by Kristie Cook
“What?” I asked.
“There’s lots of nasty stuff out in the world,” Owen said as he rubbed his palms together then held them out toward me. A wave of energy washed over me. “Don’t want to bring it in to the more sensitive among us.”
I opened my mouth with more questions as he did the same to Tristan, but snapped it closed when I looked behind Owen.
Behind him, just beyond the mouth of the doorway, a group of eight figures dressed in white haz-mat suits greeted us with the barrels of automatic weapons pointed at our heads, a long tunnel stretching out behind them. Tristan immediately threw his hands up, but not in surrender—in fighting stance—but as soon as the others saw Owen and Vanessa, their guns dropped. And when they saw Tristan and me, a few of them gasped. My eyes landed on these faces and recognized them immediately as a murmur spread over the group. Those three had been part of the group of hunters that had been on the university campus back in Georgetown. The rest of the faces behind the shields of their hoods were unfamiliar, though.
“Welcome to The Loft,” Owen said, ushering us and the supplies inside. Once we were in, he waved his hand at the door, closing it behind us. Darkness swallowed us for a moment, and then the comparatively dim light of a single fluorescent bulb overcame the gloom.
Tristan looked up at the light. “Electrical power? I figured EMPs fried everything.”
“They did,” Owen said. “Everything above ground or unprotected, but not down here. I have to do my magic on everything we bring in to get it to work.” He wiggled his fingers at us before gesturing at the group of people. “We’ve found more hunters, as you can see.”
“You got that a little backwards there. We found you,” a tall, middle-aged man with dark hair and a graying goatee corrected Owen.
“Yeah, yeah, and I’m lucky you didn’t blow my head off when we suddenly appeared by your camp. As if you could.” Owen clapped a hand on the man’s broad shoulder. “Alexis, Tristan, this is Shawn. One of the original hunters, so the story goes. You can learn it later. I think there are others you might want to see first.”
With a flick of his hand, he lifted the piles of supplies we’d brought and directed them in front of him.
“Hold up there just a minute,” Shawn said as he and three others moved toward the four of us, each of them holding some kind of device with an antenna in their hands.
“I already—” Owen began, but he shut up as they moved closer and the small, rectangular boxes started chirping with a kind of clicking noise. At least, the ones closest to Tristan and me did.
“Radiation detectors,” Tristan murmured in explanation.
“Not a good enough job!” Shawn barked at Owen. “You trying to kill us?”
Owen set the supplies down and turned toward Tristan and me. He did his decontamination spell again, on both of us and then on Vanessa and himself. The hunters swept the detectors over us again, and the little boxes remained quiet.
“Where you two been?” Shawn inquired as his dark gaze studied us.
“Everywhere,” I said. “Feels like it anyway.”
“New York? Washington, D.C.?” Shawn asked.
“And several other cities,” Tristan said.
The man nodded. “Makes sense then. We’ve figured that only a few cities got the real nukes. The rest of us just got the dirty stuff.”
Tristan lifted a brow as he stared at the man.
“I’ll tell you everything later, bro,” Owen said. “Come on.”
Using magic, he lifted the supplies again. We left the hunters by the door, presumably to guard it, and followed Owen and Vanessa down the tunnel that had been carved into the rocky hill, big enough for a truck to drive through. The floor had the slightest bit of downward grade, and about every twenty feet, another fluorescent light flickered from above, the lamps joined together by a cord that snaked along the ceiling.
“Are you going to tell us where we are?” Tristan asked as we curved around a bend in the tunnel.
I wondered the same thing. Owen and Vanessa had made it sound like they had quite the encampment here, but the only mind signatures I sensed belonged to the hunters up by the door. I couldn’t get a feel for anything ahead of us. The air had a cool, crisp feel to it against my cheeks and smelled like it filtered through something synthetic with only the faintest threads of damp earth and stone.
“It’s an old limestone mine,” Vanessa said.
