Cronin's Key III (20 page)

“
What are those?” Alec demanded. “Those drawings in your
mind. I want to see them.”

The priest
put his hands to his head and squinted his eyes, not wanting to
hide anything from Alec, but clearly not coping with the pressure.
“We have drawings in our chambers. But they don’t make sense. Well,
not to us.”

“
Show me which room they are in,” Alec said, jumping out of
the pit. He saw the room the priest pictured
in his mind, and in the blink of an eye, he
leapt them all into it.

* * * *

It wasn’t a room so much more than it was a vault. Still
underground, the room was windowless and the door, a small, heavy
wooden rectangle, was the only break from the huge stone blocks
that made up the walls, floor
, and ceiling. Along two walls, there were rows and rows of
wooden drawers that reminded Alec of spice drawers in Chinese
herbal shops and along the third wall, a large wooden
desk.

The priest sucked back a scream as they arrived, the
aftershocks of leaping still fraying his nerves. The shaking
lantern in his hand had snuffed out
. Alec sent up a ball of lumen so the priest wasn’t
enclosed in complete darkness. It took him a second to get his
bearings, and the loud banging on the door spurred him into a
flurry of action.

“
Who is in there?” a man’s
voice bellowed in Italian. Then there was a jingling of
keys.

“
It is Archbishop Gänsen,” the priest said, his voice
shaking. “I insist all is fine and that you leave me
be.”

There was the persistent rattle of keys
as the assailant tried several in the lock. “How
did you get in there?”

“
I said leave me be!” Gänsen yelled. He hurriedly opened
several of the small square drawers, muttering to himself until he
found what he was after. He carefully pulled out a small book bound
in crumbling leather. He took a deep breath and turned to face the
seven vampires who were watching him. He handed the book to Alec
with shaking hands. “Here it is.”

“
Let me guess,” Alec said,
as he gently flicked through the coarse but delicate paper, seeing
drawings and scripts in calligraphy. “Leonardo Da
Vinci.”

Gänse
n shook his
head. “These were drawn by Peter himself.”

“
Saint
Peter?” Alec
asked, unable to hide his shock.

Gänsen
nodded. “They are very old.”

Alec
couldn’t argue that. “Here,” he said, finding a page of interest.
He put it on the table so everyone could see it. “Novem tibi
orbibus.”

There,
drawn in
scratchy faded ink, were the nine interconnecting circular pits
they’d just visited buried deep under where they now stood. But
there were lines drawn through them, intersecting angles and
numbers and what appeared to be dates written along
them.

“
What are these dates?”
Alec asked.

Gänse
n shook his
head. “We don’t know. We thought they may mean a return of the
demons, but the dates have passed throughout history without
incident.”

Then Viviana thought something that turned Alec’s head.
“What do you mean?”
he asked
her.

She smiled
at him. “They’re not dates. They’re planetary projections. I study
astronomy, and these”—she traced her finger along two of the
lines—“are the courses of the equinoxes for Jupiter and
Mars.”

Alec saw a
slideshow scroll through her mind that looked like a NASA equation
of putting man on the moon. He stored the information in his memory
for later interpretation, if he could even begin to understand it,
just as the small door burst open behind them.

Two priests
entered the room and recoiled when they saw who was inside, both
taking a reflexive step backward. One recited a Latin prayer to
repel Satan and the other drew the sign of the cross on his own
forehead.

“
I told you to leave me be!” Gänse
n roared at them.

Alec waved his hand at the two priests and they went
completely slack where they stood. Their arms lowered to their
sides
. Their faces went
blank.

Gänse
n’s gaze went
from the two men to Alec. “What did you do to them?”

“
They’re fine,” Alec said.
“Completely unharmed, awake, just very docile.”

Gänsen put
his hand to his forehead and shook his head, as though he literally
couldn’t believe what he was in the middle of. Alec redirected the
conversation back to the book. “You said these drawings didn’t make
sense?”

Gänse
n turned to the
next page. “We don’t know what this is.”

On the next page
were
the circles again, with the lines drawn through them as on the
previous page. Only this time, from each point where a line crossed
the circumference of a circle, another line came off it to meet in
the center. There were nine lines, meeting at a central
point.

“
Oh wow,” Viviana
said.

Cronin shot
a glance to Alec and smiled. “It’s a nine-point circle.”

“
A what?” Gänse
n
asked.

“
A nine-point circle,” Alec repeated softly. “Wow, indeed.
Saint Peter was onto them. He knew how to do this almost two
thousand years before mathematicians. This is
incredible.”

Gänse
n shook his
head. “I don’t follow.”

Cronin
explained. “These circles are the formation of the pits. The center
circle is the important one, the largest. Each surrounding circle
cuts through the main circle at a certain point, and these lines
give us a triangle, or in this case, a pyramid.”

Eiji
said, “The
Göbekli Tepe pits are of the same configuration. The nine-point
circle and the subsequent pyramid the shape makes is ground
zero.”

“
It is a geometrical marvel,” Benito said, “that Saint Peter
was able to do this in his time.”

Gänse
n turned the
next page. “But he didn’t understand it.” And there on a third
drawing was the nine circles, the triangle, and scratches of
frustration through the whole diagram. Saint Peter himself had
furiously crossed out several attempts at trying to figure it
out.

Viviana
smiled. “Because these lines depict the celestial paths of the
planets,” she said simply. “Saint Peter wouldn’t have understood
the significance because he lived in a time when planets had not
been discovered.”

Alec nodded. It was all coming together. “So when the nine
planets make this formation”
—he turned the page back to the drawing of the nine
circles—“the triangle it makes will form an inverted pyramid, of
sorts. And that is what opens the portal.”

