City of the Fallen (25 page)

“Come with me,” he said before turning towards Miles again. “Fifteen minutes.”

Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed her hand and led her towards the tunnels and then out into the courtyard.

When they reached his bedroom and stepped inside, he hugged her, then reached for her mouth.

The hunger in his kiss startled her and scared her. It was as if he was kissing her for the last time. Her fingers closed over his arm, holding on to say what she couldn’t put into words.
Don’t go, don’t do it, don’t leave me here
. Slowly, he looked down and into her eyes, his hands holding her face with a determination that left her breathless.

“Marcus…”

“I’ll be back, Belle,” he said, his voice rolling out in a growl. “This is not goodbye.”

So why does it feel like it?
Her pulse was throbbing, her ears booming.

“I don’t like it,” she whispered and her words were tingling with uneasiness.

“I don’t like it either,” he admitted. “But it’s time for Patrick to die.”

He kissed her again, this time soft and tender. The sense of dread washing over her reached deeper, coiling and squeezing without mercy.

“I want you to stay in this room while I’m gone,” he added. “It’s basically a fortress. Come here.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the farther end of the room. Then he pushed her palm against the wall, fingers opened and twisted in an awkward position. A soft click and the wall slid open, the darkness of the corridors oozing ahead and spilling into the room. “Nobody knows about this one except Miles and me. If anything happens, use it. It will lead you back into the tunnels.”

She tried to control the shiver washing over her skin. “I hate the tunnels. It’s so dark down there.”

“I’m sorry, but any light will immediately alert everybody to your presence.”

He let go of her and spun around, walking a few steps towards the center of the room. The door slid closed and disappeared into the wall, almost as if it never existed. The sense of doom in her chest got stronger. What if she needed to find it and couldn’t? What if something came through the tunnels and broke into the room?

Stop it!
her mind screamed.

Marcus turned around and reached for her. One second he was a few feet away; the next she was in his arms. And then he smiled, but the smile lacked the wickedness it usually carried. “Don’t worry, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

A flash and he was on the other side of the room, opening the outside door. He hesitated for a second, then he turned around. As if he was standing at the edge of an abyss, deciding whether to jump at once or stay there for a while, savoring reality for one more impossible minute. Soft liquid silver danced in his eyes.

She took a step towards him but he raised a hand to stop her. And before he disappeared into the shadows of the courtyard, before his form blurred away into the darkness, he looked at her in a way that made her whole body ache.

“I love you, Belle,” he said, and the words lingered in the air long after he was gone.

~*~

The next two hours were a blur of agony. She tried to run after Marcus when he stepped into the courtyard, but by the time she got to the door, he was gone. The words replayed in her head over and over as the night extended its blanket of darkness over the compound. She watched it happen from inside his bedroom, the door latched securely and the lights off. It seemed like a pointless strategy—if vampire eyes were strong enough to maneuver through the tunnels, they surely would be able to see her in the darkness of the room. But still, she let the room sit in shadows.

She placed her hand against the cold glass and felt the vibration of the night stirring against it. That was his night out there, his domain. For her, it was little more than darkness and fear.

A month ago, she would have seen the imminent danger as a potential way to get rid of the king. Now, the future of humankind depended on the king surviving the fight. Funny how things could change so quickly in a question of days. Funny how your heart could change sides before you even realized it had happened.

She had her eyes closed and her forehead against the cold glass when she heard the noise. It was just a soft rustle, fabrics brushing together. Smooth, but also foreign. A noise that didn’t belong in the room.

Her eyes shot open and her pulse quickened. She looked around, trying to guess the movement of the shadows around her, but it was too dark to really tell what was hiding in the corners.

Holding her breath, she took a step towards the hidden door near the armoire—and that was when she noticed that the door separating this bedroom from hers was ajar. Ajar enough to allow for a body to pass through.

If something was in the room, it wasn’t a rabid. Rabids were too desperate to be stealthy. It also wasn’t a friendly vampire. Those would have come through the front door, announcing their presence.

Another step.

The rustle of fabric against air bounced on the walls, making it hard to tell where it was coming from. She was breathing so hard, it was hard to hear anything else.

Was there a guard outside her door? Probably. She could scream for help—but the vampire in the room was a lot closer to her than the one outside. She wasn’t sure the guard would make it inside before she’d been torn to pieces. Any way she looked at it, the chances were not in her favor.

