“Well, that explains a lot,” Key muttered, thinking about the people who made, and ruined, history.
“Yes,” Mahasona promised. “You will never be rid of us, because you’ll never know for sure who is us and who isn’t.”
Key snorted impatiently. “You call that a proposal?”
“No,” the creature said flatly. “That was the preamble. This is the proposal. Surrender to us, Major. We will leave your kind alone and return to the shadows if you and Corporal Nichols—the only two who can truly threaten us—give yourselves to us.”
Key’s eyebrows rose. He knew better, but responded anyway. “What sort of deal is that?” he complained. “What’s in it for Nichols and me?”
This time the creature laughed. “Eternal life.”
“Eternal hunger, you mean,” Key corrected.
“Safety for your species,” Mahasona countered.
“When you, your consorts, Nichols, and I aren’t feeding on them?”
The creature took a moment to consider that. “Relative safety for your species, then,” he amended. “After all, we’ve always fed on humanity, and you didn’t really even know it until recently. Besides, you know as well as I do that we cannot be killed, and have always been, and always will be, with you.”
“Again,” Key snapped, “not what I’ve heard.”
“Again,” Mahasona replied in tones that held complete assurance. “I strongly advise you double-check your sources.”
Finally, Key lost his temper—already feeling like a failure because he had let the creature hit his soft spot. “Sources?” he barked. “My source can’t say a fucking thing for the very reason I know you’re lying. She can’t talk because she’s—”
Dr. Helen interrupted him with a noise. It was a cross between a hiss and a click made by snapping her tongue on her teeth. Finally, Key looked away from Daniels’s covered head. He looked over to where Dr. Helen stood in the entrance to the quarantine unit, holding onto a rolling examining table. An examining table on which Eshe Rahal was propped up on her bent elbows.
Key didn’t appear to move, but in everyone’s mind they saw his jaw drop, his heart sink, and his stomach turn over.
Her neck had grafted back onto her body with what seemed like hundreds of flesh hooks that appeared to be melting into each other. Her facial muscles were twisted and her skin discolored as her infected system seemed to be struggling for some kind of control she couldn’t understand. Her limbs and fingers twitched as they sought some sort of system with which to exist.
Safar couldn’t help but think of a smartphone searching for a service signal or Wi-Fi, only this was from a reactivated brain searching for lifeblood or life force. No one said anything. The only one who would have been so crass as to speak at that moment was Daniels, but he was electrocuted and netted. Gonzales thought fuckaduck for him, but said nothing.
No one said anything until Rahal did. “I couldn’t help it,” she choked through a twisted mouth. “It’s in the blood.”
Chapter 31
Mahasona greeted them personally.
When the major and corporal landed in the F. B. Law—the heli-thing Gonzales had created to help rescue Nichols from her captors when she was being experimented upon to create the first weaponized Arachnosaur-human hybrid—the blood demon was standing between the cliff opening the redhead had originally dove out of and a tall, statue-shaped cavern that used to showcase a Buddha statue. That was, before the Taliban had destroyed it.
Key took one look at what the creature was wearing, thought about shaking his head, but then decided to simply be honest. So he laughed. Mahasona, back in his Zaman face, was knowingly dressed in a three-piece tuxedo and red-lined cape.
“Save me from a monster with a sense of humor,” Key shouted at him over the whine of the slowing rotors.
“Thought you might appreciate the irony,” the false Zaman yelled back as the Cerberus soldiers emerged from the small, nimble aircraft. “You should have seen the faces of my followers when I demanded they find me this.” The Maha-Zaman thought back on that moment. “It was in a Gaz Khun costume shop. They were as surprised as I was. Just shows you how pervasive our legend has become.” He motioned for them to follow, then turned.
Key followed without hesitation. “Wonder if he has plastic fangs? Or, given the situation, real ones?”
Nichols grimaced. “The attacks, the assaults?” she whispered to Key as they followed. “That I could take. This chummy hypocrisy?” She motioned at the flowing cape and made an incredulous face. “Not so sure.”
