“Oh, God.” I put my hand to my mouth as guilt tears up my insides—I’m going to be sick.
Bes cups the back of his neck with both hands. “Fuck.”
“What is it?” Cec chokes on his question at my back.He followed me after all.I turn to find his brow wrinkled.
When Bes doesn’t respond, Cec fumbles for the metal top of the car to keep himself upright. “Don’t tell me. He’s not dead. He can’t be dead, not like this.”
Bes vaults over the slick hood to the passenger door as I move in on Cec. Though he stands fine on his own now, I’m not sure he’ll be able to get up again if his knees give out. I place myself between him and Anders, despite knowing he can’t see him. Can’t witness the carnage.
Bes’s next words are solemn but determined. “We have to go.”
Cec shakes his head vehemently, voice thick. “We can’t leave him here. His family deserves to know what happened to him. He deserves to be buried properly.”
Bes doesn’t loosen his expression. “I’m sorry, Cec. I wish we could, but you know the rules.”
Cec whips his head in Bes’s direction, milky eyes wide—a man possessed. “And what if it were Hawkins? Would you simply dump her body on the side of the road to be picked at by birds and rot away in an unmarked grave?”
Bes looks away and doesn’t reply.
“That’s what I thought.”
I hold up a hand and do what I do best: “I’d like to go on record to say, while my first choice isn’t being dumped on the side of the road, you can feel free to set my corpse on fire as a way to escape, should the occasion arise.”
Cec clenches his fists. “It’s not right.”
“No, it’s not. He deserves an urn on the wall.” I place a hand on Cec’s arm, wanting to say it’s all my fault. To take the blame for Anders’s death. That he’d be alive if I hadn’t invited him along. “We’ll take him with us, won’t we, Bes?”
Bes’s gaze drops to the ground.
I squeeze Cec’s arm. “The best thing we can do now is to make the people who did this pay for it. If we live, we can avenge his death; if we stay here and die, we’ll be in the same boat as he is.”
After a moment, he turns to me, his eyes rimmed red. “For Anders.”
I nod. “For Anders.”
Cec opens the back door and crawls into the seat. Bes pops open the driver’s side door and the two of us lug Anders’s body onto the nearby grass. If it weren’t for half his head missing, I could imagine him sleeping. Watching his brains and skull fragments spill out onto the mud once we set him down, however, dashes that impossibility. I’m both nauseated and enraged by the sight, covering my nose with my arm as I get to my feet.
A sob claws up my throat thinking back to the time we spent together in the Archives. How he brought the exact books we needed to open the cypher. How he translated the incantation perfectly. How he gave me the slip of paper outside the church to make sure I could activate the Amulet of Amun if I needed to. He didn’t do any of that for the order, but because he thought it would help me. Maybe so I could protect myselffromthe order.
And now he’s gone.
I did this.If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have driven the car he was murdered in. I asked for him specifically because I trusted him, and now he’s dead.
The moment I pivot toward the back of the car, my guilt-ridden misery dissipates.
Two tall figures have joined us, aiming their guns at our heads. Black hoods obscure their faces like Grim Reapers.
Pulse pounding away inside my throat, I flinch back. But I don’t get far. The Reaper beside me lashes out, gripping my bad arm and pulling me to them, then holding me by the back of the neck. I glance at Bes, finding him in a similar predicament.
Cec stands outside the car once more, immobile beside a third person with a gun pressed to his head. This man is taller and skinnier than the others. His shaved head exposes him to the rain that’s barely let up, while a hoodless black leather duster protects the rest of him.
I struggle in the hooded man’s grasp, ramming my heel into his foot—he yelps and swears in German, loosening his hold on me for a split second.
Then, the one holding the gun to Cec’s head cocks it and I stop resisting.
“Enough, Miss Hawkins.” The man speaks calmly over the rain in a thick German accent. Given these men likely came with Ingrid, I’m not surprised he knows my name. “I’m going to make this easy for you: come with me, and I’ll let your friends live.”
My hand is already inching toward my father’s switchblade. I lost the pocket pistol up at the castle after shooting Ingrid with it, the loose bullets jingling in my pocket next to my blade uselessly. I wish I’d found a way to keep the miniature crossbow within reach, but my pack sits unhelpfully in the backseat of the Fiat.
