City of Screams Read Online Free PDF Page B

child’s fever-damp clothes. The low ceiling required him to run in a crouch, his shoulders bumping the walls to either side.
    As he chased his beam of light down into the depths of the dark ruins, he noted a warmer breeze wafting up from below, as if trying to blow him back outside. It smelled of damp rock along with a chemical sting, like burning oil. He was grateful for the warmth, until his eyes began to water, and his head spun.
    He knew some natural caves breathed , exhaling or inhaling depending on surface pressures and temperatures. Was that how the archaeologists knew where to dig, had they noted a section of the Shahr-e-Gholghola sighing out, revealing its inner secrets, and dug toward it?
    Within a few more yards, he had his answer. The excavated walls turned to natural stone. He discovered steps carved into the rock underfoot. The archaeologists must have broken into a section of the secret passages that once riddled the ancient citadel.
    But what had they found?
    A scream of fury chased him, echoed by another.
    He pictured the two cats crouched at the entrance, sensing their quarry was trapped. He breathed a sigh of relief for McKay.
    They’re still coming after me . .  .
    Spurred by that thought, Jordan rushed deeper, knowing where he must reach, a place roughly described to him by Atherton, even though the professor had never been there himself.
    Within a few steps, the tunnel ended at a large cavern, a dead end. He slid slightly on damp stone, coming to rest at a pile of bones, a deadfall of limbs, skulls, and rib cages. The scatter of bones covered the stone floor of the cavern, forming a macabre beach at the edge of a pool of black water. More bones glowed up through the shallows.
    Jordan remembered Atherton’s story of the citadel’s subterranean spring—and the slaughter that took place here centuries ago.
    But the deaths here weren’t all ancient.
    Resting atop the bones, at the water’s edge, were the bloody bodies of fresh kills. The corpses were torn, gutted, and broken-limbed. Here lay the remains of the archaeology team, and what appeared to be the girl’s mother. From the gnawed state of their bodies, Jordan knew he had found the lair of the leopards. They hadn’t waited long to take over the newly opened cave.
    As if sensing his violation, a yowl echoed down to him, sounding much closer than before. Or maybe it was his fear accentuating his senses. His head also continued to spin from the fumes that filled the space. By now, his eyes wept, and his nose burned.
    He had to work fast.
    He stepped to the edge of the boneyard and tossed his burden far. The girl’s clothes fluttered open, scattering straw that he’d stolen from the mattress and stuffed inside. If the beasts hunted by scent or sight, he’d wanted to do his best to convince the hunters that the girl was with him.
    Or maybe it didn’t matter.
    Maybe, as with Azar earlier, it merely took his own flight to draw the beasts.
    Cats hunted things that ran from them.
    And if he had failed to draw them after him, he had left Cooper back at the mud-brick house with the girl and the professor. It was the best plan he could muster to keep them safe with their meager resources.
    Jordan unhooked the flashlight from his gun and flipped it to the opposite side of the cavern. The beam flipped end over end, a dizzying effect with his head already spinning. The light landed near the far side of the underground spring, glowing like a beacon.
    Jordan fled away from it, to a cluster of boulders at the right of the tunnel entrance. He crouched down, drew his weapon, and waited. It didn’t take long.
    He smelled the muskiness of the leopards before the first brute stalked into the cavern. It was a sinewy monster, nine feet long, all fiery furred and marked with black rosettes, a male. It flowed like a tide into the space, silent, purposeful, unstoppable. A second beast followed, smaller, a