I sped up. Over the next hour, city lights were replaced by the faint glow from the stars. By the time I reached Mycenae, modern buildings were nowhere in sight. There was only the rolling hills of Argos and the ruins of the former great citadel.
“Mycenae rich in gold,” Homer had written in his famed poem about the fall of Troy at the hands of the Greeks. The riches of Mycenae were long gone, but hints of the citadel’s former glory remained, such as part of the fortress’s wall on the highest hill; the tall stone entryway to the rumored burial site of King Agamemnon, or the aforementioned Lion Gate, where two leonine stone carvings marked the entrance to the city.
During the day, this area was dotted with tourists. At half past four in the morning, it was empty. Or it should have been. When I parked in the lot reserved for tour buses, I heard a faint cut-off scream.
I’d dressed for court, not for battle, so I didn’t have any weapons on me. I grabbed a satchel I’d packed some demon bone knives and silver knives in, then flew toward the sound, leaving Silver behind in the car. As I flew, I prayed to any gods that might be listening. Please don’t let me be too late, please don’t let me be too late . . .
The citadel was now silent. I detected no movement among the pale stone ruins, either. I dipped lower, losing my visual advantage to utilize another sense. Yes, there. By the entrance to the underground cistern. I smelled blood.
I landed and then crouched low to enter the tunnel where the ancient city’s former water supply had been stored. It was dry now, which was unfortunate. I could’ve pulled the energy the water contained to increase my strength, but the only liquid I now sensed in the cistern was blood. The scent was almost choking as I descended the rough, uneven steps of the steeply sloped tunnel. But no scent of demon. Just blood and the sickly smell of terror.
Then a soft, anguished noise came from farther ahead. I abandoned caution and flew the rest of the way. I knew that sound. Someone was dying in agony.
After two turns, the end of the narrow tunnel came into view. A white-haired, dusky-skinned man with unlined features raised his head from the ripped-open belly of another man, whose eyes were glazing over in death.
My impact knocked the gore from the murderer’s mouth.
Our tight quarters meant my momentum slammed us both into the wall. The white-haired man cursed me in preclassical Greek as he tried to bite me with a mouth now stretched to impossibly large dimensions. I leapt back, avoiding his snapping jaws.
Not a demon or a vampire. Ghoul, to use the modern word. They normally ate the dead, but from the state of the four bodies strewn like rubbish in the tunnel, these victims had been eaten alive. And I’d arrived too late to save any of them.
“Murderer,” I spat in the same preclassical Greek dialect.
“Dead walker,” he replied in a hiss.
An ancient slur against vampires. Another hint that he was not from this era. “The world has no shortage of dead for your kind to feast on. You ate these people alive. Why?”
He smiled, showing that he still had chunks of viscera in his teeth. My stomach heaved. “The dead do not make beautiful music with their screams.”
Some of the souls that were released are very dark, my father had warned me about the people Dagon had trapped inside himself. No shit. This ghoul was cruel enough to be Dagon’s best friend, if he was one of the resurrected ones.
I had to find out.
“Did you wake up and find that the world had vastly changed since the last time you saw it?” I asked as I avoided his next attempt to grab me. With the tight confines of the tunnel, I had to bash into the walls to do it. The ghoul grinned, enjoying the sight of me in pain.
“Everything I know is gone.” Confusion and rage thrummed through his tone. “Now, metal horses bring strange-tongued invaders to gawk at my city’s bones, so I feast on theirs!”
He was one of the people I was looking for, all right, and he’d chosen to squander his second chance at life by eating innocent tourists. I couldn’t kill him fast enough, but I’d packed my satchel only with knives, and I needed a sword for ghouls. My car had a sword in it. Could I get it and return before the ghoul fled?
Ghouls couldn’t fly. I had a chance.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, and flew out of the tunnel.
Silver was growling when I got back to the car. He probably smelled the blood from my close contact with the flesh eater. I didn’t have time to reassure him. I grabbed the sword, slammed the door, and flew back toward the cistern.
