Magic Binds (Kate Daniels #9)(67)

“You’re going to drop me off in the courtyard,” I told her. “On the bridge. We’ll have to do it quickly. Don’t go and play with those flying things. They aren’t birds. They have long beaks studded with sharp teeth and their wings are leather. They’re not nice and cuddly like that flock of geese that tried to take my head off when you flew through it. They will hurt you if you get too close, and I don’t want that to happen. I like you.”

Sugar snorted.

“If I manage to make it out, I’ll release the moth I showed you before. Don’t come looking for me unless you see it, and if I’m not back in a day or two, I’m dead and you need to go back to the herd.”

Was any of this getting through to her or was I talking to myself? I hoped she understood me, because if she didn’t, I’d have a really awkward family reunion when my dad arrived with lightning and furious thunder or whatever other theatrics he would bring to bear.

The wall loomed before us. We cleared it and Sugar swooped down, flying low. Mishmar was a deep pit surrounded by a wall, with the tower rising from the center. A stone bridge stretched from the gates to the tower. Sugar landed straight into a gallop, carrying me toward the enormous door, the hoofbeats of her steps scattering echoes through the vast empty courtyard. She stopped, and I jumped off her back and pulled the saddlebags free.

“Go.”

Above us the monster birds shrieked.

“Go!”

She reared, pawing the air, then ran back along the bridge and took flight. I turned toward the massive door. The last time I saw it, we were running out of it, after Curran, Andrea, and the rest came to rescue me. Never thought I would be going through it again.

The memory of me dying slowly of exposure in lukewarm water shot through me. Thanks, brain. Just what I needed.

A new bar secured the door, a thick strip of steel controlled by a wheel with eight handles protruding from it. Things moved inside the tower, crawling through the walls, their half-atrophied brains feeling like painful pinpricks of red light in mine. Vampires. Loose and driven near mad by bloodlust. They killed the weak that Roland imprisoned in Mishmar, wore down the strong, and without prey, they fed on each other.

My knees shook. I didn’t want to go in. I would do almost anything not to go in.

“Lovely place,” I said to hear my own voice. The stone echoes made it sound puny.

Curran was counting on me. I was counting on me. I didn’t have time for post-traumatic stress.

I could feel the memory of water on my skin, leeching my will to live. I could hear Ghastek’s labored breathing next to me. I could almost see him nodding, his mouth too close to the water as he hung suspended from the metal grate that prevented us from climbing out.

Come on, weakling. Open the fucking door. How hard can it be?

I could turn around and leave. Walk away, keep walking, and never come back.

Open. The. Door.

The wheel looked impossibly large now and I knew somewhere deep in the core of my being that if I touched it, horrible things would happen.

Open the door.

Curran would’ve begun moving his people in by now. He was en route. If I didn’t open the door, my father wouldn’t leave for Mishmar.

I grabbed the wheel and spun it. Metal squeaked and clanged, invisible gears turned, and the bar slid aside.

I exhaled and pulled the door open.

Darkness.

I stood in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust. A dark stone foyer, cavernous, its roof supported by two rows of columns. Probably used to belong to some hotel or bank. There had to be an exit that would lead deeper into Mishmar, because we had crossed this lobby the last time I was here, but I couldn’t see it.

I moved to the side, away from the sunset light, and waited with my back against the wall.

The vampires stayed away. They had to have heard the bar slide aside and the creak of the gate. They should’ve come running, but instead their minds hovered above me and to the sides. That meant only one thing. Something lived in this foyer, something so dangerous that the awareness of it penetrated even the bloodthirsty, crazed minds of the bloodsuckers.

I waited, breathing quiet and slow. There was a trick to staying invisible: stop thinking. I cleared my head and simply waited, one with the darkness and the cold wall of stone touching my back.

Moments ticked by. I watched the foot-wide line of daylight cross the stones of the floor as the sunshine slipped through the gap between the two halves of the door. The chamber was roughly rectangular, the columns running along the two longer sides. Most of them had survived, but at least three had fallen, breaking into pieces. The walls weren’t perfectly smooth. A shelflike decorative molding ran along the perimeter of the lobby at about twenty feet high. Above it, at even intervals, large reliefs interrupted the stone, depicting modern buildings and people. The floor was polished marble, now dusted with dirt and grime, but still slick. I would have to be careful running.

I stayed completely still.

The attack came from above, fast and silent. I felt it a fraction of a second before the javelin hit, and I dodged right. The short spear clattered on the floor. I jumped back—two shurikens whistled through the space where I was a moment ago—and leapt left behind a column. The column was four feet across and left me two choices: left or right. Not much of a cover.

Open lobby to my left, sliced in half by the narrow light streaming through the gap in the door, a wall to my right. Down wasn’t an option; up wasn’t either. The vampires squirming above me were too far. Concentrating on drawing them close would split my attention too much.