by Karen Chance
Within moments she was shuddering, her breath fracturing into harsh, quick gasps, panting, ‘Harder, damn you!’
‘Make me,’ he growled, and in one quick movement she shoved him back, her foot behind his, tripping him, sending them both falling to the floor and driving herself onto him. Tomas barely noticed the hard floor or the pottery shard that was gouging him in the back or the unstable ceiling hanging above him. He was too busy watching her face. He kept his hands on her hips, guiding her, but not giving in to her gasped commands. Instead, he deliberately slowed down, then abruptly stopped, waiting.
‘Tomas!’ He ignored her, even though she wouldn’t stop squirming, pushing the jagged pot shard further between his shoulder blades. She shifted, pulling back enough to rip open his shirt, to rain biting kisses all along his neck, to lick the hollow of his collarbone and mouth, his shoulders. Tomas’s hands scrabbled desperately at the rubble beneath him, but he didn’t move. He just lay there and took it, amazed at how much he needed this, until she let out a frustrated scream and raked her nails down his chest. ‘Move, damn it!’
He just stared up at her, at her glittering eyes and sweat drenched, dusty hair, her blouse open and her jeans around her knees, giving him a view of the dark stain of his hands against the pale skin of her hips. He wondered how he’d ever thought her less than stunning. She glared at him and then pulled farther back, letting him almost slide out of her, then suddenly forced herself back onto him. She did it again and Tomas bit back a groan, but he held himself completely still.
‘Some help here!’ she demanded, and did something with her hips that made his eyes roll into the back of his head.
He slid his hands down the curve of her back and tightened them on her slim waist. He could feel the tremors in his frame the longer he held on and knew he’d soon have no choice but to move. And she knew it, too– she was laughing when he finally gave in, an exultant sound that ran like fire through his veins.
He let her have her moment of triumph, before suddenly stopping once more. It took her a second to notice, then she stared down at him, momentarily speechless.
‘That’s inhuman!’ she finally hissed.
He grinned. ‘So am I.’
She wrapped her hand around his tie and jerked him upwards, the new angle forcing a moan out of them both. ‘Finish this or I swear – ’
Tomas was moving before she completed the sentence, ignoring caution this time, fast and furious, glad that he didn’t actually need to breathe because she hadn’t let go of the tie. And then her hips were jerking in a way that was making it hard for him to focus, her gasps loud in his ears, her body’s pleasure doubling his own. He felt her shudder her release and the clenching of her body triggered his, making them both groan deep in the back of their throats – and a great mess of pebbles and dust poured out of the ceiling.
It took Tomas a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t trapped beneath a ton of dirt and rubble, that this wasn’t a cave in, just the result of one final tremor. He dug himself out to find Sarah staring about room, which was, surprisingly, mostly still intact. It was also blessedly quiet.
Those hazel eyes came back to rest on him and she smiled a little crookedly, teeth a shock of white in her dirty face. ‘Okay. I guess that method works, too.’
* * * * *
Instead of having to fight their way to the centre of the complex as Tomas had expected, their path was unobstructed, the halls echoing, silent and empty except for the carved faces of long forgotten gods staring down from the walls and lintels. That was more than strange – it was unprecedented. And very bad.
Tomas had always known that his only real chance was that he knew this place, and its master, better than anyone. But nothing had gone as planned all night. He honestly didn’t know what to expect when they finally made it to the huge natural cave that Alejandro used as an audience hall.
He brought them in through a little-known side tunnel that let out onto a set of steps about a story above the cave floor. There were guards at the entrance, finally, who Tomas dealt with by simply ordering them to sleep. He was a first-level master; he hadn’t been worried about them. But the creature sprawled on the throne-like chair at the head of the room was first-level also, and far older than he.
As usual, Alejandro was dressed like a Spanish nobleman of the conquest period, which he’d once been. He didn’t look like a monster, with an attractive if florid face and bright, intelligent black eyes. But then, the worst ones never did. Seeing that face again brought a sudden, miserable lurch, a shuddering memory of centuries of heartbreak and horror and nauseating fear. Tomas had to clutch at the door jamb, feeling the rock crumbling beneath his fingers, to keep silent.
