In this respect, whether he made it out of here alive or not wasn’t going to matter.
“The trapdoor is here,” he said as he beckoned Ahmare down a cramped staircase.
At the bottom, the door was locked, but he entered the correct code and the pound key, and there was that shift inside the panels and the wall.
Pushing the way open, he flicked on his flashlight. The beam pierced the darkness and reflected gold. Gleaming, resonant gold.
“Oh, my God,” Ahmare breathed.
“A suitable entry hall for a god, right?” Duran muttered.
“Is it real?” she said as they started down the passageway.
“I think so.” He put his hand out and found the wall cool and smooth to the touch. “They were required to give him all their worldly assets if they joined. Houses, cars, jewelry, clothes. There are sorting rooms in the compound, everything segregated and valued for resale.”
“To think eBay didn’t exist back then.”
“What’s eBay?” Then he glanced over his shoulder. “I was the only young at the compound. He made them give away their offspring as well, telling them that sacrifice was necessary and paramount, but I think that was, like everything else he said, just bullshit. What he was really worried about was that their concern over the welfare of their young might at some point supersede their devotion to him. Unacceptable.”
No matter how quietly he put his boots down, the sound of his footfalls reverberated in the gold colon that dumped out at his father’s private quarters. Old habits of being silent died hard, and he became uncomfortable with the sound.
“I was strong even as a pretrans,” he told her. “And I found duct work in our bedroom cell that allowed me to travel through the ceilings and observe the cult’s layout and schedule of meditations and supplications. When I found the laundry room and the robes, I could even walk around during the night, blending in. Watching from under the hood. I got good at stealing things.” He looked up at the gold-leafed ceiling. “I’ll bet if you go into the ducts even now my stashes of clothes, car keys, glasses, and shoes were where I left them. I was a hoarder, and it was all about outfitting myself and my mahmen for when we got out.”
“How many people died back there?”
“Depends on when he ordered them dead. There were over three hundred people in the cult when I was taken out of here. Maybe it continued to grow, I don’t know. Maybe it faded. It depends on when he played the end of days card. He certainly intended to add to his flock. There was an expansion of this facility”—he tapped the wall—“about two years before I left. That was how I found the human contractors to build the bunker, and I paid them with money I took out of his vault.”
“He let humans down here?”
“What choice did he have? If he’d used members of our species and it had gotten back to Wrath or the Council? He had to use humans and he paid them well enough to ask no questions, work at night, and keep their eyes to themselves.”
They came up to a solid gold door. As he entered the passcode and pound key, he swallowed through a tight throat.
And then . . .
After the lock released, he opened the panel wide and pointed his flashlight into the darkness.
“Holy . . . shit,” Ahmare whispered.
It was Creed Bratton from The Office, Ahmare thought as she walked into a sumptuously appointed bedroom. Clicking on her own cell phone’s light, she shone her beam around.
The unimaginable luxury made her remember the clip of Creed looking into the camera and saying, “I’ve been involved in a number of cults. You have more fun as a follower. But you make more money as a leader.”
Given the way those poor souls had died back in the arena, the former was obviously not true, and she hated that her brain coughed up something so pop-culture’y because it seemed disrespectful to those who had lost their lives. But as she looked at the pastel silk walls, and the draped silk bunting over the circular bed, and the satin sheets bearing the profile that had been etched on those double doors at the arena, she decided the “more money as a leader” thing was clearly right in this case.
No linoleum here. The carpet was thick and fine-napped and—
“The murals,” she said as she swung her light around.
An enormous scene of a garden, with a fountain in the center and birds in midflight and beds filled with flowers, graced the smooth plaster, obviously painted by somebody who knew what they were doing. And as if it was not an artist’s rendering but rather a picture window, or perhaps an open arch to the great outdoors, drapes had been mounted around the artwork, the swoops of sunshine-yellow damask held back so the “view” wasn’t blocked.
A representation of Utopia, a beautiful, impossible-for-a-vampire, daylight-not-reality that nonetheless captivated.
It was rather like the bill of false goods the Dhavos had sold his congregation.
“You want Chalen’s beloved,” Duran said. “Here it is.”
She pivoted around, lowering her light so she didn’t nail him in the eye. Duran was over by the bed, standing next to a shadow box that had been installed into the wall.
