Magic Breaks

13

SOMEONE JERKED THE ground from under my feet. I hurtled through empty air, weightless, my arms transparent. Bricks flashed before me. I was falling through a round shaft. Directly below me a thick metal grate blocked dark water.

I’m going to die.

I hit the grate and passed through it, as if it were air. My body plunged into the water.

Lukewarm. Wet.

My body turned solid. I kicked, surfaced, and stared at half a sword in my hand. Hugh broke my sword. He broke Slayer.

He broke my sword.

I curled into a ball around my saber, plunging into the water. I’d had Slayer since I was five. Voron gave it to me. I had slept with it under my bed almost every night for the past twenty-two years. Slayer was a part of me and now it was broken. Broken in half. It felt like someone had cut my arm off and it just kept hurting and hurting.

I would kill him. It wasn’t an “if.” It was a “when.”

He broke Slayer.

Above me someone else was falling down, through the grate, and into the water. I choked and swam up. A moment later and Ghastek surfaced next to me with a gasp. He splashed around in panic. I gave him room. About ten seconds later, he stopped thrashing and stared at me.

“It was that water. It marked us and made us vulnerable to d’Ambray’s magic.”

“Yes. Hugh must have bribed one of my people. Or blackmailed them. Or threatened.”

It was Jennifer. It had to be, and if that was the case, Hugh wouldn’t have had to threaten very hard. She must’ve sat there with that bottle in her hands and tried to scrape enough courage together to throw it on me. She couldn’t.

This would not break me. My sword might snap, but I couldn’t. I would win. I would get out of here. I would live. I would see the people I loved again.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I slipped into a quiet, cold calm. Voron’s voice murmured from my memory and I leaned on it like a crutch. “Exits first.”

“Yes. I remember.”

I bent in the water, trying to slide what was left of my sword into the sheath while staying afloat. I missed.

I fucking missed. I hadn’t missed in two decades.

“You were the target,” Ghastek said. “I’m an unfortunate bystander.”

“It looks like that.” I finally managed to slip Slayer’s stump into the sheath.

“Where are we?”

“I have no idea.”

“He knew we would be teleported here. He knew, and he did nothing to stop my teleportation,” Ghastek said.

“It appears d’Ambray believes you’re expendable.”

Ghastek looked at me for a long moment. A muscle in his face jerked. With a guttural snarl, Ghastek punched the water. “That’s it. That’s fucking it!”

Uh-oh. In all the time I’d interacted with Ghastek, he never swore. Ever. The “premier” Master of the Dead was about to throw a tantrum. I braced myself.

“He comes into my city, he throws away my people, he orders me around like I’m his servant and now this? How dare he!”

I sighed. “How dare he!” came out. Could “Does he know who I am?” be far behind?

“I’m not some illiterate he can push around. I won’t be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that fucking Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms.” Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. “Ooo, I’m Hugh d’Ambray, I’m starting a war!”

Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.

“A war I’ve been trying years to avoid. Years!”

He kept saying that.

“Does he think it’s easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can’t understand elementary concepts?”

Good to know where we stood with him.

“I won’t tolerate it. Landon Nez will hear about this.”

Landon Nez was likely in charge of the Masters of the Dead. My father liked to divide his delegated authority. Hugh ran the Iron Dogs, the military branch. Someone had to run the People, the research branch. It was a position with a lot of turnover. Landon Nez must be the latest.

“Troglodyte. Dimwit. Degenerate!” Curses spilled out of Ghastek. “When I get out of here, I’ll throw every vampire at my disposal at him until they drain him dry. Then I’ll cut him to pieces and set his disemboweled body on fire!”

“You may have to get in line.”

He finally remembered I was there. “What?”

“I’ll give you a piece of Hugh to play with when I’m done.”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “Nobody does that to me! I’ll rip his heart out. Does he know who I am?”

“Okay,” I told him. “Get it all out of your system.”

Ghastek dissolved into a torrent of obscenities.

I turned away. We had to get out of this mess and I had to check the place for the possible exit routes.

The grate above us was a pale color that usually meant the metal contained silver. Above the grate a shaft, about twenty feet across, rose a hundred feet straight up. Blue feylanterns thrust from the walls at regular intervals, illuminating the bricks. Too sheer to climb.

