And then everything became darker and a little cooler as they hit a gradual rise.
The vines backed off and the tree trunks grew smaller and the canopy lifted enough so she wasn’t getting smacked in the face. Underfoot, there were rotting layers of decomposing leaves, a tiramisu of terrain.
Great, they’d gotten through the salad course. Now they were on to dessert.
Rocks now. Granite outcroppings with crevasses.
They were skirting the base of a mountain, cool air coming down from a summit that she could not see, the rivers of temperature change so distinct, she knew exactly when she entered and left them.
The prisoner stopped next to a rotting stump. Picking up two sticks, each about three feet in length, he laid one next to the other at an angle.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, looking up through the trees.
She blinked hard at the shockingly pale sky, her retinas yelling at her.
“Come on, this way.”
When she didn’t jump back into the run, he grabbed her hand and dragged her along as her eyes watered and her sight was limited to mostly blurry what-is-that.
The prisoner jerked her to a halt. “Squeeze through here.”
Trying to focus, she wondered what the hell he was talking about. There was no “here” that she could see, just a collection of massive boulders that seemed to have been dropped like balls from the hand of a god at the foot of the mountain they were going around.
“Here.”
He changed her angle, pulling her around to reveal . . . yes, there was a slice of a gap in there.
Ahmare went think-thin sideways, her windbreaker scraping the lichen on both front and back. Soon enough, the compression gave way to a larger hidden belly illuminated only by the fissure she’d gone through. When the prisoner joined her, she was so close to him, she got his hair in her face.
Click.
The flashlight he outed beamed around. “Just where I remembered.”
She had no clue what he was talking about. There was only more of the blackened rock wall of the narrow cave—
The prisoner reached up and dropped a camouflage drape that had been hooked into the stone, the heavy-duty fabric painted and stitched to disguise its true, man-made identity. Behind the folds, a stainless steel door streaked with the earthy blood of the forest gleamed like a mud puddle.
The prisoner punched something into a keypad mounted on the left side at waist height. There was no series of beeps. Nothing lit up. Nothing released, either.
“Damn it.” He repeated the sequence. “Come on—”
Like a sleeper who’d hit the snooze button, some kind of system woke up and there was a dull thunk followed by a slide that resonated too loudly for there to be much grease on whatever was moving.
The hiss was less air lock, more not-been-opened-in-twenty-years.
As Duran went in first, Ahmare wanted to be flashlighting things, but she had his trigger box in one hand and a gun in the other.
There was no telling what was in there, and she was taking no damned chances.
12
EXACTLY AS HE’D LEFT it, Duran thought as he stepped inside the bunker and motion-activated lighting came on.
The hideaway was a stainless steel room set into the base of the mountain, a proverbial bread box buried in the earth. He’d built and outfitted the place over the period of a year and a half, and the hideout had been crucial for his revenge plan. He’d stolen money from the cult’s vast resources to have it constructed, siphoning cash out of the cult’s vault and then paying humans, who had no idea they were working for a vampire, to complete the project. The electricity that fed it had likewise been purloined from the spiritual compound, miles of cable buried underground.
Ahmare entered with her gun up and her thumb on his collar’s trigger.
As she looked around, he measured the twenty-by-twenty space with the eye of a host and found the single bunk, rudimentary toilet stall, and bare metal floor wanting only in ways that didn’t matter.
Who the hell cared if you had something soft to lie on? This place was a catch-your-breath-on-the-escape salvation.
Or, in their case, a wait-out-the-day launchpad.
Duran leaned back out and reattached the camouflage drape on the hooks. Then he shut the vault door and entered the lock code. The good news was there was no other way in. The bad news was there was no other way out. Hopefully, Chalen’s guards had had to back off because of the approaching sun. He did not want the conqueror knowing about this cave.
“Shit,” he muttered.
The female wheeled around, her ponytail swinging in a wide arc behind her head. “What?”
“I meant to get a pair of scissors from Nexi.” He took off his backpack and scratched his beard. “I have to lose all this hair before we infiltrate.” When she just stared at him, he frowned. “What.”
“I guess you are really taking me there.”