“How’s your wrist?” Nathan asked as Jake walked away.
“Stings a little.”
He sat down beside her. “If we don’t find a way out in the morning, we’ll have to go back. There’s got to be a way out back there. We didn’t just appear here.”
“Unless it was a booby trap with no exit designed to trap someone until they slowly died of thirst.”
“Thus speaks a girl who’s spent her life exploring caves and tombs,” Nathan said. “We should save our batteries.”
Nathan’s flashlight started flickering and he turned it off. “That’s not good.”
Jake appeared a moment later and sat down on Kendall’s other side. “You trying to conserve batteries?”
“Mine’s dying,” Nathan said. “The batteries were fresh.”
“It’s this cave,” Kendall said. “There’s something strange about it. Maybe the statues are draining the batteries and us.”
“We’d better turn ours off,” Jake said. “Who knows how long we’ll be in here.” He flipped his light off as a soft rumble sounded in the region of his stomach. “Don’t suppose anyone has a candy bar?” His voice sounded strange in the dark.
“I wish,” Kendall said. She was getting hungry. And thirsty. “We need water. We might find a spring.”
“We’ll check after we move on,” Jake said. “I don’t want to split up and search.”
They didn’t want to leave her alone. “I think it’s safe now.”
“We’re not taking any chances,” Jake said. “Even if it was just a ghost. Hell, a ghost killed Edward.”
“That was my father.”
Dead silence met her announcement. Then Jake blurted out a word that sounded even more obscene in the silence and darkness of the cave.
“Your father was the ghost in the chapel?” Nathan asked.
“Yes, but I don’t know if he’s a real ghost or just a… memory, a piece of the past replaying itself.”
“I thought the ghost was the old guy in the catacombs who was guarding the Spear of Destiny, and he’d seen you at the castle when you were a kid,” Jake said.
“No. It was my father. I sensed something familiar about him then, but I didn’t see his face clearly until earlier tonight when he came into my room. I think that’s why I needed to be there in the chapel with you. So he would recognize me.”
“And not kill us along with Edward,” Nathan said.
Jake frowned. “How can a memory kill someone?”
“I don’t know,” Kendall said. “How could a ghost kill someone? None of it seems logical.”
“It figures that he’d be haunting that room if that’s where you were born,” Jake said.
“And where my mother died. Given how much she was bleeding, she couldn’t have left the castle alive. There are two graves outside the graveyard. I think my mother is buried in one.”
“Outside the graveyard?” Nathan said.
“She probably wasn’t put in consecrated ground,” she said. “I’m sure she wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“Makes me wonder who the second unconsecrated grave belongs to,” Jake said.
“I think it’s mine.”
The dark silence grew quieter. “Yours?” Nathan asked.
“My father must have buried my mother there. Maybe he put up another stone to make the Protettori think the baby had died too. He would have been cast out if anyone found out. Maybe he tried to hide it.”
“It must not have worked,” Jake said. “He wasn’t Protettori when you were growing up.”
“Where is your father buried?” Nathan asked.
“Aunt Edna put up a stone in his memory, but there wasn’t a body,” Kendall said. “The authorities told us there wouldn’t have been anything left from the crash but bones. They never found them. Wild animals, I suppose.”
“Maybe the second grave is a memorial for your father,” Nathan said. “If he was part of the Protettori.”
“Perhaps,” Kendall said.
“Your father never mentioned the castle?” Nathan asked.
“Never. It must have been a bad memory for him. When I saw the vision of the birth—my birth—it seemed as if my mother had hidden the pregnancy to protect my father until she got desperate.”
“If he was Protettori, that makes sense,” Nathan said. “Who knows what they might have done to him, to all of you, to protect the order’s secret.”
“There’s more,” Kendall said. “That piece of paper we found was a letter she wrote telling him about the baby. But then someone was trying to kill her, so she panicked and came to the castle.”
“Who was trying to kill her?” Nathan asked.
“They didn’t say, but my mother was apologizing for betraying my father. She didn’t say what she’d done.”
“Obviously your father wasn’t part of the order when you were growing up, so either he left or they excommunicated him or whatever they do. Like they did the Reaper…” Jake’s voice trailed off.
Kendall wondered if his thoughts were headed the same direction as hers. Could the Reaper be her father? Marco hadn’t said when he was cast out. A chill rolled over Kendall’s already cold skin as she remembered the sense of familiarity she’d felt in the shadow. She recalled the dream she often had where the evil shadow was creeping up behind her father, as if to consume him. “Did you get your situation straightened out at the mansion?”
“Kendall doesn’t know about your situation,” Jake said. “Why don’t you tell her who you were keeping in your dungeon?”
Nathan rubbed his chin. “Raphael.”
“Raphael’s dead,” Kendall said.
“Not anymore,” Nathan said.
Kendall turned on her light so she could see Nathan. “That’s impossible. Jake and I saw him. He was dead.”
“He was dead when we found him at the castle,” Nathan said, “but he woke up.”
“You can’t just wake up from being dead.”
“Not unless you’re Raphael,” Jake said. “Or Jesus.”
“I saw a vision of him in the maze just before I fell,” Kendall said.
“I don’t think it was a vision,” Jake said. “He escaped. Remember the roaring we heard?”
“That was Raphael?” Just like the roaring she’d heard when she touched Raphael’s cross earlier. “What do you mean, escaped?”
“He was Nathan’s prisoner. Kind of poetic justice, if you think about it. He did imprison us in that tower.”
“You were holding Raphael prisoner?” Kendall asked. “Are you crazy?”
“I had my reasons,” Nathan said. “I needed to know how he was still alive, and he must know where the relics are.”
“What he really wanted to know was why Raphael’s eyes look like his when Nathan goes apeshit,” Jake said.
Kendall frowned. “Raphael’s are like that all the time, but they don’t glow.”
“We’ve never seen Raphael go apeshit. What do you want to bet his glow too? How about it, Nathan? Did they glow when he was roaring like Bigfoot as he escaped your prison?”
Nathan made a noncommittal grunt.
“Maybe the shadow was Raphael,” Kendall said.
“Could be,” Jake said. “We think he moved the treasure.”
“It’s gone?” Kendall asked.
“Every last piece of it,” Jake said.
“How did he have time to get here and move a room full of treasure?” she asked.
“Only Raphael knows,” Jake said.
Kendall was shocked, and also angry. “Nathan, you’ve been hiding things since the day I met you. I know we all have things we don’t want to talk about, but you send us on a search for the Spear of Destiny and don’t bother to tell us. And you’ve got some kind of superhuman thing going on that you never warned us about. I’m surprised Jake hasn’t already shot you.”
“I thought about it,” Jake said.
“You’re as bad as he is, Jake.” She turned back to Nathan. “Now you’ve kidnapped someone we thought was dead, and you didn’t bother to tell us? If you can’t trust us by now, when we get out of here, we need to go our separate ways.” Her light flickered and she quickly shut it off. The dark made it feel even colder. And it was already like a freezer.