14
I OPENED MY eyes. I lay on a blanket, wrapped in several layers of clothing.
I couldn’t see Curran. He’d been holding me for what felt like hours. Every time I woke up, he was there, but not now. Anxiety spiked.
Okay, I had to snap out of it. He wasn’t going to evaporate. He wasn’t a hallucination. He was here . . . somewhere.
Above me small hateful points of magic moved back and forth. Vampires. One, two . . . Nine. I pushed back the blankets. The room was mostly empty. Christopher napped, leaning against the wall. To my left Ghastek lay on his blankets. Robert, the alpha rat, sat next to him. No Curran or Jim. I also thought I saw Andrea, but that couldn’t be right. Andrea couldn’t be here. She was pregnant. She wouldn’t risk the baby.
A brown-eyed woman knelt by me. She was my age, with dark hair, a full mouth, and brown skin. She wore a black loose abaya, an Islamic-style robe, and a matching hijab, a wide scarf, draped over her head. She looked Arabic to me. I’d seen her before among Doolittle’s staff.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Nasrin.” She gently touched my face, examining my eyes. “I’m here to heal you.”
“Where’s Curran?”
“He’s checking the barricade,” Nasrin said. “Jim and others are standing guard there. How do you feel?”
What barricade? “The room isn’t blurry anymore.”
She smiled. “That’s good. We’ve had a short magic wave, and I’ve worked on you a little.”
“I think I remember.”
I had passed out at some point, but Curran woke me up every five minutes to eat. At first it was broth, which I vomited once or twice. I vaguely remembered Andrea passing me a wet rag to clean my face and Nasrin murmuring something and holding a canteen to my lips. Whatever I’d drunk had made me feel better. Then I was given some mysterious concoction Doolittle had made up and sent with them especially in case we had been starved. I asked what was in it, and Christopher very seriously told me, “Forty-two percent dried skimmed milk, thirty-two percent edible oil, and twenty-five percent honey.” I was afraid to ask about the other one percent and I had trouble keeping it down. Then a magic wave came and someone chanted over me, and suddenly I was ravenous. I had gone through two quart containers of the stuff and my stomach wanted more, but I had passed out. It seemed like that whole sequence happened more than once, but I couldn’t be sure.
“What was in the bottle you gave me?” I asked.
She smiled. She didn’t look a thing like Doolittle, but something about her communicated that same soothing confidence. “The water of Zamzam.”
“The blessed water from Mecca?”
“Yes.” She nodded with a small smile and held a bottle to my lips. “Drink now.”
I took a sip.
“When Prophet Ibrahim cast Hajar and their infant son, Ismail, out into the barren wilderness of Makkah, he left them there with only a bag of dates and a leather bag of water.” Nasrin touched my forehead. “No fever. That is good. When all the water was gone, Ismail cried for he was thirsty, and Hajar began to search for water. She climbed the mountains and walked the valleys, but the land was barren. Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“That’s good also. Finally at Mount al-Marwah Hajar thought she heard a voice and called out to it, begging for help. Angel Jibril descended to the ground, brushed it with his wing, and the spring of Zamzam poured forth. Its water satisfies both thirst and hunger.” Nasrin smiled again. “We brought some of it home with us when my family went on a holy pilgrimage. My medmagic encourages the body to heal itself by making it metabolize food at an accelerated rate. You had no wounds, so as your body absorbed the nutrients, they all went directly to where they were supposed to go and the water sped up the process even further. If we can keep this up, you’ll be walking soon. Not too bad for thirty-six hours of treatment, and it looks like we might have avoided refeeding syndrome. Without magic, restoring your strength would take a few weeks.”
I glanced at Ghastek.
“He’s recovering slower,” Nasrin said. “But you were in better shape to begin with and you had more reserves than he did. Don’t worry. I’ll get you back to fighting weight. That’s my specialty. I’m the head of the Keep’s recovery unit. We suspected you might become malnourished, so Dr. Doolittle and I agreed that I would be the most effective.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I tried to lift my head up. “You said there was a barricade. Where is it?”
“It’s at both ends of the hallway.” Nasrin looked up. “The floor above us is infested with feral vampires. Ghastek tried to count them at some point and mentioned four once and six two hours later. We killed a couple, but they’re warped. This place isn’t healthy for vampires either.”