The grate itself consisted of inch-wide bars set in a crisscrossed pattern. Usually grates like this had crossbars that were welded or locked in by swaging, but this one showed no seams at all. It had to have been custom made specifically for this shaft.

The ends of the bars disappeared into the wall. I kicked to propel myself up, stretched, and caught the grate with my fingers. So far so good. I brought my legs up and kicked the grate with all my strength. Not just solid. Immovable. Well, at least the holes between the bars weren’t tiny.

I shrugged off my jacket, stuck one sleeve through the grate, and tied it to the other sleeve. Good enough.

I took a deep breath and dove into the murky water. Not cold, but not especially warm either. Evdokia’s sweater would buy me some time. Wool kept you warm even when wet. I swam down along the wall. Darkness and bricks. No secret passages, no tunnels, no pipes with covers that could be pried loose.

Blood pounded in my ears. I had to turn back or I’d run out of air. I did a one-eighty and kicked for the surface. Above me the liquid sky promised light and air. I kicked harder. My lungs screamed for oxygen.

I broke the surface and gulped down air.

“. . . does he think he is?”

This was a prison cell meant to hold a shapeshifter. The silver in the bars would keep them from screwing with it. The water was too deep to kick off the bottom and try to ram the grate. Even if I somehow managed to pry the bars of the grate loose, which wasn’t bloody likely, the grate would fall on us and its sheer weight would drown us. My mind served a nightmarish view of the grate landing on me and pushing me deep into the dark water. No thanks.

The lanterns just added insult to injury. You could see exactly how hopeless the situation was.

You want to be treated like an animal, I’ll treat you like one. Thanks, Hugh. So glad to know you care.

I could do this. I’d trained all my life for it.

Ghastek had fallen silent.

“I don’t suppose that fancy uniform comes with a flotation device?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“A girl can hope.” I dove down and untied the laces on my left boot. The right boot followed. I surfaced to grab some air.

“What are you doing?” Ghastek asked.

“Lightening the load.” I dove, carefully pulled off my left boot, surfaced, caught the grate, and looped the shoelaces over the bar. I tied a knot and left the boot suspended, then did the same with the right boot. “I’ll get tired in an hour or two and I’ll need the shoes if we get out of here.”

I pulled off my belt, threaded it through the bars, and locked it into a loop. Ghastek raised his eyebrows. I thrust my arm through the loop and held on to the grate. The belt kept me in place without treading water.

Ghastek’s face fell. “How long do you think he’ll keep us here?”

“I have no idea.”

He sighed and began stripping off his boots.

• • •

I HUNG MOTIONLESS in the water. Time crawled by. I had no idea how long we’d been here. We had taken turns diving to search our surroundings but found no exit. Eventually we stopped. Sometime while we were diving, the magic wave ended. Now four dim electric lamps lit the shaft. The light, dim and watery, felt oppressive, just another form of torture.

We’d used Ghastek’s jacket and his belt to fashion two loops to hold him upright. With two supports each, we would be able to sleep. Small comfort, but it was something.

A while ago my mouth had gone dry and I had drunk a little from my canteen and passed it to Ghastek.

“Do you always carry a canteen?”

“It’s force of habit.” You could survive many things as long as you had a canteen and a knife.

He had taken a swallow and passed it back. “What happens when we run out of water?”

“We drink this.” I’d nodded at the dark water flooding the shaft.

“It doesn’t seem clean, and even if it is, it won’t stay that way for long.”

“People dying of thirst can’t be choosers.”

We hung in the water.

“What did you do with Nataraja?” I asked.

Ghastek blinked, startled.

“I was always curious. He just kind of disappeared.”

Ghastek sighed.

“We’re not going anywhere for a while,” I told him.

He raised his gaze to the ceiling, pondered it, and shrugged. “Why not? Nataraja was always fond of hands-off management. I never understood why he was placed in charge in the first place. He looked impressive but had very little to do with the actual function of the office. I oversaw research and development, and Mulradin handled the financial aspects. A year ago Nataraja’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He wandered around, mumbling to himself. He killed that monstrosity he kept as a pet.”

