A shape flickered across the corner of my eye, dashing behind the treadmills. Another moved in the corner. Six vampires had entered the room, and they were stalking us. This wouldn’t be pretty.
“There are many vampires,” Christopher reported.
“Shhh,” I told him. “Keep moving.”
Vampires reacted to prey that ran, so we didn’t run. We moved quietly and steadily toward the back of the room.
The ancient vampire on the right wall slunk down. Behind us, an undead leaped onto the treadmill and perched there, like some mutated hairless cat. More undead eyes glared at us through the gaps in the machines.
Not good.
Something clanged ahead. I glanced that way. Thomas had found a huge metal door.
“Locked,” he called out quietly.
Nice. Beating on it would definitely provoke the vampires.
The undead moved toward us, two on the ground, two on the walls, one across the tops of the treadmills. I braced myself. If I had to kill them, so be it.
Andrea raised her crossbow.
The leading undead leaped. The ancient bloodsucker with the scar dashed across the gym and disemboweled the first vampire in midleap. Undead blood hit the floor, and Scar jerked a chunk of vampiric spine out of its opponent. The injured bloodsucker dropped like a stone. Scar leaped, spinning like a corkscrew, its talons opened wide, and sliced two other vampires, carving their flesh down to the bone. Two clumps of spongy dry lungs with bloated hearts hit the floor.
I closed my mouth.
The three remaining vampires, two old and one with its spinal ridge just beginning to develop, trotted over to us, crossing each other’s paths, their heads down.
I turned. Ghastek stood on his own feet, his face pale, his eyes determined. The younger vampire twisted upright and picked up the Master of the Dead. The two ancients perched on the floor, Scar on the left and the other, large vamp, so pale it looked completely white, on the right, moving in perfect unison.
“You may want to break the door down,” Ghastek said from four mouths, three vamps’ and one his own, in the familiar dry voice I remembered. “The rest of the undead will smell their blood. We don’t have much time.”
15
THE DOOR OF the gym opened to a half-ruined restaurant. Then followed a room with vampires and Ghastek got to use his new undead, while I got to use my substitute saber. It still wasn’t Slayer, but it did okay enough to get me from one end of the room to another. We slammed the door shut and had ourselves a run across another hallway to a staircase. Down we went.
Filthy rooms, crumbling chairs, floors that made no sense, one moment a luxury high-rise, the next a ruin, then a hospital . . . Sometimes icy cold, sometimes sweltering hot. One room housed a pile of rotting corpses slithering with huge snakes. Another had an imaginary floor. The floor was there, we could see it, but when Thomas stepped on it, he went completely through. Robert caught him and pulled him out, but not before the rat alpha got a glimpse of what was under the floor. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just had this wild look on his half-rat, half-human face, backed away, and took off in the same direction we had come from. It took us ten minutes to catch up with him.
At one point we’d reached a hole in the side of the building and one by one stuck our heads out of it. The breath of cold, fresh air was like manna from heaven. We were high above the ground. I saw a piece of a sky, a distant field of snow, and then a giant reptilian-looking bird swooped down and tried to claw my face off with its talons. Thanks, Roland. Much appreciated.
Curran pounded on the wall for a few minutes trying to break us free. The wall held, but even if we did manage to break through and start climbing down, the birds would pluck us off.
We’d clustered around that hole for a while, not wanting to leave, but eventually we had to move. Down and down, picking up more stray vampires as escort. They were everywhere now, a constellation of filthy magic sparks moving along with us, always trying to close the distance.
“Maybe this hellhole has no end,” Andrea growled, as we opened yet another door.
“No.” Christopher gave her a smile as he walked through the doorway. “It ends. It is finite . . .” He stopped.
We stood in a prison block. In front of us two rows of cells stretched forward, and in the distance I saw a section of a familiar circular clearing. I had seen this exact setup underneath the Casino. Rows of cells radiated from the central circle like spokes from a wheel, except the Casino’s cells held vampires. These cells held corpses.
“No,” Christopher whispered. His legs crumpled under him. He dropped to the floor and pulled the hood over his face, squeezing his slender body into a small ball. “No, no, no . . .”
Bodies filled the cells. Some skeletal, grasping at the bars with fingers that used to have flesh. Others fresher, with rotting muscle still clinging to their bones. A few didn’t look human. One of these cells must’ve been Christopher’s. He had sat here, in a cage, dying slowly and watching the dead around him fall apart.
“How horrible . . .” Nasrin whispered.
I knelt by Christopher and put my arms around him.
“No . . .” he moaned.
Nasrin crouched by me, her voice calming. “It will be fine, Christopher.”
“We’re not staying,” I told him. “You are not in a cage. You are free.”
He tried to rock back and forth. He couldn’t even hear me.
Behind us, the vampiric horde swelled somewhere in the walls, like an avalanche ready to break and bury us whole.
“We can’t linger,” Ghastek said, shifting in the vampire’s arms. His other two bloodsuckers halted.
“No . . .” Christopher murmured.
“Shhh,” I told him. “Look at me. Look at my eyes.”
I let my magical defenses slip a little. My power curled around Christopher. He raised his head and looked at me. “Mistress . . .”
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” I was getting very good at making promises I couldn’t keep. “I won’t let you get stuck here in a cage. Come on.”
I pulled him to his feet.
Curran looked at Nasrin. “Carry him if you have to. We need to go.”
Nasrin took Christopher’s hand. “Here, hold on to me. It’s okay. It will be fine.”
We began jogging past the cells. Corpses watched us pass with empty orbs. The putrid smell choked me. Dear God. So many people.
“Child!” a female voice called.
I stopped in midstep. I knew that voice.
An arm in a dark sleeve thrust between the bars, above a rotting corpse pressed against the iron. A woman looked at me from inside the nearest cell. The last time I saw her she had been middle-aged, with a stocky powerful build and a face the color of walnut. She looked decades older now. Her cheeks sank into her skull, hollow and withdrawn. Her skin hung off her bones. Dirt and dry blood stained the indigo mesh veil covering her dark hair and forehead. She was a ghost of her former self.