The Skeleton Key

The tunnel ended after another bend. Voices echoed from there, sounding like they were coming from another cavernous space. Seichan motioned for Renny to hang back. She edged forward, hugging a wall, and peered around the corner.

Another room—smaller, but similarly dotted with pillars—opened ahead. Only the pillars in this room were natural limestone columns, left behind as the miners dug out this chamber, making the space feel more ancient. But like the others, these pillars were similarly decorated with explosive charges.

In the center of the room, Seichan could make out twenty people gathered in a circle, all on their knees—but they were not adorned in ceremonial robes. They wore ordinary street clothes. One couple, arm in arm, had come in formal attire for the momentous occasion. A handful looked drugged, weaving dully where they knelt or with their foreheads lowered to the floor. Three bodies lay sprawled closer to the tunnel where Seichan was hiding: facedown, in pools of blood, as dark as oil against the rock. It looked as if they’d been shot in the back as they tried to flee the coming destruction, likely having had second thoughts about giving up their lives in a suicidal orgy.

A pair of guards, with assault rifles and wearing Kevlar body armor, stood to either side of the gathering, shadowed by pillars, watching the group, ready to discourage any other deserters.

Seichan ignored them for the moment and focused on the two figures standing in the center of the circle. One, with silver hair and Gallic features, wore a cloaked white robe, shining in a spotlight thrown by a nearby sodium lamp. Seichan could hear the soft chug of a generator powering the room. The man smiled beatifically upon his flock, arms raised.

That must be Luc Vennard.

“The time is at hand,” he intoned in French. “As the sun reaches its zenith, the destruction wrought here will start. The screams of the dying, the rising souls of the dead, will carry you all upward to the next exultant stage of existence. You will become my dark angels as I claim my solar throne. I promise you: this is not the end, but only the beginning for us all. I must leave you now, but my chosen spiritual right hand will take my place and lead you out of the darkness and into the dawn of a new era.”

The man stepped aside, clearly planning to abandon his flock. From the way Vennard cast a glance toward the two armed guards, it seemed he wasn’t sticking around for the festivities and had arranged for escorts to guide him out of the catacombs—just in case any of the flock objected to his departure. She suspected the bank accounts of those gathered had been emptied into Vennard’s vaults, ready to finance his next venture, to spread more widely the Order of the Solar Temple—or perhaps to buy that new yacht he’s had his eye on.

Was he a cultist, a con artist, or merely a glorified serial killer?

From the vacuous sockets of the dead staring out at her from the nearby niche, she suspected the answer was all of the above.

Vennard waved the second man forward. In his midthirties, he wore street clothes, his face shining with a sheen of sweat, his eyes glassy from what appeared to be both drugs and adoration. Even without the photo that Claude had left in the hotel room, Seichan would have recognized the historian’s son—both from his patrician features and the aristocratic air he shared with his father. Seichan pictured Claude plying his son with tales of past noble titles and lost heritages, instilling in the boy the same sense of bitter entitlement that motivated himself. But while the father had sought solace in the embrace of history, it seemed his son had looked to the future, seeking his own path to that former glory.

And he’d found it here.

“Gabriel—like the angel that is your namesake—you will be transformed by blood and sacrifice into my warrior angel, the most exultant of my new heavenly legion. And your weapon will be a sword of fire.” Vennard parted his cloak to reveal a steel short sword. It looked like an antique, a museum piece. “Like you, this steel will soon burn with the energies of the sun’s furnace. But first that weapon must be forged, made ready for its transformation. It must be bloodied like all of you. This last death by your hand, this singular sacrifice, will herald the others to come. This honor I give to you, my warrior angel, my Gabriel.”

Vennard held up the sword and offered it to the young man.

Gabriel took it and lifted it high—then the two men stepped aside, revealing a low altar behind them. It had its own spotlight, too.

A dark-haired woman was chained naked to the stone, legs spread wide, arms outstretched. A second sacrifice—blond-haired and pale—knelt nearby, shaking in a thin white shift.

On the altar, the woman’s head was lolling in a drugged daze. But she must have sensed what was to come and struggled against the chains as Gabriel turned to her with his sword. He stepped far enough aside to reveal the woman’s face—but the tattoos across her body were already enough to identify her.

At least for one of them.

“Jolienne!”

Renny’s cry shot out of the tunnel like a crossbow’s bolt.

All eyes turned in their direction.

Before Seichan could move, a large figure stepped across the mouth of the tunnel—a third guard. He’d been hidden to the side, ensuring no one left. She silently cursed Renny. With no time to devise a strategy, she simply had to improvise.

As the guard raised his rifle, Seichan shot him in the knee. The pop of her pistol was explosive in the confined space. The .357 round at such close range blew out his kneecap in a mist of blood and bone.

She leaped as the guard screamed and toppled forward. She caught him up, embracing him with one arm like a long-lost lover, and used her momentum to carry him into the room. She pointed her SIG Sauer past his body and targeted the guard to the right as he stepped clear of the pillar. She shot him in the face.

Screams erupted across the room. The flock scattered to all sides, like a flushed covey of quail. The remaining guard fired at her, strafing wildly, but she used her new “lover” as a body shield, bulldozing forward. Rounds pelted into the man’s Kevlar armor, but one bullet struck the back of his head. His struggling weight went suddenly limp.

She carried the deadweight another two steps, enough to get a good angle around the pillar. She fired at the exposed man, squeezing the trigger twice. She clipped the guard’s ear, knocking his head back. The second shot ripped through his exposed throat, severing his spine. He crashed to floor.

Seichan dropped the guard in her arms and took up a shooter’s stance, aiming toward the altar. Vennard had retreated behind it. Gabriel, still dazed and slow to react from the drugs he’d ingested, looked confused. He still held the sword at the throat of the bound woman. A trickle of blood flowed from where the blade’s razored edge had already sliced that tender skin.