by J. R. Ward
Ahmare asked the question quietly, as if she knew he was locked in place. And the truth was, 99 percent of him was screaming for him to pull a turn-around-now and sprint back to that rickety ladder. In his instant fantasy, he was free to escape through the forest, backtrack to the ATV, and take off with Ahmare, running from Chalen and from his father, free to be in a world with only the two of them.
It was a nice piece of fiction.
In reality, he had Chalen’s tracking collar around his neck, a conscience that would not let his mahmen’s death go, and her brother stuck in a hell Duran himself had been in for two decades.
“Yes,” he said roughly. “I’m going in.”
Crossing the threshold made him ill, and he paused again. But then he looked back at Ahmare. She, too, was hesitating, in the way you’d pause if you had a gun in your hand that might, or might not, blow up in your face if you pulled its trigger. And that wasn’t about where they were going. It was clearly about her guide.
He reached out a hand. “I know where we have to go. I’m not going to let you down.”
As she focused over his shoulder, he was well aware of what she saw: darkness, thick in a way only the subterranean shadow could be.
She did not take his palm, just as she hadn’t taken it as he’d wanted to help her down the ladder. It was as if she had to prove to herself she could go it alone, even if that was not how she was proceeding in—and he could respect that.
But he needed her to hear something.
He put his hand on her shoulder, and she must have read something in his face because she went still. “Listen to me,” he said. “There are four exits in the compound, one at each point of north, south, east, and west. This is the easterly one. They all dump out in various ways at the base of the mountain. The codes are six digits, and they progress, starting with the northern one.”
He ran through the sequences with her and she got them quick, repeating them to him. “And the pound sign,” he added. “Don’t forget the pound at the end. If anything happens to me or we get separated, you need to find one of the spokes in the wheel. The compound is set up in a centralized plan around the intersection of the four compass points. The corridors that curve are not what you want because they’ll just keep you in a circle. The straight ones take you either out to the exits or down to the arena, you got it? Those are what will save you, and you’ll know you’re heading out instead of in because everyone else will be going in the opposite direction, in case the alarm is sounded.”
“Okay. Right.”
“One more thing. This whole mountain is rigged with explosives. You will have three minutes once the red lights come on.” Duran didn’t bother to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “The congregation is brainwashed by the Dhavos. They believe once those red lights start flashing, the end of the universe has arrived and they are supposed to be praying. Do not try to save anyone. Let them go to the arena, they’ve made their decision because of their delusions and that’s their destiny. Nexi and I are the only two people I know who’ve broken out of it. You are not going to win that debate, and more to the point, you need to get yourself out, okay? Do not try to save anyone. You’re the only one who matters.”
She nodded. And then, “Duran . . . thank you. For everything.”
He stared at her face. There was a dirt smudge at her temple, fine curls had escaped her ponytail, and the flush of their exertion to get to the cabin had dulled in the cool temperature of the underground passageway.
Her eyes met his like she was reading his mind.
As they both went in for the kiss, he knew this was good-bye. One, or both of them, was not making it out of this suicide mission alive.
And what worried him most was that she maybe didn’t get his message. When he told her not to save anyone . . . it included himself.
Chances were good she was going to have to leave him behind when the mountain blew, and he prayed her need to save her brother’s life was going to override the light that glowed, soft, warm, and kind, in her eyes as she stared up at him now.
“No one matters but you,” he said roughly.
22
AS DURAN SPOKE, AHMARE did not like the expression on his face. Nope. Not at all.
“Don’t forget me, okay?” he said softly. “You don’t have to mourn me, but just . . . I want someone to remember me.”
“I’m not hearing this—”
“Just in case the Fade is a lie, I don’t want it to be like I never existed at all.”
Before she could argue with him, he squeezed her hand and then reached around and pulled the vault almost shut. Without another word, he started off, and it was as Ahmare stared after him in despair that she noticed a glow far off in the dark distance.
It wasn’t a security light. Running to catch up with him, the illumination was seeping around the jambs of a closed door.
There was no keypad this time. Just a garden-variety handle like the ones in her gym, and given what waited for them on the other side, she felt like the portal should have come with surgeon general’s warnings, an airbag, and a crash helmet.
“One . . . two . . .” Duran gripped the handle. “Three.”
He didn’t slam the release down; he lowered it and pulled the door open. Leaning out, he kept his gun by his side.
“To the left. Fast and quiet.”
They slipped out into a pale gray corridor that had all the nuance and distinction of what she imagined the cult members to have: everything buffed to a low polish, no ornamentation, the ceiling, walls, and floor covered by late-sixties-era linoleum squares, the seams of which were showing fine lines of glue that had discolored into a mustard-yellow seepage. Fluorescent lights were set in bald panels every six feet along the ceiling, and many of the tubes were blinking or burned out. Underfoot, the tiles had been worn in two distinct lanes running parallel to each other.
From people walking in lines or in pairs.
The sense she had of entering a foreign world was reinforced as they came upon a door with a handle just the same as the first. A fake wood placard had been stuck on the panel at eyeball height, the white letters etched into the plastic reading, “Modesty Comes First.”
