by Krista Wolf
Silence reigned. At least for a little while.
“I know,” I said to her at last.
And I did.
32
KARESSA
The underhalls flew by as I stormed through, tunnel after darkened tunnel delving into the warm earth. For long centuries these corridors had been walked and worn smooth. For centuries beyond that they’d had been crumbling; dimly lit by torches and choked with dust.
Damn. I was beginning to hate this place.
It was time for change. I knew that now. Everything I’d had here — no, everything I’d built — had been torn down or thrown away. It meant little to me now. Even the fondest memories were tainted; recollections of running full-tilt through the fragrant forests, of wriggling through the cracks and crevasses of the ancient fortress to discover the splendor of the cathedral.
But all those times were in the distant past.
Key members of our pack were all gone now, disappearing insidiously one by one without me realizing the loss. Our numbers had dwindled to dangerous levels. But I’d always had them. I’d always had him…
Broderick. I could feel him now. Sense him as easily as if he were standing before me, in full splendid view.
He was close. He was coming.
And there wasn’t an ounce of reservation or fear in his heart.
Ah, my brave, always courageous Broderick. Your fearlessness is what I adore most about you…
I’d been a fool to think I could subvert Damien, even for a moment. Though there’d been sparks of love between us there had also been a distance; an unbridgeable gap that always kept the two of us from becoming too close. Physically he was dominant — the superior of any of the three fools I’d been forced to mate for the past year. Emotionally however…
Emotionally my heart had always belonged to Broderick.
It was just one more reason I needed to leave. Needed to find a new clan, an all new pack I could raise and rule. But not here. Not in these rotting, moonless halls beneath the ground, which men had wisely abandoned for centuries.
Again and again I’d gone over my mistake, which was pushing too hard, too fast. I needed to learn patience. I needed to temper my enthusiasm with thought and restraint. Broderick had always balanced me in that way. He’d taken the edge off my compulsivity — the one trait Damien and I actually shared — and added a certain wisdom to my influence that made us unstoppable together.
Broderick I loved. Broderick I needed. Damien could fly away to whatever shiny place next drew his attention, but Broderick…
Somehow, I would make Broderick go with me.
I turned again, moving downward into the old chambers now. Here the air was heavy and the darkness oppressive. There were piles of debris; books, scrolls. Centuries-old wood swollen with water, splintering to dust beside walls of crumbling stone.
Everything here was oldest of all. It stank of mold and mildew and decay.
But this is what she wants…
I sniffed the air, wrinkling my nose at the stench. Somewhere beneath it, I could smell something else though. Something foreign yet familiar. Something more important than anything else.
No, it wasn’t Broderick I was looking for. Finding him at this point would’ve been easy enough. But in order to win him I required something else first. I needed to eliminate the one thing that could possibly keep him from coming with me.
I needed to find her.
33
SERENA
It wasn’t the best plan in the world. But it was still a plan, and it was way better than nothing.
The smell grew stronger as I delved deeper into the earth, holding the flashlight out before me. It was black down here. Pitch black and dank as hell, with water dripping constantly from the ceiling and making it feel like bugs were crawling through my hair.
Broderick had left me half a dozen corridors ago, with strict and specific instructions on which passages to take to reach my goal. Under normal circumstances I would’ve stayed glued to his side, but somehow he’d convinced me that splitting up was the best option. For him, for Damien… for us.
Us.
Besides, the place he’d sent me? It was the very place I had to go. The place the Order was interested in, because it was their very place of origin.
The vault.
Thought to be gone forever, the idea of recovering even some of the Order’s lost knowledge had driven Xiomara and the entire Council into a frenzy. But as I got deeper, I wondered if it were even possible. The chambers down here were so dark and dingy, so waterlogged and blackened by fire that whatever might’ve once been down here had to be destroyed.
And then I saw it.
It was a door. An ancient, iron-banded door with a sigil carved halfway up, dead center.
The eye!
It was worn smooth. Broken in places, and barely legible. Slowly, reverently, I traced the circle that encapsulated the triangles. Ran my thumb over the crescent moon…
The door creaked open.
What I saw beyond it took my breath away.
It was the Paris vault; exactly as it had been described in the oldest texts of the Library! I saw row after row of decaying books, set against splintering, swollen bookshelves that lay drunkenly against one another. More than half of them had collapsed, creating a domino effect that ended in a pool of sinister brown water. The water formed a lake that took up half the room.
“Holy shit…”
My voice fell flat against the endless waterlogged volumes. I stepped forward and nearly slid; not only had the bookcases fallen over, but the floor itself was on a fairly steep angle. It looked almost like an optical illusion, until I turned my head back to the corridor I’d just left and realized something:
The entire chamber was collapsing.
Divided by great stone arches, the arced ceiling looked sagging and pregnant. Like it could come down at any moment, even as a voice in the back of my mind reminded me it had already stood for a thousand years.
Carefully, I made my way over. By watching where I stepped, and by leaning with the angle of the floor, I managed to reach the first bookcase.
