Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twenty-Nine

Ellie woke up feeling sticky. Her tent-prison had been closed up since she’d been deposited in it earlier that evening. The canvas had relentlessly held on to the day’s thick heat.

She supposed she should be glad it was simple discomfort that had dragged her from sleep, instead of another nightmare. Ellie had actually slept dreamlessly for the last two nights—ever since Jacobs had caught them and confiscated the black medallion from the psalter.

Her hand brushed over the empty place under her blouse where it had once lain.

Ellie supposed she ought to be grateful for the change. Who wanted to be regularly woken by nightmares? Still, a small part of her felt oddly as though she were missing something important by indulging in simple oblivion instead.

She sat up on her cot. Through the canvas walls of the tent, she could just make out the glow of one of the campfires and the murmur of voices from those keeping watch.

It would be cooler outside.

Giving up, she swung her legs out of bed and pushed through the tent flap.

The more temperate air outside was an immediate relief. A soft breeze whispered through the branches of the surrounding pines. There was no other sound from the forest. Not so much as a chirp or hoot disturbed the quiet—only the low buzz of insects.

Flowers sat on a stone by the entrance to the tent with his rifle leaning beside him, whistling tunelessly. The lantern at his feet had been turned down to a glimmer.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

“I just needed a little fresh air,” Ellie mumbled in reply.

“Everybody’s having bad dreams,” Flowers noted authoritatively. “This place has got the bad wind.”

He waved a hand which took in the camp and the oddly silent woods around it.

“Can I just… sit out here a little while?” Ellie asked.

“There’s plenty of rock.” Flowers scooted over to make room for her.

Relieved, Ellie plopped down beside him. She would need more rest in order to have the energy for the next day’s trek—especially if their captors once more insisted on sticking her on a mule—but she couldn’t bring herself to go back into the stuffy atmosphere of the tent just yet. Sitting outside in the dark with Flowers was surprisingly agreeable. The big man wasn’t like the other guards Jacobs had hired for the expedition. If Ellie had to guess, Flowers had been picked out for the job purely on the basis of his size.

She could almost pretend that Flowers was there to guard her from things, rather than to hold her captive.

Someone flopped over in the hammock which hung nearest to them. His form was obscured by the pale fall of a mosquito net. A frustrated grunt from the vicinity sounded distinctly of Mendez.

“Bad dreams for you too, bali?” Flowers asked.

“None of your business,” Mendez retorted.

A scream broke the silence of the night.

Mendez shot upright in his hammock. Flowers rose instinctively, drawing the rifle into his arms. Ellie stood with him, grabbing the lantern as she rose. Her pulse jumped at the terrible urgency of the sound.

The scream came again, sounding from the shadowy trees to their left—and then stopped abruptly.

Too abruptly.

Ellie and Flowers exchanged a look.

“Don’t you two even think about it,” Mendez barked at the pair of them as he flailed to get out of his mosquito net.

“Stay here, Pepa,” Flowers ordered, and then ran into the darkness.

Ellie hesitated for only a breath before bolting after him, with Mendez’s curses echoing behind her.

The lantern provided her with a halo of golden illumination as she raced through the trees after Flowers. She could still clearly recall the direction from which the sound had come. The source of it could not be far.

Flowers slowed, holding the rifle ready in his hands. That in itself was unusual for Flowers, who usually treated the gun more like a casual accessory. He glanced over to Ellie as she arrived with the lantern. He shook his head in disapproval, but didn’t try to order her to go. Instead, he shifted the rifle to one hand and pulled his machete from its sheath.

The knife was a bit longer than Adam’s, and had obviously been well cared for… though it was not quite as nicely formed, in Ellie’s admittedly inexpert opinion.

“Know how to use this?” Flowers asked.

“Um…” Ellie eyed the enormous blade as she weighed her well-justified feelings of intimidation against a deep curiosity about what it would feel like to carry it. She extended her hand. “Yes.”

Flowers passed her the knife and steadied his grip on the gun, continuing quietly and carefully through the forest.

Ellie followed. The weight of the machete was strange in her hand. It was heavier than she’d thought it would be. How did Adam toss his own knife around so easily?

She considered what she’d seen of his well-muscled, constantly exposed forearms and supposed she had her answer.

Her companion stopped a few steps later. He tilted his head, carefully focused and listening. Ellie did the same, tuning her ears to the layered sounds of the night which surrounded them.

There weren’t many. The air had gone uncomfortably still. Not even the pines were whispering. There was only a very distant murmur of the water from the stream back at camp, and something else that just scratched at the corner of Ellie’s awareness. Her mind identified the sound a moment later—as a ragged, uneven breath.

Ellie whirled toward it. She pushed through some scrubby underbrush with her lantern held up before her.

The glow spilled across the source of the scream that had brought them there.

One of Jacobs’ guards lay spread-eagled on the ground, starkly revealed in the light of her lantern. His eyes were wide and white in his blood-splattered face as they stared blankly up at the motionless pine branches overheard.

Flowers muttered a curse and made a quick sign of the cross.

“Who is it?” Ellie asked, instinctively lowering her voice in the face of what lay before them.

