PETRA
Sin and I crouch behind the shadows inside Arnoult’s mausoleum as a veritable storm of sounds whirls outside.
Sounds like a pack of wolves out to hunt.
“Here!” Sin whispers forcefully and creeps toward the narrow, dusty window of the mausoleum.
I trail behind him and eventually catch sight of a whole galaxy of flickering lights approaching our way.
My blood runs cold when I can finally see who exactly is hunting us: a crowd of dark-clad figures, men with severe expressions walking in a tidy file and women with veils covering their faces.
Some of them are holding torches, some of them are holding batons, and all of them look determined to kill.
“Sin,” I whisper urgently in a voice that just won’t stop trembling. “W-what’s happening?”
“It’s them,” he whispers back. “The Puritans. Fuck!” He actually chuckles in the face of this marauding horde. “Why would they come here?”
“I don’t know! But that looks like a very angry mob to me,” I say in a panicked tone. “Is it because of those new deaths, maybe? Perhaps they’re having funerals and—”
“They don’t use this cemetery for their own people,” Sin cuts me off. “And they would have buried them a long time ago. No, this is something else.”
“Wait, who’s that in the front? The leader?”
But as he comes closer, I finally recognize the man, and my toes go cold. It’s Edwin’s father, and his face is contorted with a dangerous fury.
“Burn the sinners!” a solitary voice cries out, and I glance back through the window—so fast I almost crick my neck.
Outside, more voices pick up the words, and soon we hear the crowd chanting, “Burn the sinners!” and “Cleanse Radcliffe!” Their voices rise together in a fervent hymn, echoing in the darkness of the night.
I watch with bated breath as the crowd comes to a halt right in front of the mausoleum door. “What are they doing?” Sin whispers urgently, but I shush him down.
At that moment, Edwin’s father steps forward, raising his torch high. “My brothers and sisters, tonight we stand at the house of the devil himself. The same God-flouting, evil-churning, pain-peddling devil who took my son from me!”
His eyes are bulging, and his face is contorted with heart-wrenching anguish.
“We will not take this travesty lying down. We will rain fire and brimstone on the sinners of the world. We will take revenge for our children taken too soon from us!”
Something about the tight-lipped looks on the faces of his listeners alerts me.
“Burn the sinners!” someone else shouts from within the crowd, and the chants restart.
Fear starts closing off my throat.
“Sin, they’re going to—”
Almost at the same moment, the first torch is thrown.
As Sin and I watch, open-mouthed in shock, the flying flame lands splat at the base of the mausoleum.
Instantly, flames start licking hungrily at the ancient stone, and as more torches are thrown onto the blazing pyre, the fire starts spreading, climbing the ivy-inked walls and setting the perimeter ablaze.
“They’re torching the place!” Sin exclaims—why he sounds surprised, I cannot tell—and grabs my hand. “We need to get out now!”
His words jolt me out of the terror-stricken reverie I had fallen into, but my feet seem rooted to the spot.
“Petra!” I hear Sin shouting, but my eyes are focused on the face of Edwin’s father. The smoldering fire casts flickering shadows across his features, and I can see the hatred glinting in his eyes.
At this moment, even if he knew that Sin and I are trapped inside the mausoleum . . . he might not care.
In fact, knowing that Sin is related to Arnoult the First, this mob might even have come prepared to torch any Arnoults that might get caught in the crossfire.
“Petra, we’ve got to run!” Sin is shaking my shoulders, and the flames are spreading rapidly; the stone walls seem to be radiating heat now. Outside, the mob’s chants grow to a feverish pitch as wild ululations rend the air.
“No more will you desecrate our town with your evil!” Edwin’s father shouts in a high-pitched voice. “No more will you tear apart our children, our innocents! Die in this fire, you mongrel hellion!”
“Petra, please.” Somehow, I seem to have stepped outside my body, because at this point Sin pulls me away from the window quite easily. “We have to find a way out. Quickly!”
Away from the sight of Edwin’s father, who is still demented with sorrow and still shouting, I can finally regain some sense of my surroundings.
Immediately, I start coughing and blinking water away from my eyes as the flames smack us in the face. The smoke begins to fill up the air, and the heat intensifies.
“What the fuck’s happening, Sin?” I finally yell out. “And where do we go? The entrance is blocked!”
“There’s another way,” Sin replies, shouting in my ears while his eyes dart around.
“What way?” I shout back over the sound of stones cracking in heat and flames roaring. I start coughing more because of the thick, acrid smoke filling up the room.