“Wiggles? His giant snake?”

“Yes. A journeyman found sections of her strewn throughout the upper floor. A report was made to the main office. A high-ranking member of the Golden Legion arrived and conducted some interviews. Nataraja disappeared. We were told he was recalled.”

“Do you think he was recalled?”

Ghastek shrugged. “What’s the point of speculating? Mulradin and I were left jointly in charge of the office until either one of us ‘distinguished’ ourselves or a replacement was assigned. I suppose now the question of distinction is moot. He’s dead and I’m here.” He spat the last word.

Now he had gone to sleep. It was best I slept, too. I closed my eyes and imagined being on the beach with Curran. It was such a pleasant dream . . .

• • •

OUR CANTEEN HAD gone dry. It held enough water for over two days if carefully rationed, and we’d split it in half. We’d been imprisoned here for more than twenty-four hours. Probably closer to forty-eight. We had begun drinking the water around us and it didn’t sit so well in my stomach.

The water in the shaft had turned colder some hours ago. The temperature hadn’t actually changed, but water sapped body heat about twenty-five times faster than air. We’d been soaking long enough to really feel it.

I was starving. My stomach was a bottomless pit filled with ache. I’d kick myself for not gorging on something delicious while I was in the Keep that morning, but it would waste too much energy. I had to conserve every drop. Hang in the water. Last. Survive.

When the cold got to me, I untangled myself from my belt and swam. The exertion burned through what meager supplies of energy I had left, but it made me feel warmer. Until the shivering started again.

“We’re going to die here,” Ghastek said.

“No,” I told him.

“What makes you say that?”

“Curran will come for me.”

Ghastek laughed, a brittle sour sound. “You don’t even know where we are. We could be halfway across the country.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’ll come for me.” He would turn the planet inside out until he found me—and I’d do the same for him.

Ghastek shook his head.

“You have to will yourself to survive,” I told him.

He didn’t look at me.

“I’m not dying in this hole. Curran will come for me and we’ll get out of here. This isn’t how it ends. Hugh doesn’t get to win. We’ll survive this. One day I’m going to ram my broken sword right through his throat.”

Ghastek peered at me. His voice was hoarse. “Let me reiterate. We’ve been teleported to some unknown place probably thousands of miles away from everyone you know, possibly on another continent. The man who put us here likely teleported as well, taking the knowledge of our location with him, so nobody we know has even an infinitesimal idea of where we might be. We have no way to communicate with the outside world. Even if we could communicate by some magical means with those we know, we would be of no assistance, because we don’t know where we are. We’re floating in cold murky water.”

“It’s pretty warm, actually.”

He raised his finger. “I haven’t finished. We have no food. We have been here for at least forty-eight hours, because the hunger pangs I’m feeling are now less intense. Right now our bodies are burning through what meager fat reserves we have, which will result in severe ketosis, which in turn will lead to blood acidosis, bringing with it nausea and diarrhea. Soon faintness, weakness, and vertigo will follow. As our brains are deprived of the necessary nutrients, we’ll begin to hallucinate, and then we’ll suffer catastrophic organ damage, until finally we will die of cardiac arrest. It’s a brutal and torturous death. Mahatma Gandhi survived for twenty-one days when campaigning for India’s independence, but considering that we’re in the water and our bodies are going through nutrients at an accelerated rate, I give us two weeks, maximum.”

“If you ever decide on a career change, I’d avoid motivational speaking.”

“Don’t you understand? The only person who knows where we are is d’Ambray, and he put us here to slowly starve to death. Even if he changes his mind and decides to pull you out, since he has some strange fascination with you, he has no such relationship with me. I’m disposable. What few dealings I had with this man were abrupt to the point of rudeness. He clearly has no regard for me.”

“I promise you now that we went in here together and we’re leaving together. Curran will get me out and I won’t leave you behind.”

“To expect that Curran will somehow come and rescue you before we die is absurd.”

“You don’t know him like I do.”

“Kate! You are delusional!”

“This isn’t my first time trapped without food,” I said. “I used to have to do this frequently. We have water, which is a huge advantage. We’re not dead yet.”