The ghoul was emerging from the tunnel. His sneer changed into a frown when he saw my sword. That was something he recognized, despite missing the past several thousand years. Swords pre-dated even me.
“For the crime of murdering innocents, I sentence you to death,” I said, and flew at him.
Before I reached him, two large forms slammed into me from either side. Bones crunched and my head rang as I was smashed between them. The impact left me so dazed, it took me a few seconds to fly away. Those seconds cost me deep, agony-inducing tears into my shoulders and almost allowed the ghoul to pin me to the ground. I flew away just in time. Then, from the safety of my higher vantage point, I finally saw what had hit me.
“Oh, come on!” I said with a groan.
Two huge pale-gray lions paced near the ghoul beneath me. That would have been shocking enough as lions had long ago disappeared from Greece, but these lions were made out of stone. I could taste the magic that turned ordinary rock into the prowling, deadly cats, and it was so foul, I wanted to gag.
The oldest souls will be slowest to regenerate, my father had said. But when they do, the power they consumed from Dagon’s essence will make them formidable . . .
No shit again. How was I supposed to defend myself against creatures made of magic-infused stone?
Chapter 7
“I suppose asking you to reconsider the lions and fight fair is out of the question?” I said, more to give myself a chance to think than any belief that it would sway the ghoul.
“Fight fair?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard of the concept.
“Didn’t think so.” I sighed, eyeing the lions.
My sword wasn’t much defense against solid stone, and stone also didn’t contain water that I could rip out to incapacitate the lions. Granted, most spells ceased when they ran their course or the person casting them died, but in order to kill the ghoul, I had to be on the ground where he—and the lions—were.
If only I could freeze time to slay the ghoul! But I’d just used that power, so it would take days before I could utilize it again. No, I had to do this the hard way. I rocketed myself at the ghoul, trying to catch him off guard. He ran faster than I expected to the shelter of the cistern’s entrance. I pulled up at the last second to avoid bashing into the rock wall, then lunged at the ghoul again.
The lions tore into my back before I could reach him.
I whirled, sparks flying from my sword from how hard it clanged against their stone bodies. It didn’t penetrate, but their teeth did. Those long stone teeth might be blunter than a lion’s real fangs, but they ripped into me as if they were the predators their magic-infused bodies mimicked.
Something smashed against my head, causing me to see stars. I half staggered, half flew away, avoiding the ghoul’s next blow. He chased me, but not far enough. He was too smart to leave the protection of the cistern’s entrance for long.
If I couldn’t get him away from the cistern to ambush him from above, then I had to make that location work for me.
Pain won’t kill you, I reminded myself as I stared at the remarkably flexible stone lions below. Only decapitation or silver through the heart will. So, time to be a chew toy.
I pretended to charge the ghoul again. He retreated into the tunnel, and the lions jumped me as soon as my feet hit the ground. This time, I let them drag me between them for a short distance before I fought back and got away. My ruse cost me two hunks from my legs and a gaping hole in my side before th
e wounds healed with vampiric swiftness, but the ghoul was now at the entrance of the tunnel instead of inside it.
I charged him and the lions mauled me again. This time, I dropped my sword as if I could no longer hold it while fighting off the great beasts. The ghoul said he liked to hear his victims scream before he killed them . . .
My gamble worked. The ghoul ignored my fallen weapon and edged toward me instead. I kept staggering back as the lions drove me toward the entrance of the cistern where the ghoul was. When I reached it, I darted past him, then pretended to trip on the steps. The lions fell on me at once. Their weight was crushing, but between the slant of the staircase and the great stone beasts, I was now invisible to the ghoul.
I pushed past the pain to channel all my magic into creating an unbreakable barrier over my body. The lions’ roars sounded like rocks smashing together as their fangs met resistance instead of ripping through more flesh and bone. But this spell wouldn’t last. Magic against magic was unstable.
