Duran bent down and picked up a syringe. “Hemlock.”
Her brain struggled to process it all. “I saw those trees in the woods?”
“My father grew them for this purpose.” Duran put the syringe back precisely where he had found it. “Deadly to humans. Worse to vampires if injected. You bleed out of every orifice.”
Which explained that thick brown staining, which had dried . . . some time ago . . . into the runners on the stairs, and in the aisles, and all over the seats and backs of the chairs.
She could only imagine the carnage when it had first happened.
“He always said he would do it.” Duran walked downward to the stage, stepping over arms and legs. Rib cages. Skulls. “He talked about end of days, and I always thought he must have gotten the idea from the human media or something because we don’t go by the term ‘days.’ And you were right, TV and newspapers and radios were all barred to us, but he kept track of the outside world with them. Sometimes he would bring clippings in to my mahmen and read them to her, especially before I went through my transition.”
“How old are you?” Ahmare blurted.
“A year out of the change.” He shook his head. “I mean, I was a year out of it when she died and I ended up at Chalen’s. Nexi was the one who helped me through my transition, and I in turn helped her get out.”
Duran bent over and gingerly moved an arm bone back into place. “He told them every night at sunset they were with sin. He told them he was the salvation. They believed him. This”—he motioned around the arena—“was supposed to be the cleansing. I imagine when they first injected themselves they were in a flush of obedience, so sure they were doing the right thing and this would take them to the next level of consciousness with their leader. They didn’t want to go to the Fade. It was a mental and emotional elevation they were seeking and that he promised to deliver.”
He picked up a thigh bone and looked at the length. “But then the pain set in. I saw him inject a male once. He did it in front of me as a threat. The male was so prepared for it, offering his vein readily, no one restraining him. My father made the male kneel before him, and he kissed the male on the forehead, cupping his face, smiling down at him with warmth and compassion. Then he told the male to close his eyes and accept the gift.”
Duran replaced the femur and walked farther down. When he got to the bottom of the seating bowl, he went around and mounted five steps up onto the dais. “My father looked at me as he injected the cult member, and then he embraced the male, as if all I had to do was submit to the rules and all my problems would go away. Except”—he laughed harshly—“the asshole would of course still be beating and abusing my mahmen. I watched as the male leaned into my father. The male was smiling—until he wasn’t. His eyes popped open. The whites of them turned red. And then the blood came. Out of his mouth as he coughed. Out of his nose. Out of his ears as he fell to the side. His breathing turned into gurgles, and he contorted, first stretching back on his spine, then curling in tight. He bled . . . from everywhere.
“And the most fucked-up thing?” Duran looked up at her. “My father stepped back and seemed shocked by it all. Like what the fuck did he think was going to happen? Did he actually believe his own bullshit about transcendence? I never thought he did, but maybe he expected a bolt of light to come through the ceiling and bathe that male in enlightenment.” There was a pause. “That’s when I knew he was going to have to get rid of me. Even without the issue of my mahmen, I had witnessed his confusion and knew that he was just making it all up. I saw behind the curtain that night, and in a world built on the illusion of his superiority, that could not abide.”
Ahmare started down the stairs, imagining all of the suffering. The people had been sitting in the chairs at first, but that hadn’t lasted. The bones were in the aisles, in the spaces between the seats, on the steps. It was difficult to tell for sure which ribs went with what arms or whether a skull was with the right spine as the bodies had intertwined, perhaps seeking comfort from each other as they realized, too late, that the promise was not coming. Only the pain.
“So this was his doomsday,” Duran said. “But he wouldn’t have stuck around. I knew he had an evac plan because he told my mahmen and she told me. He never planned to die with his flock, and he was going to take her with him. He used to say, ‘If the red lights start to flash, we have three minutes before the compound blows apart. I will come and get you.’ I guess the explosives failed.”
As Ahmare got to the bottom, she wanted to throw up. The blood had rivered down the aisles and pooled around the base of the stage, called by gravity toward the focal point, the last offering to an evil, mortal god.
Her boots left prints, as if she were walking on the silt of a dried riverbed—and she thought of Rollie’s missing head, and his blood on the dirt, spreading out like the Mississippi River. It had glistened in the night. Was it dry now? Yes, and some of it would have been absorbed into the thirsty earth.