He stared at me.

“I’ve survived the Arizona desert. I’ve survived in a forest scorched by fires. I’ve been starved, drowned, frozen, but I’m still here. The key to survival is to not give up. You have to fight for your life. You have to have hope. If you let go of hope, it’s over. Giving up is dying quietly with your hands bound in a hut where the man who tied you up threw you. Hope is kicking your way out and running ten miles across snow and forest against all odds.”

Ghastek blinked. “Did you actually do this?”

“Yes.”

“Who put you in the hut?”

“My father.”

Ghastek opened his mouth. “Why? What kind of a father does that to a child?”

“The only one I had. Don’t give up. Don’t let the troglodyte win, Ghastek.”

He shook his head.

His brain was too loud. He needed to stop thinking, because his mind kept running in circles, driving him deeper into despair. Despair was the kiss of death.

We needed to conserve energy, but if I didn’t distract him, he would fold on me. “You keep analyzing the situation and the more you dissect it, the more hopeless it seems. Try not to think about it. Talk to me instead.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Why did you decide to become a navigator? Did you always want to pilot the undead? Why didn’t you strike out on your own? Why the People?” There, that ought to keep him occupied.

He hung motionless in the water. “Ghastek isn’t my real name. I grew up in Massachusetts, near Andover. I was smart and poor. Not crushingly poor. I’ve known children who were poorer. Poverty is when your parents get home from the first job and hurry up to eat their mac and cheese, because in five hours they have to get up for their second job and they want to catch some sleep. We weren’t quite that poor. We had food. We owned a house. I saw both of my parents at the dinner table at the same time.

“In eighth grade, there was a science tournament between the local schools. The local private preparatory academy was participating, primarily to demonstrate the vast superiority of its education over the public system. I won. The academy gave me a scholarship. I remember how happy my parents were for me. It was a Yale feeder school and they thought I now had a future. So the next school year, I started at the prep school. It was a forty-five-minute drive and every day my father would take me there in his work van. My father repaired gas lines. The van had a logo on it, written in large yellow letters: GasTek. The name of the company. Nobody was interested in learning my name. I became that Gastek kid, then Gastek, and then one of the class clowns thought it would be hilarious to slip an h in there. Ghastek. A not-so-subtle association with ‘ghastly.’ Ghastek or sometimes simply ‘the Creep.’ By the end of the year even the teachers didn’t call me by my name.”

I could hear the old bitterness in his voice. He’d come to terms with it, and it no longer hurt, but it was still there.

“I realized in that first year that I would never be accepted. It was understood by all that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how I brilliant I was, the best I could hope for was to work for one of my dumber classmates when we grew up. They would be the owners. I would be an employee. You see, it’s not enough to be smart. If you’re handsome or a good athlete, they might grant you some degree of acceptance, because adolescents are shallow. You might become a trophy for one of them, if you let yourself be used, but I was neither. Being rich would open the door a crack, but they would never let you in the whole way. They’ll spend your money and laugh at you behind your back. I’ve seen it. You see, money, brains, looks, none of it is enough. There is this thing called legacy. It wasn’t just about where you went to school or who with. It was about where your grandfather went to school and who his best friends were.”

“I take it the school wasn’t your favorite place.”

“I fucking hated it. Then the People’s recruiter came in when I was a junior. They brought in a caged vampire and let us try one by one. The feeling when I first realized I could control it . . . I can’t describe it. It was right. For the first time in my life, something felt right. I made the undead unlock the door of the cage and then I chased my darling classmates with it. The recruiter wasn’t strong enough to take it away from me. They ran from me. It didn’t matter how rich they were. It didn’t matter what their name was. Their august grandparents couldn’t save them, because if they had been there, they would’ve run from me, too.”

Ghastek smiled, a bright happy smile. “Some of them begged me to stop.”

He looked so happy I tried my best to scoot a little farther away from him in my restraints.

“They expelled me within the hour.” He laughed. “By the end of the day, the People brought my parents a check totaling more than they’d made together in the previous three years. A hardship fee to make their lives a little easier if I chose to leave home and study with the People. But my parents didn’t want to let me go. The money made no difference to them.”

