“Are you moonlighting as a matchmaker or something?” Cassie asked suspiciously. “Don’t be in such a hurry to hook me up with anybody new. I haven’t even processed what just happened. It’ll be a long, long time before I get emotionally involved again.”
She paused to consider another idea. “Maybe I can’t cry because I feel guilty.”
“About what?” Griffin asked absently, apparently lost in thoughts of his own.
“About the fact that the last memory I have of Erik is an argument.”
The scrivener chuckled grimly. “I have more reason to feel guilty on that score than you do. I once punched our paladin in the jaw.”
Cassie sat bolt upright and peered at the scrivener. “When did this happen?”
He seemed baffled by the question. “I’m sure I told you.”
Mimicking his accent, the pythia retorted, “I’m quite sure if you had, it’s the sort of thing I would have remembered.”
“Sorry.” He winced sheepishly. “It was the night Erik left us high and dry in India. I had a row with him in the parking lot afterwards. Certain accusations were flung and, suffice it to say, I lost my temper.”
“I can’t see Erik letting you clock him,” she countered.
“I caught him off-guard. He did say that if I ever repeated that action, and I quote, they’d be scraping me off the sidewalk for days.”
“That sure sounds like Erik.” Cassie chuckled. “But why would you pick a fight with him in the first place?”
The scrivener faltered, casting an apprehensive glance toward the pythia. “I thought he didn’t know how to value you properly. I’m sure any decent man would have counted himself the luckiest chap alive to be romantically involved with you. Yet Erik treated that immense gift as if it were commonplace. I thought someone should teach him a lesson, that’s all.”
The pythia studied him with wry amusement. “Look at you, resorting to fisticuffs to defend a lady’s honor. You really are an old-fashioned kind of guy; you know that?”
“I’m feeling positively ancient at the moment,” Griffin murmured under his breath.
Cassie’s face took on an earnest expression. “Given everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks, promise me you won’t get yourself killed or fall into a coma or let the Nephilim kidnap you. I’m not ready to lose somebody as special as you.”
“I’ll always be near, Cassie.” The scrivener squeezed her hand reassuringly and gave a bleak smile. “Even though I might occasionally wish that my heart had a stronger sense of self-preservation.”
Cassie knit her brows and was on the point of asking what he meant when Zach came bursting through the schoolhouse doors.
“There you are!” the tyro exclaimed. “I’ve been looking all over for you two. Something’s up.”
They both rose and turned to him in puzzlement.
He continued. “I went to Maddie’s office to see if she was ready to talk about Hannah again. When I got to the door, I overheard her on the phone. She’s calling for a blackout. I don’t exactly know what that means, but I’m guessing it’s a bad thing.”
“A very bad thing indeed!” Griffin blanched.
“So, I’m also guessing you’re gonna want to stop her,” the tyro added. “She’s arranging a meeting of the Circle for tonight.”
Cassie and Griffin traded stricken looks and ran up the stairs.
Trailing after them, Zach asked, “But what does it mean?”
“The end, that’s what!” Cassie exclaimed.
Chapter 49—Going Dark
Cassie and Griffin warily entered the main hall of the old schoolhouse. In the hours since Zach had made his alarming announcement, they’d been unable to discover anything specific about Maddie’s plan or how to counter it. Now they’d run out of time. The sun had set, and the Circle was beginning to assemble. For once, the overhead lights weren’t blazing. A single pendant lamp had been lowered above the center of the table. It cast immense shadows against the walls, obliterating the stained-glass birds and flowers which decorated the windows. Faye’s throne rested forlornly in a corner. There would be no need to carry it forward. The memory guardian would not be in attendance. Thirty-four chairs had been arranged around the vast circular table. Many were already occupied by representatives from the troves of Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Americas. No one had worn a mash-up of their national costume tonight. The topic under discussion was much too serious to allow for any fashion frivolities.
