Jubal shook his head. “I have no explanation.”
He was lying. He looked her straight in the eye. His expression didn’t change, his handsome face carved with worry lines, his jaw and mouth firm, but he was lying.
“Oh, yes, you do,” she retorted. “And you’re going to tell me what it is, right now.”
Gary sighed. “Just tell her, Jubal. Worst case, she’ll just think we’re as crazy as the porter.”
“Honestly, we don’t know for certain what’s going on, but we have our suspicions. We’ve seen things like this happen before in other parts of the world.” Jubal hesitated. “Do you believe in the existence of evil?”
“You mean like Satan, the devil?”
“Sort of, but I’m not talking about God and the angels.”
Riley forced down her first reaction. Strange things happened in the Amazon. And her mother certainly had gifts that couldn’t be explained. There was the trip to the Andes every five years and the ritual performed on the mountain. There were also rumors, the legends and myths handed down of a great evil having destroyed the Cloud People and then the Incas. Of course, no one believed it, but what if it was the truth?
“Yes,” she admitted, “I believe in evil.”
Jubal hesitated again. “ I—we—suspect that something ancient is out here, an evil being that has the power to command the insects and to prey on our minds, to trick us into believing things that aren’t true.”
Riley instantly recalled her mother’s agitated rambling about the evil trapped in the mountain. The two of them were traveling to the mountain to reseal it, to keep the volcano from exploding, and Annabel was worried about being late. Riley knew generations of women had come to this mountain, and the trip had been even more rigorous and dangerous in the past, yet they’d continued to travel to that same spot and perform the same ritual.
So could it possibly be true? Was there really something evil trapped in that mountain? Something the women of her family had been keeping contained for hundreds—possibly even thousands—of years? Riley shivered, pressing a hand to her knotted stomach.
“Why would this evil thing target my mother?”
“Clearly it considers your mother a threat to it in some way,” Gary said.
“Something is happening. The evil in the mountain is deliberately trying to slow me down. It is close to the surface and is orchestrating accidents and illness.” Riley shivered, remembering her mother’s fearful warnings. She’d brushed them off as shock-induced ramblings, but now Riley wasn’t so sure. Could it possibly be true?
Jubal shifted closer to her mother’s hammock. Riley nearly leapt at him, but his body language exuded protection. He faced the forest, his body alert. She became aware of the silence then. The constant, never-ending drone of the insects had disappeared, leaving behind an eerie silence.
Instinctively Riley stepped close to her mother. Annabel writhed. Moaned. Sweat beaded on her body. Her hands rose and she began a complicated pattern of movement, a mesmerizing twisting of her fingers and hands, a conductor of a symphony, yet each flowing motion was precise and beautiful. Riley had seen those movements several times. Her own hands automatically followed the pattern, as if the memory was pressed into her bones rather than her mind. She made the effort to keep her arms down, but she couldn’t stop her fingers and wrists from twisting with her mother’s, or the flutter of graceful motion.
Her mother’s body turned toward the east and Riley found herself facing the same direction. She could feel the flow of earth rising from beneath the soles of her feet, moving through her like the sap through the trees. A heart hammered, deep beneath the soil. She could feel her pulse syncing to that steady drumming beat. She felt grounded, roots spreading beneath her to find that beckoning life force deep in the earth.
She felt the individual plants, each of them with their own character and personality. Some poison, some antidotes. She recognized them as sisters and brothers. She felt them take root inside of her, spreading through her veins, into her internal organs, and wrapping around her very bones until her veins sang with the lifeblood of the rain forest.
Awareness of every living tree, shrub and plant nearby rose until it was absolutely acute. Heart and soul reached out to them and they reached back, feeding her courage and resilience, the earth her mother, willing to aid her at any turn. She felt a stain of evil spreading through the ground itself, seeking a target. But something else was there as well—something strong and brave. Predatory. Protective. Hers. Abruptly she pulled herself back.