I pulled on a book, and its cover broke immediately away. Beneath it the pages were mush. Illegible. Unreadable…
Damn.
Not discouraged, I looked up and saw that the top row of the ancient tomes seemed slimmer and more defined. They’d been in the water less. Seen less damage.
I grabbed one and opened it. I could see everything, every word. Every sketch and diagram and description. Every letter, squiggled on parchment by some long-lost quill dragged through the darkest ink…
And there were hundreds of these books. Maybe thousands. Most would be illegible, but a good chunk of them could be salvaged. Recovered.
Centuries’ worth of knowledge — once thought lost — regained and re-transcribed. All because of me, and Damien, and Broderick…
“HOLY SHIT!”
It was amazing. It was incredible. It was everything the Order had hoped it would—
“Holy shit indeed.”
The voice was feminine, but way too sickly sweet. The tone was sardonic and biting. It belonged to someone with… malice.
“Too bad you won’t get to read any of it.”
On the other side of the chamber, a woman stepped into view. She had red hair and white skin, her mouth a thin, unwavering line drawn from cheek to cheek. Even half-shrouded in shadow, I knew who it was.
“Hello Karessa.”
I was biding my time, sizing her up. If what Broderick and Damien told me was true, she was more dangerous than anything else.
“Is this why you came?” she asked mockingly. She snatched a volume from a nearby shelf and scoffed as it fell apart in her hands. “For a moldy pile of ink-smeared books?”
She was stepping softly, on an angle. But still moving in my direction. Still closing the distance.
“Did you tell them you loved them?” she asked. “Is that how you got them to bring you
here?”
I shrugged, noncommittally. “The better question would be do you honestly care?”
Her face crossed with anger. I’d touched a nerve.
“Of course I care! They were my—”
“Or are we entertaining all these lame theatrics,” I cut her off, “just because you got scorned?”
I wanted her off balance. Wanted her angry, even out of control.
She practically turned purple.
“You know the whole thing sounds really pitiful,” I said, “trying to grasp onto something that’s no longer yours. Holding onto your ex lovers’ totems like some sort of desperate prize, in the childlike hopes that they’ll come running back to you.”
Her eyes flared. Her mouth curled back in a snarl. I could see her shaking… her entire body shuddering in gruesome, unnatural ways.
The metamorphosis couldn’t be far off.
“You’re like some adolescent schoolgirl,” I actually laughed. “One with—”
Karessa charged. Charged me in human form, even as her limbs extended outward and broke hideously free of their skin.
Hold steady…
I choked back my emotions as her clothes ripped away, her face extruding itself into a long snout. One that ended in a dark nose, set below bright red eyes. And beneath all that… a sight that flushed ice water through my veins. Two long, jagged rows of razor-sharp, canine teeth.
Steady…
There was murder in her eyes. Cold-blooded, uncaring death. Her jaws parted slightly, and her legs coiled beneath her. A second later she sprang, and my entire world disappeared.
Karessa leapt just as I put my hands together. I extended them outward, palms together…
… and pushed.
34
DAMIEN
I’d taken only a dozen steps outside the citadel, and one thing was certain: I was being followed.
Followed in the sense of stalked, really. But I knew my brood. My clan. I knew who was on me even before they knew I’d made them. But none of that mattered. Not once I realized what was really going on.
Karessa was many things, but a loser wasn’t one of them. She didn’t know what it was like to be on the short end of the stick. In all the years I’d known and loved her, she’d never tasted defeat. Which was why it wasn’t like her to just let me go… especially after all the trouble she went through to catch me.
Unless, of course, it wasn’t me she wanted to begin with.
Dammit Karessa.
I’d been foolish, leaving the hotel. And now that foolishness was going to cost me, or possibly Broderick, or even Serena.
For that, I had no one to blame but myself.
I entered the forest then looped back, forcing my pursuers upwind so I could catch their smell. It didn’t take long to pick out the two distinct scents. Lionel was the closest… and most dangerous.
Of the three who opposed us, I trusted him the least. The others might hold back a bit. In a fight, they might have reservations about ripping my throat open and letting me bleed out on the forest floor.
But not Lionel.
Wherever he’d come from, making him had been a big mistake. Where most of us loved the thrill of the hunt, for Lionel it was all about the kill. The scent of blood drove him into a frenzy, and I’d seen him gorge himself on the entrails of fresh prey long after his hunger had been sated.
As a wolf, he was gluttonous. Savage. Deadly.
In human terms, he was an asshole. And a giant one at that.
I circled back and re-entered the citadel while they were still in the woods. It wouldn’t throw them off completely, but it would buy me time. From there I drove deeper into the Underhalls, where I could sense Broderick…
And beyond him yes, Serena too.
I descended the stairs two at a time, working my way downward into the rough-hewn chambers I never really liked. The biggest one — the one I was in now — we called the ‘chasm’. Because, well… one side of the room ended in a big fucking chasm.
