The tendrils of her power, made real because of Adrien, traveled swiftly away from her, deep into the cavern system, miles from where she now sat.
“What is it, Lily? My chain is vibrating heavily.”
“I’m getting a call from the branch on the right.” She gestured to the far end of the vaulted chamber.
“How far?”
She shook her head. “Miles. Whatever relates to the extinction weapon is a long way away.”
Adrien rose to his feet, then extended his hand to her. She took it, and because of his increased Ancestral strength, when he pulled she flew upward a couple of feet then flopped into him.
He laughed, gave her a quick squeeze. “Sorry ’bout that. Still learning.”
Smiling as she slid down his body, she almost kissed him, but stopped herself. What was she thinking? That she’d have a long-term relationship with a vampire, with someone no doubt slated for death by Daniel once he got his hands on the weapon? She had to start being sensible where Adrien was concerned.
He led her to the tunnel on the right, but given her sense of where they were headed she suggested they use altered flight and communicate telepathically.
“I’m all for shaving time off this mission. I’ll just pause at each branch and you can tell me which way to go.”
“Done.” How simple this all seemed.
She turned into him and he slid his arm around her waist. But instead of pulling her against him, chest to chest, he held her to his side so that she was facing forward.
Her feet dangled as he started the altered flight.
Once he started to fly, the miles dissipated quickly. At each juncture, she made her decisions quickly because she knew the route as though it had been imprinted on her DNA. Of course, it was just the chains, and the power she siphoned from Adrien, but she never wavered as she communicated each shift in course telepathically.
We’re getting close. I can feel it now.
The tunnel had narrowed badly and finally reached what looked like a dead end, a wall of jagged rock. Adrien brought them to a complete halt, a jarring movement that rocked her against him a couple of times. She stared at the wall that wasn’t a wall, sensing that something critical lay beyond.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “An Ancestral has infused this wall of rock with a nearly impenetrable disguise. No wonder this has never been found before.”
“You mean a disguise like the ones used to prevent humans from finding your world?”
He nodded, putting his hand on the wall. “Yes, feel the vibration. Can you sense the power?”
She reached out and even before her fingers connected with the stone, she felt the disguising field. “Someone with great power created this.”
He moved his hand over the stone. “An Ancestral. I can almost get a reading on who the vampire was, but not quite.” He drew his hand back. “I suppose it really doesn’t matter. Just tell me, is this the place?”
“Yes,” Lily said “Absolutely.”
And yet, he hesitated.
“What’s wrong?” Lily asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right.”
But she chuckled softly. “Whatever is beyond these walls can’t be worse than what we just left behind, can it?” She shuddered slightly at the memory of so much blood.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. You sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Please take us through.”
He nodded and swallowed hard. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got on the other side of this wall.”
The altered flight took only a split second, as Adrien took her through the dense rock, setting her on her feet in yet another vast internal cavern.
What she saw, however, forced her to grow very still. “Oh, my God.”
“Shit,” Adrien said, his voice a mere whisper.
Scattered around what looked like an old-fashioned laboratory were long-decayed corpses, mere skeletons now, all crumpled piles of bones still covered in clothing, often with fingers pressed to skulls as though the people here had died in exactly the position they fell, all in terrible pain, holding their heads.
The air, however, was fresh, as most of the caves she’d been in were.
She glanced around. “How many do you think there are?” She moved slightly to the right, to look down another row of tables and cupboards. Sure enough, several more people lay curled up, hands to heads.
Adrien took hold of her hand and drew her close. “Looks like about fifty. At least.”
“Do you think this was the result of the weapon we’re looking for?”
“Maybe. Hell, by the looks of it, probably. I still can’t believe something like this exists.”
At that moment her revisiting power came alive, but with it a terrible sense of foreboding. For an instant she debated pulling back. She let go of Adrien’s hand, but turned into him and reached for him.
Because he no doubt sensed her fear, he slid his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “I’ve got you. Another vision?”
She inclined her head. “This is gonna be bad.”
As the revisiting vision came alive, time moved, a deep funneling motion accompanied by shifting waves that began to swirl around the edges of the cavern, creating an almost tornado-like impression at both sides of her vision.
A past view of the current environment emerged, as individuals swarmed through the facility, many running as though something was happening. Each scurried, gathering up papers, turning off equipment. All wore crisp white lab coats. Very 1950s.
When a sound began to pulse within the room, there was a moment when everyone paused to look around, eyes wide. The sound continued to release in a steady rhythm.
She felt the sudden horror of the group.
“This shouldn’t be happening?” someone called out. “Who fired up the weapon?”
Then, “Run!”
At the far end, several of the scientists headed into the tunnel, which was located opposite where she and Adrien now stood. They were running and calling back for others to leave as well.
A few escaped, but the pulsing sound grew louder and suddenly so shrill that even Lily’s ears began to hurt. Amplified by the shared chains, her hearing sharpened, so that as the sound escalated into higher and higher frequencies, she began to tremble.
Suddenly everyone dropped to the floor, holding their hands over their ears and screaming, blood pouring from mouths, nostrils, and ears.
Just as suddenly, the screaming stopped.
