Buried Secrets (24 page)

He didn't insult her by asking if she was okay. He could only trust she was strong enough to get over it. “You aren't gonna pass out like in the Lincoln Tunnel, are you?”

She pointed deeper into the cave, where he heard sandy shuffling. “Not with the welcoming committee there.”

“By the way,” he said. “I love you.”

Since it couldn't hurt to have it on record.

Then, while she stared at him, he turned to face down more of the sand-bodied ghosts of college students whom the Life Force Club had been seducing for at least five years. Zack and Cecil had collected information on eight students whose deaths, and disappearances, seemed directly connected. They'd suspected at least seven more, without the information to confirm anything.

Zack lost count of the people now coming at them—people he and then Jo were knocking back into piles of fallen sand with every kick and swing. One dozen. Two dozen. So many that, even slow, some of them did hit. A rock to the ribs hurt. A lucky strike at his head hurt more. He heard Jo cry out once, though she didn't go down. Sticks and stones, even in ghostly hands, made pretty damned good weapons. The ghosts themselves still dissolved to dirt at the first return shot. But they kept coming.

What the hell
was
this?

Only when Gabriella came at him again, then dissolved again, did Zack understand—and remember to switch his radio back on.

“—
don't answer
in the
next
minute, I'm coming
after you!
” Cecil was all but screaming from his side of the connection, loud enough that it hurt Zack's ear.

“Do and I'll kill you myself,” Zack warned. “We're okay—”

Then he picked up a dusty branch and took out the letterman kid. Again.

“The missing kids—not the evil ones, the ones from the Life
Force—they're running interference. They keep turning into sand, then coming— Hey!”

Luckily, Jo ducked the rock one of the sand-boys swung at her. She kicked, hard. The kid hung for a moment, then filtered into mere dirt. The sand didn't blow away in here; it collected in small, sad piles that rasped under Zack's hiking boots.

“—coming back. Probably made out of different dirt each time. They aren't real good fighters,” he added, poking an annoying, nerdy-looking form in the chest before it could hit him with its rock. It dissolved.

Cecil said, “They're probably a delay tactic. You need to get through them.”

“Gee, ya think? Thanks—” he jumped back when a cheerleader type almost beaned him “—Sherlock.”

“Ashley suggests telling them they're dead.”

Now Jo's voice came over the line; she must have turned her radio back on, too. “You don't think they
noticed?
”

Zack grinned. Damn, he loved her.

“She says magic can be pretty literal, sometimes,” Cecil insisted. “Can it hurt to try?”

Another line of students in funeral clothes headed for them, their faces increasingly familiar. Zack drew a deep, pained breath when he recognized Gabriella again, there on the end.

It should be easier now. He'd taken her out what, twice in the last ten minutes? But it just got worse.

Luckily, Jo spoke before he had to. “You're dead, you know,” she said firmly, convincingly, to the advancing crowd. She did have a talent for sounding earnest and convincing. “You are all dead. You need to stop fighting us—”

Suddenly she was talking to nothing but a sandy cave floor.

“—now,” she finished, more softly.

Without the shuffling dead between them, they now heard the foreign, singsong words being chanted from deeper inside the cave. Lots of consonants.
K
s and
T
s.

“Can you hear that?” Zack whispered to Cecil. “There's some kind of torches or candles farther in, and someone's chanting. It's a guy, so I guess that clears the
Bruja
and Angelique.”

“It's not Spanish, either,” added Jo. “So it's probably not the
Santero
.”

Cecil, over the radio, said, “I'm sorry, I can't hear.”

So they headed deeper in, walking through the students' sandy remains, because they were dead, but he and Jo weren't.

The chanting grew louder, the closer they crept—and then the static started in his ear. “—op!” Crackle. “Losi—ou—”

Zack and Jo touched gazes and backed up until Cecil was just saying, “I'm losing you,” with only a few crackles.

