Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(50)

The fact that she could be so devastated at the death of someone she hadn’t even known two nights ago was a testament to the male.

“We have to get your injury fixed before we go to Chalen’s.”

Numbly, Ahmare looked over at Nexi, who’d rematerialized right next to her. “It’s my shoulder.”

There was a lame cast to her voice, and she left that right where it lay, lacking the strength to inject some show of resilience or strength. She was utterly depleted.

“Can you dematerialize back to my cabin? Do you remember where it is?” the Shadow asked.

Abruptly, Ahmare thought of the beginning of their trek through the woods, when Duran had set those two broken branches on that stump. He’d done that for her, she realized. So that she’d have a marker in case she was lost on the way back.

“He never intended to come out of there.” She stared back at the collapsed mountain. “Did he.”

“It’s always where he was going to end.” Then the Shadow added with bitterness, “Even when he was out, he never left it, and it was the only thing that ever mattered to him.”

“He went back for his mahmen’s remains. He found them, he said.”

“You didn’t see them then?”

“I was busy.” On that note, her head was pounding where the Dhavos had hit her. “And then there was no time.”

“Did you get the pearl?”

In a panic, her hand slapped to the pocket she’d put it in. As soon as she felt its knobby contour, she eased up a little.

There had to be a salvaging of all this. Something good that came out of it. Otherwise, she didn’t know how she was going to keep going when the sun set tomorrow or the next night or the night after that.

Too many losses. And this newest one, of a relative stranger under a mountain, for godsakes—something that seemed, in retrospect, even more unlikely than lessers attacking the mansion her parents worked in and killing all of the staff after the aristocrats locked them out of the safe room—compressed the time between the other deaths, making her feel as if she had lost her mahmen and father just the night before.

Then again, grief was not like gravity. There was no reliable law to it, no fixed rate of falling, no universal application. The only parallel was that it was everywhere and always with you to varying degrees, weighing you down.

Sometimes crushing you like a falling mountain.

Was this how Duran felt when the collapse happened on him? This suffocation, this chest pain, this pressure inside her body?

Ridiculous parallel. Because she was still breathing—which raised the question, what the hell was she going to do with the rest of her life? Vampires lived in the darkness, in the void in which humans did not tread. As she considered whatever time was left for her, long or short, the absence of sunlight she faced seemed literal and figural.

Even if she got her brother back.

It was as if Duran and what he represented to her had been all the light that had been or ever would be in her night, and now that he was eclipsed, she was relegated to permanent blindness. Memories of him took her back to when they were on the ATV, shooting through the woods. Then she was walking in the hemlocks behind him. Going down the rickety ladder, to the crawl space under the old cabin. Rushing through the tunnel, right behind him, feeling the cold and the damp, smelling the rot and the earth.

And then he was gone from those images, and she was alone in all those spaces and places . . . in the moth room, and the arena with the skeletons . . . the bedroom with the murals.

Their journey was a metaphor for life, she thought. Two people together, meeting obstacles, surmounting them. Crashing through ceilings to rescue one or the other.

She and Duran had lived a whole life together in a compressed amount of time, the entirety of a relationship laid out . . . until she was the widow at the end. And now? With his loss, she couldn’t help feeling that all of the fresh air and illumination was gone from her future, any room she would ever walk into nothing but cramped and stuffy, vaguely threatening.

The magnitude of his death made her furious, not just for what she had been cheated out of, but for all of the suffering he had been born into as well.

At the hands of his father.

At the hands of . . . Chalen.

“Yes,” she said grimly to the Shadow. “I remember exactly where your cabin is.”





32




THIS GOES ALL THE way through.”

Ahmare stared straight ahead as Nexi inspected the shoulder wound. They were back at the Shadow’s cabin, with Ahmare seated on one of the rough-cut chairs, her windbreaker and shirt off, nothing but the sports bra, and the wound, and blood that was drying on her skin.

“What the hell were you stabbed with?”

“A chair leg.”

The Shadow eased back. “I thought I got all of Chalen’s guards.”

“It was Duran’s father.”

“Personal attention from the Dhavos,” Nexi muttered bitterly as she opened a medical kit. “You should be honored what with all his other priorities.”

“He has no more priorities. They’re all dead.”

The Shadow stopped with hydrogen peroxide and gauze in her hands. Her face seemed frozen, as if whatever emotions were going through her had paralyzed her.

“What?” she said hoarsely.