by TA Moore
“I would do almost anything for you, Luke,” he said.
Took looked stunned for a second and then glanced away to scowl out the window. He scratched his jaw with his free hand and cleared his throat. Madoc was, he thought wryly, in love with someone who had the emotional range of a teenager.
“You could call me Took, to start with.”
“It’s not a name,” Madoc jabbed back.
He expected an argument, but Took just snorted and went back to the files Madoc had shared with him. His hand stayed curled around Madoc’s, and it was odd how cold fingers could still make Madoc feel warm.
It was some comfort on a flight that didn’t have much else going for it. On most flights Madoc could at least look forward to when they’d land and he would be back on solid ground. Not this time. When they landed, all he had to look forward to was The Salt, where the monsters knew his name.
IT MADE you feel human again, the heat. It was only a few degrees, the temperature announced in red letters over a sign that encouraged staff, human and Anakim both, to hydrate, but it was hungrier. It felt like a punishment, like Madoc was a scrap of meat caught between the hammer blow of heat from the chalk-blue sky above and the hot, white skillet under his feet.
It made him rue the lost ability to sweat. Any trickle of moisture to cool him down would be welcome.
“I feel like a lobster,” Took muttered as he flapped the hem of his black, BTR T-shirt in an attempt to generate a breeze. It didn’t do much good, but Madoc appreciated the glimpse of lean, scarred stomach. “Couldn’t we find a salt mine in Montana to keep them in?”
“It’s not meant to be pleasant,” Madoc said as he watched an open-topped jeep bounce and judder across the stretch of salt-bleached sand toward them. “Besides, if they ever break out, where will they go?”
Took turned to look around. It was the sort of landscape you would call beautiful in a picture, with long stretches of ragged salt waves that smeared into the horizon and curves of colorful striated rock that curved up out of the sand like a snake’s back. A blast furnace in the day and cold enough to find chips of ice at night.
“Would it kill you?” Took asked. When Madoc raised an eyebrow at him, he amended the question. “Them. Anakim… us.”
He’d asked people to kill him in the hospital. Berated, the doctors said aggrievedly, which had been so him that Madoc hadn’t known whether to laugh or weep. If Took still wanted to die, he could have done it himself by now. Madoc still weighed the tone of the question. Hopeful or just curious? In the end, as he watched Took track the horizon, he came down on “uncomfortable.” That was appropriate. Madoc wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t uncomfortable around here.
“Maybe,” he admitted quietly. “Not how I would choose to go.”
The jeep finally pulled up to the fence, and the day warden climbed out. Like everything else laid down in the Accord, The Salt was an unhappy compromise. The Senate liked the idea of an Anakim prison well enough, but not the idea of the Anakim being in sole control of it. On the flip side of the coin, the Anakim definitely didn’t trust the living with a prison full of their monsters and their near-gods.
Nobody who wasn’t sentenced to be here was willing to stay long.
The latest Senate representative, who governed the prison during the daylight hours and therefore got to cope with the Hunter hit squads and boyar groupies who tried to force an entry, was James Tac. Madoc realized, with a flicker of surprise and jealousy as the other man walked toward them, that it looked like Took knew him.
“Bennett,” James said as he stalked up to the gate. He was one of those tall men, who, from a distance, looked short with the amount of muscle they carried. He was handsome enough to make Madoc’s jealousy hook deeper, with cool brown skin over elegant bones and cropped hair so black it had blue highlights. “You look like hell. Who are you eating, lepers?”
That startled Madoc into a laugh. Most of the agents who came from the Nations and worked for VINE were leery of the Anakim. From Egypt to Ireland, the Anakim existed in one form or another, although no one knew if they were native to those regions or had just roamed there long enough ago that it was the same difference. Until they had arrived here by boat, there had been none of them in the Americas.
Or in Australia, reportedly, but Madoc had never hated himself enough to venture there. The native gods were unfriendly enough here. There, they made the poisonous fauna look hospitable.
