Unclean, he thought. This is what evil feels like.
“You wanted something to believe in,” it rasped in Zeybekci’s voice. “Believe in me and the things I will do to your little boy when I finally touch his flesh. The ways I will pull him apart. The door is open now, Benjamin. I am here. And now others will wake and feel my presence and they will remember the world of men and the pleasures of human flesh, and they will join—”
Walker heard a crack as Zeybekci went rigid. The demon’s grip relaxed and Walker flailed as he dropped to the floor. Rage flooded him as he started to reach for Zeybekci, but the Turk was already collapsing on top of him. His eyes had gone blank, and Walker caught him by the arm and throat. As he twisted the body and dropped Zeybekci on his side, the body slumping, he knew the man was dead.
“Oh, no,” Kim said, coming up behind him.
Meryam stood in the passage, the bloody climbing ax in her hand. Pale and shaking, bent over and dragging in big gulps of breath, she stared at the man she had just killed. The man she had murdered to save Walker’s life. Behind her, like some kind of carrion creature, Calliope stood, filming it all.
“Where the hell did you two come from?” he asked, one hand on the wall as he pushed to his feet.
“Heard screaming…” Meryam said, sucking in breaths between words. “We went through level one, came up the steps. Thought it might be… better than following… in your footsteps.”
Calliope kept shooting, and he wondered how much her footage would show.
Walker stared at Meryam, curious as to just what was wrong with her. The circles beneath her eyes were dark and sagging and her skin had a sallow quality that made her look pale despite her natural hue. Not possessed—not like Adam—but something had taken hold of her just as powerfully as any demon. They’d all gleaned enough from her fight with Adam to know Meryam was ill, but Walker wanted to know just how ill. He thought he ought to know whether the woman would be able to continue taking care of herself.
Considering she had possibly just saved his life, he thought maybe Meryam would take care of herself just fine.
Walker glanced at Hakan, saw the gun in his hand, dangling uselessly at his side, and silently damned him for not getting there sooner, for not pulling the trigger and taking Zeybekci’s death on himself so that Meryam would not have the man’s blood on her hands. That might not have been fair to Hakan, but he couldn’t help thinking it. Besides, a bullet would have been cleaner.
“You killed it,” Olivieri said, emerging from the stall just beside them, staring down at the corpse of the possessed man.
Meryam glanced around the passage. Walker did the same. Errick held one hand over a bloody wound on his shoulder. Chloe lay dead, and there were several other corpses scattered on the ancient timber floors.
“No,” she said, hollow-voiced. “I only killed Zeybekci.”
The monitor lay facedown with blood pooling up through the hair at the back of his skull like groundwater from a fresh hole. Little rivers spilled down through the man’s matted hair. It was no way to die. Walker glanced at the faces now beginning to gather and saw that they felt the same. Meryam had done it to save his life—maybe all of their lives—but still it seemed unfathomably cruel. Had been cruel, but the cruelty had not been Meryam’s.
You wanted something to believe in. Believe in me, the demon had whispered.
He glanced up at Calliope, right into the eye of the camera, and pointed at her. Not at the camera, at her. “You’re going to delete the vid you just shot of this. All of this.”
Calliope ignored him, so Walker turned to Meryam. The footage would show her murdering Zeybekci. Nobody watching it would believe there had been something else driving him, something possessing him. Nobody who hadn’t been inside the ark would know the way it felt to be tainted by that evil, to feel it on your skin and taste it on your tongue, to breathe it in the air.
“It’s a conversation for later,” Meryam said. “When we know who we’re really talking to.”
Walker looked around and studied their faces, watched their eyes as they processed her statement. Realization came to them slowly, but it did come to them. It began with Kim, then Hakan. One by one he saw brows furrow and eyes narrow and then they tore their gazes from the corpses and began to glance at the others in the passage around them, wondering—just as Walker worried—where the demon had gone. As Meryam had said, Zeybekci was dead. But the thing that had possessed him, and Adam before him, was still among them.
None of the faces around him betrayed the demon’s presence. The wildly cruel grin and those ancient, knowing eyes were nowhere to be seen, but if Walker had learned anything thus far about his adversary, it was that the demon knew how to hide.
He nodded at Meryam, a silent acknowledgment that he shared her distress.
Meryam straightened up, hand still gripping the bloodstained climbing ax. “I want to cry. I want to scream. But I’m going to put all of that off until the time comes when I can do it knowing this thing is not going to be able to kill anyone else.”
“So you’re… you’re sure?” someone asked.
Olivieri uttered a broken, humorless laugh. “You must be joking. Are we sure? You’ve just seen it with your own eyes!”
“So what now?” Errick asked, wincing as he kept one hand clamped over his shoulder wound. “If this… if it can just jump from one person to another, it’s going to keep picking us off until we’re all dead.”
“You know we’re working on that,” Olivieri said, unclenching his fist to reveal a piece of carved bitumen with a strand of twine threaded through a hole in its center.
Errick shook his head. “This is insane. It can’t be real.”
“No?” Hakan said, stepping forward. “Ask him.”
The guide nudged Zeybekci’s corpse with one foot, as if to make sure he was dead. Unnerved, the others stared at him. Slightly hunched, Hakan’s eyes were hidden, and Walker had a breathless moment when he wondered if the demon had not gone very far at all. Then Hakan looked around the circle. Gun still in his hand, as if he feared he might need to use it at any moment, he used his free hand to point at one of his workers and an archaeology student.
“You two. Go down to level one and bring everyone back here. Everyone, without exception. If anyone argues, tell them I will be unhappy if I must come and fetch them myself,” Hakan said. “I will go and gather Father Cornelius, Feyiz, and the others, and we will bring Adam here as well.”
The worker started to turn immediately, but the student—Walker didn’t know her name—hesitated and looked at Meryam. It was her project, after all. She was the boss, and Walker felt certain the entire staff was aware of the animosity between her and Hakan.
Meryam gave a single nod. “Go. Quickly.”
The two rushed off even as Hakan continued, this time speaking to Meryam directly.
“We must remove them,” he said, gesturing at the bodies of Zeybekci, Dr. Dwyer, and the others. “Anyone who has yet to see this horror should be saved from it.”
“I’ll handle it,” Walker offered.
Kim volunteered to help, and immediately began poking into some of the stalls for blankets and things with which they might wrap the remains of their dead.
Meryam rapped on the wall between two stalls to get everyone’s attention.