“So you'll lose us,” Zack said. They couldn't stop now.

“Wait a moment,” insisted Cecil firmly. “I think it's Egyptian. I'm not sure, since the vowels are really anyone's guesswork, historically speaking, but it's our best guess.”

Egyptian?

“Sirus,” spat Zack. “The freakin' pet undertaker.”

The fact that he'd never seriously considered the guy pissed him off almost as much as whatever the man was in there doing.

“Egyptian,” Jo said, slowly. “Which means we may not be dealing with zombies at all.”

“No,” said Cecil, his voice increasingly unhappy. “I fear you may be dealing with mummies.”

Every time Zack thought he'd hit his weirdness quota…!

“So how do you kill mummies?” he demanded.

“Considering that the only reanimated ones I've ever known of are in the movies, Zack, I'm afraid I don't know.” Cecil sounded tense. “But what I
am
fairly certain of is that Egyptians achieved immortality
after
their death, not
before
it.”

“Which means?” Zack demanded.

“Now that he has his dead helpers—probably some sort of entourage into the underworld—he may be about to kill himself.”

Well, wouldn't
that
be convenient? “Good!”

“At which point, if his spell works, he may remain immortal and indestructible.”

Oh. “Not so good.”

“Ashley says that kind of magic takes incredible power,” said Cecil. “If you can't stop the spell, destroy the power source. But we highly recommend stopping the spell.”

“We've got to go now.” And Jo started deeper into the cave. She still looked wan, shaken. The claustrophobia was still hurting her, but damned if she wasn't working through it.

“Check in as soon as you—” pleaded Cecil, but Zack turned his headset off to follow Jo. Yeah, he loved her enough to let her die, if she had to.

That didn't mean he was gonna let her go first.

As they crept deeper into the cave, the darkness curled around them like a living thing, thick and depthless. If not for the flickering of firelight, far ahead, it might swallow them alive. Instead, as they ventured deeper, he was able to make out drawings on the walls. Hieroglyphics, right? The chanting grew louder. A sharp incense began to surround them—

And then he and Jo reached a rocky outcropping and were able to peek around the edge of it, into a larger chamber.

A velvet-draped object, flat and square, stood to the west. A huge, symbol-painted urn squatted in the east. Six bandage-wrapped bodies were laid out on the ground like a gruesome, synchronized-swimmers' choreography to form a star of mummies. And Sirus, the shopkeeper who'd seemed so strange all along, knelt in the middle of them.

All of this, Zack saw in an instant—just as Sirus fell onto some kind of ceremonial sword.

 

Jo drew her revolver and fired in unison with Zack. Once. Twice. No more waffling about the ethics of killing—this whole thing was way beyond the scope of the justice system! But unless they'd both suddenly become terrible shots, they were too late.

Sirus looked up at them, his bald head and paunchy body catching the firelight, his eyes kohled like Cleopatra's—and he smiled, because his magic had worked.
Immortal. Indestructible.

At least she wasn't noticing the cave as much.

The priest pulled the sword from his chest, with a sucking sound. He gripped its hilt as he stood, and
this
was magic the way Jo had always pictured it. Not just that hides-in-reality business Ashley and Zack kept describing. Not even the ghosts, which could have been phantoms of her mind as well as of sand.

This was flat-out supernatural
power.
So either Jo really wasn't crazy, or she was beyond help.

And what the
hell
did Zack mean, saying he loved her
now?

No—she filed that particular gripe away for a moment when they weren't facing down a now-indestructible necromancer in a rocky tomb of a deep, dark cave. Instead, she turned and shot one of the mummies. “Cecil said to destroy his power source!”

Zack shot another one of them.

Jo shot another. But Sirus just laughed—and came at them, raising his sword. “My associates
are
dead,” he chided him. “You cannot kill something already dead.”

“You're dead too,” Jo reminded him firmly, putting all her power into the words. And her words did have power. She'd
felt
it, when she spoke to the sand zombies. Unfortunately, unlike them, Sirus just kept coming.