Apparently, Jubal and Gary weren’t far off with their assessment of the situation after all. This was no mass hallucination, but a carefully orchestrated plot to attack her mother, to delay her trip to the mountain and prevent her from carrying out the centuries-old ritual. Riley couldn’t tell why, or what was in the mountain. She could only discern that it was desperate to get out, to survive, and it would use any means available to do so—including killing her mother.
So this was why her mother was so in tune with plants. She felt them, was connected to them, and not in some small way. Riley had never felt that connection before, and it occurred to her that some form of awareness and power was being transferred to her. That possibility only alarmed her all the more. Was her mother inadvertently doing something in her sleep to pass her knowledge on to her daughter, as she’d said each generation of their ancestors did before their deaths?
“What is she doing?” Jubal asked, curiosity in his voice. Curiosity and something else. Recognition, maybe?
Riley actually started, so caught up and absorbed by the myriad plants around her and the feeling of being almost transformed, mesmerized by the existence of such intense life all around her that she’d nearly forgotten there were witnesses to the ritual movements her mother performed up on the mountain. Both Jubal and Gary looked at her with far too much knowledge.
Riley shrugged, reluctant to explain her mother to anyone, although she felt as if the two men had earned an explanation—she just didn’t have an adequate one.
“Have you seen these movements before?” Jubal asked. “The way she’s moving her hands is almost ritualistic.”
“Yes.” Riley had been as honest as possible and felt they had been as well. Both were skirting around each other, reluctant to say something they couldn’t take back.
“I’ve seen similar gestures in the Carpathian Mountains,” Jubal admitted. “When we’ve worked in the remote parts of the mountains. Has your mother been there before? Does she have any ties to Romania or any of the countries the range goes through?”
Riley shook her head adamantly. “We’ve traveled to Europe once, but nowhere near the Carpathian Mountains. We mostly stay in South America. Mom’s come here many times. Most of the women in my family were born here, my mother included. We’re descendents of both the Cloud People as well as the Incas so my family has always had a huge interest in this part of the world. My mother was raised here and only went to the States when she met and married my father. He was from there.”
“Are you adopted?” Jubal asked. “You don’t look anything like your mother.”
Riley pressed her lips together. She’d heard that all of her life. She was tall and curvy with translucent skin and large, very different oval eyes. Her hair was as straight as a board and as black as midnight. Her mother was slender, of medium height, with wonderful olive skin and curly hair.
“I’m not adopted. I look like one of my great-great-grandmothers. She was taller with dark hair, at least if the drawings of her can be believed. Mom showed them to me once when I was all upset because I towered over everyone in middle school.”
She was talking too fast, too much, as she sometimes did when she was upset. They were asking a lot of personal questions. What did it matter if she didn’t look like her mother? Why were they so interested? She just wanted to grab her mother and make a run for it. If not for the fact that the forest itself seemed intent on attacking them, she might have do
ne just that. Her mother had an amazing sense of direction when it came to the mountain. Twice when they’d made the journey and the guides were lost, it had been her mother who had found the way.
But now, with Annabel sick and the attacks on her growing more violent, Riley didn’t dare separate from the group. Jubal and Gary offered a level of protection she couldn’t afford to dismiss.
“Thank you both so much for your help. I have to get some sleep tonight. I don’t know why the forest has gone silent, but I don’t feel any immediate threat. I don’t want my mother to know about this right away. I want to tell her myself and see if she has any ideas why these attacks on her are happening.”
She needed time alone with her mother, and that was nearly impossible surrounded as they were by the various travelers. The guides and porters regarded them with suspicion now, and that would make privacy even more difficult.
“Go ahead and sleep,” Gary said. “We’ll keep an eye on things.”
3
Far beneath the surface, buried deep in the hot, rich, volcanic soil of the Andes, Danutdaxton woke to a steady pounding in his head and heat rising all around him. His eyes opened to the familiar darkness, the sting of sulfur in his nose and the stabbing hunger for blood beating at him with stony fists.
