“Kassandra.”
That one word reverberated throughout the temple. It had been spoken with enough menace that she stepped down and away from me, but I could see that her fury hadn’t diminished.
Haemon approached us with slow, methodical steps, the effect of his smile under the dazzling light a chilling display. But I had my strength back. The amulet he was wearing didn’t control me any longer. What had once given rise to its formidable power no longer resided within the ancient talisman. It had been freed. It walked among us even now, concealed.
Inexperienced and unworthy as I might be, I had the Dark Mother in my corner now, for this was the name that formed in my mind, as I watched the vampire draw closer.
Her laughter echoed around and through me. “Chosen One…”
Haemon came to a stop between Kassandra and I and motioned in the direction from which he’d come. “Go now. I need you and the newborn at full strength tonight.”
At first she just stood there, unwilling to depart. Then she nodded with reluctance and turned to leave, though not before casting a heated glance in my direction.
It was far from over between us. She wanted me to know that.
Haemon made certain she was nowhere in sight before shifting his focus to the aperture in the ceiling. He closed his eyes and let the sunlight bathe him, his porcelain face and shaved head pale gold under its rays. For a fleeting instant, he looked almost handsome standing there, a man at peace with himself. And why shouldn’t he be? The vampire couldn’t have experienced sunlight in over two thousand years. Although if it were up to me, and it had to be, he would never again enjoy such a pleasure.
The Dark Mother’s energy tightened around me, fortifying me.
Through silent words she revealed that the talisman around Haemon’s neck also served as a gateway to her world, to Scáth Talún, the one place the Ritual of Malum could be performed. Through blood sacrifice he would seek to harness my incubus power in order to become the first vampire-incubus hybrid.
To become a god.
CHAPTER 40
Haemon opened his eyes and lowered his gaze from the aperture in the ceiling to fix me with a chilling stare. “Someone’s whispering secrets to you, little incubus.”
Beneath the vampire’s threatening bluster, I glimpsed a flicker of uncertainty. He clearly felt the Dark Mother’s presence and it unsettled him.
“Triumph,” she declared for only me to hear, “shall soon be yours.”
For the first time since I was a child, I experienced an honest-to-goodness surge of faith in a higher being. I trusted in Her promises and strength in the same way that the devout trusted in the might of their Lord. I’d convinced myself that, at least where I was concerned, the Dark Mother was benevolent and all-powerful. She was my Sheppard and I Her humble disciple.
In response to my surrender, her power swelled inside me. What more of a promising sign could I have asked for? Which left me with a very big choice to make. Challenge my newfound faith, break free of these chains, and bring the entire temple complex crashing down on us all, or put my trust fully in the Dark Mother that she would do right by me? The time to choose was upon me, because everything was about to change forever.
Haemon squared his shoulders and peered into the darkness beyond our circle of light.
“Impotent specters from a bygone age,” he said with arrogant certainty. “That is all that dwells in this forsaken place.”
“What about Mark and Kassandra?” I asked. “Will they become temple ghosts, too?”
Haemon shot me a vicious grin.
“He will maroon them here, child,” the Dark Mother murmured in my ear.
A flurry of images assaulted me. In them, Mark and Kassandra circled one another, then attacked, madness in their faces, their eyes hollow, cheeks sunken, their thinning lips pulling back from gnashing fangs. Eventually, their bodies hardened and toppled over, wasting away to little more than cold, living husks. Conscious, yet unable to move or speak for all eternity.
More terrifying images rolled by in quick succession.
Haemon performing the Ritual of Malum and sacrificing Niko on that sinister altar, before turning a jeweled dagger on me. Drunk on incubus power, he and the army he’d created—a militia of vampire-incubus hybrids of superior strength and with an immunity to silver—stormed the High Council of Vampires in Rome, slaughtering them to a one.
Lastly, I bore witness to Haemon’s ruthless and bloody victory over the mortal world, as he declared himself its new and supreme despot.
