by Devin Hanson
“Taking the Shroud will kill her!” I cried. I turned to Dimitri, “Please, we can’t do that.”
Dimitri just shook his head at me. “One more life would be worth the sacrifice to keep the vampires away. You are American. You have no idea the havoc they would cause here. Tens of thousands of people would die.”
“Look at this wealth!” I shouted back, throwing an arm out to the hoard. “You think David gives a shit about the cost of bribing the vampires?” I stooped down and swept up a handful of loose coins. “Look! This, just this, would be enough to bribe the vampires for decades!”
“The Church must know,” Elaida shrugged. “They demanded the Shroud because they wanted this woman dead. We passed a dozen relics that the Church would find just as valuable as the Shroud.”
“Or maybe they’re trying to preserve the life of someone vital to the Church,” Dimitri shrugged. “It doesn’t matter either way. They demanded the Shroud, and they will receive it.”
“No!” I shouted back. “You can’t know that!” I was trembling. Partly with rage at their callous disregard for life, partly at the horror this woman’s death would inflict upon David. And partly with fear of David’s retribution. Any hope that I could somehow slide out of the responsibility for his hoard being violated was gone. In the aftermath of David’s wrath, I had no doubt that the four of us would be obliterated. And he wouldn’t stop there. How far would he go before his appetite for vengeance had been settled? Would he hold the Church responsible? All of Los Angeles? All of America? I knew how much grief could cloud your thoughts.
David was trusting me. In a flash of insight, I knew this was the “wealth” that he had wanted preserved. Collecting coins and trinkets was a hobby for him, something to pass the centuries, but he had no real use for it. That woman lying unconscious on the other side of the glass was vastly more valuable.
“I won’t let you,” I gritted out. “I won’t let you murder that woman.”
“Stand aside, child,” Elaida said harshly. “Your little moral stand means nothing against the fate of millions.”
“Fuck you, Elaida, you and your sacrifices!”
“Dimitri,” Elaida jerked her head at me. “Remove her.”
Dimitri gave me a minute shrug and reached out for my shoulder with his enormous hand, a look of regret on his face.
I had seen Dimitri fight against the archangel. I had no illusions about my ability to contest him with strength or speed. So, I didn’t try.
Dimitri’s hand closed over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Alexandra,” he rumbled.
“Me too.”
He blinked at me, and I felt the muscles in his arm turn hard as steel cabling as he reacted and began to pull me close to prevent me from running. I wasn’t running, though. I had learned something in my fight against Savit. All the strength in the world did you no good if you didn’t have a platform strong enough to stand on.
What was the quote from Archimedes? Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth. Dimitri’s own strength was my platform, and as he pulled me close, I lashed out with every fiber of muscle I had. I felt the steel plate of his chest piece crack under my fist. Already damaged by Zerachiel’s sword, the plate broke in half and my fist slammed into his breastbone.
Dimitri grunted from deep down and I felt the arm wrapped around my shoulders go limp. I hit Dimitri again, but without his strength holding me in position all my blow did was send him staggering backward.
I stumbled away from Dimitri and fell against the glass. The cold bit into my hands as I pushed myself upright. I saw Elaida stare after Dimitri, and her hateful gaze swept toward me. Her hands came up, fingers knotted into contortions.
I was too far away from her. There was no way I could reach her before she finished the words already tumbling from her lips. I snatched at the pistol at my belt, flicked off the safety and fired. The gun made nothing more than a dry click. I didn’t have time to figure out why the gun wasn’t working. I threw it aside, but before I had shifted my weight forward off the glass, agony slammed into me, and I fell to my knees with a scream. My vision pulsed as my muscles cramped. Waves of pain rolled through me. My scream petered out as I ran out of breath, but I couldn’t gather the strength to breathe in again.
Then the pain was gone. I lay on the ground, pushing weakly at it, but unable to find the strength to get up again. Elaida’s boot came down on my back, shoving me down into the strewn coins. “Idiot girl,” she hissed. “You cannot fight me.”