Unbidden, an image flashes across my mind: Benny Truman on fire and cannonballing into Elias Rutherford’s swimming pool. The night that everything had changed.
Man, that seems like ages ago, my annoying inner voice says in my head.
“Burn the sinners! Cleanse the darkness!” the mob continues their chant, their voices melding together in an ugly, hateful melody.
“Sin, it’s getting too hot. We need to move!”
He nods and grabs me by the arm. “Stay close to me. We will find a way out.”
The flames have been eating through the wooden beams, which start cracking and hissing as the last of their sap sizzles in the heat.
Sin holds my hand tightly and starts moving in some direction.
All I know is that I have to put one step in front of the other—even when the heat seems to morph into a tangible blanket smothering us, and pressing against us, even when I can feel a flame lick my ankle or a small ember graze the sleeve of my Valentino shirt, burning a clean hole through it but thankfully leaving my skin intact.
As the smoke thickens, stinging my eyes and clogging my throat, we keep moving.
“This way!” Sin shouts, dragging me toward the back of the mausoleum, away from the blaze, but the heat always seems to be just one step behind, and always gaining, always getting closer.
My breathing sounds ragged, and my vision starts to blur.
“Sin, stop,” I wheeze. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe.”
Sin’s grip on my hand tightens, and he pulls me closer to him, placing his jacket over my head and shoulders, creating a temporary shelter with his whole body.
“Petra, focus on my voice. We’re getting out of here!”
I finally realize that he’s been leading us back toward the tombs. With a few more steps, we manage to clamber out of the thick smog spreading through the mausoleum, and I see that we have stopped right in front of Arnoult the First’s tomb.
“What’s—what’s happening, Sin?” I cough.
“Just hold on, Petra,” Sin replies, planting his feet firmly on the ground and shoving against the ornately carved hunk of stone covering the tomb.
“Sin?” I stand around gasping and panting like an idiot for a moment before throwing my shoulder against the stone as well.
Red and orange tongues of fire have engulfed the entire right side of the mausoleum by now, and the fiery sight before me quickens my arms as I push with all my might.
A few more agonizing moments lapse before the stone grinds open slowly. “Sin, what—” I begin, but he holds up a hand and points down to show a dark, yawning tunnel underneath the slab.
“Down here!” he urges, disappearing into the darkness under the tombstone.
“I thought Arnoult the First and his lover were buried here?” The words slip out of my mouth even as I clamber down behind him. “What . . . what is this? Where does it go?” I repeat when the stairs end at the head of a narrow tunnel.
“It’s a tunnel,” Sin replies, and I roll my eyes at him, as if to say, “Yeah, I can see that.”
He shakes his head with a dry chuckle.
“I meant that it’ll lead us somewhere safe,” he adds.
I hesitate and look around and then up at the swirling flames burning Kimaris’s alleged grave.
“Look, Petra, I promise,” Sin insists as he dusts off his clothes and pats down a few errant flames on his jacket. “And anyway, what choice do we have?” This last question is uttered in a weird monotone that sparks a feeling of doubt in my mind.
As we duck into the tunnel beneath Arnoult the First’s tomb, the temperature drops significantly, and I rub my limbs, trying to orient my body to the cold, damp air, an abrupt contrast to the inferno swirling mere feet above us.
Ha, six feet over us, says my inner voice, but I’m unsettled enough to know that she isn’t jesting.
I doubt anyone can joke around in these circumstances.
Or perhaps you need to confront such situations—escaping a bloodthirsty mob wielding torches and an actual, literal fire by climbing down some secret stairs under the fake tomb of your boyfriend’s great-great-great-great grandfather—with humor.
And yet, that fleeting humor vanishes quickly, replaced by a rush of visions from my dreams: visions of the tunnels I’d seen sprawling beneath St. Anselm Hall, beneath the entire town.
Is this it? I wonder. Are those tunnels real? And if they are . . . what do they house?
A fresh wave of fear grips me. In the past, those tunnels served a grim purpose—hosting the rituals performed by the students of the Theology Department.
Even now, they could be the lair of the killer.
Or worse, what if some madman has imprisoned that creature inside these tunnels, keeping it hidden in plain sight, lying dormant beneath the town, just waiting to strike?
My mind spins in a tangle of confusion and dread, but another, colder realization cuts through:
Even if the creature is behind the murders, it isn’t acting alone.
Not then.
Not now.
Back then, someone controlled it.
And today . . . someone still might.