There was a pause. Then an air lock, like they were going through a sealed portal.
Next she was thrown on the ground and something shut.
Breathing. Heavy breathing, not hers. And illumination. Through the thick hood, she could sense a light source.
When he grabbed her again, taking one of her wrists, she let loose with an attack, knowing damn well he was going to tie her up and that could not happen. Flipping around on him, she came alive and kicked up with her boot with such force, she drove the base of her spine into a hard floor and thought she had broken it in two.
But she got a clean hit on him. Had to be on his chest or the abdomen.
The impact sent him flying—he had to be airborne, given how hard he landed—and that crack? She prayed it was his head.
Ahmare moved fast, ripping the hood off and going for one of her knives—except he’d taken her weapons. Somehow, he’d stripped them off her. She must have lost consciousness.
Her eyes were momentarily blinded by the light. When that cleared, she saw a massive male coming at her, rags instead of clothes covering him, streaks of bright white down his long black hair.
He looked like Duran. An emaciated, crazed, older alter ego.
With bared fangs.
Ahmare sprang up on her feet, knowing a ground game was going to be harder for her against his weight. Settling into her thighs, she set her stance. They were in a storage area, all kinds of wooden spindle-backed chairs stacked five and six high, with conference tables lying on their sides. The lights overhead blinked like the ones out in the corridors did, the strobing effect making all movement seem stop-motion.
“My son’s gotten himself a female,” the Dhavos said. “And she is a thief. Or do you think I don’t know what you took from me.”
The Dhavos attacked her head-on, going for her throat with his hands, his arms out straight. With a duck, dodge, and spin, she slipped around behind him and shoved, giving him more momentum, creating a wave he was forced to ride even as he tried to stop himself. He hit a stack of those chairs like a bowling ball, shattering the order, pieces going flying.
He rebounded fast, jumping up on his bare feet, snapping free a chair leg that became a stake. It was some real-life Bram Stoker vampire time as he came at her again, that wooden length with its jagged, pointed end up over his shoulder.
Ahmare did him one better. She grabbed for a chair and put its four legs toward him, holding him off like a lion, redirecting his momentum again, sending him careening off to the side. His balance was bad, likely because he had been surviving on inferior blood—humans, deer—but he was motivated. Crashing into a table, he kept his weapon with him and shot back toward her.
The key was making him engage. He might have been on the thin side, but it was clear where Duran had gotten his muscularity from, and once all that meat got going, his physical strength became a weakness for her to exploit.
This time, as he lunged forth, she jumped out of his way and nailed him across the back with the chair, the force she put into the hit so great, the seat broke away from the top.
Just like the pearl popped out of her sports bra.
Chalen’s beloved fell out the bottom of her windbreaker and hit the bare floor, the flash of iridescence as it ricocheted away catching her eye because she thought the Dhavos had somehow found a knife.
Ahmare dove for the pearl.
The Dhavos jumped to his feet again.
She hit the floor on a slide, her hand outstretched.
And he stabbed her.
27
DURAN KNEW A FRESH kind of terror—which was saying a fuck of a lot—as he frantically spun his flashlight around the yes-it’s-really-empty bedroom.
She wouldn’t have left him. He knew that down to his soul. There was no way Ahmare would have taken the pearl and run without saying anything to him. And then he thought of the light that had come on in the antechamber—
His father. His father had turned the switch, created the distraction . . . and must have come through a hidden passageway to take her without a sound.
“Ahmare!” Duran screamed.
He picked up the first thing he came to—a bureau—and threw it across the bedroom, the wood shattering as it gouged one of the garden murals. As he yelled her name again, he wanted to trash the place, rip the drapes down, tear the bed apart, break the mirrors.
Duran forced the rage to the back of his mind because it wasn’t going to help him find his female. Trying to ground himself in logic, he went back to the golden passage in case his father had entered from the rear. No scents. They hadn’t gone that way so there had to be a secret access point. Focusing on the wall behind where Ahmare had been standing, he looked for a seam . . . a scratch on the floor . . . a . . .