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Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1) Thirty-Five 78%
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Thirty-Five

There was a new scrape on Ellie’s cheek. Her hair was tumbling from the perpetually messy bun in which she kept it. The knife in her hand—Adam’s knife, he realized with a bolt of joy—was steady as a rock.

She looked gloriously furious.

Dawson removed his finger from the trigger of the rifle, making a clear and obvious show of it. He couldn’t see the blade that Ellie held to his throat, but he must have been able to feel it well enough to take it very, very seriously.

“Now place the weapon on the ground, please,” she ordered.

Dawson slowly moved to obey—with his eyes locked on Adam’s—and then tossed the gun over the side of the pyramid.

Adam instinctively dropped. The rifle hit the next tier of stones, and another shot cracked through the night, pinging off one of the carved archways.

Chips of debris peppered Adam’s arm.

He heard a distinct clatter as the rifle continued to tumble down the side of the pyramid before coming to rest somewhere in the shadows below.

“Of all the lunatic, irresponsible things to do…” Ellie raged.

“I couldn’t let him take it!” Dawson stammered wildly. “He would have killed me with it!”

“The hell I would have,” Adam shot back, still lying on the flat, safe-feeling stones. “There were four rounds in there, tops. I’ve got much better things to do with four rounds than waste one of them on you.”

The machete flashed as Ellie pulled it away from Dawson’s throat, and then set her boot to his rear end. She kicked, sending the professor sprawling down the top steps of the pyramid.

“Come on,” she urged as she grabbed Adam’s arm and hauled him up off the floor.

She tugged him toward the temple. Adam resisted, waving toward the place where the rifle had fallen.

“Four rounds!” he said urgently.

“No time!” she retorted and ducked behind the archway.

Another bullet pinged off the stones uncomfortably close to Adam’s head, as though to emphasize her point.

He lurched behind one of the columns, and then peered down at the foot of the pyramid. Jacobs stood a quarter of the way up the stairs, balancing another Enfield expertly on his shoulder as he took aim.

“Point taken,” Adam called over to where Ellie hid against the inner wall.

“You nearly hit me!” Dawson screamed at Jacobs from where he crouched abjectly on the stairs.

“I don’t think he cares,” Adam pointed out loudly, unable to resist.

A few steps farther down the pyramid, Staines shifted from cowering to bolting around the corner of the structure to get out of range.

Ellie darted from her cover. She grabbed Adam by the front of his shirt and yanked him into the temple. They raced into the inner chamber, where she slapped the machete into his hand.

Relief washed over him at the beautiful sensation of having his knife back where it belonged.

“Did somebody break that?” Ellie blazed.

The outrage in her voice snapped Adam out of it. She was glaring down at the shattered jade mask on the floor, where it had fallen when Adam threw Dawson into the shelf.

“Uh—let’s worry about that later. How are we going to get out of here?” Adam demanded.

“The same way I came in,” Ellie replied. She pointed to one of the narrow windows. “Out the back—but Bates…” She caught his sleeve and held him back. “Padre Kuyoc is here. I don’t know how—or why—but Jacobs has him. It sounded like Kuyoc might be trying to help them. But why would he do that?”

Adam’s gut lurched with unpleasant surprise.

“Live first. Deal with the crazy priest later,” he declared.

Angry voices echoed up from the front of the pyramid. Jacobs barked at people, cold and authoritative, while Dawson complained loudly in between his commands.

Adam yanked Ellie to the window. “Lead the way, Princess,” he ordered.

Ellie scrambled onto the ledge, slid through the opening, and lowered herself down awkwardly until she dropped from view.

Adam followed, turning sideways to squeeze himself through the narrow gap in the stones. It was just wide enough to accommodate his chest.

Good thing he hadn’t been able to carry more of Cruzita’s tamales.

The drop from the window to the nearest tier of the pyramid was about six feet. Adam managed it easily.

The mountain rose up before him, cloaked in long, deep shadows. There were no stairs on this side of the structure—only the enormous tiers. Each rose perhaps seven feet from its base… or was it further?

It looked further, Adam thought as he wobbled dangerously and abruptly sat down.

Ellie scrambled ahead of him like a cat, shimmying over the side of each layer until she could let go and safely drop.

“Are you coming?” she demanded from a few tiers below him.

“The rocks aren’t moving,” Adam muttered to himself. “It only feels like they’re moving.”

“Bates!” she called impatiently.

Adam forced himself into motion, sliding to the edge of the tier and dropping over it.

