Chapter 26
The place was a poked anthill, seething.
Multicolored lights flashed at intervals along the passageways, and the constant klaxon was a mild aural irritant as he followed a soft, almost elusive pull against every nerve and artery.
Each time his heart squeezed the call intensified, leading him through the maze of concrete tunnels.
Blundering along with a little less than the whispering speed, stopping and doubling back, he barely noted the changes when he burst into what were clearly the habitable places of this heap—a bedroom with black walls and a mirrored ceiling, a long low room with a strange tank full of iron-smelling water, its egg-shaped lid open and a rubber suit like a discarded skin hung upon a nearby, curlicued metal pole, two large functional kitchens with attached plastic-booth dining areas and a smaller, much more expensive dining room with a very large tinted window staring out onto the night, more bedrooms, one reeking of recent fumbling mortal lust with an acrid tinge of some chemical aphrodisiac under a flood of hastily applied cleaning agents.
Other rooms held long tables and electrical equipment, screens crawling with static as the various interlocking fields of visible and not-so-visible flexed and fluxed in response to an Archon’s will.
And yet more rooms dedicated to purposes he did not care to guess at or even consider, since none held what he wanted.
The most concerning spaces were those full of metal tables and vaguely insectile equipment, reeking of pain and death. More torture chambers with lifts connecting to the animal prison below, simmering with a reek of stinging disinfectant applied slapdash-fashion, unable to wash away the filth.
She does not belong here either. The rage was building, almost colorless in its intensity.
He did not quite realize he was growling until he turned a corner and came nearly face-to-face with a trio of mortals—two males, plus a female with strawlike pale hair.
The central figure, ruddy-headed and jittering with nervousness, took one look at him and backpedaled, nearly pratfalling to bony posterior, and the inelegant squeak he let out might have been amusing in another time or place.
The other two, both wearing strange bleached cotton coats, froze in the eternal manner of prey.
Their bodies knew before their minds, a sudden drift of glandular terror spreading in a haze—the faint tingling sensation in the wanderer’s eyes meant the killglow was upon his gaze, liquid crimson spreading and behaving as no light should, droplets rising upon invisible updrafts at the corners.
“Ohshit,” the man on the floor piped, in a choked whisper almost lost in the continued alarums. “It’s one of them, it’s a vamp, it’s a fucking sucker!”
The wanderer recognized that voice—he had heard it through a phone’s tinny earpiece, speaking ever so casually to sweet Simone; its timbre was also familiar from the hotel, wafting down the hall just before a leman was stolen.
Ah. The fractures of looming insanity twitched, and his fangs slid free. The two white-coated mortals screamed in odd harmony, one voiding its bladder in a hot gush, and then he was upon them.
Blood hit the back of his throat, jaw distended and teeth driven in.
The claret was nearly tasteless, though it laved the thirst; oddly, the lack of flavor helped the wanderer focus, as it could never approach the nectar he longed for.
He drank merely to replenish a day’s energy spent searching, dropping the male mortal the moment the body was drained, catching the female as she scrabble-clawed along the hard smooth wall in search of escape.
A useless attempt, just like the red-haired one crab-scuttling on palms and heels, blindly retreating.
And upon all three was the very faintest ghost of fragrance. They had been in contact with his treasure, within the past hour.
“Oh please,” the copper-furred male squealed. “Ohplease ohplease Janie, I didn’t mean it—”
Too late. The wanderer was upon him then, draining the mortal in a few casual gulps.
The cargo of nourishment made the pull of his fledgling strengthen, tugging relentlessly.
Now he was replete, though he should take more to feed his prize when he found her.
What state would she be in, brought to this place and enduring an entire day of torment?
While he had languished and lingered, betraying his only purpose—to guard what he had taken.
A chatter of gunfire erupted in the near distance, echoing through overlapping tunnel-throats. A faint note underneath the pulse and the annoying screech was something else, and the wanderer’s nerves caught fire afresh with recognition.
Now he heard other things as he dropped the skinny male, licking the last traces absently; his skin would absorb splashed nutriment as well. No urge to glut, merely the imperative to find her, to aid his leman—for the song of her killgrowl was as music to him.
Between himself and that melody was the pattering of mortal feet, the soft confusion of mortal pulses, and a high, dizzying aroma of exquisite fear.
Good. One clear, cold thought, flotsam upon the whirling maelstrom. You should scream, and run, for you tried to hide her from me.
He streaked into motion, and two junctions later he found the source of the footsteps, a tide of animals far less wholesome than those he had freed.
Claws out, eyes shining with a red haze, he plunged through them as a flame through paper cutouts, tracing the flow to its source.