The ancient vampire on the right wall slunk down. Behind us, an undead leaped onto the treadmill and perched there, like some mutated hairless cat. More undead eyes glared at us through the gaps in the machines.
Not good.
Something clanged ahead. I glanced that way. Thomas had found a huge metal door.
“Locked,” he called out quietly.
Nice. Beating on it would definitely provoke the vampires.
The undead moved toward us, two on the ground, two on the walls, one across the tops of the treadmills. I braced myself. If I had to kill them, so be it.
Andrea raised her crossbow.
The leading undead leaped. The ancient bloodsucker with the scar dashed across the gym and disemboweled the first vampire in midleap. Undead blood hit the floor, and Scar jerked a chunk of vampiric spine out of its opponent. The injured bloodsucker dropped like a stone. Scar leaped, spinning like a corkscrew, its talons opened wide, and sliced two other vampires, carving their flesh down to the bone. Two clumps of spongy dry lungs with bloated hearts hit the floor.
I closed my mouth.
The three remaining vampires, two old and one with its spinal ridge just beginning to develop, trotted over to us, crossing each other’s paths, their heads down.
I turned. Ghastek stood on his own feet, his face pale, his eyes determined. The younger vampire twisted upright and picked up the Master of the Dead. The two ancients perched on the floor, Scar on the left and the other, large vamp, so pale it looked completely white, on the right, moving in perfect unison.
“You may want to break the door down,” Ghastek said from four mouths, three vamps’ and one his own, in the familiar dry voice I remembered. “The rest of the undead will smell their blood. We don’t have much time.”
15
THE DOOR OF the gym opened to a half-ruined restaurant. Then followed a room with vampires and Ghastek got to use his new undead, while I got to use my substitute saber. It still wasn’t Slayer, but it did okay enough to get me from one end of the room to another. We slammed the door shut and had ourselves a run across another hallway to a staircase. Down we went.
Filthy rooms, crumbling chairs, floors that made no sense, one moment a luxury high-rise, the next a ruin, then a hospital . . . Sometimes icy cold, sometimes sweltering hot. One room housed a pile of rotting corpses slithering with huge snakes. Another had an imaginary floor. The floor was there, we could see it, but when Thomas stepped on it, he went completely through. Robert caught him and pulled him out, but not before the rat alpha got a glimpse of what was under the floor. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just had this wild look on his half-rat, half-human face, backed away, and took off in the same direction we had come from. It took us ten minutes to catch up with him.
At one point we’d reached a hole in the side of the building and one by one stuck our heads out of it. The breath of cold, fresh air was like manna from heaven. We were high above the ground. I saw a piece of a sky, a distant field of snow, and then a giant reptilian-looking bird swooped down and tried to claw my face off with its talons. Thanks, Roland. Much appreciated.
Curran pounded on the wall for a few minutes trying to break us free. The wall held, but even if we did manage to break through and start climbing down, the birds would pluck us off.
We’d clustered around that hole for a while, not wanting to leave, but eventually we had to move. Down and down, picking up more stray vampires as escort. They were everywhere now, a constellation of filthy magic sparks moving along with us, always trying to close the distance.
“Maybe this hellhole has no end,” Andrea growled, as we opened yet another door.
“No.” Christopher gave her a smile as he walked through the doorway. “It ends. It is finite . . .” He stopped.
We stood in a prison block. In front of us two rows of cells stretched forward, and in the distance I saw a section of a familiar circular clearing. I had seen this exact setup underneath the Casino. Rows of cells radiated from the central circle like spokes from a wheel, except the Casino’s cells held vampires. These cells held corpses.
“No,” Christopher whispered. His legs crumpled under him. He dropped to the floor and pulled the hood over his face, squeezing his slender body into a small ball. “No, no, no . . .”
Bodies filled the cells. Some skeletal, grasping at the bars with fingers that used to have flesh. Others fresher, with rotting muscle still clinging to their bones. A few didn’t look human. One of these cells must’ve been Christopher’s. He had sat here, in a cage, dying slowly and watching the dead around him fall apart.
“How horrible . . .” Nasrin whispered.
I knelt by Christopher and put my arms around him.
“No . . .” he moaned.
Nasrin crouched by me, her voice calming. “It will be fine, Christopher.”
“We’re not staying,” I told him. “You are not in a cage. You are free.”
He tried to rock back and forth. He couldn’t even hear me.
Behind us, the vampiric horde swelled somewhere in the walls, like an avalanche ready to break and bury us whole.
“We can’t linger,” Ghastek said, shifting in the vampire’s arms. His other two bloodsuckers halted.
“No . . .” Christopher murmured.
“Shhh,” I told him. “Look at me. Look at my eyes.”
I let my magical defenses slip a little. My power curled around Christopher. He raised his head and looked at me. “Mistress . . .”
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” I was getting very good at making promises I couldn’t keep. “I won’t let you get stuck here in a cage. Come on.”
I pulled him to his feet.
Curran looked at Nasrin. “Carry him if you have to. We need to go.”
Nasrin took Christopher’s hand. “Here, hold on to me. It’s okay. It will be fine.”
We began jogging past the cells. Corpses watched us pass with empty orbs. The putrid smell choked me. Dear God. So many people.
