Chapter Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
MAVEN
I take a different route to the church this time. Past the high school, the houses give way to the woods. I walk through the pines with the moon as my guide, her ghostly pallor painting the forest floor in silvery, shifting shadows.
Finally, my shoes soggy and my breath visible in front of me in steaming clouds of white, I reach the church.
I crouch down behind the trunk of a massive yew tree and survey the graveyard. All is silent and still. The crumbling old building looms in the background, its tall spire spearing the starry sky, its dark windows staring out blankly like empty eyes.
After a few minutes of watchful waiting, I run hunched over through the weeds, tombstones, and crypts to the gate I found open earlier near the back.
Now, it’s locked. A thick new chain is wound around the rusted bars. A shiny padlock dangles from the end link.
I stand there trying to figure out another way in until a muffled cry of pain rises from deep within the bowels of the church.
It’s an awful sound, one of such pure agony it steals my breath. It comes again, the pitch higher, building to a wail that’s cut off as abruptly as it began, as if the person who made it finally passed out from the pain.
Another muffled scream echoes out over the graveyard, but this one has a different tenor. It was obviously made by a different voice.
Realization hits me like a wrecking ball: people are being tortured in this church.
Right now, people in cages in the basement are being tortured.
I have to help them.
Adrenaline lashes through my body, focusing my thoughts like a laser. I scan the wall, but don’t see any other entrance or opening I could exploit, so I trot around the corner, looking for anything useful.
I find it around the other side of the building. A stained-glass window with several panes missing has been barred over, but two of the iron bars are bent outward as if someone tried to pry them open.
Or maybe they were trying to get out from the inside.
In either case, there might be just enough room for me to shimmy through.
The window is about eight feet off the ground, so I drag over a few hunks of limestone rubble lying nearby that have crumbled from the main structure and pile them up until I’ve got a relatively stable base to climb on.
Carefully stepping up, I cling to the wall for balance.
I’m able to reach the window without toppling over and grab onto the iron bars.
Kicking one leg up, I catch my heel on the narrow stone sill and manage to haul myself up to a sitting position, one butt cheek resting on the sill and the other hanging out in space.
Holding my breath and trying to be as quiet as possible, I squeeze through the opening between the bars, then hang by my arms and drop to the stone floor.
I crouch, listening hard into the gloom as the dull thud of my fall echoes into silence.
After a long moment where I hear nothing unusual, I stand and pick my way carefully through the sanctuary, guided by the moonlight spilling through the windows, avoiding the drifts of dry leaves scattered over the floor.
When I reach the top of the stairs that lead underground, I look down. Swallowing the light a few steps in, the stone staircase yawns open like a monstrous mouth.
My palms are clammy. My heartbeat sounds like thunder. The pistol is a cold, reassuring weight in the small of my back.
I take the first step, half expecting an alarm to start blaring. When nothing happens, I take another step, then another, hearing only the soft, ragged sound of my breath.
The smell of animal musk is stronger with every slow step I take downward, now mingling with the potent scent of something burning, like a wood fire. After about ten steps, I pause to pull out the gun.
The eerie sense that I’m being watched is overpowering.
But no lights are on in the basement. If anyone is down there, guarding whoever those poor caged people are that I heard, they’d surely have a lamp or candle to see by.
Just as I’m about to take another step, a deep, guttural growl echoes through the basement. Heart hammering, I freeze.
It comes again, a primal, unnatural sound of animalistic rage, rumbling and resonant with an edge of a snarl.
Whatever made that noise, it isn’t human.
All the tiny hairs on my body stand on end. My nerves start screaming. Every instinct inside me yells GET OUT! so I obey them and whirl around.
I miss the step and take a hard fall onto my elbows. My forehead meets the unyielding edge of the stone staircase. I see stars, then nothing at all as I tumble down into darkness.
I swim up into consciousness slowly, feeling as if my limbs are made of lead, and I’m being dragged up from a deep ocean trench, a fossilized relic from a shipwreck thousands of years old.
I open my eyes to blinding white light. Wincing, I squeeze them shut again.
I hope this isn’t heaven. All that bright, cheerful light for eternity will drive me nuts.
