Curious, Shea examined the surface. Something had been deliberately covered up here. Age had not mounded the earth this way. Unable to stop herself, she dug away handfuls of soil and loose rock until she uncovered a long strip of rotting wood. Another door? It was at least six feet high, maybe more. She dug in earnest now, carelessly throwing clumps of dirt behind her. Then her fingers brushed something ghastly.
She recoiled, leaping back as dried little carcasses fell to the ground. Dead rats. Hundreds of withered bodies. Horrified, she stared at the rotting box she had uncovered. The remaining dirt holding it in place shifted, and the box fell forward, part of its lid giving way. Shea backed all the way to the stairs, alarmed at her find. The pressure in her head increased until she cried out with the pain, falling to one knee before she could climb the steep, rickety stairs leading out into the fog-filled night.
Surely it wasn’t a coffin. Who would bury a body upright in a wall that way? Something—morbid curiosity, some compulsion she couldn’t overcome—forced her feet back to the box. She actually tried to stop herself from moving forward, but she couldn’t. Her hand trembled as she reached out gingerly to shove off the rotting lid.
* * *
Chapter Two
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Shea stood frozen, for a moment unable to breathe or even think. Was the answer in front of her in all its stark ugliness? Was this thing, tortured and mutilated, her future, the future of those like her? She closed her eyes briefly, trying to shut out the reality. The brutality of mankind to do this. Tears welled up for the pain and suffering this creature had endured before his death. She felt responsible. She had been given such special gifts, yet she had been unable to unlock the secrets to the disease that condemned those who suffered as she did.
She took a breath, made herself look. He had been alive when his attackers sealed up the coffin. He had scratched at the wood, eventually working a hole in the side of it. Shea stifled a sob, feeling a kinship for this poor murdered man. His body was covered with a thousand cuts. A wooden stake, as big around as a man’s fist, had been driven through his body near the vicinity of his heart. Whoever had done it needed a lesson in anatomy. She sucked in her breath, appalled. What he must have suffered!
His hands and ankles were manacled; rotting, dirty rags lay in strips across his chest like those of a mummy. The doctor in her took over to allow a closer clinical study. It was impossible to tell how long he had been dead. By the condition of the cellar and the coffin, she would have guessed a number of years, but the body had not yet started to decompose. Lines of agony still creased the man’s face. His skin was gray and stretched tightly over the bones. The signs of suffering were stamped on that face, harsh and merciless.
And she knew him. He was the man in her dreams.
Although it seemed impossible, there was no mistake; she had seen him enough times. And he was the man in the photo graph Don Wallace had shown her. Though it all seemed out of the realm of possibility, she felt linked to him, felt she should have saved him. Grief was welling up, real grief. Shea felt as if a part of her lay dead in the coffin.
Shea touched his dirty, raven-black hair with gentle fingers. He must have had the same rare blood disorder as she had. How many others had been hunted, persecuted, tortured, and murdered for something they were born with? “I’m sorry,” she whispered softly, meaning it. “I failed all of us.”
A slow hiss of air was her only warning. Eyelids snapped open, and she was staring into eyes blazing with venomous hatred. A burst of strength shattered one rusty manacle, and a hand fastened around her throat with a grip like a vise. He was so strong, he cut off her airway, so it was impossible even to scream. Everything seemed to swirl, black and white rushing to overtake her. She had just enough time to feel regret that she would be unable to help him, to feel searing pain as teeth tore into her exposed throat.