“Are these the railroad tracks?” the wolven asked as he pointed to the twin lines of rusty steel.
“No, they are the trailheads of destiny.” Apex double-checked the path they’d come down, but he would have scented anyone riding behind them. “This way.”
He took them to the right, following the train route that was overgrown enough to have trees sprouting in between the tracks. About two hundred yards later, an open area with a loading dock appeared, itsoverhang providing cover, but also such a saturated darkness that even vampire eyes were going to struggle—
Click.
The flashlight beam was discreet and exactly what he needed. But the fact that the wolven was on the business end of the glow was annoying. Especially given the waft of the male’s superiority.
Which Apex shouldn’t have thought was appealing, in an annoying kind of way.
“So that’s why you took the hand,” the wolven said.
Apex followed the beam to the lock pad that was mounted by a reinforced steel door. Without comment, he went over to it, his body obscuring the illumination. Holding out the guard’s palm, he had to get the position correct.
Vampires did not have fingerprints, but that wasn’t how it worked. Right at the base of the palm, in the fleshy part below the thumb, each one of the guards had gotten some kind of implant. He had no idea how the technology functioned, but he had seen them wave whatever the hell it was over the readers at the loading area at the main building. The head of the guards had started the practice within the last week, although not all the doors were secured by the system yet.
Apex swiped the palm. And when the pinpoint red light did not turn to green and there was no unlocking, he wondered if blood flow was required. The palm was getting cold—
The grinding reverberated through the steel panel, making a sound that fortunately didn’t travel far, and as the seal on the entry was broken, the whiff that came out was of concrete, old oil, and death.
Too impatient for the automatic opener’s slow pace, he yanked the heavy weight wide, and gave the wolven’s flashlight a vista to pierce. The ascent was at a stiff angle, a pair of trolley tracks disappearing up the rise. An old cart was locked onto the tracks at the base of the incline, its high sides brokered by locked flaps that could be lowered by—
Between one blink and the next, he saw bodies tangled in its grim belly, the dead humans shriveled in their own skins, having wasted away. The vision was accompanied by a pungent smell he recognized as the full fruition of that which he initially scented as the door had been opening.
Bringing his hands up to rub away the image, he poked himself in the eye with the guard’s middle finger and almost dropped the palm. But the grinding into his sockets did nothing. Lids up or down, what he was being shown didn’t change.
“Apex?”
He didn’t know which of the two said his name. Probably Kane. Who the fuck cared.
“Gimme a minute.”
Sagging against the concrete wall, he felt a dampness seep through the thin tunic he had on, and he tried to tune in to what the cool wet felt like on the crest of his shoulder. Sometimes, if he could hook on to something that was real, he could bring himself out of it. But that didn’t always work—and until the vision decided to move on, he was stuck where he was, blinded by something that had happened in the past, the stain on the landscape the kind of thing that never washed out, but was never seen or sensed by anyone but him—
“What’s going on, mate?” the wolven asked softly.
“You guys go up the chute, I’m right behind you,” Apex said.
Kane took off, running up the concrete steps that paralleled the body car’s tracks. The guy might not have had any idea where he was going, but all he had to do was get to the top—and there was a lock on the door up there, so he wasn’t going to go start biting people and melting them all willy-nilly.
“Mate?”
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
Except Apex’s body refused to follow commands. But it was always like that, when the dead forced him to see their corpses. And fuckinghell, he could do without that smell, the sweet stench of decay making him choke.
Flailing around inside his skin, he clapped his eyes on the wolven. “What the hell are you waiting for.”
There was a pause. Then the white-haired, blue-eyed wolven replied, “You. I’m waiting… for you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the ascent, Kane’s legs were moving like pistons, his thighs pumping as he ascended a grade that was almost a total vertical. As his breath inflated his lungs and exploded out of his mouth, he had a thought in the back of his head that this shouldn’t be possible. Even before he’d been burned, he would never have moved up stairs like this.
An image of the guards’ throats dissolving and the bodies dropping free barged into his mind.
Good thing he reached the top of the body chute. Behind him, the thin beam of the wolven’s light started jerking back and forth, reminding him of a butterfly’s flight path. It didn’t take long for the other two to join him.