There was an electronic beep and a metallic click of a lock disengaging. A rush of fog came from the room as the glass door opened and the cold air inside met the humid air of the cavern. Freezing air rolled over me, stinging my lungs as I gasped after breath and chilled the beads of sweat on my brow.
“Get the Shroud,” I heard Elaida order.
No. I couldn’t let her do that. From somewhere I found the focus to climb to my hands and knees. The door was open, but I couldn’t see where Elaida had gone to through the fog. Inch by inch, I forced my limbs to move and I crawled across the floor to the door.
The floor inside the alcove was cold enough to numb my fingers and knees instantly. My face ached from the bitterly cold air. Eric was leaning over the hospital bed, carefully folding the shroud. Elaida was there, too, examining the woman with a grim frown.
“Elaida,” I rasped.
She glanced at me and her frown turned into a vicious smirk. “Come, Eric. Let us be quit of this place.”
Eric nodded and edged around where I knelt just inside the door, holding the bundled Shroud against his chest. I could hear the medical machines wittering in distress. The woman was dying, and there was nothing I could do about it.
A sharp kick in my ribs rolled me over onto my back and I gasped, trying to curl around the fresh spike of pain. Elaida stepped over me and paused, straddling me. “Did you seriously think we’d trust you with a live gun? Still just a stupid child after all. I guess there’s nothing I need to worry about,” she said, “you won’t live long enough to take your patron’s offer.”
I reached up at her, trying to grab ahold of her, hang on to her somehow. I got a grip on cloth and locked my hand into a fist. Distantly, I felt Elaida tugging, trying to free herself. I had her, though. I could feel my strength returning. There was no way she would be able to break my grip short of killing me.
“Fine,” Elaida growled. “You want it? Keep it, then.”
The tension in the cloth relaxed and my hand dropped, bringing with it Elaida’s satchel and the skull within. The door shut with a hydraulic hiss and I heard the lock beep as it re-engaged.
Elaida knocked on the glass and I looked up at her. “The cold should kill you soon, Alexandra. Use the time to think about what your sacrifice will mean to the people of America.” She saluted me sarcastically, a fist bumped against her collarbone. “Until your next life, Alexandra. I bid you farewell.”
She turned and vanished into the lingering fog.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I pushed myself to my feet and went to stand over the hospital bed. The woman lying on it looked as small as a child, and I reevaluated how tall she must be. She couldn’t be a hair over four feet six inches. She looked the same as she had with the Shroud on her, but that meant little.
The medical machines drew my attention next. Some of the words on them were familiar. A dialysis machine for cleaning waste from her blood, an artificial lung, a heartbeat monitor. That last one drew my eyes, and I watched as her slow, irregular heartbeat sent spikes racing across the monitor one at a time.
She was still alive, for the moment. Which was more than I could say about myself. With the door shut, the blowers in the room had turned on full blast, trying to bring the temperature back down to where it was supposed to be. I couldn’t feel my face or my hands. Sensation in my legs was fading, and the ache of an ice-cream headache was starting to set in.
I wouldn’t last another thirty seconds.
“I’
m sorry,” I muttered down at the woman. I couldn’t save her. I had tried, but the priors had proved more than a match for me. Maybe, if I had been faster. If I had been better at fighting. If I had been able to reach Elaida before she had finished her spell.
The woman might be doomed, but that didn’t mean I had to die as well. My muscles barely obeyed me as I straightened up. My movements were jerky and uncontrolled. The harrowing cold had stripped my body’s heat away too fast for me to start shivering.
I took a shaky step toward the glass wall, then another. I stood for a moment, weaving slightly as I fought to keep my balance, and gathered what little strength I had left. Then, with the last of my might, I threw myself at the glass and hit it with everything remaining to me.
My fist hit the glass and I felt something in my wrist give way. I was too numb to feel the pain, too cold to pull myself back up and hit it again. I sagged backward against the foot of the hospital bed. The frigid steel dug into my back, but I hardly felt it.