Nobody else said anything, either. Tomas had warned them that even a whispered word was likely to be overheard, as beyond the excellent acoustics of the room itself was the small factor of vampire hearing. So Sarah was quiet as they surveyed the scene spread out below, although her face was eloquent.
Tomas now knew why they hadn’t met anyone on the way. The prisoners should have been downstairs, the vampires getting ready to disburse throughout the property for the hunt. Instead, the entire cavernous space was crammed with people, mostly human, but with a ring of vampires circling them. It took Tomas a moment to understand what was happening, because none of this was normal.
A young Mexican man stumbled forward, pushed by one of the guards. He landed near a group of five bodies. There were lined up in a row at the front of the hall, their throats slashed down to the bone, white gleaming through red flesh in wide, jagged lines.
The floor beneath them was not the chipped, angular surface of the outer halls, but worn to a smooth, concave trough by generations of feet. A small stone altar had been found when Alejandro moved in, leading to speculation that this had once been the site of sacred rights. Blood from the corpses had run down the central depression, looking like a long finger pointing the way to the altar and to his throne above it.
Standing to the side of the carnage were two men and a woman, all human, with expressions ranging from dazed to disbelieving to horror struck. Tomas felt a hand grip his arm, and looked down to see Sarah clutching it hard enough to bruise had he been human. ‘To the right,’ she mouthed, and nodded to indicate the tall, lanky young man at the end of the lineup, his face dead white and smeared with blood.
He looked like he’d put up a struggle, but there was nothing of that spirit visible now. He was swaying slightly on his feet, mouth slack, and blinking slowly behind his glasses like a sleepy owl. Shock, or close to it, Tomas thought; so much for hoping he could run on cue.
‘You want to save the life of this man?’ Alejandro asked, addressing the young brunette on the other end of the line. ‘Because you know what I want.’
Instead of answering, the young woman giggled, a nervous, high-pitched sound that warned of incipient hysteria. It reverberated oddly in the high vault of the room; laughter wasn’t a sound that lived here, and the echoes came back with sharp, mocking edges. She stopped, cutting it off abruptly.
‘We told you already,’ the older man next to her said, his salt and pepper beard quivering more than his voice. ‘What you ask is impossible. Even if we could create that many – which we can’t – keeping them under control would be – ’
‘They’re zombies!’ Alejandro screamed, cutting him off. He gestured savagely to a row of odd-looking spectators assembled behind his throne. The missing kings looked out with dead, empty eyes onto the crowd, assembled once more in an audience chamber, as if to give their advice. ‘They’ll have no more mind than these! A child could control them!’
‘If the child had multiple souls,’ the older man snapped. ‘We’re necromancers, not puppeteers! To raise a zombie, we must lend it part of our soul – that is the only way to direct it. I can create one or two zombies at a time – no more. An especially-gifted bokor might be able to manage as many as five, but a whole army?’ he gestured to the mass of waiting humans.
They were there, Tomas realized with a sickening lurch, to be turned into more troops for Alejandro’s growing megalomania. Troops who wouldn’t question his orders, wouldn’t challenge him as Tomas and a few others, had dared. ‘You ask the impossible!’
Alejandro didn’t move, didn’t blink, but Tomas knew what was coming. A flick of a guard’s wrist broke the man’s neck, his body tumbling to the floor to join the others. The young man who had been intended as the next victim fainted and was dragged back into the waiting throng.
‘Do it,’ Alejandro told the girl, who was staring at the body of her fallen colleague as it was arranged in line with the others. ‘Now.’
She transferred her stare to the creature on the throne, and Tomas knew she couldn’t do as he asked. It was written on her face, along with horror and revulsion and abject terror. She was shaking just standing there, and he doubted she could concentrate enough to remember her name at this point. Much less how to manage a complex spell.
