Past some excavating tools, Blackwood slowed at an exposed stone support. Odessa’s eyesight had recovered enough that she was able to discern a geometric pattern carved into the rock. It was no mere directional symbol. It was a sigil.

Blackwood stopped, looking ahead. He mumbled some words to himself in Latin, Odessa realizing it was another spell of protection. When he finished, he turned to her.

“You must leave.”

“What?” she said.

“You should go no farther.”

“You let me come all the way down here to tell me to leave?”

“There is nothing you can do here. You could only be used against me.”

“Against you…?” She saw Blackwood staring into the darkness ahead. “You’re going to need help with Solomon.” Then she realized: “Are you sending me away because of what happened to him?”

Blackwood did not answer.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t know what to do down here. All I know is, we can’t let that Hollow get at you. If it jumped into an immortal being…or at least a person who can never be maimed, murdered, destroyed…it could run wild forever. And that’s after releasing the other three Hollows into the world. You would be the ultimate being for one of those things to possess.”

Blackwood said, “That is why I cannot allow that to happen.”

“But you know this is a trap.”

“Yes.”

“Then why walk into it?” she said. “Never mind walk into it alone?”

“There is another presence here,” Blackwood said. “Another fiend. One I must face. An adversary I have faced many times before.”

Odessa was bewildered. Two entities? “Who?” she asked.

Blackwood straightened out his suit jacket. “My wife,” he answered.

Blackwood walked on into the dark underground. Odessa remained behind, thrown by his comment, and unsure what to do. He was right, she had little to offer against any otherworldly being, but going into this alone seemed foolhardy. She did not know what to do.

As she stood there, she heard a familiar voice call to her.

“Odessa,” the voice said.

Hugo Blackwood followed the low-ceilinged stone cavern around a blind turn, emptying into a chamber that presaged a wider, airier vault. He heard an accented female voice incanting in Caribbean Spanish, her voice amplified by the ancient acoustics into a forceful, mesmerizing drone. A dim but luminescent violet glow was apparent in the stirred motes of centuries-old dust and soot.

He heard also a sharp snarl and the snapping of jaws. An onrush of animal paws; he could not tell from which direction they were coming. He imagined massive beasts, the exaggerated volume indicating a monster many times the dimensions of the chamber, an impossibility.

They slowed and rounded the corner, two pit bull canines, their faces contorted with ferocity. Inhabited beings, vicious hounds. Blackwood remembered the botanica owner’s house, the grave robber saying that their two pit bulls had run off.