“We cannot let this be!” the Dark Mother told me.
Of all of his twisted machinations, one stood out as fundamental to his stripping me of my incubus powers through dark ritual: The ability to walk beneath our own sun’s rays.
Haemon fell to studying the opening in the domed ceiling again. The golden light was losing its brilliance. Soon it would surrender to twilight.
The vampire approached me, delighted by my apparent helpless state, by my near-naked body on display for him alone.
Newfound faith was one thing, but if one of Haemon’s plans involved raping me again, the Dark Mother was going to have a helluva time keeping me from retaliating.
“If immortality has taught me one thing, it is that the world is a throne of the weak and fearful.” He reached up to rake fingernails down my exposed chest and stomach. Blood began to ooze from the thin cuts and trickle down my torso. “And that fear,” he said, taking in an excited breath as he leaned in to lap up the crimson rivulets, “is a mouth which craves the flesh and blood of the innocent. It is upon that throne that I alone shall sit.”
If it wasn’t clear to me before, Haemon was not only sadistic and power-hungry, he was also mad as a meat axe.
The arrival of Mr. Curious and his brother, the two Slavic henchmen, interrupted an attempted repeat of Haemon’s sexual sadism. The fiend looked none too happy about it, either.
The men stopped a few feet shy of the elongated ring of fading light encircling me, their expressions uncertain. Despite the sun’s inability to incinerate them on contact, the duo chose to wait for their leader to join them. Once he had, they spoke to Haemon in hurried voices too low for me to hear. The way he was glaring at them, the news couldn’t be good.
This was my moment. The Dark Mother should let me kill them right here, right now.
“Patience,” she whispered.
My newfound faith was on shaky ground. No small wonder. I’d essentially gone from being Haemon’s prisoner to someone else’s. Correction: I was now hostage to two supernatural beings.
Doubt and anxiety forced me to test the chains attached to my manacled wrists. Nothing. They were as firmly fixed as ever, despite renewed incubus strength pulsating inside me.
“Impetuous child,” the Dark Mother chided. “Know that I shall set you free when the time is ripe. When triumph and revenge shall be ours together…”
Like it or not, I was going to have to do as she instructed.
And just as I began to pray that I hadn’t placed all of my trust apples in the wrong basket, a profusion of orange blossom wafted through the colossal interior to allay my doubt.
The scent quickly soothed the tension I’d been holding onto in my back and shoulders. The numbness in my outstretched arms diminished as well, and with it I found myself better able to focus on Haemon and the two vampire henchmen. If they sensed the Dark Mother’s presence, or the intoxicating citrus perfume it carried, they gave no indication of it.
In fact, the more I concentrated on the three vampires, the more centered and relaxed I became. Until I was actually standing right next to them! Not in physical form, but as thought projection. Then, I was suddenly everywhere at once. I saw myself at the center of the temple, my semi-naked body shackled to the ancient stone wheel in a perverse “X” shape and straining to listen in on the vampires’ conversation.
Was this my doing, or was the Dark Mother trying to guide me, trying to get me to—
&n
bsp; “The mortal has escaped,” I heard one of them confess in a tentative voice.
Niko was still alive!
My relief was short-lived. A series of gruesome visuals flashed behind my eyes. In them, a rabid Haemon was punishing those responsible for letting Niko get away. It wasn’t vampire torture and death that so alarmed me as much as to where Niko had escaped. We weren’t in our own dimension anymore. If he’d managed to flee the temple, was he in worse danger now?
I knew nothing of the Dark Mother’s world. Was it devoid of life or did sentient beings inhabit it? If so, would they be receptive to an outsider or attack and kill him on sight?
Mr. Curious and his brother exchanged anxious glances.
Haemon left the two bodyguards standing there and stormed toward the rear of the temple. The two henchmen reluctantly followed him, with my ethereal body in hot pursuit.