And the vision ended.
Lily looked down, and she knew the people she’d seen were the present-day skeletons. The places where they’d died were the same, hands to skulls, the blood having long since dried up and disintegrated.
Suddenly she felt the presence of others in the space and gripped Adrien harder.
Three vampires arrived at the mouth of the opposing tunnel, Daniel and two others, equally tall and powerful in build, like Adrien.
Daniel wore another fine suit but with a scarlet tie this time. His hair, slicked back and oiled, as well as his goatee, looked exactly the same as the previous vision. Only this wasn’t a vision.
“So, we meet again, Lily Haven.” Then he smiled, an expression both charismatic and seductive. He even bowed as though carrying forward for effect the affectations of earlier centuries.
She drew closer to Adrien. It was one thing to have heard tales about the monster or even to have spoken with him in a revisiting vision. But right now, in this moment, the serpent slithered through the room.
* * *
Adrien stared at Daniel, now standing on the opposite side of the room. The monster who now ruled the Council and who held Adrien’s brothers in the Himalayan prison stood flanked by his two oldest sons, Quill and Lev. Daniel, of all vampires, didn’t deserve to have even one child, never mind the several he had sired.
All male vampires, brought into the world and raised during the first years of l
ife by human mothers.
He’d hurt all his children.
And killed off their mothers.
Adrien stared at Daniel, and his two lackeys, the sight of him clamping around Adrien’s heart like a vise. “What are you doing here?”
Daniel looked at Adrien, still smiling. “Protecting my investment, of course.” He glanced around the room. “I never could find this place. All those decades of searching, but this one remained hidden to me. Naturally, I’d heard rumors. After all, it was my friend Charles who had run this laboratory illegally for at least a decade after the Council had shut everything down. Too bad he died when he did. Other rumors said he’d built a weapon and hidden it.”
“You’ve been following us.”
“I’ve kept tabs.” He levitated and started moving slowly, above the corpses but between tables and cupboards in a distant row. His minions trailed him, matching his flow. Dread seized Adrien’s heart, an old familiar sensation from childhood. How much pain would Daniel inflict this time?
He couldn’t breathe. Lily’s hand, normally comforting, felt like fire on his back.
Her voice pierced his chaotic thoughts. Daniel is more to you than just an evil in your world, isn’t he? I can feel through the chains that you fear him like no one else we’ve encountered. Who is he to you, Adrien? Who is he?
He turned to Lily but he couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t speak the words. “Stay close. No matter what happens, stay close to me. Do you understand?”
Her hazel eyes looked huge as she stared back at him, nodding once very slowly. He hurt you before, didn’t he? I can feel it now. A long time ago. Centuries ago.
Yes, Adrien responded slowly, remembered pain flashing through his body. He hurt all of us, me and my brothers, even the two with him right now. He hurt us all.
She blinked once. He watched her mind open to the truth, the one he hated to speak. “Oh, my God. Adrien, he’s your father, isn’t he? Daniel is your father?”
Adrien nodded. “The one who sired me, yes. Lucian helped us escape but others found us and protected us, Gabriel among them. But Daniel is my father. I carry his genes, and I’m never to be trusted.” He grabbed her arm and squeezed. He stared hard into her face. “Do you hear me, Lily? Never to be trusted.”
Again she nodded, in that way that seemed to almost draw time to a standstill.
Daniel still glided slowly, milking his approach, one of the few who could sustain altered flight in such a perfect, slow-drifting manner. All part of his performance, to remind Adrien how powerful he was.
At the top of the row and now hovering fifteen feet away from Adrien, he turned and surveyed the room, his gaze raking across the various counters and tables, the skeletons on the floor, silence in the space suddenly deafening.
Lily once more entered his head but very quietly, as though afraid Daniel could hear her telepathy. He’s looking for the weapon.
Of course he is. Adrien’s gaze never left Daniel. He knew how fast the bastard could move.
But Daniel’s gaze, after making a careful sweep of the large, vaulted space, finally landed on Lily. “The weapon isn’t here, is it?”
Adrien shifted so that he could look at her. She frowned, and he felt her focus her tracking abilities on the weapon once more. He felt the truth as she shook her head. “No, it was removed. This is the remnant, this laboratory and these corpses.”
Daniel began to move slowly once more, but this time Adrien saw that his father had focused his energy on Lily. “I created this,” he said, now ten feet away. He swept his hand to encompass Adrien and Lily. “I created this bond because I knew that with her tracking ability and your power, you’d form a formidable tracking pair, something I couldn’t do on my own, something I tried a hundred times to achieve. Every tracker I tried to bind myself to died immediately. My power was too immense for them. When I discovered Lily, one of the strongest trackers I’d found, I couldn’t risk losing her like all the others, so I brought in another vampire whose power isn’t as great as mine. Now I expect results, Lily. Kiernan must have told you that, must have told you carefully everything that was at stake, all that precious flesh and blood.”
“He did.”
“Lily, what’s he talking about?” Adrien felt dizzy suddenly, sick deep in his gut, as though his body knew exactly what Daniel had used to force Lily on this journey. He swallowed hard as Daniel closed the last few feet to stand a yard away from them.
