Immortal Craving (Dark Dynasties) (33 page)

Lyra stared. “Before he knocked you out too, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.” Lyra turned around and shook Jaden awake. The vampire came to pretty quickly, sitting beside his mate. Lyra filled him in, and the sleepy haze left his eyes almost instantly.

“Damn it. Where’s my phone?” He fumbled out of bed and grabbed his cell, cursing softly. “You don’t even want to know how many messages are on here. Something’s going on. Whatever it is, that has to be what set him off.”

He pressed the screen, and the three of them listened to a panicked Shade desperate to get a hold of someone, anyone at the mansion.

“Jaden, we found Anura. She’s in bad shape, and she’s been bled, but she told us what she could while she could still talk. She wants the Rakshasa locked up immediately.
Whatever she overheard while she was here, she’s convinced that the demon’s going to head for Arsinöe as soon as it gets control. There’s some ancient rite to get it out that involves a lot of blood… the Rakshasa’s blood. There was more, but she blacked out before she could finish. We’ve never heard of anything like this… Is the Dracul there? Is anybody there? Get in touch, this is urgent!”

Bay put a hand to her mouth, feeling sick. “Oh God.” Bay said. Somehow, the demon had gotten Tasmin to bend to its will. For a moment, she could think of no earthly way it could have happened… and then the pieces clicked together. Horrified, she looked up at Lyra and Jaden.

“It’s how he saved me.”

Lyra frowned. “What?”

Bay shook her head, tears beginning to sting her eyes as she understood exactly what he’d done. “He only drinks from deer, rabbits—forest animals. He doesn’t have any control when he drinks from humans because of the demon. But the night we were attacked by the Ptolemy, he was the only one who got to me in time. He turned me. He must have made a deal with the demon to do it without killing me.”

And there she’d been worried that he didn’t give a damn about her. He’d given up everything for her. She couldn’t let him. She refused to let the malignant thing leeching off of his soul use Tasmin’s love to destroy him. Because losing him would destroy her too. Whatever place for herself she would make, it would never be what she wanted without him.

“We have to stop him,” Bay said, her heart in her throat. “Anura said she could separate them, there’s more going on here. We need to get to Arsinöe.”

“Say no more,” Lyra said, swinging her long legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll get my people and we’ll get our asses to the airport. Hopefully we won’t be too far behind him.”

Bay looked at the clock, which showed 6:10 a.m. “He’s got maybe forty minutes on us,” she said. “Maybe a little more.”

“Yeah, well, he’s never tried to outrun the Thorn,” Lyra growled. She grabbed a pair of jeans off the back of a chair. “Can you be in the sun yet, Bay? Jaden could do it right away after he and I were fully bonded, but you weren’t bitten by a wolf. I don’t know how it works.”

“I’ll be fine,” Bay said. “I’ve been out for longer periods all this week.”

Lyra paused. “You’re doing okay, right?”

Bay considered this. “Not really. Can we go?”

“Hell yes,” Lyra said, and Bay rose to let the two of them get dressed. She turned when Jaden spoke to her, his silken voice warm and strangely comforting.

“We’ll get to him, Bay. The man’s been through hell. This happened because he tried to do the right thing, and the demon used it against him. If we have anything to do with it, we’ll turn the tables, all right? Hang in there.”

She nodded, unable to speak, and walked out of the room to wait.

Arsinöe might be asleep, but she hadn’t left her estate vulnerable.

Tasmin finally slumped through a shattered window as the late-afternoon sun filtered through the trees. One arm was completely numb, pulsing with poison from the claws of one of her new pets. There were at least two full
packs of wolves here, hulking, angry beasts that seemed to delight in pain. He’d been fighting them off almost as soon as he’d gotten out of his rental car two miles from where the Ptolemy’s land began.

Had it not been for the demon, he would already be dead. He had never dreamed he would willingly be letting the thing inside of him take over, but today he’d had no choice.

And even the demon was weary, more foul tempered than usual.

It wanted to be done with this.

That made two of them.

Tasmin staggered to his feet, his every movement sounding impossibly loud in the tomb-like silence of this place. He could smell her, a scent that brought memory crashing through the walls his mind had built around it.

