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“Not a good time,” Rumy said. The tension in his voice had Marius reaching for one of his daggers. Something was going on.
“Is that my son?” Daniel’s voice penetrated the airwaves. Looked like dear old Dad had recovered from his second stab wound. “If you don’t get your ass over here to talk to me, I’m taking your pal, Rumy, back to the Dark Cave system and stringing him up like I did you.”
Marius grew very still. This was no time to react to anything Daniel had to say, including his threats. Besides, he and Rumy had talked strategy for years, working through several scenarios that might involve Daniel’s intrusion into The Erotic Passage.
Daniel was definitely in the middle of making his play.
He took a deep breath. He would hate more than anything to have Rumy’s torture or death on his hands, but Rumy hadn’t been around this long, rubbing shoulders daily with the entire vampire underworld, without having a few plans in place.
Rumy finally said, “Don’t sweat it, Marius. I’m about to serve my guest some tea and cookies.”
Shit, Rumy was going to blow up part of The Erotic Passage.
Marius hung up and slipped his phone back into his deepest side pocket. He packed his battle leathers full of chains and daggers. Thinking Shayna would probably want a little more time with the shower, he headed back to the waterfall room.
* * *
Shayna took her time drying off, her thoughts having returned to making love with Marius.
She felt changed, born anew, and the terrible oppressiveness she’d carried with her because of Michelson had disappeared. She hadn’t realized the extent to which his purposeful tearing away at her self-esteem over the course of their relationship had left her burdened.
Now the burden had vanished like a heavy stack of firewood set ablaze and reduced to the weight of ashes.
She would always feel grateful that her bizarre journey into this unknown world had released her from something she hadn’t even known existed.
When she started blowing her hair dry, making use of the high setting, she became aware of how sensitive even her hearing had become. She tried to imagine what this was like for vampires, living with a heightened auditory capacity. She knew that the extinction weapon used an extreme decibel level to kill vampires. If the sound of the blow dryer bothered her, what would a high-pitched sound do to a full-blooded vampire? She could only imagine the pain.
With her hair sufficiently dry, she returned to her dress and pulled her iPhone from the small side pocket. Still wrapped up in her towel, she scrolled through the various pictures she’d taken of the stonework, enlarging the parts that looked like an ancient language, and just let her eyes wander over the lines and shapes. She felt certain she was looking at the key to understanding something important about the vampire world, possibly even about Daniel.
The anthropologist in her wanted to spend the rest of her life exploring the intricacies of a culture lived at night and in the depths of secret, hidden caverns. She’d want to delve into the earliest traditions, charting the evolution of the society through the ages. If she had more time, a study of this kind could even offer an understanding of Daniel and possibly even the best means of corralling the beast.
She set her phone on the counter and made use of a tool she often employed when studying a culture. She took a deep breath and got very relaxed. She let all she knew about the culture surround her, imagining the spiritual and social aspects of what she’d seen now float around her head. She let her memories of the physical night-to-night activities move through her. She envisioned the sensuality of Marius’s world and of the vampire life generally, perhaps a result of cavern-based living.
She added in the sex-slavery component that had become a partially accepted element in a disproportionately large segment of the vampire-world population. She saw the driving scientific elements that she recognized all around her, serious feats of engineering that allowed for hot water, and fresh-flowing air, even for electricity and grow-lights and extensive underground gardens, and for the development of a weapon with genocidal application.
To all of this, she added the reverence she felt whenever Marius spoke of the children of his world and the rarity of procreation. The sheer absence of young minds in need of guidance would alter how an entire culture spent its hours, established its essential morals, developed its basic theory of education.
A former vision returned, the one she’d felt had been meant just for her. And she could see everything so clearly, just as she’d hoped she would. She took a moment to revel in the change, that nothing inhibited her visions now.
She saw herself once more in the room stacked full of clay tablets, rising all the way to the carefully carved ceiling, and hidden deep within a cave. She could feel the location, that the cave was somewhere in Egypt, which actually made a lot of sense. A large portion of ancient civilization came from that region of the world. Vampires, it would seem, had always borrowed from their surrounding human communities. Why wouldn’t they have developed their own brand of cuneiform?
But what wouldn’t she give to enter that room, a thought that caused her heart to beat hard in her chest.
While she saw this vision, a sense of urgency began to work in her veins, troubling her thoughts. She felt the pressure of another vision and because she was already in a receptive state, she let it come.
What unfolded before her eyes, however, brought tears flowing down her cheeks.
She saw death.
CHAPTER 12
By the time Marius returned to the waterfall room and found Shayna caught in the grips of another vision, a faint vibration shook the villa. He knew Rumy had blown up the front part of his offices.
If he hadn’t believed that things were quickly coming to a head, he believed it now.
He stood in front of Shayna and settled his hands gently on her shoulders to support her, but he felt such pain coming from her that he prepared for the worst.
After a moment, she opened her eyes.
