Ghastek’s face fell. “How long do you think he’ll keep us here?”
“I have no idea.”
He sighed and began stripping off his boots.
• • •
I HUNG MOTIONLESS in the water. Time crawled by. I had no idea how long we’d been here. We had taken turns diving to search our surroundings but found no exit. Eventually we stopped. Sometime while we were diving, the magic wave ended. Now four dim electric lamps lit the shaft. The light, dim and watery, felt oppressive, just another form of torture.
We’d used Ghastek’s jacket and his belt to fashion two loops to hold him upright. With two supports each, we would be able to sleep. Small comfort, but it was something.
A while ago my mouth had gone dry and I had drunk a little from my canteen and passed it to Ghastek.
“Do you always carry a canteen?”
“It’s force of habit.” You could survive many things as long as you had a canteen and a knife.
He had taken a swallow and passed it back. “What happens when we run out of water?”
“We drink this.” I’d nodded at the dark water flooding the shaft.
“It doesn’t seem clean, and even if it is, it won’t stay that way for long.”
“People dying of thirst can’t be choosers.”
We hung in the water.
“What did you do with Nataraja?” I asked.
Ghastek blinked, startled.
“I was always curious. He just kind of disappeared.”
Ghastek sighed.
“We’re not going anywhere for a while,” I told him.
He raised his gaze to the ceiling, pondered it, and shrugged. “Why not? Nataraja was always fond of hands-off management. I never understood why he was placed in charge in the first place. He looked impressive but had very little to do with the actual function of the office. I oversaw research and development, and Mulradin handled the financial aspects. A year ago Nataraja’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He wandered around, mumbling to himself. He killed that monstrosity he kept as a pet.”
“Wiggles? His giant snake?”
“Yes. A journeyman found sections of her strewn throughout the upper floor. A report was made to the main office. A high-ranking member of the Golden Legion arrived and conducted some interviews. Nataraja disappeared. We were told he was recalled.”
“Do you think he was recalled?”
Ghastek shrugged. “What’s the point of speculating? Mulradin and I were left jointly in charge of the office until either one of us ‘distinguished’ ourselves or a replacement was assigned. I suppose now the question of distinction is moot. He’s dead and I’m here.” He spat the last word.
Now he had gone to sleep. It was best I slept, too. I closed my eyes and imagined being on the beach with Curran. It was such a pleasant dream . . .
• • •
OUR CANTEEN HAD gone dry. It held enough water for over two days if carefully rationed, and we’d split it in half. We’d been imprisoned here for more than twenty-four hours. Probably closer to forty-eight. We had begun drinking the water around us and it didn’t sit so well in my stomach.
The water in the shaft had turned colder some hours ago. The temperature hadn’t actually changed, but water sapped body heat about twenty-five times faster than air. We’d been soaking long enough to really feel it.
I was starving. My stomach was a bottomless pit filled with ache. I’d kick myself for not gorging on something delicious while I was in the Keep that morning, but it would waste too much energy. I had to conserve every drop. Hang in the water. Last. Survive.
When the cold got to me, I untangled myself from my belt and swam. The exertion burned through what meager supplies of energy I had left, but it made me feel warmer. Until the shivering started again.
“We’re going to die here,” Ghastek said.
“No,” I told him.
“What makes you say that?”
“Curran will come for me.”
Ghastek laughed, a brittle sour sound. “You don’t even know where we are. We could be halfway across the country.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll come for me.” He would turn the planet inside out until he found me—and I’d do the same for him.
Ghastek shook his head.
“You have to will yourself to survive,” I told him.
He didn’t look at me.
“I’m not dying in this hole. Curran will come for me and we’ll get out of here. This isn’t how it ends. Hugh doesn’t get to win. We’ll survive this. One day I’m going to ram my broken sword right through his throat.”
Ghastek peered at me. His voice was hoarse. “Let me reiterate. We’ve been teleported to some unknown place probably thousands of miles away from everyone you know, possibly on another continent. The man who put us here likely teleported as well, taking the knowledge of our location with him, so nobody we know has even an infinitesimal idea of where we might be. We have no way to communicate with the outside world. Even if we could communicate by some magical means with those we know, we would be of no assistance, because we don’t know where we are. We’re floating in cold murky water.”
“It’s pretty warm, actually.”
He raised his finger. “I haven’t finished. We have no food. We have been here for at least forty-eight hours, because the hunger pangs I’m feeling are now less intense. Right now our bodies are burning through what meager fat reserves we have, which will result in severe ketosis, which in turn will lead to blood acidosis, bringing with it nausea and diarrhea. Soon faintness, weakness, and vertigo will follow. As our brains are deprived of the necessary nutrients, we’ll begin to hallucinate, and then we’ll suffer catastrophic organ damage, until finally we will die of cardiac arrest. It’s a brutal and torturous death. Mahatma Gandhi survived for twenty-one days when campaigning for India’s independence, but considering that we’re in the water and our bodies are going through nutrients at an accelerated rate, I give us two weeks, maximum.”
“If you ever decide on a career change, I’d avoid motivational speaking.”
