Blood Codex

Chapter 24

Rob Jeffries crouched outside the small cell and shone his red light on the two large stones, sat beside the hole they had been removed from. He frowned. Landvik sure had him do some unsavory things, and crawling around creepy dungeons was definitely high on that list. He should have sent Dean Patterson down after all, but the guy was constantly complaining about his injured knee. Jeffries wondered again if the loser was overplaying the hurt to get out of the tough jobs. Surely that Rose Black woman hadn’t kicked him hard enough to do the kind of damage Patterson complained about. Then again, Jeffries had to respect her skill if she had. Tough woman.

He moved into the small cell and shined his flashlight into the space beyond the removed blocks. The room was large, but seemed empty. He considered firing a round or two into the room ahead of himself, but thought better of it when he considered the noise and the potential ricochets.

Instead, he put his arm with the light through the hole, then the other hand with the gun, and played both around inside, looking over the top as best he could. Nothing. And no one made a grab for him. He leaned his head in, groaning with the tightness of the fit, and checked again. Nothing. A desk, a cupboard. He looked to his left and saw a massive statue, broken and lying around all over one side of the room.

With a grunt of effort he wriggled and pushed his way through, fell unceremoniously onto the cold flagstones, and quickly gained his feet. He turned in a full circle, light and gun aligned as he tracked every inch of the room. No one. He looked closely at the floor looking for trapdoors, scanned the ceiling for other openings, the wall for ladders. Nothing. He kicked at the large statue and a couple of pieces lying around. “Ugly damn thing,” he muttered.

It looked as though someone had been here before them, no doubt Rose Black and the man she had dragged along with her, but they appeared to have missed them. So close, it was infuriating.

He crawled back out through the tight access gap and went back into the pool of light and the rope. “There's no one down here,” he called up to Patterson.

“The girl's not there?”

Jeffries rolled his eyes, ground his teeth. “What do you think ‘no one’ means?”

“You checked thoroughly.”

“Yes, I did! If the girl and her friend were here, they’ve gone now.”

“Why did they leave the rope? Leave evidence they were here?”

Jeffries shook his head, bit down on an abusive response and said instead, “I guess they were in a hurry. Or maybe they just didn’t care.”

“What are we gonna tell Landvik?” Patterson called down.

Jeffries barked a derisive laugh. “Landvik? Nothing right now. We’ll have to decide what’s next before we tell him anything. Now, either come down here and check for yourself or pull me up. It’s creepy as hell in this hole.”

“All right, all right, keep your hair on.”

Jeffries pocketed the gun and flashlight, wrapped the end of the rope around one ankle, and gripped on. “Pull!” he called as he began to climb and he heard Patterson’s grunts of effort as the man finally started doing something useful.

Crowley kicked away a large slab of clay and scooted out of the golem’s large torso. The hiding place he had crawled into was cramped and uncomfortable, and the two chunks of broken golem pelvis he’d used to conceal himself had been a sloppy effort, but the man with the gun hadn’t looked very hard, despite what Crowley had heard him calling up to his friend.

Crowley stood and dusted himself off, taking deep breaths to settle his racing nerves. That had been way too close for comfort and only the fact that the gunman hadn’t realized the golem was hollow had saved him from a dangerous, almost certainly deadly confrontation.

Urgency pressed at Crowley’s heart and mind as he mentally kicked himself for leaving Rose alone. He’d gotten so caught up in the search for the bible that he hadn’t considered the people who were after Rose might have caught up with them already. Or at all, for that matter.

He had become sloppy thinking their flight from the country had bought them all the time they would need. His mind flickered to the archivist, to the introduction Rose’s boss at the museum had made for them, and realization washed over him in a cold flood. Their pursuers had obviously been to Rose’s workplace and got the information from Professor Phelps. Crowley desperately hoped that man was okay. He needed to get back to Rose, get on the move again, and put some new distance between them and their pursuers.

Cautiously, he made his way back through the tight gap, out of the small cell and into the oubliette. He couldn’t get out of this miserable place soon enough.

A chill shot up his spine as he emerged into the larger space and looked to the pool of light falling from the access hole high above. Light was all that fell down.

His rope was gone.