“I’ve never heard of undead doing that,” I said.
“There have been cases,” he said. “It involves severe starvation or controlled feeding. I’ve been able to reproduce it before in a laboratory environment. There are”—he yawned—“many variables. A vampire who feeds on other undead undergoes morphological changes. It must be done very carefully, or the vampire may die. Some undead . . .” He yawned again. “A consistent diet of other vampires over time . . . What was I saying?”
I had trouble concentrating, too. “Something about vampires feeding on other vampires.”
“It makes them feel older, more powerful to us,” Ghastek said. “The navigators can feel an undead’s age, and a diet of other undead makes a vampire feel older.”
I had met vampires that felt old enough to be pre-Shift before and I never could get over it. It should’ve been an impossibility. Before the Shift, the magic was so weak, it was barely there. The Immortuus pathogen didn’t manifest until after the first catastrophic magic wave. Now I knew. They weren’t really old. They were cannibals.
“Older how? By decades?”
“Yes.” Ghastek yawned. “Unless you just want an overpowered specimen, it’s not cost-effective to continue to feed a vampire other undead over time. The procurement of vampires is expensive. It’s really a waste.” He yawned again. “You have to tell your lion to avoid killing them. Cannibalistic vampires target the weaker of their species and they react to undead blood. Kill one, and a swarm will converge on the corpse.”
He closed his eyes.
“How many vampires are in Mishmar?” Robert asked.
Ghastek opened his eyes. “I’ve been here only once, five years ago. I had to take a test to be admitted to the Golden Legion. You must walk into Mishmar and bring out a vampire. Back then, I felt hundreds.”
Hundreds. We had to go. The faster we got out of here, the better our chances of survival. Ghastek and I were keeping us anchored here. I needed to get mobile fast.
I reached over for the container and began to eat more of Doolittle’s paste.
“Thank you,” Ghastek said.
“For what?”
“For keeping me alive.” He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Curran pushed through the door. His blond hair looked longer than it had before he left for North Carolina. Heavy stubble sheathed his jaw. He also hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks. Blood splattered his clothes, some of it old, some new.
He landed next to me. I put my arms around him and kissed him. The taste of him against my tongue was magic. He kissed me back and held me against him. “Did you eat?”
“I did. It tastes much better than the feast Hugh was offering.”
“I’ll break his neck,” Curran whispered, his voice vibrating with so much menace that I almost winced. The muscles on Curran’s arms hardened with tension. He was probably picturing killing Hugh in his head. I wouldn’t want to be Hugh d’Ambray at this point. Between me and Curran, his prognosis for a long life didn’t look good.
“Ghastek says the vampires here are feeding on each other. If you kill one, they’ll swarm. How’s the barricade?” I asked.
“It will hold for a couple more hours.” He stroked my shoulder and kissed my hair. I leaned against him. It felt so good just to know he was here.
“You can have one more nap and then I’ll carry you,” he said.
“I might manage a walk.”
“That would be good, but if not, I’ve got you.”
I wrapped my arms around him again. There were things I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how. He’d crossed half of the country, broken into an impenetrable prison, and found me against all odds. There were no words to explain to him how I felt about that.
“I love you,” I told him. There. Nice and simple. “I knew you would find me.”
He smiled at me. “I would never stop looking.”
And he wouldn’t. He would’ve kept going until he found me. I had no doubt of that.
He reached into his jacket and handed me something wrapped in a rag. I unfolded the fabric. Slayer’s other half. I imagined sliding it into Hugh’s eye. It was that or start crying, and I would not cry in Mishmar.
“Can it be repaired?” Curran asked quietly.
“No.” I’d broken the tip off before, once, and Slayer regrew it, but this break was right in the middle. My saber was done. An old friend had died. Thinking about it made me cringe. I stroked the blade. It was like a part of me had been cut off. I felt . . . naked. “Even if I managed to fix it somehow, the blade would always have a weak spot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Hugh got under my skin and I got careless.”
