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As Check and his men held the day-runners against the wall, questioning them, trying to find out what we could about Geoffrey, Leo, and this complex, it was obvious the yummanii weren’t going to cooperate. They kept silent, refusing to speak. The wounds on their necks were deeply scarred. All of them had been fed from at one point or another.
After a few minutes, Peyton looked at me. “We aren’t going to have any luck, and with those Klaxons going off, surely they’ll be waiting for a report upstairs. We have to get moving or they’ll be fully armed and ready for us.”
She made a good point. I motioned to Check. The look on the day-runners’ faces told me they knew what was coming; the men’s eyes went wide while the woman closed hers, steeling herself. My guards were quick and humane, and as their daggers expertly slashed their throats, the blood poured to the ground. Within ten seconds, they were all unconscious, and within another twenty, they’d bled out enough to die.
Somber, feeling my heart weigh heavy in a way it never before had, I turned back to the room in which they’d been hiding. Stepping over the creature on the floor, I led the way in, followed by Check, Grieve, Chatter, and the others.
The room was large enough to house our entire party, and we glanced around, keeping an eye on both the door to the passageway and the door leading to what was undoubtedly the hidden lair housing Geoffrey and Leo’s operation.
What had been down here before? After all, the pair had only recently been on the run. Or did someone else control this lair, only allowing the two of them to make use of it? With these questions racing through my mind, I joined the others in poking around.
A logbook sat on the table, listing alerts. It looked like the last one had been three days ago, and all that was noted was Enemy dispatched. Korbant. Whether Korbant was the name of the creature they’d killed or the person logging the incident was impossible to tell. The rest of the entries for December were just initialed with the words No threat.
The room was filled with display cases, which in turn were filled with weapons. Big-assed guns that had been modified to blow away something with the hide of an elephant. A few flamethrowers. And a few other weapons that were hard to identify. I didn’t want to muck with them just in case one backfired.
“What lies through that door?” I started to walk over to the inner door, but Check was in front of me in a flash. He gave me a look that stopped me cold. I backed away, letting him check it out. But at least there was something I could do.
Ulean, can you peek behind that door?
A moment, then another.
Cicely, I can only sense a maze of twisting passages, but I can go no farther. There are blocks against my kind. I can see just beyond the door, but then a magical barrier prevents me from moving forward. No doubt the vampires set it up—it has the feel of new magic. And Geoffrey knows you have me with you, so I imagine it’s his doing. I have no idea how you’re going to get through there before the vampires rise.
I looked over at Peyton. “What time is it? Do you know?”
She pulled out her phone, checking the time. “No cell service down here, but it’s past three thirty now. We don’t have a long time till the vamps wake up, do we?”
“Fuck, no. We have less than an hour. Come on; no matter what, we have to get through there.” I motioned to Check. “You want to go first, fine, but we have to go. Ysandra, any chance you and Luna can see if there are any magical traps on this door?”
Ysandra and Luna pushed to the front. After a moment, they both shook their heads. Ysandra said, “I don’t think so, but there’s so much magic beyond this door I can’t tell for certain.”
“We should close the outer door,” Grieve said. “And lock it again. If another one of those…tredobytes comes wandering in, we don’t need to be dealing with it as well.”
Two of the guards who were standing sentinel by the door moved to close and bar it. They turned back. “We’re ready when you are, Your Highness.”
“Then let’s go.” I braced myself, praying that whatever might be on the other side of that door wouldn’t turn us into toast.
Check moved into position in front of me, along with Teral, and then motioned to the nearest guard, who yanked open the door. For one moment we were facing clear hallway, empty, but the next, a rolling mist poured out from nowhere, and in it were a host of forms. Shadows, they weren’t physical and yet not illusion. As they swarmed us, something grappled my throat.
Choking, I reached out, trying to get ahold on the shade, but my hands plunged through the filmy mass. Gasping, I struggled, but my fingers kept slipping through the shadow.
Ysandra let out a long cry out in some ancient tongue, and a blast rocked us, knocking us all to our feet as a forked chain of lightning filled the area, leaping from one shadowy creature to the next. They lit up like luminescent fog, then quickly burst into ethereal flames and vanished.
As I sat up, rubbing my throat, Grieve hurried to my side. “Are you all right, my love?” He lifted me up, and I nodded, still sputtering a little from the chokehold.
“Is everyone okay? Luna—Peyton?” I turned to check on them, but the guards were already helping them up. Everybody seemed to be fine, if a little shaken. “We have to get moving; that set us back a few minutes. What the fuck were those things?”
“Some sort of magical trap,” Ysandra said. “They weren’t real spirits, but magical constructs, and once I realized that, I knew I could shatter them.” She dusted her hands on the legs of her catsuit. “Whatever created them is dangerous, though. That’s an advanced spell, and I have my fears about what may be on the other end of it. There must have been a way to deactivate it in the outer room, but without knowing what to expect, it would be hard to find the trigger.”
And with that lovely thought, we entered the hallway. I only hoped that less than forty-five minutes would be enough time to find Geoffrey and Leo before they found us.
Chapter 16
Forty-five minutes isn’t a long time, and it feels even less when you’re facing a maze. As we entered the hallway, I stopped short. Instead of running just left and right, or even straight ahead, there were numerous passages opening along the horizontal wall, each leading into the darkness.
There weren’t any signs, and the only light was diffused, from overhead recessed lamps. The shadows were deep and my stomach lurched again. How the hell were we going to find our way through to where Geoffrey and Leo were sleeping in the time we had left?
“What do you wish us to do, Your Majesty?” Check stood at attention, waiting along with the other guards.
