Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(45)

He rebounded fast, jumping up on his bare feet, snapping free a chair leg that became a stake. It was some real-life Bram Stoker vampire time as he came at her again, that wooden length with its jagged, pointed end up over his shoulder.

Ahmare did him one better. She grabbed for a chair and put its four legs toward him, holding him off like a lion, redirecting his momentum again, sending him careening off to the side. His balance was bad, likely because he had been surviving on inferior blood—humans, deer—but he was motivated. Crashing into a table, he kept his weapon with him and shot back toward her.

The key was making him engage. He might have been on the thin side, but it was clear where Duran had gotten his muscularity from, and once all that meat got going, his physical strength became a weakness for her to exploit.

This time, as he lunged forth, she jumped out of his way and nailed him across the back with the chair, the force she put into the hit so great, the seat broke away from the top.

Just like the pearl popped out of her sports bra.

Chalen’s beloved fell out the bottom of her windbreaker and hit the bare floor, the flash of iridescence as it ricocheted away catching her eye because she thought the Dhavos had somehow found a knife.

Ahmare dove for the pearl.

The Dhavos jumped to his feet again.

She hit the floor on a slide, her hand outstretched.

And he stabbed her.





27




DURAN KNEW A FRESH kind of terror—which was saying a fuck of a lot—as he frantically spun his flashlight around the yes-it’s-really-empty bedroom.

She wouldn’t have left him. He knew that down to his soul. There was no way Ahmare would have taken the pearl and run without saying anything to him. And then he thought of the light that had come on in the antechamber—

His father. His father had turned the switch, created the distraction . . . and must have come through a hidden passageway to take her without a sound.

“Ahmare!” Duran screamed.

He picked up the first thing he came to—a bureau—and threw it across the bedroom, the wood shattering as it gouged one of the garden murals. As he yelled her name again, he wanted to trash the place, rip the drapes down, tear the bed apart, break the mirrors.

Duran forced the rage to the back of his mind because it wasn’t going to help him find his female. Trying to ground himself in logic, he went back to the golden passage in case his father had entered from the rear. No scents. They hadn’t gone that way so there had to be a secret access point. Focusing on the wall behind where Ahmare had been standing, he looked for a seam . . . a scratch on the floor . . . a . . .

In the mural she had been checking out right before the light had come on, there was a door depicted off to one side, as if the viewer could go through it to access another part of the fake estate.

Bringing the flashlight close to the wall, he found a faint break that followed the artist’s contours of the portal, an actuality in the midst of the illusion.

Duran backed up. Took three running jumps.

And slammed his body into the “door.”

The access panel gave way, the plaster that covered the wooden supports powdering under the impact, and he caught himself before he face-planted in the passageway beyond.

The scents were unmistakable. More than that, now that he was calming down, he could track Ahmare because he’d fed from her, zeroing in on her as if her body had a beacon attached to it.

She had not only come through here; she was somewhere not far.

Shining his flashlight ahead, he followed the cramped crawl space at a run and found her weapons thirty or forty feet down, the guns and knives scattered as if they had been stripped off her in a hurry. He almost left them. But as urgent as this was, he had no idea what he was going to find, so he tucked the pair of autoloaders into his belt and left the hunting knife and length of chain behind.

As he continued along, heart pounding, palms sweating, half his brain was enraged, the other terrified.

Some forty feet farther down, he came to the end of the passage, and he didn’t waste time. Turning his shoulder into the solid wall, he gave himself a runway, as he had done before, and threw himself at the panel—

Like a sledgehammer hitting a steel plate, instead of breaking through, his body baseballed back, becoming airborne.

Landing on his ass, he skidded over the concrete floor, losing his flashlight, the beam of which settled at a haphazard angle focused on the panel.

Back up on his feet, he gave it a second try. And like the panel was improving its punch, he was thrown even farther, his breath getting knocked out of him as he hit the floor.

Passcode, dummy.

As he caught his breath, he saw in the beam of the flashlight that there was a passcode pad to the left, and he launched himself at it. Entering the digits, he slammed that pound key—

On the far side, he heard with his keen ears the sound of a fight.

This was good. It meant she was alive.

He shoved against the panel. Nothing gave way.

Entering the code again, he banged with his fist so she might hear that he was coming for her—

The lock did not budge. The code he had did not work.



As Ahmare slid belly-down over the floor, she felt the chair leg go into the meat of her shoulder.

The penetration was so deep, her momentum stopped as the wooden stake pinned her in place to the linoleum.