“You’re right about the sword. You broke mine. I owe you one.”
He tapped his naked chest over his heart. “This is the spot. Give it a shot, Kate. Let’s see what happens.”
“What is it you want from me, Hugh?”
“Short term, I’d like you to say my name with a please attached to it. I’d like to walk into Jester Park with you on my arm.”
Jester Park, Iowa. Once a park in Des Moines, and now one of my father’s retreats.
“Long term, I want to win. And I will win, Kate. You’ll put up a good fight, but eventually you’ll be sleeping in my bed and fighting with me back to back. We’ll be good together. I promise you.”
“What part of no don’t you understand?”
“The part where I don’t get what I want. You need to be taught your place. It’s not at the Keep.”
Something inside me snapped. “And you’re going to teach me where my place is?”
“Yes.”
Time for a reality check, Hugh. “You have what you have only because my father mixed your blood with his. Everything you do and everything you are, you owe to someone else and when he’s done using you, he’ll toss you aside.”
Hugh’s eyebrows came together.
I kept going. “I’ve carved my own life out of this world. You try getting by without Roland’s help and then come back and lecture me. Oh wait, you did, and first I kicked your ass, then Curran broke your spine and threw you into a fire. How does that feel, Hugh? To know you’re second best?”
“You’re pushing it,” he told me.
“You’re hired help. You can’t even tell Roland no. So how about you shut up and go back to what you do best. Roland’s boots need cleaning.”
“Suit yourself.” He put his hands behind his head and smiled. “I have nothing but time.”
I jerked awake. The cold water washed over me. Ghastek stared at me, bleary-eyed.
“Curran will come for me,” I told him.
• • •
MY LEGS WERE cramping. The cramps came with sickening frequency, twisting me, so painful I would’ve screamed if I hadn’t been so weak. We had gone through four magic waves now. During the third, Ghastek spoke to the wall begging his mother not to die. We were on our fourth wave now and he had fallen silent hours ago.
I’d tried using power words, but none of them worked. They just bounced off the walls of the shaft. Hugh must’ve warded it.
I tried to sleep as much as I could. When I couldn’t, I counted the bricks. Lately they had turned blurry and out of focus, as if I were looking at them through hot air rising from the pavement. I was no longer Kate. I was a thing. Cold. Exhausted. Starving. Filthy.
I don’t want to die in this dark hole. I don’t want to die!
I just want to see the sun. I want to hug Julie one more time. I want to kiss Curran.
Maybe I was wrong.
Maybe he wouldn’t find me in time.
• • •
WARM. DRY. FOOD. Hugh.
“Five days in. It’s an anniversary. I thought I’d check on you. The offer is still open.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay then.”
Cold, wet darkness. Ghastek convulsing in his restraints. Holding his head above water. Don’t die. We will make it. We have to make it.
• • •
THE WATER SPLASHES me. I no longer know if it’s warm or cold.
The wall of the shaft falls apart. Curran looks at me. I see him. I see his gray eyes. I hear his voice. “I’m coming, baby. Hold on. Just hold on for me.”
He’s come for me! He’s come to get me out. “I love you so much . . .”
I just want to touch him, but I can’t get through. Something is blocking me. He is right there. I can see him right there. I can’t . . .
“Kate! Kate!” Something is trying to hold me back, but I have to get to Curran. I have to get out.
“It’s not real.” Ghastek’s voice. “It’s not real. See?”
Curran fades. There are only the stones, the dark cold stones and smears of my blood, where I’d clawed at them.
• • •
SIX MAGIC WAVES. I float in a lake of blood. I’m hallucinating, but I can taste it on my lips, the salty hot flavor of a human life.
It will pass. It’s just the hunger.
Ghastek, blurry, his face out of focus, floating in the blood next to me. “I’m afraid.”
Have to keep him alive. “We’ll make it.”
