"No use." Maeve shook her head and plucked the bud from her ear, then stuffed it into a pocket. "Your old dog learned some new tricks. At least we know we're going the right direction."
Even without the cameras, that would have been evident. The flickering lights dimmed, casting the hallway in a sickly amber light. It sloped downward so that we had to lean back with each step, our boots leaving prints in the dust. Soon, the doors disappeared. Nothing but grimy wall stretched on and on, slanting steeper and steeper into the dark.
The air thickened with heat and humidity, the scent of nightwalker clinging to my nostrils. Though I had fed before coming here, the scent of blood was so heavy on the air that my fangs extended in anticipation.
Ahead, the hallway zagged to one side, an abrupt corner. We took it carefully, peering around the edge, and were greeted with nothing more than ramps digging down into the earth. Not twenty feet away, the hall turned again, bending back on itself, slanting down, down, down into the bedrock. Whatever this building appeared to be from the outside was only a facade.
Maeve went stock still beside me, her fingers splayed and rigid.
"What is it?"
She hushed me and cocked her head, listening. Hesitantly, I sniffed the air. Through the overwhelming stench, an older scent. A bitter, acrid touch of floral smoke. As if someone had seen a meadow filled with wildflowers and decided they all must burn.
"The Venefica's magic, near its source." Maeve explained, her fingers twisted through the air as if weaving on an invisible loom.
"Wards?"
Her brow pinched. "No."
I could sense no direction to the magic, no single place. It hung in the air like a cloud—or, more likely a funeral shroud—heavy but diffuse, without compass or center. I pressed my hands against the walls, trying to find some trick or illusion in the hallway. If there was anything, it was beyond my ability to sense.
A drop of something wet struck my shoulder. I flicked off the moisture, thinking it condensation from the humid air, and froze. It was sticky between my fingers, dark, in the amber light.
I looked up.
The ceiling throbbed with the bodies of half-formed nightwalkers, malnourished beasts brought over the edge into unlife but never fed again. Naked, grey flesh pulsed with its own invented heartbeat as the creatures roiled against each other, their claws the only thing holding them to the ceiling.
Under direct scrutiny, the spell that had concealed them shimmered and broke, a pearlescent shudder in the air. Black holes where eyes should have been turned to stare at us as one.
"Run." I grabbed Maeve's shoulder and dragged her alongside me as I sprinted down the hall.
Forty-Two: The Jar
The switchback hall slowed us, but it did not slow them. Only their own animalistic thrashing kept them from overwhelming us in those first few moments. I dared not look back as the scrabbling of claws mounted, as the mindless howls of the hungry thundered against our ears. We knew not where we ran. Knew only that if Ragnar's twisting maze ceased, if the hallways came to an end, it was over. We would be overwhelmed.
Maeve wrenched free of my grip, pumping her legs as hard as she could. I could leave her. In an instant, I could outpace her and escape the closing vice. Sweat banded her brow and her eyes stared straight ahead, narrowed, focused as her arms swung in concert with her legs. Though she sweat, she did not pant.
Panting would put a real damper on her spell casting.
Maeve snapped off a few words and flung a hand back, not bothering to look. The heat of flames pulsed against my back, the startled cries of the monsters—for that's what they were, creatures without a name, neither remnant nor ghoul, something else, something of Ragnar's twisted making—made it clear she'd hit her mark.
The hallway widened into a cavern of metal and concrete. Branching walkways splayed out like gnarled tree roots, no rhyme or reason to them that I could see. I took the widest, a massive thoroughfare cut through the center, angling down, and twisted off the path down a side hall. I yanked on the first door handle.
The door flung open and I grabbed Maeve by the arm, throwing her inside before I stumbled after and slammed the door shut behind us, throwing the lock. Pressing my back against the door I stood frozen, straining to hear over Maeve struggling to catch her breath. I cut her a look and she stifled her panting, leaning forward over her knees to draw slow, deep breaths.
