Naomi joined in. She took her knife from her belt and slashed at the vines and brush.
In a few moments, they cleared part of a low stone wall held together by cracked and weathered mortar. Several gaps showed. Warren studied the stones, hoping for some kind of markings.
“What is this?” Naomi asked.
“I don’t know.” Warren glanced up to where Lilith stood watching them.
“It looks like an old Roman wall.”
Warren agreed. England was covered in structures and walls left by the Romans, as was most of Europe. That empire had covered continents and spanned centuries. For a time, Hadrian’s Wall had separated northern England from the south, holding back the Picts.
“A Roman wall in this part of the country isn’t anything special,” Naomi said.
“Looks like no one knew this one was here,” Warren replied. Dread laced his excitement at the discovery. Whatever Lilith searched for couldn’t be good. He hoped it wouldn’t kill him.
You don’t believe it will, he told himself. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.
“You’ll need to clear more of the wall,” Lilith said.
“What are we looking for?”
“A mark.”
“What mark?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.” Uncertainty touched Lilith’s features, but she shook it off. “This has to be the place. But so much has changed.”
Warren stepped back from the wall and called to the zombies. “Here. Rip this away.”
With zombies, it was hard to tell what they understood and what they didn’t until it was sometimes too late. Simple commands that a living, breathing person understood immediately became difficult to issue. But in this case, the zombies understood immediately. They fell upon the wall like locusts and tore the brush away.
“Stop them,” Lilith ordered.
At Warren’s command, the zombies stepped back from the wall. They’d worked hard for ten or fifteen minutes. Many of them now had broken fingers, and the freshest zombies from the village had lacerated palms. The undead stood nearby, twitching and jerking.
Lilith peered more closely at the wall and traced stones with a manicured forefinger. Accumulated dirt peeled away under her nail. Warren couldn’t imagine any other woman he knew risking her nails in that fashion. But every now and again, Lilith’s nail looked like a curved talon.
“She’s touching the stone?” Naomi asked.
For the first time, Warren realized that Lilith interacted with the physical world. Something had changed, and change—at least in his experience—wasn’t a guaranteed good thing. Wariness rose up within him.
“Yes,” he whispered.
Seconds later, a shape carved into one of the stones stood revealed. Warren thought it was maybe a bird, or maybe an insect.
Lilith stood and looked around. She smiled and turned to him. “This is the place. I feel the power here.” She reached down for a loose stone atop the wall. She tried to pick the stone up, but in the end she succeeded only in causing it to shift and topple from the wall.
“What place?” Warren asked.
“My place.” Lilith strode from the wall in carefully measured paces. At thirty-two, she stopped and turned back to Warren. “You must dig here.”
“Why?”
“Because what we seek is underground.”
Warren looked at the virgin snow and knew the hard-packed earth below it would be frozen. “I didn’t bring any shovels or trenching tools. I didn’t know there was going to be digging involved.”
“Find a way,” Lilith ordered. “You didn’t come all this way to fail.”
NINETEEN
When she was released from the hospital a few days later, Leah wore an eyepatch over her right eye. The patch and the strap holding it itched and constantly bothered her. Beneath the patch, the socket remained empty. The surgeons chose to remove the eye rather than risk infection so close to the brain.
A prosthetic replacement—nonfunctional except for the possibility of an image recorder or poison dart air gun, both of which were readily available—wouldn’t be feasible till the flesh healed. Even then the prospect of putting an artificial eye into her head didn’t sound pleasing.
Leah returned to the rooms she’d been given inside the secret complex maintained below London. The city, it seemed, held enough spaces belowground to hide many secrets. There were several such complexes, but her organization didn’t have access to all of them.
Even after four years, the rooms didn’t feel personal. Instead, she felt like a hotel guest. She tried to watch recorded movies and programs, and she tried the few books she’d managed to get her hands on. She even cooked her own meals instead of simply going down to the commissary to eat.
Nothing worked. Each day—and there were five of them in a row, five times as much as she’d ever spent there in a row—got harder to manage. She needed something to do, and she felt that need incessantly.
The only times she got out of the rooms were to get supplies and to exercise. Despite the physical recovery ahead of her, she pushed her body to get back into shape. Physical conditioning mattered out on the street, even inside one of the bio-enhancing suits.
Mostly she slept and she waited for the time when Lyra Darius cleared her for an assignment. Leah petitioned daily in the mornings and afternoons by e-mail. But she didn’t know if she was ready to undertake the assignment she felt certain she would be given. She wondered what Simon Cross would say about Lyra’s offer to make him the supreme leader of the Templar.
Will it tempt Simon? she wondered. Especially in light of what Booth tried to pull only a few months ago? She knew if it simply meant getting High Seat Terrence Booth out of his position then Simon would be more tempted. She’d been with the other Templar when they’d broken Simon out of Booth’s trap.
Simon respected many of the other Templar. Usurping power over them wouldn’t be easy.
And that was only if Lyra Darius could
