Dark Challenge (17 page)

Julian was intrigued with the ease with which Darius unraveled the safeguards the vampire had set. Darius moved with great confidence yet was unhurried by even the setting sun. He seemed absorbed in his work, as if it commanded his complete attention, but Julian was not deceived. Darius was aware of the danger they were in.

As Darius continued weaving his strange pattern along the cliff, a faint line began to take shape, zigzagging across the face of the rock. With an ominous rumble the line began to deepen and widen into a crack. At once scorpions began to boil out of the crevice, thousands of them, large and hideous, rushing at Darius. As Darius moved to avoid the cascading fall of poisonous insects, the ground rolled, heaved, and buckled, throwing him directly into their path. Julian jerked him up and out of the way, launching them both into the air as the vampire’s guardians swarmed along the ground.

Darius glanced skyward, and lightning arced from cloud to cloud. He gazed steadily at the sizzling streaks, building the energy until he could gather it into a bright orange fireball and direct it straight into the scurrying mass of scorpions. At once there was a stench as the insects blackened into charred ashes.

When Julian settled once more to earth, Darius went right back to work as though the interruption had never taken place. Julian watched the strange pattern, intrigued by the work he had not experienced in his long centuries of hunting. He had to admire the fluid grace Darius exhibited, his sureness and confidence, his lack of hesitation. His own heart was beating out a rhythm of excitement and dread.
Was this the one? Was a certain ancient evil waiting inside this lair, waiting to claim the pupil he had long ago so skillfully wrought?

“The ground.” Darius spoke the words softly. Julian
nearly missed them, even with his acute hearing, so deep was he in his dark memories.

“Excuse me?” Even as his own words slipped out, Julian was heeding the warning, studying the earth beneath them carefully. Darius had not looked away from the cliffside, working at the safeguards so that the crack expanded, the rock face creaking and groaning as it was forced to spread apart. Julian caught a movement—so fast and subtle, he nearly missed it—as it passed under Darius’s feet, raising the soil a scant half inch as something streaked beneath the surface.

Then a tentacle erupted but three inches from Darius’s shoes, wiggling obscenely, blindly seeking prey. Julian instantly battled the vampire’s writhing demon root. He withered each appendage as it burst through the soil seeking Darius, who was seemingly oblivious to the entire battle, working efficiently even as the lashing tentacles attempted to wind around his ankles. Julian hastily destroyed the repulsive thing.

As the last wriggling tentacle withered into ash, a huge bulb erupted a few feet from Julian, its mouth yawning wide. A spray of greenish-yellow liquid spewed toward Darius, who held himself still, widening the crevice, revealing the hidden chamber within, relying on Julian to defend them from the latest menace. Julian blasted the bulb with a laserlike burst of fire from the sky, incinerating it before the acid spray could touch Darius.

“The sun,” Julian reminded him, aware of its low position in the sky, seeing the reds and pinks of sunset stain the heavens.

“There is no way to hurry this procedure,” Darius replied softly. “The undead is aware of us and sends his minions to delay us.”

Julian reached out for the mind of their hidden opponent.
You are weak, evil one. You should not have
challenged one so much stronger than you. I am of ancient and powerful blood, undefeated these centuries by those far more learned in the arts than you. There is no way to win. You are already defeated
.

Out of the darkened interior of the chamber rushed an army of large rats, leaping for the two Carpathians with a savage ferocity fed by starvation and compulsion. With his desperate, cunning mind, the vampire orchestrated the pack’s vicious attack. Julian realized the rats were charging Darius. The vampire was prepared for this dark one, but perhaps he had not comprehended that another hunter, too, was stalking him. The rats were charging Desari’s protector, suggesting that Dara
was
the un-dead’s ultimate goal. With a savage satisfaction, Julian leapt over the thick mass of furred bodies and made his way into the belly of the mountain.

The ancient he had spent lifetimes searching for was not in the lair; he would have immediately recognized Julian, his voice, his blood, the shadowing. Still, the merciless fury drove him inward, seeking his prey. This one would not escape.

