Elizabeth strode along at his side as if passing through a garden, her back straight, her chin high. He tried to emulate her confidence, her stiff swagger, but he failed. Once he saw the far side of the bridge, he rushed to it, happy to escape the burning river.
For a moment, he was alone, all the others behind him, even Henrik with his flashlight. Ahead, the pitch-dark room smelled oddly of flowers, the perfume cutting through the stink of the sulfur.
Curious, he headed deeper, wanting to find the source.
Henrik and the others finally caught up with him. The large man directed his light high, revealing an arched ceiling of volcanic rock, covered in heavy soot. The walls held many iron sconces, bearing fresh bundles of reeds. Someone had prepared this place.
“Light the torches,” Iscariot ordered.
Henrik and his partner set about igniting the tar-soaked bundles, each setting off in opposite directions, slowly revealing more of the large cavern. Other tunnels led out from here.
Tommy remembered Iscariot’s description of the hundred paths to Hell.
In the center of the room, a large black stone, slightly slanted but polished flat, sat like a black eye staring back at him. He had difficulty looking at it, sensing a wrongness about it.
His gaze skittered past it to the far side as the last torches were lit.
What he found there, bound to an iron ring in the wall, was a woman in a white dress. Her skin was brown and smooth, her cheekbones high. Long black hair spilled over her round bare shoulders. Torchlight glinted off a splinter of metal hung round her neck.
Unlike the black stone, Tommy’s eyes couldn’t look away from her. Even from across the chamber, her gaze glowed at him, drawing him closer, capturing him, like a whisper of his name spoken with all the love in the world.
Iscariot stopped him with a touch on his shoulder. He stepped past Tommy to face the woman across the gulf of the room, but the sadness in his voice made that gap sound infinite and impossible to cross.
“Arella.”
6:58 A.M.
Judas stopped near the altar stone, unable to approach her closer. It had been centuries since he had last seen her in the flesh. For a moment, he considered forsaking everything and rushing to her side and begging her forgiveness.
She offered him that path now. “My love, there is yet time to stop this.”
A moth fluttered before his eyes, breaking the well of her dark gaze with emerald wings. He fell back a full step. “No . . .”
“All the centuries we wasted. When we could have been together. All to serve this dark destiny.”
“After Christ’s return, we can spend eternity together.”
She stared at him sadly. “Come what will, that will never be. What you do is wrong.”
“How can that be? For the centuries that passed following your revelation of my purpose, I collected bits and pieces of other prophecies, to understand what I must do, how I must bring about Armageddon. I sought seers from every age, and each confirmed my destiny. Yet it wasn’t until I learned of the boy, of this immortal so like me yet so different, that I recalled something you drew, my love. One of your earlier predictions before you fled my side. I had forgotten about it, considered it of little worth.”
He turned to the First Angel. “Then came this wondrous boy.”
“You see shadows I cast and call them real,” she countered. “They are but one path, a ghost of possibility. No more. It is your dark actions that give them flesh, that imbue them with significance and weight.”
“It is right that I do so, for even the slimmest chance to bring Christ back.”
“Yet all of this you’ve built up in your mind’s eye alone, basing so many deeds on these prophecies you stole from me. How could anything good come from such a shattering of trust?”
“In other words, an act of betrayal.” He smiled, almost swayed by her earlier words, but now delivered. “For you see, I am the Betrayer. My first sin led to the forgiveness of all sins, by Christ dying on the cross. Now I will sin again to bring Him back.”
She sagged along the wall, baring her restraints, clearly recognizing his resolution. “Then why have you trapped me here? Only to torment me by forcing me to watch?”
Iscariot found the strength at last to cross fully to her. He breathed in the scent of lotus, of the skin he once kissed and caressed. He reached and touched her bare collarbone, daring such a violation with only one finger.
She leaned toward him, as if to sway him with her body where her words failed.
Instead, he slipped that finger into the loop of her gold necklace, tightened his fist around it, stirring the silver shard between her perfect breasts.
Her eyes darted to his, filling with understanding and horror. She pulled away, smashing her back flat against the wall.