One more quick breath and she pressed her hand against the wall.

The second the door started to slide open, the vampire jumped out from the shadows and directly towards her. A flash of silver bursting through the air at impossible speeds. His hand brushed her arm as she plummeted into the darkness of the tunnels, but the door closed too quickly for him to make it through.

She was in complete darkness, her heart hammering madly against her chest. And then the vampire on the other side of the door let out a scream that sent waves of raw panic through her. He started pounding on the door, and she realized it wouldn’t take long before he figured out how to open it.

An uproar of noises exploded in the room. Crashes of glass breaking and things being thrown around. Vampires fighting. She didn’t want to wait around to see who would win.
  

Reaching for the nearest wall, she pressed her back against it and started sliding down the corridor. The pounding on the door made it difficult to listen to the sounds of the tunnels. She had no idea where this one went and how it connected to the underground rooms. And since she was walking blind, all she could do was to keep moving away from the door, hoping she could get far enough before the fight was over and the wrong vampire figured out the entry to the tunnels.

Because once he did, her chances of escaping were gone.

Her steps rippled in maddening echoes, bouncing above her and clinging to invisible corners. After a few feet, the corridor turned once, then again, then back around. It was impossible to keep up with it and it didn’t take long before she was completely lost. The roar of the vampires in the distance was the only indication that she was still walking in the opposite direction, away from the bedroom.

It felt like she walked around for hours in the darkness, even though it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Then she turned another corner and a chill rush of air hit her.

She froze, her heart pounding so wildly in her ears she couldn’t hear anything else.

The tunnels had always had a suffocating feel to them, so a breeze down there could only mean one thing: the door connecting the tunnel to the outside world was open. A knot built in her throat. There was no way of knowing what was waiting for her on the other end of the tunnel. Or who was winning the battle raging back in the bedroom.

She took another step forward and then she saw it. A slight flickering in the distance, maybe fifty feet away. Black and thick and deep—but still less dark than the darkness devouring her in the tunnels.

It was the pulsing energy of the night beaming through an open door. A slight movement of air and dust against the night sky. She had to make a choice: either find her way to the open door and hope there was nothing waiting for her there. Or walk back towards the bedroom and count on the right vampire winning the fight.

Both were terrifying choices.

Like tossing a coin in the air and knowing you were lost no matter what side turned up.

Maybe if she found one of the secret rooms along the tunnel, she could hide in there until things calmed down. Except she had been walking down the tunnels for a while and hadn’t come across any doors—or maybe she had but she hadn’t realized it.

A bang against the sliding door on the bedroom wall made her jump. Somebody was trying to open it.

She ran her palm over the wall, somewhat hoping there would be a sliding door right there where she was standing. The walls remained silent and obscure, the whispering of the night ticking along all around her.

Another bang. Louder and this time accompanied by raging wailing. Rabids. They were inside the compound and trying to fight their way into the tunnels.

That was when she decided to run towards the night. Whatever was out there, it was probably no worse than what was waiting for her inside the compound. And at least out there she had a chance to make a run for it.

She took a deep breath, tried to focus her eyes on the promise of light in the distance and took off. It was a half-hearted run, but only because she couldn’t see where she was going and the ground was too uneven to attempt a full run.

From forty feet away, the night was calling to her with open arms.

Thirty.

Twenty.

And then she tripped on something and fell forward.

She swallowed the scream rising in her throat as her hands reached forward and found a body. It was too dark to tell what it was. Probably not human, down there in the tunnels. That still left her with too many questions—the biggest one being “friend or foe?”

Because if this was a vampire who had died protecting the tunnels, it meant the enemy could be just steps ahead of her, crouched into the darkness waiting for her to walk right into it.

She got up, stepping over the body. The tunnels were so narrow in that area, she could touch both sides without completely stretching her arms.

The sound of bodies banging against metal reverberated along the tunnels. Any second now, the door would explode open and then the rabids would be on her, hungry and raging and ready for the kill. With her hands on the walls serving as guides, she tore down the rest of the tunnel, straight towards the night.

The second she stepped into the open air, the explosion of sounds assaulted her. The wind howled around the walls and into the barren landscape. She turned around to see the flames extending over the walls. Wailings of war, mixed with the sounds of humans screaming and doors being razed down, filled the night. She was alone outside the compound.