The walls of the narrow tunnel bulged with razor-sharp, jagged spikes, erupting unexpectedly right, then left, as the vampire threw obstacles in his hunter’s path to delay him. The vampire was aware of the peril approaching
and
of the sun sinking. He felt he had a fighting chance if he could hamper the progress of the hunter long enough to allow the sun to set and his own strength to rise.

Julian simply thinned and elongated his body, sliding easily through the maze of sharpened spikes, continuing deeper within the bowels of the mountain. He smelled the evil stench, the lair of the beast. It stank of death and decay. As Julian stepped into the chamber itself, thousands of bats rushed at him, emitting high-pitched
squeals of alarm. His mind automatically reached to calm them and sent them retreating back into the depths of the cave so they wouldn’t be caught in the light, prey for more aggressive species.

The vampire lay staring at him with red eyes hot with hatred, his thin, bloodless lips drawn back in a snarl to reveal rotting teeth. His skin had shrunk to barely cover his skull; he already resembled a skeleton. Julian wanted to feel pity for the damned creature, but his revulsion at such proximity to evil was overwhelming. He detested the undead with a relentless, merciless drive he could never overcome. In his childhood he had come far too close to such a repulsive being, and the rotted, foul stench was forever etched in his memory.

The vampire lay in a depression in the earth, rotted clothes, once elegant and fine, covering his emaciated body. He looked grotesque. As Julian approached, the mouth curved in a parody of a smile. “You are too late, hunter. The sun has dropped from the sky.” The vampire floated from the soil to an upright position.

Julian shrugged with studied casualness. “Do you not recognize me? We grew up together. You were once a great man, Renaldo. How is that you have sunk so low as to roam the earth in search of fresh kills?”

The head undulated back and forth in a palsied motion. “Why have you come to this place, Savage? You never concerned yourself with the politics of our race.” The vampire’s voice was an ugly hiss spewing from his throat.

“You chose to become something other than what you were born to be. I have long hunted those who chose to damn their souls and imperil others,” Julian replied softly, almost gently. His voice was beautiful purity, its tones filling the cavern, pushing aside the stench of decay. “There was a time, Renaldo, when you hunted by
my side. Even then you were not nearly of my strength and power. Why would you think yourself capable of challenging me now?” On the surface, it seemed an innocent enough question, but his voice was hypnotic, velvet, all the more powerful because it was nearly impossible to detect the hidden compulsion in it.

Darius had followed Julian into the mountain, remaining in the background to scan for other dangers, knowing from experience that the undead had many traps and deceptions and that they always tried to take those hunting them with them to their death. With the undead, nothing was ever as it seemed.

He found Julian’s soft, gentle approach to the vampire interesting. Darius was more direct, hunting the undead down and quickly dispatching them in a brief, ferocious battle. Julian was a bit like the vampire himself—indirect, deceptive, undermining the confidence of his opponent, sidetracking him, throwing him off, reminding him of his earlier, better days. Darius shook his head but remained silent and unseen. His sister’s mate was an interesting man, a renegade, going his own way in all things, a careless, sardonic humor spilling over when least expected. Julian appeared to be afraid of nothing, to respect few, and to be a law unto himself.

Darius’s curiosity stemmed from more than merely wanting to become better acquainted with the man who claimed his sister for his own. There was something eluding him about his sister’s chosen lifemate. Something dark and mysterious that nagged at him.

The vampire was moving in a circular direction, trying to position himself closer to the exit. Julian was not giving ground, merely turning with the monster in a strange, flowing dance. Julian could have been performing a minuet for all the stress he portrayed. “You know
that I cannot allow you to live, Renaldo. It would be inhuman of me.”

“You have no regard for humans, Julian,” the vampire pointed out. “You follow no one, not even the Prince of all Carpathians. You think I do not feel the shadow lengthening and growing within you? You are of our blood. My challenge was not issued to you but to another, one not known to the people of our homeland. This one hoards more than one eligible woman for himself. This is against our laws.”

Julian’s white teeth gleamed in the darkness of the chamber. “And you follow those laws?” He asked it with deceptive mildness, but the vampire’s words had struck deeply.
“You are of our blood.”