“Actually, it’s several mines joined together,” Owen corrected.
“With an air filtration system and electricity,” Tristan noted. “So mines that have been reclaimed and developed.”
“Pretty much,” Vanessa said.
“By who?” Tristan asked, skepticism and a bit of annoyance lacing his tone. I didn’t blame him. I was growing impatient for answers, too.
“Almost there,” Owen said, ignoring the question. “We have the place double-shielded to keep the Daemoni from finding us. An exterior shield and an interior one, like they do in Hades.”
“That explains the lack of mind signatures,” I muttered. “Who’s ‘we’?”
We rounded another bend and on the other side, the tunnel widened to the left into a space big enough for three or four semi-trucks to park. Owen moved ahead of us, magically directing the pile of supplies into the open space. On the far side of the area was a wall with a door, a sign hanging over it that said Intake. Vanessa headed for the wooden door, and when Tristan and I passed into the space to follow, the air gave the slightest bit of waver around us. We’d passed through the barrier of the interior shield.
And hundreds of mind signatures popped into my brain.
I drew in a sharp breath when I picked up the one on the opposite side of the door. My legs sprang forward, and my feet moved with no command of my own. I practically bowled Vanessa over to get through that door.
“Hey,” she snapped.
“Hey what?” another female asked. The blonde had been facing a whiteboard with colorful markings all over it and turned around to look at the doorway, apparently thinking Vanessa had snipped at her. Her jaw dropped open.
“Charlotte!” I squealed as I ran for her.
Her arms sprang around me at the same time I collided into her, holding onto her thin body as though it had given me life. She could never replace my mom, but she was the closest I had here in the Earthly realm, and seeing her alive definitely built on the hope for the possibility of a new life. A hope that had only sparked barely more than an hour ago.
“I thought you disowned me,” Char said over my shoulder.
“What? Never! Why …?” I squeezed her even tighter.
“I couldn’t stop him. Dorian. I tried, but he’s so powerful, Alexis …”
Her voice trailed off, and I closed my eyes. I’d never even thought to blame Charlotte, Blossom, or any of the others whom I’d asked to watch my son that fateful night. I knew they would have done anything and everything they could, so Dorian’s escape would have been no fault of their own.
“I don’t blame you,” I said quietly. “Dorian … when he’s determined to do something …”
“He’s like his mother and Mimi,” Charlotte finished.
I let out a small chuckle. “Yeah, exactly.”
She grasped my upper arms and pulled away enough to give me a good once-over. When her gaze fell on my belly, she frowned.
“You lost her, too?” she asked.
I blinked back tears as I nodded, but at that exact time, the new life inside me fluttered.
“I’m pregnant again, though.” I tried to sound chipper to lift the mood as I placed her hand over my stomach. The baby kicked again, but Charlotte didn’t react, except to look at me with her brows raised expectantly. “I guess you can’t feel it yet. I’m surprised I even can.”
Tristan had felt the movement the first time, too, but maybe our heightened senses explained it. I could only be about two months along anyway, at the most.
“Well, that’s good news,” Cha
rlotte said, pulling me into a hug again before we finally let go. She leaned against a table that was one of four set up in a U-shape, facing a wall of whiteboards. The room could have easily been a basic conference room or classroom, but the charts marking the whiteboards made it feel like a command post. “So what happened to you? Where have you been?”
“To Hell and back,” I blurted, and Tristan gave me a sideways look. I flipped my hand in the air. “You know, that hell up there on the surface.”
“How many times do you want to tell your story?” Vanessa asked, her arms crossed over her ample chest and her light-blond brow lifted.
“Oh, of course,” Charlotte said. “Let’s get you processed so you can see everyone.”
She went over to a row of long, low cardboard boxes full of four-by-six-inch index cards. She stopped at the first box in the row and fished out two cards from its front.