“Don’t worry, I plan to get under his skin, too.” He curled his fingers as he did when he had claws. “He won’t like it.”
We sat quietly for a long minute.
“I brought your other saber,” he said.
“The Cherkassy?”
Curran nodded.
“Can I have it?”
He reached over and pulled it from the pile of backpacks. I drew the slightly curved metal blade from the sheath and ran my fingers along it. Not the same.
Curran nudged the container of food toward me. “Eat.”
“Feeding me again, Your Furriness?”
“Of course,” he said. “I love you.”
It made me feel warm all over.
“I figured out how Hugh teleports,” I said between bites. “He wears an emergency vial of water around his neck. He breaks it and the water wets his skin, he says a power word, and it teleports him to the water’s source. Once the process begins, you go ethereal for a few seconds from start to finish. He teleports only as a last resort—if the tech hits during transit, he’s toast.”
“Good to know.”
“Was Gene’s invitation a setup?”
Curran shrugged. “I don’t know. But when we get back, I’m planning on asking him. He is our guest at the Keep.” The way he said “guest” didn’t bode well for Gene.
“What happened after I left?”
Curran leaned against an overturned chair. “I chased Hugh across the field, but he teleported before I could get to him. I got his horse. You want it?”
“His Friesian? No thanks. It looks pretty, but they don’t make the best riding horses. Did they tell you I rode a giant donkey?”
He blinked. “You what?”
“A giant black-and-white donkey. She was like twelve feet tall and bad tempered. I left her in the Keep’s stables. I’d rented her from a livery stable, so we may have to buy her now, because of all the time that’s passed. Her name is Cuddles.”
He struggled with it for a minute. “Sometimes hunger has strange side effects . . .”
“No, I was there,” Robert said, his eyes still closed. “I’ve seen Cuddles. Long ears.”
Curran’s eyes widened.
“If we get out of here, I’d like to keep her,” I told him.
“If you finish eating this food, I’ll get you a whole herd of giant donkeys.”
“That’s the strangest bribe I’ve ever heard of,” Robert said.
“I don’t want a herd. I just want one.” I ate more of Doolittle’s paste. “What are you going to do with Hugh’s Friesian?”
“I don’t know. Hell, I might keep it. I’ll walk it around like a dog on a leash.”
I laughed. “You hate horses.”
“No,” Curran said. “I don’t trust them. There’s a difference.”
“So what else happened after I went poof?”
“Then I had a problem,” he said. “You were gone, Hugh had disappeared, and Ghastek vanished, too. The People were screaming bloody murder and running back and forth. Jim told me about Brandon and his water trick. I needed more information and I wanted to know what inside Brandon made him so stupid that he would do this, so I opened Brandon’s stomach and pulled his guts out while Jennifer watched. I told her that if she moved an inch, I would do t
hings to her that would make what I was doing to Brandon seem civilized and kind.”
He lost control. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times Curran had let himself go, and they were branded in my memory. He prided himself on always being in control. I finally did it. I had driven the Beast Lord crazy. He must’ve been either really scared for me or angry, or both. I knew exactly how he felt. I couldn’t roar, but if he’d been teleported off that field, I’d make the entire Pack cringe and wet themselves.
“Did Jennifer move?” I asked.
“No. Stood there quietly as he screamed. Brandon didn’t give me anything constructive. It was Barabas who remembered that Jennifer had walked into your meeting with that bottle.”
“She couldn’t do it,” I told him. “I think she went into the meeting planning on it, but she backed out at the last minute.”
“Since Brandon wasn’t helping, I gave what was left of him to Mahon and told Jennifer it was her turn. She said I wouldn’t dare. I assured her I would. I grabbed her by her throat and shook her a little. I may have roared.”
