“Who are you?” one of them asked. I said nothing in reply. All I did was pull my hood from my head, revealing my face to the Jagers. That alone stunned them, giving me a few extra seconds.
“Her eyes,” a second one spoke in awe. I figured if I gave them any longer they would call for help, so I started my Pulse. I shifted my eyes back and forth in rapid succession while concentrating on putting all four Dahmshed into the trance. Then, with one short flash of my hand, I ended the Pulsing ritual. None of the Jagers moved or spoke, so I tried to motion to the others that I had finished, but I couldn’t move. Suddenly, my legs gave out and I fell to the hard, marble floor. I saw a figure flash over me and run towards the gate. Still, none of the Jagers moved, which meant I had succeeded, but I had drained too much of my own energy to do it. As I lay on the ground, I began to black out, and Falko’s warning came into my head. “You can’t handle a Pulse on a Dahmshed, Aderes,” he had told me. “If you try it, you will die.”
Chapter 15
Lair
I was not in the black marble tunnel when I awoke. My first thought was that I was in heaven, but when I rolled over and saw the sight before me, I knew that I was in hell. I was on a ledge that looked over a large room made entirely of black stone. The smell of human flesh and blood pierced my nose instantly, and if I had been human, I would have thrown up. Even being a Dahmshed, I could hardly handle the stench of the rotten and burning flesh. Human bodies were stacked in large piles all over the floor. In the center of the room was a roaring fire that only engulfed a few of the bodies. Around the fire were four small pits in which Dahmshed were throwing the rest of the dead. I couldn’t see into the pits, but I could hear that something was inside them.
“She’s awake!” a voice spoke from behind me. I was still too dazed to recognize the voice, but when I was pushed onto my back, I was staring into Elliot’s black eyes. The only explanation I could come up with was that we had both been killed and sent to hell.
“How did you die?” I asked him weakly. “I blacked out before I could see.”
“What are you talking about?” He looked at me questioningly. “You think we’re dead?”
“We’re not?” I looked back at the horrific sight below us. There was no way we weren’t in hell.
“No, Aderes. We made it into the lair because of you.” I looked behind Elliot to see JD, Jamie, and Matt all staring at me.
“If we’re not in hell, then what’s going on down there?”
“It’s one of the Jagers’ disposal rooms,” Elliot explained. “They burn the enemy Dahmshed, which are technically us, and throw the humans that they’ve drained to the nomeds.”
“Nomeds? I thought you said they weren’t real.” I turned back to the pits to see if I could get a glimpse of the horrible human-eating creatures that Elliot had once told me about.
“Turns out, I was wrong.” Elliot grabbed my sweatshirt and helped me to my feet. “We need to start moving, though. You’ve been out for almost three hours.”
“Three hours?” I stumbled over to the wall for support. “Where are we going? Did you look around?”
“Not exactly. We came straight here with your body because this place is crawling with Jagers. It’s going to be very hard to navigate without being caught.”
“Especially since you can’t really Pulse anymore,” JD added.
“Do you know where Alexander is supposed to be?” I asked Elliot.
“I know no more than what I knew before,” he replied, just as there was a loud, bloodcurdling screech from below us. It made my legs feel like rubber, and I nearly collapsed.
“What was that?” I asked, grabbing for the wall again.
“One of the nomeds,” Matt explained. “They seem to shriek out every once in a while. I think it’s a way for them to take down a human easier.”
“Why did it affect me then?” I was still clutching for the wall.
“Pulsing must have made you really weak,” Elliot speculated. “We’ll have to wait for you to get your full strength back before we try anything.”
Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes, the nomeds’ screeches bothered me less than the others, and I felt as strong as ever. It was actually amazing the difference I felt in myself. I thought I could take on every single Jager in the lair; I not only thought I could, I wanted to. It was exactly how I felt when I had first been altered by Falko. The feeling of such extreme and sudden power was addictive. Gaining all of my strength back so quickly must have triggered the same feelings inside me. My first instinct was to jump down into the disposal room and kill all of the Jagers in it, and if I didn’t know why I was feeling that way, I probably would have done just that.
These thoughts and feelings suddenly made me think of Jason. If he were to be altered, he would have to go through this, too. I was on Falko’s side when I was altered, and he encouraged me to kill humans, but Jason wouldn’t want to do that. If he didn’t have the willpower to hold himself back, he would do something he would later regret. I couldn’t let that happen to him; I couldn’t give him any reason to be altered. Alexander had to die as soon as I could get my hands around his neck.
“Oh, my God, Aderes. Are you okay?” Elliot snapped me from my thoughts. Everyone was staring at me.
“What? Is something wrong?” My hood was down, but they couldn’t have been distracted by my face. They had been some of the first to see it.
“You better believe something’s wrong,” JD said in awe. “Your eyes are turning red!”
“Are you serious?” I began to panic. The rage of power was starting to choke me, and I didn’t know what to do or how to channel it. My eyes turning red must have been some type of secondary reaction to me getting so strong again.
