Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(39)

Ahmare felt the hand of death tickle the back of her neck. “Do you think we’re going to need to?”



As Duran went back out into the corridor and held the door open for Ahmare, moths escaped like a puff of smoke from a burning room, flitting out in a scatter. He almost felt like shooing them back in so they weren’t left out of the party.

On his nod, he and Ahmare doubled back the way they’d come, proceeding along one side of the curving corridor, crouched but moving at a steady pace with guns up. As they passed by the entry where they’d come in and ran into nobody coming to check why the door had not been fully closed . . . as they approached the cafeteria’s kitchen and there were no lingering smells of food being cooked or having been eaten . . . as silence and stuffy air were the only accompaniment to their infiltration . . . a terrible conclusion began to form in his mind.

And he fought it.

Fought it like he should have been battling the Dhavos’s defenders.

When they came up to the intersection of the next spoke, the one that ran north-south, he leaned out and looked around. No one. No one talking. Walking. And not just because of the ablution ceremony.

“This way,” he said.

As he spoke, he could hear the rage in his own voice, and his body started to tremble with aggression.

Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered, more of them out as they zeroed in on the arena, the illumination a herky-jerk that juiced up the warnings already screaming in his head.

Memories came back to him, things he wished he could unsee. His mother’s eyes, wide in a bruised face, brimming with tears she was trying to hold in. Her quiet, desperate courage to put one foot in front of the other because she was terrified her son would be taken away by her abuser. The years of suffering that she had borne.

Because of Duran.

You are my reason for living, my blessing, she’d always told him.

Bullshit, he was her curse. And killing his sire had struck him as the only thing he could do to earn the love he had never deserved from her.

The only way he could live with himself.

As he closed in on the arena, he felt chased even though he repeatedly looked behind himself and almost wanted to see hordes of armed defenders bearing down on his neck. But . . . no. No matter how many times he glanced over his shoulder or checked out an intersection of a curving corridor, there was nobody around them.

No alarms going off.

Just the pair of worn paths in the linoleum underfoot and the fluorescent tubes spasming overhead.

“My mahmen died the night before I was abducted.”

As Ahmare’s head jerked toward him, he realized that he’d spoken the words aloud.

“I am so sorry—”

He interrupted her. “She died, I believe, of a heart attack. She and I were in our cell, and she had been tired for a number of nights. And with that off stomach. Suddenly, she just . . .” He shook his head. “She was sitting on her pallet and she put her hand under her arm, like she had a sudden pain. Then she was holding the front of her chest and gasping for air. She looked at me.”

“Oh, Duran.”

It was helpful that they were rushing down the spoke, focused on any attacks, busy, busy, busy. He doubted he would have been able to get through the story otherwise.

“She slumped over to the side. She was still staring at me, but I don’t think she could see me anymore. I started yelling her name. I sat her up, but her head . . . it was lolling to her shoulder, then it fell . . . back.”

He was unaware of having slowed to a stop. But one of the four sets of double doors into the arena was in front of them.

“One of the defenders—the Dhavos’s private guard—came in because he heard me yelling. The Dhavos then ran into our room. I went for his throat. I just fucking . . .” He closed his eyes. “It took seven defenders to get me off him, and as soon as he was free, he fell all over himself to get to her body. She was going gray by then, the color leaving her. He cried. All over her. They had to drag me out of that room. They stuck me with something, a needle. I blacked out.”

He stared at the closed double doors. The wooden panels had been carved with the profile of a male whose features were identical to his own.

Duran looked in the direction they’d come one last time. “She arrived here as a lost soul, and she bought into the lies, into the greatness, into the saving. And then he ruined her in all the ways that mattered. He did that to a lot of people, but she was the one who mattered to me.” He cleared his throat. “The next night, after they’d drugged me, I woke up back in the room alone. Her body was gone. Her pallet. It was as if he had erased her. I decided I would honor her memory, do her Fade ceremony anyway. He wasn’t going to take that away from her. I went to the bathroom. I showered and I shaved so that I would be clean. It didn’t matter that I had no remains. I told myself it would still work. I would say the words, make the movements, do the ritual even if I had to pantomime it. If the Scribe Virgin was truly the benevolent mother of the race, I told myself, she would grant my mahmen dispensation.”

“I’m sure your mahmen is in the Fade—”

“You don’t know that. Neither do I.” He rubbed his eyes. “They hit me over the head and I came to in Chalen’s great hall in front of his hearth. On his table. My father was smart. He knew what I was going to do as soon as the Fade ceremony was done. I was going to have two dead parents before midnight, and nothing was going to stop me.”