“Child!” a female voice called.
I stopped in midstep. I knew that voice.
An arm in a dark sleeve thrust between the bars, above a rotting corpse pressed against the iron. A woman looked at me from inside the nearest cell. The last time I saw her she had been middle-aged, with a stocky powerful build and a face the color of walnut. She looked decades older now. Her cheeks sank into her skull, hollow and withdrawn. Her skin hung off her bones. Dirt and dry blood stained the indigo mesh veil covering her dark hair and forehead. She was a ghost of her former self.
“Naeemah.”
“Child.”
She came from an ancient family of shapeshifters who served as bodyguards. Months ago Hugh had hired her to guard me, though not out of the goodness of his heart. He had begun to suspect that there was something off about me, but Roland sent him on another assignment, so he instructed her to watch over me and keep me alive until he could come back and pick up where he’d left off. My aunt had chosen that particular time to waltz into town. Without Naeemah’s help, I would’ve been dead.
I turned to Curran. “We have to get her out.”
He grabbed the bars and let go. “Silver. I need the saws.”
“We’re short on time,” Jim said.
“I’m not moving until she’s out,” I said.
Jim gave me a hard look.
“She said she wants her out,” Andrea told him. “Don’t give her any crap.”
“Take your time,” Ghastek said. His vampires moved to cover the way we had come. “Nobody should starve to death in a cell.”
Jim pulled out the saws and he and Curran began slicing through the bars. Metal screeched.
Naeemah watched me with feverish eyes.
“What are you doing here? Did Hugh put you here?”
“Yes. For helping you,” she said. “And for my son.”
“What happened to your son?”
“He refused a job for d’Ambray. I’m a lesson he wants to teach my children.”
I added one more item to my “Reasons to Kill Hugh” list. It was getting long.
One cell bar hit the floor.
A vampire shot into the passageway. Ghastek’s ancients moved like the two blades of a pair of scissors. Two coordinated slices of their talons and the invader’s head rolled to the floor.
I hadn’t realized how tired I was while I was moving. I was standing still now and the exhaustion was trying to pull me to the ground. And once I landed, I would stay there.
The second bar dropped down. One more and the gap would be wide enough for her to get out.
The avalanche of vampiric minds was getting closer.
Third bar. Naeemah squeezed through the opening.
“We need to run now,” Ghastek said, his voice very calm.
“Which way?” Curran asked.
“This way.” Naeemah ran down the hallway. “I know the way out.”
“Do you trust her?” Jim asked.
“Yes!” I ran after her, stumbling.
We dashed across the room. Behind us the door shuddered—the undead were trying to break through. My legs decided this would be an awesome time to stop supporting my weight. Curran grabbed my arm, steadying me.
A dark hole gaped in the wall in front of us. Naeemah dove into it. The wererats followed her.
A vampire fell from the ceiling, cutting off Nasrin and Christopher. The healer reared back and slapped the undead upside the head, ramming it against the cell on the left. The vampire’s skull broke like an egg dropped on the pavement. I turned to Curran. “What is she . . . ?”
“Iranian lion.” He pointed at the hole. “Go!”
I reached the hole and looked down. All I could see was a shaft leading down at a sharp angle. Here goes nothing. I jumped in legs first and slid down on my ass, rolling through complete darkness. My butt hit something wet. I smelled algae. My hands slid over slime. I hurtled down through the tunnel. If there was a concrete floor waiting for me below, I’d make a lovely splat.
Light flared ahead. I planted my boots into the bottom of the tunnel, but the slick, algae-coated stone offered no resistance. If this had been a movie, this would be the part where I was supposed to yank a knife out and dig it into the stone to slow myself down. Except I’d break my nonexistent knife, hurt my arm, and still end up as a wet human pancake.
The tunnel ended. I went airborne for two terrifying seconds and plunged down into warm water. Yay, survival. I kicked up to the surface and swam away from the hole in the ceiling.
A huge room spread before me. Above, an ornate yellow ceiling, beautiful and gilded, soared in elegant arches, as if someone had opened a portal in time and Renaissance glamour spilled out. The golden swirls glowed, bright enough to bathe the entire chamber in soothing light. An enormous dusty chandelier hung from the circular recess in the ceiling, like a collection of crystals suspended from the roof of a cave. The remnants of red curtains sagged on both sides of me. Beyond them the room widened, its bottom flooded with emerald-green water. Plants covered the water’s surface. Cream and ivory lotuses, the tips of their petals touched with pink, floated next to larger bright yellow lotus blossoms. Star-shaped lilies bloomed among wide leaves, some lavender, some scarlet, some with petals of light orange darkening to copper-red near the center. Ten feet above the water a balcony, cushioned in greenery, dripped vermilion and moss-green vines.
What the hell?
Curran swam up next to me.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“So I’m not hallucinating?”
“Nope.”
“Think if we crawl on that balcony, those plants will eat us?”
“If they try, I’ll eat them first.”
Naeemah climbed up the side wall and jumped onto the balcony, disappearing behind the plant growth. Thomas and Robert followed.
“We’re in the Orpheum Theater,” Ghastek said behind me.