By now, both Discord and Cronos were sitting nervously on the edge of their seats, their eyes imploring Bacchus to stop talking. Even Adelaide had turned from admiring the relic hunters’ wounds to frowning at her boss.
“You reveal too much,” she said.
Bacchus stared at her and then at Bodie, blinking as if realizing the same but a little too late. “It matters not. The sacrifice is about to begin.”
Bodie really didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s a vile sanctum?” he asked.
But Bacchus’s focus had realigned. Calmly, he shook his head. “You will get nothing more out of me. Even though you are about to die, you are not pure and blessed enough to learn the Great Dragon’s ways. You could never understand. I think this day has gone on long enough.”
Bodie looked at one of the stained-glass windows. It seemed that the last of the light was already dying from the day.
“And now, we end this,” Bacchus said.
Adelaide clapped in delight.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bodie went cold as a loud, unidentified noise filled the air.
Glancing at Cassidy, he saw her incomprehension, and then Jemma and Lucie beyond her. It was a clanking of gears and a grinding of stone. It was the scraping together of hard surfaces, the tortured sound of a timeworn mechanism starting to grind. Bodie realized more deeply now that, though they were staked facing the Grand Master and Minervals, there was still a vast, open space in the room before them.
It was into this space that the nightmare came. Two oblong pieces of concrete crept aside to reveal blackness, at least at first. Then, inch by inch, something rose up, a sight that chilled Bodie’s bones and made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
“No way,” Cassidy breathed. “Is that... an...”
Bodie swallowed and grated his teeth as, before them, a massive stone altar rose up from unknown depths, to become the centerpiece of the room. It was four feet high, ten feet long and three feet wide. It bore deep, dark stains in many places. It rumbled, clanked and grated itself into position.
With a thunderous clang, corrugated black shutters slammed down over every window, sending the room into pitch blackness. Bodie licked his lips.
One by one, candles flickered into life. The room illuminated, hooded figures passing from table to table with jet lighters in hand. The candles themselves were thick and black. The Grand Master and his Minervals were donning robes. Bodie’s eyes were drawn to various paintings on the wall.
They’re about to sacrifice us in a fucking Black Mass.
Judging from the wild glare in Cassidy’s eyes, she’d figured it out too.
Bodie watched as an inverted cross descended from somewhere in the high ceiling. Wide and thick, it swayed against thick support chains before coming to a stop just a few feet above the altar.
Of all the ways I thought I’d die... this isn’t one of them.
No surprise there. Bodie watched as Discord, Adelaide and Cronos accepted thick, black books from the Hoods and took a moment to flick through and find the right page. Bacchus was nowhere to be seen and, alarmingly, Bodie hadn’t seen him move. He tried to tell himself it was the dark, the apprehension and the worry.
What else could it be?
Most unnerving was the lack of sound.
The Hoods, vicious, brutal and callous, moved as if they floated on air. Bodie clamped his teeth together as he sensed sudden movement at his back. Twisting, ignoring the pain, he saw a Hood—faceless and soundless—pulling at the ropes binding his wrists to the stake.
The ropes fell to the ground, but the reason for the handcuffs now became obvious as Bodie was unhooked from the wooden pole, but left standing, cuffed with his hands behind his back and flanked by four Hoods.
In the flickering dark, lit only by random candlelight, the relic hunters were untied.
Then Bodie saw it. Something abnormal, making its way through the deeper shadows veiling the room. It was big, too big to be a man, and it was the oddest shape.
Bodie squinted, holding his breath. The air seemed to thicken. The stench of sulfur swirled past his nostrils. And even though blood trickled from various wounds to pool on the ground, Bodie felt nothing as he stared in rapt attention at the unnatural shape making its way toward the altar.
“Ave, Satanas!”
The chant, spoken by many and out of nowhere, made Bodie flinch. Already, he was biting his inner lips to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. This couldn’t be real. It didn’t happen anymore, did it? These dark ceremonies, these occultist crazes, they’d all died out with Aleister Crowley hadn’t they?
Looking along the line he saw Cassidy with wide eyes, Yasmine with an unreadable expression, Jemma standing rigid and disbelieving, and Lucie with that inquisitive expression on her face. Lucie was taking it all in, every moment, despite the blood dripping from her chin and the pain clearly wracking her limbs.
A moment later, the abnormal figure lumbered to the head of the altar and into the candlelight. Through flickering, sputtering flame, Bodie caught his first glimpse of the creature.
It wore a robe, cinched at the waist by a length of rope. Its shoulders were wide, its feet covered. It was essentially nondescript: not a man, not a woman, not a beast.
All except the head. Wide, carved and gnarled, it bore two horns and a goat’s face and sat top-heavy on the wide shoulders, so weighty it could only swivel an inch at a time.
Which made it even more unnerving.
Bodie stared at the goat’s head, trying to keep everything in perspective. The man underneath lifted a serrated dagger, at least nine inches long, and held it in the air.
Propelled by ritual and unspoken instruction, two
