The Belial Ring (The Belial Series 3) (2 page)

Hypatia stared into his eyes and read all of that commitment there.
She knew it was useless to argue with him. He would not abandon her.

Her hand caressed the side of his face.
“All right, my friend, all right. We go together.”

He nodded and spurred the horses on.
Hypatia wanted to bring them to a gallop, but she knew that would draw attention, and with the mobs roaming the streets, they could easily crash. No—slow was safer.

They worked their way through the city, heading for the outskirts.
Hypatia grew cold as she surveyed the damage from the mobs. Everywhere she looked, homes lay in ruins, reduced to smoking embers. Others still shone brightly, wrapped in devouring flames.

Whole families
had been strung up in the streets—an undecipherable warning for some perceived crime. The wails of despair from unseen victims fought with the screams of irrational anger from the mobs.

Antonius turned the cart
toward the market, which was usually full of life. But today, stalls burned on either side, and bodies littered the way.

Antonius tried to steer around them, but occasionally he would have to go over.
Hypatia’s stomach rolled with each bump.

At the end of the road, a barricade of debris and bodies blocked the way.
Hypatia was struck with fear.
Could they have known we were coming this way?

Antonius halted the horses and began the slow process of turning them around.

Feeling eyes upon her, Hypatia looked over her shoulder.
A group of ten men had come up behind them, blocking their retreat. All stood silent. Hypatia recognized them for who they were. And who had sent them.

This group was no irrational mob.
They were here for her.

Antonius caught sight of the men and leapt from the chariot, his battle ax
e in hand. With a scream from the back of his throat, he charged the men.

The first man ducked, but Antonius
’s axe buried itself in the shoulder of the second, who screeched in pain. Another man grabbed Antonius by the hair and stabbed him in the side. "No!”

Hypatia yelled as she jumped from the chariot and raced for him.

One of the men
charged at her. She ducked his spear, caught its shaft as he swung it back, and kicked him in the chest. The man lost his breath.

Hypatia wrenched the spear from his grasp
and slammed the end into his face. She then flung the spear—and her aim proved true. It plunged right into the chest of the man holding Antonius.

Strong a
rms wrapped around Hypatia from behind, yanking her off her feet. She was pressed up against her assailant, unable to move her arms, uselessly kicking her legs.

“
Where is it, librarian? Where have you put it?” a voice snarled in her ear. It was a voice she recognized: Brutus.

“
It’s gone. You’ll never find it.”

Brutus dropped her and whipped her around.
He wrapped his fist in the front of her tunic and pulled her close. “You’ll tell us where it is. “ He glanced down at her. “And even if you don’t, there’s still something he wants.”

Hypatia went cold.
He knows.

A yell from behind her drew her attention.
A mob of at least two dozen men, their clothes and bodies stained with blood, charged down the road, blood in their eyes. The frenzied group wouldn’t care who they killed. With demonic screams echoing from their lips, the mob fell on the men like ravenous beasts.

Brutus dragged
Hypatia back, trying to get them both away from the carnage.

Hypatia dug her heels into the
hard ground, tearing her skin but slowing his progress. She screamed as loud as she could.

Brutus screeched at her.
“Shut up! Shut up! Or they’ll come for us.”

But his words were too late.
The mob had seen them. As a wave, they surged toward the two of them.

“
That was the idea,” Hypatia murmured, as she snapped her head back, catching Brutus in the nose.

He
cried out and his grip loosened. Hypatia slipped free, threw herself to the ground, and rolled. The mob flew right past her and pounced on Brutus. She lost sight of him under the mass of writhing bodies.

Getting to her knees, she braced herself to stand
—when a spear lanced her chest. She fell back, the pain stealing even her ability to scream. With trembling hands, she pushed the spear out; blood poured from the wound, soaking the dry ground below.

Fearful, she looked around.
Antonius lay on the ground, twenty feet to her right. She turned herself onto her side and pulled herself toward him, crying out with the effort. Exhausted and shaking, she reached his side.

He lay on his back, not moving
; blood covered his chest. Hypatia lowered herself into the crook of his shoulder, whimpering with the pain. She pulled Antonius’s arm around her.

Laying her head on his chest, she felt the unsteady beat of his heart.
And then it went still.

Tears streamed down
Hypatia’s cheeks. Pulling his arm tighter around her, she whispered, “Until we meet again, my friend.”

The mob howled, a few of its members catching sight of her.
They advanced, but she knew they would be too late. Death would claim her before they could.

Hypatia
thought of Amaris as she felt the last drops of blood drain from her body. She prayed she had escaped.

Mankind’
s freedom depends upon it.

CHAPTER 1

Washington, D.C.

Present Day

D
r. Delaney McPhearson pulled the packing materials from the crate and carefully lifted out the metal folio. She braced her legs as she lowered the book onto the lab table in front of her. A white cotton blanket on the lab table kept it from making any noise as she set it down. It also reduced the likelihood of injury to the ancient tome.

Her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail
to keep it out of her way, Laney ran a gloved hand over the cover. Symbols were etched into the corners, and a trim had been added: it looked like vines. In the center was a title written in Enochian. Alone, it was an astounding find.