‘She’ll fail,’ Sarah said suddenly, ‘and my brother will be next.’
Tomas looked around frantically for any sign that she had been overheard, but there was nothing. The closest vamps, two guards a few yards away at the bottom of the stairs, never even flinched. They were watching one of the captives, who was busy vomiting up his dinner, the gasping, wet sounds followed by painful dry gasps.
Tomas glanced at Sarah, who nodded at the fanatic. He was clutching his bones and murmuring something with a distracted air, as if everything below wasn’t enough to hold his attention. ‘Silence shield,’ Sarah explained. ‘Have any suggestions, or do you just want to wing it?’
Forkface had taken off his bulging pack and was systematically tucking stoppered vials into his already weapons-filled belt. It was pretty obvious how he was voting. Too bad they’d all be dead within half a minute of an attack.
‘This is Alejandro’s power base,’ he said, struggling to explain in terms a human could understand. ‘In addition to his own, he can draw power from every vampire in the room. A frontal assault will not be successful.’
‘Any idea what will?’
Tomas’s eyes were on the woman necromancer, who was crying and chanting at the same time, with theatrically raised arms but no discernable effect on any of the bodies. ‘Can he do a spell to allow you to move through the crowd unseen?’ Tomas nodded at the fanatic.
‘The best he can do in full light is a shadow spell to make us less obvious. It works on humans by redirecting attention away from us. But I don’t know what effect it will have on vamps.’
She glanced at her colleague, who was still muttering to himself but was now staring at an old inscription in the rock. She kicked him.‘Yes, yes. Will not work on master-level, but all else, yes.’
Tomas nodded. ‘I will distract Alejandro. While he is occupied with me, slip through the crowd and get your brother.’
‘That won’t help everyone else.’
‘If I can defeat him, his position will devolve onto me and they’ll be safe.’ But the odds were a lot less in his favor than he’d hoped. Catching Alejandro somewhere in the tunnels or the jungle, alone except for a few of his closest attendants, he might have stood a chance. But nowhere in his plans had he figured on anything like this.
His voice must have reflected some of his doubt, because Sarah narrowed her eyes. ‘And if you can’t?’
‘Once they see me, the court will likely have eyes for nothing else. Get as many people out as you can while they are distracted.’
‘Distracted killing you, you mean. Bullshit.’
‘I came here knowing this was the likely outcome.’
‘Another little thing you forgot to mention. We’re gonna have to work on our communication.’
Tomas decided he couldn’t waste more time arguing. The woman necromancer had failed and Alejandro’s power was boiling through the room, hot on his neck. He was furious. And when he lost his temper, people died – a lot of them. It would be perfectly within character for him to simply order every human in the room put to death.
As if in response to Tomas’s thoughts, the guard behind the woman started forward, hand raised.
Tomas was grateful for vampiric speed, which allowed him to reach her before the guard could snap her neck. He caught the vamp’s arm, but he needn’t have bothered. The room had frozen.
‘Tomas.’ The voice was the one he remembered, echoing inside his head like cool silver, but crawling under his skin like something alive. But the power behind it, the force compelling him to do Alejandro’s will, was gone. For the first time, Tomas had reason to be grateful for his current master. As much as he hated the man, Louis-Cesar’s ownership insured that Alejandro’s unspoken command exerted no more pull than that of any other first-level master. A rank he currently shared.
Tomas opened his hand and the guard retreated in an undignified scramble. The rest of the court was moving closer, not attacking, not yet, but on high alert. No one had any doubts about why he was here.
Apparently, neither did Alejandro. The moment Tomas made a move in his direction, a strong force pushed against him, like a hundred invisible hands holding him back. Make that two hundred, he thought, glancing about at the family he’d once called his own.
The fifteen feet to the bottom of the stairs felt like miles; he had to fight for every inch with eyes burning into his spine like acid and a thick, roiling nausea in his gut. He had a moment of vertigo, swaying on his feet like a drunk trying to dance, and someone laughed, high and cold and mocking. It wasn’t Alejandro. His eyes were glittering dangerously and he'd lost the faintly amused smile that was his usual armor.
