Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(5)

I head toward the tall staircase, gun at the ready in my hand. I’m more a knife-girl, but something tells me this unexpected mission thrown on us in the middle of the night might be more a gun event. As I ascend the rock steps quietly, I reach down and pat Pearl jutting up from my boot, just to make sure she’s still there. She and I have a very close relationship—she’s killed far more people than I have.

A shadow moves across the gray light on the basement floor, snapping me around on the sixth step to look behind me. I never heard the door opening from the outside. I back myself against the wall, my black, tight-fitting attire helping me blend in with the darkness. My long auburn hair is pulled into a tight braid trailing down the center of my back and out of my face, keeping my vision sharp. I don’t move and I steady my breath so that it’s as noiseless as the rest of me.

I ready my gun when I hear the distinct sound of small debris being crunched underneath a pair of boots.

“It’s just me!” Dorian whispers sharply as his hands shoot up on both sides, my gun pointed down at him from the middle of the dark staircase. “Jesus! Scared the shit out of me, woman!” His voice is low, his breath noisy.

I lower my gun.

He points at the small door on the other side of the room.

“Came through there,” he whispers. “There’s another way into the basement on the other side of the building. That door links the sides.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No, not a soul.” He comes up the steps behind me. “This doesn’t feel right.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I say.

“Where’s Faust?”

“He came in this way ahead of me. Where he is now I don’t know.”

We take a few more steps, getting closer to the door at the top.

“I didn’t know you were married,” I say quietly, but keep moving because this isn’t the time to stop and chat about our exes. Besides, I don’t really have any exes, unless you want to count Javier Ruiz, the Mexican drug lord who I was a sexual slave to for nine years. And personally, I don’t consider him an ex.

“I guess we all have things about us we’d rather not talk about,” he says.

That wasn’t necessarily his way of refusing me the conversation, but I end it just the same.

We reach the door and I place my hand on the dusty old knob, preparing to open it slowly.

“She hates me,” Dorian says, catching me off-guard.

I look down at him two steps behind me.

He shrugs. “I don’t blame her though,” he says and then nods, looking at the door. “Let’s go.”

The door breaks apart from the frame, thankfully without a sound, and I crouch down on the top step in my tall black boots before poking my head carefully around the corner—if anyone’s standing there waiting to blow my head off, they’ll probably expect my head to be a little higher, giving me just enough time to spot them first and back away before they can react.

There’s no one in the long, dark hall that splits off in two directions. Just more debris—overturned metal chairs and what looks like old desks of some sort are stacked in a sloppy pile along one wall. Papers are strewn about the floor.

We step out of the doorway and into the hall, passing quietly around the debris and the paper.

“I’ll go this way,” Dorian says, pointing to his left.

I nod and we part ways, me heading in the opposite direction past several opened doors on both sides of me, each room revealing that this might’ve been a school at one time. Now that I think about it, I do recall seeing what resembled an old running track a block over, and other red brick buildings much like this one, and a basketball court—it and the track overrun with weeds made it harder to identify in the dark, initially.

I take my time down the length of the long hallway, stopping at each door to make sure the rooms are clear before walking past them, and minutes later find myself at a set of closed metal doors, with strips of silver running horizontally along the centers, waiting for me to place my hands upon them to push them open. I step up to the doors and press my back against one instead, carefully turning my head at an angle to see inside the vertical piece of glass running from the top of the door to the horizontal push-handle. Moonlight barely penetrates the room from the frosted glass panels high up in the tall ceiling. All I can see are rows and rows of seats drowned by the darkness. And a stage, I finally make out the longer and harder I look. It’s an auditorium.

Taking a deep breath, I press my hip against the push-handle and open the door. The handle pops and cracks, just like I remember it when I was in Jr. High school, and I wince. When I believe I’m still in the clear, I begin to move farther into the room, crouched low as I move down the center aisle. The carpet smells like fifty years’ worth of dirt and mildew. The air is dry but cool, and getting cooler as November approaches, and it too stinks of old, abandoned building and weather damage.

I stop cold in my tracks and adjust my eyes in the semi-dark. There is movement below; what looks like a figure is sitting in one of the seats on the second row close to the stage. I drop closer to the floor, my finger ready to pull the trigger if I have to, and I watch for any more signs of movement, hoping my eyes were only playing tricks on me in the darkness.

A foot sways back and forth, propped on the back of the chair in front of what I’m definitely certain of now is a figure.