There were nine vampires now. They could sense us somehow, and they’d keep aggregating. We had to nuke them or move.
“They’re feeding on each other,” Ghastek said. He turned to lie on his side, facing me. His eyes had sunk in their sockets. He looked like a ghost of himself.
“I’ve never heard of undead doing that,” I said.
“There have been cases,” he said. “It involves severe starvation or controlled feeding. I’ve been able to reproduce it before in a laboratory environment. There are”—he yawned—“many variables. A vampire who feeds on other undead undergoes morphological changes. It must be done very carefully, or the vampire may die. Some undead . . .” He yawned again. “A consistent diet of other vampires over time . . . What was I saying?”
I had trouble concentrating, too. “Something about vampires feeding on other vampires.”
“It makes them feel older, more powerful to us,” Ghastek said. “The navigators can feel an undead’s age, and a diet of other undead makes a vampire feel older.”
I had met vampires that felt old enough to be pre-Shift before and I never could get over it. It should’ve been an impossibility. Before the Shift, the magic was so weak, it was barely there. The Immortuus pathogen didn’t manifest until after the first catastrophic magic wave. Now I knew. They weren’t really old. They were cannibals.
“Older how? By decades?”
“Yes.” Ghastek yawned. “Unless you just want an overpowered specimen, it’s not cost-effective to continue to feed a vampire other undead over time. The procurement of vampires is expensive. It’s really a waste.” He yawned again. “You have to tell your lion to avoid killing them. Cannibalistic vampires target the weaker of their species and they react to undead blood. Kill one, and a swarm will converge on the corpse.”
He closed his eyes.
“How many vampires are in Mishmar?” Robert asked.
Ghastek opened his eyes. “I’ve been here only once, five years ago. I had to take a test to be admitted to the Golden Legion. You must walk into Mishmar and bring out a vampire. Back then, I felt hundreds.”
Hundreds. We had to go. The faster we got out of here, the better our chances of survival. Ghastek and I were keeping us anchored here. I needed to get mobile fast.
I reached over for the container and began to eat more of Doolittle’s paste.
“Thank you,” Ghastek said.
“For what?”
“For keeping me alive.” He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Curran pushed through the door. His blond hair looked longer than it had before he left for North Carolina. Heavy stubble sheathed his jaw. He also hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks. Blood splattered his clothes, some of it old, some new.
He landed next to me. I put my arms around him and kissed him. The taste of him against my tongue was magic. He kissed me back and held me against him. “Did you eat?”
“I did. It tastes much better than the feast Hugh was offering.”
“I’ll break his neck,” Curran whispered, his voice vibrating with so much menace that I almost winced. The muscles on Curran’s arms hardened with tension. He was probably picturing killing Hugh in his head. I wouldn’t want to be Hugh d’Ambray at this point. Between me and Curran, his prognosis for a long life didn’t look good.
“Ghastek says the vampires here are feeding on each other. If you kill one, they’ll swarm. How’s the barricade?” I asked.
“It will hold for a couple more hours.” He stroked my shoulder and kissed my hair. I leaned against him. It felt so good just to know he was here.
“You can have one more nap and then I’ll carry you,” he said.
“I might manage a walk.”
“That would be good, but if not, I’ve got you.”
I wrapped my arms around him again. There were things I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how. He’d crossed half of the country, broken into an impenetrable prison, and found me against all odds. There were no words to explain to him how I felt about that.
“I love you,” I told him. There. Nice and simple. “I knew you would find me.”
He smiled at me. “I would never stop looking.”
And he wouldn’t. He would’ve kept going until he found me. I had no doubt of that.
He reached into his jacket and handed me something wrapped in a rag. I unfolded the fabric. Slayer’s other half. I imagined sliding it into Hugh’s eye. It was that or start crying, and I would not cry in Mishmar.
“Can it be repaired?” Curran asked quietly.
“No.” I’d broken the tip off before, once, and Slayer regrew it, but this break was right in the middle. My saber was done. An old friend had died. Thinking about it made me cringe. I stroked the blade. It was like a part of me had been cut off. I felt . . . naked. “Even if I managed to fix it somehow, the blade would always have a weak spot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Hugh got under my skin and I got careless.”