Laughter in the brush, the scent of an intruder.

He had given chase, distracted from his hunt, never bothering to alert his pride brothers nearby. How much trouble could one interloper be? Just another foreign vampire come to gawk at the Rakshasa. He had run them off before—no doubt it would happen again.

Then had come the pain, a sharp, hot prick in his shoulder. Numbness. Darkness.

Fires. The chanting of many voices. And above them all, her voice, speaking words in an ancient tongue as something dark and painful slipped beneath his skin, both of them screaming until it was with one voice.

Sleep. Awaken when your brother Chaos walks the world again and come to me. We will call him together, you and me, and I will set you free
…

Tasmin groaned, his head feeling like it was about to
split in two. His stomach rolled, though whether from the poison or the force of memory he couldn’t say. Arsinöe had always wanted him to come back, but as a tool. Somehow, he didn’t think this was the rite Anura would have tried to perform. She’d never mentioned anything about suicide.

The life he’d sworn to take would be his own.

Keep your word, Rakshasa. Find her. Let me out.

“I will,” Tasmin growled at the angry hiss through his mind. His thoughts were jumbled, some his, some the demon’s. The line was beginning to blur.

He was glad Bay couldn’t see him like this. Knowing she slept safely so many miles away was one of the only comforts he had now. He clung to that, and to the memory of all she had said to him.

“Should have told her,” he muttered to himself as he worked his way along the wall, dully surprised when he noted he was leaving a crimson streak behind. He looked down and saw blood still oozing from multiple lacerations on his arm and side. Claw marks.

So much poison…

He staggered through the great hall and started up the stairs, having to rest every few steps. The bleeding refused to stop, and whatever foul poison she’d equipped her wolves with wasn’t being flushed out of his system as quickly as it should. She’d always been clever with her poisons, Tasmin remembered. It seemed she’d perfected the art over the years.

A soft growl reached his ears as he hit the top of the stairs, and his heart sank. Of course she wouldn’t have left herself unprotected inside the mansion as well. Of course not.

Two massive wolves, the largest he’d yet seen, advanced on him from where they’d been stationed at the end of the hall, in front of a pair of ornate double doors that could only lead to the queen’s chambers. Their eyes glinted as they padded through pools of shadow toward him.

Steeling himself, trying to shore up his flagging energy, Tasmin felt his body stretch and change into the form of his lion. As soon as all four paws hit the ground, he leapt, claws extended, and slammed into one of the wolves.

Each wolf was solid muscle, and unlike Tasmin was well rested. Tasmin kept finding himself rolled, bitten. Within seconds one of his shoulders was shredded, white-hot pain replacing the lethargy of the poison.

Let me let me let me you pathetic bastard
…

With weary resignation, Tasmin closed his eyes and was pulled under again.

When he came back to himself, he was on his side on a plush carpet, panting heavily. His body felt like it was on fire. His flesh was torn. He could feel it. His head felt far too heavy when he lifted it, but Tasmin managed. He had to look away from the shredded flesh of his body, a tattered mess of blood and fur. His mouth was rimmed with blood when he licked his chops.

What happened?

There was a pause, and he could hear the demon sounding somehow stronger than before. It was no longer sharing strength, Tasmin realized. It was just taking what it needed from this body, preparing for the moment it was finally released. As long as he had enough strength left to lift the dagger, that was all the demon cared about.

I took the wolves. They were quite a feast. Sorry you missed it.

The sly amusement disgusted him. They’d wasted precious time devouring the werewolves, and the curtains in here were drawn so tightly that he had no way of knowing how long they had been occupied.

Then he inhaled and smelled how close she was, heard the slow, even breathing coming from atop a dark shape that rose before him. Her bed. They had made it into Arsinöe’s chamber. With a great deal of effort, Tasmin got to his feet, first four, then two as he became a man again.

She will see my true face before she dies.

Come, lion. Let’s end this living hell.

