He found it, flicked it on, and lost it as it slipped from his fingertips.
It bounced away behind him.
Still, the glow offered enough light from behind to help illuminate the way up.
He ran—while a howl arose behind him.
As it echoed away, he heard a faint whispering in his ear.
“. . . hurry. All done here . . .”
McKay.
Jordan forced himself upward: buffeted by that foul wind, chased by howls, pursued by things that scratched rock with rotted nails and bone.
Shadows cast up from below danced on the walls around him, ahead of him, capering up from the fires of Hell.
Heavy footfalls rushed up the tunnel behind him. No more howls now.
Just the silent hunt.
Jordan ran his palms along the wall to keep his legs under him. He tore his skin on the coarse stone, but he didn’t care. The pain meant he had abandoned the smooth natural cavern walls below for the excavated sharp edges of man-made work.
Behind him, a harsh panting echoed. The penlight’s glow vanished.
Darkness collapsed around him as the beasts closed in.
He ran faster, his lungs burning.
He smelled the creatures now, the stench blown up to him by the foul breath of the cave: stinking of meat and blood and horror.
Then light shone ahead. The exit.
He fled toward it, diving through it from a yard away to freedom, landing hard, almost forgetting to make that last leap to save his life.
McKay caught him in his arms and rolled him to the side.
A howl burst forth from the tunnel, full of frustration and the promise of bloody vengeance.
As Jordan tumbled away, he caught sight of the male leopard stepping to the mouth of the tunnel—then the world exploded.
Fire. Smoke.
Pelting rocks and stinging grit.
Jordan shook free of McKay’s embrace but stayed on his knees.
He took in deep gulps of fresh air, trying to clear his head.
He watched for any sign of the leopards through the smoke, but the tunnel had completely collapsed. As he stared, an avalanche of rock continued to flow down from above, further sealing the passageway, reburying those bones along with the two leopards inside.
“How many land mines did you use?” Jordan gasped out, his ears still ringing from the blast.
“Just one. Didn’t have time to dig up more than that. Plus, it was enough.”
Before him, the mass of Shahr-e-Gholghola steamed and shuddered. Jordan pictured the subterranean cavern collapsing into stony ruin below. More explosions ripped through the ruins, blasting smoke and rock.
“The quaking is triggering other land mines to blow,” McKay said. “We’d better haul ass out of the way.”
Jordan didn’t argue, but he kept a wary eye on the ruins.
They retreated to the thatched-roof house. Cooper came stumbling out to meet them. Blood ran down one side of his face.
“What happened?” Jordan asked.
But before Cooper could answer, Jordan hurried past his teammate to find the home empty.
What the hell . . .
Concern for the girl spiked through him.
Cooper explained. “As soon as you went into the cave, the girl dove through the window. I tried to go after her, but that damned professor clubbed me, screaming, ‘Let her go! Let the demons take her.’ That guy was a whack job from the beginning.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. I just woke back up.”
Jordan sprinted out of the hut. Falling snow filled in their tracks but he could see that the girl’s tiny feet pointed west, the professor’s east. They’d gone in opposite directions.
McKay caught up to him.
A thump-thumping beat echoed in the distance.
A helicopter, ablaze with light, came sweeping toward them from Bamiyan, drawn like moths to a flame. The rangers had heard the explosions.
“Great,” McKay said. “Now the cavalry comes.”
“What’s next, Sarge?” Cooper asked.
“We let someone else get the professor,” Jordan said, rediscovering his outrage. It flowed through him, warming him, telling him what he must do, centering him again at long last. “We go get that little girl.”
Three days later, I sit in my nice warm office at the Afghan Criminal Techniques Academy. All the paperwork has been filed; the case is closed.
The events surrounding that night were blamed on a single unusual finding at the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola: a gas signature emanating from deep underground. The gas was a hydrocarbon compound called ethylene, known to cause hallucinations and trancelike states.
I remember my own confusion, the things I thought I saw, the things I wished I hadn’t. But they weren’t real. They couldn’t have been. It was the gas.
The scientific explanation works for me. Or at least I want it to.
The reports also attribute the leopards’ strange and aggressive behavior to the same hydrocarbon toxification.
Other loose ends are also resolving.
Professor Atherton was found a mile from the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola—barefoot, raving, and suffering from hypothermia. He ended up losing most of his toes.
McKay, Cooper, and I had searched through the night for the little girl, and eventually I found her nestled in a shallow cave, unharmed and warm as toast in my coat. I’d been grateful to find her, relieved that I had cared enough to keep searching. Maybe I’d find my way back to those innocent Iowa cornfields someday after all.
The girl had no memory of the events at the ruins, likely a blessing. I’d taken her to a doctor, then turned her over to her relatives in Bamiyan, thinking that was the end of it.
But the cave where I found her, not far from the ruins, revealed itself to be the entrance to a small crypt. Inside rested the remains of a young man, entombed with the weapons and finery of a Mongol noble. Genetic studies are under way to determine if the body might not be that of Genghis Khan’s grandson, the emissary the king of Shahr-e-Gholghola had murdered centuries ago that set in motion the events that would lead to the citadel’s downfall.
