by J. R. Ward
A place where something had been driven into the linoleum.
Ahmare’s blood marked the point of impact. And there was more of her blood all around, already drying, making him think of the deaths in the arena. But he had to reroute from that. He needed to pull right the fuck out of thinking how she had been hurt or his head was going to explode, the tension between his love for this female and his—
His love.
For this female.
Duran glanced over at her. Her dark head was bent, her fresh blood leaving a trail even as she pressed on, her determination so fierce, he was convinced that she could lift the whole mountain they were under to locate what she was after.
He loved her. Probably since the moment she had come into that dungeon.
Take out the “probably.”
The dark spices that had come out of him upon her arrival in the dungeon should have been his first clue. But whatever the increments had been, now was the realization—
With a shift in his torso, he put his hand down to catch a tilt in his weight.
A smooth nub registered under his palm.
“I got it!”
Ahmare flipped around as Duran shouted in triumph, and her wounded shoulder let out a holler—not that she cared. “Thank God!”
They met in the middle of the storage room, reaching for each other as he held the beloved between his forefinger and thumb. She kissed him without thinking, and he returned the contact without hesitation, their mouths meeting in a rush of relief.
As she pulled back, she frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Duran just stood there, staring at her. Then he seemed to snap out of whatever place he had gone to in his head and pressed the pearl into her hand. “I’ll show you where to go. So I know you get out of here.”
The reality that they were parting hit her as he took her over to the door. She still didn’t have a solution for what was going to happen when she got back to Chalen’s alone. She supposed she’d thought Duran would come with her now, and they could take down the conqueror together. But he had scores to settle here.
As she put the pearl in the pocket of her windbreaker and zipped it in, she decided Chalen was going to have to be satisfied with the beloved. And as long as she had the damn thing, she had leverage. It would have to be enough.
Before she and Duran jumped out into the corridor, he gave her her guns back, and she was glad that his father hadn’t thought to strip off her ammo belt. She checked both clips and then nodded she was ready.
Duran stayed where he was for another long moment, his eyes roaming around her features. In a cold rush, she realized what he was doing.
“No,” she said. “This is not the last time. Do you hear me? This is not the last time we see each other. We’ll meet up . . . somehow. Somewhere. This is not it.”
He took her face in his hands, his thumbs stroking her cheeks. Then he pressed his lips to hers and lingered.
Everything was said in that kiss. Although no words were spoken, everything was expressed, the yearning and the sadness, the commitment that did not include a future, the wish on both sides that it had all been different.
Their beginning, their middle, and their end.
All of it.
“Please,” she whispered.
It was all the fight she could muster against an inevitability that nearly killed her. But there was no time to dwell on her emotions.
Overhead, red lights started to flash, and off in the distance, an alarm began to wail.
29
DURAN LOOKED UP AT the red lights and wanted to punch a wall. “That sonofabitch.”
In his brain, he triangulated where they were and prayed like hell he had the storage room located right. There were a number of them in the facility—or had been twenty fucking years ago.
Grabbing Ahmare’s hand, he pulled her into the corridor and broke into a flat-out run. Unlike the fluorescent tubes that had been in use constantly and were failing, the red lights, also inset into the ceiling, were fresh as a damn daisy, no blinkers or dead soldiers among them, their strength overpowering the weaker illumination and leaving everything stained the color of blood.
Seemed fitting.
When they got to the spoke he’d been looking for, he ran them back toward the moth room and the entrance they’d infiltrated. And as they pounded down the hallways side by side, he kept a count in the back of his head. Three minutes was nothing when your life depended on it—it was even less when you needed to save someone else.
There was still one minute forty seconds left as he got her back to the door they’d entered through, the one with the code, the one he’d left open for Chalen’s guards, who had yet to materialize.
“Come with me,” she said when he halted. “We’ll hunt your father together.”
“That’s not why I’m going back.” He kissed her hard. “I’m not leaving my mother’s remains here.”
“I can help!” When he shook his head, she gripped his shoulder. “Duran, you’re not going to make it out of here alive.”
He stared at her panic, at her pain, and wished there was another fate for her, for them.
“I’m at peace with that.” He searched her face for the last time. “I love you. I wish there was more for us—”
“Come with me!”
“Go! I’ll find you.”
It was a lie, of course. The chances of him getting to those bones and getting out in time? Less than zero—and he knew damn well she was doing that math in her head, too.
She paused for one last heartbeat. “I won’t forget you. I promise.”
He closed his eyes as pain lanced through him. When he reopened them, she was entering the escape tunnel.
She didn’t look back and that gave him comfort. She was a fighter, and she was going to make it—and he almost pitied Chalen. The conqueror was not going to live through what that female was going to do to him.
Turning away, Duran broke out into a sprint and headed back for the Dhavos’s private quarters.
He couldn’t leave his mahmen’s bones behind—even if she technically wasn’t there anymore. That Fade ceremony was going to happen or he was going to die trying to get what he needed for it.
