Vamped Up (24 page)

He was lying through his fangs. “No.” It was all she could muster beneath the weight of the shade lying over her body and the truth seeping into her mind. “Lilith wouldn’t have—”

“If it’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t trust Lilith. She only acts if she gains some sort of benefit from it.” He leaned over her, palms down on the tablet.

Lilith and Savage certainly seemed to know each other when they met unexpectedly in the apartment foyer, though she’d called him Kane. This was too much. Eve suddenly didn’t know who to trust, who to believe.

Eve’s heart ached, never having felt so alone in all her life. She wanted to bury herself in Ruan’s arms. She wanted to take back the words she’d said to him so they wouldn’t be the last things he heard her say. Now she would die in this evil place by Savage’s greedy hands and Ruan would live on, thinking she didn’t love him anymore. That thought bothered her most of all.

“You know, I think this, right here, is the most beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on in ages.” Savage ghosted his hands along the death shade. It rippled at his touch like a kitten arching for a good scratch.

Although the death shade was silent, no longer hissing and spitting with each move, Eve could feel evil churning inside it. It was ready to smother her body and soul, given the slightest opportunity.

The amulet burned through its evil depth, against Eve’s chest, warming her from the inside out, despite the cold coating her skin. The warmth felt heavenly, filling the frigid void in the room and her heart. She needed more of that. More heat. Less evil chill. Despite Savage’s lingering gaze, Eve pinched her eyes tight and focused on the pure white energy swirling within the amulet, just like Lilith had taught her. Her breath caught. Her heart slowed.

Instantly, the chamber grew a bit brighter, the blanket less stifling.

“Thatta girl,” Savage hissed, slowly backing out of the room. “That’s the way . . . we’re going to do this one elder at a time, and we’ve got about five hours of moonlight left. Keep calling them to you and this will all be over soon.”

That’s exactly what had Eve shutting down the energy in the amulet and shivering with the cold fragments of her heart the instant the chamber door closed behind him.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

NIV Bible: 2 Peter 1:19

“T
HE LAST CUSTOMER
is gone.” Dylan strode through ReVamp’s lab with a heated kick to her step and a worried tone etched in her voice. At least she was feeling better. She’d been sick for the better part of a week and everyone was beginning to worry. Her color was still . . .
off
, but she wasn’t vomiting into office trash cans anymore, which made ReVamp smell a whole hell of a lot fresher. “Slade is closing up, then heading over to the haven. He’s called an emergency Crimson Council meeting to inform the Primuses what’s going on. As soon as you decipher more, I’m supposed to report back.”

“Right.” Ruan spread two pages of scroll over the smooth white top of the lab table, his eyes skimming for the encrypted portion he’d written a hundred years before.

Dylan brushed her tiny hand up and down his arm. He was wound so tight he could barely feel her gentle, reassuring touch. “We’ll find her, Ruan.”

He nodded, lost in thought.

Her expression turned to a scowl as she turned to Lilith, who was quiet and contemplative after having just spouted off information about the scrolls and Eve’s role. “So is there anything else we need to know?”

Lilith had done her best to fill in Dylan and Slade once they got back to ReVamp, but the concept was so damn hard to believe. Eve was some sort of gatekeeper for elders’ shades? The purest spirit? The oldest? Ruan wouldn’t have believed that she’d resurfaced every hundred years unless he saw it with his own eyes . . . or at least experienced the memory of her.

He certainly couldn’t expect Dylan and Slade to believe it, but they’d jumped on board, taking Lilith’s words and Ruan’s concern more seriously than he ever thought they would’ve. Still, Dylan didn’t trust Lilith wholeheartedly. She must’ve picked up on the same vibes Ruan had.

Lilith sat board-straight in a desk chair at the back of ReVamp’s lab, her scarlet corset holding her tight. Against the whitewashed walls and sterile surroundings, she looked out of place—like a blotch of blood on a doctor’s starched straight lapel. “As much as you’d like to blame me for all of this, I didn’t foresee Savage taking Eve. I don’t have any idea where he’s taken her. All I know is what he plans to do with her and that he must be stopped.”

As they continued to bicker back and forth, Ruan flipped over to the scroll with his encrypted writing. His eyes came to rest on the passage:

gtw drh sos aiv xkqgal
—
jzvv gyvumww sycoxhb kcmv hki wpxc bwijqg chdwex
. . .
lnm gqi lc evv toj jx bzpp gvpqnifaxp lby wdtoaxg sqwppgcujvw qxl hts fezu etu.

“Ruan?” Dylan asked, following his line of sight to the jumble of letters. “Why do I feel like there’s something you’re leaving out of all this?”

Although Lilith revealed everything about Eve’s role and the elders and the mawares trapped in the amulet, she respectfully left out the part about Ruan’s role in her past. Slade and Dylan were told about Eve dying prematurely every hundred years before she could bind the shades and set the elders free, but Lilith conveniently left out that it was Ruan’s fault. That Eve had died because of the hideous sin bubbling in his veins.