“We’ll make the best of it, Terri,” Key murmured. “Until we don’t.”
The Maha-Zaman stopped at a crevasse in the cliff wall. “Look familiar, Corporal?” he asked Nichols. “Not by location, but by design? We’ve become quite adept at creating entries that look like solid rock, even if you stare directly at them.”
To prove his point, he slipped into the seemingly impassable crevasse and disappeared. Key looked knowingly at Nichols and followed suit, seemingly without fear.
Despite the further negotiations that had occurred over the comm-link after the surprise reappearance of Eshe Rahal—whose death turned out to be slightly exaggerated—the time between Cerberus’s agreement to the blood demon’s terms and the two agents’ arrival at the Hindu Kush crypt was relatively short. The realization that the opposition couldn’t be killed had a way of short-cutting any pesky details. The only real delay was the travel time needed for the heli-thing to get from Tashkurgan, and that seemed to take all day.
The Maha-Zaman led them through tunnels Nichols recognized. She had a nearly overwhelming fantasy of unleashing a flame-throwing scythe on everything in sight, but, knew, even without Key’s input, that it would ultimately only slaughter her own comrades while simply delaying their captors. The result would simply be that she would be infected by a burned body rather than a mind-massaging beauty.
Key, however, had other things on his mind. “So,” he started. “You’re the original, huh? The thing that started all the vampire legends?”
The Maha-Zaman shrugged. “Who can say? Certainly not I. All I know is that I have been feeding on humans for as long as I can remember, but it all changed when my companions started collapsing and withering away.”
“Dying?” Key asked, perhaps too quickly.
The creature shrugged once more. “Again, who can say? What is death, Major? In my many millennia of observation, human death simply looks to me like a captain abandoning his desiccating ship.” He glanced back at the humans. “As someone who feeds on life force and lifeblood, I can assure you I have never been tempted to take a bite out of your flesh, organs, or bones—contrary to some of your more elaborate legends that attempt to communicate our power.” He turned back to pay closer attention to the cave networks. “No, our soulless simply were trapped in themselves as they disintegrated.”
“Why didn’t that happen to you?” Key asked pointedly.
Maha-Zaman looked back with a small, knowing, smile. “For the third time, who knows? I suppose that, perhaps, I was more careful and considerate with my diet.” He turned away. “Not for me the ‘McHuman.’ No, for me, only the best would do.”
“Like us?” Key mused.
“Don’t flatter yourselves,” Maha-Zaman tsked. “As you know by now, your little friend there nearly made me sick. What are you feeding her back at your fake palace? Chips and dip?”
They walked silently for a few steps before Key replied. “Maybe it was what you fed her that made you sick. Nothing like a little tongue and rocky mountain oysters to turn the stomach, huh?”
Maha-Zaman paused, turning back toward the soldiers. “No need to be crude, Major. Don’t make me regret my peace offering.”
“You call this peace?” Key immediately retorted. “This is a lesser of two evils if there ever was one. And all the civility in
the universe can’t disguise what you did to her.”
Maha-Zaman surveyed the major coolly. “I suppose you feel you have nothing to lose by being blunt.” His expression soured. “Don’t be too sure.”
“I’m never too sure, Dearden,” Key said pointedly. “But I’m here, aren’t I? So let’s get on with it.”
There was a moment when the two stood their ground, but then, as if becoming aware that he was the host, Maha-Zaman bowed slightly and returned to the path. Finally, their calm, almost unctuous, host turned the corner of another camouflaged crevasse.
“I will admit,” he said, “that I was relieved that you so readily saw the futility of continuing to fight.”
Key followed the creature into the second crevasse, and shrugged. “Don’t believe in beating a dead horse,” he sighed.
“Ah, yes,” said the Maha-Zaman. “Politician John Bright, yes? 1860s England, I believe.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Key replied.
The creature mirrored Key’s shrug. “Just trying to make your transition as pleasant as possible,” he assured them. “‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’ yes? Senator James E. Watson, 1932.”