“You took a nasty fall,” says a low voice to my right. “No broken bones, though, which doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know of anything that could break Maven Blackthorn.”
Turning my head toward the voice, I crack open my eyes again. There beside the bed I’m lying in sits Ronan, beautiful and watchful, dressed all in black.
I gaze at him blankly, wondering if this is a dream, until the memory of the church comes flooding back in a cold rush. I sit upright too quickly, and the room spins.
Ronan leaps to his feet and catches me as I fall back, easing me onto the pillow with a hand cradled beneath my head.
I lie still with my eyes closed for several moments, breathing in the warm scent of his skin and trying to understand what’s happening.
His knuckles brush my cheek. Warm fingertips trace my forehead. He exhales softly, then chuckles.
“Stubborn little witch. You might be the only person in the world who hates being told what to do more than me.”
Because my throat is so dry, my voice comes out raspy. “Where am I?”
“In my bed.”
Sure. Of course. Because that’s so reasonable.
“How did I get here?”
“What do you remember?”
I hate it when someone answers a question with another question because it only means one thing. They’re busy fabricating falsehoods.
“I remember that you’re supposed to be out of town for the rest of the week. Yet here you are, popping up like a recurring rash.”
“I came back as soon as I heard you’d hurt yourself.”
I peer at him suspiciously. “You heard?”
He nods. “Edward found you in the basement of the church, passed out cold.”
Edward is the Croft family’s equivalent of Q. I think he’s been with them as long as Q has been with the Blackthorns.
“Speaking of that lovely little sanctuary of yours, what the hell is going on in there?”
His expression impassive, he says smoothly, “Besides a deranged stalker trespassing on private property, you mean? Absolutely nothing.”
I turn my head to stare at the ceiling, thinking how he saved me from the falling cement facade at the restaurant, how he saved Bea from a falling mirror in the haunted house that would have sliced her to ribbons had it landed on her head, and now, after a nasty fall that could have easily snapped my neck, I’m waking up in his bed.
Is it coincidence that he’s always acting as the savior? Or is something else going on?
“I’ll give you deranged, but I’m not a stalker. I don’t have the patience for it. And I know you’re lying.”
“I’m curious what makes you think so.”
“Because words are coming out of your mouth.”
He chuckles.
I jerk to an upright position again, staring at him in panic. “Bea.”
He knows what I mean without having to explain. “She’s fine.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve made sure of it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means when I can’t be there brooding at your front gate, do you think I just leave you two unguarded?”
Suspicious, I squint at him. “Guarded from what?”
When he merely smiles, I decide he’s playing another one of his games and eviscerate him with my eyes.
“You know I love it when you’re wishing you could shred me to pieces, but it’s too early to fight.”
“I’m not fighting.”
He smiles. “Yes, you are. I know because there are words coming out of your mouth.”
He thinks he’s so clever.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and stare at him as the spinning slows at the edges of my vision. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be very much wrong with me.
Unlike my grandmother, I’m lucky I didn’t break my neck.
He hands me a glass of water from the nightstand. I look at it for a moment, wondering if it’s poisoned, but decide he could have killed me when I was unconscious if he wanted to.
I chug it in one go and set it back on the nightstand like I just won a dare, which of course makes him chuckle again.
Which, of course, irritates me.
“What’s in the basement, Ronan? And please don’t say ‘nothing.’ Just give me a straight answer.”
“I’ll tell you what. You admit Bea’s mine, and I’ll admit what’s in the basement.”
When I remain silent, he smiles again.
“Didn’t think so. But just to show good faith, I’ll tell you. Wolfhounds.”
“Wolfhounds,” I repeat doubtfully.
“Yes. They’re excellent guard dogs.”
I picture a giant version of a wolf with glowing red eyes and bristling black fur, slobber dripping from its sharp canines as it growls menacingly.
Something about that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test, however. I’ve never heard a dog make the kind of growls I heard in that basement. And there’s still the matter of those screams.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Why are they kept in the church?”
“My father normally lets them patrol the grounds freely, but as it was Halloween and there were so many children out, he put them in the kennels.”
“Halloween was the night before last.”
“The groundskeeper neglected to let them out. Edward was about to, but then he found you blacked out on the floor.”