It was his, and only his, burden to bear. He appreciated Lilith’s gesture.

“I just want to bring Eve back and it’s driving me mad that I’m stuck here flipping through scrolls instead of out finding her. I need to figure out what I wrote back then . . . and the clock’s ticking fast.”

Ruan snatched a pad of paper and pen from Dylan’s desk drawer and laid it out over the smooth white table top beside the scroll. Along the top he wrote:
If I die tomorrow it will be because I loved you too deeply.
Beneath each letter of that line, he corresponded the matching gibberish phrase, letter for letter. As Ruan plugged away at the cipher—entering each letter of the key phrase in turn, skating his hand along the row, finding the ciphered letter, then skimming up the column to discover the unlocked letter—Dylan leaned over the table.

She swept her fingers over the key phrase. “What does that mean?”

He didn’t stop. He kept working, skimming over shifted rows of alphabet, writing each new letter down, trying to make sense of what was revealed.

Gtw drh Sos orr xkqhal—jzvv gyvumww
became
You and Eve are joined—your futures . . 
.

His heart sparked to life. It was working. “It’s something Eve said to me two-hundred years ago. Something she remembered in 1912 when I repeated it to her. And she spoke the same words to me in ReVamp’s office only this week.”

Dylan’s eyes met his as she whispered, “You remember your past.”

He paused, his gaze landing on a UV-blocking window leading to the back alley, then nodded. He remembered everything . . . well, nearly everything. The good with the bad. Her innocence and his sin. There’d be a million questions later as more snippets of his past resurfaced, Ruan was sure. But now was not the time. Thankfully, Dylan understood that.

“Here, let me help. It might go faster this way.” She tilted the scrolls toward her, then spouted off letter after letter, waiting for Ruan to decipher each in turn before saying the next. She was right. It did speed things along. Within minutes the gibberish had turned into readable phrases.

More words cleared.

Sycoxhb kcmv hki wpxc bwijqg lhdwex
changed to
knotted with the same tragic string . . 
.

He continued letter after letter, his speed increasing the closer he got to the end of the encrypted passage.

He read the next part aloud as its encryption cleared. “You must live for Eve to access the mawares in her amulet. Without those powers, she is no more special than any other mundane.” He remembered those exact words as they were spoken from Lilith’s lips in that dusty chamber in Fort Point.

The last lines hit him like a freight train.

Before he read the words aloud, he checked Lilith’s position. She was bent over the scrolls at the back of the room, sipping a mocha vampuccino from ReVamp’s special branded espresso machine. From the crinkle in her finely arched brow and the sweat beading at her temples, Ruan assumed she was having a harder time translating Valcish than he’d predicted. Seemed the dead language really was dead—not even the oldest of their species could translate it easily.

Seeing her deep in concentration, Ruan whispered the final lines, breathing hard as if each word sucker-punched him in the gut. “If your memory returns, and my attempt has been in vain, you must die. Die so Eve can be free from Lilith and Savage’s enslavement.”

Ruan remembered Lilith and Savage’s talk in the gunpowder stockhold of the fort. He remembered the dim lights, Savage’s threat to kill him, Lilith’s offer to scrub his memory, and their words about the balance of the worlds. They needed him to live so Eve could harness the mawares . . .

“We don’t mention this to a soul.” Ruan folded the scroll and shoved it into his trench coat pocket.

Nodding, Dylan slowly stood upright.

Ruan watched Lilith scribble something onto a pad of paper before he said, “We find Eve first and then I’ll do what needs to be done.” He turned to Dylan, whose tender blue eyes shadowed to a steel gray. “Promise me that no matter what happens tonight, you’ll keep Eve safe.”

“Of course,” she whispered. “She’s one of us now, whether or not she shares our blood.”

Ruan roped her into an embrace that was more of a
thank you, goodbye
than she could’ve realized. “You’re one of a kind, Dylan. You know that?”

She pushed him away, smiling through the sparkle in her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what Slade keeps telling me.”

Swallowing down the thought that he’d never see Dylan again—the friend who had become like a sister—Ruan turned and strode to where Lilith had pages of scroll tossed about. “Tick tock, tick tock, Lilith,” he ground out. “Make yourself useful yet?”

“Not quite. This section reads more like blueprint instructions than a prophecy. There’s something here about a granite sea wall. At least I think I’m translating this right.”

“I don’t have time for you to
think
you’re doing anything right,” Ruan said. “Figure it out.”

She pursed her lips, thoroughly unamused. “Listen to this: adobe and brick. Ten feet thick. Four tiers . . . and I think there’s something about a lighthouse, though I’m not sure. I’m working on translating the rest right now but it’s slow-going. Still could be anywhere on this side of the bay.”

Dylan piped up. “Why would elders bother documenting blueprints?”