Outside, the scrabbling grew closer, louder, echoing against the metal walls and doors, rock crunching as the creatures' claws sheared through concrete. Behind me, the soft hiss of a claw raking the metal of the door. A huffing breath, a predator scenting for its prey. Uncertain howls, plaintive and confused. A low snarl raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
The clacking scramble faded as they moved on. We stayed like that, frozen, until neither one of us could hear that horde, even with my sensitive hearing.
I could see, but I noticed Maeve stepping carefully with her hands out in front of her face, and so I reached over and flicked the light on. For a moment, all either of us could do was blink.
Towering shelves surrounded us, leaning like giants above our heads. Each massive framework of metal was crammed with boxes, labeled in thick black marker in a cipher I didn't understand. Hundreds of them stretched off into the distance, the ceiling soaring above us. Maeve sidled up to the nearest and flipped the lid, peeing inside. She recoiled, disgust twisting her expression.
"What is it?" I asked.
Her nose crinkled. "Supplies. Of a sort."
I flipped the lid myself. Inside, separated by neat Styrofoam packaging, were narrow jars filled with pinkish fluid. Stomach clenching, I picked one up, slowly turning it to the light. A curled creature, vaguely humanoid, floated in a viscous fluid. At first my mind rebelled, refusing to translate what my eyes saw.
And then—a fetus. Human. I knew not how far along. Such things had never been relevant to my life, but it was the size of a hand, perhaps a bit more. Limbs, fingers, all the small pieces assembled to create a person developed.
Fangs, too. I didn't think babies had teeth, not really, but two milky points protruded from the pink child's upper jaw. The first knuckles of his fingers bristled, like porcupine quills trying to escape from beneath the skin. Knobby with excess bone. Ridges marred the spine, the rib cage, some new protrusion I did not know.
Swallowing, I put the jar back. Replaced the lid with both hands. Slowly. And stepped away.
Maeve stared straight ahead, down the aisles and aisles of shelves, and neither one of us discussed just what all those other boxes might hold.
"A room this large should have another exit." My voice echoed under the high ceiling. "Do you sense anything?"
She held her hands out to either side, palms flat to the air as if she were holding back an invisible vice. "No wards. Some residual wisps of broken spells." Maeve cocked her head. "Nothing dangerous."
I sniffed. The sting of preservatives tingled my nostrils. The stale scents of old herbs, blood, and decaying plant matter. The nuances of it I ignored, focusing only on the fact that the scent of nightwalker was less here. There would be no more surprises from above.
"I feel a draft, there." I pointed toward the back of the room, slightly to the right. We crept forward, shrouded under Maeve's silence spell but moving with abject care.
With each step, the shelves seemed to reach higher, their shadows grow deeper and colder. I prayed for the kiss of the sun, then swallowed shame. Of all in this room, Maeve and I were the only ones likely to see the sun again.
We reached an exit, a metal double-door, rust bleeding from its hinges. Neither one of us moved to open it. Instead, we turned, slowly, letting our gazes roam in tandem over the endless crates behind us. Committing what we saw to memory. Promising, in silence, that we would do something about this. That this—whatever this was—would stop.
Tonight was no longer about rescuing my kin. This place... this place would burn before we were done.
Maeve met my gaze, grim-faced, and nodded. No words were needed. We were of one mind. I grasped the door handle and swung it open.
Forty-Three: Hooked
The carcasses of Seamus's drones lay scattered on the ground, their camera lights winking at us like a heartbeat stuttering its last. I nudged one with my foot. It whirred and died.
"At least we know we're going the right direction."
Maeve crushed one under her heel. "Unless this was the group that went the other way."
"Pessimist."
"Says the vampire."
I grinned at her, and she grinned back, a frantic giggle threatening to burst from my lips. Calm. Focus. This place was a dark mirror of Ragnar's mind, a twisted amalgamation of all his horrors. If I let myself dwell on it, my mind would become as lost as his. I could not let this place break me. Not until my work was done.
The watch on my arm blinked an hour left until sunset. A new sensation washed over me—a welcome one. The faint sense of sunstrider, not close, not exactly, but nearby. My skin prickled in anticipation and I craned my head, feeling out the direction.