Robert sighed. “He was in half-form. He’d grown claws the size of walrus tusks and they were wet with Brandon’s blood. His fur stood on end, his mouth was this big”—Robert held his hands about two feet apart—“he’d sprouted an extra set of fangs, and his eyes looked on fire. He was roaring so loud the windows in the Keep vibrated, and when he spoke, he sounded like a demon from hell. I would’ve told him anything.”
I brushed my fingers along his stubbled cheek gently. “Did you have a failure of control, Your Furriness?”
“No,” Curran said. “I was perfectly in control.”
Across the room, Robert shook his head. “He was holding Jennifer up a foot off the ground the whole time he questioned her.”
“Did you strangle the wolf alpha?” Not that she didn’t deserve it.
Curran grimaced. “Of course not. I needed information. After I put her face in my mouth, we agreed that it was in her best interests to tell me what I wanted to know. Then the floodgates opened and all sorts of interesting things fell out. She had been approached five months ago, just after Daniel died. A man met her in a restaurant and told her that he was from Ice Fury, and that they wanted inside information. At first she told them to take a hike, but then paranoia set in. When we left for Europe, they offered her panacea. She took it.”
She was pregnant, alone, and afraid. Her baby was also Daniel’s baby, and she would do anything to keep her child from going loup. But to betray everyone in the Pack . . .
“She started feeding them intel about us,” Curran continued. “In return, they supplied her with panacea and other favors. Do you remember when Foster and Kara’s business burned down?”
Foster and Kara Hudson served as Jennifer’s betas for a while. She’d inherited them from Daniel. They had owned a small textile mill and clothes shop until it burned to the ground while we were gone on our “let’s get panacea” trip. “Arson? Against her own betas?”
Curran nodded. “For a while it looked like Foster might challenge Jennifer, but after the fire, he took a loan from the Pack and both he and Kara stepped down from the beta spot to focus on rebuilding. Jim had thought it smelled bad so he checked it out, but neither Jennifer nor anybody else from Clan Wolf was anywhere near the fire at the time.”
Wow. I didn’t think she’d sink that low. Kate Daniels, brilliant judge of character. Not.
“Then we came back with Desandra, she took the beta spot, and things got worse and worse, until Jennifer demanded they make her go away. Before the Conclave, Jennifer was given the bottle and told that either she dumped it on you in the morning and Desandra would be taken care of, or evidence of her betrayal would be presented to the Pack.”
“You can have everything you want if you do what we say, or we’ll take away everything you have?”
“Yes. According to her, she couldn’t do it, so Brandon did it for her. She didn’t ask him. He volunteered.” Curran grimaced.
Robert shrugged. “I can’t decide if her failure to completely betray us was to her credit, because she still had some scruples, or if it was the ultimate sign of her cowardice, because she’d manipulated someone else into doing it.”
“I don’t care,” Curran said.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“Next I dropped Jennifer down and told Desandra that if she wanted to lead the wolves, now was a good time. To her credit, she didn’t drag it out. Jennifer put up a good fight, but in the end it was a quick kill.”
I should’ve hated Jennifer. If she had somehow escaped discovery, I would’ve killed her when I returned, not because I disliked her, but because she was a traitor and a liability. I should’ve been angry, but Hugh had a monopoly on all of my anger lately. All I felt for Jennifer was sadness. Two years ago everything was great for her. She had a husband who loved her and a job that fulfilled her. They were planning on having children. Her life held so much promise. Instead it all went sideways and ended in a tragedy.
“What happens to the baby?” I asked.
“Winona took her,” Curran said.
One of Jennifer’s sisters. She had five. “Are they going to cause a problem?”
“I don’t give a flying fuck,” Curran said. “If they decide to cause a problem, I’ll cull them down until they stop being a problem.”
Okay then. “How did you find me?”
“I found Nick first,” Curran said.
Oh boy. “Please don’t tell me you opened up the crusader’s stomach to see if he had something stupid in him, too.”
