The Jewels of Jezebel (The Reluctant Hero Series Book 2) Page 7

  “No. I’m not okay!” Magena dropped to the ground, her hands over her ears to block out everything, including what Daniel was now saying to her. She muttered, “Please! Make it stop!”

  He needed to help Magena before he continued forward. He walked over to her and gently placed one hand on the top of her head to calm her. He then gently clasped both her hands away and pulled them from her ears.

  He gasped when he saw that her hands were covered in blood.

  He looked all around and then toward the wall between the rooms. He yelled his loudest, “Lady! Who are you, and why are you torturing us?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Magena finally lay exhausted on the soft carpeted floor.

  She was quiet after Daniel had wrestled her hands off her ears. Being almost out of her mind, she had put up a good fight with him. After her hands were removed, she calmed down. Daniel then explained that he was trying to help her return to her right mind and out of pain. He said, “You stopped bleeding when the screaming stopped.”

  She sighed. “Or was it the other way around?”

  “I guess we won’t know.” He opened her pack and pulled out some long bandages. He wrapped them around her head, focusing mainly on the ears. She put a hand on her eyebrows to make sure he didn’t cover her eyes.

  “What is this all about?” He tried to make sense of why only she was affected the way she was with the woman’s screaming. He could not understand, but decided that the high-pitched sound could not cause him damage.

  Holding her in his arms, he rocked back and forth. Once he realized that Magena was breathing normally and sleeping, he placed her on the soft floor.

  Going back to the wall, he tapped it. Pressing his ear against the wall, he braced himself for more screaming. Nothing. His imagination went wild as he thought about all kinds of bad things that the woman was going through. He had to get to her as soon as possible.

  After about an hour of examining every aspect of the wall, he dropped to his knees in frustration. He turned back and saw that Magena was still out, so he knew it was up to him to figure this one out alone. There didn’t appear to be any serious damage to Magena’s ears, but he needed to talk to her to find out if she could hear. She needed rest first and foremost.

  He dug around the dirt at the base of the one wall and decided there were two chambers of one room. He searched the other wall for a clue as to how to get through it and into the next chamber, but he found nothing.

  There were zero clues on all four craggy walls, with no visible signs in or out. Choking back the tears, he yelled, “I’m getting real tired of these puzzles. I’m not Indiana Jones, for crying out loud.”

  He slugged the wall with his fist.

  His frustration continued to maximize, but he needed to be quiet to allow Magena her rest.

  The wall became a hated enemy who fought him at every turn. He was fed up and didn’t care what it would take to save that woman. If she was savable.

  Momentarily forgetting Magena, he let out a primal roar and rushed toward the hated wall with all his might. Lowering his head, and using his arms as battering rams, he prepared for impact.

  “Ow!” As he hit the wall, the pain in his forearms caused him to yell. The jagged surface of the wall caused him immeasurable pain. For some strange reason, he did not stop. He felt like he was still moving forward, and he was. He had broken through the wall.

  He was suddenly stuck in thick sand and could not move. He collided with something hard made out of wood. Pain shot through his left foot. He fell down and swallowed a mouth full of sand. He coughed until he vomited it back up. Confused and disoriented, he opened his eyes to see several sconces with lit torches on the walls. There were four or five large and thick stone pillars placed from ground to ceiling around the edges of the room, with one pillar double the size of the others, smack dab in the middle.

  Against the furthest wall away from him, he saw rusted metal shackles for hands and feet hanging on the wall. The large pillar in the center of the room prevented him from seeing the entire back wall, but he did notice several skeletons still attached to most of those shackles.

  He looked back and saw that there was a large hole in the wall where he had come through. His forearms were skinned up with a giant gash in one. He didn’t need to see them to know that. He felt the sting.

  Looking back into the other room, he could see Magena still resting on the floor. He sighed in relief.

  Daniel could hear the faint sound of whimpering coming from the back shackled wall. Reluctantly, he turned slowly and walked toward the wall, through the thick sand, past the main pillar. As he rounded the pillar, he could see a figure hanging from the shackles. It was a female.

  Momentarily, he froze in place. Standing still, he tried to analyze the situation. The unconscious woman was shackled by both her hands and ankles, as she hung down by her hands. She was dressed in a khaki top with matching jacket and shorts.

  She had long blonde hair, which cascaded down over her shoulders and was about waist length. She had on hiking boots and from the look of dirt on her outfit, had been on a trail for a while. Daniel was surprised, and he surmised that she had been down there for quite some time.

  There was a dusty backpack at her feet.

  Even though there appeared to be no obvious exits from the room other than the way he had just come through, he knew that someone had to shackle her on the wall. He also knew that someone might still be around to do the same thing to him and Magena.

  Daniel stood for several minutes, wondering whether he should help the shackled woman or not. What prevented him more than anything was the fact that she was no longer screaming and his freeing her might alert whoever or whatever was causing her pain.

  Hearing moans coming from Magena, he turned and stepped closer to his traveling companion. He needed Magena’s intelligence to help him think of what to do next.

  ***

  Magena strained to open her eyes. She removed the bandage and squinted against the light. “What… happened?”

