Ravenous (38 page)

Omara watched, saying nothing.

He slid his hand down the wood, feeling its roughness. A long existence had inured him to fear, yet the Castle, as Lore had put it, was like old, bad dreams. It was a hell built for the vampires and the wolves, the dragons, the demons, and the fey, made for their eternal imprisonment. Made to keep his kind trapped forever. The guardsmen were mad and merciless. Holly had made a door, but who was to say that it would work from the inside?

Holly had disappeared. Logic said she was in the Castle, perhaps lost or hurt or worse. He touched the cold iron strapping, the metal dented as if from a blacksmith's hammer. Anxiety pounded like a full-body migraine. Alessandro drew the bolt. It slid without resistance.

Omara broke her silence. "I forbid it!" she snapped. "You need to rest. You'll bleed into insensibility and lie there like a great idiot until a guardsman trips over you."

The door swung out on massive hinges that gave a sighing groan.

"Alessandro!" Omara cried, her voice sliding from command to entreaty.

"I'm sure you'd be happy enough to see me if you were the one trapped inside."

He walked into hell.

When Holly awoke she was sprawled on a cold floor of stone. The chill went bone-deep, the air around her clinging with damp. The light was faint, but enough for her to see that the wall in front of her eyes was stone, too.
Where ami
?

She jumped to her feet, then fell against the wall, dizzy. She'd moved too fast. She felt sick, spent. Almost hungover. But she was unhurt and alone. For the first time in days no one was trying to bite her. Sluggishly, memory flowed back.

Sweet Hecate, I'm inside the Castle
. Holly looked around. She'd tried to make the portal into a doorway, but there was no doorway in sight.
I could have been thrown. Someone could have brought me here. It might not have worked at all, and I'm trapped
.

Holly looked beyond the presence or absence of a door. What she saw wasn't reassuring. The picture in Grandma's book was pretty accurate. The Castle was a wilderness of gray stone. Torches set into the walls threw smears of smoky light, but the glow died within feet of the flames.

Every few hundred feet, passageways intersected the hall where she stood, regular and endless. Holly walked to the nearest corner, cautiously peering around its edge. The new passageway looked much like the last, its ceiling hidden in a fog of shifting shadow.

Movement. A few hundred feet away two guardsmen herded a cluster of changelings, swords and whips at the ready. They crossed the hallway, following yet another passage deep into the Castle's maze. Holly pulled back, afraid she would be seen. Prisoners from the battle?

She turned the other way and nearly walked straight into the guardsman with the braid—the same one she had seen in the Flanders house. He had a thing on a chain that was probably a wolf, but looked as big as a bear.

The wolf looked as crazed and brutal as the man.

"Hi," she said stupidly. She reached for magic, but there was nothing there.

Holly spun and took off down the nearest side corridor, lungs burning as she gulped the musty, damp air. She heard the rattle of a chain, and the guardsman released the wolf, shouting something in a tongue she didn't know. The wolf lolloped after, his juggernaut form crashing into corners whenever his bulk refused to turn quickly. The Castle, solid stone, didn't even quiver.

The only thing in Holly's favor was a head start. Using one hand as a brace, she swung around a corner, then raced off in a new direction. She was utterly lost. The wolf's panting echoed behind her, gusting as if there were fifty beasts hurtling along the corridors. Claws scraped as he moved, the sound like the drag of chalk on slate.

Cold stone smacked against Holly's sneakers, hard even through the cushioned soles. If she could find a room, some doorway too small for the wolf to pass through, she would be safe.

Before her she could see the foot of a stairway. The light barely touched it, showing only a few horizontal edges highlighted against the prevailing murk. She hurtled up the stairs, using hands as well as feet.

Her fingers slipped on slime—some mold that grew in the dark, or else the trail of something she did not care to meet. Shuddering, she pulled her hands away and tried to ignore the slick sensation beneath her running feet.

The stairway was steep, going up and up an irregular slope. At the top of the stairs she froze, counting on the darkness to hide her. Slowly, careful of the long drop at her feet, she turned and looked down, her stomach cold.