"The sunstriders are this way." I sped my steps, eager to finish my task and quit this place.
"Roisin?"
"I can't be sure. More than one, yes, but we are missing many."
She matched my speed, her hands held wide at her sides, fingers trailing through the air as she sensed for magic in the area. I was glad to have her. To be alone in this place... It was not a situation I wanted to consider. Not after the crates.
The path was worn clean here, the presence of nightwalker strong enough to make me tingle. But the call of my brethren hooked in my skin, reeling me forward. I lengthened my stride, reaching my whole body forward as if by force of will I could close the distance. A mania spread from deep within my bones. I had to reach them. Now. Now.
Maeve's voice echoed somewhere behind me, distant, strained. I'd left behind the shelter of her bubble of silence, my boots thudding against the concrete floor. Claws and fangs extended, my arms pumped at my sides. Close. So close.
A door barred my path. I pressed my palm against it—cold, like frost, like ice—and shoved. It swung into unsteady light, warmth and smoke and oil. A cavern gaped open before me, stalagmite and stalactite teeth jutting up from ceiling and floor as if to snap me up in the earth's jaws. Torches lined the walls, the only light, the high flames licking black soot onto the grey stone.
Coffins. Biers. The resting places of the sunstriders—I recognized them all—wrapped the walls, elevated to hip height. To working-table height. Their lids had been torn off, and each lay still as ancient dust beneath a thin veil of grey silk. Unmoving, unblinking. Their chosen sleep perverted by the Venefica's twisting of their oath.
In the center, Roisin. Chained by ankle and wrist, her lustrous hair dirty and ragged, to the floor in the center of the room. Not just the room. All around her the ground had been carved in deep grooves, a mandala-shaped pattern I could make no sense of, though I didn't need to understand the branching symbols to know their intent was vile.
"Roisin!"
Her head jerked up, eyes rolling like a startled horse. I stepped toward her—and through a film like a spider web, like the thinnest silk. Pressure pushed against me. One moment I scented the room—the sunstriders, the nightwalkers, the stone and the oil and the flame. Then... Water. Cold, salty, laced with brine and subtle rot. Nightwalker, too. Faint and familiar, heady with... with the warmth, the hay-spice, of Lucien.
The world dissolved at the edges, my vision blurring.
Laughter. Soft. Maternal chastisement. The Venefica's—as it had been while I'd torn through the moor, bloodlust riding my mind, my muscles.
They wanted you to forget.
Her voice. Taunting, but not cruel. The tease of a lover who knows how to push your raw spots without hurting. I fell to my knees, palms pressed to the floor. Cold. The floor was cold. The torchlight warm on my shoulders but also—a breeze that should not exist, something out of broken memory, filtering back. Icy mist. Stinging. Invigorating. The thrum of power unlike anything the sun had ever let me taste electrifying my skin.
Remember.
Light help me, I did.
Forty-Four: Oubliette, Broken
The cavern is gone. Maybe never existed. I stand in the surf in the dead of night, the moon's wary face painting silvery lashes on the white foam that rushes up against my ankles. My feet are bare. My arms, my legs. I wear only a thin dress of black silk, hiked to my hips. The cold does not bother me. It never would again.
Cardamom. Oak. Hay. Nightwalker.
Lucien's blood is on my hands. I know its scent as well as I know my own. It does not startle me. I meant for it to be there. This was all a part of my plan.
My crime.
"Promise me," I say in memory.
"I cannot. Only she can."
"But she will come?"
"For you? She would tear the world down."
I turn to him—to Ragnar—my Lucien's sire. I wish, even then, that this were his blood on my hands. In memory he appears younger, but that cannot be true. He cannot age. Maybe he is lighter, somehow. It seems true. He stands with his hands in his pockets, light grey slacks rolled to his knees as the foam licks his ankles. A piece of kelp, broken from the ocean floor, twists around his toes. He kicks it free.
"Why? Why would she do this for me?"
He turns away, stricken, blond curls twisting in the frizzing mist of the sea. "I don't know."