Then, something else happened. Another feeling of Jason came into my mind. This one was not worrying about what would happen to him if he were to be altered, but what was happening to him at that very moment. I knew something was wrong, that something had happened, and because I didn’t listen to myself all the other times, it was my fault. I should have gone to him right away, but now it was too late, and I was losing control.
“Calm down, Aderes.” Elliot put his hand on my forearm. Without realizing what I was doing, I whipped my other arm out, sending Elliot into the stone wall. Fortunately, the Jagers below us didn’t seem to hear anything, but I feared that I was getting worse and would cause some type of commotion that would alert them.
“Aderes, stop!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at me!” My mind was racing, and I couldn’t think straight. Looking at Matt was the last thing on my mind. “Aderes, look at me. Look into my eyes.”
He reached out and grabbed each of my shoulders, forcing me to stand still and look at him. It took all of my concentration to focus on not killing Matt; I was just barely able to succeed. When I looked into his eyes, I could see my own in the glistening reflection. They were still fully black, but bright red veins were spreading from the outside of my eye into the center. This was now much more than I had felt when Falko altered me, and it was still growing worse. The red veins seemed to be getting thicker, taking over my entire eye.
“Aderes, you have to focus,” Matt said as he realized I wasn’t getting better. “Look straight at the center of my eye and focus on it.”
“Are you trying to hypnotize me?” I asked him through gritted teeth. “It won’t work on me. That stuff doesn’t even work on regular Dahmshed.”
“It will work if you concentrate and let it work. If you don’t, you might wind up killing us all.” He was speaking tranquilly, and it helped to calm my nerves and let me stop staring at my own eyes and focus on his. They were just as calming as his voice, and I began to feel lost and empty rather than powerful and filled with anger. The feeling of wanting to rip out his throat slowly left me, along with the rest of my rage. “Your eyes are back to normal,” Matt said after a few seconds. “I’m going to let you go now.”
“No, not yet,” I replied subco
nsciously. “I’m not ready.”
“That’s just the trance talking, Aderes,” Matt persuaded me. “You’re okay. I’m going to let you go.”
Before I could resist further, Matt closed his eyes, and the trance was broken. At first I was groggy, but as I began to feel more normal, I was happy to see that I wasn’t ready to kill anyone that touched me. That’s when I remembered what I had done to Elliot. He was now sitting next to the wall with Jamie and JD standing over him.
“Are you okay?” I asked him as I glided to his side. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what just happened.”
“I think I’ll live.” He chuckled quietly. “I’m just glad that you were able to come out of that without alerting the Jagers.”
“Speaking of the Jagers,” JD began, as he and Jamie helped Elliot to his feet. “Are we still going to be able to go after Alexander?”
“I believe that’s up to Aderes.” Elliot turned to me. “Do you think you’ll be okay?”
“I’m in control now. I don’t think that will happen again.” I nodded. “But, I got another bad feeling about Jason. This one was way worse than any of the others. I think something may have actually happened this time.”
“You were going crazy,” JD suggested. “I bet it was just some side affect. You’ve been having these bad feelings, and what you just went through probably didn’t help.”
“I guess you’re right.” I wasn’t totally convinced, but it seemed like a logical explanation.
“Good, let’s go right away then.” Elliot walked into a tunnel a little to our left without another word. The rest of us followed him quickly.
The tunnels in the lair differed greatly from the ones outside. None were made of the brilliant black marble that had helped lead us here, and most were covered in blood, with the occasional dead body lying on the floor. The black stone looked as though it had been charred by fire, and it was collapsing in many spots. I couldn’t understand why the tunnels were kept nicer outside. The only thing I could think of was that they wanted to strike as much fear as possible into the humans that they brought down from the surface. Most of the outside tunnels were too dark for a human to see, while the horrific tunnels were lit with torches.
There were enough tunnels and empty rooms to make dodging the sight of the Jagers very easy. With my extended senses, I could hear, and sometimes even smell, them before they were too close to us. I only had to kill two of them because they entered a room where we were hiding. Still, the dodging made it difficult to search the lair for Alexander.
“How do we know he’s even here?” JD asked after about an hour. “What if this isn’t even the right place?”
“We’re basing this all off of the fact that the Rogue scent brought us here,” Elliot responded. “He might not be here, but it’s a chance we have to take. Killing him when he least expects it will be a lot easier than in battle where he’ll have over twenty personal guards.”
As we rounded a corner, I began to hear a loud chanting and banging. It sounded as if there were hundreds of people stomping their feet on the ground. It made me think of a roaring crowd at some type of old sporting event.
“Can you hear that?” I asked the others.
“I don’t hear anything,” Matt replied, but then his eyes widened. “Wait, I think I do. It sounds like…what is that?”
We raced down an empty corridor toward the noise. With each step, it grew louder and louder, until it was almost deafening. I couldn’t understand how we weren’t finding the source when it seemed like we were right on top of it. That’s when it hit me.
“Elliot!” I stopped short. “What if we’re over it? Maybe we have to go down.”
“That’s brilliant.” He looked around hastily. “We need to find a stairwell or something that can bring us lower into the lair.” Then, he snapped his fingers. “That’s probably why we haven’t found anything, yet. We need to go deeper!”
