Korvel lifted a finger to his lips and pointed toward an open passage on the other side of the room. "We go through there," he told her in a barely audible whisper, "and down into the dungeons."
"Is that where the king is?"
"It's where my friends are. We have to free them." He picked up a couple of dark-colored swords from where they had been left on the counter. "Can you use one of these?"
Nick nodded. It was slightly bigger than her stiletto. It worked on the same principal.
The vampire led Nick through the corridor, where they met another vampire, this one with a scar running down his face.
"Who are you?" he asked, sniffing her.
"Nick. You?"
"Phillipe," he answered. "You smell like Gabriel Seran."
"Not now," Korvel said, and gestured for them to move down a set of stone steps.
Nick went first, and stepped into what looked to her like a set from one of Vincent Price's old movies. Flaming torches blazed from sconces on the brick walls, while dull copper chains and various nasty-looking apparatuses hung from huge iron rings and suspension bars.
"New guests?"
Nick froze in midstep. A group of dazed-looking humans seemed to appear out of nowhere, and formed a circle around her, Korvel, and Phillipe. They said nothing, but began hitting and scratching at them and kicking their legs and knees. The thin faces were blank, but the eyes were filled with terror.
"Ah, you're here for the tour." Behind them, a fair-haired woman in a bright silk gown appeared. "Welcome to our stronghold."
Nick stopped thinking, shoving three zombie-eyed humans out of her way as she brought her sword up and used it to stab the smiling woman in the shoulder. The blond woman didn't scream, but looked very annoyed.
"Ungrateful little girl." She clasped her shoulder and glared at the humans, who converged and pulled the sword from Nick's hand. "I invite you into my home, and this is how you repay my hospitality?"
Nick saw Korvel attack two of the guards, while Phillipe seemed to be trying to touch as many of the zombies as he could. With each touch the human minions stopped clawing and kicking, and turned toward the woman. Nick struggled wildly against the four that had her by the arms now.
"Elizabeth."
The zombies' eyes suddenly cleared, and their voices rose with very normal-sounding terror and panic as they tried to find a way out of the dungeon's center. It was during the confusion that someone grabbed Nick from behind, clamping a hand over her mouth and dragging her out of the room.
When Nicola did not return within the promised hour, Gabriel questioned a few of the villagers coming in from the fields and discovered from their sightings that she had ridden out to Dundellan.
"You don't have to track her on foot." Marcella brought him to the town stable and removed two white mares from their stalls. "I will ride with you."
Gabriel was more concerned about Nicola, especially when they arrived at the castle and saw it sitting open and unguarded.
"Richard must be dead," he said, "for he would never allow his stronghold to be found so vulnerable."
They tethered the horses to a tree and without invitation walked through the front entry of Dundellan. Gabriel picked up Nick's scent almost immediately. He followed it to the basement access door. "They are all down there."
Marcella nodded. "I smell them, too."
The first person Gabriel saw as he walked down into Richard Tremayne's dungeons was the high lord himself.
"Gabriel." The man was Richard, and a much more human-looking Richard than Gabriel remembered in the past. "You are alive."
"My lord." He made his bow. "My traveling companion came here. I have come to collect her."
"She has disappeared, as have my wife and a Brethren interrogator." Richard raised his voice over the cries of the newly awakened addicts. "Calm yourselves."
Phillipe handed Marcella a bunch of keys. "The seigneur and his sygkenis are locked in one of these cells."
"I do not need keys," she told him, and placed a hand on the steel locking mechanism on one cell's barred door. Something inside the lock rattled, and Marcella pulled the door open. At the same time, two muffled voices called out. "I hear them. Down here." She led Phillipe down the row of cells.
Gabriel heard his name being called frantically but from some distance away. "Nicola?" He projected his talent, summoning every insect in the castle and sharing their knowledge of the place. The beetles led him back upstairs and into the west wing of the castle. The termites led him to the locked door of a secured, sealed chamber. Behind it, he could hear Nick screaming.
Come to me.
Gabriel's command thundered through the halls of Dundellan, drawing every insect within its cold stone walls. He reached farther, out into the fields for the ants and bees and spiders, and into the woods for the crickets and moths and wasps. He brought together the many that were one mind, one house, one soul, and one spirit, and they poured in through every window in the castle, the winged ones carrying those that could not fly, streaming through the castle in a single column, past the cringing humans and Darkyn and into the west wing, becoming a living battering ram against the door that separated Gabriel from Nicola.