Zack shot the priest, just for sheer cussedness, but it did no good. Sirus's body seemed to absorb the bullets.

“No, Ms. James,” he corrected her, lifting the sword higher. Blood laced across its blade. “I did not die. I killed myself, but clearly I did not die. Now I never will.”

“We'll see about that.” But Jo began to sidle away from this madman. Zack headed the opposite direction, probably so Sirus couldn't come at both of them at once.

Sirus chose to come at her. He came slowly, deliberately, like he had all day. Being immortal, maybe he did.

“Hey,” yelled Zack. “Cueball! Over here!”

Sirus smiled. “I've already captured from my mummified acolytes what I most needed,” he explained. “Their
Ba.
Their
Ka.
Their
Khaibit.
And mostly, mostly their
Akhu,
their immortality. Now the power of their evil fills and protects me.”

What can best fight evil?

Jo saw Zack slowly approaching Sirus from behind. He had one of the clubs they'd taken from a sand-guard. He swung with all his protective power—power she realized she'd felt in him from the start—and the branch connected in an ugly, hollow thud.

Good
can fight evil.

Sirus's head lopped sideways under the blow. But somehow
he then turned—and with one foot, kicked Zack back across the cave.

Zack stumbled, almost fell, but grabbed on to the cloth-draped square. Velvet slid sideways, but he kept his feet.

Sirus used his beringed, braceleted hands to straighten his head with a popping, wet sound—and Jo, the closest to him, thought she'd throw up.

“The
Akhu,
that's the most powerful part for my purposes,” he told her, as if nothing had happened. He was certainly chatty.
Must be lonely, being an evil necromancer,
she thought.

“True, I needed the help of Vodoun to call my servants to me, but there is a power of darkness in Voudun, too. And Quimbanda. And Satanism. All for the taking, if one knows where to look.”

He did not seem to notice Zack heading for the huge pot.

The power source?
Please let it be the power source!

Jo tried very hard not to look, lest she give him away.

Sirus said, “Once my servants were here, the ancient secrets of mummification allowed me to—”

Zack gave the jar a hard shove. It tottered—then went over with a crash that echoed almost painfully from the cavern walls. Cracks zig-zagged across its painted surface, but it did not actually break open.

Please,
thought Jo, still backing up.
Please.

Zack stood back, swore, and shot the thing for good measure.

The jar wasn't indestructible or immortal. With a gray cloud of dust, it shattered to the cave floor—and along with it, hopefully, did Sirus's immortality. Soft dirt slid from between jagged chunks of pottery. When Zack kicked the shards farther apart, to disperse its power further, more dirt spilled out.

“See anything familiar?” asked Sirus, glancing coolly over his shoulder. “Your wife's ashes are among those.”

Zack stopped still.

That's when Jo truly knew hate—and a grimmer determination than ever.
Sirus is bluffing. That was his source of power.

“Only her ashes, though,” continued Sirus. “I am the one who holds her soul. And I will never—”

Which is when Jo stepped forward, thrust her revolver's muzzle under his smooth-shaven chin and fired upwards.

The impact tore a hole through the back of his head. She hoped never to see something like that, this closely, ever again—but it was exactly what she'd wanted.

Then, in a flash, Sirus had not only slapped the revolver from Jo's hand, he'd slashed downward with his ceremonial sword.

The urn had not been the power source after all.

Jo threw herself back from him, from the flashing blade, her cry echoing off cave walls. The way she fell awkwardly, at the last minute, made her think she'd tripped. But at least the priest seemed to have missed her.

Then she heard Zack scream, “Jo!”

And she saw the blood spattered across the rock floor beside her.

G
abriella's ashes. Jo's blood.

Despite years of searching, Zack had new priorities.