He might have sacrificed the chance to kill his father to help Ahmare.
But this was different.
Ahmare ran through the escape tunnel like her life depended on it because duh.
And she found the first of the bodies about halfway to the vault door. It was one of Chalen’s guards, curled on his side and unmoving, the scent of blood thick as if his throat had been cut.
She didn’t waste any time checking into the particulars with her cell phone’s light.
That alarm grew dimmer the farther she went out, but that was a function of distance, not a change in detonation. She jumped over the second of the bodies. Another guard. More blood. And a third.
The fourth was just as she came up to the vault, the robes pooled around the cooling corpse.
There was only one explanation: As Duran’s father had escaped, he’d been good with a knife, even in his weakened state.
He’d also closed the heavy steel door, and her hands shook as she trained her light at the keypad and punched in the series of numbers.
And the pound key.
Ahmare’s eyes were teary, and her heart was skipping beats as she prayed that the—
The rumble was dull at first. Very distant, like thunder still miles away. But the earth shook under her feet.
The explosions were starting to go off.
“Damn it! Work!” She punched in the code and hit the pound key. “Come on!”
Another rumble, more tremors, and now there were cracks and creaks in the tunnel, fine dust coming down and making her eyes sting.
“You have to work!” As she tried a third time, her eyes teared up as she remembered Duran saying the exact same thing.
But maybe those were the magic words needed because the vaul
t lock sprang, the air lock hissed, and Ahmare yanked open the steel panel.
Bars. There were bars blocking the way out. Bars that had come down and were covered with a steel mesh that meant she could not dematerialize away.
She was trapped, either because his father had known this was the way they would try to get out, or because this was part of the doomsday scenario, a safeguard to make sure that even if the hemlock didn’t work on everyone, there wouldn’t be any survivors.
“No!” she screamed as part of the ceiling collapsed on her head.
30
AHMARE PULLED AGAINST THE bars. Scratched at the steel mesh. Screamed in frustration and dropped her phone because she needed both hands to try to get through the grating more than she needed illumination.
The explosions were getting closer, and the collapse that was happening deep inside the colony was creating a hot, front draft of wind that pushed against her body. The smell of gunpowder and chemicals, of electrical burn and earth, of linoleum on fire and wood as well, made her panic like an animal.
She couldn’t believe this was how she was going to die. Here, in the almost-out, on the very verge of freedom and safety.
Ahmare yelled again even though there was no one to hear her, the heat making her sweat under the windbreaker, her mind splitting so that it felt as though a calm part of her was watching her struggle.
It was that section of her brain that went to her parents. Had this been what it was like for them when they’d been murdered? Had they struggled against the lessers as the attack happened, fighting in an untrained way against a greater, better-equipped killer, falling down, succumbing to mortal wounds . . . as a version of themselves played witness, marveling that it was happening in this way.
That in this particular fashion, they were leaving the earth.
Did everyone think that at the end? Especially if it was unexpected, an attack, an accident?
“Help!” she screamed—
The flare of flame on the far side of the bars came out of nowhere. One second, it was all black on the other side, her beam having settled so it faced her boots. The next, there was a very distinct, totally controlled blue flame floating in front of her.
“Get back.”
The voice was female.
“Nexi?”
“No time. Get the fuck back.”
The Shadow set to work on the mesh, a blowtorch eating through where the steel had been soldered into place. And all the while, the now not-so-distant explosions were going off, one by one, a drumbeat of devastation.
Ahmare yanked against the bars even though that did nothing. “Why did you come?”
“I don’t know.”
“You killed the guards.”
“I did. But I couldn’t make myself go into that compound. My body refused—besides, that was your business in there, not mine.”
“Duran is still—”
“I can’t think about that right now.”
In the light from the sparks that kicked up where the torch was eating its way through steel, the Shadow’s concentration was complete, her eyes locked on the mesh, the planes and curves of her face strobed, her hundreds of braids falling forward. She was going fast as she could.
“You’re going to have to calm yourself,” the female said. “I’m only going to peel back a section, we don’t have time to do anything else. Close your eyes and get calm, I’ll let you know when. You’ve got one shot.”
Ahmare shut her lids tight and tried to get control of the adrenaline rushing through her veins. All she could hear was the rumbling. All she could feel was the hot breath on her back, the gust getting stronger. And now the ceiling was splintering and hitting her head and shoulders.
It reminded her of Duran crashing out of the ductwork to save her—
Calm. She needed to be calm. Calm. Calm . . .
Oreo cookies did the trick.
It should have been the Scribe Virgin, but she tried that and got nowhere. It should have been Duran’s face, but that only made her want to weep. It was most certainly not the fact that he’d told her he loved her—
Had he done that? Had he really said the words—
Oreo cookies. The original ones. The old-fashioned original kind, fresh out of the blue cellophane wrapper, unrefrigerated, though some people liked them from the icebox, Oreo cookies. She pictured one in her hand and watched as her fingertips gripped and twisted, pulling off the top, leaving her with one side that had all the frosting and one side that had just the shadow of the vanilla center.