“I blame the heat,” Took said. He smiled crookedly through the diamond wire. “I haven’t seen you since your last stint at the Academy. I certainly didn’t expect to see you out here.”
James scowled and rubbed his left shoulder. “I broke my shoulder in an incident up in the mountains,” he said. “Since I was off active duty, when the last warden made for the hills, the boss tapped me in.”
“What happened?” Madoc asked.
James’s eyes were like chips of dark granite, hard and pointedly empty as he glanced away from Took. Whatever tolerance he would give Took obviously didn’t extend to Madoc. It was almost reassuring.
“Nations business,” he said. “None of the East’s.”
“Or the West’s,” Madoc pointed out. He gave James a smile that was as empty as the other man’s eyes. “Technically.”
“We like them better, though,” James said. Then he held up his thumb and forefinger, pinched close enough to touch. “A bit. What brings a red cardinal all the way to The Salt, Agent Madoc? Want to make sure your boyar is still with us?”
Madoc grinned back, enough to flash his eyeteeth, even unextended. “We’d all know if Elizabeth had shucked the Salt,” he said. “I’ll pay my respects while I’m here, but it’s someone else we’ve come for.”
He held his hand out. After a second, Took dropped the letter of invitation into his palm.
“Dominic Waring,” Madoc said as he tucked the letter into the crack of the gate and left it. “The Storm Warning of the Hunters.”
James plucked the letter free and unfolded it. He read it thoroughly, top to bottom, despite the sweat that beaded his hairline and flushed his throat. When he finished, he grunted and keyed in the code to unlock the door.
“He won’t talk to you,” he said as he waved them through. “But this letter gives you full authority to talk to him.”
“Do you think he’s guilty?” Took asked as they walked toward the jeep. The driver, young and lobster pink under his uniform, stared at Madoc with nervous, fever-bright eyes. “Waring?”
James snorted as he swung up into the passenger seat. “I knew who you meant,” he said. “I don’t know. Boy’s done something bad, you can see that in his eyes, but I’m not looking forward to executing him. Some of them, the ones we can kill, that come through here? I can’t wait to put them in the ground, get rid of them. Not Waring. Maybe that’s just because he’s quiet, though. It’s easier to like someone who’s not howling slurs at you.”
“I can sympathize,” Madoc said dryly as he scrambled into the hard bench seat in back.
“No,” James said as he slapped the dashboard to get the driver to throw the car into reverse. “You can’t. I appreciate the effort, though.”
That was a lie, but Madoc didn’t bother to call him on it as they bumped toward the outpost that stuck up out of the desert like a thumb. If something went wrong down there, they would need the warden onside.
It took five minutes to get to the tower and another sixty to descend the roughly chipped steps that corkscrewed down under the sand. The driver had been left above, so only one of them had to breathe. It pettily annoyed Madoc that James didn’t even sound out of breath as they climbed down.
“They say you can take the air whenever you want,” James remarked. His voice echoed up the shaft. “After a few climbs, though, you can hardly be bothered. Most months, unless we get a new resident or supplies, we only go topside once or twice. Some of the Anakim lot, not even that often. The biggest problem? Agoraphobia. You’d think it’d be
the other way around, but you get used to being down here.”
The warmth leached away as they went down, sucked away into the rock until the only source of heat seeped from James. It was hard not to pull closer to him, steal the warmth from his back, and draw it from his throat.
He made a point to keep himself between Took and James. The respect of personal space hadn’t been written into the Accord, but people either liked the undead in their personal space or loathed it. Madoc didn’t approve of either option when Took was involved.
“Someone got to your driver,” Madoc noted as they took the last flight of steps. “He’s bloodstruck. You can see it in his eyes.
“I know,” James said as they reached the bottom. “That’s why he’s upstairs and we’re down here. It’s not far now. I kept Waring close by. It gets creepy farther in.”
Madoc could taste the salt in his throat, the scratch of tiny crystals, and feel the weight of the ground above pressing down on him. Salt inhibited the boyars’ gifts—and compared to them, Madoc’s ability to sidestep the world was a party trick—and being deep underground made them sluggish. It was instinct.