“I’ve been optimistic,” she said, waving them in the air. My eye caught Tristan’s name on one and mine on the other. “This is how we keep track of everybody and know who’s here, when they go out and come back. Everyone gets their own card when they first arrive, but I made yours in the beginning. Normally we ask new arrivals if they have any family or friends they’ve been searching for so we can see if maybe they’re already here, but I already know who you’d like to see.”
While she used a pencil to jot down something on the cards and put them back, I reached my mind out across the sea of others putting off a signature in my range. A few hundred of them were scattered for what felt like a mile or two away, all underground. My heart did a little flip each time my mind landed on a familiar signature.
“New arrivals?” asked a deep, male voice. A vampire strode into the room—tall, barrel-chested and thick-armed, a ramrod spine and his strawberry-blond hair cut short, screaming ex-military. He handed a folder to Char, his eyes barely flitting to Tristan and me at first. But then he did a double take, dropped to a knee, and bowed his head. His voice came out softly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, ma’am, sir. I’m new to this.”
“Please, don’t worry,” I said as I looked over at Char. A small smile played on her lips as she eyed the man. “You don’t need to bow.”
He stood up and then at attention, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes staring at a point straightforward on the wall. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Relax, Brogan,” Charlotte said, amusement still alit in her eyes. “I told you. She’s not like that.”
Brogan’s green eyes cut over to Char and then down to me. I nodded and gave him a small, but encouraging smile. His body relaxed. If you called a slight drop in the shoulders relaxed.
“Alexis, Tristan, this is Brogan,” Char introduced. “He used to own this place.”
Chapter 17
“Used to own it?” Tristan asked.
“I’ve given it over to the Amadis,” Brogan said without the tiniest hint of remorse. “I’m not a good leader since being turned, and Charlotte … the Amadis can do more with it than I could on my own.”
“What is this place?” I asked once again.
“We’ll tell you on the way to get the others,” Owen said as he moved for the door.
Char held up a walkie-talkie. “I could just call them.”
“I thought we’d surprise them and give Alexis and Tristan a tour at the same time,” Owen said. “They’re probably starving, too.”
“Definitely.” Tristan rubbed his stomach with one hand while he slid his other arm over my shoulder. “We all need to eat.”
I nodded. “Drink, eat … a bath and bed would be amazing.”
“We can take care of the first two,” Owen said from the doorway. “The other two … well, we have them, but they’ll have to wait.”
Char eyed us. “That’s right. You two owe us a story before you get the good stuff. And it better be impressive, considering everything we’ve been through, looking for the both of you. I’ll be here when you get back.”
We followed Owen and Vanessa out the door and to the left, farther down the tunnel. About ten yards down, it opened up into another, much larger space. Owen pointed at the wall at the corner of the junction where a gridded, upside-down egg shape had been etched into the limestone.
“This place is huge and can be a maze if you don’t know where you’re going,” he said. “So I put maps up. You can see how the entire space is divided into sections. We use the section numbers as part of addresses, so to speak.”
He indicated the orange signs hanging from the ceiling next to the lights, each numbered and spaced about fifty yards apart. The map engraved into the limestone wall reflected the section “addresses” that appeared to be numbered like a hotel’s rooms—the bottom row where we were was in the 100s and each row up the grid incremented by a hundred. The Intake area and the room where Charlotte was, at the bottom center of the egg, were Sections 104 and 105. What happened to 101-103? I was already confused.
“We pretty much have everything we need here,” Owen continued as we walked past the section marked 106. This section and the next consisted of row after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves holding boxes and large plastic buckets and containers.
“Not everything,” Vanessa muttered.
“No, I guess not everything,” Owen admitted. “But enough to keep us surviving, as long as we’re careful and keep working.”
“All of this was already developed?” Tristan asked as he craned his neck to look around. “Before you found it?”
“How did you find it?” I asked. “And so quickly?”
“You’re going to love this,” Vanessa said, rolling her eyes. “Your friend James was holding out on us.”
