by J. R. Ward
Ahmare indicated the carnage with a sweep of her hand. “And you marked our place, too. There’s blood all over here and the scent is traveling on the wind. So I suggest that we stop arguing and start moving. If I have to wait through another day, I am going to lose my goddamn fucking mind—”
Duran lurched to one side—caught his balance.
And then passed out, landing with the response-less bounce of a dead body.
20
AHMARE’S FIRST THOUGHT—WELL, SECOND; her first was that Duran had been stabbed somewhere and died from internal blood loss—was not about the cult’s location. Chalen. The conqueror’s beloved.
It wasn’t even about her brother.
Her prevailing thought was, I don’t want to lose this male.
Duran’s life, and its instant of extinction, was the only thing that mattered as she crashed down beside him, her hands going to his chest, her torso bowing over his body as if her back could block the Fade’s arrival. His eyes were fixed on the heavens above, staring up to the night sky as if there was a message in it for him, ghostly symbols of the Old Language floating aloft that only he could see.
“Duran?” she breathed as she patted him down.
There was so much blood on his clothes, it was hard to tell what was his and what was from that guard he’d bitten. And a puncture wound of less than an inch could seal itself off on the surface, while the artery underneath became an oil spill in his ocean, ruining everything.
“Duran!” Now she was more urgent. “Are you . . .”
Are you dead?
Dumb-ass question to ask, but that wasn’t why she didn’t finish the sentence. She feared the answer—
Abruptly, his torso jerked upright with such force and strength, his shoulder punched her, throwing her back. And the inhale he took in was so great, she could have sworn she felt the very draw of it.
“Are you okay?” she said.
Yes, are you?
His head cranked in her direction. His pupils seemed to focus on her properly, and neither was dilated. “Sorry. Don’t know what that was.”
As she exhaled, she felt like she was doing part two of that inhale of his, finishing the relay, so to speak. “It’s all right. But we need to check you out.”
He lifted his shirt and they both looked down at the ridges of his abdominals. Nothing. Then he twisted around and offered her an inspection of his spine. There were no wounds there, either.
That took care of the big stuff, she thought. As long as he hadn’t been nailed in the groin. Femoral arteries were the superconductors of the lower body, capable of draining blood volume like a tub, but in that case, there would be all kinds of blood seeping through his pants and there was none.
“Let’s go,” he said as he pushed himself onto his feet.
Ahmare thought he was going to make it to vertical because he was speaking coherently. Nope. He went down again, to a sitting position this time—and given that the plan had been for them to run? Not good.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He looked at his arms, flipping his hands from palm up to palm down. “Nothing is listening to the commands.”
Ahmare scanned the woods, noting that unlike the kudzu-choked forest that buffered the mountain’s approach, there was nothing but tree trunks and pine boughs to hide behind here at its base. Considering the lack of ground cover, they were sitting ducks, even though the moon was hazy and that cut down on its glow.
And then there was that anatomy exam of a body, no more than five feet away, a beacon for anyone with a halfway decent nose.
Duran made a second attempt to get up. A third.
As he fell back down that last time, she put two and two together and got an oh-hell as an answer.
“You need to feed,” she said roughly.
He recoiled. “No, I’ll be okay. I did about two weeks ago.”
Frowning, she asked, “Chalen gave you females?”
“It was the only way to keep me alive.” He glanced over at the two dead bodies. “And I took those veins just so I could be strong enough for my revenge.”
He seemed confused, as if feeding had been part of a bargain with destiny, and he’d kept his side—so why wasn’t he strong enough to keep going now?
She let herself go down to her knees and yanked up her sleeve. “Let’s do this.”
“No.” He frowned and pushed her arm away. “No, I’ll just—”
“You want to waste time trying to get up a fourth time? I’ve been counting in case you haven’t. And you may have fed fourteen nights ago—” God, she did not want to think of the particulars—and maybe he had been with a female before. Maybe she’d been wrong about that. “—but you know as well as I do that stress and physical exertion will drain the strength fast. And don’t try to tell me you didn’t just get one hell of a workout because I watched you.”
Duran looked off into the woods—as if the idea of her seeing him in that violent state, doing that damage, shamed him.
“Come on,” she said, holding her wrist to him again. “This is not a place to get caught, and I don’t want to have to drag you back to those boulders. I will if I have to, though.”
Ahmare was right.
He did need to feed. Getting away from Chalen, covering the distance, expending the energy he just had . . . it had taken his energy reserve to zero.
And then there was seeing Nexi again.
And Ahmare herself.
All moves on the abacus that had to be balanced by him taking a vein. It was the way biology worked, the setup the Scribe Virgin had created for the species, male taking from female, female taking from male.
“Just do it,” she prompted him. Then she rolled her eyes. “God, you’ve turned me into a Nike commercial.”
“What’s that?”
“The cult didn’t have TV, did it.” She brought her wrist to her mouth. “I’m done talking about this.”