Off in the distance, there was an odd, disquieting hum.
Duran looked around with a frown. Then he shook his head.
“Let me go in first,” he said as he curled his hand onto the lever.
She glanced behind them. No one was in the corridor. Nor were there people moving around, at least not that she could hear or sense, and she wondered just how huge the facility was.
Duran moved in quick silence, opening the door and disappearing into an interior that, going by the sign, gave Ahmare images of old Kotex pad ads, and bathing suits that had skirts and built-in bras, and pantyhose that were more like compression stockings.
Maybe this was where the human race sent their maiden aunts when they couldn’t stand the whisker-chinned, lipstick-smudged kisses for one more holiday season—
What the hell was that hum?
Duran popped his head out. “There’s something wrong here.”
“You think?” she muttered to herself.
He pulled her inside, and she gasped, nearly jumping back out into the corridor. The vast room, which had to be forty feet long and twenty feet wide, was swarming with flies—no, not flies, moths. A thousand pale-winged moths were in the air, fluttering in disjointed flight paths, knocking into each other, billiard balls without the felt and the pockets.
Batting them away from her face, the smell was horrible, like the sludge of a late August riverbed, stagnant, wet, rotting.
She flapped her hand around again, even though it was useless. There were too many—
“Is this the laundry?” she said.
“Used to be.”
There were industrial washers and tumble dryers on one side. On the other, racks and racks . . . an entire department store of racks . . . on which hundreds of maroon wool robes hung in various sta
ges of decay. The moths were living off the fabric, chewing holes that were ever expanding, leaving bolts of shredded material in their wake.
It was an entire ecosystem, the result of two moths, or three, being imported into the environment, whereupon housekeeping had been set up and the Mr. and Mrs. had Left It to Beaver like a trillion times.
Duran went over and pulled a robe free. The wool powdered in his hands, falling onto his boots, autumn leaves without the season or the tree, just the molting.
“Unwearable.” He dropped the shawl collar. “I’d assumed we’d be able to camouflage ourselves and thus integrate into the congregation.”
Ahmare felt the hand of death tickle the back of her neck. “Do you think we’re going to need to?”
As Duran went back out into the corridor and held the door open for Ahmare, moths escaped like a puff of smoke from a burning room, flitting out in a scatter. He almost felt like shooing them back in so they weren’t left out of the party.
On his nod, he and Ahmare doubled back the way they’d come, proceeding along one side of the curving corridor, crouched but moving at a steady pace with guns up. As they passed by the entry where they’d come in and ran into nobody coming to check why the door had not been fully closed . . . as they approached the cafeteria’s kitchen and there were no lingering smells of food being cooked or having been eaten . . . as silence and stuffy air were the only accompaniment to their infiltration . . . a terrible conclusion began to form in his mind.
And he fought it.
Fought it like he should have been battling the Dhavos’s defenders.
When they came up to the intersection of the next spoke, the one that ran north-south, he leaned out and looked around. No one. No one talking. Walking. And not just because of the ablution ceremony.
“This way,” he said.
As he spoke, he could hear the rage in his own voice, and his body started to tremble with aggression.
Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered, more of them out as they zeroed in on the arena, the illumination a herky-jerk that juiced up the warnings already screaming in his head.
Memories came back to him, things he wished he could unsee. His mother’s eyes, wide in a bruised face, brimming with tears she was trying to hold in. Her quiet, desperate courage to put one foot in front of the other because she was terrified her son would be taken away by her abuser. The years of suffering that she had borne.
Because of Duran.
You are my reason for living, my blessing, she’d always told him.
Bullshit, he was her curse. And killing his sire had struck him as the only thing he could do to earn the love he had never deserved from her.
The only way he could live with himself.
As he closed in on the arena, he felt chased even though he repeatedly looked behind himself and almost wanted to see hordes of armed defenders bearing down on his neck. But . . . no. No matter how many times he glanced over his shoulder or checked out an intersection of a curving corridor, there was nobody around them.
No alarms going off.
Just the pair of worn paths in the linoleum underfoot and the fluorescent tubes spasming overhead.
“My mahmen died the night before I was abducted.”
As Ahmare’s head jerked toward him, he realized that he’d spoken the words aloud.
“I am so sorry—”
He interrupted her. “She died, I believe, of a heart attack. She and I were in our cell, and she had been tired for a number of nights. And with that off stomach. Suddenly, she just . . .” He shook his head. “She was sitting on her pallet and she put her hand under her arm, like she had a sudden pain. Then she was holding the front of her chest and gasping for air. She looked at me.”
“Oh, Duran.”
It was helpful that they were rushing down the spoke, focused on any attacks, busy, busy, busy. He doubted he would have been able to get through the story otherwise.
“She slumped over to the side. She was still staring at me, but I don’t think she could see me anymore. I started yelling her name. I sat her up, but her head . . . it was lolling to her shoulder, then it fell . . . back.”
He was unaware of having slowed to a stop. But one of the four sets of double doors into the arena was in front of them.