“Jo!” He'd aimed his pistol as the priest's blade sliced a dark line of blood across her leg. Now Zack fired while she fell. Once. Twice. Again.

Sirus absorbed the shots. The gaping hole Jo had blown through the back of his bald head knitted closed.

Immortality was freakin'
gross.

Even crawling away, Jo asked, “Then you
did
steal their bodies?” Her glare at Zack said,
Keep him talking!

Trust Jo to try calming the situation, even while crabbing backwards. Not only was their necromancer chatting like a geek with his first girl, giving them information to use later—

—if they survived—

—but his explanations helped them stall for time.

Jo left a bloody smear where she dragged her leg behind her; did she
have
time? Zack hated not being able to help her or even, apparently, stop Sirus. But he could see this through.

“Sirus couldn't have stolen
all
the bodies,” he challenged
quickly, and eyed the ashes spilling in dusty clouds from the urn. Human ashes.
Gabriella's?
“There were too many.”

Zack began to back toward what slipping velvet now revealed to be some kind of…picture frame?
Something
in this damned cave had to be Sirus's source of power!

“I
had
them stolen,” the priest agreed. “You white-light types underestimate the darkness that is rising in this world, underestimate how many fools blindly pledge their souls without checking the fine print. I needed young people for their energy, their ambition—their life forces. Assistants would nudge death along for likely candidates, then steal the bodies under the cover of magic. As you've surely noticed since I tried shooting you, magic is useful for masking one's trail
and if you go any farther, I
will
kill her!
”

Zack froze, barely four feet from the velvet-covered frame.

The good news was, from the way Sirus's heavily lined eyes had widened, burning at him, the frame
had
to be a power source.

The bad news was, Sirus still held his bloody sword.

Beyond him, Zack saw Jo pulling herself to her feet—and drawing Cecil's machete. “He'll
try,
” she said grimly. “Do it!”

So Zack turned, lunged for the frame, and yanked the velvet the rest of the way off to reveal—

A mirror.

A huge, black mirror.

Zack's heart clutched with strange and familiar horror. He took an instinctive step backward, sand and ashes gritty beneath his shoe. His pulse throbbed in his ears. His throat closed.

The mirror was as black as a window at night. And in its reflective surface writhed the faces of the innocent souls whom the priest had imprisoned over the years. Faces of pain. Faces of longing. Faces of despair.

Zack's priests sometimes tried to describe the worst punishment in Hell as despair—a separation from Nature, from God Himself. He'd never fully bought it until now, and knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Even before Gabriella's image glided into the forefront of the dark mirror's surface, her pretty face wet with tears.

She pressed her left hand, her ring hand, against that glass, as if only that stood between their worlds. Maybe every reflective nighttime window had drawn them this close since the moment of her death—her capture. Maybe on some level Zack had been seeing her in the dark glass, knowing his helplessness, remembering his guilt, over and over. That had been
his
hell.

Behind him, he heard a roar of male anger—and the clash of blade against blade. Jo yelled, “Break it!”

Zack wanted to touch the glass over Gabriella's fingers, so lifelike. His heart would always remember her. But she really was dead. By keeping secrets, she'd kept him from protecting her. He was only allowed so much say in other people's decisions, even people he loved. Jo had taught him that.

It was time to move on.

The farewell rasped out of him. “I'm sorry for taking so long,
cara.
”

Gabriella's dark, dark eyes seemed to understand.

And Zack stepped back and shot the glass.

It didn't break.

“What?”
he demanded, stunned. He shot it again—with the same results. Why the hell didn't it break? Was it a Nature thing? Since this was ancient Egyptian magic, did firearms have no effect? Quickly, Zack grabbed a rock and slammed it against the mirror's glassy surface with all his strength.

Gabriella, inches and worlds beyond him, did not flinch.

The impact jolted Zack's arm—but the glass remained whole. And Gabriella hid her face in her hands, despairing again.