“They loved you,” I guessed.

He nodded. “They did. I put the check in their hands and walked out of the house. I wanted the power. I wanted respect and money too, but most of all I wanted power. You asked me why I’m a navigator. Because I love it. I love when my magic makes that first connection. I love the precision of it, the subtlety, the art of it. If you could pilot, you’d understand.”

Oh, if he only knew.

“It’s like being connected to a spring of pure power. It nourishes you. I have risen so far. I’m now ranked seventeenth in the Golden Legion.”

The Legions were Roland’s top Masters of the Dead. Gold was the top fifty, and Silver was the next fifty. “I thought it was the Gold Legion.”

“They changed it last year,” Ghastek said. “‘Golden’ sounds better. Navigation is like anything else. It takes practice and discipline and eventually the hard work pays off. Every year my power is increasing. I could be in the top ten, but I choose to not make the bid for that spot.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Ghastek said.

“Try me.”

“No. Enough to say that I worked for years and now all of my efforts have brought me here. To this . . . hole in the ground. I’m going to rest now. I’ve talked enough for today.”

Ghastek grew quiet. Minutes passed. His head dropped.

I could picture him in the yard of the school, a skinny kid in cheap clothes sending an undead after the people who looked down on him. Who knew?

I closed my eyes. It was all I could do.

We would get out of here.

Curran would come for me. Of course he would.

• • •

A FIREPLACE LIT the room, and warmth flowed from it, so luxuriously hot and soft that for a long moment I simply basked in it. I was warm and dry. The savory scent of seared meat floated through the air. Food. This was heaven.

“Hey, baby,” Hugh said.

Heaven just got canceled.

I turned. He was sprawled in a large wooden chair, leaning against the back, big legs in blue jeans stretched out in front of him. His shirt was off and the firelight played over the sharply defined muscles of his chest and arms. A small pendant hung around his neck on a plain steel chain. I liked how he was sitting, all loose and relaxed. It would make it harder for him to dodge and there was a lovely heavy chair next to me.

I grabbed the chair.

Except I didn’t move.

And I didn’t have any arms or legs either. Awesome.

Hugh chuckled.

“Let me guess, this is one of those special dreams.” At least my mouth still worked.

“Something like that. It’s a projection.”

“Aha. But the magic is down.”

“Nope. Came back about fifteen minutes ago. You’ll feel it when you wake up.”

“How long have I been in your little prison cell?” Might as well get whatever information I could.

“Three days.”

That long. Hell.

“How’s the water?” Hugh asked. “Getting cold yet?”

Asshole. “So that’s how you teleported out of the burning castle? Did you have water on you somewhere?”

He touched the pendant hanging from his neck and lifted it. The light of the fire played on the glass of the bullet-shaped pendant. Water sloshed inside.

“I always have one on me. It takes a second to crush. Once the water touches you, a power word pulls you through to the source of the water.”

So the water Jennifer dumped on me had come from the shaft where my body was currently floating.

“Teleporting is a last resort,” Hugh said. “It takes a few seconds for the transfer depending on the distance. If tech hits while you’re in transit, you’re dead. But you left me no choice.”

“What did you promise Jennifer to betray me?”

“Power,” he said. “She was supposed to drench you in private, so nobody would suspect her once I triggered the teleportation. You would disappear and she’d use the time while everyone was running around looking for you to solidify her hold on the clan. In a week or two one of my people would take out Desandra for her, which would’ve made things easier. Except she fucked up, and then her boy screwed the pooch even further. I imagine they’re fitting the stone on her grave about now. I told you before: shapeshifters are difficult to train. You’ve got to get them young.”

“You’re a sick fuck.”

“I know.” Hugh nodded at the table next to him. “Hungry?”

Food covered the table. Fresh bread, still warm and crusty from the oven waited on a cutting board. A rib eye roast, the fat crisped and melting, lorded over a bowl of soup, a tub of golden butter, and a dish of mashed potatoes. The air smelled of seared meat, roasted garlic, and fresh bread.

My mouth watered, while my stomach clenched in pain. How come I didn’t have arms to throw a chair at him, but I still had a mouth and a stomach? The Universe wasn’t fair.