“One of the defenders—the Dhavos’s private guard—came in because he heard me yelling. The Dhavos then ran into our room. I went for his throat. I just fucking . . .” He closed his eyes. “It took seven defenders to get me off him, and as soon as he was free, he fell all over himself to get to her body. She was going gray by then, the color leaving her. He cried. All over her. They had to drag me out of that room. They stuck me with something, a needle. I blacked out.”
He stared at the closed double doors. The wooden panels had been carved with the profile of a male whose features were identical to his own.
Duran looked in the direction they’d come one last time. “She arrived here as a lost soul, and she bought into the lies, into the greatness, into the saving. And then he ruined her in all the ways that mattered. He did that to a lot of people, but she was the one who mattered to me.” He cleared his throat. “The next night, after they’d drugged me, I woke up back in the room alone. Her body was gone. Her pallet. It was as if he had erased her. I decided I would honor her memory, do her Fade ceremony anyway. He wasn’t going to take that away from her. I went to the bathroom. I showered and I shaved so that I would be clean. It didn’t matter that I had no remains. I told myself it would still work. I would say the words, make the movements, do the ritual even if I had to pantomime it. If the Scribe Virgin was truly the benevolent mother of the race, I told myself, she would grant my mahmen dispensation.”
“I’m sure your mahmen is in the Fade—”
“You don’t know that. Neither do I.” He rubbed his eyes. “They hit me over the head and I came to in Chalen’s great hall in front of his hearth. On his table. My father was smart. He knew what I was going to do as soon as the Fade ceremony was done. I was going to have two dead parents before midnight, and nothing was going to stop me.”
Duran put his hand on the right side of the door. On the profile of his father’s face. “I was so close to getting her out, too. It was a fulcrum of events coming together. The bunker was ready, our escape route planned, my supplies set at Nexi’s. I had helped Nexi get out of the compound as a test the week before, and it had worked. I’d needed to make sure it would work, you see . . . I had to be certain my mahmen would be safe.”
When Ahmare put her hand on his shoulder, he jumped and focused on her. In a low voice, he said, “I was so close. I was so fucking close.”
As he spoke, he wasn’t sure whether he was talking about getting his mother free.
Or what he had come to do here on this night.
Duran pushed the door and stepped into the arena.
23
THE SKELETONS WERE EVERYWHERE. Hundreds of them, maybe more.
As Ahmare followed Duran into a theater area that had rows upon rows of seats descending to a central stage, she couldn’t count the bones.
And they had died horribly. These people . . . these poor people had suffered.
She lowered her gun and went over to the topmost section of seats. “Dear . . . God.”
Duran walked down the carpeted stairs that were covered with brown stains. Blood, she realized. They must have bled out, but from what?
Duran bent down and picked up a syringe. “Hemlock.”
Her brain struggled to process it all. “I saw those trees in the woods?”
“My father grew them for this purpose.” Duran put the syringe back precisely where he had found it. “Deadly to humans. Worse to vampires if injected. You bleed out of every orifice.”
Which explained that thick brown staining, which had dried . . . some time ago . . . into the runners on the stairs, and in the aisles, and all over the seats and backs of the chairs.
She could only imagine the carnage when it ha
d first happened.
“He always said he would do it.” Duran walked downward to the stage, stepping over arms and legs. Rib cages. Skulls. “He talked about end of days, and I always thought he must have gotten the idea from the human media or something because we don’t go by the term ‘days.’ And you were right, TV and newspapers and radios were all barred to us, but he kept track of the outside world with them. Sometimes he would bring clippings in to my mahmen and read them to her, especially before I went through my transition.”
“How old are you?” Ahmare blurted.
“A year out of the change.” He shook his head. “I mean, I was a year out of it when she died and I ended up at Chalen’s. Nexi was the one who helped me through my transition, and I in turn helped her get out.”
Duran bent over and gingerly moved an arm bone back into place. “He told them every night at sunset they were with sin. He told them he was the salvation. They believed him. This”—he motioned around the arena—“was supposed to be the cleansing. I imagine when they first injected themselves they were in a flush of obedience, so sure they were doing the right thing and this would take them to the next level of consciousness with their leader. They didn’t want to go to the Fade. It was a mental and emotional elevation they were seeking and that he promised to deliver.”
He picked up a thigh bone and looked at the length. “But then the pain set in. I saw him inject a male once. He did it in front of me as a threat. The male was so prepared for it, offering his vein readily, no one restraining him. My father made the male kneel before him, and he kissed the male on the forehead, cupping his face, smiling down at him with warmth and compassion. Then he told the male to close his eyes and accept the gift.”
Duran replaced the femur and walked farther down. When he got to the bottom of the seating bowl, he went around and mounted five steps up onto the dais. “My father looked at me as he injected the cult member, and then he embraced the male, as if all I had to do was submit to the rules and all my problems would go away. Except”—he laughed harshly—“the asshole would of course still be beating and abusing my mahmen. I watched as the male leaned into my father. The male was smiling—until he wasn’t. His eyes popped open. The whites of them turned red. And then the blood came. Out of his mouth as he coughed. Out of his nose. Out of his ears as he fell to the side. His breathing turned into gurgles, and he contorted, first stretching back on his spine, then curling in tight. He bled . . . from everywhere.