Dax’s hands flexed as he checked his safeguards throughout the chamber. He was not alone. Another pounding wave of pressure slammed into him. Despite the pain, the attack made him smile with grim admiration.
“Manners, my old friend,” he murmured.
To his credit, Mitro Daratrazanoff was as relentless a foe as Dax was a hunter. They had pursued one another for countless centuries before being trapped in this volcano, and in the countless centuries since their entombment, they had continued their battle, never giving up, each constantly searching for a moment of weakness to exploit. The fight had become their entire existence. Hunter and hunted, predator and prey: their roles switched continually, but they were so well matched neither ever had the upper hand for long.
Dax drew a breath and let the heat and pain and darkness wash over him. His body calmed. The ravenous hunger subsided as the heat and power of the volcano sank into his flesh, feeding him its energy, its strength. He drew sustenance from the earth, much the way a Carpathian drew sustenance from the veins of his human prey.
Once, only blood could have assuaged his hunger. Once, only blood could have given him strength. But the last five hundred years of being locked in the heat and pressure at the heart of a volcano had changed him. He was no longer “just” Carpathian. He had become something different, something … more.
Flesh and bone had grown denser, harder, less susceptible to injury. He had a much higher tolerance for heat and fire. He could probably stand in the heart of a bonfire without raising the slightest blister. His hair, once long and thick as most Carpathians wore it, had been singed close to his scalp, leaving a short, thick pelt, and his eyes could amplify the slightest light, enabling him to see clearly in nearly pitch-black conditions. And in caverns where not the smallest hint of light shone, he had developed the ability to see through other means. Heat signatures were clearly visible to him, and even in the coldest, darkest caves and tunnels, he could differentiate between the vibrations of energy in the rock and air and thus “see” his surroundings.
Those vibrations whispered across his skin, as he woke fully from his healing slumber, his body shifting and stretching in the heated soil. Parting the soil with a wave of his hand, he rose from his resting place into the empty magma chamber above. Cracks in the hardened black rock revealed glowing orange lava bubbling restlessly in pools below that lit the chamber with a dim orange light.
The earth rumbled beneath his feet, and the ground gave a sudden lurch that nearly knocked him off balance. Steam vented from the glowing orange cracks in the chamber floor, and with it came the familiar, decaying stench of evil.
Dax’s muscles clenched. He’d grown used to the rumblings and movement of the volcano over the years, but this was different. The volcano was awakening. And Mitro was the one waking it.
Another wave of pressure slammed into him, throwing him to his knees. The ground shifted and rolled. Dax steadied himself and sent feelers stabbing into the soil, trying to locate his ancient enemy. But the clinging, oily miasma of the vampire’s decay had saturated everything inside the volcano, making it impossible for Dax to track the evil back to its source. Mitro was here, working to break free of his bonds and use the explosive force of the volcano to free himself.
For too many years, Mitro Daratrazanoff had fought to escape his prison. Dax had pursued him through the caverns and tunnels of the volcano, hunting, tracking, fighting to destroy him. And for the same amount of years, first Mitro spurned his lifemate Arabejila and then her descendents, who had come to the volcano once every five years to strengthen the bonds of Mitro’s prison and keep him contained until Dax could finally kill him. Without Dax constantly hunting him, fighting him, and without Arabejila and her descendents continually renewing the strength of Mitro’s prison bonds, the vampire would long ago have escaped to wreak his unimaginable evil on the world.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades, the power woven by Arabejila’s descendents had been growing weaker. Their renewal rites no longer imparted the same adamantine strength to the bonds as before. And with the weakening bonds, Mitro’s attempts to escape had come increasingly closer to succeeding. The last three times, Arabejila’s descendent had arrived just in the nick of time, renewing the bonds only scant days—even hours—before Mitro broke through.
Worry crept down Dax’s spine. Judging by the volcano’s increasing turbulence, Mitro had already found enough of a chink in his prison walls to work his influence on the outer world. It did not bode well. Mitro must have woken much earlier than Dax this time. He’d grown stronger—too strong.
