by J. R. Ward
“And the most fucked-up thing?” Duran looked up at her. “My father stepped back and seemed shocked by it all. Like what the fuck did he think was going to happen? Did he actually believe his own bullshit about transcendence? I never thought he did, but maybe he expected a bolt of light to come through the ceiling and bathe that male in enlightenment.” There was a pause. “That’s when I knew he was going to have to get rid of me. Even without the issue of my mahmen, I had witnessed his confusion and knew that he was just making it all up. I saw behind the curtain that night, and in a world built on the illusion of his superiority, that could not abide.”
Ahmare started down the stairs, imagining all of the suffering. The people had been sitting in the chairs at first, but that hadn’t lasted. The bones were in the aisles, in the spaces between the seats, on the steps. It was difficult to tell for sure which ribs went with what arms or whether a skull was with the right spine as the bodies had intertwined, perhaps seeking comfort from each other as they realized, too late, that the promise was not coming. Only the pain.
“So this was his doomsday,” Duran said. “But he wouldn’t have stuck around. I knew he had an evac plan because he told my mahmen and she told me. He never planned to die with his flock, and he was going to take her with him. He used to say, ‘If the red lights start to flash, we have three minutes before the compound blows apart. I will come and get you.’ I guess the explosives failed.”
As Ahmare got to the bottom, she wanted to throw up. The blood had rivered down the aisles and pooled around the base of the stage, called by gravity toward the focal point, the last offering to an evil, mortal god.
Her boots left prints, as if she were walking on the silt of a dried riverbed—and she thought of Rollie’s missing head, and his blood on the dirt, spreading out like the Mississippi River. It had glistened in the night. Was it dry now? Yes, and some of it would have been absorbed into the thirsty earth.
She looked over at Duran and didn’t know what to say. It was all too much.
His eyes swung back to her. “I never knew his name.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The male who died in front of me. I never knew anyone’s name—well, except for Nexi, and she told it to me only after I got her to the bunker, when she was thanking me. I informed her it was a team effort, and that was the truth. She was the one who figured out the escape route and the timing of it all. She’s brilliant like that.”
He looked around again. “You know, my mahmen used to tell me her father’s name all the time. I couldn’t figure out why, but now . . . I think she wanted to give it to me. She couldn’t quite get there, though.”
Ahmare knew that she would never forget what he looked like, the risen son, his hair chopped by a blade’s thin edge, his eyes wary and pained, his big body magnificent and unbowed under all he had endured.
And there was that collar around his throat, locked on tight, blinking a red light.
It was a symbol of everything that had marked his life: He had never been free. He had been ever a captive.
“What was her father’s name?” Ahmare said hoarsely.
“It doesn’t matter now.” He paused. “Theo. It was . . . Theo.”
Going around, she ascended the five steps and joined him on the stage. The view from the focal point of the arena was gruesome, the full magnitude of the deaths the stuff of nightmares.
How could anyone do this to other people? she wondered. It was murder even though the cult members had volunteered for it.
“We’ll see about the beloved now,” Duran said. “Enough of the past.”
Lost in his story, she had forgotten about everything else—except . . . “Oh, God, was your mahmen Chalen’s female, too?”
He laughed in a short, hard burst. “No.”
“But then she’ll be dead, too, right? The Dhavos must have killed Chalen’s female, too. Or . . . did he leave and take her with them?”
Shit, her brother.
“We’ll find out. This way—”
“Wait.” She stopped him. “First this.”
He turned around with expectation on his face, like he was ready to answer a question. That expression changed quick as she took the trigger to his collar out of her holster.
Placing the black box on the floor between them, she lifted her boot over the control. “You deserve your freedom. Just the same as everyone else.”
With that, she slammed her steel-reinforced sole down with all the anger she felt at what had been done to him, to his mahmen, to all the innocent, wayward souls who had died here.
The trigger box broke into pieces. The red light on the front of the collar dimmed.
And was extinguished.
It was an incomplete freedom, of course, as he would never not be tied to the circumstances of his birth or the terrible acts of his father. But he could choose his path forward. Just as she had chosen a path forward from the deaths of her parents.
No one else at the helm.
“What have you done?” he whispered.
“Fuck Chalen,” she replied.
24
WHAT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER?”
As Duran asked the question, he knew Ahmare had already answered it by crushing the trigger to his restraint collar. But he wanted to make sure he understood what she meant.
“I’ll save you both.” She shook her head. “That’s the way this has to end. I cannot accept any other outcome.”
He glanced out at the skeletons and then thought of the empty corridors of the facility. It seemed cruel to mention that outcomes were not always acceptable. That sometimes they were even worse than un-acceptable. But he appreciated what she was doing for him, what it implied . . . what it meant.
An impulse to kiss her mouth occurred to him, but not here. Not in the space where all these deaths had occurred—it would be like turning something special into a bad omen, as if the setting could contaminate the contact.