We all hurried into and along a narrow corridor, the air warmer and drier here, with a layer of smoke from the odd torch fitted into niches that was somehow able to sting my ghostly eyes and throat. The flickering light exposed strange glyphs carved into the thick stone walls that should have been alien to me, but weren’t. Unfortunately, there was no time to study them.
“We don’t know how the human escaped,” Mr. Curious said, “but we—”
Haemon spun around and lunged at him, the look in his dark, glittering eyes truly terrifying. “Better find out.”
I made to follow the retreating vampires, but an invisible force stopped me, drawing me instead into a cooler, unlit chamber. It had to be the Dark Mother guiding me.
Why then could I no longer detect her signature scent or feel the weight of her presence?
Foolish or not, I chose to enter this new space. Once my eyes adjusted, I made out a second doorway—no, a stairwell, where a blast of frigid air greeted me at the base of the curved shaft leading up into yet more darkness.
I glimpsed another flash of my physical self in shackles, of the oculus high above me. The sky was darkening, streaked now with slashes of reds, oranges, and pinks in between splashes of deeper violet. Night was coming on fast. And with it, Haemon and the other vampires would return to perform the Ritual of Malum.
Whatever I was supposed to do or see, I needed it to happen fast!
An image of Niko exploded in my mind. One of his eyes was still badly swollen and sealed shut. His good eye was large and frightened and staring back at me, his dark, wavy hair wind-tossed. An instant later, I saw him silhouetted by the same vibrant sky I’d glimpsed earlier. Everything else around him was shrouded in darkness.
As it began to lift, I realized that he was navigating a long, curved passage up and around the temple’s colossal dome, wind howling through the narrow channel. I could feel its cold buffets striking his goose-fleshed skin, hear him telling his body to ignore the discomfort and compel his legs and feet to carry him toward the fading light up ahead.
My God, we were both in the same stairwell! Only he was much higher up.
“Niko,” I called out to him in my mind.
Startled, he tripped, the wind a deafening roar in his ears. He thought he’d hallucinated the sound of my voice, the intense streaks of color in the sky deepening with the rapidly setting sun and framing Niko’s form nearing a large, arched doorway.
“I’m coming for you!” I called to him.
He definitely heard me that time and looked even more panicked because of it. Using both hands to brace himself against the thick stone walls from the intensifying wind, he said, “Don’t!”
Why was he so terrified by the thought of me reaching him? I wasn’t planning to wait to find out and sent my essence racing up the stairwell.
Nothing could have prepared me for what awaited me once I reached the arched opening through which Niko had only just passed. The temple’s great dome was even more massive from this vantage point, and the sky had become an angry sea of red and orange flames. But it was what lay beyond the rim of the colossal rooftop that left me shaken and speechless.
Perfect desolation.
The shrine had been built on a jagged precipice high above a valley floor, the landscape beyond so foreign and unwelcoming that I had no real point of reference with which to associate it. A vast, scarred plain of deep ocher and rust stretched as far as the eye could see, with no relief to the barren backdrop—no plant life, no hills or dwellings. No sign of life whatsoever.
Then I caught sight of Niko nearing the opposite side of the great dome. Cold blasts of air slammed against his body, sending stinging sand particles and strands of his hair to assail his face and eyes like tiny whips, as he crept up to the rim’s edge, where a gust of wind nearly knocked him off balance and sent him careening over it.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted to him. I’d managed to affect physical reality in a disembodied state once before and had damned well better be able to do it again.
He ignored me and crouched low to peer over the ancient stone lip, a flicker of hesitation crossing his face. Then it was gone. He turned his head skyward and struggled to his feet against the howling wind. “It is the only way, Austin!”
Niko the mountain climber, the man who’d so unexpectedly captured my heart, spread his arms wide against the ever-darkening sky and let himself fall forward.
My essence shot forward and slammed into his. I was inside his body now, and we were both toppling over the rim in a free fall to the valley floor below. Except that we weren’t falling. We were choking and gagging, the flesh around our neck constricting so tightly that our windpipe was beginning to collapse.