The stairwell leading up to his throne had twenty steps. By the time Tomas reached them, he was panting like he’d run a mile. ‘I challenged you once before,’ he said around the mass that had risen in his throat, huge and cold and sickening. ‘But you were too cowardly to face me. I have come – ’
It was a good thing he hadn’t worked too hard on his speech, because he never got to give it. The vampires had closed in on every side, jostling each other, trying to get up the courage to attack him. Tomas had hoped that Alejandro’s pride would force him to fight his old servant himself, especially with the odds so heavily in his favor. But Alejandro remained seated, letting his men get more and more worked up until, finally, two broke away from the crowd and dashed in, snarling.
They came from opposite sides, and while Tomas was dealing with the one on the left, turning his own knife back against him, the one on the right smashed something heavy against his leg. It was the one he’d injured earlier, the one that had yet to completely heal. He fell to his hands and knees, the jar of landing on the shattered kneecap turning the whole room white hot with blinding pain.
He pulled the knife out of the first vamp, who retreated back into the crowd, howling and clawing at his wound, and rolled in time to slash at the second’s throat. He missed because the man dodged, lightening fast, at the last minute. But Tomas didn’t need weapons to crush his throat with an application of raw power.
The vamp was young and that effectively put him out of commission. But it also used up power Tomas couldn’t afford to lose. And there were plenty more that the family would consider expendable if their deaths served to further weaken him.
Tomas dragged himself back onto one leg, momentarily crippled while his system fought to rebuild torn cartilage and shattered bone. Alejandro leaned forward, still not bothering to get to his feet. ‘Do you really believe you will make it all the way up here, Tomas? Because I believe I will sit here and watch them gut you as you try.’
Four more vampires rushed him, all from the same side, and although he dealt with them and with the low level master who had waited for them to distract him, he missed the ax that someone threw from the crowd. Alejandro made a small gesture and the assault halted, for the moment, while Tomas shuddered and leaned his forehead against the slick, cold surface of the third step, a buzzing uproar surging all around him. On the t
hird or fourth or tenth try, Tomas managed to take a couple of shallow breaths. He brought up shaking hands and tore the weapon out of his belly.
‘Really, Tomas. I’m disappointed. I remembered you as better than this.’ Alejandro had finally bothered to get out of his seat, but he didn’t come any closer. ‘And to think, I was contemplating offering you a position at the head of my new army. I really will have to reconsider.’
Hot tendrils of agony shot out from his stomach wound as he tried to stand. At least he couldn’t feel the throbbing in his leg anymore, Tomas thought, and laughed to cover the scream that wanted to tear out of his chest. An all out assault on Alejandro was the only chance he had. If he hurt him badly enough, the family might back off, waiting to see the outcome before they risked attacking the man who might be their new master. Slogging slowly up these steps, one by one, being battered from all sides and buffeted by Alejandro’s power, was a sure recipe for disaster. But it was also the only hope the humans had.
He couldn’t hear anything from the back of the cave, from the mass of four or five hundred people who had been corralled there. And there was no way so many could remain silent while witnessing something like this. Not unless they were being shielded and hopefully guided out.
But it was a long way through the maze of hallways, as countless mortals had learned to their terror, and even further to the town beyond. He had to give them time, if they were to have any chance at all. And in this slice of hell, time meant pain.
Pain wasn’t a problem, Tomas decided, looking into Alejandro’s amused black eyes. He’d brought it to enough people through the years. It was his turn.
‘Still a coward posing as a gentleman,’ Tomas gasped, and threw the gory ax straight at Alejandro.
His old master turned it aside with an elegant wave of his hand, but anger and surprise caused his attention to waver slightly, allowing Tomas to make headway against the stream of power opposing him. He made it to the tenth stair before the world spun around and dropped out from under him, and he hit something hard and unyielding. Only when the pain receded a fraction did he realize he'd been dumped on the floor by another ax, this one to the spine.