“Rhynie,” Flowers said darkly. He picked up the man’s discarded rifle and swung it across his back.

There were wounds in both of Rhynie’s shoulders. The rents in the fabric of his shirt revealed the torn skin beneath… but it was the two puncture wounds in his forehead that had clearly been the reason he had stopped screaming.

The twin holes were each about an inch wide. They were terribly deep and red.

“What could possibly have done this?” Ellie whispered roughly as her stomach twisted.

The answer slid into her mind in an echo of Adam’s joking voice as he reported Padre Kuyoc’s words from the night before.

There are monsters there that bite people’s skulls.

The memory—coupled with the horror that lay before her—sparked a quick, cold fear.

But there is no such thing as monsters, Ellie reminded herself firmly.

“He didn’t shoot,” she pointed out, swallowing thickly.

The sound of a rifle discharge would certainly have been audible from where she and Flowers had been sitting.

“No,” Flowers agreed, scanning the darkness around them with his rifle ready in his hands. “He did not.”

Something whispered against the back of Ellie’s neck—an abrupt breeze which tickled the fine hairs there. A strange sound brushed at her ears from beyond the shadowy undergrowth behind her. It was a familiar sound, and yet so out of place that she struggled to fix it in her mind.

Her attempts to do so were quickly drowned out by the crashing, hurried arrival of more men from the camp.

Jacobs appeared first. He moved far more quickly and quietly than the companions who emerged from the shadows behind him. Ellie recognized Bones, the expedition foreman, with two more of the armed guards. Dawson trailed along at the rear, looking around himself nervously with his shoulders hunched.

The professor startled with a barely contained squeak as Adam stepped silently from the trees beside him.

Staines hurried in his wake, carrying his rifle in his hands.

“I told the bakra to stay in the camp, but he doesn’t listen to me,” Staines complained. “How do I know if I’m supposed to shoot him for that?”

Jacobs ignored him. His eyes flashed thoughtfully from Ellie and Flowers to the corpse.

“Coming through. ?Abran paso!” Velegas ordered. The tracker pushed past the two guards who had arrived with Jacobs and now gaped at their fallen colleague with drained faces.

Velegas knelt down at the dead man’s side. He whipped a clean handkerchief from his pocket and touched gently at the wounds.

“More light,” he ordered.

Ellie realized that she was the one with the lantern. She moved in closer, turning up the wick to provide him with more illumination.

Velegas frowned under his gray mustache.

“This was not a cat,” he concluded firmly.

“Then what the devil was it?” Dawson demanded. He was half-hiding behind Jacobs’ two nervous-looking guards.

“I cannot say,” Velegas concluded as he pulled aside the man’s shirt to study the wounds in his shoulders.

In the greater glow of the lamp, Ellie could see the injuries too. They looked as though they had been torn by thick claws.

A silence followed, heavy with unspoken dread. Jacobs broke it.

“Where is his partner?” He looked impatiently back at the blank stares that answered him. “These men patrol in pairs.”

Ellie thought of the odd sound she had heard a moment before. Following an uncomfortable instinct, she turned and pressed through the thick green leaves toward it.

In the clearing on the other side, another man lay on the ground. His face was gruesomely injured.

Blood soaked his shirt around another pair of those terrible puncture wounds which marked the center of his chest.

He blinked up at the intrusion of the light. His eyes rolled toward her as he took in another gurgling breath.

Adam moved quickly to the man’s side and dropped to his knees. He yanked his shirt over his head, stuffing it at the wounds on the victim’s chest.

Ellie swallowed thickly.

“I think he’s punctured a lung. I can…” Her voice caught. “I can hear it.”

Jacobs and the others joined them, forming a ragged circle around the fallen man—Ramos, Ellie thought as she looked down at him. She had heard someone in the camp call him Ramos.

His eyes fixed on Adam.

“Salió de… la noche,” he rasped. He blinked, and his eyes focused as though he was just realizing who he was speaking to. “Out of the night,” he repeated, choking the words out in English twisted by pain.

“What did?” Adam demanded, his voice low and urgent.

Ramos coughed. A spray of blood splattered across Adam’s chest and face. He flinched back from it as Ellie took a step forward, propelled by the need to help—to do something… even though it was abundantly clear that there was nothing any of them could do.

“El ángel de la muerte,” Ramos rasped.

The words ended on a desperate, choking pull for air. Ramos’s limbs twitched.

It looked as though he were drowning… and then it was over.

Adam reached down and gently closed the dead man’s eyes.

Dawson’s face glistened with nervous sweat in the lamplight.

“What did he say?” he demanded. “What did this?”

“He said it was the angel of death,” Adam replied.

He stood. His tanned chest was speckled with Ramos’s blood. His gaze locked onto Ellie across the fallen man’s body.

She could read the lines written in it clearly enough.

Escape might have been an option for them before—but not anymore. Not when something was hunting in this forest… something big enough to bring two armed men to the ground.

Something that looked very much to Ellie as though it had somehow attacked from above.

She thought of the odd noise she had heard a few moments before as an impossible breeze had brushed the back of her neck.

Wings, she realized with a distant and terrible shock. It had sounded very much like wings.