“Don’t worry, I plan to get under his skin, too.” He curled his fingers as he did when he had claws. “He won’t like it.”
We sat quietly for a long minute.
“I brought your other saber,” he said.
“The Cherkassy?”
Curran nodded.
“Can I have it?”
He reached over and pulled it from the pile of backpacks. I drew the slightly curved metal blade from the sheath and ran my fingers along it. Not the same.
Curran nudged the container of food toward me. “Eat.”
“Feeding me again, Your Furriness?”
“Of course,” he said. “I love you.”
It made me feel warm all over.
“I figured out how Hugh teleports,” I said between bites. “He wears an emergency vial of water around his neck. He breaks it and the water wets his skin, he says a power word, and it teleports him to the water’s source. Once the process begins, you go ethereal for a few seconds from start to finish. He teleports only as a last resort—if the tech hits during transit, he’s toast.”
“Good to know.”
“Was Gene’s invitation a setup?”
Curran shrugged. “I don’t know. But when we get back, I’m planning on asking him. He is our guest at the Keep.” The way he said “guest” didn’t bode well for Gene.
“What happened after I left?”
Curran leaned against an overturned chair. “I chased Hugh across the field, but he teleported before I could get to him. I got his horse. You want it?”
“His Friesian? No thanks. It looks pretty, but they don’t make the best riding horses. Did they tell you I rode a giant donkey?”
He blinked. “You what?”
“A giant black-and-white donkey. She was like twelve feet tall and bad tempered. I left her in the Keep’s stables. I’d rented her from a livery stable, so we may have to buy her now, because of all the time that’s passed. Her name is Cuddles.”
He struggled with it for a minute. “Sometimes hunger has strange side effects . . .”
“No, I was there,” Robert said, his eyes still closed. “I’ve seen Cuddles. Long ears.”
Curran’s eyes widened.
“If we get out of here, I’d like to keep her,” I told him.
“If you finish eating this food, I’ll get you a whole herd of giant donkeys.”
“That’s the strangest bribe I’ve ever heard of,” Robert said.
“I don’t want a herd. I just want one.” I ate more of Doolittle’s paste. “What are you going to do with Hugh’s Friesian?”
“I don’t know. Hell, I might keep it. I’ll walk it around like a dog on a leash.”
I laughed. “You hate horses.”
“No,” Curran said. “I don’t trust them. There’s a difference.”
“So what else happened after I went poof?”
“Then I had a problem,” he said. “You were gone, Hugh had disappeared, and Ghastek vanished, too. The People were screaming bloody murder and running back and forth. Jim told me about Brandon and his water trick. I needed more information and I wanted to know what inside Brandon made him so stupid that he would do this, so I opened Brandon’s stomach and pulled his guts out while Jennifer watched. I told her that if she moved an inch, I would do things to her that would make what I was doing to Brandon seem civilized and kind.”
He lost control. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times Curran had let himself go, and they were branded in my memory. He prided himself on always being in control. I finally did it. I had driven the Beast Lord crazy. He must’ve been either really scared for me or angry, or both. I knew exactly how he felt. I couldn’t roar, but if he’d been teleported off that field, I’d make the entire Pack cringe and wet themselves.
“Did Jennifer move?” I asked.
“No. Stood there quietly as he screamed. Brandon didn’t give me anything constructive. It was Barabas who remembered that Jennifer had walked into your meeting with that bottle.”
“She couldn’t do it,” I told him. “I think she went into the meeting planning on it, but she backed out at the last minute.”
“Since Brandon wasn’t helping, I gave what was left of him to Mahon and told Jennifer it was her turn. She said I wouldn’t dare. I assured her I would. I grabbed her by her throat and shook her a little. I may have roared.”
Robert sighed. “He was in half-form. He’d grown claws the size of walrus tusks and they were wet with Brandon’s blood. His fur stood on end, his mouth was this big”—Robert held his hands about two feet apart—“he’d sprouted an extra set of fangs, and his eyes looked on fire. He was roaring so loud the windows in the Keep vibrated, and when he spoke, he sounded like a demon from hell. I would’ve told him anything.”
I brushed my fingers along his stubbled cheek gently. “Did you have a failure of control, Your Furriness?”
“No,” Curran said. “I was perfectly in control.”