I had cracked the glass with my fist. It wasn’t much, just a gleam that caught the light from the medical machines, a few inches long. If I hadn’t been so cold, if I hadn’t felt so weak, I would have hit it again. I would have broken my other hand if I had to. If I could crack the glass, I could break it.
The blowers cut off as the target temperature was reached and my head sagged forward. At least it wasn’t windy anymore. I hadn’t been able to feel the wind, but my hair wasn’t blowing in my face now so I had that going for me.
My eyes wanted to sag shut, but my lids refused to move. Maybe the tears on my eyes had frozen my eyelids open. There was a quiet krii-i-i-ick from somewhere in the room. I didn’t have the strength to get up, but I lifted my head high enough to look at the glass.
The crack was widening. I watched it, too numb to feel hope. The crack wandered upward and to the left out of my slowly narrowing cone of sight. Where I had punched the glass, a minute star had appeared. Slowly, the star grew into a webbed network of cracks, then expanded, faster, faster, the cracks multiplying and splitting again and again. For a long, endless moment, the glass panel stood, milky with the myriad of cracks in it. Then, with a rush of sound like a thousand lightbulbs being crushed at once, the whole panel collapsed into tiny fragments.
A wave of hot air rolled over me. Frost leapt into existence on my jacket and fuzzed on my eyelashes, blurring the edges of my vision. I blinked and took a deep breath, luxuriating in the bonfire heat. Behind me, I heard the blowers kick on again. Awareness was beginning to come back to me and I heard an alarm shrieking somewhere.
I had to move. I had to get out of the alcove before the lingering cold killed me. I tried to stand and my leg muscles cramped, sending me sprawling forward onto the ground. The little chunks of safety glass dug at my skin, but I couldn’t feel them. I was head and shoulders beyond where the glass wall had been, and I could feel the heat radiating from the stone floor.
I crawled forward, adrenaline stirring slushily in my veins, pushing me onward, and didn’t stop until I was all the way out of the alcove. Then I rolled over, once, twice, and a final, strenuous third time. The fog boiling from the alcove passed by to one side and I was clear of the cold.
The radiant heat from the floor faded as my body temperature came back up. And with my return to warmth, my body seemed to suddenly realize I was cold, and uncontrollable shivers wracked me. Sensation began returning to my limbs as I shook and trembled, bringing with it a fresh wave of pain from pins and needles.
My broken hand stabbed pain from my wrist all the way up my arm and to the pit of my stomach, making me feel nauseous. I groaned and curled around my broken hand, cradling it against my chest. My shudders took a long minute to pass, leaving me weak and sore in their aftermath. I still felt cold to my core, but I hadn’t been in the alcove long enough for true hypothermia to set in. Or maybe my recovery was sped up by the lingering strength from the nights spent with Ilyena.
If only Ilyena was here now. I grinned despite the pain. Leave it to me, to think of sex at a time like this.
The pain in my wrist had settled down to a dull throb and I climbed to my feet. The alarm had silenced itself, with only a spinning red light set into the wall decrying the desecration of the alcove. Frost had settled over the woman as the humid air from the cavern precipitated onto her frigid skin.
I limped back inside the alcove long enough to grab Elaida’s satchel and the skull within. Maybe I could give the skull to David and he could properly contain Zerachiel again. I had no idea how David had managed to contain the archangel in the first place, or if it would even be possible to return it to its chains.
I lingered over the woman in the bed until the shivers started to return. There wasn’t anything I could do for her. The Shroud was gone. The cryogenic chamber had been breached. If those were the things keeping her alive, then she was as good as dead.
Failure crushed me as I started limping back up the chamber. Cold tears trickled down my face as I worked my slow way through the treasure stacks, surrounded by my little bubble of green light. I couldn’t muster any attention for the wealth all about me. Gold and platinum and carved jade held no interest for me anymore. The stacks were nothing more than obstacles preventing me from leaving this place behind as fast as possible.