As Ahmare approached, she focused on what he was illuminating. Something was set back behind the glass . . . something that glowed.
“A pearl?” she breathed. Then she remembered the conqueror’s decrepit body on his throne. “Of course. Chalen’s crown had an empty mounting in front—and that is what went in it.”
“The Dhavos wasn’t just a spiritual leader, he was a good businessman, a wholesaler of drugs, and Chalen was the middleman for the heroin and cocaine, getting the product to the street after my father brought the stuff in from out of the country. I used to hear them, when I was up in the ducts, talking about the deals on the phone. The shipments. The deliveries. You needed up-front cash to play with the big overseas contacts and the Dhavos had that liquidity courtesy of his congregation turning their worldly goods over to him. He and Chalen had a profitable partnership until there was some kind of double cross. In retaliation, my father infiltrated Chalen’s stronghold and took the one thing that male loved most. The pearl. How my father did it, I have no idea.”
Duran made a fist and punched the glass, shattering the fragile barrier. Reaching in, he took the pearl and passed it over like the priceless oyster creation didn’t mean anything.
And to him, she supposed, it didn’t.
To her, as the cool contours of the baroque settled into the crease of her palm, she felt like she was holding her brother’s life in her hand.
Not going to lose this, she thought as she tucked it into her tight sports bra.
“I think,” Duran said as he inspected one of the other “windows” with his flashlight, “that my father assumed that he would kill two birds with one stone when he dropped me at Chalen’s door—”
All at once, a line of light, like something you’d see at the bottom of a door, flared in the far corner. As if there were another room outside . . . and someone had just thrown a switch.
“You stay here,” Duran ordered as they both wheeled in that direction and he clicked off his flashlight.
As the bedroom plunged into darkness, Ahmare didn’t argue with him, although not because she had any intention of following his rules. Instead, she got her gun out again and prepared to run after him.
“Turn off your light,” he whispered without looking back. “So they don’t see you when I open the door. And step to the side so you stay in the shadows.”
Good advice, she thought as she clicked her beam off. Best to stay hidden for as long as she could before they rushed into the other room.
To get out of the most likely path of illumination, she shuffled back a number of feet, going up against a wall. Then she held her breath as Duran got ready to open things and jump on whoever was—
Just as Duran pulled the door wide and lunged out of the bedroom, a soft sound from behind her got her attention.
She didn’t have time to react. The hood that came down over her head smelled like old wool, and before she could scream, a brutally heavy hand clamped over mouth, her gun was taken, and a thick arm locked around her waist.
With brutal efficiency, she was carried off.
25
AS DURAN SWUNG THE door open, he kept his body out of the way in case—
The instant he caught the scent in the air, he came alive, instincts roaring to life, possibilities filling him out from the inside. It was the same kind of rush he’d gotten from Ahmare’s gift of vein, power and purpose returning.
His father was still alive.
His father was still in the compound.
As Duran’s eyes adjusted to bright light, he wanted to put his gun away so his attack could be more personal. But he kept the forty up in case the male was armed—although he was not worried about anyone else because there were no other scents in the air. The Dhavos was alone.
“Father,” he said in a low growl. “Will you not welcome your son?”
Duran looked around, and instantly, nothing else mattered.
The luxurious antechamber to the Dhavos’s bedroom had been emptied of its fancy gilded and padded accessories. There was only one piece of furniture in it.
His mahmen’s cot. And on the cot . . . was a skeleton, the skull on a satin pillow, a set of clean sheets pulled up to the collarbones, a blanket folded with care over the legs. Beside the remains, on the floor, was a twisted bundle of blankets. A half-eaten tear of bread. Water bottles that bore the name “Poland Spring.” A book.
Several books.
Duran stumbled across the otherwise empty space and fell to his knees at the cot. His mahmen’s hair . . . her long dark hair . . . had been preserved, a braid of it lying off to the side, tied with satin ribbon.
“Mahmen,” he whispered. “I’m here. I’m going to get you out . . .”
The pits of the eye sockets stared sightlessly to the ceiling, and the jaw had been wired into place by an amateur with what looked like . . . dental floss. Dental floss had been wound around the jaw joint to keep the teeth together.