“He wasn’t my friend,” I snapped, my teeth on edge at the mention of the hunter’s name. Tristan had tensed next to me, as well. “More like my punching bag.”
Tristan relaxed and even smiled. Neither of us had fond feelings for James. He’d been one of the last people I’d trusted and been betrayed by as a teen, leading me to punching him in the nose when he called my mom a whore. Of all the people who could have shown up, he’d been with Carlie’s group as one of the supernatural hunters.
“Well, he certainly won’t be your friend now.” Owen turned to face us, walking backwards. “He’d known about this place all along. Shelter, food, a water supply, weapons …”
“What?” I demanded. “How? And he never mentioned it to Carlie?”
“Claims he thought it was too far away for the group to reach safely,” Vanessa said. “Which, you have to admit, it probably was for the Normans. We’re in Kansas, of all places. James didn’t know about Owen’s portals, and probably wouldn’t have used one anyway because of his whole issue with the supernatural.” She snorted. “So it would have taken weeks for them to get here from D.C. They would have never made it with the gangs and Daemoni out there.”
“When he had no choice, James finally spilled, though. He knew about the place because Brogan’s his uncle,” Owen said. “Although Brogan won’t have much to do with him anymore. He agrees with the rest of us that James is an ass.”
“So who is Brogan exactly, and what is this place?” I asked one more time.
Owen stopped walking, and so did the rest of us. We stood among shelves stacked with fifty-gallon plastic boxes marked “FLOUR” and “RICE.”
“Brogan was a general in the Army, and when he retired, he started The Prepper’s Stash House,” Owen started.
“The Prepper’s Stash House?” Tristan interrupted as though he knew what that was.
“The world’s biggest supplier of survival gear and know-how,” Vanessa confirmed, sounding as though she quoted a motto. It sounded vaguely familiar to me.
“Supplier of the goods and the knowledge,” Owen added. “Said he saw the writing on the wall when he was in the military and knew something was coming down, so he wanted to help people learn how to survive the end of the world as we’d known it. He had no idea supernatural creatures would bring it on,
though, so he’d never expected to be turned.”
“James thought Brogan was dead, so he took off and left him.” Disgust colored Vanessa’s tone. I thought she might despise James more than I did. “Brogan got attacked by a Kansas City nest and woke up as a baby vamp with nobody around to help. James brought us here at the last minute when he saw the mushroom clouds, and we had to subdue Brogan right away. He missed out on the first week of the apocalypse while being converted.”
And now I fully understood Vanessa’s contempt for James. His betrayal of my trust when we were teenagers was nothing compared to what he’d done when shit hit the fan. What a coward.
“So Brogan’s one of those doomsday prepper guys?” I asked. “Like the ones everyone used to make fun of?”
“The king of them,” Owen said. “Started his business from scratch and made himself millions, all of which he used to develop this place.”
“And what, exactly, is this place?” I asked once again. “His bugout bunker?”
“Oh, it’s much more than a bunker,” Vanessa said. “I hate to admit it, but even I was impressed when I first saw it.”
“Because this is The Prepper’s Stash House. And more.” Owen lifted his hand to indicate the rows of shelves we’d stopped next to. “Food, first aid, equipment, filled water tanks … His company’s whole inventory was stored down here, enough to keep him and several hundred people going for many months—years if we can keep supplementing it.”
“But that’s not all,” Vanessa said as she began walking again. I started to feel like we were in a late-night TV infomercial. The kind that didn’t exist anymore. “This was also his training facility, where people would come on their vacations to learn all kinds of survival and preparations for the worst. So he had a lot of the facilities and space already here for that.”
“People spent their vacations here? Underground?” I shuddered at the thought. At least this place was large and somewhat illuminated, rather than small like the rock island or pitch-black with screaming souls, like Hell. But still—not exactly my first choice of a vacation destination.