What the hell? Zack spun to face the cave to see that Sirus had stopped trying to kill Jo long enough to stare, frightened and increasingly pleased.

The fright told Zack that the mirror, with its trapped souls, really
was
the priest's power source.

The pleasure—that was probably a bad, bad sign.

“What did you do?” Zack demanded while Jo, momentarily unnoticed, began to hobble along the wall behind Sirus, toward Zack. The leg of her jeans was dark with blood now, spreading down below the knee. How much longer could she stay conscious—or alive? “How did you trap them?”

“With magics you could never comprehend,” Sirus assured him condescendingly. “I used evil.”

But good was supposed to counter evil. Simplistic though it seemed, Zack knew now that he believed it completely. As surely as he believed that pizza was the perfect food, that there was a God and that he loved Jo James with all his body and soul.

That last thought somehow made sense of everything else.

“You used more,” Zack challenged, carefully not watching Jo, trying to keep Sirus's attention off of her—and on him. “Something you thought was even greater than evil, didn't you?”

Just to be on the safe side, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a replacement clip for his automatic.

Sirus shook his head at Zack's seemingly futile exchange of ammunition. “Perhaps not greater. But powerful enough.”

“The ingredient you needed off of those mummies of yours.”

“And it cannot be stopped,” Sirus agreed.

Jo limped closer, her poor leg leaving intermittent smears along the cave wall in the flickering firelight.
Come on, Jo!

“Hatred,” Zack clarified.

Sirus nodded. “Hatred.”

But any fool—except those blinded by hate—knew what best countered that. Love.

Zack had always thought that meant loving the asshole who hated you—that's how Catechism class had presented it. Without the word “asshole,” anyway. If that was the case now, he guessed they were screwed, 'cause he could never love this bastard. But maybe the secret was more obvious than that.

He sensed Gabriella, in limbo behind him—and Jo, ever closer. Magic could be damned literal, sometimes.

Maybe it meant him and—

As if alerted by Zack's thought, Sirus suddenly whirled to find Jo. His lined eyes narrowed at the bloody trail across the wall to where she'd gotten within maybe fifteen feet of Zack.

Fifteen long feet, and her barely able to hobble.

“Stop!” commanded the priest, raising his sword.

But when Zack shot him, even with an indestructible, im
mortal body, the man was still knocked backward a half step. That was the beauty of hollow-point bullets. Stopping power.

Jo limped closer. Zack shot Sirus again, then again. At best, Sirus managed one step forward between each shot. When Jo crumpled to the ground with a gasp, still too damn far, Zack ran for her, caught her hand, and pulled her not just to her feet but the rest of the way to the mirror—still shooting.

She didn't cry out. Zack wasn't sure he could have done it even to save the world, if she'd cried out.

“What best counters hate,” she gasped instead, proving that she understood too. She kneeled to scoop up a rock, then stayed down. “The reason we have to do this together.”

“Yeah,” said Zack, and fired again. Despite being repeatedly knocked back, Sirus
was
inching nearer.

Then Zack's pistol clicked, empty and useless.

Sirus laughed his triumph, sandaled feet slapping the floor as he rushed them. Zack dropped between Jo and the priest, and caught her small, strong hand in his. They both understood.

“I love you too,” she said—and together, they swung.

 

Jo barely had time to hear the glass breaking before Zack pushed her onto the stone floor and covered her with his body—and a good thing! From beneath him, she saw the river of power that exploded from the mirror. What must be souls poured out, a current of faces and forms reflecting off jagged shards of glass, all aimed in one direction.

Sirus.

The priest screamed and tried to cover his face, dropping his sword, but it did him no good. The glass debris cut through him like shrapnel, each wound accompanied by a silent sigh from each spirit he'd enslaved. For a moment it felt unending, like the rapid-fire finale to a bloody fireworks show.

Then the necromancer's scream drowned into a gurgle of blood and he fell, shards covering him like shiny, jagged fur. Dead. And the river of souls, finally freed from their prison, flashed around the room, free, at last, to go.

