Wherever he had gone, he had been without a light to guide him.
“What’s back there?” Cain asked.
“A meeting room,” Thomas said. “And a . . . place for rituals. There’s an entrance to a lower chamber, but we never used it.”
The men’s sacks were heavy with books. “Take these back to the camp,” Cain said. “Mikulov and I will go look for him.”
Thomas began to protest, but Cain raised a hand. “Go,” he said. “He may have gone that way, and you can catch him. Take the lantern, and protect those texts. We’ll follow you in a moment.”
Thomas shouted Egil’s name, but there was no response. The two men hoisted the sacks, took the lantern.
Thomas put his hand on Cain’s shoulder. “Hurry,” he said. “There is something evil here. I can feel it.” Then they headed back to the passageway. Mikulov grabbed the torch from the wall and stepped through the entrance to the next room. Cain followed him inside.
The torchlight revealed a smaller chamber with a large, wooden table and chairs at its center. The walls were bare, and the air smelled more strongly of mold and rot. It was empty. Mikulov swept the torch down toward the dusty floor, revealing footprints leading to another archway beyond.
A frigid draft washed over them, followed by a faint, echoing moan. Mikulov looked at Cain and slipped out his blade. They moved cautiously to the next archway. Inside was an empty room with a round ceiling and a circle at the center. A portal. Cain could only guess where it might lead. There was a red jewel in its center, and he knelt there and pried it free, slipping it into his sack for safekeeping.
Another noise, this one like a shuffling of feet, drew their attention to an open door. Mikulov tensed, muscles going rigid as he held up the torch for a better view.
Egil stood in the doorway. He had his head down, his colorless hair nearly glowing in the torchlight, hands held at his sides. His breathing was slow and even, white clouds rising in the cold air.
Cain called his name, but the man did not move or answer. Mikulov took several steps forward, keeping the torch out like a weapon. He held his blade down, away from sight.
The two men stopped halfway across the room. “Something is wrong,” Mikulov said quietly. “I don’t think—”
Egil looked up, his face making Mikulov abruptly cut off whatever he was about to say. Egil’s pale skin had gone gray and lifeless, blue veins running underneath like map lines. His eyes caught the fire and reflected it, like an animal’s in the dark.
He was grinning at them.
Cain took an involuntary half step back. The look on Egil’s face . . . it wasn’t Egil, in there. This was someone else.
“It’s about time you arrived,” the thing rasped. “A bit too slow, I’m afraid, and still blissfully unaware. Then again, you were always the last one to see the truth, weren’t you, Deckard Cain?”
“Who are you?”
“You know who I am.” The creature slid forward, as if floating inches off the floor, and stopped ten feet away. “After all, you came here looking for me.”
Cain tried to calm his racing heart. Garreth Rau. If he had indeed been able to possess Egil’s body, his skills were considerable indeed.
“There are others here too.” The thing turned its gaze on Mikulov. “Do you really think that what you are about to do will make any difference?”
Cain tried to stop him, but it was too late. Mikulov moved blindingly fast, but Rau barely seemed to glance at him as green light erupted from his hands and a brilliant flash painted the room. Cain cried out and put his arm up to protect his face, and he was thrown backward to the floor, landing hard and hearing the loud crack of something breaking. He lay for a moment, stunned. When he looked up again, the torch was out, but a strange glow remained, Egil’s slight frame bathed in it as if his own flesh was on fire.
Mikulov was on the floor against the wall, motionless. He didn’t appear to be breathing.
Cain crawled to the fallen monk’s side, cradling his head in his arms. Mikulov’s eyelids fluttered, and he moaned softly.
“Deckard?”
The voice was different now, lighter, touched with fear. Familiar. Cain looked back, and Egil’s face had changed, the jawline softening, cheekbones more pronounced, eyes large and dark as pitch.
“It’s cold here, Deckard. I can’t get out of this place. Please.”
Cain’s own blood turned to ice. It can’t be. The pain came rushing back like a freezing river, chilling him to the bone.
“Amelia,” he said. The words were ripped out of him like a hand twisting his insides. “No.”
His dead wife, gone thirty-five years now, vanished from his life like a phantom. He had buried the truth for decades, pushed it down so deep it had nearly disappeared. The pain was too much for him to bear. But there was more, so much more, and to even begin to think of the rest of it meant madness.
“We thought it was safe. We needed someplace to go. My mother, she begged us to come. I . . . you weren’t there, Deckard. I tried to reach you, but you were lost with your books; you weren’t there . . . You were never there.”
“You aren’t real—”
“They took us, Deckard. They hurt us. Please don’t let them hurt us anymore. Don’t let them hurt your son.”
Egil’s face rippled, changed again, flesh melting like wax forced to the flames, a screaming, blood-soaked mask of pain that re-formed itself, becoming smaller and rounder, softer yet, plump cheeks and smooth brow. The face was someone else’s now, someone who had haunted Cain’s dreams for decades, a young boy who had learned to run before he could walk, who had never slowed down enough to listen to a word his parents said, a wild, trembling ball of pure energy and a true force of nature.
“Daddy!” The boy was crying hysterically. “I don’t like the monsters, Daddy! Please come get me!”
With a strangled cry, Cain launched himself at the possessed figure, the walls he had erected around these memories during so many long years suddenly crashing down all at once, and the flood of pain and suffering pouring out like rushing water over a broken dam.
“A letter for you, sir.”
Deckard Cain looked up bleary-eyed from the table where he had fallen asleep. The empty bottle and glass, still crusted with wine, stood in silent witness to his despair. He glanced at the door, where Pepin stood framed by sunlight. “It was open,” Pepin said. “I thought I’d deliver this. Thought it might be important.”
The healer stepped forward too quickly, setting the envelope down on the table and rushing back to the doorway, as if Cain might have a contagious disease. It was uncharacteristic behavior. But he could not be blamed. Cain had shut everyone out, even his family, so absorbed in his scholarly pursuits, he had left no time for anything else.
And so his wife had left him, taking his young son. He was thirty-five years old and alone. He had no friends left in Tristram.
“Get out,” he said.
“I—”
“Out!”
Pepin stepped back across the threshold and closed the door, leaving him in silence.
His head ached from drink. “Amelia,” he whispered. He wasn’t quite sure why. They had fought bitterly several nights before, the same argument they had had for years now: he was always locked away among his books, she said, always more attentive to them than to his students, his wife and son, or anyone else, for that matter. Why had they named the boy after his famous ancestor when family apparently meant so little to him, she had asked? Where had he been when his little Jered had spoken his first word, taken his first steps? Where had he been when the boy had nearly died from fever? Where was he when she needed him?