Chosen to make a pilgrimage-a pilgrimage to hell.
Chapter One
“Wherever you want to lead, Ryan…” J. B. Dix had said long days ago, and as Ryan Cawdor now regained his senses, grateful this latest mat-trans journey hadn’t invoked the nightmares that usually came during the fantastic quantum journeys, he found himself dwelling on the words.
What had brought the words to mind was the color of the walls surrounding him-armaglass walls of milky, colorless gray.
“Fireblast,” Ryan muttered. Unless his memory was starting to slip, the walls of the chamber he was now resting within were exactly the same as the mat-trans unit beneath that stickie-infested pesthole hospital in Carolina.
The light in the hexagonal-shaped chamber seemed to be impossibly bright and his head was pounding, as if an unknown assailant had shoved a lighted candle into the open eye socket of his face and twisted down, driving the flame both into the frontal lobe of his brain and the optic nerve of his remaining good eye.
The white-hot light had begun to slowly fade into a more reasonable wattage. Through the spots dancing in front of his vision, Ryan was able to make out the forms of his companions, all six of them in various prone positions on the polished floor around him.
“Looks like we’re calling North Carolina home again,” Mildred Wyeth commented.
“Not much changed,” Jak Lauren agreed.
Since they knew the area, and not a great deal of time had passed since their last visit to the complex, a quick recce soon found the group out of the chamber and into a small white anteroom located outside the armaglass door. As before, an ordinary desk with a computer and monitor rested directly across from the observation window of the gateway. Everyone kept their hardware ready as they crossed the room to another door, which they knew to be made of painted wood with a simple bronze doorknob. There were no high-tech locking systems or security keypads. No apparent locks of any kind.
Maintaining a triple red alert, they then entered the mat-trans control room, which was also still intact. Ryan held up a hand and all paused, listening and waiting. Things appeared to be quiet and safe.
“We got two choices,” Ryan stated.
No one replied. They knew the options: try Carolina’s hospitality again or take the risk of another gateway jump. Neither was particularly appealing.
“Any of you feel strongly about picking one over the other?” he asked.
“Your call,” Jak said with a shrug.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” J.B. agreed.
“For now, let’s check the rest of the area. Make sure we don’t have any company.”
Ryan, on point, took a moment to glance back. They were good friends, every last one of them.
No, more than friends. Dean was his biological son and Krysty his soul mate, but the others were just as important in the tangled web that was his life.
They were family-more so than Ryan’s blood kin back in the mountains of West Virginia. Most of the relatives who shared the Cawdor name were long chilled, dead and buried. His murderous brother, Harvey, had cowardly challenged a young Ryan and taken his left eye, leaving the disfigured and maimed boy for dead. His adulteress stepmother, Rachel, who’d seen to the death of Ryan’s father, Lord Cawdor, had then, in an act of taboo lust, slept with the insane Harvey. His nephew Jabez had seen the power and station of the Cawdor name as a dkect route to the domination of others and the rape of helpless young women and children.
Ryan had claimed Harvey, and had seen to chilling his mad brother personally, while Doc Tanner’s weapon had taken Lady Rachel. Krysty had killed Jabez with her bare hands after he’d attempted to sodomize her. When the bloody combat was over, Ryan had left his nephew Nathan, who’d been sired by his murdered older brother, Morgan, in charge.
Nathan Freeman dropped the surname Cawdor during his subsequent banishment, a banishment Ryan himself had shared for many long years. Ryan had come home for his reckoning and cleaned house, later finding Nathan and installing him as the new baron of Front Royal.