Innocent Blood(131)

“Don’t know,” Erin said softly, feeling like she should whisper for some reason.

She studied the sides that curved up around her, noting the ridgeline was not as smooth as she had thought from the air, but looked rather more jagged, forming a natural palisade at the bowl’s rim. Heat radiated underfoot, more than she would have expected from this ash-covered day. It shimmered across the sand-filled crater, dancing with motes of dust.

Arella stepped away from them, heading toward the center of the crater. “Quickly with the boy” was all she said.

They followed her, mystified and confused—especially when she dropped to her knees in the sand and began digging with both hands.

Jordan cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe we should help her.”

Erin agreed. As Christian stood with Tommy in his arms, she joined Jordan and Rhun, digging shoulder to shoulder, scooping out the hot sand. Thankfully, the deeper she dug, the cooler the sand became.

Arella knelt back, letting them work, clearly still weak.

A half foot down, Erin’s fingertips hit something hard. A heady mix of anticipation and wonder rolled through her. What lay hidden here? How many times had it been buried and uncovered by passing sandstorms?

“Careful,” she warned the others. “It might be fragile.”

She slowed her movements, removing smaller amounts of sand, wishing that she had her digging tools, her whisks and brushes. Then a flake of black ash fell and stung her eye, reminding her that they needed to hurry.

Her pace picked up again, the others following her example.

“What is it?” Jordan asked, as it became clear that a layer of glass lay beneath them, swirling and rough, natural, as if something had melted the sand.

“I think it’s impact glass, maybe secondary to a meteor strike.” Erin tapped the surface with a fingernail, making it clink. “There’s a large deposit of such meteoric glass out in the Libyan desert. The yellow scarab on King Tut’s pendant was carved from a chunk of it.”

“Cool,” Jordan mumbled and returned to his labors.

Erin took a breath to wipe her brow with the back of her wrist. As Jordan and Rhun continued to clear the sand off the glass, she realized who worked so hard to free what lay buried here.

They were the prophesied trio . . . together again.

Taking heart in that, she redoubled her efforts, and in a few more minutes, they had cleared enough sand away to reveal edges to the glass—though more extended outward. Erin glanced all around.

Was the entire crater glass?

Had some meteor hit and melted this perfect bowl?

Was that possible?

It seemed unlikely. When the meteor hit Libya twenty-six million years ago, giving birth to Tut’s pendant, it had scattered broken glass for miles around.

With no answers at hand, she returned her attention to what they had exposed. It was as if someone had taken a diamond-tipped knife and cut a perfect circle in the glass floor here, forming a disk four feet across.

It looked not unlike a plug in a bathtub.

Erin bent to examine its surface closer, cocking her head at various angles. The disk was translucent amber, darker on one side than the other, the two shades split by an S-shaped line of faint silver, forming a melted version of a yin-yang symbol.

She noted the same pattern extended outward from here.

The glass on the eastern half of the crater appeared to be dark amber, the western half distinctly lighter.

But what was this in the center?

“Looks like a giant manhole cover,” Jordan said.

She saw he was right. She carefully fingered the edges of the large plate of glass, feeling enough of a ridge that someone might be able to lift it free if they were strong enough.

“But what’s under it?” Erin glanced to Arella. “And how does this help Tommy?”

Arella turned her face from the skies to the north and nodded to Erin. “Place the boy near my feet,” she instructed. “Then lift the stone you have uncovered.”

Christian gently lowered Tommy to the sand. Then he and Rhun took to opposite sides of the disk-shaped plug. They grabbed hold with the very tips of their fingers and lifted it cleanly up with a grating of glass and sand. The plate looked to be a foot thick and must have weighed hundreds of pounds, reminding Erin yet again of the herculean strength of the Sanguinists.

Carrying it at waist height, they stepped it over a few paces and dropped it to the sand. Erin crawled forward and looked down at what was revealed. It appeared to be a shaft, with a mirror shining back at her from a few feet down, reflecting the sky and her face.

Not a mirror, she realized.

It was the still surface of dark water.

She glanced to Arella. “It’s a well.”

The woman smiled, stepping closer, growing visibly stronger, more radiant, her body responding to some essence from this well.