“It’s already fairly creepy,” Took said. “I read about The Salt, but this is the first time I’ve been so close.”
James smirked as he picked up a heavy torch from the floor and flicked it on. “This is just a hole in the ground. It’s no creepier than a rock or a hollowed-out log. Anakim, though? Once they’ve done here for a while, they forget to pretend they’re human. Down in the deep tunnels, you carved out mansions for boyars who sit in the excretion of their own salts for years without moving. Between Waring and them are all sorts of monsters.”
He led the way down a side tunnel, the stone walls shod with rusty layers of metal. It wouldn’t be enough to stop Madoc if he’d wanted to sneak in, but it would have slowed him down.
A titter of excitement eddied down the tunnel as the light pierced the darkness. In the first cell, a narrow, wrinkled-scarred face appeared and spat thick, greasy sputum at Madoc. A Hunter they’d kept alive to get information from but who’d killed too many to ever walk free. Farther down, a dark arm laced with pink scars stretched out to claw at the air with stubbed fingers, the first joint taken off for a ritual the rapist had never explained and everyone had eventually decided not to care about.
The Biters had filled a lot of these cells.
“Madoc,” a voice hissed. “The Bastard Cardinal.”
Another cell picked it up and then another. The tunnel echoed with hatred and pleas for clemency. The din of it rocked Madoc back on his heels, the assault on his sensitive ears almost physical.
“Underestimated your popularity,” James muttered as he pulled a remote from his pocket. He held it up and roared, “Arms in the goddamned cells!”
Everyone recoiled, the arm was dragged back inside hastily, and James hit a button. Steel doors snapped down in every single doorway and clicked into place as they locked. The only one that didn’t was the one they had stopped in front of.
James tucked the remote away again and pulled out a key. “Here you go,” he said as he wrestled the heavy tumblers, designed for vampire usage, around in the lock. “Dominic Waring. Alive for now.”
There was a single cot in the room, pulled up in front of the small fireplace, and a bookshelf against the far wall. As prisons went, Madoc had seen worse, but misery rarely made for an untroublesome population.
Waring lay on the cot. Framed in stark whites—the walls, his prison smock, the harsh spray of light from the ceiling—Waring looked vivid. He reminded Madoc of a pet fox he’d seen in a Russian Anakim’s palace once, the same color and the same wildness in his eyes—not tame, just collared.
“These two are here to talk to you,” James said. “You don’t get a choice about listening, but you want to piss on the dark one’s boots, I’ll shed no tears.”
Waring didn’t laugh at the joke, but a shred of the wire-taut tension loosened in his shoulders. He sat up on the bed and folded his legs under him. Nearly two years under The Salt had made him seem oddly younger. The harsh-featured man, all stark bones and greasy skin, had faded back into the boy with the heavy glasses and a YouTube account where he spouted juvenile bigotry to the world. His Salted pallor made the birthmark over one green eye look crimson.
He stared at them, blank as a doll, as James let them in. The only signs of emotion were the white-knuckled fists he twisted in his smock.
“You’ve got half an hour,” James said. He closed and locked the door. “If he isn’t in the same condition when I come back for you… well, I don’t have to open this door. Understood?”
He left. Madoc dragged a chair from the corner of the room to the end of Waring’s bed and sat down. They stared at each other, and Madoc wondered how hard you’d have to push to break that shell. It could be done—anything could be done—but it would take a concerted effort to drill back down to anything human.
“Nora Aron is alive,” Took said. “We found her.”
A desperate, reluctant joy bloomed on Waring’s face as he stared at Took. Tears swam in his eyes and he dragged his glasses off so he could wipe them away.
“Son of a bitch,” Madoc said precisely. There was too much purity in that unguarded moment, an innocence that he’d never have attributed to the boy in the videos, never mind a killer. “He’s right. You didn’t do this, did you?”