He heard her breath hitch in her throat, but she said nothing.
“So you kept your word and you didn’t tell him?” Daniel chuckled and smiled, that broad, charismatic, beckoning smile of his.
“I told him nothing. I followed Kiernan’s instructions.”
Adrien felt panic rising in Lily, a wave of sensation that vibrated the double-chain at his neck.
Daniel shifted his gaze to Adrien. “And you didn’t tell her who I was. What an interesting pair you are. Well, I won’t give up Lily’s little secret, either; Kiernan wouldn’t like it.”
His cold light teal eyes shifted to Lily.
Adrien felt her trembling now, fear washing through her, then rage, then fear, then rage hot again, her skin flushing and burning Adrien. He held her pressed against his side, the relative position that tended to keep them both safe now.
But what would happen next, he couldn’t guess, except for one great truth: Pain would follow. When Daniel entered a room, pain always followed.
Try not to listen to him. Adrien needed Lily to be as strong as possible right now. He could sense what was coming and he needed her with him, aware and focused.
“You haven’t exactly fulfilled your promise to find the weapon, Lily, and I’m very disappointed. But use your power right now, the tracking ability you have, and focus on the weapon. Tell me where you sense it coming from. Do it now!”
Lily jerked at these last words and the force behind them. She obeyed and turned slightly to face the far wall, where the tunnel had allowed a few of the scientists to escape. Adrien felt her siphon his power and he let it flow as she reached out over the earth. “I don’t know,” she said. “The tendrils go to a hundred places at once, nothing specific. I’ve since learned that there was more than one weapon and that many of the separate parts were hidden away in over twenty cavern systems.”
“Yes, a plot to confuse even a tracker. The Council at that time didn’t lack for intelligence.” Daniel’s gaze shifted away from Lily as he once more surveyed the laboratory. “So there’s nothing here, just evidence that the weapon works and how it works, how it kills—very effectively, I see.”
He grew very still, the kind of stillness that broadened the pain in Adrien’s gut.
Daniel turned toward Adrien, his gaze fierce and controlling. He smiled. “At least you’ve taken a step to becoming an Ancestral like me, like your brothers here.” He turned his shoulders first one way then the other, slight movements that indicated Quill and Lev.
Adrien felt their Ancestral status. As Daniel’s devoted followers, they would have taken on the Ancestral mantle long ago. And yet, because of his new power, he could feel their inherent weakness, that neither would become as strong as Daniel. Had Daniel created them to be less than him? Or was it just the result of genetics, the luck of the draw?
Daniel’s eyes took on a fiery fervor. “You have such potential if you would just open yourself up to the true possibilities of your nature, that part of you deeply vampire. I was wrong to have created you from a human female because you’ve been polluted, you and your younger brothers. Yet strangely, the potential in you astounds me. You could almost be as powerful as me, if you’d just try.” He took a step closer, lowering his chin, holding Adrien’s gaze in his tight grip. “That’s why I’d treated you so harshly in the past, you and your brothers. It was to strengthen you and prepare you for your inheritance, what I’ve given you because of who I am as an Ancestral.”
“I’ll never do that,” Adrien returned, also lowering his chin, battling Da
niel’s hypnotic abilities. “I took on the chain to keep Lily safe so she could fly without hurting. The rest, the potential you value so highly, revolts me. I have no intention of opening myself up to the kind of power that has devoured you.”
Daniel laughed. “You’re so naive, so much like Gabriel. I can see his handprint on your life. But who rules the Council now and is likely to rule for centuries, if not millennia, to come? Answer me that?”
Adrien remained silent.
“My son, you always lacked something indefinable, a certain finesse, or courage, perhaps, or confidence. I was never quite sure what defect it was that kept you from being a real man. You’re weak, not in power, but in those attributes that define a man, a willingness to set his eye on an object and take it merely because he wants it. Without that drive, a man is nothing but a whimpering shell, a child weeping at his mother’s knee because life is too hard. Poor Adrien. You’ll always be nothing, a little maggot of a vampire.”
The taunts piled up, one after the other, so familiar, a clanging bell from a torturous childhood, until Adrien’s brain seized, right in the middle where a sharp pain split his hemispheres in half. He breathed hard through his nose. He blinked and tried to pull his thoughts back into some kind of order, but couldn’t.
He wished like hell that he could believe Daniel was using some kind of thrall on him, but he wasn’t. No, what he felt, this kind of numbing pain and disorientation, always happened because at the core of Adrien’s being, when he confronted Daniel, was rage, a knife of rage that severed his soul and his mind into two dysfunctional parts. He couldn’t even speak. All he could feel was a profound need to slay the man now hovering in his fine Italian shoes a few inches above the ground.
He wanted to strike, but he didn’t have the power and Daniel knew it.
“Well, what an asshole you are.”
The words came from beside him, from Lily, the weak human, the one that Daniel could crush with a thought.
Adrien didn’t know what to do because suddenly, as Daniel shifted his gaze to Lily, turning all that evil on her, Adrien knew he would do her harm, and that he’d enjoy doing it because Lily now meant something to Adrien.