“I’m an hour away,” Hugh said. “If you ask me, I’ll come and fish you out and all this will be yours. All you have to do is say, ‘Hugh, please.’”

“Stick a thumb up your ass and twirl on it.”

He smiled, cut a piece of bread, and spread butter on it. I watched the butter slide over the slice. He bit into it and chewed.

Bastard.

“Are you done with your food porn show? I have a cold wet hellhole I need to get back to.”

“Sooner or later you’ll break,” he said.

“Keep hoping.”

“You’re a survivor. Voron put you on the edge of that cliff again and again until he conditioned you to claw onto life. You’ll do whatever you have to do to survive, and I’m your only chance of getting out. At first you’ll balk, but with every passing hour my offer will look better and better. You’ll convince yourself that dying will accomplish nothing and you should at least go out with a bang. You’ll tell yourself that you’re accepting my offer just so you can stick that broken sword into my chest and feel it cut through my heart. Even if you die afterward, the fact that I’ll stop breathing makes your death mean something. So you’ll call me. And you’ll try to kill me. Except you’ve gone three days without food, and that body . . .” He tilted his head and looked me over slowly. “That body burns through calories like fire goes through gasoline. You’re running out of reserves. I can put you down with one hit.”

“You’re right about the sword. You broke mine. I owe you one.”

He tapped his naked chest over his heart. “This is the spot. Give it a shot, Kate. Let’s see what happens.”

“What is it you want from me, Hugh?”

“Short term, I’d like you to say my name with a please attached to it. I’d like to walk into Jester Park with you on my arm.”

Jester Park, Iowa. Once a park in Des Moines, and now one of my father’s retreats.

“Long term, I want to win. And I will win, Kate. You’ll put up a good fight, but eventually you’ll be sleeping in my bed and fighting with me back to back. We’ll be good together. I promise you.”

“What part of no don’t you understand?”

“The part where I don’t get what I want. You need to be taught your place. It’s not at the Keep.”

Something inside me snapped. “And you’re going to teach me where my place is?”

“Yes.”

Time for a reality check, Hugh. “You have what you have only because my father mixed your blood with his. Everything you do and everything you are, you owe to someone else and when he’s done using you, he’ll toss you aside.”

Hugh’s eyebrows came together.

I kept going. “I’ve carved my own life out of this world. You try getting by without Roland’s help and then come back and lecture me. Oh wait, you did, and first I kicked your ass, then Curran broke your spine and threw you into a fire. How does that feel, Hugh? To know you’re second best?”

“You’re pushing it,” he told me.

“You’re hired help. You can’t even tell Roland no. So how about you shut up and go back to what you do best. Roland’s boots need cleaning.”

“Suit yourself.” He put his hands behind his head and smiled. “I have nothing but time.”

I jerked awake. The cold water washed over me. Ghastek stared at me, bleary-eyed.

“Curran will come for me,” I told him.

• • •

MY LEGS WERE cramping. The cramps came with sickening frequency, twisting me, so painful I would’ve screamed if I hadn’t been so weak. We had gone through four magic waves now. During the third, Ghastek spoke to the wall begging his mother not to die. We were on our fourth wave now and he had fallen silent hours ago.

I’d tried using power words, but none of them worked. They just bounced off the walls of the shaft. Hugh must’ve warded it.

I tried to sleep as much as I could. When I couldn’t, I counted the bricks. Lately they had turned blurry and out of focus, as if I were looking at them through hot air rising from the pavement. I was no longer Kate. I was a thing. Cold. Exhausted. Starving. Filthy.

I don’t want to die in this dark hole. I don’t want to die!

I just want to see the sun. I want to hug Julie one more time. I want to kiss Curran.

Maybe I was wrong.

Maybe he wouldn’t find me in time.

• • •

WARM. DRY. FOOD. Hugh.

“Five days in. It’s an anniversary. I thought I’d check on you. The offer is still open.”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay then.”

Cold, wet darkness. Ghastek convulsing in his restraints. Holding his head above water. Don’t die. We will make it. We have to make it.

• • •

THE WATER SPLASHES me. I no longer know if it’s warm or cold.

