Mercy's Chase Read online

  Salem pulled back so she could look at Bel. “I can see by your dreamy expression that you’ve met her.”

  “Damn,” Bel said, her voice growing husky. “I have. That woman has—what’s the female equivalent of balls?”

  “Ovaries. She’s got ovaries.”

  “Those too,” Bel said, laughing. “She saved you. Agent Stone and his men were on her heels, but if she hadn’t gotten there when she did, things would have ended very differently.”

  Salem uttered the name that had been haunting her. “Charlie?”

  Bel’s expression grew serious. “You couldn’t have known. He fooled everyone.”

  “Not Alafair. She told me that the first time she met him, she didn’t trust him.”

  Bel shrugged. “She wasn’t told by her FBI supervisor that he was MI5 and assigned to work with you. You were fucked with from the word go, Salem, but you survived. Not only that, you saved Mercy. And you solved the mystery of Stonehenge.”

  Not yet she hadn’t, but it hadn’t taken long to assemble the necessary team, and here they were, gathered at the Heel Stone, ready to plumb its secrets. Salem really hoped there were some. It would be embarrassing as hell to have come this far for nothing. She tossed the worker a thumbs-up, and he pushed the button that would raise the scissor lift. It groaned to life, elevating her toward the Heel Stone’s eye.

  One of the two archeologists inside the perimeter, a woman, climbed aboard the opposite scissor lift. They’d ascertained that the eel’s eyes would not be large enough to accommodate a man’s hands. Neither archeologist had a guess as to what they’d find inside, and Salem felt a chill of fear as her scissor lift ground to a halt next to the Heel Stone opening. What if the gaping recess held some sort of trap that smashed her hand?

  Bel stood near the base of the lift, her smile reassuring. Vida was also there at the behest of President Hayes. Salem avoided looking at her mother, instead searching the crowd for Mrs. Molony’s beautiful lined face. Salem didn’t know how the woman had learned about Salem cracking the final code, but she’d assumed it had something to do with the Irish arm of the Underground that Mrs. Molony led, their calling card the colorful sachet Salem had carried.

  Mrs. Molony’s face was serene. Salem smiled at her before she eased her hand into the hole. The interior of the stone eye socket felt cool, a mini-cave. Salem had told the archeologist about the drawer releases she’d discovered in the stone of the Gloup as well as St. Brigid’s Tower. The same stonemason who had constructed those hiding spots had surely been in charge of concealing whatever was hidden in the Heel Stone.

  The early afternoon was cool, but Salem was sweating with the effort of searching every surface inside the tunnel, which was nearly as long as and not much wider than her arm stretched to its extreme. Seconds ticked away.

  “Are you finding anything?” the archeologist on the opposite side of the Heel Stone hollered.

  “Nothing!” Salem yelled back. “You?”

  “Nope.”

  Salem’s heart dipped. Maybe she’d read the Robing Room image wrong. Or someone had already been here and removed the treasure. But she’d come too far to give up. She had to persevere. She closed her eyes, envisioning Bode. He’d told her to use all the senses and to trust the rock. She tucked her ear toward the opening, listening for a change in tenor as she traced her finger tips over the surface.

  She finally heard it three quarters of the way in, a break in noise as her fingers crossed over a dip. She returned to it, pushing her pinky finger into the hollow. A scraping sound indicated something inside the tunnel had shifted. “I found it!”

  “Yeah!” Bel cheered.

  Salem yelled instructions over to the archeologist, who located her own depression at the same distance inside her tunnel as Salem’s. “Push it on the count of three,” Salem commanded. “One, two, three!”

  “Do you feel that?” the archeologist yelled.

  “Yeah,” Salem said, heartbeat fluttering. “It feels like it’s moving to the right.”

  “It’s moving left for me,” the archeologist said. “I think it’s a globe vault. Pull your finger out of the depression and turn the stone at the end of your tunnel, gently.”

  Salem obliged. The stone moved surprisingly smoothly once they both applied force, twirling to Salem’s right like a mounted sphere. It moved several inches, and then her hand fell into an opening. “I’m in!” She felt paper, coins, containers.

