The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Witchy Woman, pt. 1

THE LAST TIME I STOOD IN THE RUINS AT EPHESUS, I WAS ALONE. Berkant was dead, along with his child. And his wife, the mother, was mangled. As I stood over the bodies in the tiny shack, I had the sinking realization that this act had been committed by Alexander Raven.

The mother was the giveaway.

And for whatever reason, I had kept this fact to myself. When I'd told Mark I'd found Berkant, I neglected to mention the mother and child. Nor did I mention that I had seen the handiwork of the Devil himself.

That same night so long ago, I'd revisited the hidden cave where we'd first seen the symbols. Not long before that, we'd deduced that the symbols were a way for Alexander to track powers of those he bore and those he killed. Post-mortem family trees. That night, I'd touched the ancient symbols, ran my fingers across the dirt wall, and felt the power of the records of the dead. And in old Hollywood style, when my hand reached an aging lantern, the earth shook, the wall gave way, and it opened into a more deeply hidden room. The room had twelve walls that formed an almost-circle. The one we'd found was only one leg of the polygon. Each wall was covered in a pyramid of symbols that looked like three of the five that had infested my left wrist.

I sat in this room for hours, staring at the Xs, Os, diagonal lines, dashes, parentheses-like curved lines, and dots. I stared, willing myself to understand how someone could kill this many people — people he essentially fathered — and trying to understand why he'd keep this record.

But that was back when I tried to understand Alexander Raven.

Weeks faded into months, which had begun to fade into years from that moment until now, when I found myself in a corner of Beverly's bookstore in Bigfork, hours before it opened, feet tucked up under me while I stared at Lizzie's cipher.

I don't know why I stared at it. I had it memorized.

FFHOAUURXYJCXUVTXTIWGGFSFLCCAYAMPICBUKGFXAVIZVNZHBXMUIENTYIBZOTCHOLCCWJYGAIRZCGCESCCAHUYMFSICSECFPRS!GBQFHDMZGARLMLHHNOGWHBASXSWMAUWHUCVFHWIMUIPYGMSFMWICFLEBJZVTXDMHNHUCBUGCSDYCMLWHUFLUA . . .

And so on.

I knew every letter, and I knew every line of gibberish it produced if you decoded it like a playfair cipher or a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. None of them worked, of course. I'd learned everything there was to learn about codes. Read every book about them, every paper, consulted hobbyists and professionals to look at our cipher, and they all said the same thing:

It was unbreakable. Uncrackable without the key.

And so I spent so many of my hours alone thinking of why Lizzie left me this when there was such a good chance of my never being able to break it.

But that was back when I tried to understand Lizzie.

Now our steps were clear. I had tracked each of those symbol-pyramids to hidden cities like the one I was born and raised in. We had hunted them down. We followed that GPS tracker in Sam's leg, and it worked better than any supernatural endeavor we'd engineered in the whole process. We sought out old villages that looked like desecrated Survivors' Cities all over the world, other hiding places of relevant humans like the mausoleum town in York, even the campgrounds where he was breeding a new army of dedicated followers. Some of the people there were supernatural, but too many were human to stomach.

It seemed so odd to me that he was going after humans. The human world and my world existed in different dimensions to me. But Raven was closing the gap. The words he'd said to me the first night I met him had stayed with me. On humans: What if one day I want them to like me? That One Day was now.

What had started as a joke — or had it? I couldn't remember, not really — in a motel room in Swan Lake, Montana, had ended up as a painful truth: Alexander Raven was enlisting humans in an as-of-yet-tobe-determined cause that seemed would inevitably, be in the legacy of comic-book and Nazi villains before him, a plan for world domination.