The wall of the shaft falls apart. Curran looks at me. I see him. I see his gray eyes. I hear his voice. “I’m coming, baby. Hold on. Just hold on for me.”

He’s come for me! He’s come to get me out. “I love you so much . . .”

I just want to touch him, but I can’t get through. Something is blocking me. He is right there. I can see him right there. I can’t . . .

“Kate! Kate!” Something is trying to hold me back, but I have to get to Curran. I have to get out.

“It’s not real.” Ghastek’s voice. “It’s not real. See?”

Curran fades. There are only the stones, the dark cold stones and smears of my blood, where I’d clawed at them.

• • •

SIX MAGIC WAVES. I float in a lake of blood. I’m hallucinating, but I can taste it on my lips, the salty hot flavor of a human life.

It will pass. It’s just the hunger.

Ghastek, blurry, his face out of focus, floating in the blood next to me. “I’m afraid.”

Have to keep him alive. “We’ll make it.”

“I just wanted life,” he whispers. “I watched my mother die. She suffered. She suffered so much. I can’t do that. I can’t. I’m too afraid. I did all this because I wanted the Builder’s gift. I wanted him to make me immortal.”

He stares at me with deranged eyes. He doesn’t really see me.

“Ghastek?”

“My name is Matthew.” His voice is a feverish whisper. “If the Builder cares about you, if he needs you, he’ll let you live forever. He won’t let you die.”

“I care about you, Matthew. Hold my hand. I won’t let you die.”

• • •

SEVEN MAGIC WAVES.

Curran stands on the grate above me and I talk to him. I say, I love you all. This is not the end. I won’t roll over and die.

I wish I had been a better person. I wish things had been different.

This place won’t kill me. I will survive. I won’t break.

Curran smiles at me. He’s holding his hand out. I know he’ll come for me.

He’ll come for me. He just might be too late.

• • •

NOISE. LOW RHYTHMIC noise, like the pounding of some giant heart.

It keeps getting louder.

It keeps coming.

I’m hallucinating again.

Pain.

My left hand is gripping the grate. There is a chunk of brick on the other side of the grate next to it.

There is a chunk of a brick.

My mind started working slowly, like a rusty engine trying to will itself back to life.

Thud! Something hit the wall above us.

Another brick bounced off the grate.

I reached over and shook Ghastek. He hung motionless in his restraints. I could barely move him.

Thud!

“Ghastek,” I whispered. “Ghastek . . .”

His eyes opened slowly.

Thud.

Bricks showered the grate. In the dim light of the electric lamps, the shaft wavered, blurry, but I saw the hole about twenty feet up. Another thud. More bricks plunged down, bouncing off the metal. Someone moved at the top of the hole, leaped, and landed on the grate. Gray eyes looked at me.

Curran.

Please let it be real.

He stared at me. His eyes were horrified. “Kate? Jesus Christ.”

My lips moved. “Please be real.”

He pulled a metal hacksaw out of his backpack and started slicing through the grate. “Stay with me, baby.”

This was a dream. Another hallucination. Or Hugh screwing with my head. I braced myself. I would wake up and he would disappear.

Two others landed on the grate. Jim. Thomas, the rat alpha.

Jim saw me and swore.

“Get me out,” Ghastek whispered. “Please.”

“I should leave you in there, you sonovabitch,” Curran snarled. “Cut him out.”

Jim pulled out another saw.

The blade sliced through the bars above me. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Please be real. I reached through the bars and touched his fingers in cutoff gloves. His hand was warm.

“Hold on, baby. I’ve got you.”

A creature tumbled out of the hole and landed on the grate. Hairless and muscled, it crouched on all fours as if it had never walked upright. Thick curved talons crowned the toes of its feet. Its chest was wide, its hindquarters muscled like those of a boxer dog. A bone ridge protruded from its spine. The massive jaws unhinged and finger-sized fangs pierced the air. Its eyes, deep set and bright red, burned with hunger.

A vampire. An ancient vampire, so old it sent a shiver down my spine.