Even as he spoke, he felt the slight shift in the earth beneath his feet, the undead’s next deadly desperate assault beginning. At once he moved with lightning speed, going from a loose standing position to lunging straight at the vampire, his hand diving deep into the chest wall, extracting the pumping heart as he leapt away.

His image was so blurred, his speed so swift, even for one of their kind, that Darius thought for the space of a heartbeat that he might have imagined Savage’s skillful charge. The vampire swayed uncertainly, gasping from the blow, his grotesque features contorted into an even more grotesque mask. He fell in slow motion, landing nearly at Julian’s feet.

Julian tossed the heart some distance from the body and immediately gathered energy in his hands to cleanse the blood from his skin. He then directed an orange flame at the still-pulsating organ, incinerating it to a fine gray ash. The flame then leapt from his hand to the body, instantly cremating the remains so that the vampire could not possibly rise again.

The earth beneath his feet rolled, heaved, and bucked.
There was an ominous creaking of rock, a grinding of layers of stone as slabs of granite began to slide toward one another. Darius appeared and sprang toward the shifting crevice, his hands weaving a strange pattern as he sang something softly beneath his breath, slowing the vampire’s lethal trap. Julian didn’t wait for an engraved invitation. Shape-shifting on the wing, making himself as small as possible, he streaked through the closing crack toward open air and the night, Darius right beside him. The two burst out into the freedom of sky, the open expanse of air, just as the two sides of the crevice thunderously crashed together.

“I thought you were planning on talking him to death,” Darius informed the golden bat dryly as he himself shape-shifted from a black bat to a feathered and much more powerful predator.

“Someone had to do something while you were playing with your rock patterns,” Julian replied easily, allowing iridescent feathers to erupt along his own body, becoming a raptor more than able to keep up with his companion’s aggressive flight.

They began to fly side be side easily toward the forest where they had left Desari. “I could do no other than protect the man of my sister’s choosing.” Darius managed to make it sound as if his sister had a hole in her head.

Julian snorted. “Protect me? I do not think so, old man. You were the one standing back in the shadows while I destroyed the beast.”

“I had to ensure you came to no harm through other traps and snares. You certainly wasted enough time with the undead,” Darius replied softly. He veered to the left, winging his way above the canopy of trees. When Julian continued on his present course, Darius made a wide
circle back to him. “You do not wish to return to my family with me?”

“I must awaken Desari first,” Julian replied complacently.

“Desari rose an hour ago.” Darius delivered the message in a tranquil, neutral voice.

Julian, within the owl’s body, nearly dropped from the sky in shock. He could not conceive of Darius teasing him. Darius had no discernible sense of humor. He was closer to turning than any other Carpathian male Julian had ever met. It was an unsettling thought that someday he might have to hunt and attempt to destroy Desari’s brother.

Desari
. He whispered her name across the sky, somewhere between tenderness and rage. She had somehow managed to awaken on her own despite his forceful command. He should have known the moment she had risen. He was her lifemate. They were connected, two halves of the same whole. Darius had known Desari was gone. Had she contacted him? For a moment Julian’s feathered body shook with anger. Desari didn’t understand what it meant to be claimed by a mate. She was bound to him, heart and soul. She needed to learn much more of the man who was now her lifemate. Petty retaliation because he had forced her obedience would not be tolerated.

Tolerated?
Desari’s soft voice said scornfully in his mind.
I do not owe you obedience, Julian. I am no fledgling to follow your lead without question. You are the one who needs to learn more of the woman you claim you have bound to you. I will not be treated in such a manner
.

Julian slammed his mind shut while he wrestled with an unfamiliar, smoldering rage. He had never really experienced jealous anger. He had never had reason to.
And, as a powerful Carpathian male, he had naturally believed that his lifemate was the one who would willingly change her life for him. She would want to fit into his world, not force him to live in hers. Yet Desari appeared to have ideas of her own.

Julian deliberately turned away from Darius, working at repressing his unexpected temper. He needed time alone to get himself under control, to think things through. To try to understand that Desari was no fledgling to be guided by her mate. That she had lived many centuries, had many powers, and was used to making decisions and commanding a certain amount of respect. He winged his way toward the mountain peaks, where he always felt a semblance of peace. He would spend time there pondering the situation and the best way to handle it.