Something Wicked (22 page)

“Then we might break the boat and sink.” But I laughed as I said that, too, full of sunshine and moonlight and magic and Ben’s help…and new shoes. “Good thing I got rid of the cast.”

The stony shelf loomed closer. We could hear the even lapping of lake water against nearby rocks, now.

Ben lifted the oars from the water—I think to start rowing backward, before we hit the rocks.

“Trust me,” I said. “Me and Hekate.”

“You and Hekate cursed me,” he reminded me, clearly torn.

Good point. “We’re sorry about that,” I said.

Ben rolled his eyes. But he also slid off his seat at the prow of the rowboat, onto his knees, and bowed down into the space between us, his head beside mine. “You’d better be right,” he whispered.

And with only a slight scraping of wood against rock, we drifted into the underworld.

Victor watched the rocks swallow the rowboat like a big dog would.
Gulp!

Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have wanted to be swallowed like that.

Goodbye. So long. Th-th-that’s all, folks.

Cue watery grave.

He knew better, now. He could always sense Benny, even when he didn’t want to. And Benny was still there.

With her.

It wasn’t fair.
Not fair!

He watched and watched. But the earth didn’t spit the rowboat back out.

Victor broke into a run.

I
tried to sit up and bumped my head against overhanging stone. “Ow!”

“Stay down.” Ben’s fingers found the sore spot in the darkness. “We’ll be able to hear if it opens up.”

If?
It was one thing to imagine swimming to safety when I’d imagined safety—in the form of the lake’s surface—only a few feet from us. With each breath, safety floated farther and farther away. Instead, we got looming rock walls and crushing darkness.

The urge to laugh with the joy of the moonshine faded, the farther and more slowly we drifted.

I tried not to remember the place on the other end of the Sibyl’s Cave, where the tunnel had caved in. But I remembered it anyway.

Should we turn back? I came really close to saying just that, despite how strongly I could sense something sacred—the cup?—up ahead. And then—

Just as Ben had promised, I could hear when the ceiling lifted away from us. It sounded like water and echoes and space. And as the ceiling rose, so did the submerged tunnel floor, beneath us, until it was barely submerged at all.

With a slushy scrape, the boat lurched to a stop.

We sat up—well, I did. It
sounded
like Ben sat up, but the blackness around us was so thick, no way could I—

Oh. A small white beam reflected off the water, lighting several feet of tunnel and Ben, holding a tiny penlight.

“Wow,” he said, sending the little beam across the angles of the ancient hewn roof. That didn’t light everything as well as shining it off the water, though. When he turned it behind us, I could see how the tunnel must have once climbed just a little from its lake entrance. That’s why it rose out of the water, what allowed Ben to stand now. “You were right.”

“Don’t tunnels usually go down?” I asked, eyeing the water warily.

“Not if they emerge on a hillside.” With a careful splash, Ben climbed out of the boat. I grasped the edge as it teetered, glad my center of gravity was still low. When he offered a hand, I gratefully took it to scramble to the stony floor.

Ben handed me the penlight so he could haul the rowboat more firmly out of the water.

Watching him almost distracted me from the call of the grail. Almost.

From what I could tell, the Sibyl’s Cave on the Lake Averno side looked a whole lot like the Cumae side had. It had the same long, angular walls. Soft stone floors. The occasional blocky bench, made of rock slabs. But unlike the tunnel we’d explored earlier that day, there didn’t seem to be any openings to the surface.

Or maybe…?

“Hold up,” I whispered. This seemed too sacred a place to use my outside voice. I turned off the penlight—

And after a blink or two, I could see a silver glow somewhere ahead of us.

I groped beside me, found Ben’s arm, and tugged. “Come on.”

His fingers twined with mine as he did.

The sensation of walking through the blackness, having to just trust that there would be ground under my next step, then my next, unsettled me. But in a good way, like a roller coaster or…or a dare to jump from rooftop to rooftop.

I began to relax into it. My shuffling, careful baby steps became strides into the unknown. Ben’s hand felt like the only solid thing here. The echoes sounded as if there were twenty of us, instead of just two. And then, as we rounded a curve in the tunnel—

I gasped.

Sheet after sheet of silver moonlight streamed down from above, about every seven feet, lighting the way forward.

“Wow,” said Ben again.

I let go of him to spread my hands—both hands—ahead of me into the first wash of moonlight, watching silver slide across my palms and around my fingers. “Why wasn’t there light until now, do you think?”