They dispersed into the far corners of the cave's rock walls, some toward the sky, some into the ground, some rushing out
the way Jo and Zack had come in. Going wherever souls should go. Because they did have to go, in the end.

It really
was
the way life worked.

And finally, there was silence.

The cave no longer smelled of magic or evil. Only lingering incense. Only rock. Only blood. Then, from dark cracks and crevices, snakes began to flow out.

“Oh, crap,” muttered Zack.

But Jo thought she understood. “They're going home too,” she suggested. And sure enough, no longer attracted or upset by the immortality magic, the sleek reptiles slithered away.

She let out her breath, barely aware she'd been holding it until her head swam from the effort. “Oh…”

“Jo!” Zack sat up, then sat her forcibly up like some really big doll to be positioned. He grabbed the edges of her cut jeans and tore them wider, to better see the wound beneath. Despite his decent poker face, his eyes flared. “Oh, hell.”

Jo's head swam more when she looked—too much exposed muscle, too much shiny blood, a little too real, thanks—so she closed her eyes. “It doesn't really hurt,” she insisted.

But now that Sirus lay dead, and she had time to notice, it
was
starting to hurt, to throb and burn the way deep cuts could.

“Hardly,” she added, not too convincingly.

“We're getting you out of here,” said Zack—and when she heard a ripping noise, she looked anyway. He was tearing off strips of his shirt to tie as a tourniquet. Then he folded another hunk of shirt into a bandage, pressed it onto the wound, and said, “Put pressure here.”

The sort of man who either made a woman feel threatened, or wholly safe.
In the sudden absence of evil, Jo had never felt so safe. Good thing Zack was an ex-cop, and knew first aid.

Good thing he was a big man, with a lot of shirt.

Still… “We can't go yet,” she reminded him, taking regular breaths. It got easier, with him here. “Unless there's a clean-up squad you haven't mentioned.”

So he picked her up and carried her to the edge of the main cavern, then settled her carefully against a rock. Jo almost protested, but she felt woozy enough that she reconsidered. Zack
had enough strength for them both, just now. And she loved him. Why
not
let him support her a little? Still light-headed, practicing her breathing, she watched as he strode partway down the rough-hewn corridor to where the two-way radios would work, then barked orders for Cecil and Ashley into his headset. Pure Zack.

Her heart had ached at his visible longing when he stood in front of that mirror, staring at his wife. It was better proof of his capacity to love than anything she'd seen yet, and she'd seen a lot. More than enough. She loved him.

Maybe it's too soon,
she thought, and selfishly, the ache deepened. But when Zack came back and sat beside her, his arms sliding around her, the longing was still visible.
For her.

“They'll be here in a minute,” he assured her. “Apparently the storm ended right about the time everything else did. Just hold on a few minutes longer, got it?”

“I'll hold on longer than that,” she promised.

He grinned, wide and handsome. “You'd better.”

There he went, telling her what to do again. Increasingly comfortable in the circle of his arms, she had the strength to lightly punch his shoulder.
“‘By the way, I love you?'”

Zack actually had the nerve to look confused. “What?”

“You wait until we might
die
to tell me you love me?”

“I wanted—” But he stopped, scowled and changed his mind. “What, wasn't it romantic enough?”

Like packaging mattered. “I want you to love me
alive.
”

Instead of arguing, Zack tipped his head closer, rested his forehead against hers. “I do,” he assured her, his voice an intimate rumble that eased through her, better than painkillers. “Love you. Alive. Every tough, nail-chewing inch of you.”

I don't chew my nails.
Then she realized what he meant.

“Well, good,” she said, appeased. “Because I love you too.”

Enough to let him take care of her. Enough to let him risk himself for her. Enough to stake her own wounded heart on that risk. Zack—and what she and Zack had between them—was worth any danger, any vulnerability.