Fountain of Secrets (The Relic Seekers) (11 page)

“We’re all pale,” Jake said. “It’s black as Hades in here.”

“I’m fine,” Kendall said. “Let’s go.” She wasn’t fine, but there was something hostile about this place, as if it didn’t want them here. She was happy to oblige.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I don’t like the feel of this place.”

Nathan and Jake each linked an arm through Kendall’s and they started walking, continuing to keep an eye out for that sinister shadow. Her mind felt a little less foggy as she moved away from the place where she had encountered it. “How did you find me?”

“We followed you through the maze,” Jake said. “We must be underneath it. We gotta be getting close to the catacombs. I can hear the statues.”

“I hope they don’t work underground,” Kendall said. “We don’t have the crosses.”

Nathan let go of her arm and reached into his pocket. “Here.” He pulled something out and slipped it over her head. A cross.

“Busted,” Jake said. “We found them in your room.”

Kendall felt the comforting weight against her chest. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take them without asking. I saw them in your study and picked them up. When I thought you were choking in your bedroom, I shoved them in my pocket and forgot about them.”

Jake made a rumbling noise that could have been either a grunt or his stomach complaining.

“It’s a good thing you brought them,” Nathan said. “I didn’t think about it.”

“You were
preoccupied
with your guest,” Jake said.

Guest? Kendall would have asked what he meant, but she was too focused on staying awake.

It didn’t take long until Kendall was slowing down and Nathan and Jake were using more of their own strength to drag her. Her head had cleared some, but her body was still weak. “I’m sorry, but I have to stop. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“We’ll carry you,” Jake said. “We can’t stop if that thing is in here.”

They were tired too. Their steps had slowed. “It’s gone now,” she said. “I can feel that it’s not here.”

“You’re sure?” Nathan asked.

“Yes. It was probably just a ghost.”

“Then let’s rest,” Jake said. “You’ve had a hell of a night, and I feel like shit.”

Using her light, she chose the least dirty spot. “How about here?”

“Dry, no bat droppings,” Nathan said. “Looks good to me.”

“Turns out our rich boss has a lot of experience with bat shit,” Jake said. “Says he could write a book on it.”

Nathan might wear suits and have loads of money, but he was no pansy. Still, she hadn’t pictured him crawling around places where there were bats, like Adam had. She sat down while Jake and Nathan inspected the area around them. “How long have you been searching for me?”

“A couple of hours,” Nathan said.

“Are you sure? I left the castle less than an hour ago.”

“You must have blacked out longer than you thought,” Jake said.

“It felt like just a few minutes,” Kendall said. “I went to the graveyard first, then the maze. What time is it?”

Jake looked at his watch and frowned. “It’s not working.”

Nathan held up his wrist. “Neither is mine. That’s bloody strange.”

“Is there anything about this castle that isn’t?” Jake murmured.

“Must be something to do with the statues,” Nathan added.

But that didn’t happen before, Kendall thought with a sense of foreboding.

“Did you sleep at all before you went chasing ghosts?” Jake asked.

“Not much.” Kendall felt awkward thinking about what had happened before Jake left the tower room. If he hadn’t held back, none of them would be here now. She would probably be lying in bed with him instead of lost in a cave. She should have insisted. She was getting sick of secret caves and tunnels.

Nathan started walking back the way they’d come.

“Where you going?” Jake asked.

“Bathroom.”

“I miss the garderobe,” she said.

“I miss food and water.” Jake squatted beside her and turned over her wrist. “We need to get this fixed. Don’t want it getting infected.” His touch was warm, and she thought again how close they’d come to making love. Was it always going to be this dance? One of them darting in, the other pulling back? Nathan was back in moments, distracting her train of thought.

“Do you need to go?” Jake asked Kendall.

Was he going to escort her? “No, I’m fine.”

“My turn then,” he said.

