“Too late,” Sam replied. “I messed with them. Big time.”
“Excuse me,” Harris interrupted. “May I ask who you are?”
“This is Father Harper from the St. Columbanus Church in Oban. Father,” Sam introduced the annoying female with visible apathy, “this is Janet Harris, a mostly freelance television reporter for British broadcasters. She has been contacted by Amir… uh…”
“Ayer,” Father Harper corrected patiently.
“Ayer,” Sam continued, “to facilitate a deal that could mean the end of me, on so many levels.”
“That is correct, Father,” Harris nodded. For the first time, the priest acknowledged her presence there, meeting eyes with her. “So, then, how is it that you know these sordid characters?” She tried to insinuate some unsavory collaboration. Sam took a deep breath and reminded himself that he was not allowed to snap her neck, at least not yet. But Father Harper was not a regular man, and her passive aggression did not bother him.
“My business is the business of sordid characters, is it not? Am I not the spokesperson for the lost and wicked, when they displease the Lord?” he asked her. “I know Lucifer, as do you. Would you grant that makes us as sordid as he?”
Sam chuckled in amusement, feeling better already. Even just the awkward expression on Miss Know-It-All’s face was enough to fuel him. Especially the fact that she was literally sitting with an open mouth, waiting in vain for words her brain could not articulate — that was the best reward Sam could ask for.
“So, tell me more about the man that has Nina, Father,” Sam said, rescuing the deluded woman from the clergyman’s debate. After all, he had to garner as much information as quickly as possible so that he could call Purdue and ask for help in finding her. “Why have they not called Harris with some sort of ransom command?”
“Because they did not take Nina for ransom,” Father Harper elucidated. “They took her because she was here. She was conveniently here, speaking to me, when they broke in to reclaim the corpses of their brothers. You see, they have to inter their own, but they could not very well arrive on the doorstep and prove kinship. These people, for all intensive purposes, do not exist.”
Jan Harris gasped. Sam had expected that, because he also realized how Pulitzer-worthy such a story would be. But right now he had to get Nina back before getting everyone killed. Awards and career boosters were hardly important here.
“They took Nina because she was speaking to you?” Harris asked the same question Sam was going to. “Then they know you?”
Father Harper sighed, his face laden with distress. He looked at Sam and nodded slowly before shifting his gaze to the nosy female journalist. “I was not always a priest.”
22
Canto in the Dark
Nina woke to the sound of chanting, the likes of which made her flesh crawl, even in the state of heavy inebriation she found herself. She couldn’t recall how she’d fallen into a slumber, or coma by the heaviness of it, but she remembered a burlap hood being pulled over her head before several strong hands subdued her from behind the chair she was sitting on.
“Dr. Hooper! Dr. Victor!” she cried out in the solitary darkness that was wrung around her body like a heavy wool blanket on a summer’s day. Nina’s mind opened little by little, allowing her to remember bits and pieces of what happened, but she could hardly breathe. By the choking humidity that aggravated the heat, she figured that she was probably not in the Nirvana Public Morgue anymore.
Her heart pounded as the deep masculine voices repeated the litany over and over, only broken by the sound of a bell to divide each verse. A crescendo in volume echoed through the structure she was in. Nina reluctantly reached out into the blackness.
“Oh God, please, don’t let me touch a cadaver… or a spider,” she mumbled. Her tongue was numb in her dry mouth, her sight worthless in the dense darkness. But she would gladly have sacrificed her hearing instead. Their cantos in hierarchal voices terrified her to her core. It was not the aspect of the unknown that frightened Nina, or the sinister sound of monks singing odes in voices with the power of an Iron Maiden concert. Something in the words, the words she did not understand, appealed to her soul, beckoning like a beautiful nightmare. It promised the sublime pain of redemption and the calling of higher orders, and that made her tremble.
Her fingertips found cold stone, slightly rugged, and under her body a slab of the same composition. Soft wool cradled her body, draped over the stone to make her more comfortable.
Maybe it’s your funeral shroud, her inner voice warned.
A loud bellow ensued from one man, and the chants ceased instantly, followed by a deafening gust of wind that roared through the place. Under Nina’s hand, the stone wall trembled under the force of the din. Inadvertently she began to weep. Fear and uncertainty mated in her heart, but it was the sheer power of the moment that shook her to tears, the power of something so awesome that she could hardly breathe in its magnificent presence.
Chains clattered, startling her enough to cease her crying for the sake of ascertaining the nature of the sound. Nina sat shivering, cold, in the pitch-blackness of what she construed to be a cavernous prison, listening. Heavy steel ground like nails on a chalkboard, hoisting up something big while the men started their final aria.
She remembered their hoods over shadowed faces, giving them the illusion of not being human and robbing them of individuality. Now she was putting that image together with their perfect voices, deep male voices in unison — quite the opposite of their hoodies and sweats at the morgue.
Aside from a slight headache, Nina actually felt fine otherwise. Physically, she had no injuries or discomfort, a strange occurrence for someone who had been taken by force. Gradually she became used to the powerful song, but the words disturbed her immensely. In her quest to procure King Solomon’s diamonds, she had learned much about the binding of catastrophes into stones by her Egyptian alchemist colleagues. The names of demons written in the Testament of Solomon whirled in her memory like a thousand colors poured into a maelstrom, difficult to isolate, but some of the names had stuck in the process.
Latin was not Nina’s strong suit, yet she recognized root words like infestus, forneus, and malefica. Not names, per se, but unsettling words normally used in conjunction with nefarious deities. In a sea of noise, their chants grew more and more forceful, almost violent, until with another bell chiming, it all stopped. Nina held her breath, too scared to whimper. Nothing but the dampened fury of that previous gust prevailed, bring a restlessness to the fresh emptiness.
Eventually she heard men’s voices in casual discussion that she could tell by ear were moving in various directions. She imagined them moving all about the place by how the sound was traveling. At once, a man spoke right in front of her. “Did you enjoy the sermon, sister?”
Nina jumped at the phenomenon. He’d been invisible to her, she thought, until he moved into a growing light against the wall behind him. In fact, he’d been standing in front of her all the time, masquerading as a shadow, but it was her own distorted perception that had deceived her.
“I love the song, but the lyrics suck,” she retorted indifferently.
To her surprise, he chuckled at her snide comment and called out, “Ayer, she is with us!”
When the man had moved into the light, Nina realized that she was not locked in some chilly prison chamber after all. There was no door, no obstruction, to stop her from leaving. The molten darkness had fooled her sight to the illusion of confinement, making her feel a right fool when she discovered the contrary. But she did not mention it.