I staggered to a halt and leaned against a table piled with emerald-studded jewelry as a fresh wave of despair hit me. I had no idea how to get out of the cavern. I really should have asked Elaida before alienating her. Would it require a spell? I had no idea how magic worked. Would I reach the cul-de-sac at the far end of the cavern and be stuck there? Something told me this cavern was sealed from the surface. Magic was the only way in or out.
Gunfire erupted from somewhere further up the cavern. Immediately, distant shouts rang out and the bobbing beams of flashlights swept around the cavern. There was one way I could protect what was left of David’s wealth. If I could get back to the entry chamber and work out how to return to David’s suite, I could destroy the focus and strand them in the hotel.
I started making my way back up the cavern. I could tell by the panicked shouts that Raveth’s mercenaries were retreating in confusion. Gritting my teeth against the jarring pain in my wrist, I cradled my hand as best I could and started jogging through the stacks.
It wasn’t difficult to tell where Raveth’s men were, and I swung wide around where the gunfire was coming from. Before I knew it, the cavern walls were turning inward. I slowed to a walk and pulled the light stick off my jacket. Raveth had set up battery-powered floodlights that illuminated the front of the hoard. A handful of his men were wheeling squat, heavy carts away from the foremost piles, laden with gold bars.
Elaida had come here for a specific item, but Raveth had come prepared to loot the hoard of wealth that could be melted down and all identifying marks removed so David could have no way to track them.
I crouched behind a pile on the edge of the light and watched. Raveth stood at the pile nearest to the entrance chamber, all but rubbing his hands with greed as his men loaded another cart. He didn’t seem concerned with the echoing firefight happening a hundred feet further into the hoard.
The automatic rifle fire was punctuated by the flat crack of a pistol, and a man screamed. Raveth looked up, then turned and stared right at me. I flinched back into cover, cursing, but the damage had been done.
“Cousin?” Raveth shouted, “Is that you?”
“Damn, damn, damn,” I muttered. There was no way I could fight Raveth right now. Even if my hand wasn’t broken, the strength I had left from last night was down to the very dregs. Raveth, on the other hand, was brimming with fresh strength from the greed of his men.
I ducked away into the deeper shadows further into the stacks. Without my light stick, I had to fumble my way through the darkness. I saw the bobbing light of Raveth’s flashlight coming closer and pressed against a stack of bullion.
“Alexandra, isn’t it?” Raveth called confidently. I
heard his footsteps as he kicked loose coins across the floor, careless of the noise he was making. “Why don’t you come out? I’m inclined to forgive you for stealing the skull from me since you’ve made this haul possible. Can’t you feel it? The greed coming from the men?”
“I’m not like you, Raveth,” I called back. “My mother wasn’t Mammet.” I left my stack and slipped away, to take cover behind a different pile of gold.
“No, of course.” I heard his footsteps change direction and he came more directly toward where I had been hiding. “Who was your mother, anyway?” I stayed silent and he chuckled. “You don’t have to tell me. Just look at you! Could only be Mahlat; she’s a real piece of ass, that one, just like you. You understand why I wanted the skull, of course? Nothing against Mahlat, but she’s had her time in the sun. It’s my mother’s turn to have power once more.”
“I haven’t taken the offer, Raveth,” I spat, “I’ve no interest in restoring my mother to the skull.” Shit. I really needed to stay quiet. I hurried through the darkness and ducked behind a table holding piles of pearl necklaces as Raveth’s flashlight swung by.
“Really? Well, well.”
I watched beneath the table as Raveth’s feet turned about aimlessly, then headed away from me.
“You know, Alexandra, America really is the land of opportunity. I’ve never encountered as much greed as I have since coming to Los Angeles. This city positively oozes with it. I understand now why the vampires are so desperate to come here.”
“You’re with the vampires?” I ran in a crouch to another pile and then slowed to a careful, stealthy walk as I put a few more piles between Raveth and myself.
“Mammet orchestrated the pact all those years ago,” Raveth called smugly. “Her agents collect a finder’s fee from every payment of dues. I want to take it a step further. The pact is stale, you know. Barely any greed to be had there anymore.”