You always ate the frosting first.
Then the two hard cracker-cookies, the one that was fresh and dry and the other that you’d had to scrape with your front teeth.
The taste was youth. And summer. And treats.
It was the contrast of the dark chocolate and the fluffy white inside—
“Now!” Nexi yelled.
Just as the corridor was crushed by thousands of pounds of dirt and rock, the mountain reclaiming the hollow spaces that had been carved out from beneath its ascent, Ahmare dematerialized her physical form and traveled in a scatter of molecules, ushered by the explosive wind, out into the night.
31
AHMARE RE-FORMED A QUARTER of a mile away from the tunnel’s cabin, and from that distance, she watched the mountain sink into itself, a great cough of dust and debris expelled over the tree line as the components of dirt, rock, and tree found a lower level. The sound was thunderous, and then there was a silence so consuming that a mosquito dive-bombing her ear was loud as a dirt bike.
She thought of the moths, now gone.
Of the skeletons, now buried.
Of Duran . . . now dead.
As the pain hit, there was a part of her that railed against having met him at all, under the guise of Haven’t I been through enough—as if his fate had been predetermined and she could have avoided this agony now if only destiny had recognized that she’d already lost her parents, and maybe still her brother, and accordingly provided her with an alternative path to the pearl because she’d given at the office. So to speak.
But that didn’t last.
Especially as she heard his voice in her head: I don’t want it to be like I never existed.
The fact that she could be so devastated at the death of someone she hadn’t even known two nights ago was a testament to the male.
“We have to get your injury fixed before we go to Chalen’s.”
Numbly, Ahmare looked over at Nexi, who’d rematerialized right next to her. “It’s my shoulder.”
There was a lame cast to her voice, and she left that right where it lay, lacking the strength to inject some show of resilience or strength. She was utterly depleted.
“Can you dematerialize back to my cabin? Do you remember where it is?” the Shadow asked.
Abruptly, Ahmare thought of the beginning of their trek through the woods, when Duran had set those two broken branches on that stump. He’d done that for her, she realized. So that she’d have a marker in case she was lost on the way back.
“He never intended to come out of there.” She stared back at the collapsed mountain. “Did he.”
“It’s always where he was going to end.” Then the Shadow added with bitterness, “Even when he was out, he never left it, and it was the only thing that ever mattered to him.”
“He went back for his mahmen’s remains. He found them, he said.”
“You didn’t see them then?”
“I was busy.” On that note, her head was pounding where the Dhavos had hit her. “And then there was no time.”
“Did you get the pearl?”
In a panic, her hand slapped to the pocket she’d put it in. As soon as she felt its knobby contour, she eased up a little.
There had to be a salvaging of all this. Something good that came out of it. Otherwise, she didn’t know how she was going to keep going when the sun set tomorrow or the next night or the night after that.
Too many losses. And this
newest one, of a relative stranger under a mountain, for godsakes—something that seemed, in retrospect, even more unlikely than lessers attacking the mansion her parents worked in and killing all of the staff after the aristocrats locked them out of the safe room—compressed the time between the other deaths, making her feel as if she had lost her mahmen and father just the night before.
Then again, grief was not like gravity. There was no reliable law to it, no fixed rate of falling, no universal application. The only parallel was that it was everywhere and always with you to varying degrees, weighing you down.
Sometimes crushing you like a falling mountain.
Was this how Duran felt when the collapse happened on him? This suffocation, this chest pain, this pressure inside her body?
Ridiculous parallel. Because she was still breathing—which raised the question, what the hell was she going to do with the rest of her life? Vampires lived in the darkness, in the void in which humans did not tread. As she considered whatever time was left for her, long or short, the absence of sunlight she faced seemed literal and figural.
Even if she got her brother back.
It was as if Duran and what he represented to her had been all the light that had been or ever would be in her night, and now that he was eclipsed, she was relegated to permanent blindness. Memories of him took her back to when they were on the ATV, shooting through the woods. Then she was walking in the hemlocks behind him. Going down the rickety ladder, to the crawl space under the old cabin. Rushing through the tunnel, right behind him, feeling the cold and the damp, smelling the rot and the earth.
And then he was gone from those images, and she was alone in all those spaces and places . . . in the moth room, and the arena with the skeletons . . . the bedroom with the murals.
Their journey was a metaphor for life, she thought. Two people together, meeting obstacles, surmounting them. Crashing through ceilings to rescue one or the other.
She and Duran had lived a whole life together in a compressed amount of time, the entirety of a relationship laid out . . . until she was the widow at the end. And now? With his loss, she couldn’t help feeling that all of the fresh air and illumination was gone from her future, any room she would ever walk into nothing but cramped and stuffy, vaguely threatening.