Alec pictured the image in his mind and shared it with
those around him. Better than any computer image or hologram, he
could picture the planets in formation and the lines through their
ax
es would form the upside
down pyramid toward earth. “Does that look right?” he asked
Viviana, and she nodded.

Gänse
n blinked
several times. “What was that?”

“
Telepathic projection,”
Alec answered. “Sorry. It’s just easier than trying to
explain.”

The priest
gawped at him. “How do you do those magic tricks?”

Alec
shrugged one shoulder. “We don’t know really. I have many gifts.
Most are unexplainable. It’s not magic though, and they’re not
really gifts either. I’d give them back if they were.”

That got him
a few glances from the vampires around him, as though they could
not believe he’d say such a thing. Cronin put his hand to Alec’s
back, knowing all too well that out of everything being the key
gave Alec, all he really wanted was a sense of normalcy.

“
We must go home,
m’cridhe,” Cronin said softly.

“
Agreed.” Alec looked at his friends. “Benito, Viviana,
would you please come with us to New York
? I can bring you back to Rome whenever you’d like,
but I might need your help, Viviana, working out planetary
stuff.”

She bowed her head. “It would be an
honor.” Then she eyed the book on the table. “We may need
that.”

Gänsen
started to object, but Alec put out his hand and picked up the
ancient book. “No, the original stays here. It is only right,” Alec
said, and Gänsen sagged with relief. “But I could take a copy,”
Alec said. He held the book in one hand and made a replica appear
in his other.

Gänsen’s
mouth fell open, and Alec handed him the original. “I have the
talent of replication or duplication,” he explained with a shrug.
“Some talents have their perks.”

Alec turned
and asked if everyone was ready, but Eiji said, “Ah, Alec.” He
nodded to the two docile priests still staring blankly into
space.

“
Oh.” Alec nodded in their direction and they both startled
back to normal. Alec looked right at them and pointed to Gänsen.
“This man should be commended for his bravery and for his
commitment to God. He helped save the world today.”

Then with no more than a tho
ught, he left the three priests alone in the dungeon room
and leapt everyone back to the apartment in New York.

With just an hour or so before the coven meeting, Alec
explained everything they’d found
out and showed them a telepathic slideshow of where they’d
been and what they’d seen. Including the encounter with Gautier, to
which no one seemed too surprised. And he showed them Saint Peter’s
book he had duplicated from the Vatican.

Jodis took
the book, like it wasn’t a replica, with two careful hands and a
wondrous smile. “Oh, Alec,” she cooed.

Pretending to be offended,
Eiji put out both hands. “And what am I? Did you not miss
me at all?”

Jodis quickly threw her arms around him, and he lifted her
and twirled her around, making her laugh.
Then she gasped. “Be careful of the book, my
love.”

Eiji set her back on her own two feet and kissed the side
of her head with smiling lips.
Jodis, speaking fluent Italian, greeted Benito and Viviana
with warm kisses to their cheeks, saying it had been far too long
since they’d seen each other. They soon had the replica book open
on the table, along with notepads and pens and laptops, and were in
deep conversation about planets and nine-point circles.

Alec barely had time to think. With a deep sigh, he
walked into his and Cronin’s walk-in
closet to change his clothes. With a clean shirt on, he pulled up
his jeans and was doing up his fly when familiar hands cupped his
face.
Cronin
. The mere
thought of Cronin, the close proximity, calmed him, centered him.
He closed his eyes and leaned his face into Cronin’s palms and
sighed again.

Cronin’s soft voice whispered in Alec’s mind.
You never rest.

Alec agreed with a nod.
I never have alone time with you. It’s all I want. Just
peace and quiet, and you.

Cronin smiled
. “As do
I, m’cridhe.” He ghosted his lips to Alec’s, just as there was a
knock on their bedroom door.

“
It’s time,” Eiji called.
“We can’t be late, brothers.”

Alec sighed. He stole a quick kiss
from Cronin and said, “Come on. Let’s get this over
with.”

He took Cronin’s hand and led him back out to the living
room. Once a peaceful sanctuary where they could lounge on the
sofa, cuddle
, and talk, it
was now a bustling hive of activity.

Eiji put his hand to Jodis’ shoulder, where she and Viviana
were still furiously working out planetary alignments,
paths
, and dates. “Are you
ready, my love?”

She looked
up at him and smiled. “I cannot go.”

Eiji’s face fell. “Oh.”

“
My sweetest Eiji,” she said, putting her hand to his face.
“We are so close to figuring this out,” she said. “I can’t be in
two places at once.”

“
I understand,” he
whispered.

She kissed
him softly. “I promise when all this is over, you and I will spend
a decade in Japan. Just us.”

He smiled
and gave her a nod. “I will hold you to that.”

She kissed him again, this time with smiling lips, and
turned back to join Viviana in working out improbable mathematic
equations. Alec hated that his responsibilities were weighing his
friends down as well.
For
vampires who would live an eternity, they sure were always short on
time.

Alec looked
at Cronin and smiled. He closed off his mind and concentrated, and
with all the power he could summon, he let one word scream through
his mind.

Stop!

And time stopped.

Everyone in
the room stopped, frozen in time, except for Cronin, who still held
Alec’s hand. “Alec? Is something wrong?”

Alec smiled
at him and kissed him. “Yes. We’re out of time. All I wanted was a
moment with you, and then I remembered that was something I could
have.” He kissed Cronin again, but before Cronin could deepen it,
Alec pulled back. “And not just us.”