“Any number of factors. The ground up top may be overgrown, this close to the lake, covering any openings that might have once been there. Or the angle of illumination as the moon rises…”

Yes, that seemed right. I’d started walking again, and he stopped talking to follow. Eventually, the tunnel opened into a rounded chamber, splitting off into two other tunnels. Slab benches lined each wall and moonlight sheeted in from three different openings above us, all converging in the now bare center of the room.

A crossroads. Paths of energy so powerful, the place fairly hummed with it.

For a brief moment, I envisioned women in togalike dresses, holding hands, moving in a slow circle. Then, like ghosts, the image faded.

“This is where they would hold rituals,” I whispered, lifting my face to the light.

But I turned fast enough when a voice said, “Then this is where they would have hidden the grail, right, Katie?”

Even before I spun at the same time Ben did, to face his dripping wet brother in the tunnel behind us, I knew that hadn’t been Ben.

Victor’s Naples T-shirt stuck to his shoulders and chest. His water-shiny black hair really had grown out over the last month; it wasn’t that surprising that he’d been able to imitate his brother so well, with a few of Ben’s mannerisms thrown in.

I’d
known
I would lead him to the grail. Damn it to hell. That’s why I hadn’t wanted to look for it in the first place. And now—

And now, both his and Ben’s eyes widened in absolute shock, fixed on some spot over my shoulder.

“Uh, Katie?” said Ben.

Victor, just past him, whispered a drawn-out “Fuuuck.”

Slowly, my hair on end, I turned to look—and my shoulders sank in relief. It was just Diana. But she looked real this time. Not imagined. Not transparent. Not ghostly. She stood there, wearing a toga-style gown like the one I’d imagined the ancient goddess worshippers wearing, bathed in the silver moonlight. She smiled at me, the goofy, special kind of smile she’d reserved for birthdays and graduations. And
she was real.

Real enough that the Fisher brothers could see her, too.

Tears burned my eyes. Tears of reunion. Tears of loss. “Di?”

But behind me, Victor growled, “You bitch. This was all your—”

I spun on him.

But not before Ben Fisher slammed his twin into the wall.
“Shut up!”

That’s when things really got weird. Magic? Sure. Hidden, underground caverns? Why not? And ghosts? Natch. But this was Ben the good, Ben the kind, Ben the gentle.

Beating the holy crap out of his brother.

I guess everyone has their breaking point.

Yeah, Victor was fighting back. But maybe he’d been as stunned as me, because Ben landed three good punches into Victor’s gut before Vic even swung at him.

“Benny!” Vic protested, staggering back.

“The name—” Ben used his forearm as a wedge to drive Vic into the cave wall again. “Is
Ben.
”

Vic slammed a fist into Ben’s jaw, knocking him sideways.

Real fights are quieter than you’d think. Even the impact of the punches seemed muffled. Most of the noise came from their gasped words—and the occasional grunt of pain.

“She bewitched you, Benny!” Victor caught Ben with an uppercut that spun Ben around.

Ben pushed off the wall that caught him and shoulder-checked Vic, driving a fist into his gut. Again. “And you killed her sister!”

Sister!

I spun back to where Diana waited, solid and real…and amused. With three fast steps I’d reached her, spread my arms, thrown them around—

Except I stumbled right through her, solid or not.

The only real thing about her was the whisper of
I love you
that tickled through my head during that moment when our two souls mingled. No.
No!

She shrugged, smiled sadly—and pointed at one of the benches.

I widened my eyes and looked over my shoulder at the brothers now rolling on the soft stone floor, kneeing each other, pounding on each other. Even as I watched, the one on the bottom—Ben—clasped a hand over his other fist and swung, two-handed, into the side of Vic’s head. Vic fell off him. Ben followed the roll and hit him again, this time from on top. “How could you do that? How could you
be
something like that?”

“It’s not my fault! You’ve always known that, bro. They attacked me. Mom said to keep an eye on me, but you didn’t, and they
hurt
me!”

“Mom said for us to get help. You went back.”

Damn, Vic could put on the innocence when he needed to. “I was a kid!”

But I guess if anyone could read him…“Not,” growled Ben, “when you murdered Diana Trillo.”

Victor’s head lolled to one side. Blood ran from his mouth, and his eyes shone pure murder at Diana and me. “It’s their fault—”

Ben’s fist cracked against Victor’s cheek. “Grow up!”

I looked quickly back at Diana. She extended her hands toward my face, as if to say how pretty I was—but she wasn’t talking at all. For Diana, that seemed awfully strange. But for a ghost…

And she was a ghost. The truth of it hurt my heart. No matter how real she looked, my sister was only a ghost, now.

As her hands slid down and through my cheek, another whisper tickled through my head.
I’m real. So is Hekate. Trust Her.

