Cutter barreled into Keech, lifting him off his feet and tackling him to the rugged floor. The impact drove the air out of Keech’s lungs, and the back of his head smacked against a rock, blurring his vision. Before he could shake his head clear, Cutter drove a fist into his jaw. The iron taste of blood filled Keech’s mouth.
“Cutter, stop!” Duck screamed.
Keech tried to say something, anything, that would stop Cutter’s attack, but more blows crashed down on his shoulders and chest, driving away any hope of connection.
Cutter pressed his blade to Keech’s neck. “Don’t you move.” He turned and sneered at Duck, “And you stop right there!”
Duck slid to a halt. “Cut, it’s us, your friends.”
Cutter wagged his head in confusion and pain. “If you don’t cooperate, you’re dead meat, is what you are. Now drop the shard.”
Reeling and dizzy, Keech reached for Cutter’s wrist. Before he could wrench the blade away, the other boy drove a heavy fist into his jaw. The world went fuzzy again.
Charging up, Duck kicked out with a loud cry, and her boot walloped Cutter in the side. The boy tumbled back across the cavern floor.
In his dazed condition, Keech wasn’t sure he’d seen things properly. Duck was half Cutter’s size, yet she had booted him clear off Keech.
Duck held out her hand. “Come on.” As she pulled Keech to his feet, she pointed to the coil of rope he’d taken from the supply room. “We’ll tie him up and haul him out.”
Cutter reached for his dropped blade. “Master said he prefers you alive, but if you fought back, he’d accept you dead. He can always raise you as thralls to get what he wants.”
Shouts of alarm spread across the cavern. Uniformed thralls abandoned their posts to scurry over. Most of the approaching guards carried clubs and knives, but a few dead men tarried on the chamber platforms and leveled muskets at them. The captive townsfolk stopped swinging their pickaxes and dropped the stones they’d been hauling to stand in place and stare. For a split second, the underground work site in Skeleton Peak fell still and quiet.
Then a hefty soldier shouted from one of the towers, “Don’t move!” He pulled the trigger on his musket, and a plume of smoke erupted from the barrel. But the thrall had aimed too high, and the lead ball smashed into the stone above Keech’s head.
Pandemonium broke loose as thralls stampeded the chamber, scampering toward Keech and Duck. The people of Wisdom cried out in fear and scuttled for cover. Thralls screamed instructions to surrender as Cutter jumped to his feet, his blade flashing.
Duck yanked at Keech’s sleeve. “We gotta go!” They pedaled away from Cutter and the advancing thralls. A soldier vaulted at them, swinging a dull pickax. Duck sidestepped the attack and touched her shard to the man’s bare hand. The thrall froze in surprise, muttered something unintelligible, then collapsed.
The thralls stopped dead in their tracks.
“What happened to ’im?” one soldier grunted.
“She kilt him! I mean, kilt him for real!”
A third bewildered voice muttered, “That shiny piece of metal done it!”
Keech’s dizziness settled enough for his vision to clear. He hurtled toward a dumbstruck thrall and slapped the creature with his charm. Yelping in surprise, the soldier stiffened at the silver’s touch and keeled over.
“Don’t let them touch your skin!” Cutter shouted at the thralls. He dashed toward Keech again, his knife slashing at the air. “Just keep them penned in. I’ll handle the rest.”
Keech swiveled and shoved one of the advancing thralls, forcing the fiend into Cutter’s path. The soldier flailed and gripped Cutter’s shoulders, spoiling his attack.
A hail of musket fire filled the cavern as the soldiers perched on the towers and platforms squeezed off. Lead balls thumped around Keech’s feet. Duck reached to still another thrall, but the brute flinched back, avoiding the graze of the silver. “Don’t come any closer!” she yelled, waving her arm back and forth in front of her, the amulet shard beaming like electricity itself. The crowd of soldiers seemed to wilt away, clearing her a broad path.
Keech joined her. “We can lose them in the tunnels.”
“Blackwood!” Cutter had pushed aside the bumbling soldier and was once again driving toward him. Witnessing such murderous fury in Cut’s eyes tore at Keech’s heart. Despite their occasional differences, they had been true partners. They had shared stories over campfire meals, had giggled together at John Wesley’s dumb jokes, had taken down Bad Whiskey Nelson as a team in Bone Ridge Cemetery. That Cutter might be lost forever to the Reverend was too much to bear.
But Keech knew the solution.
The Fang of Barachiel.
Back in Bonfire Crossing, Keech had accidentally stabbed the Chamelia with the relic, only to discover that the dagger had the power to heal the Devil’s mark. One poke from Abraham’s dagger would release Cutter from his branded torment.
Keech whispered to Duck, “You’ve got the Fang. When I draw Cut in close, use it to free him.” He raised his fists, waiting for Cutter.
“Got it,” Duck said, still waving her shard back and forth at the soldiers.
Snarling, Cutter twirled his own blade through his fingers—the usual display of arrogance, but this time it filled Keech with dread. “You should have yielded, Lost Cause.”
Keech didn’t dare glance at Duck, for fear of giving away his plan. “C’mon, Cut. Let’s do this.” He set his feet wide in the soil.
Suddenly a voice called out, “Stop fighting, Keech. It’s time to surrender.”
From the same O-shaped tunnel from which Cutter had emerged walked a small figure, his arms outstretched. As he cleared the shadows of the tunnel and entered the light of the cavern, Keech staggered back a step, bumping into Duck.