He almost please-don’t-do-that’d her. Because he knew, even before the first scent of her blood hit the air and apparently hopped a ride on a torpedo straight into his nose, that she wasn’t going to stop.
And he wasn’t going to be able to say no.
Duran wasn’t even clear why denying himself her vein was so critical. He and Nexi had fed each other when they needed to, and they hadn’t even had sex. It had just been a no-big-deal exchange of the necessary, one for the other—well, at least on his side, it had been that way. And it should be that way with Ahmare, too—
Not. Even. Close.
As she scored herself and put her wrist directly onto his lips, it became immediately clear that “no big deal” was not at all applicable to Ahmare.
“Everything in the Whole Fucking World” might have covered it.
No, that didn’t go far enough. How about “Universe.”
Everything in the Whole Fucking Universe and an Infinity Past That.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, that barely described the first draw of her precious blood, the first welling inside his mouth . . . the first swallow down his throat. His body, once his own, became hers to control, an extension of her will and direction sure as if he were just another of her limbs, dictated by her and her alone, no part of him his own at this moment.
And forevermore, he suspected.
Which had been the true why of his “no.” On some level, probably the one closest to his survival skills, he had known that there was no going back now. The taste of her, the vitality that blasted through every cell in his body, the tingling, springing, full-tilt-and-then-some that flooded him was at once blinding and telescopically clarifying—
Moaning.
Something was moaning—it was him. Sounds were rising up his throat, and getting no further than that because he was too busy gulping down the wine, the beautiful wine, the astounding, incredible, transforming wine of her blood.
He fell back—either that or the earth came up to support him. And as a bed of soft, fragrant pine needles caught and held him, nature’
s mattress, Ahmare accommodated the shift, moving closer, keeping the connection as he continued to drink.
Unlike him, she was not focused on the feeding.
She had oriented herself with her back to the mountain’s ascent, no doubt so that she could catch with her nose any scents carried down on the drafts from the summit. She had a gun in her free hand, and she was sweeping the muzzle in a slow panorama of what was to the left, right, and center of them. As the barrel moved, so, too, did her head, but the two went in opposite directions.
So that either her gun’s sight, or her eyesight, covered or could cover them.
In her watchful protection of him during this most vulnerable time, he knew to his core that she would get deadly if she had to defend him—and she would succeed. She was fierce, but not agitated. Alert, but not afraid. Aggressive, but only if she had to be.
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and not just because someone was protecting him. It was because he hated that she was in a situation where such defenses needed to be put up. God, he wished he could have brought something to her life other than his body’s need . . . just after she’d been forced to watch his revenge manifest itself all over two other living things.
Even if those guards had been ones who had enjoyed hurting him.
“Keep taking,” she told him without looking down. “I only want to stop once for this.”
Duran closed his eyes and felt a stab in his heart. In the midst of his ecstatic spell, he would do well to keep in mind that this was not a beginning for them. A launching pad to grow closer. A foundation on which to build.
This was biology in wartime.
And when the hell had he gotten to be such a romantic, anyway?
21
AHMARE HAD TO GIVE him credit.
Duran took only what he needed, and then he lapped the wound closed with his tongue and got right to his feet. Usually after a feeding, there was a lull of laziness, a post-vein glow that floated anyone who had just been nourished in a placid pool of satiation. But he was clearly ignoring all that in favor of what she needed from him.
He required blood. She required movement.
So after he nodded to her—a thank-you, she guessed—he pointed to the west and started to run, going slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. Soon enough, the two of them were making an expert marathoner’s time through the forest.
With the wind in her face, and her body on exertion autopilot, her senses were alive, ready to find in the woodland landscape pursuers, aggressors, trackers . . . murderers. She searched what was to the sides of them, and to the rear, her eyes pulling shadows out from behind trees and large boulders, isolating trunks as possible covers, identifying hideouts in fallen logs and stumps.
Duran was doing the same, and the focus they needed on their environment was a good reminder of the reason they were together, of the purpose of this intersection of their lives. The forced intimacy of those daylight hours, which had led to some very naked skin on very naked skin, was exactly like that feeding just now.
A side step, not the ultimate goal.
And in a way, she was grateful. Otherwise, her brain, riding a high of chemicals cooked up by his mouth on her wrist, might have carried her off into an oblivion she could not afford to visit, much less live in—
“Over there,” he said. “That’s the entry.”
Those were the first words he’d spoken since they’d started running, and the fact that they were no more breathless than if he’d had his feet up on a sofa and a sleeping cat on his chest made her stupidly proud. But come on, like she had any control over the contents of her blood or how it nourished him?
Still, she felt as though she mattered, and not just in some ephemeral emotional sense, but in a nuts-and-bolts, chassis, gas-tank kind of way.
It seemed more reliable, more tangible, than what had happened between them in the bunker.