As the pythia searched for empty seats, she noticed an unoccupied chair draped in black bunting. With a start, she realized it was meant to be a memorial to Erik. Feeling a lump forming in her throat, Cassie hastily looked away. “C’mon,” she urged Griffin. “Over this way.”
They found two seats together on the opposite side of the table.
Once they’d settled themselves, a familiar voice piped up. “It’s nice to see you both again.”
“Jun!” Cassie exclaimed. In the dim light, she hadn’t noticed that they’d taken seats beside the Hongshan trove keeper. “What are you doing here?”
The old man shrugged. “I thought this meeting was important enough for me to fly to Chicago.”
“How is your foot?” Griffin asked.
“It still hurts, but I’ve graduated from a crutch to a cane.” Jun smiled ruefully. He pointed to the walking stick hooked to the back of his chair. “My granddaughter sends her regards.”
“Rou was a big help to us,” Cassie assured him. “I don’t think we would have been able to pull off the relic switch if not for her quick thinking.”
“Ever since her return, she’s become very...” The old man paused to select the right word. “Chatty.”
All three of them laughed knowingly.
“I’m sure Rinchen had something to do with that,” Griffin noted.
“Yes, they speak all the time. In English. Full sentences.”
While Griffin continued to converse with Jun, Cassie scanned the Circle. Much to her surprise, the pythia recognized several other attendees because they had assisted her team in the quest for the Sage Stone. Michel Khatabi, the Berber trove keeper from North Africa, sat three chairs away. She smiled at him, and he inclined his head to acknowledge the greeting. Since this was a closed session for voting members only, his daughter Fifi was nowhere to be seen. Cassie gave a mental sigh of relief. The meeting was bound to be stressful enough without the added annoyance of Erik’s former hookup lamenting theatrically over his crepe-draped chair.
The pythia allowed her gaze to wander further until she spotted Stefan Kasprczyk, the Kurgan trove keeper from the Kazakh steppes. She was unlikely to ever forget the tainted artifact he had brought for her to validate. Stefan waved when he saw her looking in his direction.
Toward the opposite end of the table, the pythia also spied Aydin Ozgur from the Anatolian trove in Turkey. He didn’t see her because he was conferring with yet another familiar face—Grace Littlefield of the Haudenosaunee trove in upstate New York.
The murmur of small talk died abruptly when everyone felt a blast of cold air emanating from the front doors. The chatelaine strode into the hall. Taken aback by the sight of Cassie and Griffin, she faltered for a second but recovered quickly. It was obvious she hadn’t meant for them to know about this gathering. She moved forward to claim the remaining empty seat at the table. “The Circle is now complete,” she announced authoritatively. “I call this meeting to order.”
An expectant hush fell over the group. Several people leaned forward in anticipation.
Maddie settled herself and began. “I want to thank you all for attending on such short notice. I wouldn’t have summoned you unless there was an emergency and, in my opinion, what we have is a full-blown crisis on our hands. As you all know, the Arkana’s search to recover the Sage Stone has forced us to cross paths repeatedly with the Blessed Nephilim. We did more than cross paths with them when one of their own ran away from the cult and too
k refuge with our memory guardian Faye. The girl’s name is Hannah, and she’s the youngest wife of the Nephilim’s diviner. Needless to say, he made her recovery a high priority. I seriously underestimated the measures he would take to get her back. Abraham Metcalf went so far as to send a raiding party to Faye’s house. In the process, his thugs put our memory guardian in a coma.”
A gasp was heard from several quarters. Apparently, not all the trove keepers had been kept in the loop.
“Last week during a failed attempt to rescue Hannah from the Nephilim compound, our paladin Erik was shot and killed.” Maddie’s eyes strayed unwillingly to the empty chair draped in black. Her face expressed a mixture of sorrow and desperation. “Shortly before his passing, Erik found out that the Arkana has officially made the Nephilim’s hit list.”
A burst of exclamations followed this announcement.
Grace Littlefield asked tensely, “Do they know the location of the vault?”