She looked over at Duran and didn’t know what to say. It was all too much.
His eyes swung back to her. “I never knew his name.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The male who died in front of me. I never knew anyone’s name—well, except for Nexi, and she told it to me only after I got her to the bunker, when she was thanking me. I informed her it was a team effort, and that was the truth. She was the one who figured out the escape route and the timing of it all. She’s brilliant like that.”
He looked around again. “You know, my mahmen used to tell me her father’s name all the time. I couldn’t figure out why, but now . . . I think she wanted to give it to me. She couldn’t quite get there, though.”
Ahmare knew that she would never forget what he looked like, the risen son, his hair chopped by a blade’s thin edge, his eyes wary and pained, his big body magnificent and unbowed under all he had endured.
And there was that collar around his throat, locked on tight, blinking a red light.
It was a symbol of everything that had marked his life: He had never been free. He had been ever a captive.
“What was her father’s name?” Ahmare said hoarsely.
“It doesn’t matter now.” He paused. “Theo. It was . . . Theo.”
Going around, she ascended the five steps and joined him on the stage. The view from the focal point of the arena was gruesome, the full magnitude of the deaths the stuff of nightmares.
How could anyone do this to other people? she wondered. It was murder even though the cult members had volunteered for it.
“We’ll see about the beloved now,” Duran said. “Enough of the past.”
Lost in his story, she had forgotten about everything else—except . . . “Oh, God, was your mahmen Chalen’s female, too?”
He laughed in a short, hard burst. “No.”
“But then she’ll be dead, too, right? The Dhavos must have killed Chalen’s female, too. Or . . . did he leave and take her with them?”
Shit, her brother.
“We’ll find out. This way—”
“Wait.” She stopped him. “First this.”
He turned around with expectation on his face, like he was ready to answer a question. That expression changed quick as she took the trigger to his collar out of her holster.
Placing the black box on the floor between them, she lifted her boot over the control. “You deserve your freedom. Just the same as everyone else.”
With that, she slammed her steel-reinforced sole down with all the anger she felt at what had been done to him, to his mahmen, to all the innocent, wayward souls who had died here.
The trigger box broke into pieces. The red light on the front of the collar dimmed.
And was extinguished.
It was an incomplete freedom, of course, as he would never not be tied to the circumstances of his birth or the terrible acts of his father. But he could choose his path forward. Just as she had chosen a path forward from the deaths of her parents.
No one else at the helm.
“What have you done?” he whispered.
“Fuck Chalen,” she replied.
24
WHAT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER?”
As Duran asked the question, he knew Ahmare had already answered it by crushing the trigger to his restraint collar. But he wanted to make sure he understood what she meant.
“I’ll save you both.” She shook her head. “That’s the way this has to end. I cannot accept any other outcome.”
He glanced out at the skeletons and then thought of the empty corridors of the facility. It seemed cruel to mention that outcomes were not always acceptable. That sometimes they were even worse than un-acceptable. But he appreciated what she was doing for him, what it implied . . . what it meant.
An impulse to kiss her mouth occurred to him, but not here. Not in the space where all these deaths had occurred—it would be like turning something special into a bad omen, as if the setting could contaminate the contact.
“Thank you,” he said in a voice that cracked.
She grasped one of his hands and squeezed. Her eyes were wide with emotion. “Let’s do what we need to and get out of here.”
Duran nodded and led them off stage to the right, to the back of the house where the lighting and AV equipment were dust-covered and long asleep. He imagined, as they weeded in and out of the various theater lamps and speakers, that all of the equipment was antiquated now. Twenty years down the line and there would have been improvements, right? As with Ahmare’s car, the styling and buttons and screens of which he had not recognized or understood, there would be new technology, advancement, refinements.
That was not going to be the case for him, however.
He knew, on the same deep level that had gotten him through Chalen’s dungeon, that he was not going to progress past all this. There would be no technological improvement to him, no advancement . . . no refinement.
Collar or not, freedom or not, he would be ever among the skeletons here in his father’s arena, his mortal animation an insufficient distinguishing characteristic from the Dhavos’s dead. Made sense. Though he moved, his soul, his vital animation, had died out long ago.