His body accomplished the move gracefully. It seemed to know what to do even as Adam’s thoughts were consumed by something like a silent, high-pitched wail of protest.

It got easier as the ground got closer. He even managed to pull ahead of Ellie. At last, he cleared the final tier, landed solidly, and turned around to extend his arms.

“Come on. I’ll catch you,” he offered, mustering up a bit of his signature charm.

“I am entirely capable of—”

Another bullet snapped off the stone nearby. Adam’s gaze shot up to see Jacobs’ dark silhouette emerge from the window of the temple.

“Drat,” Ellie declared—and jumped.

Adam caught her with a grunt and nearly lost his footing. He pulled both of them up against the base of the pyramid, pressing closer for cover.

“Now what?” Ellie demanded.

Thunder cracked overheard. A damp gust of wind blew against Adam’s neck. Ellie flinched in his grip as another bullet cracked somewhere nearby.

“How about we get the hell out of here?” he suggested.

He grabbed her arm, swung her in front of him, and pushed her into a run.

They plunged into the deeper shadows of the brush, sprinting blindly through the gloom as more bullets snapped down at them from above. Ellie flashed a narrow-eyed glare back at him as she ran.

“Why are you behind me?” she demanded as she caught herself against a stumble.

“Does it matter?” Adam shot back, flinching as another bullet cracked off a tree trunk beside him.

“It had better not be out of some misguided, chauvinistic attempt to use your person to shield me from the bullets!” Ellie pitched the words back at him as she bolted across the tumbled stones, her boots skidding for purchase.

“Can we worry about this later?” Adam retorted as he caught her arm and steered her around the obstacle of a fallen wall. He yanked her down into a crouch behind the crumbling barrier as another quick cluster of gunshots flashed at them from behind.

“They are shooting at the structures!” Ellie protested. Outrage strangled her voice.

“They’re shooting at us,” Adam countered as he made a quick, sharp study of what lay around them. “They’ve come from around the front of the pyramid as well. Jacobs must have ordered them to try to flank us.”

“Well? What does that mean?”

The sun had already dipped below the mountains. It would set soon, sinking the entire place into complete darkness rather than the shadow-swathed gloom in which they currently hid.

Another scattering of gunshots splintered the tree trunks to Adam’s right. To his left rose the mountain. The face of it was far too steep for them to climb in the dark without equipment.

“It means we’re going straight,” he concluded and tugged Ellie into another sprint along the crumbling path.

They dodged through the slender trees as more shots rang out behind them. Adam heard pounding footsteps and calling voices as Jacobs and his minions coordinated their chase.

The road ended at a broad stairwell, which led down to a long, overgrown rectangle of ground framed by massive, sloped tiers of stone.

“It’s a ball court,” Ellie said. Her voice managed to mingle both urgency and wonder.

At the far end of the structure was a circular annex framed by more stone tiers. It looked almost like an amphitheater. Beyond that loomed the dark shadow of a thicker, wilder forest—a forest they could easily lose themselves in.

“Let’s cut through,” Adam ordered.

Ellie gave him a tight nod, and they hurried down the tumbled steps.

The tangled brush that grew on the old game field was thick and tall. It provided them with a modicum of cover. Adam shoved through it quickly, heedless of the thorns that scratched at his arms. Speed was what mattered now. No amount of foliage would save him from a bullet in the head if their pursuers managed to catch up from behind them.

The thicket ended, and Adam stumbled onto a paved court that surrounded a big, black hole in the ground.

It was the amphitheater he’d seen from above. The tiers of seats circled the dark gap. The space looked as though it had been deliberately constructed to frame the opening.

Probably another sinkhole, Adam thought.

They would need to skirt it. He picked a side and tugged Ellie with him. He kept his eyes on their goal—the darkly promising trees that rose on the far side of the seats, rustling with the uneasy wind.

A dark silhouette rose from behind the time-stained stones. Jacobs stepped into view and leveled his rifle neatly at Adam.

“Best step back down now,” he ordered calmly.

Adam whirled to see Mendez, Pickett, Buller, and Price burst from the tangled growth of the ball court. The four guards quickly took up positions around the amphitheater, blocking any other possible route of escape.

Dawson jogged out a few minutes later, red-faced and breathing heavily. He carried a lantern. The light of it illuminated just how much trouble Adam and Ellie were in.

Adam tried to calculate the odds of getting both himself and Ellie out of this without getting shot.

They weren’t good.

