He’d barely put the car in Park before he and Rocky were out of their vehicle, racing for the Jeep.
By then, he heard a siren in the distance, as well.
He quickly saw that there was no one in the passenger’s seat; Devin Lyle, covered with blood and glass, was emerging from the hole left by the broken windshield, which was flush with the road.
Rocky was on his knees, screaming Devin’s name as he helped her out.
“I’m fine!” she cried. “Superficial...these are superficial. The crash was on purpose—they came at the car. They would have... I don’t know...”
Rocky was holding her.
“Where’s Vickie?” Griffin demanded. His voice was thick; his head was ringing. “They have her...oh, God! They have her—”
“No!” Devin told him. “No, she ran. A while ago. I was stuck in my seat belt. She’s in the woods. But she found it—she found something at least, their hideout—right before we were hit. We have to find it. She’s going to go there, Griffin—I know she will. She’s going to try to figure out a way to free Alex. I know it.”
Griffin spun around, his gaze desperately searching through the trees for any sign of movement, a clue to which direction Vickie might have gone. He pulled his phone out. Wendell Harper answered on the first ring.
“Vickie is out in the woods—running. Devin has a possible location on the cult hideout. Get me every officer you have. Whatever is going down, it’s happening now. We have to find Vickie. Please. We have to find her.”
“I know where you are. We’re on our way. We’ll tear the forest to shreds.”
Griffin hung up. He closed his eyes. He could hear Rocky talking to Devin; she’d seen Robert Merton and Isaac Sherman arrive. They had followed the horrible sound of the crash that had echoed all over the forest. But whoever had been driving the truck was already gone; the men had chased them into the trees.
He had to concentrate. Concentrate on Vickie.
And he saw...he thought he saw...
The blonde woman was there again, the very beautiful blonde. She was leading him along the path, the path that Vickie had followed in her dreams. He recognized the path because she had described it so vividly.
He heard a scream.
He saw an inverted cross ahead in a clearing; the woman had been hung upon the cross, and blood streamed from her down to the earth—it was everywhere.
But there was more. There was something behind the inverted cross. It seemed to grow, find substance, as he stared at it...
There were suddenly words. Words that had been written into the earth.
Satan is coming!
Was Satan coming?
Or was Satan already there?
“Griffin!”
Devin was in front of him; she had her hands on either side of his face. Her eyes were on his. “Griffin, listen. Vickie found a building with the maps. It shouldn’t be there—it was supposedly torn down. It’s at the end of the path that leads from this road once it peters out. It was an old insane asylum. She’s—”
“Gone there!” He grabbed Devin by the cheeks and pulled her close, planting a kiss on her forehead.
“Wait!” Devin cried. “Griffin, I think we saw... Hanson. He was in the passenger’s side of the truck as it came at us.
“So she was right. It is him!” Griffin said. “I’ll find him. So help me, I’ll find him. If he was in the passenger’s seat, who was driving?”
“I don’t know what I saw,” Devin said.
“What do you mean? Who was driving?”
“Satan,” she told him. “Someone with a giant ram’s head and a red hood.”
Griffin looked at her and nodded.
And then he began to run.
They would be right behind him—he trusted Rocky to have his back.
“Griffin!” Rocky cried. “When we reach it—”
“We figure out how to go from there!” Griffin said.
*
Vickie wished that she’d been a Girl Scout.
She hadn’t been.
It wasn’t that she’d never been hiking or never been in the woods, but she was from Boston.
She was a city girl.
The forest was ridiculously thick. When she looked up, she realized that, to make matters much worse, it seemed that the afternoon was waning. The morning had disappeared while they had been digging up Brenda Noonan.
And then they had driven and searched, and...
She prayed that Devin was all right, and she kept running.
It was strange; when she had been in the car, she had known where she was—according to the map at least.
And she had known where she was going, and why. Now, out of the car, having run so hard and so fast, she wasn’t at all sure of where she was. She stopped, breathing desperately, not even sure of which direction she had come from. The good thing was that she had evaded whoever had been coming to the car; she was far ahead of them.
That made her worry about Devin again.
But Devin was trained. Devin was smart.
And how long had it been? Surely help had come. Devin would be fine.
If the cult members hadn’t gotten to her first.
She stopped suddenly, her heart beating at what seemed like a million miles an hour, as she heard voices.
Two voices... They belonged to two women. The women were walking along what seemed to be a path, and it was near her.
Vickie ducked low into the bushes next to a heavy oak with thick branches.
“He’ll kill us. We haven’t got her,” said the first. She had a soft voice. Straining to see, Vickie caught a glimpse of her. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. She was pretty, with sandy hair in a ponytail.
The girl at her side was a brunette of just about the same age.
“He won’t kill us, he’ll understand,” the brunette said.
“He wants her. It’s time. Victoria Preston. He said that the time is here, and he must have her. And he said that the first messenger failed. He needs her now. What will happen to us? Maybe...”
“Maybe what?” the brunette asked.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go back! I remember...”
“What? What?”
“I remember what it was like. Before. I mean... I had a life.”
“No, don’t forget, there is no going back,” the young brunette said worriedly. “We’ve turned our backs on God. We have given ourselves over to Satan. We can’t walk away. Carly, remember the things that we’ve...that we’ve seen?”
“Yes—things we’ve seen! I didn’t do any of it!” the girl named Carly said. “I was just...there. I was...scared. I’m scared now. We’ve failed! Darryl went to Boston and he...he failed. He didn’t come back. And Gloria went to Boston, and they said that she’s dead, too, that they killed her. They shot her down in the streets. Because she failed. Sarah, he’ll wonder why we didn’t punish ourselves. We failed. We are...done.”
“That’s not true at all! And we didn’t fail alone. The others are going to be back already. They’ll have explained what happened. Hey! We weren’t driving the truck. He was driving the truck, remember?”
He was driving the truck. The high priest? The man behind it all?
“We didn’t bring back the woman he wanted—we’ll be made to pay!” Carly said.
“Hey, we weren’t alone,” Sarah said. “We didn’t fail alone.”
“We’ve got to get back quickly. He’s going to drag out the messenger. He’s going to find Jehovah so that we may call upon the great master, Satan. We must—”
“You go back! I’m not going,” Carly said.
The two had stopped walking; they weren’t twenty feet away from Vickie.
“Carly, we’re almost there!” Sarah whispered. “Others could be watching us already.”
Almost there—almost where? Vickie tried to gauge where she was.
She was looking for a building that shouldn’t exist. The old insane asylum that wasn’t razed—because those who were supposed to have razed it had to wait, and it was written down as done.
The two stared at one another nervously, neither speaking for a minute. And then, suddenly, another voice, male and deep, broke through the forest.
“Help me!”
It was him—surely, it was him, Vickie thought.
Milton Hanson.
She’d seen his face so briefly—seen him sitting in the passenger’s side of the truck just a split second before the truck had broadsided the Jeep, sending her and Devin on a deadly roll.