  Daniel breathed a sigh of relief. “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me. Something happened to cause your ears to bleed. I mean, I know it was the woman screaming. I just don’t understand why it didn’t affect me.”

  She struggled to her feet, as she glared through the hole in the wall. “I swear if you tell me you think it’s a girl thing…”

  She stopped in mid-sentence, as her curiosity got the better of her. “Did you do that?” she asked, pointing and moving toward the hole.

  Daniel smirked at his physical prowess.

  She shook her head and proceeded carefully into the adjoining room. Her eyes widened when she saw the back wall filled with shackles with the skeletons of previous prisoners’ remains attached.

  Slowly working around the huge pillar in the center of the room with Daniel following close behind, Magena gasped when she saw the woman who appeared to be still alive.

  Common sense went out the window as she rushed toward the woman to see if she could be of assistance.

  Daniel’s gut gnawed at him as he watched Magena drop to her knees in front of the captive and wept.

  Magena stood and gently placed her hands on the woman’s face. She lifted her head up to get a better look at her eyes. She examined her face and saw several scratches, cuts, and a lot of dirt. In spite of the blond hair, the woman had a dark complexion. She appeared to be well groomed, and she wore an expensive wedding ring set.

  Magena sighed, as Daniel approached her. “She’s married, Daniel. I hope her husband isn’t one of the other prisoners on this wall. She is well groomed. She has recently colored her hair and nails. I’d say she looks to be of some kind of Middle Eastern descent. I would have to say Israeli.”

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed, and then quickly put his hands over his mouth to avoid yelling. He didn’t want to attract the attention of the woman’s captor.

  A small whimper came out of the woman’s mouth, as her e
yes fluttered open. Once fully open, her eyes widened, like she was in fear of Magena. She started to scream again, shaking her head to wrest it from Magena’s grasp.

  “No! No! We’re not here to hurt you!” Magena repeated over and over, as she stepped back from the woman. “Please. It’s alright. We want to help you. We’re friends.”

  The woman’s breathing was erratic as she narrowed her eyes in disbelief at Magena’s words. She stopped screaming long enough to give Daniel and Magena the once over. She tensed and pressed her back as far against the wall as she could.

  Magena looked at Daniel and moved her eyes toward the woman. Motioning with her head, she was trying to tell him to say something.

  “Hi,” he started. “We won’t hurt you, but we need to get you out of here before whoever put you here comes back. We’re going to look for something to free you with if you don’t mind us getting close enough to free you.”

  The woman’s breathing began returning to normal. It appeared that she realized the duo were no threat.

  Her mouth opened while her bottom lip quivered. “I… I am Yasmeen Babel.” Her eyes started to tear up and her heavy accent was unmistakably Israeli. “My husband… was killed.”

  Magena’s heart sank as she turned toward Daniel. It was what they both hoped hadn’t happened. “I’m so sorry,” Magena said, as she looked around for something to open the shackles with.

  “My… bag,” Yasmeen murmured. “I have… lock picking… tools.”

  Daniel’s eyes lit up as he grabbed the pack and tried to brush a lot of the dust off it without coughing. No such luck.

  He noticed something about three feet long out of place leaning against the wall, out of the corner of his eye. He looked just to his left and saw a cylindrical metal tube. It was about 4 feet in length, and appeared to have some high tech mechanisms on both ends. When he grabbed it, it was cold to the touch, like hot ice.

  He could only hold onto it for a few seconds before the cold seeped through his skin and he dropped it. “Ow! What the heck?”

  Magena rushed to him, as he held his cold wrist with his other hand, trying to warm it up.

  “Are you alright?” she asked, being mesmerized by the tube.

  “Yeah, but wow! That thing was going to freeze my hand off!”

  Yasmeen showed no emotion. “Please get those tools. Your hand will be fine in a few minutes.”

  Daniel shook off the pain, as feeling and warmth started to return to his hand. He used his other hand to scrounge through her backpack and found a wooden box marked, LOCK PICK KIT. The box resembled an old cigar box, but had no writing or any other markings than those three words.

  He opened the box and noticed that every piece of the kit looked to be rusted and far older than he thought they should be. “I’ve never picked a lock before.”

  Magena glared at him, wide-eyed in disbelief. She wasn’t about to judge him, but she just wished that he told the truth all the time around her. She hated thinking the worst of anyone.

  “It’s okay,” Yasmeen answered, calmly. “Any one tool should do the trick.”

  Daniel pulled out the first tool he saw and applied it on the shackle on Yasmeen’s left wrist.

  She braced herself and closed her eyes. “I trust you, but my wrists are badly bruised and bloodied. I don’t want to see what they look like without the metal hiding it.”

  He nodded and proceeded to work on the lock.

  Magena thought it was strange how nonchalant Yasmeen was about the whole situation. “So, who did this to you?”

  Yasmeen shrugged. “I do not know. My husband and I were blindfolded and forcibly brought down here. I only remember a strange odor and then being shackled here.”

  Magena felt a slight gripping pain in her gut. Something was way off base. “I don’t mean to bring up your pain, but what was happening to you when we heard you screaming?”

