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 the 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?”
Ahmare asked the question quietly, as if she knew he was locked in place. And the truth was, 99 percent of him was screaming for him to pull a turn-around-now and sprint back to that rickety ladder. In his instant fantasy, he was free to escape through the forest, backtrack to the ATV, and take off with Ahmare, running from Chalen and from his father, free to be in a world with only the two of them.
It was a nice piece of fiction.
In reality, he had Chalen’s tracking collar around his neck, a conscience that would not let his mahmen’s death go, and her brother stuck in a hell Duran himself had been in for two decades.