“I didn’t have to. He told me where you were.” Curran waved his hand at the grimy office. “This was Hugh’s backup plan. If he didn’t get his way, you would end up in Mishmar. I went back to the Keep and asked for volunteers to come with me. We had to move fast. Christopher showed up with your hair and said he could track you with it.”
“You brought Jim.” I smiled.
Curran rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t planning on it. Then Jim and I snarled at each other for half an hour, and Raphael and Mahon decided that this time they could stay behind. I had Jim and Christopher. Derek wanted to come, but he wasn’t at one hundred percent, so I wouldn’t take him. Robert and Thomas volunteered. Andrea, too.”
Oh, you bloody idiot. She shouldn’t have come. I’d give her shit for it when we got out. I glanced at Robert. “Why?”
He sighed. “Because I understand. If my mate were gone, I would find him. No matter what it took. He would do the same for me. Where one of us goes, the other follows.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“With the two of them, we had enough, but we needed a medmage. Doolittle couldn’t go, but he asked for volunteers.” Curran nodded at Nasrin.
The medmage shrugged. “I go where I’m needed.”
“Then I had to make fucking arrangements to make sure the Pack didn’t fall apart while we were gone. The Council pitched a fit. We didn’t set out until the next morning.”
The way he said that didn’t bode well for the Council. “They didn’t want you to go.”
“Somebody got excited and told me that I couldn’t go since it wasn’t in the best interests of the Pack,” Curran said.
Figured. No matter how well I served the Pack, my life wasn’t worth risking Curran or the other alphas. It should’ve hurt, but I was used to it by now.
“They were panicked,” Robert said.
“What did you do?” I asked Curran.
He shrugged. “I reminded them that I was the one who decided things.”
“It took us two days to get here,” Robert said. “There is a really fast ley line coming back from here that starts around St. Louis, but there’s almost nothing going northwest.”
“The roads are shit,” Curran said. “We didn’t exactly know where Mishmar was in the first place, and when we finally got here it took another day to find a way in. But the real issue was
that we couldn’t move during tech. Christopher suspended your hair in some solution and we used it as a compass, but it only worked while the magic was up. I had to sit on my hands and wait half of the time. We’ve been wandering through the damn place for days.”
Poor Christopher. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, but not there. I cannot go there again. But he did. He came to Mishmar for me. If we got out of here alive, I would find a way to repay him.
“Did Christopher tell you to bring the saws?”
Curran nodded. “He said there were prison cells . . .”
Curran raised his head. Robert turned toward the doorway.
A rhythmic staccato of shots was coming from somewhere down the hallway. Ten to one, it was Andrea.
Thomas stuck his head into the doorway. “We have to move.”
• • •
WE RAN THROUGH the narrow hallway. Well, I wasn’t really running. I was dragging myself forward.
Curran leaned toward me. “Are you going to be a hardass about this?”
“What do you think?” We were already down by one, because Ghastek couldn’t walk and Jim decided to carry him. I wouldn’t tie up Curran’s hands by making him carry me, too.
“If you say you got it, you got it. But if you fall down, I’ll pick you up.”
“Deal.”
Falling didn’t seem like such a bad idea now.
The narrow hallway kept going, its plain brown walls punctuated by doorways that opened into offices filled with filthy shattered furniture. The two wererats led the way, both in half-form, lean, shaggy, and fast. Nasrin followed, then Curran and I, Jim with Ghastek, and Christopher and Andrea bringing up the rear. Behind us, the vampires dashed through Mishmar. I could feel their minds. There were close to twenty now, six directly behind us and the rest above and on the sides. It felt like they were moving through the walls.
Thomas, the larger of the two wererats, made a sharp turn. I followed just in time to see him jump through a jagged hole in the floor. I ran after him and looked through the hole. A nine-foot drop. Sure, why not. I climbed into the hole. Ow. I stumbled. Okay, this wasn’t a good idea. Curran dropped down after me.