“I just wanted life,” he whispers. “I watched my mother die. She suffered. She suffered so much. I can’t do that. I can’t. I’m too afraid. I did all this because I wanted the Builder’s gift. I wanted him to make me immortal.”
He stares at me with deranged eyes. He doesn’t really see me.
“Ghastek?”
“My name is Matthew.” His voice is a feverish whisper. “If the Builder cares about you, if he needs you, he’ll let you live forever. He won’t let you die.”
“I care about you, Matthew. Hold my hand. I won’t let you die.”
• • •
SEVEN MAGIC WAVES.
Curran stands on the grate above me and I talk to him. I say, I love you all. This is not the end. I won’t roll over and die.
I wish I had been a better person. I wish things had been different.
This place won’t kill me. I will survive. I won’t break.
Curran smiles at me. He’s holding his hand out. I know he’ll come for me.
He’ll come for me. He just might be too late.
• • •
NOISE. LOW RHYTHMIC noise, like the pounding of some giant heart.
It keeps getting louder.
It keeps coming.
I’m hallucinating again.
Pain.
My left hand is gripping the grate. There is a chunk of brick on the other side of the grate next to it.
There is a chunk of a brick.
My mind started working slowly, like a rusty engine trying to will itself back to life.
Thud! Something hit the wall above us.
Another brick bounced off the grate.
I reached over and shook Ghastek. He hung motionless in his restraints. I could barely move him.
Thud!
“Ghastek,” I whispered. “Ghastek . . .”
His eyes opened slowly.
Thud.
Bricks showered the grate. In the dim light of the electric lamps, the shaft wavered, blurry, but I saw the hole about twenty feet up. Another thud. More bricks plunged down, bouncing off the metal. Someone moved at the top of the hole, leaped, and landed on the grate. Gray eyes looked at me.
Curran.
Please let it be real.
He stared at me. His eyes were horrified. “Kate? Jesus Christ.”
My lips moved. “Please be real.”
He pulled a metal hacksaw out of his backpack and started slicing through the grate. “Stay with me, baby.”
This was a dream. Another hallucination. Or Hugh screwing with my head. I braced myself. I would wake up and he would disappear.
Two others landed on the grate. Jim. Thomas, the rat alpha.
Jim saw me and swore.
“Get me out,” Ghastek whispered. “Please.”
“I should leave you in there, you sonovabitch,” Curran snarled. “Cut him out.”
Jim pulled out another saw.
The blade sliced through the bars above me. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Please be real. I reached through the bars and touched his fingers in cutoff gloves. His hand was warm.
“Hold on, baby. I’ve got you.”
A creature tumbled out of the hole and landed on the grate. Hairless and muscled, it crouched on all fours as if it had never walked upright. Thick curved talons crowned the toes of its feet. Its chest was wide, its hindquarters muscled like those of a boxer dog. A bone ridge protruded from its spine. The massive jaws unhinged and finger-sized fangs pierced the air. Its eyes, d
eep set and bright red, burned with hunger.
A vampire. An ancient vampire, so old it sent a shiver down my spine.
Curran whipped around. The vamp leaped. Curran’s right hand closed on the vamp’s throat. He spun, oblivious to the talons ripping at his jacket, and drove the undead’s head into the wall. The vamp’s skull bounced off the brick. Curran bared his teeth and smashed it into the wall again and again, his face savage.
The bones cracked. Undead blood splashed the bricks. Curran ran the bloodsucker into the brick one last time, and twisted its head off like he was wringing out the laundry. The vamp body fell one way, the head went the other.
“Show-off,” I whispered.
“Hold on. Almost through.”
He gripped the grate. The skin of his fingers turned gray—the silver burning him. Curran strained. His legs shook under the pressure. The last two bars bent, and he pushed part of the grate aside like a lid on a can. He dropped to his knees and reached for me. I slid out of my restraints. Someone must’ve turned my legs to lead, because they pulled me down like an anchor. I sank. The water rose over my neck and my mouth . . . He grabbed my arm, pulled me up through the grate, out into the air, and hugged me to him.