Curran whipped around. The vamp leaped. Curran’s right hand closed on the vamp’s throat. He spun, oblivious to the talons ripping at his jacket, and drove the undead’s head into the wall. The vamp’s skull bounced off the brick. Curran bared his teeth and smashed it into the wall again and again, his face savage.

The bones cracked. Undead blood splashed the bricks. Curran ran the bloodsucker into the brick one last time, and twisted its head off like he was wringing out the laundry. The vamp body fell one way, the head went the other.

“Show-off,” I whispered.

“Hold on. Almost through.”

He gripped the grate. The skin of his fingers turned gray—the silver burning him. Curran strained. His legs shook under the pressure. The last two bars bent, and he pushed part of the grate aside like a lid on a can. He dropped to his knees and reached for me. I slid out of my restraints. Someone must’ve turned my legs to lead, because they pulled me down like an anchor. I sank. The water rose over my neck and my mouth . . . He grabbed my arm, pulled me up through the grate, out into the air, and hugged me to him.

He smelled like Curran. He felt like him. I buried my face in the bend of his neck. His skin was so hot, it burned.

“Don’t die on me.” He kissed my face, pulling off his jacket. “Don’t die on me.”

I couldn’t stand. I just slumped there on top of the grate, holding on to him.

He wrapped me in his jacket, closed his arms around me, and jumped. Then we were in a narrow hallway. He carried me through it.

“I love you,” I told him.

“I love you, too.” His voice was raw. “Stay alive, Kate.”

“Ghastek . . .”

“They’ll get him. Don’t worry. Stay with me.”

“Where would I go?”

He squeezed me to him. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”

“Dibs,” I told him. “He broke my sword.”

“Fuck the sword. I almost lost you.” He kicked a door open and lowered me to a fire built on the concrete floor. “Andrea, clothes! Quickly.”

Curran ripped my shirt in half. My pants came off—someone was pulling off my sodden clothes. The heat of the fire swirled around me. Christopher swung into my view, his hair snow white, and held a thermos to my lips. “Drink, mistress.”

I sipped. Chicken broth. I drank again and he pulled it back. “Not so fast. You’ll get sick.”

“Hang on,” Andrea told me, and slipped socks on my feet. “Don’t ever pull this shit again, you hear me?”

“Sure,” I whispered.

“Here.” Robert handed Curran a shirt.

“What are all of you doing here?” I whispered, as Curran put it on me.

“We came to save you.” Christopher smiled. “Even me. I didn’t want to come back to this place, but I had to. I couldn’t leave you in a cage.”

He gave me more broth. I drank. Curran hugged me to him.

We were in some sort of large room. A fire burned in the center, eating the remains of office furniture. A pile of cubicle partitions rested against one wall. There were windows in the ceiling. The room looked like it was on its side. That made no sense.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“You don’t know?” Christopher’s blue eyes widened. “We’re in Mishmar.”

Roland’s tower prison. I only knew what Voron told me of it. When the business district of Omaha fell, my father had bought the rubble from the impoverished city. He had taken colossal chunks of fallen skyscrapers, two, three, four stories tall, pulled them into a remote field somewhere in Iowa, and piled them onto each other into a huge tower, held together by magic and encircled by a wall. It was a vicious place, an ever-changing labyrinth, where exits sealed themselves and walls took on new shapes. Feral vampires roamed here. Things for which nobody had any name because they had no right to exist hunted here. There was no escape from Mishmar. Nobody ever got out.

“You came into Mishmar for me?”

Curran hugged me to him, cradling me like I was a child. “Of course I did.”

I loved him so much. “You’re a fucking idiot.” My voice was hoarse. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“Because I love you. Give her more broth. She’s coming around.”

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Hugh checks up on me in my dreams.”

Curran’s eyes went gold. “Let him come.”

“A vampire!” Andrea shouted.

The window above and to the left of us broke. Shards of glass and wood cascaded to the floor. A vampire fell into the room, its mind a hot spark in front of me. It landed on all fours, old, gaunt, and inhuman. A sharp bone crest protruded from its back. Another ancient one.

The vamp shot forward and then stopped abruptly.

“I’m still . . . a Master of the Dead,” Ghastek said from a blanket on the floor. “Kill it before I lose consciousness.”