“Thank you,” he said in a voice that cracked.
She grasped one of his hands and squeezed. Her eyes were wide with emotion. “Let’s do what we need to and get out of here.”
Duran nodded and led them off stage to the right, to the back of the house where the lighting and AV equipment were dust-covered and long asleep. He imagined, as they weeded in and out of the various theater lamps and speakers, that all of the equipment was antiquated now. Twenty years down the line and there would have been improvements, right? As with Ahmare’s car, the styling and buttons and screens of which he had not recognized or understood, there would be new technology, advancement, refinements.
That was not going to be the case for him, however.
He knew, on the same deep level that had gotten him through Chalen’s dungeon, that he was not going to progress past all this. There would be no technological improvement to him, no advancement . . . no refinement.
Collar or not, freedom or not, he would be ever among the skeletons here in his father’s arena, his mortal animation an insufficient distinguishing characteristic from the Dhavos’s dead. Made sense. Though he moved, his soul, his vital animation, had died out long ago.
In this respect, whether he made it out of here alive or not wasn’t going to matter.
“The trapdoor is here,” he said as he beckoned Ahmare down a cramped staircase.
At the bottom, the door was locked, but he entered the correct code and the pound key, and there was that shift inside the panels and the wall.
Pushing the way open, he flicked on his flashlight. The beam pierced the darkness and reflected gold. Gleaming, resonant gold.
“Oh, my God,” Ahmare breathed.
“A suitable entry hall for a god, right?” Duran muttered.
“Is it real?” she said as they started down the passageway.
“I think so.” He put his hand out and found the wall cool and smooth to the touch. “They were required to give him all their worldly assets if they joined. Houses, cars, jewelry, clothes. There are sorting roo
ms in the compound, everything segregated and valued for resale.”
“To think eBay didn’t exist back then.”
“What’s eBay?” Then he glanced over his shoulder. “I was the only young at the compound. He made them give away their offspring as well, telling them that sacrifice was necessary and paramount, but I think that was, like everything else he said, just bullshit. What he was really worried about was that their concern over the welfare of their young might at some point supersede their devotion to him. Unacceptable.”
No matter how quietly he put his boots down, the sound of his footfalls reverberated in the gold colon that dumped out at his father’s private quarters. Old habits of being silent died hard, and he became uncomfortable with the sound.
“I was strong even as a pretrans,” he told her. “And I found duct work in our bedroom cell that allowed me to travel through the ceilings and observe the cult’s layout and schedule of meditations and supplications. When I found the laundry room and the robes, I could even walk around during the night, blending in. Watching from under the hood. I got good at stealing things.” He looked up at the gold-leafed ceiling. “I’ll bet if you go into the ducts even now my stashes of clothes, car keys, glasses, and shoes were where I left them. I was a hoarder, and it was all about outfitting myself and my mahmen for when we got out.”
“How many people died back there?”
“Depends on when he ordered them dead. There were over three hundred people in the cult when I was taken out of here. Maybe it continued to grow, I don’t know. Maybe it faded. It depends on when he played the end of days card. He certainly intended to add to his flock. There was an expansion of this facility”—he tapped the wall—“about two years before I left. That was how I found the human contractors to build the bunker, and I paid them with money I took out of his vault.”
“He let humans down here?”
“What choice did he have? If he’d used members of our species and it had gotten back to Wrath or the Council? He had to use humans and he paid them well enough to ask no questions, work at night, and keep their eyes to themselves.”
They came up to a solid gold door. As he entered the passcode and pound key, he swallowed through a tight throat.
And then . . .
After the lock released, he opened the panel wide and pointed his flashlight into the darkness.
“Holy . . . shit,” Ahmare whispered.
It was Creed Bratton from The Office, Ahmare thought as she walked into a sumptuously appointed bedroom. Clicking on her own cell phone’s light, she shone her beam around.
The unimaginable luxury made her remember the clip of Creed looking into the camera and saying, “I’ve been involved in a number of cults. You have more fun as a follower. But you make more money as a leader.”
Given the way those poor souls had died back in the arena, the former was obviously not true, and she hated that her brain coughed up something so pop-culture’y because it seemed disrespectful to those who had lost their lives. But as she looked at the pastel silk walls, and the draped silk bunting over the circular bed, and the satin sheets bearing the profile that had been etched on those double doors at the arena, she decided the “more money as a leader” thing was clearly right in this case.
No linoleum here. The carpet was thick and fine-napped and—
“The murals,” she said as she swung her light around.
An enormous scene of a garden, with a fountain in the center and birds in midflight and beds filled with flowers, graced the smooth plaster, obviously painted by somebody who knew what they were doing. And as if it was not an artist’s rendering but rather a picture window, or perhaps an open arch to the great outdoors, drapes had been mounted around the artwork, the swoops of sunshine-yellow damask held back so the “view” wasn’t blocked.