Come on, murderer. Come and get me . . .
The ghoul commanded the lions to let him pass. They did, and he squeezed by them to enter the narrow tunnel where I was sprawled. I waited until he was close enough for me to clearly see his smile. Then I smiled back—and leapt at his head.
I held on with all my might, ignoring his screams and the brutal pounding he gave my unprotected torso. The lions roared again, coming to his defense. I flung the ghoul and myself backward, the steep stone steps adding more punishing blows as we tumbled down into the stygian darkness. All the while, I held on to the ghoul’s head, using every bone-crunching jolt of our fall as added momentum while I lodged my arm under his chin and twisted.
His head had come off by the time we reached the first landing.
For a few moments, I was so exhausted that I sat with it in my lap. Then, I threw it aside, hearing it bounce its way down the rest of the steep staircase. The lions had collapsed as soon as the ghoul’s head came off. Now, they were a collection of scattered stones on the steps instead of the solid, lethal creatures they’d been moments before.
I stepped over those stones as I climbed back up the steps. I was almost at the tunnel’s entrance when I saw a man crouched about twenty meters away. He had a long, tubelike object balanced on his shoulder that was pointed right at me—
Oh, shit!
I retreated into the tunnel, then was hurtled backward from the tremendous explosion.
Everything. Hurt.
I opened my eyes, then shut them when they immediately filled with gravel. I tried to wipe that away, but my arms were pinned. So were my legs. I couldn’t even wiggle.
Panic rose. I fought it back while trying to remember what had happened. That’s right, the man outside the tunnel had pointed some kind of rocket launcher or other military-grade weapon at me. I’d flown back into the tunnel to avoid getting shot, but from the taste of blood and gravel in my mouth, the tunnel had collapsed on top of me.
If I had any room to move, I could use my formidable strength to begin digging out of this. But my arms and legs were pinned beneath multiple heavy rocks. How long would it be until people started clearing away the stones? Mycenae wasn’t the most popular tourist destination in Greece. Worse, the cistern was hardly the most famous aspect of the ruins.
What if no one bothered to clear away the rocks for weeks? Or longer?
And what if the man who’d blown up the tunnel decided to make sure I didn’t survive? Enough flame accelerant poured on top of the rocks would eventually reach me. Then all it would take was a match to turn my prison into a stone-lined inferno . . .
Don’t panic! I thought, feeling it rise again. You can’t move, but that does not mean you’re helpless.
I concentrated on the magic inside me, bringing it forth while trying to ignore the continuous pain from the heavy stones. When I had enough, I sent that magic out to coat the stones around me. After that, I whispered a spell to form a perimeter around those stones. I was light-headed by the time I finished, but the magic was now as ready as a cocked gun.
I pulled the trigger. The stones around me exploded so thoroughly, they disintegrated into sand. The ones of top of those didn’t collapse into the empty cavern that now formed around me, either. The perimeter I’d made held them up.
I got up slowly, wincing at the many shards my body expelled as I healed. My ears still rang from the explosion, but soon they healed, too. It would take everything I had, but I could repeat this process all the way to the surface. Thankfully, it wasn’t too far . . . What was that?
I listened harder, catching faint fragments from an argument several meters above me.
“. . . felt that explosion? I told you, she’s not fucking dead,” a male voice snarled.
“. . . still can’t stay. Sun’s coming up!” Different male voice.
It was? I’d been unconscious for over an hour, then. My head must have been badly crushed by the initial cave-in.
“. . . we go back without her . . . dead anyway,” the first man said.
“Then you stay and burn!”
Only one species burned in sunlight. Demons. I gave my stony prison a grimly appreciative look. All those rocks crushing me had also saved me. Without any empty space around me, the demons had had nothing to teleport into.
Now they did. I searched through the centimeters of crushed gravel on the ground for my weapon’s satchel. At some point, it had been ripped from my neck. But I didn’t find it, and magic didn’t work on demons.