They were babysitting her. As she had so many times in the past week, she felt both grateful and irritated. If she weren’t so tired, she’d remind them that she’d probably had more experience in caves than both of them combined, but she was ready to drop from exhaustion. She wondered if the shadow hovering over her had done something to her mind. It was probably just a vision. Intense visions drained her. But even seeing her mother and father hadn’t made her feel this bad afterward. And Jake and Nathan were also tired. Was the cave itself draining their energy?

“How’s your wrist?” Nathan asked as Jake walked away.

“Stings a little.”

He sat down beside her. “If we don’t find a way out in the morning, we’ll have to go back. There’s got to be a way out back there. We didn’t just appear here.”

“Unless it was a booby trap with no exit designed to trap someone until they slowly died of thirst.”

“Thus speaks a girl who’s spent her life exploring caves and tombs,” Nathan said. “We should save our batteries.”

Nathan’s flashlight started flickering and he turned it off. “That’s not good.”

Jake appeared a moment later and sat down on Kendall’s other side. “You trying to conserve batteries?”

“Mine’s dying,” Nathan said. “The batteries were fresh.”

“It’s this cave,” Kendall said. “There’s something strange about it. Maybe the statues are draining the batteries and us.”

“We’d better turn ours off,” Jake said. “Who knows how long we’ll be in here.” He flipped his light off as a soft rumble sounded in the region of his stomach. “Don’t suppose anyone has a candy bar?” His voice sounded strange in the dark.

“I wish,” Kendall said. She was getting hungry. And thirsty. “We need water. We might find a spring.”

“We’ll check after we move on,” Jake said. “I don’t want to split up and search.”

They didn’t want to leave her alone. “I think it’s safe now.”

“We’re not taking any chances,” Jake said. “Even if it was just a ghost. Hell, a ghost killed Edward.”

“That was my father.”

Dead silence met her announcement. Then Jake blurted out a word that sounded even more obscene in the silence and darkness of the cave.

“Your father was the ghost in the chapel?” Nathan asked.

“Yes, but I don’t know if he’s a real ghost or just a… memory, a piece of the past replaying itself.”

“I thought the ghost was the old guy in the catacombs who was guarding the Spear of Destiny, and he’d seen you at the castle when you were a kid,” Jake said.

“No. It was my father. I sensed something familiar about him then, but I didn’t see his face clearly until earlier tonight when he came into my room. I think that’s why I needed to be there in the chapel with you. So he would recognize me.”

“And not kill us along with Edward,” Nathan said.

Jake frowned. “How can a memory kill someone?”

“I don’t know,” Kendall said. “How could a ghost kill someone? None of it seems logical.”

“It figures that he’d be haunting that room if that’s where you were born,” Jake said.

“And where my mother died. Given how much she was bleeding, she couldn’t have left the castle alive. There are two graves outside the graveyard. I think my mother is buried in one.”

“Outside the graveyard?” Nathan said.

“She probably wasn’t put in consecrated ground,” she said. “I’m sure she wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“Makes me wonder who the second unconsecrated grave belongs to,” Jake said.

“I think it’s mine.”

The dark silence grew quieter. “Yours?” Nathan asked.

“My father must have buried my mother there. Maybe he put up another stone to make the Protettori think the baby had died too. He would have been cast out if anyone found out. Maybe he tried to hide it.”

“It must not have worked,” Jake said. “He wasn’t Protettori when you were growing up.”

“Where is your father buried?” Nathan asked.

“Aunt Edna put up a stone in his memory, but there wasn’t a body,” Kendall said. “The authorities told us there wouldn’t have been anything left from the crash but bones. They never found them. Wild animals, I suppose.”

“Maybe the second grave is a memorial for your father,” Nathan said. “If he was part of the Protettori.”

“Perhaps,” Kendall said.

“Your father never mentioned the castle?” Nathan asked.

“Never. It must have been a bad memory for him. When I saw the vision of the birth—my birth—it seemed as if my mother had hidden the pregnancy to protect my father until she got desperate.”