Key shook his head. “Now you’re just showing off,” he complained.
“Actually, trying to prepare you for the sight that originally sent Corporal Nichols running,” the creature explained. “If anything will make you back out at this late date, it will be that.”
“She already gave me a full debriefing,” Key said, somewhat petulantly. “And I’m already convinced of the cost if I back out now.”
“Yes. A full-scale battle against an enemy that cannot be killed—one that you could not win no matter how hard you tried—would be ugly indeed. Still…” the Maha-Zaman said cautiously, then stepped out into the main cavern, turned, and spread his arms.
Nichols’s words had not communicated the full, gut-punching effect of the blood demon incubation chamber. The literally inhuman sight of the perfectly stacked and layered bodies interwoven with glowing webbing that both fed, and fed on, them was bad enough, but added to that the smell of both preserved and rotting flesh was enough to make Key dizzy.
He took a step back, but felt Nichols’s hand on his arm. When his vision cleared and his equilibrium returned, he saw that they had been joined by Rita Jayson in her open-shirt, slit-skirt uniform, as well as the men who had surrounded Nichols during her fight with Daniels.
Behind them were many more villagers, all carrying their rifles and knives. Key counted at least thirty, who lived up to their reputation by surrounding the Americans again—only this time with the master and his consort within the circle as well.
“Welcoming committee?” Key guessed.
“You could say that,” Maha-Zaman said
“Do they know your secret identity?” Key wondered aloud, certain that the witnesses didn’t understand English.
“Would it matter?” the creature mused. “These people are willing to blow up themselves and babies. All you need to do is give them a reason they can die with.”
“How is Morty doing?” Jayson interrupted with sardonic self-assurance.
Key was unimpressed. “Speaking with forked tongue,” he replied. “As if you didn’t know.”
“I look forward to seeing him again,” she quickly added, while placing her hand on Maha-Zaman’s shoulder and her thigh over her master’s leg.
Key raised one eyebrow. “Speaking of showing off,” he muttered. “Into threesomes, are we?”
Maha-Zaman smiled with no offense. “The more, the merrier,” he replied, motioning at the gestating bodies of the captured Marines.
“Then I look forward to our first night,” Key said.
Maha-Zaman reacted as if he had just remembered a trifling point. “Oh, yes,” he breathed. “About that—”
Key stilled at that comment. He reached over and carefully placed Nichols behind him. “About what?” he asked slowly.
“Well, my dear Major, my dear Corporal,” the Maha-Zaman said with pseudo-sadness. “I already articulated that our only true threat is you two. So, could you imagine what mischief you might get up to if we made you one of us?”
“You lying bastards,” Key started, backing up only as far as the circle of terrorists would allow.
The false Zaman reacted as if complimented. “Well, after all, I am Mahasona, the great demon. You were expecting truth?”
Key felt Nichols shaking against him, her face buried in his shoulder, until three of the terrorists surged forward and grabbed her by the arms, dragging her away from her team leader.
“No!” she cried, writhing in their grip. “No!”
“Yes!” Jayson shrieked as the Maha-Zaman let his cape drop to the cavern floor. The powerfully sensual consort walked indolently over to the corporal and gripped her chin in one claw. “But don’t worry, my dear. The master will not sully himself with your tainted blood. Not again.”
She spun on Key, whose face had set in shock. “But you. You will get the rare pleasure, the supreme honor, to experience what only your most sordid ancestors experienced. You will get to find out where the true legend of the vampire originated!”
She hadn’t even finished the word “originated” before the creature in the three-piece suit was on him impossibly fast, and with incredible strength. Key was slammed to the ground, the creature’s hands a blur as they knit firmly into his hair, pulling one way, and clasped tightly around his chin, as if it were a doorknob, pushing another.
Before Key could even react to the initial onslaught, he felt teeth plunging into his dorsal scapular artery, and saw blood—his blood—spurting into the creature’s mouth.