“Don’t you understand? The only person who knows where we are is d’Ambray, and he put us here to slowly starve to death. Even if he changes his mind and decides to pull you out, since he has some strange fascination with you, he has no such relationship with me. I’m disposable. What few dealings I had with this man were abrupt to the point of rudeness. He clearly has no regard for me.”
“I promise you now that we went in here together and we’re leaving together. Curran will get me out and I won’t leave you behind.”
“To expect that Curran will somehow come and rescue you before we die is absurd.”
“You don’t know him like I do.”
“Kate! You are delusional!”
“This isn’t my first time trapped without food,” I said. “I used to have to do this frequently. We have water, which is a huge advantage. We’re not dead yet.”
He stared at me.
“I’ve survived the Arizona desert. I’ve survived in a forest scorched by fires. I’ve been starved, drowned, frozen, but I’m still here. The key to survival is to not give up. You have to fight for your life. You have to have hope. If you let go of hope, it’s over. Giving up is dying quietly with your hands bound in a hut where the man who tied you up threw you. Hope is kicking your way out and running ten miles across snow and forest against all odds.”
Ghastek blinked. “Did you actually do this?”
“Yes.”
“Who put you in the hut?”
“My father.”
Ghastek opened his mouth. “Why? What kind of a father does that to a child?”
“The only one I had. Don’t give up. Don’t let the troglodyte win, Ghastek.”
He shook his head.
His brain was too loud. He needed to stop thinking, because his mind kept running in circles, driving him deeper into despair. Despair was the kiss of death.
We needed to conse
rve energy, but if I didn’t distract him, he would fold on me. “You keep analyzing the situation and the more you dissect it, the more hopeless it seems. Try not to think about it. Talk to me instead.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Why did you decide to become a navigator? Did you always want to pilot the undead? Why didn’t you strike out on your own? Why the People?” There, that ought to keep him occupied.
He hung motionless in the water. “Ghastek isn’t my real name. I grew up in Massachusetts, near Andover. I was smart and poor. Not crushingly poor. I’ve known children who were poorer. Poverty is when your parents get home from the first job and hurry up to eat their mac and cheese, because in five hours they have to get up for their second job and they want to catch some sleep. We weren’t quite that poor. We had food. We owned a house. I saw both of my parents at the dinner table at the same time.
“In eighth grade, there was a science tournament between the local schools. The local private preparatory academy was participating, primarily to demonstrate the vast superiority of its education over the public system. I won. The academy gave me a scholarship. I remember how happy my parents were for me. It was a Yale feeder school and they thought I now had a future. So the next school year, I started at the prep school. It was a forty-five-minute drive and every day my father would take me there in his work van. My father repaired gas lines. The van had a logo on it, written in large yellow letters: GasTek. The name of the company. Nobody was interested in learning my name. I became that Gastek kid, then Gastek, and then one of the class clowns thought it would be hilarious to slip an h in there. Ghastek. A not-so-subtle association with ‘ghastly.’ Ghastek or sometimes simply ‘the Creep.’ By the end of the year even the teachers didn’t call me by my name.”
I could hear the old bitterness in his voice. He’d come to terms with it, and it no longer hurt, but it was still there.
“I realized in that first year that I would never be accepted. It was understood by all that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how I brilliant I was, the best I could hope for was to work for one of my dumber classmates when we grew up. They would be the owners. I would be an employee. You see, it’s not enough to be smart. If you’re handsome or a good athlete, they might grant you some degree of acceptance, because adolescents are shallow. You might become a trophy for one of them, if you let yourself be used, but I was neither. Being rich would open the door a crack, but they would never let you in the whole way. They’ll spend your money and laugh at you behind your back. I’ve seen it. You see, money, brains, looks, none of it is enough. There is this thing called legacy. It wasn’t just about where you went to school or who with. It was about where your grandfather went to school and who his best friends were.”
“I take it the school wasn’t your favorite place.”
“I fucking hated it. Then the People’s recruiter came in when I was a junior. They brought in a caged vampire and let us try one by one. The feeling when I first realized I could control it . . . I can’t describe it. It was right. For the first time in my life, something felt right. I made the undead unlock the door of the cage and then I chased my darling classmates with it. The recruiter wasn’t strong enough to take it away from me. They ran from me. It didn’t matter how rich they were. It didn’t matter what their name was. Their august grandparents couldn’t save them, because if they had been there, they would’ve run from me, too.”
Ghastek smiled, a bright happy smile. “Some of them begged me to stop.”
He looked so happy I tried my best to scoot a little farther away from him in my restraints.
“They expelled me within the hour.” He laughed. “By the end of the day, the People brought my parents a check totaling more than they’d made together in the previous three years. A hardship fee to make their lives a little easier if I chose to leave home and study with the People. But my parents didn’t want to let me go. The money made no difference to them.”
“They loved you,” I guessed.
He nodded. “They did. I put the check in their hands and walked out of the house. I wanted the power. I wanted respect and money too, but most of all I wanted power. You asked me why I’m a navigator. Because I love it. I love when my magic makes that first connection. I love the precision of it, the subtlety, the art of it. If you could pilot, you’d understand.”