A representation of Utopia, a beautiful, impossible-for-a-vampire, daylight-not-reality that nonetheless captivated.
It was rather like the bill of false goods the Dhavos had sold his congregation.
“You want Chalen’s beloved,” Duran said. “Here it is.”
She pivoted around, lowering her light so she didn’t nail him in the eye. Duran was over by the bed, standing next to a shadow box that had been installed into the wall.
As Ahmare approached, she focused on what he was illuminating. Something was set back behind the glass . . . something that glowed.
“A pearl?” she breathed. Then she remembered the conqueror’s decrepit body on his throne. “Of course. Chalen’s crown had an empty mounting in front—and that is what went in it.”
“The Dhavos wasn’t just a spiritual leader, he was a good businessman, a wholesaler of drugs, and Chalen was the middleman for the heroin and cocaine, getting the product to the street after my father brought the stuff in from out of the country. I used to hear them, when I was up in the ducts, talking about the deals on the phone. The shipments. The deliveries. You needed up-front cash to play with the big overseas contacts and the Dhavos had that liquidity courtesy of his congregation turning their worldly goods over to him. He and Chalen had a profitable partnership until there was some kind of double cross. In retaliation, my father infiltrated Chalen’s stronghold and took the one thing that male loved most. The pearl. How my father did it, I have no idea.”
Duran made a fist and punched the glass, shattering the fragile barrier. Reaching in, he took the pearl and passed it over like the priceless oyster creation didn’t mean anything.
And to him, she supposed, it didn’t.
To her, as the cool contours of the baroque settled into the crease of her palm, she felt like she was holding her brother’s life in her hand.
Not going to lose this, she thought as she tucked it into her tight sports bra.
“I think,” Duran said as he inspected one of the other “windows” with his flashlight, “that my father assumed that he would kill two birds with one stone when he dropped me at Chalen’s door—”
All at once, a line of light, like something you’d see at the bottom of a door, flared in the far corner. As if there were another room outside . . . and someone had just thrown a switch.
“You stay here,” Duran ordered as they both wheeled in that direction and he clicked off his flashlight.
As the bedroom plunged into darkness, Ahmare didn’t argue with him, although not because she had any intention of following his rules. Instead, she got her gun out again and prepared to run after him.
“Turn off your light,” he whispered without looking back. “So they don’t see you when I open the door. And step to the side so you stay in the shadows.”
Good advice, she thought as she clicked her beam off. Best to stay hidden for as long as she could before they rushed into the other room.
To get out of the most likely path of illumination, she shuffled back a number of feet, going up against a wall. Then she held her breath as Duran got ready to open things and jump on whoever was—
Just as Duran pulled the door wide and lunged out of the bedroom, a soft sound from behind her got her attention.
She didn’t have time to react. The hood that came down over her head smelled like old wool, and before she could scream, a brutally heavy hand clamped over mouth, her gun was taken, and a thick arm locked around her waist.
With brutal efficiency, she was carried off.
25
AS DURAN SWUNG THE door open, he kept his body out of the way in case—
The instant he caught the scent in the air, he came alive, instincts roaring to life, possibilities filling him out from the inside. It was the same kind of rush he’d gotten from Ahmare’s gift of vein, power and purpose returning.
His father was still alive.
His father was still in the compound.
As Duran’s eyes adjusted to bright light, he wanted to put his gun away so his attack could be more personal. But he kept the forty up in case the male was armed—although he was not worried about anyone else because there were
no other scents in the air. The Dhavos was alone.
“Father,” he said in a low growl. “Will you not welcome your son?”
Duran looked around, and instantly, nothing else mattered.
The luxurious antechamber to the Dhavos’s bedroom had been emptied of its fancy gilded and padded accessories. There was only one piece of furniture in it.
His mahmen’s cot. And on the cot . . . was a skeleton, the skull on a satin pillow, a set of clean sheets pulled up to the collarbones, a blanket folded with care over the legs. Beside the remains, on the floor, was a twisted bundle of blankets. A half-eaten tear of bread. Water bottles that bore the name “Poland Spring.” A book.
Several books.
Duran stumbled across the otherwise empty space and fell to his knees at the cot. His mahmen’s hair . . . her long dark hair . . . had been preserved, a braid of it lying off to the side, tied with satin ribbon.
“Mahmen,” he whispered. “I’m here. I’m going to get you out . . .”
The pits of the eye sockets stared sightlessly to the ceiling, and the jaw had been wired into place by an amateur with what looked like . . . dental floss. Dental floss had been wound around the jaw joint to keep the teeth together.
“I’m sorry, Mahmen.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t get everything set fast enough. I’m so sorry.”
The pain of seeing her remains and feeling his failure to save her was so great, he couldn’t breathe, and then he couldn’t see as tears came. Lowering his head, he tried to be as a male should, as she deserved, someone strong and capable. Someone who was worthy of the love she had so inexplicably given him.