Then she drew back and pointed at the same bench, holding my gaze with the stern look she’d reserved for broken curfews and failing grades.

“But Victor…” I whispered.

She narrowed her eyes and, again, pointed downward.

So I knelt beside the bench, the humming in my head almost deafening me. When I laid my hands on the stone, it made my palms tingle. I tried to push the top slab off.

Nothing happened. Since it was as big as me, not surprising.

Diana knelt beside me, still so solid looking that only her silence and her odd dress convinced me she was a ghost—that, and the whole falling-through-her thing. She pushed upward, from below. She did
not
fall through the rock.

Following her illustration, I pushed the same way. Me and my sister, working to uncover—

When it happened, it was so easy that I gasped. Apparently there’d been some kind of slanted opening built behind the bench. When the slab that made the seat tipped upward and back, it slid into the hidden pocket in the cave wall. Gravity took care of the rest. With an echoing, deafening scrape, the slab sank backward—

And I was staring down into the now open bench, at something that wasn’t a cup at all.

It was a buff-colored stone jug. The weirdest jug I’d ever seen. It was narrow at the bottom, but the rest of it was as round as a pregnant woman, seeming all the wider because of three faded red horizontal stripes around it. A flat ceramic handle arched over the top of it, and beside that a spout protruded upward, topped with a ceramic stopper.

“That’s a grail?” I whispered—I guess to Diana. But I could already
feel
that it was the grail. It certainly felt more sacred than anything I’d ever been this near.

“It’s…” Ben was there then, panting, over my shoulder. He dropped to his knees, either because he wanted a closer look…or because he couldn’t stand anymore. His nose was bleeding, his face smeared with dirt and blood. His lip was swollen. His gaze cut from the jug to where Diana stood, a few feet from me, then back to the jug. “I think it’s a Mycenaean stirrup cup. But Katie, we’re really seeing a ghost!”

It was Ben, all right. I could sense that as surely as I knew the difference between day and night, and not just because of the green shirt. But I glanced over my shoulder, all the same.

Victor lay on the stone floor, apparently unconscious, his arms drawn behind him.

Diana walked silently, barefoot, to stand over him—and sadly shook her head.

Ben drew his raw-knuckled hand across his bleeding nose. “I tied him up with my shoelaces.” He gulped more breath, as if he couldn’t talk and breathe at the same time. “I’ve read a lot about knots. You really do see her, don’t you?”

Maybe it’s me being a bad guy or something, but damn, he looked sexy right then. Still—I had a grail in front of me!

“Yes, I see her.” I reached for the jug.

“No!” Ben gently touched my wrist with his bloody hand, stilling my reach. “This looks like it could be two, even three thousand years old. Why didn’t we bring a camera?”

Well, Hekate was a very ancient goddess, wasn’t she? Since I’d found this “grail” for a reason, I picked it up anyway, and something inside it sloshed. “It still has liquid in it!”

I didn’t need to look over my shoulder at Diana’s now smiling ghost to know what that meant. Victor had killed for this. She’d died for this. I’d come halfway around the world and explored three countries for this.

And I was a daughter of Hekate.

With a quick wrench, before Ben’s
“Don’t!”
could make a difference, I’d pulled the ceramic stopper free. Ben looked horrified, but his horror wasn’t so intense that he couldn’t examine the stopper.

“Paraffin wax,” he murmured. “I’ve heard of this kind of thing being recovered from ancient shipwrecks, but—never mind.”

I sniffed the spout, and whatever was in there smelled…watery. And a little like bay leaf.

Diana, standing silently in a sheet of moonlight between Ben and Victor, nodded her encouragement.

I glanced once more at Ben.

“Hail, Hekate,” I whispered, like on a dare—and drank.

“You—” he began to protest.

It
was
water, faintly stale, wonderfully cool, with a faint bay flavor familiar from a lifetime of spaghetti sauce. And…that was
all?
I felt betrayed by the normalcy of it.

What a freaking anticlimax!

Except that, when I turned to Ben to say just that, he wasn’t moving. At all. It wasn’t like he’d gone still, so much as if I’d gone somewhere, some
time
else. What the…?

“Hail, Hekate,” said Diana, turning toward one of the tunnels and bending low from the waist.

Now
she spoke?

My breath fell shallow. I saw the torchlight first, approaching from one of the tunnels leading to this juncture. Mist rolled out toward us, knee-high, and shadows seemed to bend and warp across us. So did time. Two large black dogs loped out of the tunnel then, of a breed I couldn’t begin to name. They sat, one by each entrance. And then…?