Nichols howled in fear and rage, but that only returned Jayson’s attention to her. “Shut up, you bitch!” she snarled. “You should be so lucky! By the time these men get done with you, you’ll beg for Mahasona to drink your blood. But even then, no! I will dance on your bullet-ridden flesh!”
“Enough!” they all heard Charles Leonidas Lancaster boom. “Now!”
Chapter 32
Everyone except Mahasona, Key, and Nichols looked around the cavern for the source of the voice. But when Jayson returned her attention to the redhead, Nichols was not where she had been—and the men holding her were already trying to staunch the blood erupting from their faces and throats.
Jayson turned to see where the girl had gone, only to wind up staring into the widening neck of one of the terrorists—who Nichols was holding by his hair and chin, aiming his sliced-open throat. A moment later, his jugular vein gushed a torrent of blood directly into the brunette’s stunned face.
At the same moment, Key’s left hand came hurtling across his shoulders to slam into the Maha-Zaman’s upper face, his thumb going into the creature’s left nostril and his first two fingers going deep into the Mahasona’s only recently healed eyes.
Once blinded, twice shy, so the Maha-Zaman recoiled away as if being yanked by a cable. Key was up almost as impossibly fast as the creature, already pressing his bunched Cali-brake jacket against his throat punctures.
“Good performance, huh?” he croaked, hunched down and gasping. “You assholes have gotten jaded, arrogant. You think any human is stupider than you, huh? Think again.” He turned to see Jayson running from the chamber into the curve of the camouflaged crevasse. He dismissed the Maha-Zaman with a wave of his hand. “Let him have it.”
Key then hustled after the woman, frustrated that he had to miss the execution of his plan, but Nichols had been too busy killing the rest of the terrorists with her razor-sharpened fingernails to prevent the brunette’s exit.
As Key slipped through the camouflaged corner he caught a glimpse of a dark figure rising from the stacked and layered bodies, holding a handgun with a goblet-like muzzle and multi-banded barrel. Desperate to stay to see if it worked, but equally desperate t
o leave no loose ends, he squeezed through the opening as something began to course out of the goblet and curve through the air toward Maha-Zaman—something interwoven and filmy, like Silly String mixed with cotton candy.
But then Key was in the tunnel, staunching the flow of blood from his neck as he chased the woman, whose slit pencil skirt and high heels slowed her down just enough for him to start catching up. As muddled as his thinking was after the attack, he knew she could have thrown off the shoes and torn the skirt into a more sprint-friendly loincloth, but she hadn’t.
Maybe it was because the horrible screams and whomping detonation that came from back in the cavern had unnerved her. Maybe it wasn’t. But, for whatever reason, he eventually slid to a halt in what was obviously her chamber. It was filled with jewels and treasures from many famed eras of history. It actually looked like any Middle Eastern potentate’s parlor, only every single item, from rug to bed to pitcher, was a glorious, plundered work of art.
She stood before him in her standard low cut, high slit outfit—the one both Craven and Daniels knew so well—but with a face that combined the soulful eyes of Rahal, the flaming hair of Nichols, and the lips of Kay Arnold, Key’s high school prom date.
Key nearly doubled over, trying not to laugh. “Tajabana,” he said. “You look terrible.”
Her face registered surprise, dismay, and insult. “It is only a reflection of your own mind!” she accused angrily. “I am beautiful. It is your thoughts that are not.”
“Naw,” Key countered, keeping his distance as her face wavered in his eyes. “Just an echo of my chaotic condition.” He placed one hand flat on the rock wall and leaned on it while keeping the pressure on his still bleeding puncture wounds. “You’re trying so hard to massage my mind that it’s coming out muddled.” He looked up, directly at her eyes, whose colors were swirling from brown to blue to green to red. “You know it’s over, right? It’s been over for a while, hasn’t it?”
She looked shocked, then grew wide-eyed and strident. “It is not over,” she declared fearfully. “Not while Mahasona lives! We are all merely his victims. Go! Go stop him, by any means necessary!”
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