“If he was Protettori, that makes sense,” Nathan said. “Who knows what they might have done to him, to all of you, to protect the order’s secret.”

“There’s more,” Kendall said. “That piece of paper we found was a letter she wrote telling him about the baby. But then someone was trying to kill her, so she panicked and came to the castle.”

“Who was trying to kill her?” Nathan asked.

“They didn’t say, but my mother was apologizing for betraying my father. She didn’t say what she’d done.”

“Obviously your father wasn’t part of the order when you were growing up, so either he left or they excommunicated him or whatever they do. Like they did the Reaper…” Jake’s voice trailed off.

Kendall wondered if his thoughts were headed the same direction as hers. Could the Reaper be her father? Marco hadn’t said when he was cast out. A chill rolled over Kendall’s already cold skin as she remembered the sense of familiarity she’d felt in the shadow. She recalled the dream she often had where the evil shadow was creeping up behind her father, as if to consume him. “Did you get your situation straightened out at the mansion?”

“Kendall doesn’t know about your
situation,
” Jake said. “Why don’t you tell her who you were keeping in your dungeon?”

Nathan rubbed his chin. “Raphael.”

“Raphael’s dead,” Kendall said.

“Not anymore,” Nathan said.

Kendall turned on her light so she could see Nathan. “That’s impossible. Jake and I saw him. He was dead.”

“He was dead when we found him at the castle,” Nathan said, “but he woke up.”

“You can’t just wake up from being dead.”

“Not unless you’re Raphael,” Jake said. “Or Jesus.”

“I saw a vision of him in the maze just before I fell,” Kendall said.

“I don’t think it was a vision,” Jake said. “He escaped. Remember the roaring we heard?”

“That was Raphael?” Just like the roaring she’d heard when she touched Raphael’s cross earlier. “What do you mean, escaped?”

“He was Nathan’s prisoner. Kind of poetic justice, if you think about it. He did imprison us in that tower.”

“You were holding Raphael prisoner?” Kendall asked. “Are you crazy?”

“I had my reasons,” Nathan said. “I needed to know how he was still alive, and he must know where the relics are.”

“What he really wanted to know was why Raphael’s eyes look like his when Nathan goes apeshit,” Jake said.

Kendall frowned. “Raphael’s are like that all the time, but they don’t glow.”

“We’ve never seen Raphael go apeshit. What do you want to bet his glow too? How about it, Nathan? Did they glow when he was roaring like Bigfoot as he escaped your prison?”

Nathan made a noncommittal grunt.

“Maybe the shadow was Raphael,” Kendall said.

“Could be,” Jake said. “We think he moved the treasure.”

“It’s gone?” Kendall asked.

“Every last piece of it,” Jake said.

“How did he have time to get here and move a room full of treasure?” she asked.

“Only Raphael knows,” Jake said.

Kendall was shocked, and also angry. “Nathan, you’ve been hiding things since the day I met you. I know we all have things we don’t want to talk about, but you send us on a search for the Spear of Destiny and don’t bother to tell us. And you’ve got some kind of superhuman thing going on that you never warned us about. I’m surprised Jake hasn’t already shot you.”

“I thought about it,” Jake said.

“You’re as bad as he is, Jake.” She turned back to Nathan. “Now you’ve kidnapped someone we thought was dead, and you didn’t bother to tell us? If you can’t trust us by now, when we get out of here, we need to go our separate ways.” Her light flickered and she quickly shut it off. The dark made it feel even colder. And it was already like a freezer.

“You gotta start trusting us sometime,” Jake said. “If not, I’m out too. You can
try
to stick me back in prison if you want to.”

Nathan rubbed his chin, and Kendall heard the soft rasp of an unshaven beard. “Do you believe in curses?”

N
O,
” J
AKE SAID.

“Curses?” Kendall asked, startled because she’d been thinking about that very thing. “Why?”

“I think I’m cursed. I think that’s what’s wrong with me, why my eyes change.”