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He waved a casual order to Buller.
“Shoot him,” Jacobs said.
Adam’s arm circled her waist. Ellie hadn’t even realized that she had started to charge out of the antechamber.
“Not like that, Princess,” he whispered tightly at her ear. “You can’t help him if you’re dead.”
The men by the crate—Charlie, Lessard, Pacheco, and Flowers—had all gone still. The sound of their hammers died as they stared between Jacobs and the priest. Ellie could practically see the wheels churning in Charlie’s head. She suspected that Adam’s wry ally was frantically calculating his odds of intervening successfully on the priest’s behalf.
For his part, Buller was looking uncomfortably from Kuyoc to Jacobs. Shooting a priest must have stretched the limits of his admittedly flexible moral boundaries.
“Hold on!” Dawson protested as he scrambled over to where they stood. “What if he actually knows something about the mirror?”
“Do you?” Jacobs demanded as he turned back to Kuyoc.
Kuyoc’s front of cheerfulness had dropped. He looked at Jacobs with all the clarity and discernment Ellie knew him to possess.
“Yes,” the priest said flatly.
Jacobs looked thoughtful.
“Tie him to the column, then,” he ordered.
Buller and Price moved more readily to obey. The two guards easily hauled the slight, wiry priest to one of the thick stone pillars that punctuated the periphery of the cavern. Staines stumbled over with a length of rope.
“His crazy shirt’s in the way,” Staines complained. He waved a hand at Kuyoc’s homemade breastplate.
“So take it off him,” Jacobs snapped in reply.
Kuyoc raised a quick hand as Staines and Price moved to follow Jacobs’ command, holding them off. With a few quick tugs on the cords that bound his contraption together, he loosened it, shrugged it over his head, and held it out to the guards.
“Careful with that,” Kuyoc cautioned Staines deliberately.
Staines uneasily shoved the garment at Price.
The bigger guard sighed and tossed the bundle of reeds aside. The breastplate slid across the floor of the cave, coming to rest at the wall right near to where a dark crevice broke the smooth limestone surface.
Could the opening be another way out?
Ellie’s brain lurched automatically into a rapid calculation. She considered the position of the antechamber and the angle of the tunnel through which she and Adam had climbed to reach it.
Her stomach sank. The hole must be the other end of the opening that had sat at the top of the mountain of bones. That meant it was the gap through which all those people and animals had been thrown.
Had they been killed right here? She wondered over it queasily as she peered out at the graceful beauty of the cavern.
Price and Staines finished binding the priest to the pillar. The job complete, they ambled away. Staines winced a bit as he bent over to retrieve Adam’s Winchester from the floor.
“You said he was trying to get caught,” Adam complained in a low grumble. “Was he also trying to get himself tied to a rock?”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t part of his plan,” Ellie admitted.
Adam gave a tired sigh and rubbed a muddy hand over his features. “Great,” he concluded and neatly slipped from the tunnel.
Ellie instinctively dropped to a crouch as she watched him dart across the shallow flow of water and tuck himself behind a rippling stone formation.
No one noticed. All of the men in the room were once again focused on watching the construction of the crate.
With a breath, Ellie followed after Adam.