Hands raised, Adam stepped back down to the ring of ground that encircled the sinkhole. Ellie inched right up to the edge of the pit as though trying to put as much distance between herself and Jacobs as she could.

Adam considered joining her there… and immediately felt dizzy. He reminded himself that it was dark. The hole might not even be all that deep.

His guts remained unconvinced.

Ellie’s boot scraped against a few pebbles and tipped them over the edge. Three seconds later, Adam heard the soft plonk of a splash.

An idea snapped into place inside his mind.

It was a very, very bad idea.

“Excellent work, Mr. Jacobs,” Dawson called out, still huffing with exertion. “Now perhaps we might take a moment… Come to some sort of… agreement…”

“Take a breath,” Adam said quietly.

“Why?” Ellie demanded, startling.

“Because I’m about to do something stupid.”

“Shoot them,” Jacobs ordered.

Adam yanked Ellie into his arms and threw himself backwards—over the edge and into the pit.

They plummeted through a terrifying darkness as gunshots cracked overhead. Then Adam hit cold water with a painful, skin-stinging slap.

He let it take him, still clutching Ellie to his chest. Their momentum broke, gentling to a drift just as his back came up against rubble. Adam shifted, circling one arm around Ellie’s waist as he used the other to reorient himself in the water. He pushed his boots against the tumbling, uneven ground and thrust himself up to the surface.

They broke into the air. The darkness around them was nearly complete. Adam could barely make out the shape of Ellie’s face as she gasped in a breath and then shoved back from him, water streaking down from the plastered locks of her hair.

He made a hurried study of their surroundings—or what he could see of them in the thickly shadowed gloom. Stone walls rose in a slick, concave curve roughly twenty feet overhead to the gap that had made up the center of the amphitheater. The opening framed a neat circle of roiling, lightning-haunted clouds.

It was a cenote, Adam thought to himself as he recognized the pattern. He had thrown them into a cenote—a natural well created by the long-ago disintegration of some ancient cave.

Lantern light spilled into the opening, illuminating the slick, glistening sides of the well.

Jacobs looked down at them from the edge.

“Finish them off,” he ordered.

Pickett appeared, his pale eyes bulging down at them. He was joined by Buller and Price a moment later.

“Get ready,” Adam ordered Ellie urgently—and then shoved her into the water.

He dove with her, pushing her down even as she struggled against him. He pulled with his free arm, dragging them deeper as low, muffled drumbeats thrummed against his ears—the impact of gunshots distorted by the water.

Something stung against his bicep. Adam ignored it, continuing to swim until he came up against the smooth expanse of a wall. He held Ellie there as she flailed at his face until his own lungs started to burn.

He pushed up gently against the rocky base of the pool, following the slick shape of the wall as he broke the surface.

It was shallower here at the edges of the well. With his boots planted on the ground, the water lapped at Adam’s chest.

He tugged Ellie closer as she hauled in a breath, covered her lips with his hand, and set his mouth to her ear.

“Quiet,” he breathed.

She nodded. He could feel the way her heart was pounding.

He let his hand fall away but didn’t let her go—not yet. Ellie wouldn’t like being restrained, but she tolerated it for now—for which Adam was deeply, silently grateful. He wasn’t ready to release her… not when the threat still loomed above them.

“Give me the bone.” Jacobs’ voice echoed down coldly from above.

“One more time,” Adam whispered.

Ellie nodded, her face a paler oval against the gloom.

Light flared to life above them. It was far brighter than the lantern had been, like a thousand candles blazing with sudden and impossible intensity.

Ellie’s eyes widened with shock, but at Adam’s tug, she sank, dropping down to hover just below the surface.

Through the wavering distortion of the water, Adam saw the light grow brighter—and knew that Jacobs was holding the firebird arcanum over the mouth of the cenote.

Even through the water, the glare radiated fiercely. Adam could see the wondering question in Ellie’s gaze as she whipped her head around to look at him.

The light dimmed, flickered, and then went out. The cenote dropped back into a darkness that felt absolute by comparison.

Adam drew his head back out of the water, careful to stay silent. Ellie did the same beside him.

As his eyes slowly readjusted to the gloom, Jacobs’ voice carried down from above.

“If they are still alive, they will not be able to climb out,” he declared flatly. “Let them drown or starve. Either way, they’re no trouble to us any longer.”

His footsteps crunched against the stones as he moved away.

The others followed. Only one silhouette moved closer—it was Mendez, hesitating at the edge of the well. At a barked order, he hurried after the others, leaving Adam and Ellie alone in the dark.

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