It's a lie. He knows, or suspects, but will not tell me. That is why he took Lucien. So that I, who scorned Ragnar so long ago, might finally be compelled. Controlled. He's wrong. I will put in motion what he asks. I will begin the end of the world, for what has this world done to me but scorch me from the inside out? I am hollow. A husk. But a husk has weight enough to push the lever to tip the balance of the world.
Behind us, on a cliff overlooking this sea I cannot name, laughter trickles down like rain. Music chases after it, liquid light. Quick, effervescent. Like mortals. Bright and burning and ultimately consumed.
We were there, Lucien and I. In that place. Dancing. My memory too broken to recall why.
Across the sea, lights swirl. Flicker from too-white porticos, hint at the perfect blue curve of roofs painted, over and over again, a tradition lost on me, but beautiful all the same. Greece. This is Greece, where my mortal body was born. The sea, the Aegean.
I am not here to meet the sea.
Closer, but behind us still, Lucien moans. He wakes, slowly, the polluted blood Ragnar passed through his lips doing its dark work. Changing him. Shaping him. His blood on my hands is crusting, flaking off into the water. I've stalled too long, but I will not go back to refresh my bounty. To look upon that face again, contorted in pain and darkness, would open up a fissure in my resolve. A crack to be wedged open. A place from which this husk I am could be well and truly broken.
I step forward, the sea reaching greedily up my thighs, and press my bloodied palms to the surface of the waves. The mist, thin and sticky before, thickens around us. Ragnar gasps—elated—and I look up.
I will not watch what I have called come. I stare at the moon, the nightwalker mistress, instead. They call her Luna, but I will not give her her name. Do you see what I do? Do you understand, you bloated celestial bitch, that I lie? That you, and all your children, will not just die for this? That I will break you, even if I have to crack this world in twain to do so?
She stares back, impassive. Perhaps the wink of a cloud slides across her gleaming face.
"Magdalene," the Venefica says.
I stand tall, the blood washed free from my hands, and face the witch.
She is mist and sea and light. A human, yes, a woman too—wrapped in silver, not the color, not the metal, the essence of the word, the glittering beauty of it edged with all the poisoned promises it holds. A beautiful wink and nudge at the deadly gleam of steel. Long ropes of her hair—black as mine, curled
and twisting—hang down to her hips, her eyes two pools of garnet. Of blood. She smiles, and there is something gentle in it. Something gracious and welcoming. A lure. A bet.
She fools me not at all.
"You know what I want," I say.
Ragnar sucks air through his teeth. His eyes are wide, his expression worshipful. He has waited all his long unlife for this moment. But he will not speak. He did not sound the call, he only handed me the horn.
The Venefica's gaze slides to Lucien, lingers, then returns to me. "Just the one?"
"Yes." My voice thickens. I clear it. "Save him."
Her grin flashes. "Save is such a fragile word, with so much meaning, child of my blood."
It is dangerous, I know, to deal so vaguely with a creature such as she. Ancestor or no, she holds no good will for me. Whatever mortal blood once pumped through her veins has long since atrophied, dried up. I cannot smell the human on her. She is a creature of magic. But blood holds the reins to the strongest of oaths. She will do as I ask. If she wishes to walk this world again, she has no choice. I have inherited none of her magic, but I hold the leash of her blood between us. I can cast her back to the foam as easily as I called her forth.
I consider. This is what Ragnar wants. He has pushed me to this precipice. I know now what it is to lose Lucien. And, light save me, I will not do so again.
We will stand together, immortal. Terrible. As the world bends for what it's done.
"Let him stay immortal, but gift him the right to take strength from the day."
The Venefica laughs. And laughs. And laughs.
Forty-Five: A Thread to Pull
The room snapped back into place. We weren't alone, now. Ragnar stood beside Roisin, his hands in his pockets, an easy slouch in his shoulders, the mirror of the way he'd looked that night. But older, yes. His immortality had saved him from wrinkles and sagging, but his silver eyes were haunted now, tensed always at the corners. Though he slouched, there was a live-wire tension throughout his body. A creature always on the brink of snapping.
Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1) Page 22