But it was the manner of that young man’s death that keeps me sitting at my desk this winter morning staring at the neatly filled out report and wondering.
According to Atherton’s stories, the Shansabani king had slain his daughter’s suitor by decapitating him after he discovered their planned elopement. And the Mongolian body in the tomb had no head.
Could the emissary and the lover have been the same man? Had the king’s daughter fallen in love with the Khan’s grandson? Had that tragic love triggered the massacre that followed? Everyone always said that love led to good things, but it didn’t always. I find myself playing with my wedding ring again and make myself stop.
I don’t know, but as I sit here, stuffing the reports in a folder, I remember more details. How Azar told me that leopards were the royal symbol of the Shansabani kings. How Farshad screamed about the girl being possessed by a djinn and hunted by ghosts.
Was he right after all?
With the opening of the tombs, had something escaped?
Had the wisp of a long-dead princess slipped into the girl, seeking another to help carry her to her lost love?
Had her father, still mired in anger and vengeance, possessed those two leopards, the royal sigils of his family, and tried to drag her back to the horrors hidden under Shahr-e-Gholghola?
And in the end, had the explosions that resealed that tomb reburied his grave along with the bones of the leopards, ending the angry king’s ghostly pursuit of his daughter?
Or were the pair of hunters merely leopards, not possessed by anything more than hunger, their aggression fueled by the toxic gas in their new den?
And those voices. Had it just been the cats? I hadn’t been able to track down another Bactrian scholar, so no one but the professor had translated those eerie sounds into words. Maybe he w
as unhinged by his colleagues’ deaths or already affected by the gas from his earlier work at the dig site.
I shake my head, trying to decide between the logical explanation and the supernatural one. Usually, I’m a logical guy.
These crazy thoughts must be the aftereffects of all the gas I breathed in the cavern. But when I think back to the professor’s words, I can’t be so sure: Things happen out here in the mountains that you cannot believe when you are safe in the city.
A knock at the door interrupts my train of thought, and I’m grateful for it.
McKay comes in, steps to the desk. He carries a paper in hand. “New orders, Sarge. Looks like we’re shipping out.”
“Where?”
“Masada, Israel. Some strange deaths reported following an earthquake out there.”
I reach to the folder on my desk and close it, ending the matter.
“I bet this assignment will be easier than the last one.” McKay frowns. “What’s the fun of that?”
Blood Brothers
James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell
Summer, Present Day
San Francisco, California
Arthur Crane woke to the smell of gardenias. Panic set in even before he opened his eyes. He lay still, frozen by fear, testing the heavy fragrance, picking out the underlying notes of frangipani and honeysuckle.
It can’t be . . .
Throughout his childhood, he had spent countless hours reading in the greenhouse of his family’s estate in Cheshire, England. Even now, he remembered the hard cement bench in a shaded corner, the ache in his lower back as he hunched over a novel by Dickens or Doyle. It was so easy to lose himself in the worlds within those pages, to shut out his mother’s rampages and threatening silences. Still, no matter how lost he was in a story, that scent always surrounded him.
It had been his childhood, his security, his peace of mind.
No longer.
Now it meant only one thing. Death.
He opened his eyes and turned his nose toward that scent. It came from the empty pillow next to him. Morning sunlight slanted through his bedroom window, illuminating a white Brassocattleya orchid. It rested in an indentation in the middle of the neighboring pillow. Delicate frilled petals brushed the top of his pillowcase, and a faded purple line ran up the orchid’s lip.
His breathing grew heavier, weighted by dread. His heart thumped hard against his rib cage, reminding him of his heart attack last year, a surprise gift for his sixty-eighth birthday.
He studied the orchid. When he’d last spotted such a flower, he’d been a much younger man, barely into his twenties. It had been floating in a crimson puddle, its heavy scent interwoven with the hard iron smell of his own blood.
Why again now . . . after so many years?
Arthur sat up and searched his apartment’s small bedroom. Nothing seemed disturbed. The window was sealed, his clothes were where he’d left them, even his wallet still lay on the bureau.
Steeling himself, he plucked the orchid from his pillow and held its cool form in his palm. For years he’d lived in dread of receiving such a flower again. He fought out of the bedsheets and hurried to the window. His apartment was on the third story of an old Victorian. He picked the place because the stately structure reminded him of the gatehouse to his family’s estate, where he’d often found refuge with the gardeners and maids when the storms grew too fierce at the main house.
He searched the street below. Empty.
Whoever had left the flower was long gone.
He took a steadying breath and gazed at the blue line of the bay on the horizon, knowing that he might not see it again. Decades ago, he had reported on a series of grisly murders, all heralded by the arrival of such an orchid. Victims found the bloom left for them in the morning, only to die that same night, their bloody bodies adorned with a second orchid.