Oh, if he only knew.
“It’s like being connected to a spring of pure power. It nourishes you. I have risen so far. I’m now ranked seventeenth in the Golden Legion.”
The Legions were Roland’s top Masters of the Dead. Gold was the top fifty, and Silver was the next fifty. “I thought it was the Gold Legion.”
“They changed it last year,” Ghastek said. “‘Golden’ sounds better. Navigation is like anything else. It takes practice and discipline and eventually the hard work pays off. Every year my power is increasing. I could be in the top ten, but I choose to not make the bid for that spot.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Ghastek said.
“Try me.”
“No. Enough to say that I worked for years and now all of my efforts have brought me here. To this . . . hole in the ground. I’m going to rest now. I’ve talked enough for today.”
Ghastek grew quiet. Minutes passed. His head dropped.
I could picture him in the yard of the school, a skinny kid in cheap clothes sending an undead after the people who looked down on him. Who knew?
I closed my eyes. It was all I could do.
We would get out of here.
Curran would come for me. Of course he would.
• • •
A FIREPLACE LIT the room, and warmth flowed from it, so luxuriously hot and soft that for a long moment I simply basked in it. I was warm and dry. The savory scent of seared meat floated through the air. Food. This was heaven.
“Hey, baby,” Hugh said.
Heaven just got canceled.
I turned. He was sprawled in a large wooden chair, leaning against the back, big legs in blue jeans stretched out in front of him. His shirt was off and the firelight played over the sharply defined muscles of his chest and arms. A small pendant hung around his neck on a plain steel chain. I liked how he was sitting, all loose and relaxed. It would make it harder for him to dodge and there was a lovely heavy chair next to me.
I grabbed the chair.
Except I didn’t move.
And I didn’t have any arms or legs either. Awesome.
Hugh chuckled.
“Let me guess, this is one of those special dreams.” At least my mouth still worked.
“Something like that. It’s a projection.”
“Aha. But the magic is down.”
“Nope. Came back about fifteen minutes ago. You’ll feel it when you wake up.”
“How long have I been in your little prison cell?” Might as well get whatever information I could.
“Three days.”
That long. Hell.
“How’s the water?” Hugh asked. “Getting cold yet?”
Asshole. “So that’s how you teleported out of the burning castle? Did you have water on you somewhere?”
He touched the pendant hanging from his neck and lifted it. The light of the fire played on the glass of the bullet-shaped pendant. Water sloshed inside.
“I always have one on me. It takes a second to crush. Once the water touches you, a power word pulls you through to the source of the water.”
So the water Jennifer dumped on me had come from the shaft where my body was currently floating.
“Teleporting is a last resort,” Hugh said. “It takes a few seconds for the transfer depending on the distance. If tech hits while you’re in transit, you’re dead. But you left me no choice.”
“What did you promise Jennifer to betray me?”
“Power,” he said. “She was supposed to drench you in private, so nobody would suspect her once I triggered the teleportation. You would disa
ppear and she’d use the time while everyone was running around looking for you to solidify her hold on the clan. In a week or two one of my people would take out Desandra for her, which would’ve made things easier. Except she fucked up, and then her boy screwed the pooch even further. I imagine they’re fitting the stone on her grave about now. I told you before: shapeshifters are difficult to train. You’ve got to get them young.”
“You’re a sick fuck.”
“I know.” Hugh nodded at the table next to him. “Hungry?”
Food covered the table. Fresh bread, still warm and crusty from the oven waited on a cutting board. A rib eye roast, the fat crisped and melting, lorded over a bowl of soup, a tub of golden butter, and a dish of mashed potatoes. The air smelled of seared meat, roasted garlic, and fresh bread.
My mouth watered, while my stomach clenched in pain. How come I didn’t have arms to throw a chair at him, but I still had a mouth and a stomach? The Universe wasn’t fair.
“I’m an hour away,” Hugh said. “If you ask me, I’ll come and fish you out and all this will be yours. All you have to do is say, ‘Hugh, please.’”
“Stick a thumb up your ass and twirl on it.”
He smiled, cut a piece of bread, and spread butter on it. I watched the butter slide over the slice. He bit into it and chewed.
Bastard.
“Are you done with your food porn show? I have a cold wet hellhole I need to get back to.”
“Sooner or later you’ll break,” he said.
“Keep hoping.”
“You’re a survivor. Voron put you on the edge of that cliff again and again until he conditioned you to claw onto life. You’ll do whatever you have to do to survive, and I’m your only chance of getting out. At first you’ll balk, but with every passing hour my offer will look better and better. You’ll convince yourself that dying will accomplish nothing and you should at least go out with a bang. You’ll tell yourself that you’re accepting my offer just so you can stick that broken sword into my chest and feel it cut through my heart. Even if you die afterward, the fact that I’ll stop breathing makes your death mean something. So you’ll call me. And you’ll try to kill me. Except you’ve gone three days without food, and that body . . .” He tilted his head and looked me over slowly. “That body burns through calories like fire goes through gasoline. You’re running out of reserves. I can put you down with one hit.”
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