“I don’t know!” He struggled to his feet. “I always assumed that when we found it, somehow you would know, that some book or ancient carving would have told us by then or it would be an instinct… I don’t know.”
“Lovely.” Looking around the passage for some better weapon, Simon found a rough wooden stake encrusted with cobwebs and dirt—the weapon of Saint Joseph. “Maybe this will work.”
“Simon, how will you find them?” The wizard chased him into the study. “If Kivar finds the Chalice first, he will become more powerful than any demon in creation, a god in his own right. How will you find him first?”
“Isabel’s blood.” He smiled a madman’s smile. “I can smell it.”
“Of course…” The wizard smiled. “Come, warrior. Lead on.”
Isabel stumbled in the dark, struggling to stay on her feet. She had no doubt that if she fell and broke both legs, Kivar would drag her the rest of the way. The glow from the creature’s eyes cast the faintest of glows on the damp cave walls, glittering occasionally on a trail of some phosphorescent powder on the floor.
“Your friend, Orlando.” They crossed over the gleaming track and plunged into another dark tunnel. “As he ever was, so clever and so wrong.”
She wanted to answer, but she wasn’t sure she had the strength. She had been exhausted and weak from the loss of the blood Simon had taken from her when she came back to Charmot; now she was bleeding again, and the pain from her wrist was making her feel faint. Not to mention she was being dragged through a labyrinth by a rapidly disintegrating corpse. Given her absolute preference, she would have screamed until she passed out dead. But screaming wouldn’t save her—or Charmot. “Simon is going to catch you,” she made herself say as they rounded another sharp corner. “He is going to destroy you.”
“Is he?” He turned sharply again, so quickly she had to put up her free hand to stop herself from crashing into the wall before he yanked her on. “How do you know he’s not destroyed himself?”
A picture of Simon lying beheaded on the drawbridge of the castle with Malachi standing over him rose up in her mind, but she pushed it away. “He isn’t.” She made herself think of her mother instead and her tapestry, her vision of the great deed her child would do to save her people. This creature, this Kivar… this was the wolf. “I would know.”
The vampire laughed. “Perhaps you would.”
They rounded another, softer curve, and the ground fell off steeply before them, leading them down in a spiral that seemed to go on forever. Kivar muttered something in his ancient tongue and moved faster.
Simon could smell the scent of his beloved growing stronger and sweeter in the chill. In his eagerness to reach them, he didn’t notice the way the ground sloped sharply downward until it was almost too late. He staggered, the stake held out before him, and Orlando lunged past him and grabbed it, pushing it aside just before Simon was impaled. “Thanks,” the vampire muttered, shaking, clapping his friend on the shoulder before he climbed back to his feet.
Isabel heard a scuffle from somewhere far behind and above them, no louder than a rat in a wall, and she smiled. Simon was coming; he would find her. Then Kivar laughed, a bitter little chuckle, and her hope turned cold. “Not so graceful, is he?” he said, his smile plain in his voice. “Come along, little one.”
“Simon, be careful!” she cried out, planting her feet to hold him back one more moment. “He knows!”
Kivar caught her hard by the hair, making her gasp with pain, but she would not scream, not with Simon close enough to hear her. “Aren’t you the brave little beastie?” the creature said coldly, turning to continue down the slope.
Alive, Simon thought, the meaning of her words barely registering as they echoed back through the dark. Alive and still conscious. Exchanging a look with Orlando, he quickened his pace.
The passage opened up as it leveled off, and Isabel stumbled as Kivar suddenly stopped. “Of course,” he said, laughing. “What else would they do?” He raised his hand as he had done to attack Orlando, and a torch blazed up before them, then another, then another, forming a half-ring of fire. Behind the torches were columns of stone carved to look like the trunks of great trees, so intricate Isabel blinked, thinking for a moment they were real, great oaks growing under the earth. Even the ceiling was carved to mimic a canopy of summer leaves frozen forever in time. The ring seemed to end against the opposite wall of the cavern, melting into a smooth, flat slab of rock.
“Behold the labors of your fathers, little one,” Kivar said, drawing her into the ring. “See what their folly has wrought.”
“Were they so foolish?” Just inside the ring were two smooth obelisks of stone, shoulder high and set a man’s arm span apart. “Did they not escape you?”
“For a time.” He gazed up at the rock face, his demon’s eyes triumphant. “But that time is over.” He turned back to her, letting go of her wrist to reach for her shoulders, and she knew her moment had come. Before he could catch her, she attacked, falling on him in a fury, gouging at his eyes, the only part of him that seemed alive. He screamed, clawing at her hands, kicking her legs from beneath her and driving her to the ground. “Little bitch,” he snarled, crouched in front of her with both her wrists in his grip. One eye was torn completely from its dry and skinless socket, hanging useless on the flap of parchment that should have been his cheek. The other was whole but oozing, obviously blind. “Do you think I need to see you?”
“I will kill you,” she promised, trembling with horror but furious, the daughter of a druid and a knight. “The time that is ending is yours.”
He yanked her back to her feet and shoved her between the obelisks, the loss of his sight apparently no great hardship in his quest. He slammed her bleeding hand against the top of one, pulling her arm nearly out of the socket to do it, and a sickening shudder passed through her, the cavern turning dark to her eyes in spite of the light of the torches. He tore open the flesh of her other wrist with his ruined teeth and fangs, gnawing at her like a dog, and this time she did scream, unable to hold it back. He pressed her bleeding wrist to the other obelisk, and her body felt like it was being split in two by lightning, the whole cavern shuddering around them.
“Here it is, little one,” Kivar said, tearing her gown down the back and ripping the fabric to shreds to bind her hands to the stone. “Here is your great destiny.”
Simon stepped into the light behind them, the stake held out before him. “Be careful, my son,” Kivar warned him as he moved to strike. “I would hate to snap her neck.” Isabel was bound to some sort of stone pillory with her blood flowing freely down either side, and the ancient vampire stood behind her, a wasted skeleton cradling her head between his bony hands. “Look what she can do.”
The wall of stone before them was suddenly glowing with light, a cold, blue glow that spread outward from the center. Isabel writhed in her bonds, the power that coursed through her tearing her apart, and the light grew brighter, the stone turning to what looked like ice, white then translucent, a frosted window to another world. At first Simon thought he saw the torches he could touch reflected in the shining surface, then he realized that no, the ring continued on the other side. The icy wall turned clearer still, and he could see an altar just opposite the position where Isabel was bound, a high stone table draped down the center with a cloth of gold. The other side was not a cavern but a grove, a shining forest in daylight, and his heart leapt up in spite of all to see it, a sun that would accept him, a light that did not burn his eyes. At the center of the altar stood a single cup.
“The Chalice,” Orlando murmured, awestruck beside him. “It is the Chalice.”
“This is the birthright I would offer you, my son,” Kivar said. “This is the realm I would give you to rule.” Isabel’s heart was growing weaker; Simon could hear it. She was dying. He didn’t have time for trances and dreams.
“Let her go!” he shouted, turning away from the vision before him.
“Let her live,” Kivar answered. “Not as this animal that time will decay, this food for worms and the carrion crow, but as a goddess.” His eyes were destroyed, but he turned to face Simon as if he could still see him, one skeletal hand entangled tenderly in Isabel’s red hair. “Go forth and take the Chalice, use it as I will instruct you, and we shall be as one. Together we will save her; we will make her a queen.”