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securing the bodies of the Sanguinists for proper burial. Jordan’s background with the Army had been in forensic investigations. It was a skill set much suited to the task at hand.
    Especially when this tunnel was discovered.
    Nobody remembered seeing this mystery passageway before, and from the freshly excavated appearance of the surrounding walls, it looked to have been dug recently.
    A fact that presented an interesting dilemma: was the tunnel formed by someone digging down into that inner temple cavern or someone clawing their way out from below?
    Neither prospect was a good one, but Jordan had come down to investigate.
    As last, he spilled painfully out of the tunnel and sprawled onto a rough stone floor. Baako helped him up, pulling him to his feet as effortlessly as if lifting a small child instead of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall soldier.
    A small lamp on the cavern floor offered some illumination, but Jordan flicked on his helmet light as Sophia climbed out of the tunnel, rolling gracefully to her feet, looking barely disheveled.
    “Show-off,” he scolded, brushing dust from his clothes.
    That perpetual ghost of a smile grew wider. She combed her short-cropped black hair from her wide brown cheeks as she searched. With her sharp unnatural gaze, she didn’t need the lamp or his helmet light to take in the room.
    Jordan envied such night-vision. Stretching a kink out of his neck, he began his own search. As he drew in a deep breath, the smell of sulfur filled his nostrils, but it wasn’t as intense as when he was last down here, during the battle, when a wide crack in the floor had been fuming with smoke and fiery brimstone.
    Still, a new odor underlay the sulfur.
    The familiar reek of the dead.
    Jordan noted the corpses of several strigoi scattered to his right, their bodies broken and burned, their flesh cracked and split. A part of him wanted to turn and run, a natural instinct when faced with such a slaughterhouse of horror, but he had a duty here. Leaning hard on his background to settle himself, he took out a video camera and filmed the room. He took his time, making sure that he captured each body, more out of force of habit than anything else. He had worked as a crime scene investigator as part of the Army’s Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility in Afghanistan, and he had learned to be thorough.
    He moved deeper into the cavern, filming the stone altar, trying not to remember the young boy, Tommy, who had been chained there, his lifeblood dripping to the floor. The boy’s angelic blood was the catalyst to open a gateway to the underworld, and in the end, it was the same boy’s bravery that was instrumental in closing it.
    Tommy had left his mark on Jordan, too, healing him with a touch of his palm. Jordan could still feel that imprint, and it seemed to burn brighter with every passing day.
    “Well,” Baako said, drawing him back to the present, “what do you think?”
    Jordan lowered his camera. “It . . . it’s definitely changed since we were last here.”
    “How so?” Sophia asked, joining them.
    Jordan pointed to a pile of dead rats in the far corner. “They’re new.”
    Baako crossed over, picked up one of the tiny bodies, and sniffed at it. The action made Jordan cringe.
    “Interesting,” Baako said.
    “How’s that interesting ?” Jordan asked.
    “It’s been drained of blood.”
    Sophia took the rat, examined it herself, and confirmed the same. “Baako is right.”
    The small Indian woman offered the dead body to Jordan.
    “I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “But if you’re right, that means something was down here, feeding on those rats.”
    Which could only mean one thing . . .
    Jordan dropped his hand to the machine pistol holstered at his side. It was a Heckler & Koch MP7. The gun was compact and powerful, capable of firing 950 rounds a minute. It had always been his go-to weapon, only now the magazine was loaded with silver rounds. He also checked the