Concerned, Dax sent his senses out, searching for that frisson of awareness that alerted him to the presence of another Carpathian. He’d been able to use that awareness over the years to track the progress of Arabejila and her descendents when they came to the mountain. His senses soared out, passing through rock, soil, into the sky above the volcano, then across the dense, tropical jungle.
After several long minutes of searching, he found her. Arabejila’s descendent. She was approaching the mountain as she had once every five years for the last who-only-knew how many centuries, but she was still hours away. She was not going to get here in time. The woman was too far out and Mitro had grown too strong.
Dax had been considered the greatest hunter of the entire Carpathian race, yet still, fight after fight, Mitro had eluded him. Being locked in the earth for so long without blood to sustain them should have weakened them both, possibly even killed them. But just like Dax, Mitro had found a way to survive and grow stronger. The intense pressure, heat and harsh environment of the volcano had changed them both. If Mitro escaped now, there would be nothing, no one strong enough to stop him.
Dax couldn’t let him escape.
The whispers grew stronger, demanding, incessant. For months now, even as he slept, the voices had whispered in his ears, a never-ending chorus. Urging him to visit the cavern near the heart of the volcano. The heat and pressure there was intense, so close to the volcano’s main magma chamber that Dax had never been able to stay more than a few seconds at a time. But something was there. Something powerful and fierce. Something that normally did not like to be disturbed.
Something the earth believed Dax needed, because it had been driving him back to that chamber again and again and again over the centuries.
The push was stronger now than it had ever been. Every part of him felt both driven and pulled toward that chamber deep in the heart of the volcano. What lay there was waiting for him, and he could delay no longer. The strength he needed was there, offered up to him if only he had the will to claim it.
He dispatched the wards surrounding his resting place and shifted into a clear mist, trave
ling swiftly through the lava tubes and fissures in the rock, descending deep into the earth until he reached the superheated chamber. A small section of the floor on the far side of the chamber had cracked, and molten rock from the adjacent magma chamber was spilling into the room, thick and glowing orange. The pool was rising rapidly. It wouldn’t be long before the entire chamber was completely filled.
In the center of the room, its hindquarters half submerged in the deepening magma, lay the petrified remains of a dragon. Immense and breathtaking, the creature lay curled tightly, wings tucked against his back, tail curled around his body, head resting on diamond-clawed forepaws. The entire dragon had crystallized, its body turning to ruby and diamond in the intense heat and pressure of the volcano. The dragon’s chest was destroyed, crushed. Huge chunks of faceted crystal spilled around the petrified carcass.
The heat rising from the magma made the air around the dragon ripple, distorting Dax’s vision until the entire crystallized carcass seemed to tremble and move.
Take it. Take what remains. Take what is offered.
The whispers filled Dax’s head, making him dizzy. Before him, the heat waves rising from the magma pool seemed to shimmer and take on a translucent fire-red hue, but the shimmer was … dragon-shaped?
Dax shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. The image was still there … hazy, translucent, a dragon formed of insubstantial red mist. He stretched out his senses, but could detect no concentrated stench of evil.
The Old One offers you his strength. You were not ready before, but we have made you so. Take what is offered. Without it, you cannot defeat your enemy. Take it. Quickly, before it is lost to the volcano. The earth continued to whisper to him, pushing at him to take a chance that could result in his death.
Dax moved closer. The heat from the magma was so intense, he half expected to burst into flame at any moment, yet his burnished skin didn’t even blister. Another step brought him close to the dragon’s head and a mere five feet from the widening magma pool. Now, he could sense the power radiating from the crystallized dragon. Where had it come from? He’d been here in this chamber before. He’d found the crystallized dragon, half-crushed but still an awesome discovery, but he’d never sensed this pulsating energy. It almost felt alive.
Dark Storm ('Dark' Carpathian Series) Page 5
