She’d done what Homer had asked, and more. She’d found Perry’s partner. The man he’d murdered.
She felt as if she’d been kicked hard in the solar plexus. Her knees buckled. There, face-to-face with hard reality, she bent her head and mourned. And, in her hands, the two halves of the stone chip burned and burned.
The brief ceremony she’d planned was no longer something simple and far away. It was as real and inescapable as Liam’s bones.
What now, Homer? Do I bury him along with the pendant, and hope that will be enough? But she knew it wouldn’t be, somehow. Even apologies would never be enough. Now she understood the weight of guilt Homer had felt near the end, as if Peregrine Sinclair’s evil act had come to rest on her own shoulders. And only she could set it right.
Mac rose shakily. It was so damned hard to think of Liam O’Shea as this pile of bones. She didn’t take out the photo, though she wanted to. As if that could bring him to life again.
She forced herself to turn back to the wall. She needed to clear her mind. There was something regular and soothing about the glyphs and ritual figures carved into the limestone surface. Repetitive and patterned, yet elegant and profound. Eternal, as human life was not. She followed each line of glyphs from right to left and back again, trying not to think of Liam O’Shea.
Had he been afraid when he died? Had he cried out for someone to care, someone to hold his hand as Mac had done with Homer?
Had he cursed the Sinclairs with his dying breath?
She laughed a little and leaned her folded hands against the wall, one stone chip still nested in each palm.
“I wish I could undo it, Homer,” she said. “His death, the curse, everything. Maybe you’d still be alive. Maybe Dad, and Mom—Oh, this is insane. But if I could go back…”
In her right hand, Perry’s stone chip flared like a burning brand. In her left, Liam’s did the same. A wave of overwhelming nausea caught her by the throat and twisted her innards, propelling her away from the wall. Her fingers spasmed helplessly around the pendants even as they seared her flesh.
A black stab of pain shot into her skull, and she knew she was going to faint. She flailed blindly for the wall again, catching the brim of her cap and knocking it from her head. Her fists struck something solid, and the impact drove the broken edges of the pendants into her palms with enough force to pierce the skin.
The slow welling of blood startled her into a moment of lucidity. She opened her hands. At the precise moment the pendants dropped to the ground, the wall she was leaning on vanished.
She fell. It seemed she traveled toward the ground for a much longer time than distance or gravity could account for. The nausea redoubled, accompanied by a pounding in her skull that drove out anything resembling a coherent thought. When she hit the floor it was as if she landed on something soft rather than unevenly laid stone. A moment later she felt the impact and rolled into a compact ball, waiting for the temple to crash down on top of her.
It didn’t. She straightened carefully. The sickness and pain were miraculously gone, but she was in total darkness. Her flashlight had been knocked from her hand; she couldn’t tell where the tunnel walls were, or how far she’d fallen. Logic dictated that it couldn’t have been more than a few feet. But what in hell had happened to the glyph wall?
“Hidden trap doorways?” she murmured, getting to her hands and knees. “Never heard of those, either.” She kept up a steady stream of talk, listening to her onesided conversation echo back from unseen walls, reminding herself that she’d never really been afraid of the dark. She’d grown up in a big echoing house with a thousand rooms full of mysterious and often scary objects—or so it had felt to a child.
She checked her backpack by feel; okay. Her body was still in one piece. Watch still functioning—she’d been in this place for almost an hour. Next thing was to find the flashlight—and Homer’s cap, which she’d been clumsy enough to knock from her own head.