He turned from the window, knowing the flower’s arrival was not pure happenstance. Two days ago, he had received a call from a man who claimed to have answers about a mystery that had been plaguing Arthur for decades. The caller said he was connected to a powerful underground organization, a group who called themselves the Belial. That name had come up during Arthur’s research into the past orchid murders, but he could never pin down the connection. All he knew was that the word belial came from the Hebrew Bible, loosely translated as demonic.
But did that mean the past murders were some form of a satanic ritual?
How was his brother involved? “Christian . . .”
He whispered his brother’s name, hearing again his boyish laughter, picturing the flash of his green eyes, the mane of his dark hair that he always let grow overly long and carefree.
Though decades had passed, he still did not know what had happened to his brother. But the caller had said that he could reveal the truth to Arthur.
Tonight.
He glanced at the orchid still in his hand.
But will I live long enough to hear it?
As he stood there, memories overwhelmed him.
Summer 1968
San Francisco, California
Another funeral.
Morning light from the stained-glass windows painted grotesque patterns on the faces of the young choir at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But their ethereal voices soared to heaven—clear, beautiful, and tinged with grief.
Such grace should have brought comfort, but Arthur didn’t need comfort. He wasn’t grieving. He had come as an interloper, a foreigner, a young reporter for the Times of London.
He studied the large lily-draped photo of the deceased mounted on an easel next to a carved mahogany coffin. Like most of the people in the church, he hadn’t really known the dead man, although everyone in the world knew his name: Jackie Jake, the famous British folk singer who had taken the United States by storm.
But that tempest was over.
Ten days ago, Jackie Jake had been found murdered in an alley off San Francisco’s Mission Street. Arthur’s newspaper had flown him from London to cover the death—both because he was their youngest reporter and because he was the only one who admitted to having listened to Jake’s music. But the last was a lie. He had never heard of Jackie Jake until this assignment, but the ruse got him on the plane to California.
He had come to San Francisco for another reason. A hope, a chance . . . to right a terrible wrong.
As the funeral Mass continued, the crowd shuffled restlessly in the pews. The smell of their unwashed bodies rose in a cloud around them. He’d assessed them when he came in earlier, taking stock of Jake’s fans. They were mostly young women in long skirts and blousy white shirts, many with flowers in their hair. They leaned in postures of utter grief against men with the beards of ascetic hermits.
Unlike most of the crowd, Arthur had worn a black suit, polished shoes, something that befit a funeral. Despite his desire to shake the iron rule of his childhood household, he could not escape the importance of correct attire. He also wanted to present a professional demeanor for the policemen investigating Jake’s murder. Arthur sensed that their sympathies would not lie with this hippie crowd.
As the service ended and the mourners began to file out, Arthur spotted his target near the back of the nave, a figure wearing a black uniform with a badge on the front. Arthur contrived to bump against him as he exited.
“I’m very sorry, Officer,” Arthur said. “I didn’t see you standing there.”
“Not a problem.” The man had the broad American accent that Arthur associated with California from films and television programs.
Arthur glanced with a heavy sigh back into the church. “I can’t believe he’s gone . . .”
The police officer followed his gaze. “Were you close to the deceased?”
“Childhood friends, in fact.” Arthur held out his hand to cover his lie. “I’m Arthur Crane.”
The man shook Arthur’s hand with a too-firm grip. “Officer Miller.”
The officer kept an eye on the exiting crowd, his face
pinched with distaste. A man wearing jeans and sandals swept past, leaving a strong smell of marijuana in his wake. The officer tightened his jaw, but did not move after him.
Arthur played along with his obvious disdain, hoping to tease information out of the officer. “Jackie and I were friends before he came here and got involved with”—he waved his hand at the crowd of hippies—“that lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these flower children had killed him. From my experience, it’s a fine line between fan and fanatic.” Officer Miller shrugged, his eyes still on the mourners. “Maybe. The killer did leave a flower near his body . . . some type of orchid.”
And that was how Arthur first found out about the orchids.
Before Arthur could inquire further, Miller lunged to the side as a rake-thin man grabbed an easel near the door, clearly intending to steal the blown-up photo of the folksinger. The thief’s dark eyes looked wild under his unkempt hair, his dirty hands gaunt as a skeleton’s.
As the officer interceded, the man abandoned the photo, grabbed the easel, and swung it like a club.
Miller tried to dodge, but his hip crashed against a neighboring pew. The easel struck the officer on the shoulder, driving him to his knees. The thief raised the easel again, high above the head of the dazed officer.
Before Arthur could consider otherwise, he rushed forward. It was the kind of foolhardy action his brother, Christian, would take in such a circumstance—but it was out of character for the normally reserved Arthur.
Still, he found himself barging between the two men as the crowd hung back. He grabbed the attacker’s arm before he could deal a fatal blow to the fallen police officer. He struggled with the assailant, giving Miller time to scramble to his feet. The officer then manhandled the attacker away from Arthur and quickly secured the man’s wrists behind his back with handcuffs. The man glared all around. His pupils filled his entire irises, making his eyes look black. He was definitely under the influence of some kind of drug.
Miller caught Arthur’s gaze. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
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