Within seconds, Jamie found a door that lead to a flight of spiral stairs. We went as fast as we could without being totally careless of the fact that we might run into a Jager. It frustrated me that I could flash down the stairwell, but instead I had to stay with the others. We had to have gone at least six stories down before we found a second door. The banging was as loud as ever, which meant that, wherever it was coming from, it was big and filled with lots of Dahmshed. That would either mean we would blend in well, or we’d all die very quickly.
We exited the stairwell cautiously. Again we found a deserted corridor, but unlike the last one we were in, this one had large oak doors about every hundred feet. They shuddered with each thud from the Dahmshed. I was the first to step forward and open one.
On the other side was a magnificent, but awful, sight. It was hard to believe that there was a stadium as massive as the one I was seeing. It wasn’t just the fact that it was underneath New York City, but that it was one of the biggest places I had ever seen. It must have been able to hold at least four football fields. The seating was up high and circled around the coliseum-like center. There weren’t even that many Jagers in the stadium because only the front two rows of seats were filled. The pulsating noise was mostly from the echo.
What made me hate the place was the spectacle in the center. In the middle of an enormous field of black cobblestone were about twenty humans. They looked incredibly small in the core of the vast arena, but to fill in the space around them was what must have been nomeds.
The creatures stood on two feet at about the height of a small child and had dark, scaly skin with a ridge of porcupine-like spines running across their heads and down their backs. Their arms ended in sharp, claw-like hands, and their long legs looked very powerful. They, too, ended with claws. Their heads were almost like a fully-developed Rogue’s; human-looking with canine-like noses and sharp, jagged fangs. Their eyes were orange and bulged from their faces like gumballs on a gingerbread man.
The forty or so nomeds hopped around the humans on their powerful legs, grouping them up for an easier kill. The Jagers were enjoying the spectacle below them and showing it with their loud cheers and stamping.
“This is repulsive!” Jamie yelled over the loud roar of the crowd. “They’re going to let those things kill the humans!”
“And, if I remember the story correctly, nomeds don’t kill things too peacefully,” JD said, as he stared down into the stadium with a disgusted look on his face.
Suddenly, a nomed leapt over fifteen feet and into the group of humans. It let out a single, unearthly screech that made every one of the humans fall to the floor. The rest of the nomeds pounced and swarmed over the humans. It was a feeding frenzy as the nomeds tore the helpless humans to pieces. The Jagers cheered louder and louder.
“I’m a Dahmshed, and I can’t even watch this.” Matt turned away from the bloody mess. “What the hell is wrong with the Jagers?”
“I thought letting the nomeds dispose of the dead bodies was bad, but this…this is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen the Jagers do.” Elliot put a hand over his mouth.
I couldn’t watch any longer, but just as I was turning away, I saw something. Alexander was walking into a large booth on the opposite side of the stadium. Already sitting in the booth were Grath and Rose; Rose had the biggest smile on her face as she watched the gruesome event. Alexander whispered something to Grath, and they both began to leave. I could tell Rose didn’t want to follow, but she got up anyway and ran after them, keeping her head turned to watch the nomeds feast the entire time.
“Elliot, did you see that?” I asked him.
“I sure did. We’ll have to move fast if we want to find them before they disappear into the tunnels.”
“What was it?” Matt asked me as he turned around.
“I’ll explain while we’re running.” I closed the oak door, and we were off. The tunnel we were in wrapped around the entire outside of the stadium. It was very long, but at the pace we were moving, we found Alexander, Grath, and Rose quickly. They had just started
a descent down a very large staircase that seemed to lead to an even larger tunnel. The tunnel itself was short, but it was lined with about twenty doorways on either side.
The three Jagers entered the first door, and we followed close behind. The door didn’t close very fast, so I was able to get a look into the room. It was long and empty, aside from a single table that sat twenty Jagers, Alexander’s personal guards. They would make killing him very difficult, but not impossible. All we had to do was get him alone, and that wouldn’t be hard.
“What now?” Jamie asked quietly.
“Aderes, you have to go alone,” Elliot said. “You’ll be the hardest for them to detect. We’ll be here when you get out.”
“What if I get a chance to kill him? I may need backup.”
“There’s no time to worry about that right now.” Elliot pushed me toward the door. “Get in there and listen to what’s going on.”
“All right!” I slipped through the door and immediately jumped into the rafters. The room was tall and supported by large, stone beams that arched across the ceiling. No one seemed to have noticed me, so I quietly leapt across the rafters until I was directly above the table. Alexander sat at one end, with Grath and Rose sitting on either side of him.
“What is so important that you had to interrupt our show?” Rose complained. It was so sick that she thought that she had been watching a form of entertainment.
“Rose, my darling, remember what we talked about.” Grath scowled at her. “Don’t be so rude to Alexander.”
“I really don’t care right now, Grath.” Alexander smiled at him. “Nothing can bring my spirits down at the moment.”
“Oh, really?” Rose perked up. “What’s happened? Something bloody, I hope.”
“Well, actually…” Alexander began, than stopped. “Where’s Lamia? I wanted her to be here when I told you all.”
Descendant: The Protector (The Descendant Series) Page 22
