Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(38)

They weren’t charged—no Heka glowed within the lines—but, like the pink spell on the door, there was something achingly familiar about the patterns around the inner square of the mandalas. I knew it well. Change the square to a triangle and you had practically the same markings that were painted beneath each of the tables in Tambuku.

“Binding magick,” I whispered to Lon.

The magical artwork surrounding the mandalas was unique. Each of the four sigils was drawn with clean lines, and all were scored with letters in a sophisticated, evolved alphabet that wasn’t earthly.

I squatted and looked closer. “Something Æthyric, maybe.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lon mumbled.

No sign of old blood, Heka, bones, or anything else around them. I took out my phone and snapped a quick photo of each one, trying not to think about terrified kids being held here. If there were such things as ghosts, as Jupe stubbornly believed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than their being trapped in a place like this for eternity.

Lon shone the light around the room after I’d finished taking pictures. “I don’t see any remains.”

“That’s because the thread’s not connected. Those are clean.” Hajo pointed to the far side of the conveyor machinery, away from the mandalas. “The thread ends over there.”

My heart sped up as we treaded across the room. Hidden from view between the wall and a broken machine, an oblong oval stretched across the cement floor—not carved like the mandalas, but drawn with a dark pigment.

Outside the oval was more of that strange alphabet from the mandalas.

And inside the oval was a single skeleton.

An adult skeleton. Not a child.

The arm and leg bones lay in a pattern that suggested the body had been splayed out. The skull was still connected. In the middle—where the torso should have been—a pile of splintered bones radiated in a rough circle, as if a bomb had gone off inside the body. A dark spatter stained the concrete beneath, stopping abruptly inside the edge of the oval. No trace of any clothing whatsoever.

A gruesome sight. But what was written on the cement above the skull sent an army of chills down my spine:

JESSE BISHOP

Shock swept through me. I stood frozen for several moments, then pushed it away and focused on the details. The writing was definitely inscribed by the same hand who’d carved the mandalas, and, like the strange alphabet on those, the letters here were evenly spaced.

Like a child practicing block letters. That shook something loose in my brain. An image from an old newspaper clipping in the bottom of Dare’s banker box. I was no handwriting expert, but even I could see that Bishop’s name was written in the same manner as the names of the seven kids that were carved into the trees at Sandpiper Park.

Oh, Christ . . .

Bishop wasn’t the Snatcher.

Bishop was killed by the Snatcher. The key on the necklace had provided Hajo with a direct thread to its owner’s remains—not the children.

A dry croak stuck in my throat as I tried to say this out loud, but Lon immediately hushed me. “Take a picture,” he commanded softly.

With shaking hands, I pressed the screen on my phone to enable the camera function. It was all I could do to focus long enough to get a partially blurry shot, so I took a second one, but it didn’t turn out much better. One thing was obvious: though the seven mandalas were well planned and precisely executed, the oval holding Bishop’s bones was an afterthought. It was set off in the corner, the angle slightly askew. Drawn quick and rough. In a moment of anger?

“So, this is the guy you’re looking for, yeah?” Hajo said. “Looks like he was involved in some heavy occult shit. Remind me not to cross a magician.”

“Damn straight,” Lon muttered.

Hajo squatted down near the circle and pointed. “What’s that? There’s something behind the jaw. Looks like he swallowed it.”

Lon shifted the flashlight’s beam to illuminate the skull, while Hajo leaned over the skeleton to reach for it. When his fingers almost made it, he leaned in farther, taking a step inside the oval, and a tinge of dull red light, barely perceptible, washed over his shoe.

“No!” I shouted. But it was too late.

The red light sizzled around the oval and brightened. Another spell. It wasn’t a deterrent this time. Not a warning, either . . .

A deafening blast cracked the concrete beneath the skeleton and the whole room shook. An unseen force rushed at us, knocking Hajo against the wall and slamming Lon into the conveyor machine. My back hit the concrete floor. Pain ripped through my lungs. Lon’s flashlight flew from his hand and ricocheted off the wall. It blinked a couple of times as it spun on the floor and rolled somewhere near me.

“Cady!” Lon bellowed in the darkness.

Before I had time to answer, “What happened?” echoed in the distance and I saw Lon’s golden Zippo flame flickering, floating through the air like a yellow fairy as Bob ran toward us.

I pushed myself up, scanning the dark for the flashlight. It was pointed at the wall. I touched the handle with my fingertips, accidently pushing it away as a strange scuttling sound vibrated through the air, somewhere off in the corner.

Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.

“Be quiet!” I yelled. Bob’s running feet stopped abruptly.

My hand stilled as I strained to listen to the bizarre scratching sound. It multiplied and moved, and my heart nearly stopped.