Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(38)

She nodded. And then, “Duran . . . thank you. For everything.”

He stared at her face. There was a dirt smudge at her temple, fine curls had escaped her ponytail, and the flush of their exertion to get to the cabin had dulled in the cool temperature of the underground passageway.

Her eyes met his like she was reading his mind.

As they both went in for the kiss, he knew this was good-bye. One, or both of them, was not making it out of this suicide mission alive.

And what worried him most was that she maybe didn’t get his message. When he told her not to save anyone . . . it included himself.

Chances were good she was going to have to leave him behind when the mountain blew, and he prayed her need to save her brother’s life was going to override the light that glowed, soft, warm, and kind, in her eyes as she stared up at him now.

“No one matters but you,” he said roughly.





22




AS DURAN SPOKE, AHMARE did not like the expression on his face. Nope. Not at all.

“Don’t forget me, okay?” he said softly. “You don’t have to mourn me, but just . . . I want someone to remember me.”

“I’m not hearing this—”

“Just in case the Fade is a lie, I don’t want it to be like I never existed at all.”

Before she could argue with him, he squeezed her hand and then reached around and pulled the vault almost shut. Without another word, he started off, and it was as Ahmare stared after him in despair that she noticed a glow far off in the dark distance.

It wasn’t a security light. Running to catch up with him, the illumination was seeping around the jambs of a closed door.

There was no keypad this time. Just a garden-variety handle like the ones in her gym, and given what waited for them on the other side, she felt like the portal should have come with surgeon general’s warnings, an airbag, and a crash helmet.

“One . . . two . . .” Duran gripped the handle. “Three.”

He didn’t slam the release down; he lowered it and pulled the door open. Leaning out, he kept his gun by his side.

“To the left. Fast and quiet.”

They slipped out into a pale gray corridor that had all the nuance and distinction of what she imagined the cult members to have: everything buffed to a low polish, no ornamentation, the ceiling, walls, and floor covered by late-sixties-era linoleum squares, the seams of which were showing fine lines of glue that had discolored into a mustard-yellow seepage. Fluorescent lights were set in bald panels every six feet along the ceiling, and many of the tubes were blinking or burned out. Underfoot, the tiles had been worn in two distinct lanes running parallel to each other.

From people walking in lines or in pairs.

The sense she had of entering a foreign world was reinforced as they came upon a door with a handle just the same as the first. A fake wood placard had been stuck on the panel at eyeball height, the white letters etched into the plastic reading, “Modesty Comes First.”

Off in the distance, there was an odd, disquieting hum.

Duran looked around with a frown. Then he shook his head.

“Let me go in first,” he said as he curled his hand onto the lever.

She glanced behind them. No one was in the corridor. Nor were there people moving around, at least not that she could hear or sense, and she wondered just how huge the facility was.

Duran moved in quick silence, opening the door and disappearing into an interior that, going by the sign, gave Ahmare images of old Kotex pad ads, and bathing suits that had skirts and built-in bras, and pantyhose that were more like compression stockings.

Maybe this was where the human race sent their maiden aunts when they couldn’t stand the whisker-chinned, lipstick-smudged kisses for one more holiday season—

What the hell was that hum?

Duran popped his head out. “There’s something wrong here.”

“You think?” she muttered to herself.

He pulled her inside, and she gasped, nearly jumping back out into the corridor. The vast room, which had to be forty feet long and twenty feet wide, was swarming with flies—no, not flies, moths. A thousand pale-winged moths were in the air, fluttering in disjointed flight paths, knocking into each other, billiard balls without the felt and the pockets.

Batting them away from her face, the smell was horrible, like the sludge of a late August riverbed, stagnant, wet, rotting.

She flapped her hand around again, even though it was useless. There were too many—

“Is this the laundry?” she said.

“Used to be.”

There were industrial washers and tumble dryers on one side. On the other, racks and racks . . . an entire department store of racks . . . on which hundreds of maroon wool robes hung in various stages of decay. The moths were living off the fabric, chewing holes that were ever expanding, leaving bolts of shredded material in their wake.

It was an entire ecosystem, the result of two moths, or three, being imported into the environment, whereupon housekeeping had been set up and the Mr. and Mrs. had Left It to Beaver like a trillion times.

Duran went over and pulled a robe free. The wool powdered in his hands, falling onto his boots, autumn leaves without the season or the tree, just the molting.

“Unwearable.” He dropped the shawl collar. “I’d assumed we’d be able to camouflage ourselves and thus integrate into the congregation.”