Powerful hands yanked us up and onto the temple rooftop once more. “Mustn’t spoil my ritual fun,” Haemon said with a flash of fangs, his soulless eyes catching the remnants of the otherworldly sunset and making them glow deep red.
He dragged a kicking Niko and I back toward the darkened stairwell, but my essence was suddenly wrenched free. The disorientation of being incorporeal again didn’t stop me from rushing Haemon, but a powerful gust of wind picked me up and tumbled me over the edge.
Instead of falling, I was racing over the hostile landscape at inconceivable speed, and then delivered to a place I’d only ever glimpsed in dreams—to that ancient fissure in the world.
Above the stench of death and decay, dark feminine laughter filled the frigid night air.
“Surrender to me, child,” the voice said, “and know true power.”
CHAPTER 41
In the temple and back in my own body once more, I couldn’t shake the ominous implication of the Dark Mother’s words: “Surrender to me.”
At what cost? What would becoming her Chosen One require of me?
This was why blind faith had been an issue for me in adulthood. It could so easily lead a person to a dark place. What someone believed in, followed with their heart and soul, used as a spiritual meter, became the one and only truth to them. Everyone and everything else was either wrong or hell bound, or both! Wars and persecution had been the outcome of such a mind set.
Of more immediate concern, I was still shackled and half-naked in an absurd spread-eagle, my arms numb again from being stretched above my head for so long. The ancient stone ring serving as my prison was also now perfectly centered beneath the gaping mouth of the oculus.
Night had fallen. Soon the moon would rise, the very moment for which the Dark Mother had been waiting. The moment for which she was keeping me bound by these damned chains.
Another problem? The addition of guards, one posted on either side of me.
Their faces were concealed by the hoods of their burgundy robes, and each sentry held a short ebony staff, of which I got a hard and fast taste after tugging on my restraints.
The groan of stressed metal had motivated one of them to drive the blunt end of his rod into my gut. Satisfied that he’d taught me a lesson, the guard resumed his former position.
Being the constant target of vampire aggression was getting old. Time for some blood-suckers to sta
rt dying.
But the Dark Mother had plans of her own, which clearly did not include setting me free to mess them up. The only thing to do now—hell, the only thing I could do!—was get my emotions in check. I had to be prepared for whatever happened next.
Common sense dictated a cursory sweep of the vast, circular room to assess exactly how many bloodsuckers I was up against. I counted half a dozen. In addition to the pair beside me, another two had just lit the last of the large copper braziers. Amber and orange flames leapt and crackled, pushing at the darkness and lending an eerie illumination to the interior’s soaring columns and shadowy recesses. Pungent incense hung heavy in the air, and the flickering light caught in the wall-embedded crystals, a sinister tapestry of winking black diamonds.
The last set of vampires busied themselves at the granite altar just a few feet away, polishing what was certain to be the stage for my bloody demise. The black stone gleamed a cold, evil thing that seemed to grow right out of the temple floor.
No Haemon, Kassandra or Mark, though.
And what about Niko? Where was he?
One of the altar vamps must have picked up on my panicked thoughts, because he turned to regard me with a knowing sneer. When he did, his hood fell back to expose the same waxy burns I was responsible for giving Kassandra. His expression said it all. He couldn’t wait to see me die.
He was also holding a fabric pouch in gloved hands from which he extracted an ornate, silver-handled dagger. The very same weapon I’d seen Haemon use on Niko in a former vision. The blade appeared to be solid ruby and glinted with lethal beauty in the firelight. Three narrow strips of silver framed and secured the spine to its razor-sharp tip, and then ran back along the sides to end at the flared bolster. With great care, the vampire prepared to slot the dagger into its niche at the head of the stone slab, but then flinched at a deafening explosion of sound, the weapon nearly slipping from his fingers.
At the far end of the temple, a pair of colossal doors had been thrown wide. The rumbling produced from their striking the temple walls sent shockwaves through the stone beneath my feet and up and over the high-domed ceiling.
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