Free Passage Graves by Madyson Rush Page A

her leadership fr om the start. There was no question in her mind that he was capable of masterminding such a careless prank, but she couldn’t stomach Golke being involved.
    “Hold on a sec.” Marek pointed at his monitor. “This map isn’t topographical.” He moved the cursor between the village and their test site. “Stenness is in a valley, right?”
    “There’s a hill between us, ” Thatcher realized.
    Marek compensated for the landmass blocking the two variables. “Guessing the size and location of the hill, erring on the conservative…”
    The screen refreshed to show the bluff separating their test site and Stenness. Sonja exploded at full threshold. Sound waves rolled toward the village but lessened in magnitude as they deflected off the hill.
    All four legs of Bailey’s chair met the ground.
    “There is no way that we did this,” Marek said. “Even at threshold.”
    All three of them stared at the monitor in shock.
    Thatcher swallowed. It was more comforting to think they were responsible.
    Marek turned to her. “You sure noise killed those people?”
    She nodded, certain.
    “Then who did this?” Bailey asked.
    Ma rek shook his head. “And how the hell did one man survive?”

Chapter 19
    MONDAY 3:50 a.m.
    St. John’s Cathedral
    Bathwick, England
     
    He had to make this right. There had to be a pathway forward that did not include Javan.
    Closing his eyes, Ian waited for guidance . In the fog of his eyelids, the captive remained coiled in the corner of the aphotic cell, staring at Ian, waiting, irrepressible. Ian grabbed his head and tried to force the vision from his mind. Maybe he could bury the image of his desiccated body, burning eyes, and dehydrated veins—entomb it somewhere beneath hundreds of unanswered prayers.
    There was no sanctuary for him, not even within the protective walls of St. John’s Cathedral. By meeting with Javan, he had turned his back on God. He had unwittingly invited a poltergeist inside his mind. The demon quickly rooted itself, sinking talons into unquenchable grief and spreading like wildfire over the parched grasses of his faith.
    Come .
    “Not again,” Ian begged. He ground h is palms against his ears until he felt the sting of the symbol in his hand. It was a futile attempt to block out a voice that originated inside. He sat up and tried the lamp. The power was still out. He lit the candle near his bedside.
    The darkness receded to the corners of his room.
    Grabbing his cane, he limped back and forth across the floor. The room was narrow, airless like the captive’s cell, just as suffocating. He could take no more. He burst out the door and descended the stairway, moving quickly down the steps and ignoring the pain in his joints. His robe flared as he hurried across the corridor into the library. It hurt to move so quickly, but his mind weighed heavier on his soul than his body.
    He ran the candle along the dusty shelves. Hundreds of 17th and 18th century texts were stacked floor to ceiling. Nearly two decades ago, when he had first come to study at St. John’s, he had stumbled upon writings of the occult. It was purely by accident. A priest would never search out apocryphal texts, and he never expected to find the arcane in a Catholic collection. The book was written in Hebrew. Brenton had taught him Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Coptic Egyptian, and even Mayan, but he knew little about the Hebrew writing system. The occult text would’ve been indecipherable, but someone had painstakingly translated the Hebrew into blocky, swirling Greek. Once Ian had discovered the Greek translation, his nights were spent pouring over the script, defacing the pages with his own penciled English translations.
    Where was that book?
    He climbed the sliding ladder attached to the shelves. Holding the candle with his left hand, he searched the highest shelf, hoping to recognize the book. He ran his forefinger along each leather spine, dipping momentarily into the gaps between books