Page 64 of Curse of the Wolf
“For those who crave leaving a legacy, ambition never goes away. We don’t know, however, that taking over theworldis their goal. They never confided in me.”
“Whatever they’re angling for with the werewolf artifacts, I doubt it’s anything wholesome.”
“No.”
We bumped off the pavement and onto gravel. Did delivery vans truly take mushrooms all the way back here? If there were any more houses along the route, I couldn’t make them out in the twilight gloom.
To the right, the trees we’d been driving through thinned and then disappeared altogether as the view opened up, revealing a steep cliff dropping sharply away. Only the most modest of low guard rails blocked a car from going over. On the other side of the road, an equally daunting vertical rock face rose up toward mountain-goat territory. Normally, heights didn’t bother me, but my palms grew damp as I imagined another car coming from the other direction. Would there be roomfor it to pass us on the increasingly narrow road?
“There’s no way a FedEx truck comes up this,” I stated.
“Maybe deliveries are dropped off back at the cluster of mailboxes we passed.”
“Yeah.” I glanced at the map. We’d reached the end of the line. In fact, it looked like we had missed a turn. “Crap.”
“I didn’t see any driveways or side roads we could have taken,” Duncan said.
“The GPS might have been leading us astray all along.” With few options, I continued on. “I’ll turn around as soon as I can.”
Duncan peered out the side window at the deep descent. “There’s a stream down there.”
“I’m not stopping so you can magnet fish.”
He laughed. “I don’t believe we would find much in such a remote locale.”
“You’d have to go back downstream to where the kayaking happens.”
“Most assuredly.”
I spotted a turnout ahead and let out a relieved breath. Though I didn’t like that it was on the side of the road with the drop-off, it was wide enough that we could use it to point the van back in the other direction.
“I’m turning around there,” I said. “We can go back and check the addresses on the mailboxes. See if we’re even in the right spot.”
As I pulled onto the turnout, a distant light came into view around a bend farther up the road. It was halfway up the side of a treed slope.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
Duncan had noticed it too. “That’s a much more likely location for someone to live while plotting to take over the world.”
“No resort amenities there, I’ll bet.”
“Continue on?” Duncan extended his hand toward the road.
I grimaced at the windshield. It looked like the road moved away from the cliff to climb toward that slope, but it took me a moment before I could convince myself to continue along it. Possibly because I remembered being chased away from the mushroom farm by Radomir’s thugs in his armored tank. No cliffs had been involved that night, but the experience had been harrowing.
“Do you want me to drive the rest of the way?” Duncan must have noticed my expression—or maybe my white-knuckled grip on the wheel.
“This is thelastplace I would want my driver to faint.”
“Understandable. I’ll simply sit over here and beam moral support at you.”
“Thanks.”
We continued on. Fortunately, after the bend, the road meandered away from the cliff. It turned to dirt as it switch-backed up the side of the slope toward the single light that we could intermittently see through the trees. I didn’t try to hide the relieved dabbing of sweat from my forehead when the forest once again rose on either side of us.
Ahead, a sturdy iron gate blocked the road, a brick wall with two rows of barbed wire on top stretching to either side.
“Final destination,” I murmured while considering a gravel parking area outside the gate. Near it, a keypad mounted on a post glowed softly. “For those who know the code.”
