Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(36)

21




AHMARE HAD TO GIVE him credit.

Duran took only what he needed, and then he lapped the wound closed with his tongue and got right to his feet. Usually after a feeding, there was a lull of laziness, a post-vein glow that floated anyone who had just been nourished in a placid pool of satiation. But he was clearly ignoring all that in favor of what she needed from him.

He required blood. She required movement.

So after he nodded to her—a thank-you, she guessed—he pointed to the west and started to run, going slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. Soon enough, the two of them were making an expert marathoner’s time through the forest.

With the wind in her face, and her body on exertion autopilot, her senses were alive, ready to find in the woodland landscape pursuers, aggressors, trackers . . . murderers. She searched what was to the sides of them, and to the rear, her eyes pulling shadows out from behind trees and large boulders, isolating trunks as possible covers, identifying hideouts in fallen logs and stumps.

Duran was doing the same, and the focus they needed on their environment was a good reminder of the reason they were together, of the purpose of this intersection of their lives. The forced intimacy of those daylight hours, which had led to some very naked skin on very naked skin, was exactly like that feeding just now.

A side step, not the ultimate goal.

And in a way, she was grateful. Otherwise, her brain, riding a high of chemicals cooked up by his mouth on her wrist, might have carried her off into an oblivion she could not afford to visit, much less live in—

“Over there,” he said. “That’s the entry.”

Those were the first words he’d spoken since they’d started running, and the fact that they were no more breathless than if he’d had his feet up on a sofa and a sleeping cat on his chest made her stupidly proud. But come on, like she had any control over the contents of her blood or how it nourished him?

Still, she felt as though she mattered, and not just in some ephemeral emotional sense, but in a nuts-and-bolts, chassis, gas-tank kind of way.

It seemed more reliable, more tangible, than what had happened between them in the bunker.

As they came up to an old hunting shack, a nothing-special relic that seemed more likely to have been built and abandoned centuries ago by humans hunting for food instead of sport, unease went through her—and it was a surprise to realize the anxiety didn’t have anything to do with the fact that they were about to break into a cult.

Duran was going to have to go back to Chalen, wasn’t he.

That had been the plan that she’d made with the conqueror. She had agreed that she would take the weapon he gave her, use it to get his female . . . and return it to him. If she didn’t, Ahlan wasn’t getting out of that castle alive.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Duran said as he opened a door that was more air hole than board and nail. When she didn’t immediately follow, he looked over his shoulder. “What?”

His return to that cell had been slightly less traumatic when she hadn’t cared about him. When she’d thought of him as “the prisoner.” Now, she knew she was going to lose one or the other: If she let Duran go free, her brother was dead, and bloodline always should win, right?

“Sorry,” she mumbled as she forced herself through the flimsy door.

Inside, the cabin was barren and rotting, nothing but dust and pine tree debris, the forest reclaiming the construction. The passage of time had made that which should have been durable just another biodegradable carcass, a bag of bones soon to become dirt save for the pick-up sticks of nails and the two four-paned windows that would survive longer.

“Over here,” he said as he went across to the far corner.

As his heavy weight made the floorboards groan, she hoped for his sake there was no lower level. He was liable to fall through.

Crouching down, he tucked his fingertips into a knot in a board, and as he lifted, he brought up a three-by-five section that was more solid than you’d think.

“We go down here.”

Ahmare went over and didn’t accept the hand he put out to help her descend a ladder that was just thin cross-hatches tied to two poles with twine. As she carefully lowered herself, her sinuses became filled with a complex bouquet of rot and mold and mud, and she decided, if she got out of this alive, she was going to Disney World.

Okay, fine. Not Disney World, because really, how was a vampire going to handle the land of sunshine, sunscreen, and screeching human children. But she was going to go somewhere where they had air-conditioning and air fresheners and beds with clean sheets. Running water. A refrigerator.

A shower with multiple heads.

Or how about just warm water.

With both her brother and Duran.

Ahmare got to the ground and flicked the light of her phone on. Plastered walls, the earth held back by what looked like clay packing. Dirt floor. And ahead, a narrow passageway, the terminal of which her illumination could not reach.

Duran jumped down, as if he knew that his bulk was going to make kindling out of that ladder. “We go that way.”

Not that there was another option.

“Wait,” she said. “You need to close the hatch.”

“No.” He flicked on his flashlight and pointed it into the void, the beam perfectly round and distinct as it widened from the pinpoint of the bulb, like something out of a Nancy Drew illustration. “At this stage of the game, I want Chalen’s guards to follow us.”