead that she could see. Silence.
Karas stood up beside her and played her light around. “A cavern below the old monastery. This has to be it, Silvie, Nothing else would explain this.”
“Let’s go.” Silvie stepped gingerly around fallen rock, pushing stones aside as she descended. Fifty steps. Farther. Now a stench from below. A smell that reminded her of putrid water or …
She stopped. “Shataiki!” Her whisper echoed softly. She flashed her light up and saw a stone wall ahead, wet with mucus. And lying across the mucus was a large worm, perhaps a full foot in diameter. Twenty yards long.
Karas put a hand on her shoulder and held tight.
These were the same worms from Alucard’s lair. Johnis had wondered if they might be larvae for the larger Shataiki, and looking at this one now, Silvie guessed he was right.
She wanted to spin, run back up the stairs, and drop fire in this hole to kill all that lived below. But Johnis …
Silvie clenched her jaw and stepped down, farther in.
The steps ended at the base of the wall. They were in a massive cavern, but she could only see this one wall. A single blackened wooden door hung from rusted hinges, gaping an inch or two.
“This is it.” Her voice came raspy. “Is it safe?”
A stupid question, one that Karas didn’t bother answering. She stepped past Silvie, her gun extended again. Still silence. So then what had done ail the squealing? Karas drew the door wide with the gun’s barrel.
A smaller atrium waited inside. And from this atrium several tunnels headed farther in. But the tunnel on their right was the one they should take. It was the only one with worms on the walls, slipping through their own mucus.
They held their torches on the same entrance, transfixed by the sight of two worms so close. And then the squealing came, louder than Silvie thought could have been possible from the small mouth on one of the worms, now open in a scream.
She jumped back. But other than moving its head about, the worm did nothing. No sign of threat other than this cry of protest. The halls fell quiet once more.
“They’ve been trapped down here,” Karas said, “for Elyon knows how long. Waiting to be set free.”
“By who?”
“Alucard? Maybe he couldn’t do it without all seven books.”
“If you’re right,” Silvie said, “and if he thinks he has the other four, he might be on his way now,”
“So … we should go in.”
They exchanged a look of fear, then walked forward into the tunnel.
The walls were strewn so thick with worms that they hid most of the stone. They waded through four inches of sludge covering the floor, only partially protected by their boots.
Silvie switched her torch to one hand and covered her nose with the other. If the lair was laid out like Alucard’s, the heart of the nest would be behind a set of gates, ahead on the right.
Which is where they found it. Gate locked. Empty of worms.
Their torches illuminated a study of sorts, complete with desk, a couch, and some bookcases. No dust, but plenty of worm salve. It was almost identical to the study in Alucard’s lair. Slightly different furniture and arrangement, but clearly cut from the same blueprint.
“Stand bac
k.” Karas aimed the barrel of her gun at the lock, turned her head, and pulled the trigger. Boom!
Worms squealed. The lock lay in two. She wrestled it from the latch and opened the gate. With a screech of rusted hinges, the study opened to them.
“Are they here?” Silvie demanded.
Karas Bred a stick and set the flame against an old torch mounted on the wall. The flame grew and crackled, spewing black smoke.
Orange light licked the glistening walls. Someone had carved an inscription into the rock next to the gate: Welcome to Paradise, Population 450.
“This is definitely what Billy wrote,” Karas said.
“You mean ‘Billos’?”
“No. One of the children in the monastery. It’s a long story. But this is where the showdown all began. Or ended. Or is it still in full swing?”
“In my book it’s still going,” Silvie said. “Until we find Johnis and the books.”
“So where are they?”
She turned, studying each corner. Silvie walked to the desk and pulled open one of two drawers on each side.
There, just visible in the shadows, lay an old black book. The words on its cover jumped out. Silvie gasped. Reached for the book and pulled it out. Bound in red twine exactly like the other four.
“I was right!” Karas cried. “They’re here!”
But the drawer was empty. “They?”
Karas fumbled with the other drawer, yanked it open, staring inside. She reached in with both hands and pulled out two books, laying them on the desk beside Silvie’s black one.
Purple and gold, bound by red twine, bearing the same name: The Story of History.
They’d found the three missing books.
“You know what this means?” Karas looked at her. “With the book I have hidden, we now have four. We have to collect the fourth book! We have to get down to Paradise!”
Silvie agreed. One problem: “They still have Johnis,”
As one, the worms in the hall behind them began to screech.
aradise? Why would she hide the book in Paradise, of all places? It’s far too obvious.”
“Not just anywhere in Paradise. You’re saying you could just walk in, tear them apart, and take the books?”
“But Paradise. We’ve searched …”