The wolf was nosing the bottom step as if it wasn't sure it wanted to make the effort to climb. From Holly's vantage point he was a shapeless mass of dark brown fur, his head a matted wedge. He put one massive paw on the bottom step, and she could hear the clack of the scythe-sharp claws over his wet, slurping snuffle.

Surely a wolf could smell my trail
? Maybe it was a wolf with a sinus disorder. Maybe it was senile. Silence might save her, make it forget she was there.

She barely dared to breathe. Behind her, in the unseen tunnel, she could hear the distant moaning of wind. Grit and dust sifted over her toes, blown by an errant gust of air.

Holly's gaze stayed locked on the wolf. He lifted his head, looking from side to side and making a doggy whine of boredom. She dared let a tendril of hope unfurl in her breast.

Then some
thing
crawled over Holly's foot. Instinctively she flicked it away. The infinitesimal scritch of the creature's carapace hitting the stone floor was enough. Ears pricked. The wolf's eyes, crimson as sin, looked up into hers.
Hecate
!

Spinning, Holly resumed her flight, shadows and puddles of torchlight mottling the long hall. The passageway angled, breaking her line of sight. There were rooms branching off the passage, and she was running out of strength.

Holly ducked into a large room on her left, curling into the darkest corner. Here the movement of air gave the impression of a high ceiling. It almost smelled fresh.

Then it smelled like wolf. Two eyes like red coals peered through the door.

"Viktor!" bellowed healthy male lungs. The echo bounced through the stone halls.

The wolf whined, backing away.

"Viktor!"

The wolf barked, a deep, hair-raising woof. With a scrabble of nails on stone, the thing lolloped away to answer its master's voice.

Holly slid up the wall, trembling. Something brushed her cheek and she jumped, barely stifling a squeak. She slapped at it, finally realizing it was only cloth. Her foot sank into something soft, and she bent to touch it. Carpet.

This was no prisoner's cell.

Alessandro prowled the stone corridors, sword drawn. He was growing weaker, blackness edging his vision. Omara was right: He was pushing his endurance to a foolish degree, but he could feel Holly's presence now. The blood bond between them had been erased by the sheer volume of power she had channeled, but a connection remained. He knew where she was as surely as the ocean felt the pull of the moon.

However, knowing where she was and getting there were two different things. The Castle was a maze filled with unpleasant surprises, some of them large and furry.

Others told dire stories. He found
The Book of Lies
, the cover bloodied and torn, lying abandoned in one passageway. If Pierce drove away from the campus, how did the book get here? Who had taken it? There was no way to know. Alessandro picked it up. It could well be their ticket out of the Castle.

And then, an hour into his search, he discovered a woman's body, facedown. From the camouflage pattern on the outfit and the long fair hair, he knew it was Geneva.

He crept up on her slowly, unwilling to make any assumptions. There was no heartbeat, no respiration, but then demons were smoke and energy. They didn't need to breathe.

He drew close enough to nudge her gently with the tip of his sword.

Nothing. He placed his sword down close at hand and knelt by her, feeling a strange familiarity with the scene. Her human form was young and pretty. The long hair fell around her like a wreath of silk, glimmering in the torchlight. Tentatively he put his fingers against the skin of her neck.

She was cold, as cold as his own bloodless hands, and she smelled all wrong. Startled, he rolled her to her back. The corpse fell with the limpness of the recently dead. He stared.

Shock numbed his face.
She is human
!

She had been restored to her original living state. The powerful collision between the portal and Holly's earth magic had purified even Geneva.

For what good it had done her. A changeling's bite crimsoned her throat. She had probably been killed before she even had a chance to realize what had happened to her.

Blond and pretty, Geneva was the last of the Fairview murders, felled by the very creatures that had murdered to summon her. She even had an Orpheus token in one hand.

Groping, Holly felt around the entranceway to the chamber. There was a door. She pushed it shut and, hoping for the best, tried her candle-lighting spell. Magic felt different here, awkward, as if she were trying to write with her other hand. It took a few tries, but finally it worked.