It was his little brother.
Stunned, Keech dropped his arms. “Sam?”
Duck’s face screwed up in confusion as the figure shuffled closer. “Wait—this is Sam?”
Keech gasped. “You can see him?”
Duck pointed. “I can see him. But I thought he was just a vision.”
Sam appeared exactly as he had on the Santa Fe Trail, on the night he came rapping at the door of the abandoned shack. His boots were still muddy, the knees of his pants still ripped, his skin still crusted with frost. Even the lacebark limb was still in his hand, the one he and Keech had used a lifetime ago for a game of Grab the Musket.
The figure strolled toward them, stabbing the lacebark limb into his path like a cane. “You must be Duck Embry. Boy howdy, you sure messed up Big Ben Loving at Bonfire Crossing. No one should ever raise your bristles.” The boy reached to shake her hand, but she jerked away from the fingers as if they were covered in bees.
Keech remembered the first time he’d shaken Sam’s hand. Pa Abner introduced the blond-headed kid on the front porch of the farmhouse, which hadn’t even been named the Home for Lost Causes yet. Keech was six years old, and Sam was five. Pa said, This is Sam, and he don’t have any family. But now he’s gonna be your little brother and live with us. Show him your bedroom, introduce him to Granny, then explain all the chores. Pa Abner had then tousled little Sam’s hair. I think you’re gonna like it here, little Rabbit.
“Sam, I don’t understand,” Keech muttered. “What are you doing here?”
Before he could receive the answer, Cutter slammed into Duck’s side, knocking her down to the rock-strewn floor. He pressed a boot down on Duck’s wrist, and her fingers opened, releasing the Fang.
Keech moved to help her, but a band of soldiers hurried over to seize him. Bellowing in defiance, he swung his fist, grazing his shard over one greasy fellow’s cheek. The soldier shrieked, dropped to the ground, and tumbled back to his true death. The other goons shoved Keech over and subdued the hand wielding the charm. “Let me go!” he screeched, but the monsters held him fast.
Keech couldn’t believe they had been taken prisoner again, but their predicament felt secondary to the colossal question darkening his mind. “Sam, why are you helping them?”
Sam clicked his tongue three times in a scolding manner. “Shame on ya, Big Bad Wolf. You haven’t been true to your own whisper.” When he spoke, a blackness deeper than the darkest midnight stained the whites of his eyes. A child-like laugh tumbled from his lips, permeating the hollows of Skeleton Peak like a grim lullaby. “Everything you touch turns to ash. Your friends, your family, your precious Lost Causes.”
Keech’s lips trembled. “I don’t understand.”
“I think you do,” Sam said.
Behind the rabble of thralls, a low-pitched voice murmured a command to step aside, and the soldiers obeyed at once, opening their ranks as if a prince had just arrived.
A tall man stepped into the circle, garbed in a heavy fur coat and heavily tattooed—and Keech knew at once he was looking at Ignatio, the real Ignatio, not the nightmarish shadow version of him. The fellow was a decade older than the man Keech had seen in the vision of forty-five, but he was clearly the same wicked disciple of Rose. When the man smiled at Keech and Duck, a gold tooth flashed in his mouth.
Close on Ignatio’s heels was a short fellow wearing a frock coat and a curved sword on his hip. The man fluttered a fiendish hand. “Hello, children. I had hoped never to see you again, but you Lost Causes are stubborn little squirts.”
“Coward,” Duck hissed.
Keech watched in lingering disbelief as Sam sauntered over to Ignatio. The boy tilted his head at Keech, and this time when he spoke, the words ushered forth in bizarre unison with the tattooed fiend. The two formed an unholy harmony, as if their lips and tongues were connected, a frightening layer of two voices. “Did you truly believe your dead brother had come back to offer you advice? Did you think his fantasma had returned to save you?”
Opening his fur coat, Ignatio held his arms out to Sam like a father greeting his child. The boy’s body vibrated, shimmering into a blur. Sam’s laughter faded into a dull hum, and hazy darkness poured out of him. His form collapsed into a ribbon of quivering blackness. Ignatio opened his mouth and inhaled. The dark energy flowed into his mouth and seeped into the inked pores of his skin, till every aspect of what had just been Sam was consumed like water absorbed by a sponge.
Though the black tattoos crowded Ignatio’s body, Keech had noticed a vacant spot on the man’s left chest muscle, a flesh-colored oval void. But after Ignatio swallowed the dark substance that had been Sam, a blemish like a bruise formed in the empty space, then solidified into a fresh tattoo, a mark that resembled a large eye. Small lines extended from the eye, like the rays of the sun.
As his vision blurred with fresh tears, Keech felt the betrayal stabbing at his center, but he couldn’t figure out exactly who had been disloyal. After all, Sam had never lied, because Sam was gone, buried in the ashes of the Home for Lost Causes.
Keech realized who the true traitor was. Himself. He had opened the door to Ignatio. The powerful lure of the Black Verse had been too tempting, too exquisite. Duck and Quinn and Strong Heart had warned him, but he’d been unwilling to listen. He had fallen right into Ignatio’s trap.
Tears boiling down his face, Keech turned to his defeated trailmate. “I’m so sorry, Duck. Please forgive me. For everything. I’ve just led us to our doom.”