“Where would I go?”
He squeezed me to him. “I’m going to kill that f**ker.”
“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 f**king 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.”
14
I OPENED MY eyes. I lay on a blanket, wrapped in several layers of clothing.
I couldn’t see Curran. He’d been holding me for what felt like hours. Every time I woke up, he was there, but not now. Anxiety spiked.
Okay, I had to snap out of it. He wasn’t going to evaporate. He wasn’t a hallucination. He was here . . . somewhere.
Above me small hateful points of magic moved back and forth. Vampires. One, two . . . Nine. I pushed back the blankets. The room was mostly empty. Christopher napped, leaning against the wall. To my left Ghastek lay on his blankets. Robert, the alpha rat, sat next to him. No Curran or Jim. I also thought I saw Andrea, but that couldn’t be right. Andrea couldn’t be here. She was pregnant. She wouldn’t risk the baby.
A brown-eyed woman knelt by me. She was my age, with dark hair, a full mouth, and brown skin. She wore a black loose abaya, an Islamic-style robe, and a matching hijab, a wide scarf, draped over her head. She looked Arabic to me. I’d seen her before among Doolittle’s staff.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Nasrin.” She gently touched my face, examining my eyes. “I’m here to heal you.”
“Where’s Curran?”
“He’s checking the barricade,” Nasrin said. “Jim and others are standing guard there. How do you feel?”
What barricade? “The room isn’t blurry anymore.”
She smiled. “That’s good. We’ve had a short magic wave, and I’ve worked on you a little.”
“I think I remember.”
I had passed out at some point, but Curran woke me up every five minutes to eat. At first it was broth, which I vomited once or twice. I vaguely remembered Andrea passing me a wet rag to clean my face and Nasrin murmuring something and holding a canteen to my lips. Whatever I’d drunk had made me feel better. Then I was given some mysterious concoction Doolittle had made up and sent with them especially in case we had been starved. I asked what was in it, and Christopher very seriously told me, “Forty-two percent dried skimmed milk, thirty-two percent edible oil, and twenty-five percent honey.” I was afraid to ask about the other one percent and I had trouble keeping it down. Then a magic wave came and someone chanted over me, and suddenly I was ravenous. I had gone through two quart containers of the stuff and my stomach wanted more, but I had passed out. It seemed like that whole sequence happened more than once, but I couldn’t be sure.
“What was in the bottle you gave me?” I asked.
She smiled. She didn’t look a thing like Doolittle, but something about her communicated that same soothing confidence. “The water of Zamzam.”
“The blessed water from Mecca?”
“Yes.” She nodded with a small smile and held a bottle to my lips. “Drink now.”
I took a sip.
“When Prophet Ibrahim cast Hajar and their infant son, Ismail, out into the barren wilderness of Makkah, he left them there with only a bag of dates and a leather bag of water.” Nasrin touched my forehead. “No fever. That is good. When all the water was gone, Ismail cried for he was thirsty, and Hajar began to search for water. She climbed the mountains and walked the valleys, but the land was barren. Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“That’s good also. Finally at Mount al-Marwah Hajar thought she heard a voice and called out to it, begging for help. Angel Jibril descended to the ground, brushed it with his wing, and the spring of Zamzam poured forth. Its water satisfies both thirst and hunger.” Nasrin smiled again. “We brought some of it home with us when my family went on a holy pilgrimage. My medmagic encourages the body to heal itself by making it metabolize food at an accelerated rate. You had no wounds, so as your body absorbed the nutrients, they all went directly to where they were supposed to go and the water sped up the process even further. If we can keep this up, you’ll be walking soon. Not too bad for thirty-six hours of treatment, and it looks like we might have avoided refeeding syndrome. Without magic, restoring your strength would take a few weeks.”
I glanced at Ghastek.
“He’s recovering slower,” Nasrin said. “But you were in better shape to begin with and you had more reserves than he did. Don’t worry. I’ll get you back to fighting weight. That’s my specialty. I’m the head of the Keep’s recovery unit. We suspected you might become malnourished, so Dr. Doolittle and I agreed that I would be the most effective.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I tried to lift my head up. “You said there was a barricade. Where is it?”
“It’s at both ends of the hallway.” Nasrin looked up. “The floor above us is infested with feral vampires. Ghastek tried to count them at some point and mentioned four once and six two hours later. We killed a couple, but they’re warped. This place isn’t healthy for vampires either.”
There were nine vampires now. They could sense us somehow, and they’d keep aggregating. We had to nuke them or move.
“They’re feeding on each other,” Ghastek said. He turned to lie on his side, facing me. His eyes had sunk in their sockets. He looked like a ghost of himself.
“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.