The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(35)

Dr. Mingus stepped between me and Ashley, but I could see her face over his shoulder—she was at least a head taller than him—and I could also see what he held in his right hand.

A scalpel.

I jerked in the chair. The straps yanked me back. Mingus’s shoulder hunched and pivoted forward as he shoved the scalpel into the middle of Ashley’s chest.

Then he pushed the blade straight down toward her belly button. Her knees buckled, but the two guys kept her on her feet.

Mingus stepped away. Ashley’s chin dropped to her chest. A swirl of blond hair and the drip-drip-drip of her blood splattering on the cold tile, forming rivulets that ran toward the metal drain, and I remember thinking, Oh, that’s why there’s a drain in the floor.

Mingus turned to me.

Show me the gift.

Candy-breath, whispering.

Show me the power of God!

He cut a four-inch-long groove into my palm, threw off the straps, and flung me out of the chair. The men holding Ashley stepped away, and she crumpled to the floor as if in slow motion, coming to rest on her side, curled up like I was curled up now on my little bed in my little cabin, breathing in lavender and the smell of my own spit.

I crawled to her.

Her eyes were open, but I saw no spark of life in them.

Then a voice I had heard before whispered inside my head, Beloved!

My vision clouded. I was seeing her through a white film, a mist of shadow and light.

My beloved . . .

Something familiar and warm had come to me—or was it always there? I had felt it first in Merlin’s Cave, a being at once intimate and alien, so familiar but at the same time so terrifyingly different. The Sword of Kings, the gift passed down by heaven’s hands, was in this world but not of this world, my father had told me, and so was this presence around me now, between me and Ashley, joining me to Ashley.

Lying beside her, I pressed my bleeding hand into the gaping wound in her chest, and with my other hand I smoothed the blond hair away from her face.

In the name of Saint Michael . . .

I couldn’t feel the floor beneath me. I was floating in the white cloud. I was still in that room but also in a different place, a place where Mingus and the OIPEP Mafia couldn’t go. A still place that didn’t touch any other place on earth. A place with no center.

Prince of Light, hear my prayer.

Her eyelids fluttered, black butterflies, and her hands gripped my wrist. Our blood mixed. I could feel the beat of her heart.

She was going to live.

03:04:27:51

I dreamed I was sitting on a hilltop with an old man. We leaned against an ancient oak tree, watching workmen on the promontory below stack great white stones, one on top of the other, and when one stone slid into place more workmen filled the cracks with mortar.

I asked the old man what they were building.

“Camelot,” he answered.

The castle was rising three hundred feet above an inlet filled with jagged rocks and razor-sharp outcroppings of stone. I could hear the crash of surf and, just beneath it, a high-pitched wail, like a swift current hidden beneath calm water.

“I’ve been here before,” I told the old man.

He nodded. “So have I.”

“Who’s that crying?” I asked.

He smiled at me. “It is I.”

Then he reached up and unzipped his face. The flaps of skin fell away. He pulled out his skull, white at first, like the stones of the castle beneath us; then it turned clear as glass. Only the eye sockets remained dark, filled with a shadow that no light could chase away.

“Touch.”

I woke up soaked in sweat, still lying on top of the covers in my jumpsuit, my wounded hand throbbing beneath its bandage. Someone was in the room with me. I saw his hiking boots and, resting between them, the end of his black cane.

“Ashley,” I whispered.

“Far from it,” Nueve said.

“I know you’re not Ashley, you jerk. Is Ashley alive?”

“Why wouldn’t she be? She’s been touched by an angel.”

I lunged toward him. His cane swooshed through the air and I felt the tip of the knife poking into the soft flesh beneath my chin.

“Inadvisable, Alfred.”

“You won’t kill me. I’m a Special Item now.”

“Dr. Mingus believes he may have more than enough material to accomplish our goal. Like most scientists, he possesses an optimism bordering on arrogance. One might say, however, that that is precisely what arrogance is: optimism taken to its extreme. What? You’d rather not discuss philosophy?”

“You tricked me.”

“You asked to be extracted from the civilian interface and Camp Echo could not be farther from it.”

“You know what I mean. You were never going to give me a new identity.”

“My mission was twofold: the immediate concern of obtaining the Great Seal and the long-range one of protecting a Special Item of vital importance to international security.”

“My blood.”

He smiled. “You know what I am, Alfred.”

“That’s right. You’re a jerk.”

“I am the Superseding Protocol Agent.”

I knew what he meant. What I wanted didn’t matter. Even what his boss Abby Smith wanted didn’t matter. Only the mission mattered. I wondered how that worked. Normally a boss can tell you what to do or not do, but a SPA didn’t have to follow those rules. And if that was true, then what rules did he have to follow? I thought I knew the answer, and that made my heart speed up.