He smelled like Curran. He felt like him. I buried my face in the bend of his neck. His skin was so hot, it burned.
“Don’t die on me.” He kissed my face, pulling off his jacket. “Don’t die on me.”
I couldn’t stand. I just slumped there on top of the grate, holding on to him.
He wrapped me in his jacket, closed his arms around me, and jumped. Then we were in a narrow hallway. He carried me through it.
“I love you,” I told him.
“I love you, too.” His voice was raw. “Stay alive, Kate.”
“Ghastek . . .”
“They’ll get him. Don’t worry. Stay with me.”
“Where would I go?”
He squeezed me to him. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”
“Dibs,” I told him. “He broke my sword.”
“Fuck the sword. I almost lost you.” He kicked a door open and lowered me to a fire built on the concrete floor. “Andrea, clothes! Quickly.”
Curran ripped my shirt in half. My pants came off—someone was pulling off my sodden clothes. The heat of the fire swirled around me. Christopher swung into my view, his hair snow white, and held a thermos to my lips. “Drink, mistress.”
I sipped. Chicken broth. I drank again and he pulled it back. “Not so fast. You’ll get sick.”
“Hang on,” Andrea told me, and slipped socks on my feet. “Don’t ever pull this shit again, you hear me?”
“Sure,” I whispered.
“Here.” Robert handed Curran a shirt.
“What are all of you doing here?” I whispered, as Curran put it on me.
“We came to save you.” Christopher smiled. “Even me. I didn’t want to come back to this place, but I had to. I couldn’t leave you in a cage.”
He gave me more broth. I drank. Curran hugged me to him.
We were in some sort of large room. A fire burned in the center, eating the remains of office furniture. A pile of cubicle partitions rested against one wall. There were windows in the ceiling. The room looked like it was on its side. That made no sense.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
“You don’t know?” Christopher’s blue eyes widened. “We’re in Mishmar.”
Roland’s tower prison. I only knew what Voron told me of it. When the business district of Omaha fell, my father had bought the rubble from the impoverished city. He had taken colossal chunks of fallen skyscrapers, two, three, four stories tall, pulled them into a remote field somewhere in Iowa, and piled them onto each other into a huge tower, held together by magic and encircled by a wall. It was a vicious place, an ever-changing labyrinth, where exits sealed themselves and walls took on new shapes. Feral vampires roamed here. Things for which nobody had any name because they had no right to exist hunted here. There was no escape from Mishmar. Nobody ever got out.
“You came into Mishmar for me?”
Curran hugged me to him, cradling me like I was a child. “Of course I did.”
I loved him so much. “You’re a fucking idiot.” My voice was hoarse. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Because I love you. Give her more broth. She’s coming around.”
“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Hugh checks up on me in my dreams.”
Curran’s eyes went gold. “Let him come.”
“A vampire!” Andrea shouted.
The window above and to the left of us broke. Shards of glass and wood cascaded to the floor. A vampire fell into the room, its mind a hot spark in front of me. It landed on all fours, old, gaunt, and inhuman. A sharp bone crest protruded from its back. Another ancient one.
The vamp shot forward and then stopped abruptly.
“I’m still . . . a Master of the Dead,” Ghastek said from a blanket on the floor. “Kill it before I lose consciousness.”
14
I OPENED MY eyes. I lay on a blanket, wrapped in several layers of clothing.
I couldn’t see Curran. He’d been holding me for what felt like hours. Every time I woke up, he was there, but not now. Anxiety spiked.
Okay, I had to snap out of it. He wasn’t going to evaporate. He wasn’t a hallucination. He was here . . . somewhere.
Above me small hateful points of magic moved back and forth. Vampires. One, two . . . Nine. I pushed back the blankets. The room was mostly empty. Christopher napped, leaning against the wall. To my left Ghastek lay on his blankets. Robert, the alpha rat, sat next to him. No Curran or Jim. I also thought I saw Andrea, but that couldn’t be right. Andrea couldn’t be here. She was pregnant. She wouldn’t risk the baby.