As they came up to an old hunting shack, a nothing-special relic that seemed more likely to have been built and abandoned centuries ago by humans hunting for food instead of sport, unease went through her—and it was a surprise to realize the anxiety didn’t have anything to do with the fact that they were about to break into a cult.
Duran was going to have to go back to Chalen, wasn’t he.
That had been the plan that she’d made with the conqueror. She had agreed that she would take the weapon he gave her, use it to get his female . . . and return it to him. If she didn’t, Ahlan wasn’t getting out of that castle alive.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Duran said as he opened a door that was more air hole than board and nail. When she didn’t immediately follow, he looked over his shoulder. “What?”
His return to that cell had been slightly less traumatic when she hadn’t cared about him. When she’d thought of him as “the prisoner.” Now, she knew she was going to lose one or the other: If she let Duran go free, her brother was dead, and bloodline always should win, right?
“Sorry,” she mumbled as she forced herself through the flimsy door.
Inside, the cabin was barren and rotting, nothing but dust and pine tree debris, the forest reclaiming the construction. The passage of time had made that which should have been durable just another biodegradable carcass, a bag of bones soon to become dirt save for the pick-up sticks of nails and the two four-paned windows that would survive longer.
“Over here,” he said as he went across to the far corner.
As his heavy weight made the floorboards groan, she hoped for his sake there was no lower level. He was liable to fall through.
Crouching down, he tucked his fingertips into a knot in a board, and as he lifted, he brought up a three-by-five section that was more solid than you’d think.
“We go down here.”
Ahmare went over and didn’t accept the hand he put out to help her descend a ladder that was just thin cross-hatches tied to two poles with twine. As she carefully lowered herself, her sinuses became filled with a complex bouquet of rot and mold and mud, and she decided, if she got out of this alive, she was going to Disney World.
Okay, fine. Not Disney World, because really, how was a vampire going to handle the land of sunshine, sunscreen, and screeching human children. But she was going to go somewhere where they had air-conditioning and air fresheners and beds with clean sheets. Running water. A refrigerator.
A shower with multiple heads.
Or how about just warm water.
With both her brother and Duran.
Ahmare got to the ground and flicked the light of her phone on. Plastered walls, the earth held back by what looked like clay packing. Dirt floor. And ahead, a narrow passageway, the terminal of which her illumination could not reach.
Duran jumped down, as if he knew that his bulk was going to make kindling out of that ladder. “We go that way.”
Not that there was another option.
“Wait,” she said. “You need to close the hatch.”
“No.” He flicked on his flashlight and pointed it into the void, the beam perfectly round and distinct as it widened from the pinpoint of the bulb, like something out of a Nancy Drew illustration. “At this stage of the game, I want Chalen’s guards to follow us.”
As he started off, striding fast, she followed. “Are you crazy?”
“Trust me.”
Duran’s skin was alive with warning as he strode through the damp and cold passageway. It wasn’t because anyone was behind them.
On the contrary, it was what lay ahead.
He knew the turns and the straightaways by heart. Knew also that this stretch of their entry was the most dangerous. In all other parts of this infiltration, they had options, defensible covers, vistas to bolt off into. Here? If for some reason their presence had been sensed and the Dhavos’s defenders were sent out, they would have to rely on a direct, hand-to-hand fight. And with him still logy from the feeding?
He doubted either one of them would survive.
And feared th
e even worse outcome of his father taking Ahmare prisoner.
On top of that, there was the risk represented by Chalen’s guards, but he needed them. The cult would currently be centralized at the arena doing the nightly “ablution” ceremony whereby they were washed in a metaphysical sense of their sins of the previous twenty-four hours by the Dhavos. Assuming that practice hadn’t changed, this was going to give him and Ahmare a chance to get in, get disguised, and get going. Chalen’s guards, on the other hand, weren’t going to be as efficient as he and Ahmare in finding their way around—and when they were discovered, chaos was going to ensue.
A perfect smoke screen for him and Ahmare to hide inside as they got the beloved. And then he pared off and did what he had come to do.
A final curve in the passageway and they were at the vault door. This one was similar to the one he had put on the bunker and, in fact, had been his inspiration.
Stopping, he went for the keypad, and entered the six-digit code that he’d gotten from spying on a defender using it inside the compound.
No backup plan. If this didn’t—
“Is it working?” Ahmare said.
“It’s the right code.” He reentered the digits. “At least it used to be.”
As he waited, his heart pounded in his—
“The pound key!” he said as he hit the symbol.
With a clunk and a grind, there was a shift of gears, and then . . . they were in.
The air that escaped was dry and many degrees warmer than the draft-and-damp they were in. But the smell of it, the over-conditioned, not-even-close-to-natural, piped-through-tinny-ducts sting in his sinuses rode ingrained neuropathways to the oldest part of his brain.
The part that had been forged when he’d been young and his mahmen had still been alive—and life had been all about her suffering.
“Are you going to go inside?”