A dozen black pillar candles sprang to life, lighting the chamber. Holly gaped. Tapestries hung on the walls, abstract birds and animals glittering with silver thread. The room was huge, the ceilings high and draped with swaths of silk. There were couches and chairs and a canopied bed in the corner, piled high with cushions of black velvet and gold braid. A violin case rested on a bookcase decorated in gold leaf, and a waterfall ran down one corner of the stone wall, splashing into an enormous marble basin that drained somewhere in the floor.

The whole was covered with a thick layer of dust. Whoever had lived here was long gone. Holly had met Lore and the hellhounds, seen the brutality of the guardsmen and their wolf, and here was another face of the Castle—evidence of a luxurious melancholy, pungent as incense.

First she carefully warded the door. Next she invoked a cleaning spell. Partially she wanted the comfort of a clean room to rest in. Mostly she wanted to find her magical footing in the Castle, and domestic spells were fairly safe to practice with. She'd never used them before, but now that she could cast them pain free, they'd be at the top of her list of favorites.

After she cleaned up, she tried some defensive spells. She wasn't leaving her new haven before she could fire a decent shot. Not with that wolf out there.

The delay was a blessing. It was the first moment Holly had possessed to think—but what moment was it? Thursday? Friday? Night or day?
So much for making my first week of classes
. Her goals of boyfriend, business, and school had shrunk to one imperative—get home alive, with soul and will intact.

In the last few days she'd been infected with the Dark Larceny, was tricked by Omara, and learned the depths of Ben's paranoid betrayal.
But I won. I reclaimed my memory and my magic, kicked Geneva's backside, and neutralized both Mac's kiss and Alessandro's bite. Go, me
.

That wasn't all.
I've fallen in love. Really, really in love
.

Not so smart to pick a vampire. She had known that from the start. He had stolen her will. Marked her. Whatever his motivation, that made her
angry
. She hadn't realized how much until she had space to think about it. Tears ached at the back of Holly's throat.

He had no right. Worse, it's in his nature. He's pushy. Fangs or not, he's one of those I-know-best guys
. On the other hand, Alessandro was a big reason she was around to get angry in the first place. He was honorable. He protected her. He had spared her that first night, giving her pleasure, denying himself. He had always loved her as best as he could.

She sat down on the end of the bed, her face in her hands. The last time she saw Alessandro, he was hurt.
Please, Goddess, let him be all right
.

Holly licked her lips, tasting the dust of the chamber on her skin. It tasted bitter, like ashes.

He is coming for me.

As if conjured by her thoughts, Holly could feel Alessandro seeking her, intent on gathering her back under his protection. He was close. He no longer possessed her will, but the connection between them still burned.
Oh, thank the Goddess. If he's coming, that means he is fine
.

Holly didn't like to think she needed rescuing, but she sure wasn't going to object if he arrived with a map showing the exits. She doused the candles, releasing the wards and opening the door a crack. The torches, apparently as eternal as the stones they lit, burned with the same smoky glow as before. Slipping out of the room, she crept toward a junction of three corridors. He was somewhere near there.

But Holly didn't see Alessandro when she paused where the three paths crossed. She heard no sound of footfalls drawing near. And yet he seemed so close. Holly hurried across the junction to the corridor straight ahead, anxious not to be seen. That wolf was still too fresh in her mind.

She found him in the shadows,
The Book of Lies
cradled in his lap. He was slumped at the foot of the wall, sword in hand, bone-pale. Panic thrummed through her.

"Alessandro!" she whispered, kneeling at his side. She picked up his hand. It was heavy and cold.
He came for me. He is bleeding to his final death, and still he came
.

His head turned a fraction, his eyes opening to slits. "There you are," he said, as if she were something he had simply mislaid.

"I found a place. A safe place," she said, warming his hand in hers. "Come on; get up."

With painful slowness, Alessandro shifted the book and gathered himself to move, his boots scraping on the stone. Standing seemed to exhaust him, even with Holly's help. He leaned against the wall, a damp sheen glossing his skin.

Holly put an arm around him, helping him stand, and felt the sticky wetness on his side. Her heart hovered in her throat. "What do you need? Blood?"