The chatelaine shook her head. “Not yet. They only know that we played a role in sheltering Hannah and that three of our agents have been obstructing their artifact search.” She paused and added heavily, “Correction—two agents now. Because of our interference, the diviner has targeted our entire organization for destruction.”
She solemnly regarded the troubled faces around the table. “Things have taken a bad turn for us, but we’ve been in tight places before. The Arkana has been around for a long, long time and we’ve managed to weather witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, Communist purges, and two world wars. Every time the planet faced a new crisis, we declared a blackout and shut ourselves down temporarily. I believe we need to apply the same measures now. That’s why I propose we end the quest for the Sage Stone immediately, dismantle the Central Catalog, and suspend operations.”
“For how long?” Michel Khatabi asked in a concerned tone.
Maddie shrugged. “Who can say how long it will take for the cult to forget about us. A year? Five years? A decade? I only know one thing for sure. The price of fighting the Nephilim has gotten too steep to pay. Faye was like a mother to me. I’m sure many of you felt that way about her. Now she’s in a coma. Erik was the son I never had, and he’s dead. I’ll never—” She cut herself off abruptly as her voice threatened to crack. Mastering her emotions, she sighed wearily. “We’ve lost too many good people already. We can’t afford to lose any more. Before I call for a vote on my proposal, the floor is open for discussion.”
Worried voices surged as people turned to their neighbors and debated the situation. Nobody appeared to dispute Maddie’s assessment of the need for a shutdown.
Cassie stood up. “I have something to say,” she declared.
The buzz ceased immediately.
Maddie folded her arms truculently across her chest. “Of course, you do.” She looked annoyed but knew she couldn’t stop the pythia.
All faces turned toward Cassie. She took a deep breath. “I don’t think everybody here realizes how close we are to the finish line. We just returned from China with the final clue that points to the hiding place of the Sage Stone. Now that we’re only one step away from retrieving it, you want us to back off and call it quits?”
Aydin Ozgur cleared his throat to speak. “I have been a trove keeper for many decades now. Perhaps more than most, I understand the symbolic importance of the Sage Stone. It is the matristic equivalent of the Holy Grail. But what is that when weighed in the balance against the survival of the Arkana itself? It seems to me the wisest course of action would be to terminate the quest.”
The pythia shook her head. “This isn’t about us nabbing the Sage Stone. It’s about keeping that rock out of the hands of the Nephilim. Their diviner has been assembling global death squads ever since this quest started. He’s planning to arm those guys with some kind of biological or chemical weapon and turn them loose on the world. I don’t know why the Sage Stone is important to him, but Faye believed that his whole plan hinges on it. I believe it too. He won’t give the order to attack til he has it. We can stop him cold by snagging the artifact before he does.”
“But what if your theory doesn’t hold up?” Grace Littlefield challenged. “Say you prevent Metcalf from capturing the Sage Stone, what’s to keep him from unleashing his army without it?”
“He won’t,” Griffin remarked quietly. “You must remember that the brotherhood of the Nephilim owes its very existence to nothing more substantial than a mad set of religious beliefs. The god they serve is exacting and prone to wrath which makes cult members anxious to please him. Their diviner has apparently decided that the best way to gratify his lord is by starting a holy war—a war which he is convinced he cannot win without the Sage Stone. If we deprive him of the artifact, he will interpret his loss as a sign of divine disapproval of his military ambitions. Such an ill omen will immobilize him with fear.”
Grace remained unconvinced. “Even if you’re right, it would still be a good idea to hedge our bets. In the past, whenever soldiers started marching, the Arkana went dark and waited til the smoke cleared.”
Several members of the Circle nodded vigorously in agreement. Half a dozen voices chimed in with comments like “Yes, absolutely” and “We need to lay low.”
Cassie raised her hands for silence. “You’re forgetting one major difference. Every time the Arkana used that strategy in the past, we were spectators. We could afford to sit back and watch while the rest of the world slugged it out. Now that Abraham Metcalf has tagged us for extermination, we don’t have seats in the second balcony anymore.”