  “My husband was being killed right in front of me. His screams were horrible.” Yasmeen answered quickly, as if she had anticipated the question.

  Magena looked at Daniel, who was too preoccupied with getting Yasmeen free to pay attention to the conversation. She distinctly remembered that she did not remember hearing anyone but a woman screaming when her ears started to bleed.

  She didn’t know what Yasmeen’s game was, but she was sure she would have heard a man screaming as well… if it happened. Now she had her doubts. What is really going on?

  She decided to turn her attention back to the mysterious cold tube. Looking it over without touching it, Magena could see a slight haze around most of it. The only place where there wasn’t a haze was on both ends.

  She looked back at Yasmeen, who was just looking at her with a grin. There was a clicking sound, as Daniel got the first shackle off of her.

  “Whoo hoo!” he exclaimed. “One down, three to go!”

  As he started to work on another shackle, Yasmeen didn’t take her eyes off of Magena. Magena knew it, and could feel it, so she preferred to investigate the tube more thoroughly.

  Playing a hunch, she took in a deep breath and reached to the ends. She pressed both of her open palms on both ends of the tube. There was no cold there. She smiled, as she glanced Yasmeen’s way.

  Yasmeen’s eyes were glued to Magena. She seemed almost excited to see what would happen next.

  Magena narrowed her eyes as she pressed harder on the ends. She heard each side give a click. She knew she was on the right path, so she pulled her hands away to see what would happen. The end pieces simply fell away onto the dirt.

  There was a brief puff of steam from inside of the tube which appeared to turn off the cold.

  “You have three minutes before the contents disintegrates,” Yasmeen said, nonchalantly.

  Magena tried to contain her surprise. “You knew I would get it open. Didn’t you?”

  Yasmeen snarled, while hissing.

  “Who are you?”

  “I think you should find out what’s inside of that tube before you worry about me.”

  Shaking it, Magena carefully emptied the contents of the tube onto the ground. Something wrapped in a thin silicon-coated plastic slid smoothly out. With the protective covering, Magena wasn’t worried about damaging what was obviously something extremely old.

  She rolled it slowly open. When she got about three feet unrolled, she dropped it in shock. A small gasp came out of her mouth as she backed away. “How? I thought that was at the Hive of Baal…”

  “I took it,” Yasmeen exclaimed, with a sense of superiority. She looked to be more than pleased at her accomplishment. “It’s mine now.”

  As Daniel freed Yasmeen’s right hand, he could smell her perfume. His senses started to reel, as the scent invaded his mind. He never smelled anything so beautiful. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  Yasmeen was free.

  Magena saw her partner’s silly grin, like he had been hypnotized. She knew that she was now on her own. “How did you get this? We’ve been looking for this for quite a while now.”

  Yasmeen smiled. “You and I are birds of a feather. We are very similar and somehow linked. That is how you felt my pain when you heard me scream.”

  “What? How did you…?” Magena was again caught off guard. “There’s no way you could have known about what happened to me. I’ll ask you again. Who are you?”

  Yasmeen locked eyes with Magena. Her confidence was overwhelming and permeated the captive’s entire being. “Two minutes.”

  Magena pulled Daniel away. He was the smitten one now. Daniel was out of his head. Once he was out of range of Yasmeen’s perfume, he blinked his eyes, like his head was starting to clear. Magena pointed down at the contents of the tube.

  Daniel’s eyes widened.

  “Is that… the Shroud of Turin?”

  Magena nodded, as she glared at Yasmeen.

  “The real one?” Daniel added.

  “Yes. At least I think so,” Magena answered. “It has the burn marks that were missing from the o
ne we saw before. I really think that this is the real Shroud of Turin.”

  Magena then remembered part of the poem that the Hive gave her. The husband will not be with the wife.

  She turned pale as she peered at the Shroud. She looked it over, as a severe pain appeared in her head. Through the pain, she continued to look at the artifact with mixed feelings. She was excited to be holding the actual Shroud, but she was confused at what she was thinking.

  A small trickle of blood rolled down Magena’s face, which came from her eye.

  “Mags! You’re bleeding again,” yelled Daniel with great concern. “Are you okay?”

  Shaking her head, Magena turned away from the Shroud and wiped the bloody tear away. “No! I’m not okay, Daniel! For one thing, I told you not to call me that anymore! I asked you again and again, but obviously that wasn’t enough! I tolerated your childish behavior, only because I needed you on this trip! But now I’m exhausted.”

  Her eyes widened, as she slapped both hands over her mouth. That was what she was thinking, but she didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

  Daniel’s mouth dropped open. “Wow. I knew I should have stopped calling you… that when you first asked. I guess I’m just used to people forcefully telling me what to do. You asked all nice and stuff. I’m really sorry Mag… Magena.”

  Magena was about to apologize for being rude, but she stopped herself when Daniel apologized. It was the desired reaction she wanted all along. She didn’t know what caused her to blurt out her true thoughts, but she had a feeling it had something to do with the Shroud of Turin. She decided to get her mind off of her new foot-in-mouth disease. She had to stay in the present.

  “I’m going to ask you again, Yasmeen,” Magena said with a firmer tone. “Who… are… you?”