Ruan’s gaze locked on Lilith. “Because they think the place Savage has taken Eve is impenetrable. They were trying to help us find a way in.” He suddenly got the feeling that he’d been submerged under the sea for years—beneath miles of salty bay water and murk and mud. He could feel the pressure building. His lungs burned from air deprivation. He gasped. As the sweet, heavenly breath filled his lungs, he said, “He’s taken her to Fort Point. Savage is going to finish what was started in 1912.”

“More than that,” Lilith said, taking another slow sip of her drink. “He’s going to use the remnants of the evil energy in those walls to ensure the death shades he releases are the strongest yet.”

Ruan swiped his hand across his jaw. “How’s that work?”

She sighed. “They become more powerful when anchored by deep-rooted emotions—the truest—like lust and anger or greed and grief. We know from the way it was used as a battle stronghold at the turn of the century that at least three of the four have been experienced within its walls.”

Ruan remembered the heat firing through his synapses when he dropped Eve to the floor and made love to her. “Oh, I think we can say all four are covered. Lust included.”

Dylan cocked a curious eyebrow and threw up her hands. “I won’t ask if you don’t tell.”

Ruan stormed to the locked cabinet against the wall and popped it open. He armed his belt, boots, and leather pants pockets with enough guns, knives, ammo, and grenades to take on every therian in Crimson Bay. He strapped a thick band of throwing knives to his black Under Armour shirt and closed his trench coat tight. Despite his urge to bash into Fort Point without reason, he couldn’t dismiss the buzzing in his brain. Could they be mistaken about the location? “Dylan, the pieces of scroll written in Latin . . . didn’t they say
place of horror . . . time will come . . . elders will fall . . .”

“ . . .
all will succumb
. Yes.” Dylan’s expression flickered with anger. “It’s gotta be the fort. Fort Point is the site of one of the greatest horrors committed against our race. How’d we miss that?”

“
Manent optima coelo
,” Ruan mumbled to himself. He remembered the Latin phrase scribbled on the top corner of the first page of scroll he’d read. “The best things await us in heaven.”

That’s exactly where he was headed, but Ruan doubted the best things awaited him there. Eve would be here. Left behind.

After clamping the last knife on his belt, he shoved his cell in his pocket and pulled his trench coat closed.

“You know that you could fire every piece of artillery in that cabinet at a death shade and it’d fly right through it, right?” Dylan asked. “We saw a death shade first hand in the haven. The way it took that girl was unlike anything we’d ever seen. It merely brushed against her! That’s all it took.
That
is what we’re going up against here, except there’s no telling how many there’ll be.”

“I met up with one in the alley behind Mirage.” Ruan suddenly realized how close he’d come to killing Savage then. “I’ll be ready for them this time.”

“Fort Point is a dark, mysterious place with an underground facility that could house hundreds of elders.” Lilith said, rubbing the tips of her fingers together nervously.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.” He slammed the cabinet closed. “We can talk on the way over.”

“Okay, worst case scenario here.” Dylan frantically packed a black duffel with binoculars, a couple Alvambra bottles, and a few Bloodblaster bars. Mathilda’s diamond-encrusted shaft gleamed in ReVamp’s overhead lights as she secured it on the waistband of her jeans. “Lilith, you said the amulet around Eve’s neck draws elders to her, right?”

Lilith blinked slowly, as close to an acknowledgment as Dylan was gonna get.

“Then let us assume Savage is going to slaughter every elder Eve draws to Fort Point. How many elders do you think Eve will call? How many in the area are capable of making the trek in the next . . . say, twenty-four hours?”

Lilith pinched her lower lip and came away with a thumb full of cherry-red lip gloss. “Fifty. Maybe double.”

“A hundred?” Dylan squeaked. “We could be up against a hundred death shades? Holy hell.” She tore open a Bloodblaster bar, shoved the mini-morsel into her mouth, and chewed wildly.

“Not to mention Savage,” Ruan added, striding toward the door. He had all the information he needed. It was time to get outta dodge. “Savage is going to have their mawares at his disposal and we’re still not sure what that kind of power that’s going to give a single vamp.” Which reminded him . . . “Dylan, I need you to stay behind and get in touch with Slade. Have him make a motion to mobilize the haven’s army and any of those in the area as well. See if we can get reinforcements sent over to the fort.”

She slung the duffel over her shoulder and strode toward the exit as if she didn’t hear a word he said. He stopped her. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re not coming.”

“You can’t do this alone.” For such a petite little thing, she sure had the will of a bull.

“He’s not alone.” Lilith slid the duffel from Dylan’s shoulder onto her own. “I’m going with him.”

Trust or no trust, Ruan couldn’t turn down an offer to help. He nodded in agreement. “Dylan, I need someone to fill in Slade and the Crimson Council. Tell them what’s going on. Tell them what the scrolls revealed. Hiram will know what kind of a threat Savage is and won’t be able to decline Slade’s motion.”