“Do these stairs go where I think they go?” I asked.
Isaac looked over his shoulder at the Cloisters towering above us. “Stryge’s tomb must be right below us,” he said. He pulled the gate open wider, its hinges surprisingly quiet considering how old they looked, and we entered, descending the steps inside. The sunlight coming through the open doorway lit the way, but the deeper we went the murkier it got. By the time we reached the bottom, nearly a hundred feet down, there was more shadow than light.
We found ourselves in a wide tunnel of rough-hewn stone that extended off into the inky black distance. The walls were pitted with dark recesses, vaulted nooks that at one time must have held statuary or treasure, but now stood empty.
A shadowy figure stood in the dark before us. I lifted my gun. “Melanthius.”
“Not this time,” came a familiar voice. The figure stepped closer, out of the shadows, and Gabrielle gasped.
It was Thornton, his eyes glowing red with Reve Azrael’s magic.
Gabrielle ran at him, hefting the morningstar with her good arm. “Get out of him, you bitch!”
A hulking revenant stepped out of the dark between them. It grabbed Gabrielle’s neck with one beefy hand and yanked the morningstar out of her grasp with the other. More revenants appeared, crawling out of the darkened nooks like roaches. They surrounded us, took our weapons, and tied our hands behind our backs with thick cords of rope. I felt two revenants behind me tightening the knot around my wrists. Others pulled back Philip’s hood and slipped a thin chain over his neck. He cried out and fell to his knees, clutching at the chain until they tied his hands behind his back as well.
“It is silver, vampire, to keep you in your place,” Reve Azrael said. “You will find I do not make the same mistakes twice.”
Isaac struggled to break away from the revenants that had tied his hands. His palms began to sizzle and glow.
“Stay your hand, mage, or my revenant will snap Gabrielle’s neck like a matchstick,” Reve Azrael said. Isaac stopped struggling. The glow faded from his palms. Reve Azrael turned to Gabrielle, who was gasping for air in the revenant’s strangling grip. “That is your name, isn’t it? Gabrielle? It’s the name your lover Thornton has for you in his mind, though there are others as well. Private names; names that exist only between you. He has so many memories of you, Gabrielle, each with such strong emotions attached that I feel almost as if they are my own.” With Thornton’s hand she stroked the side of Gabrielle’s face.
Gabrielle flinched away. “If you’re going to kill me, you better do it quick,” she said. “Because if I get free, this time I won’t hesitate. I won’t hold back.”
“No,” Reve Azrael said. “I imagine you wouldn’t.”
The revenant let go of Gabrielle’s neck. She doubled over, coughing, but before she could recover and make a move against Reve Azrael, the revenant pulled her injured arm out of its sling. She cried out in pain as the revenant yanked both her arms back and tied them together.
“You sent Melanthius to lead us right to you,” Isaac said. “Why? What do you want with us?”
“I have use for this one.” Reve Azrael stepped up to me, studying my face. She was so close all I could smell for a moment was the rot of Thornton’s dead body.
“What do you plan to do with the rest us?” Isaac demanded.
“Watch you die,” Reve Azrael answered. A revenant clubbed Isaac in the back of the head with the metal Anubis Hand. The mage fell to the floor, unconscious.
“Stop!” I shouted. “I’ll stay, I’ll do whatever you want, just let the others go.”
“But I already have you, my little fly. Why would I strike a bargain now? I’ve waited so long for this moment. I even prepared for your arrival. As you see, I wanted you to feel at home.”
The revenants behind me spun me around to face them. They were both severely burned, their faces reddened and charred. Yet even grossly disfigured by the fire that had killed them, I recognized them. How could I not?
“How you doin’, T-Bag?” Big Joe’s corpse said. The red glow of Reve Azrael’s magic danced in the burned wreckage of his eyes. Next to him, the corpse of Tomo started laughing.
Thirty-eight
Watching Tomo and Big Joe’s half-burnt corpses laughing at me, I thought I was going crazy. How could they be here? Why? Then, finally, I put it together. I turned back to Reve Azreal. “You’re the one who blew up the gas station,” I said. “Why? You were keeping tabs on me, you must have known I wasn’t there, so why kill Underwood and his crew? Was it just for the thrill of it?”
She didn’t answer. “Bring them,” she said, and she turned and walked deeper into the tunnel. The revenants pushed us forward. One grabbed the collar of Isaac’s duster and dragged the mage’s unconscious body behind it like a duffel bag.
“Life, death, it’s all just some sick game to you, isn’t it?” I called after her. She continued to ignore me.
The tunnel ran for several hundred feet before it terminated in a huge archway. Reve Azrael passed through, and her revenants pushed the rest of us through after her. On the other side was an enormous chamber.
The first thing I saw was the massive throne carved out of rock that stood at the far wall. Seated upon the throne was the headless body of an enormous gargoyle, as gray as stone, and chained to the throne by thick metal links that crossed over his chest and looped around his shoulders.
This, I realized, was Stryge. If he’d been standing upright instead of sitting, and if he’d had a head, he would have hit thirty feet tall, easy. But it wasn’t just his size that was intimidating. Stryge was so powerful it had taken all the warriors of the Lenape Indian nation and every spell in Willem Van Lente’s arsenal just to chain him to this throne and chop off his head. And even that hadn’t killed him, only put him into some kind of supernatural hibernation.
Somehow, it was brighter in the chamber than it had been in the tunnel outside. Looking up, I saw why. Sunlight streamed through a hole far above us in the ceiling, coming in at an angle and hitting the wall to our left like a spotlight. Rings of concentric circles had been carved in the wall, each of them decorated with strange symbols. All but the circle in the center, which had been left blank. Lenape Indian glyphs, I guessed, left by the warriors who’d hidden Stryge’s body here. As the sun moved across the sky, its light traveled along the wall, inching closer to the empty circle at the center of the rings.
A metal cage had been set up across from the throne. The revenants herded Philip, Gabrielle, and Bethany inside, then threw Isaac’s unconscious body in after them. They closed the door. The thunk of the lock sliding into place echoed through the chamber.
For some reason, they left me on the outside. Reve Azrael had said she had special plans for me, but I wasn’t exactly eager to find out what they were. I started working the ropes that bound my wrists. They’d been tied by the clumsy, numb hands of revenants and the knot felt sloppy. If I could just loosen it …
Inside the cage, Philip knelt down beside Isaac’s unconscious form, keeping watch over him as he had sworn to do, but with his hands tied and the silver around his neck, the vampire wasn’t capable of anything else. Gabrielle leaned against the bars, a sheen of sweat coating her face and a spot of blood dotting the shoulder of her shirt where the bullet wound had reopened. If she felt any pain from it, she didn’t show it. Instead, she watched Reve Azrael in Thornton’s body with a red-hot intensity. And then there was Bethany. She was working her wrists like I was, trying to squeeze them out of the knotted rope, but she wasn’t getting very far. She was still wearing her cargo vest. The revenants had confiscated our weapons and tossed them in a pile off to one side of the cage, but they must not have known her vest was full of charms.