I put the rock wall to my back and readied myself to attack. I’d fought demons weaponless before. All I had to do was use their own bones to stab their eyes out—
A tall man teleported in, his back to me. I hurled myself at him, only to pull back my fists when I recognized his frame and the shoulder-length auburn hair that swung as he whirled to face me. My momentum still made me crash into him, though, and he laughed as he caught me.
“Running into my arms? You really don’t like it down here.”
Another rock must have crushed my head and caused me to hallucinate. That was the only logical explanation for Ian being the person whose arms were around me now.
“How are you down here?” I said in disbelief.
In reply, his arms tightened. A nauseating blur later, we were at the entrance of the tunnel instead of trapped inside it. Cat hadn’t been exaggerating about Ian’s teleporting skills. No wonder she and Bones hadn’t been able to keep or catch him.
“No great mystery as to where you were,” he replied. “Those sods,” a nod at the nearby bodies of two men with smoldering eye sockets, “were arguing about which of them would risk the rising sun to teleport down there and kill you. I stabbed their eyes out before they realized a vampire had teleported into their midst instead of one of their own kind. Almost too easy—”
“But how did you know I was in Mycenae?” I interrupted.
His turquoise gaze gleamed with emerald. “Think I didn’t know you’d flee the first chance you got? Didn’t expect the villa spell, but by then my tracker was already in place.”
I still felt like this couldn’t be real, but I began searching my jacket pockets for the tracker anyway.
He only winked. “If we were playing hot and cold, you’d be icy right now.”
“Then where is it?” I asked, still reeling.
“Don’t you have better things to fret about? Like, for instance, how two demons managed to ambush you so impressively?”
I already had a theory about that. “Dagon’s after the people I’m tracking. He must have seen the same video I did, that led me to this place. So, he sent two of his demons here to stake it out in case I showed up.”
Dagon must not want to face me himself yet. He must still be too weak, but that wouldn’t last. Someone as determined as Dagon would find ways to scrounge every bit of power he could. He obviously still held a grudge. Those demons hadn’t accidentally been carrying a weapon powerful enough to take down a tank when they came across me
.
Ian grunted. “Right wanker this Dagon is.”
“You have no idea,” I muttered, a stab of memory causing me to push away from him.
“Careful,” Ian said when my preoccupation made me ignore the loose ground at my feet. I almost tripped, but I caught myself, then looked at the pile of rocks where the ancient wall used to form the cistern’s entrance.
These ruins had survived for several thousand years, but they weren’t the only priceless loss today. Four murdered people were still buried beneath this pile of rubble. Four innocent lives I might have saved if I’d been faster, smarter, stealthier . . . just more!
Now, all I could give them was the dignity of being found. I’d place an anonymous call to the Greek authorities later about them. It felt so inadequate, but aside from killing their murderer, I could do no more to help them.
To cover my lingering frustration and guilt over that, I kicked one of the demon corpses nearby. “That’s what you get for shooting at me with an anti-tank weapon,” I muttered. “Gods, I hate demons!”
“And I don’t fancy coppers, present company excluded,” Ian replied. “Place will be crawling with them soon since one of the detonations set off the museum’s alarm.”
Yes, I’d also heard the mechanical wail from the only modern building located within the ruins. Before I could reply, Ian vanished. He reappeared almost immediately, Silver tucked under one arm and my purse slung over his shoulder.
Then, he grabbed me and everything blurred again. When it stopped, a stunned glance revealed rows of tall stone columns from the Athenian goddess’s temple gleaming in the early light of dawn.
“Here we are,” Ian said, as if teleporting us over a hundred kilometers away, to the Parthenon, was nothing exceptional. Silver didn’t seem nonplussed by the swift, drastic change of location. When Ian let go of him, the Simargl scampered off to explore his new surroundings.
Then Ian smiled at me, enticing and oh-so dangerous to my still vulnerable heart. “Alone at last.”
Wicked Bite Page 5