Her listeners looked stunned as the implication struck them.
The pythia continued. “None of you have been up close and personal with the Nephilim the way Erik and Griffin and I have. The cult has a zero-tolerance policy for anybody who doesn’t drink their flavor of Kool-Aid. You can’t simply stick your heads in the sand and wait for this thing to blow over because it never will. We’re the Nephilim’s Number One Enemy now which means they’ll be coming after us bigtime. You might as well paint a giant red bull’s eye on the roof of the schoolhouse because they won’t quit til they’ve wiped us out.”
“All the more reason to dismantle the Central Catalog,” Stefan Kasprczyk objected vehemently. “Above all else, we have a sacred duty to protect the troves, no? We have guarded them for centuries, and they must remain our chief concern.”
Cassie nodded. “You’re right. The troves are your top priority, but I think you’ve lost sight of what the troves really are.”
Several attendees exchanged puzzled glances.
“The troves aren’t just collections of cracked pottery and broken statues. You’ve preserved them because of what they stand for. They prove there was a time long ago when we knew how to live in peace with each other. We created entire civilizations that weren’t fueled by invasion and slavery and murder. The troves prove that the world was a decent place before overlords slaughtered their way across the globe and almost destroyed it with their endless warmongering.”
She eyed her listeners intently.
“If you hide and don’t lift a finger to stop them, the Nephilim will root out every single trove and burn it to the ground. They won’t simply destroy the Arkana, they’ll destroy the only proof that a better way of life ever existed and the hope that it could ever exist again.”
She paused to let her words sink in before continuing. “And it won’t end with us either. After we’re out of the picture, Metcalf’s death squads will keep killing until civilization as we know it is gone. In its place, the Nephilim will set up a world where women are traded around like herds of cattle. Where families are broken apart and reassembled like Legos at the whim of the guy in charge. Too many good people in the Arkana gave their lives to keep that kind of world from becoming our only option.”
“You just proved my point, kiddo,” Maddie remarked acidly. “We’ve had too many losses already.”
“You want to talk about loss?” Cassi
e wheeled on her. “I’ve lost everybody I ever cared about because of the Arkana. My parents, my only sister, Faye, Erik.”
She stared at the chatelaine accusingly. “If Erik were standing here right now, what do you think he’d say to your proposal?”
Maddie glowered back, refusing to answer.
“He’d ask you why he died for nothing. He went down fighting, and he expects us to do the same—to keep on fighting til we win or die trying.”
Despite Maddie’s stubborn silence, she forged on relentlessly. “Well? He’s waiting for your answer, and so am I. You say he was the son you never had. If you really loved him as much as you claim, then you couldn’t use his death as an excuse to take the coward’s way out. He would never have stood for that!”
The chatelaine leaped from her chair, overturning it in the process. She towered over the pythia.
Cassie fought the instinctive urge to take a step back. Instead, she stood her ground, wordlessly daring the Amazon to strike her.
Maddie drew herself up. Her eyes were burning with fury and grief. Tears streamed down her face unchecked. In mute rage, she turned and stormed out of the hall. The doors slammed behind her with a decisive bang.
During the stunned silence that followed her departure, Cassie walked around to the other side of the table. She rested her hands on the back of the paladin’s empty chair as she searched the faces of her colleagues. “Erik would ask all of you the same question. Did he really die for nothing? The only way you can honor his sacrifice is by seeing this mission through—by rescuing Hannah and recovering the Sage Stone and shutting the Nephilim down for good. That’s the answer the Arkana owes him.”
The pythia stopped abruptly. “I don’t have anything else to say.” Without another word, she returned to her seat.
Just as the chorus of voices resumed its chaotic rumble, Griffin stood up. “I’d like to add a comment or two, if I may.”
In an instant, the chatter ceased.
“Although Cassie has ably addressed all your concerns, there’s one topic we haven’t touched upon yet—the divergence between the collective and the individual.”
Arkana Archaeology Mystery Box Set 2 Page 57