A cold wind wafted up from the big opening as I skirted past it, moving toward the opposite exit. Serena was closer than Broderick, I could sense that now. I’d head to her first. But the others…
The other were coming on quickly. As in four-legged quickly.
I could change. It would be faster, easier… and I’d see better in the dark. But I wasn’t ready yet. Not until—
“Damien!”
I froze. Behind me, something shifted in the shadows.
“That’s as far as you go.”
I turned and saw Boone. He was standing between me and the chasm, blocking the exit.
“Step aside,” I told him. “And we can forget you were ever here.”
Boone’s ponytail shook as he laughed. “Oh, really?”
He drew something from behind him that I recognized right away — a long dark stick. More of a sawed-off baseball bat really, but he carried it with him practically everywhere he went.
“I’m telling you now,” I warned. “I’m not in the mood.”
“No one ever is.”
He stepped in, swinging the bat in the air before him. Making some weird figure-eight, helicopter motion that he’d practiced hundreds of times. I picked up a rock. Threw it at him. He sidestepped, and the rock flew over his shoulder.
“You should’ve never come back,” Boone told me. “You made her so fucking angry.”
I picked up another rock. “You know why we’re here.”
He shrugged. Slapped the bat with his opposite hand.
“She’s petty,” I told him. “Vengeful. The worst kind of person.” I threw the rock, and he stepped to the same side. We were circling each other now, rotating positions. He watched absently as the rock skidded up against a wall.
“But you know all this already,” I said. “You learned it the moment you stepped in and tried to fill my shoes.”
“Your shoes?” he laughed derisively. “I’m filling much more than your shoes.”
“Maybe,” I smirked. “I hope you like following Christophe’s lead, though. She’s all about him now. You’re secondary, Boone. And that’ll never change.”
His mouth went tight, and I knew I’d hit the right nerve. I scooped up another rock.
“You’ll never be the alpha,” I told him. “You’ll try to please her in everything you do… but you and Lionel?”
I chucked the rock and almost hit him. This time it deflected off the edge of his bat.
“You’ll always be last choice.”
Boone’s upper lip curled in a sneer. He opened mouth and almost said something, but I quickly interrupted him.
“Have fun with all that,” I laughed. “In fact—”
He lowered his head and charged. But before he took a step, I whipped my arm forward and threw again…
I had no rock this time — it was only a bluff. But the motion was convincing enough that he halted, awkwardly, mid-stride. Throwing his arms over his head for protection, he didn’t see me rushing up to meet him. I collided with him before he could swing the bat, just as he realized he’d been deceived.
“UNGHH!”
My entire weight struck him right below center mass. It set him off balance. Sent him sprawling backwards…
Backwards and into the chasm.
I hadn’t realized he was so close! With all my rock-throwing I’d somehow circled him around. Repositioned him so that he had nowhere to retreat. His left foot missed the lip of the canyon, and at the very last second his eyes went wide, realizing what was going to happen.
So did mine.
He grabbed at me as he fell… and I reached out for him too. Our hands missed. For a heart-stopping moment his fingers swept through my hair… but they never caught.
“AHHHHHHHH!”
His scream was disturbing. Especially since it decreased in volume for a very long time and just sort of faded away, not even ending in a crash or thud.
Holy… Holy shit…
My limbs were shaking. My heart,
pounding so hard I thought my chest would explode. I took a step backward, away from the chasm’s cold, dark edge. Then another…
“MURDERER!”
The word was Lionel’s. His hulking form took up most of the chamber’s entrance. Christophe stood next to him, his face twisted in horror.
For a second we just stood there staring at each other, realizing the magnitude of what just happened.
Then they began to morph… and I grabbed Boone’s club and fled faster than my two legs have ever carried me in my life.
35
BRODERICK
“Say it. Say the words…”
I was delirious. My mind, in a constant fog. My body burning… eating itself alive…
“I can’t help you unless you say it.”
She was breathtakingly beautiful. A red-tressed, flowing-haired goddess. I thought she was an angel, to tell the truth. An angel of mercy, sent to bring me over, safely, to the other side.
I tried to sit up, but my chest flared with pain. Somehow I managed to crane my neck down, and my already heavy heart sank even further. The bandages were soaked through. My wounds still ran with pus, all stinking and white and yellow.
But I was alive… and they weren’t.
My God…
My unit. My men. My responsibility. I’d failed them all. I deserved to die.
You did everything you could.
I shoved away my own voice of reason. I simply didn’t want to hear it. Besides, the stench was overpowering. The agony, even more so.
“There’s a piece of shrapnel lodged just beneath your heart, Broderick. If they try to extract it, you’ll die.” The voice was soft, soothing. Almost musical. “But you’ll also die if they don’t…”
I writhed beneath the thin white sheets, sweat pouring off of my fever-soaked body. Somehow I knew she was right. I could feel it. I knew it as certainly as I knew my own name: I’d never wake up tomorrow.