Chapter Fifteen
SOMETIMES ALL it took was one crack to bring the whole facade down. It worked with suspects and witnesses who’d been less isolated than Waring had been these last months. They walled up their secrets and sat there, alone with them, until they were actually desperate to talk. All it needed was one crack in it and they could just let go.
That’s why Took had led with Nora, the one child whose fate Waring didn’t know. Relieved she’d survived or disappointed, either way, they’d get a reaction. That had worked, but now Waring had tucked in the corners of himself and huddled under it.
Setter-red hair hung over his face as he stared at his bony knees in gray prison leggings. It moved with his breath every time Took edged closer to something that the boy held close. His fingers were twisted in the hem of his smock and his knuckles whitened when he wanted Took to change the subject.
He didn’t need to talk to tell them what they wanted to know. It would just have been quicker.
“We tracked down Annabelle,” Took said. He watched as Waring’s fingers tightened, bones sharp under his skin, but the flicker of his eyes up and away was contemptuous. He knew they hadn’t, because…. Took didn’t know that exactly yet, but Annabelle was significant enough that she’d have changed everything that VINE did. “Or where she was anyhow. Appleberg. Such a small town for such big secrets.”
Closer. That was something Waring wasn’t so confident about. The taste of fear cut through the salt. How did anyone lie to a vampire? Took didn’t know why Madoc didn’t just do these interviews. Maybe Took was there to keep the living in the Senate, and the Anakim born or made since the Accord was signed happy that their evidence wasn’t based in magic.
“We don’t know everything yet,” Took admitted. He slid down the wall until he was on the floor, legs folded to mirror Waring’s. The honesty seasoned the mix, a touch of comfort amid the panic. “But we think it all started with Annabelle.”
Waring looked up. His eyes were almost black, and Took leaned forward as he met them.
“Or maybe with their mission?”
TOOK KNEW time had passed. He was used to the glitch in his brain, the hiccup of missed minutes. He rolled with it as he registered the blood in his mouth—his own from the taste—and the odd ache in his brain. There were slivers of something in there, caught on old mental scars like a cat’s fur on barbed wire. He filed it away for later as a hand grabbed his collar and yanked on it.
He snarled and lunged forward into them. His shoulder rammed into a hard gut and they both lurched backward. The narrow cot tangled between their le
gs and they pitched down onto it. Took threw a punch, and his brain finally caught up with his panic. He recognized Madoc just as it was too late to pull the blow.
Madoc grabbed his wrist before Took’s knuckles connected with his jaw. He used the leverage to casually throw Took off the bed like a sheet that had gotten in the way. Took hit the ground with a thud and skidded into the bookshelf. It pitched forward, a rainfall of books showered down over the floor, and it landed on him.
Fuck. He kicked the shelves off and scrambled to his feet. Old, hard-earned instincts wanted to fight, because defiance had been all that kept him together. Instead he made himself back away on stiff legs.
“I don’t exactly know what’s going on,” he said—lisped, rendered ridiculous by shredded lips and extended fangs. Took licked his lips and tried again. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Could have fooled me,” Madoc growled as he prowled to the side. He wiped blood from the side of his face and smeared black liquid into the black fabric of his shirt. The scrapes were as deep and thin as if Snack had been at him. “Who are you?”
“You’re the one who can’t remember my name,” Took pointed out. He tripped over a tangle of naked flesh on the floor and just about caught himself before he landed on it… him. A risky glance down revealed it was Waring, naked and charred. “What the fuck?”
Smoke in the air made him cough and then resolved itself into Madoc, eyes narrowed and fangs exposed as he grabbed a handful of Took’s hair and yanked his head back. He leaned in and sucked in a breath of air straight from Took’s mouth.
The slivers of… something… in his head convulsed with panic. Took’s cock thickened with the conviction it was hot. The dissonance of it made him shudder and suck in air that tasted like salt, blood, and….
“What is that?” he asked as he grimaced around the flavor of something he couldn’t define, not even as “like” something else.
