This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress, #5)(43)
I could hear Bones reply and Marie answer, but somehow their words were lost to me amidst the keen of countless others, so much louder than when I’d picked up on humans’ thoughts. His touch wasn’t lost, though, when he knelt next to me and scooped me up in his arms. The feel of his skin on mine was an anchor I tried to focus on amidst the whirling chaos that had overtaken me.
I was so cold. So empty. So HUNGRY.
As he carried me out of the room, Marie stopped him, pressing her mouth to my ear. She murmured something, but it was only one voice among thousands, her words snatched away by the roar in my mind before I could fully register her question. Bones yanked me away, but I could still feel the burn of her lips against my skin. His long strides took me into the blackness of the tunnel, brushing by Jacques as though the ghoul wasn’t even there. My fingers dragged along the damp walls as we passed, faintly bemused by the trails of light they seemed to leave. That light increased, pulling itself from the walls to reach toward me with seeking tentacles, but I wasn’t afraid. I was sad. There were so many of them, poor things, and they were so hungry . . .
Grinding metal sounded ahead, then a thicker ray of silvery light shone at the end of the tunnel. Bones increased his pace, jumping straight up into it when we were bathed in its glow, and then everything around me exploded. The voices became deafening, the cold mind-numbing, the hunger insatiable. Those sensations increased, until it felt like I was struggling in the midst of a huge silken web to get away, but all the while my efforts only tightened the cage around me.
Chapter Seventeen
The first thing that registered was the scent of smoke, curling around my nostrils as if begging to be inhaled. The next realization was that my arms felt stiff and my wrists were sore. I opened my eyes, the bland grayness of a concrete ceiling above me, Bones’s pale, naked flesh to my right.
“What?” I began, trying to sit up, only to have something pull on my arms. I tilted my head backward, shocked to see that I was manacled to a wall even as another glance revealed that Bones and I were on a narrow bed. My gaze flew to him once more, noting the cigarette he set down even as he exhaled a long plume of white.
“Why are you lying there smoking while I’m chained to a wall?” I demanded.
The look he gave me was a mixture of relief and cynicism. “Since it seems you don’t remember anything about the past two days, let me assure you, luv—I earned that smoke.”
Two days? The last thing I clearly remembered was Bones carrying me out of that underground room with Marie. That was two days ago? And during that time, it had somehow become necessary to chain me to a wall?
“Oh shit,” I whispered, the memory of my voice sounding like the gateway to hell reverberating across my mind. “Marie’s blood . . . I absorbed some of her powers, didn’t I?”
He grunted even as he pulled a key out from under the bed. “Kitten, that’s quite the understatement.”
I thumped my head against the bed a couple times, more angry than afraid. Goddamn Marie. Why the hell had she insisted on me drinking her blood? Wasn’t it enough that she’d figured out where I got my abilities from? Guess not. She had to add to my problems by forcing me to drink from her. Now in addition to freaking people out once it became known that I could absorb vampire powers through feeding, Marie made sure to have proof that I could do the same thing with ghouls. People would be flocking to Apollyon’s side once these little tidbits were revealed.
“She must want war,” I said, rubbing my wrists when Bones unlocked the manacles. “If she didn’t, she would’ve just killed us. Once news of this hits, nothing but my public execution will calm things down with the ghouls.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he said coolly.
I grunted. “I’m not in favor of dying, either, but when people hear about this, Apollyon’s going to be fighting off converts with a stick—”
“I meant Marie’s not telling anyone, though you’re also right that I won’t let any of that zealot’s sods touch you.”
I sat all the way up, wondering briefly at the dampness beneath me but more focused on what he’d just said.
“Marie won’t tell anyone?” I repeated. “That doesn’t make sense. Why else would she have used such drastic measures to make me drink her blood, if she didn’t think it could benefit her in some way? And what other way could it benefit her except to tell everyone that I can absorb powers from vampires and ghouls? I don’t think she did it just so I can be her new voodoo buddy.”
His mouth twisted. “I don’t think so, either, but the last thing she said to me was if we revealed to anyone that you were able to siphon powers from ghouls, or that you’d drunk her blood, she’d kill the pair of us. Said she’d know it if we told anyone, too. Must mean she already has some ghostly buggers spying on us. Makes me want to hire an expert to banish every filmy-fleshed one of them I come across, and double goes with the Remnants.”
“Don’t say that.” Thank God Fabian was with Dave or the ghost would’ve been inconsolable at hearing Bones speak so coldly about his kind. “They’re not the same as Fabian or other ghosts,” I went on, my voice catching at a fresh surge of memory. “Marie said that, but I could also feel them. They’re not conscious of right, wrong, what they’re doing, any of that. Those Remnants are just . . . like huge gaping holes of need that gravitate toward whatever energy source they’re pointed at. They couldn’t help what they did to you—”