A brown-eyed woman knelt by me. She was my age, with dark hair, a full mouth, and brown skin. She wore a black loose abaya, an Islamic-style robe, and a matching hijab, a wide scarf, draped over her head. She looked Arabic to me. I’d seen her before among Doolittle’s staff.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Nasrin.” She gently touched my face, examining my eyes. “I’m here to heal you.”
“Where’s Curran?”
“He’s checking the barricade,” Nasrin said. “Jim and others are standing guard there. How do you feel?”
What barricade? “The room isn’t blurry anymore.”
She smiled. “That’s good. We’ve had a short magic wave, and I’ve worked on you a little.”
“I think I remember.”
I had passed out at some point, but Curran woke me up every five minutes to eat. At first it was broth, which I vomited once or twice. I vaguely remembered Andrea passing me a wet rag to clean my face and Nasrin murmuring something and holding a canteen to my lips. Whatever I’d drunk had made me feel better. Then I was given some mysterious concoction Doolittle had made up and sent with them especially in case we had been starved. I asked what was in it, and Christopher very seriously told me, “Forty-two percent dried skimmed milk, thirty-two percent edible oil, and twenty-five percent honey.” I was afraid to ask about the other one percent and I had trouble keeping it down. Then a magic wave came and someone chanted over me, and suddenly I was ravenous. I had gone through two quart containers of the stuff and my stomach wanted more, but I had passed out. It seemed like that whole sequence happened more than once, but I couldn’t be sure.
“What was in the bottle you gave me?” I asked.
She smiled. She didn’t look a thing like Doolittle, but something about her communicated that same soothing confidence. “The water of Zamzam.”
“The blessed water from Mecca?”
“Yes.” She nodded with a small smile and held a bottle to my lips. “Drink now.”
I took a sip.
“When Prophet Ibrahim cast Hajar and their infant son, Ismail, out into the barren wilderness of Makkah, he left them there with only a bag of dates and a leather bag of water.”
Nasrin touched my forehead. “No fever. That is good. When all the water was gone, Ismail cried for he was thirsty, and Hajar began to search for water. She climbed the mountains and walked the valleys, but the land was barren. Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“That’s good also. Finally at Mount al-Marwah Hajar thought she heard a voice and called out to it, begging for help. Angel Jibril descended to the ground, brushed it with his wing, and the spring of Zamzam poured forth. Its water satisfies both thirst and hunger.” Nasrin smiled again. “We brought some of it home with us when my family went on a holy pilgrimage. My medmagic encourages the body to heal itself by making it metabolize food at an accelerated rate. You had no wounds, so as your body absorbed the nutrients, they all went directly to where they were supposed to go and the water sped up the process even further. If we can keep this up, you’ll be walking soon. Not too bad for thirty-six hours of treatment, and it looks like we might have avoided refeeding syndrome. Without magic, restoring your strength would take a few weeks.”
I glanced at Ghastek.
“He’s recovering slower,” Nasrin said. “But you were in better shape to begin with and you had more reserves than he did. Don’t worry. I’ll get you back to fighting weight. That’s my specialty. I’m the head of the Keep’s recovery unit. We suspected you might become malnourished, so Dr. Doolittle and I agreed that I would be the most effective.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I tried to lift my head up. “You said there was a barricade. Where is it?”
“It’s at both ends of the hallway.” Nasrin looked up. “The floor above us is infested with feral vampires. Ghastek tried to count them at some point and mentioned four once and six two hours later. We killed a couple, but they’re warped. This place isn’t healthy for vampires either.”
There were nine vampires now. They could sense us somehow, and they’d keep aggregating. We had to nuke them or move.
“They’re feeding on each other,” Ghastek said. He turned to lie on his side, facing me. His eyes had sunk in their sockets. He looked like a ghost of himself.
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