The door exploded inward.
Gabriel stepped into the stream of the many, moving with them into the glittering room made of amber. Richard's wife huddled in one corner, her arms over her head. Leary was jerking his arm up and down, up and down over another woman. Gabriel saw the bloodied knife in his hand and with a guttural roar brought the column of the many down on Leary's arm, severing it cleanly from his body at the shoulder.
Nicola dropped to the floor, her body covered in blood.
The priest tottered around, his left hand grasping the empty socket of his right arm, and smiled at Gabriel. "Their name is Legion," he choked out. "And you are many."
The column descended on Leary and dragged him, writhing within their suffocating mass, out of the room.
Chapter 20
Gabriel carefully slid one arm beneath Nick's lax shoulders and lifted her into his arms. Blood pulsed from dozens of stab wounds in her chest, stomach, and arms. The mad priest had slashed her face, and there were matching wounds on her hands. Bruised eyelids covered her eyes, blood staining the fine lashes. Her blond curls spilled over his arm.
"Nicola." She had saved him, protected him, and now when she had needed him most… "No."
She did not stir, and as her breathing faltered the bleeding of her wounds slowed.
Gabriel carried her to a velvet settee as Alexandra and the others slowly came into the amber room. Nicola could not survive such damage to her human body; he knew that. Yet she was young, and strong, and there was still time.
There had to be time.
"Is there a doctor here?" He dropped down with her in his lap, unable to release her, and held her like a child.
"Yeah, me. I'm Alexandra," the woman said, coming to his side.
A breath escaped Nicola's lips but did not return.
"Alexandra." He looked up, desperate. "She is not breathing. Please. Show me what to do."
Cyprien's sygkenis pressed her fingertips to Nick's wrist, and then carefully lowered her hand.
"Gabriel," she said very gently, "there's nothing you can do for her now. She's gone. I'm so sorry."
He looked down at Nicola's lacerated face. "You cannot leave me again. I waited for you. I lived for you. I have only just found you."
Someone—Cyprien, perhaps—touched his shoulder. He ignored it, unable to move, unwilling to release her fragile mortal form. There was no reason to do so. He had nothing left, nothing for which to live.
The touch changed, and Gabriel finally looked up. The blazing colors of the glorious room around him faded from his senses. It seemed right that everything had dulled to a meaningless blur of dull, ugly gray. She had gone and taken his last hope of happiness with her.
He would not allow her to go into the darkness without him. Wherever she was, that was where he had to go. "Kill me."
Michael shook his head.
"Give me a blade, then."
Alexandra made a strange sound, and Michael's gaze shifted to her.
"Not yet, my friend." Cyprien nodded toward Nick.
Gabriel looked down at his beloved's ruined face. The wounds slashed across it were shrinking, the edges pulling together, the raw exposed tissues vanishing.
"So," Alex murmured, fascinated. "That diagnosis sucked."
Watching her heal, Gabriel blanked his mind, until he saw his hand carefully pull aside her jacket, exposing the torn front of her T-shirt. The stab wounds in her chest had also closed and were disappearing.
"She's Kyn." He stared across at Alexandra. "How can this be?"
She shook her head. "Wasn't anything I did this time." She rolled up her sleeve. "But I think I can help her now." She bit her wrist and pressed the wound to Nick's lips.
The younger woman opened her mouth as soon as Alex's blood touched it. She drank and swallowed, and a rosy flush tinted her pale skin under the drying blood on her face.
"That should about do it," Alex said, taking her bloody wrist away.
Nick opened her eyes and pushed out of his arms. She staggered as she got to her feet, then found her balance and moved away from him, Alex, and the other Kyn. As soon as she tasted blood on her lips, she rubbed the back of her hand across them.
"She is Darkyn," Marcella said, and breathed in. "But she smells human."
Nick pulled down the shreds of her T-shirt, and then noticed that she was the center of attention. "Stop doing that. Stop looking at me." She pressed a hand to her face, as if to cover what was happening to it.
"Kind of hard to do that," Alex said, "after the show you just gave us. Honey, exactly how long have you been Kyn?"
"I'm not Kyn. I'm not like you. Any of you." Her voice rose to a shout. "I'm human. Do you hear me? I'm still human."