T
HEY’D BEEN LUCKY
to find a last-minute flight, but Bay knew they were at least an hour behind him. The SUV he’d stolen from the Dracul had been abandoned at the side of the road on the way into the airport. Seeing it, imagining what Tasmin must have been going through when he’d left it, made it hard for Bay to sit quietly on the flight to Baltimore, and then on the two-hour drive down to southern Maryland in a hastily arranged rental car.

The first thing she saw when she stepped into the silent Ptolemy mansion was blood on the walls.

“I don’t like the look of this,” Jaden growled as the small group of them walked in through the front doors.

Bay took off the baseball cap she’d had pulled low over her eyes and dropped it on the floor beside her, looking at the crimson trail, spatters and streaks, leading up the enormous staircase in the entry hall. To the right, a wide smear of blood ran along the wall, disappearing from sight as it curved around a corner.

She didn’t like the look of anything. The carnage out front had been incredible. Just thinking about it made her gorge start to rise. Whatever had done that, it hadn’t been Tasmin. She’d never really understood how much hunger, how much violence he’d been grappling with until she’d seen what the demon was capable of.

Bay, Lyra, Jaden, Eric, and two other wolves of the Thorn stayed close together as they made their way up the stairs. The scene at the top made even Eric turn away.

“I know they probably got what they deserved,” he growled, “but… gods.”

The afternoon sun filtered lazily through the spaces of the drawn curtains of each room they walked by, toward the massive double doors at the end of the hall. Somewhere in the recesses of the mansion, a clock ticked away the minutes with stark rhythmic perfection. It should have been peaceful. But Bay knew what slept in here, the murderous creatures lying prone in beds behind every closed bedroom door. As soon as the sun went down, every eye would open. And if she was found, she would wish for death long before they gave it to her.

This was what Tasmin had walked into.

And she had no doubt he was in that room with the queen of the Ptolemy, a woman Bay had heard so much about that she half expected to see a Medusa-like monster instead of a human-looking woman.

The sky was just beginning to haze with color outside as the shadows on the ground grew long, the beginning of sunset. They didn’t have much time until every vampire here was waking up. If that happened, they were dead, all of them.

“We have to hurry,” Bay said.

Jaden was looking around, blue eyes far-off. “I know. It’s just… strange. It hasn’t changed at all.”

“
You’ve
changed,” Lyra said, stroking her hand down his back. That seemed to bring him out of it, and he gave her a brilliant smile before nodding.

“Let’s do this. Fling the doors wide. I don’t want any chance she’s awake and moving around in there in the dark.” He gave Bay a sidelong glance and then looked away. “Just be ready. I don’t know what we’ll find in there.”

She nodded. With every mutilated corpse, she’d lost more hope that there would be anything left of the man she loved by the time they found him… or what had been him. But she needed to see it for herself.

Eric and one of the other wolves went for the doors, paused, and then threw them open at the same time. Bay steeled herself for whatever she might see.

But there was… nothing.

Jaden’s eyes narrowed, and he strode in, fingers hooked into claws. He whipped his head back, fangs bared, to look at the rest of them.

“Damn it,” he growled.

Bay stepped in farther, and that was when the smell hit her—the horrible, sickly sweet aroma of charred flesh.

“What the hell happened?” Lyra asked, eyes wide. “Where are they?”

“I know where they are,” Jaden said. “Come on. There isn’t much time left.”

There were tunnels deep beneath the summer estate of the Ptolemy, stone-walled passages that led to a multitude of rooms. Some went to the dank and airless chambers
where most of the Cait Sith servants once slept and lived. Some went to rooms where those same servants, and occasionally a disobedient Ptolemy, had been punished in bloody and creative ways for their transgressions. And one room, farther away from the rest, was a place only open to Arsinöe and her closest advisors.

It was here that Jaden led them, to a chamber he had never been in and had never wanted to see. His kind was never invited as simple observers. And once they went in, they never came out.

One of the huge, heavy doors set into the stone wall was ajar.

Bay’s steps quickened. She could smell so many terrible things down here, some of them old but no less awful. This was a place that stank of sweat and fear, fire and pain. But she could also smell that terrible stink of burning, and more faintly, Tasmin. It shouldn’t have been so faint, that familiar blend of sandalwood and musk. But it was strangely muted, and tainted with a scent she was unfamiliar with.