Her green eyes roamed over the other ten crates
in the back of the room waiting to be unpacked. And they formed only a small portion of the crates still to be examined. They literally had hundreds of them.

Although Laney was excited about
the opportunity to examine these books, the way in which their discovery came about had been brutal, causing the death of more than a hundred people. Those deaths always tempered the excitement she felt.

But awe still filled her, as it always did whenever she looked at one of relics from the advanced civilization that pre-dated 10,000 BC. The
very words of that ancient society were now right in front of her.
The find of a century
.

Today, she
’d scan each page of this book. Some of the analysts at the Chandler Group had developed a translation program that worked pretty well. She’d send them the photos and they’d begin the translation.

But the words were only part of the story.
Each tome was intricately carved with pictures that sometimes provided even more knowledge than the words.

She glanced at the cover longingly, wishing she
could read Enochian. The program was good, but it still took a while to capture each of the pages, isolate the words, and translate them. And she was always impatient when she began.

But sadly, she did
n’t have any natural ability with languages. Luckily, she knew someone who did.

She glanced over her shoulder.
“Hey, Henry. Can you come look at this?”

Henry Chandler, founder and head of the Chandler Group, an international think tank with a net worth just shy of a billion dollars, looked over at her.
With dark, almost black hair and unusual violet eyes, Henry was a handsome man . . . and an intimidating one.

When Laney had
first met him a year ago, she’d been nervous about meeting this man who was known as a titan in multiple spheres, even having been dubbed this generation’s “most analytical thinker” by Forbes magazine. The fact that he also stood almost two feet taller than her modest five-four didn’t help either.

But she quickly realized
that all of his professional accomplishments were merely window dressing. At his core, Henry was a good man. One she could trust with her life. One she
had
trusted with her life.

Henr
y came to stand next to her, an eyebrow raised.

Laney gestured
toward the book. “What’s the title of this one?”

Henry
’s pupils constricted and almost wavered before he spoke. “Hard to translate into English. The closest word would be Alchemy.”

They were working from a lab at the Smithsonian.
The entire collection, the Shuar collection, was being housed there until its formal home down in Ecuador could be built. The Smithsonian was the safest place any of them could think of to house the ancient library.

Jake Rogan, the Chandler Group
’s head of security, had insisted, though, on adding some Chandler guards round the clock—in addition to the Smithsonian’s already impressive security detail. Not a bad call, being that one of the books had been stolen from the collection prior to its move to the Smithsonian.

“
Alchemy? Really?” Jake walked into the room and Laney’s heart did a little flip.

Standing at six foot four, Jake had the broad shoulders of a football player and the
V-shaped torso of a gymnast. Dark brown hair and eyes, and a nose just a little crooked, made for one beautiful, masculine man, in Laney’s opinion. And he was all hers.

Jake leaned over and kissed her cheek before looking over her shoulder at the book.
“Wonder if they ever figured out how to do it.”

“
It’s not that hard,” Danny Wartowski said from a desk at the other side of the room. The fourth member of their team was also the youngest. At age thirteen, Danny was the powerhouse thinker behind many of the Chandler Group’s incredible projects.

Henry, Laney
, and Jake all stopped and stared at him.

Danny must have felt
them looking because after a minute he turned around. His deep brown eyes stared out at them from under a shaggy mane of brown hair. “What?”

“
Alchemy isn’t that hard?” Laney said. “Rulers for hundreds of years struggled to find the secret combination that would change metals into gold. Without any success.”

Danny shrugged.
“Yeah, but then there was Dr. Hantaro Nagaoka.”

Laney glanced at Henry and Jake
, who just shook their heads. She smiled. “Okay Danny, share with the rest of the class.”

“
In 1924, Dr. Hantaro Nagaoka discovered that if you place an isotope of mercury under paraffin oil and then bombard it with one hundred fifty thousand volts of electricity, you get gold,” Danny said, surprise in his tone.

Danny often forgot that not everyone had a genius
-level IQ. And seeing as Danny also bore more than a passing resemblance to the boy Elliot from the movie
E.T.
, it was also easy for others to forget that he was by far the smartest person in any room.

In fact, Danny was considered a genius even among geniuses.
His IQ was greater than 200, while an average intelligence hovered around 100. Only two percent of the world population had an IQ above 175. Danny’s IQ outdistanced even theirs.

“
Really?” Jake asked.

“
Really.” Danny turned back to his screen, obviously done with the conversation.

Laney shook her head.
Danny, the king of obscure facts. What must it be like to have a brain that works like that?

Shaking her head, she turned back at the book.
What would this book reveal? The same thing that Dr. Nagaoka had discovered in 1924—or another way to create gold?

In the last few centuries, man always seemed to be
“discovering” facts that other civilizations had already known hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. An image of the Dogon people of Mali flashed through her mind.

In western Africa, the Dogon
people claim to have known about Jupiter’s four moons and the rings of Saturn for thousands of years. They even knew about the star Sirius and the two stars, Sirius B and C, that circled it. Modern man didn’t verify these facts until the last century, with the invention of high-powered telescopes. The Dogon, by contrast, knew about Sirius as far back as 3,200 BC.