  “I’ll hold it in place.”

  Salem drew out what she could, one handful at a time, handing it out to the other archeologist who gathered it reverentially in a bin.

  “What am I looking at?” Bel asked impatiently, staring into the bin.

  Vida stood near the base of the scissor lift, her voice quivering with emotion. “Jewels. Gold coins. Scrolls that will tell the story of matriarchal cultures, including the female engineers who built Stonehenge to celebrate their queens. The discoveries of women hidden to protect them, their freemasonry, building plans, scientific discoveries. Land deeds returning whole counties to their female owners. It is proof that justice always gets the last word.”

  Vida had been icily quiet since Salem had returned with Mercy. Salem realized her mother had her own demons to work through. Salem would no longer take them on as her own. She glanced down at one of the loose papers she’d retrieved. It was drawn in the same hand and featured the same code as the single page she’d uncovered in the Beale Cipher. “Take a picture of that for me,” she ordered Bel.

  Vida appeared ready to argue but held her tongue.

  When Salem had the vault emptied, she stepped down. The archeologists would return to fully examine the Heel Stone. For now, what they had recovered would be kept safe by the English Heritage, though Salem was not leaving until she had photographed everything.

  Alafair stepped forward, pointing toward a scroll of paper whiter than the rest. “May I?”

  The archeologist shrugged. The rules were not clear.

  “Yes,” Agent Stone said, his gravelly voice the perfect antidote to the surreal situation. “Of course you may. We are in your debt.”

  Alafair plucked the scroll and unrolled it. She held it up toward the sun, inhaling sharply. “It’s real.”

  Salem stepped next to her. She recognized Rosalind Franklin’s handwriting. “Oh my god.”

  She hadn’t told Bel of this possibility. There was so much to catch her up on.

  A dot of pink caught her eye. It was Mercy, charging away. She must have grown bored with the paper and the stone. She darted under the rope, through the crowd, and toward Stonehenge. “Mercy!” Salem yelled, suddenly gripped by anxiety. This was the farthest the girl had been from her since they’d been reunited in the Tower Bridge penthouse.

  Salem found it difficult to breathe. She lunged toward the rope, but a warm hand slowed her. She turned to see Lucan Stone, powerful, solid, beautiful. Her heart squeezed. She could smell his crisp cologne, imagine his strong arms holding her.

  He’d visited her in the hospital after her eighteen-hour nap with an offer. He wanted her and Bel to be his partners in a new endeavor, a three-person team answering only to the president. Their mission would be to discover and crack the Underground’s codes. Salem told him that she needed more rest, but that she would talk to Bel and they would consider it. She couldn’t believe that those words had come out of her mouth, and she was even more surprised to discover that she meant them. Her and Bel working together again, but this time, chasing rather than running from the bad guys? That could work. That could work really well.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said, nodding toward Mercy.

  Salem wanted to believe him. She looked back toward the girl. She was darting through the field of red poppies toward the monument, past the guards, and into the center of the stone ring. The child touched the ground near the Altar Stone and c
harged back toward the Heel Stone like she was playing a game of Red Rover by herself.

  She was giggling and breathless when she leapt into Salem’s arms.

  Salem squeezed Mercy, burying her face in her sunshine-scented hair. She wanted the child to promise she’d never leave her side again, but Stone was still next to her, and his nearness made her feel stronger than she did standing alone. Still, she had to say something. “What were you doing?”

  Mercy didn’t answer. She snuggled more deeply into Salem, sighing contentedly.

  “I think she was being a kid,” Agent Stone said, his voice a gentle rumble. “Girls get to play.”

  Salem turned to him, searching for judgment. All she saw was an easy smile.

  She nodded.

  Girls get to play.

  About the Author

  Jess Lourey is an Agatha-, Anthony-, and Lefty-nominated author. Jess writes humorous mysteries, thrillers, sword and sorcery fantasy, edge-of-your-seat YA adventure, and magical realism. She is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology, a recipient of The Loft’s Excellence in Teaching fellowship, a regular Psychology Today blogger, and a TEDx presenter. Jess lives in Minneapolis with her family.