"Anything not in a bottle or can could have been contaminated from the rain, the wind ... we don't know exactly how they're spreading this shit, Mar. Might be airborne for all we know. Maybe not, but are you willing to gamble?" Carlos waited a beat, vindicated when no other concerns got raised.
Yonnie opened his arms wide as he spoke, looking among Val, Tara, and Damali. "We can't steal, because that sets up a negative energy trail right to us. We can't use up valuable supplies on the island that innocent civilians will need. They won't go on the cruise ships until they're really desperate, because, frankly, how will they board 'em? If we find people alive on the cruise liners, us going on board will be their salvation, because we can drop them on dry land. But, if we find anything else, us taking supplies off ain't stealing from the living--okay? Besides, any good supplies left on those five ships out there could be jettisoned back here to the cathedral we just left... a safe haven for it and for folks who, ultimately, could starve to death on this island."
"I think that about says it all. It's a screwed up job, but somebody's gotta do it." Rider hocked and spat, and then checked the magazine on his weapon before glancing at Yonnie and Car-S. "Gentlemen, shall we?"
Nuit stood in the courtyard of the abandoned Australian castle ind drank in the night. This was what Dante had exiled himself from--feeling the raw power of the living planet. If his former Chairman had only left Vampire Council Chambers, he would have been able to track Rivera more closely, would have learned from his duplicitous style. But the old man was from the predawn era of vampires that hid in the caverns of Hell, soaking up power from the depths for power's sake alone and never enjoying their immortality to the very fullest--and that had been what had initiated his failed coup and alliance with the Amanthra demons.
Yet, he was still here . . . and the Devil's firstborn son, Dante, was not. The irony of that made Nuit smile as he gazed at another ruined vampire stronghold. He'd never envisioned the Chairman dead at the hands of the Neterus. Cain had even succumbed, and through it all he was still standing!
The awareness almost made him laugh out loud. Nuit waved off the thick-bodied, hooded messengers that had scythes at the ready to guard him. There was no threat here. Just feeding rats and meandering serpents. What had once been an opulent display of raw master vampire power had been reduced to dust at the hands of Rivera. That wealthy bastard, McGuire, had lost it all. Pity.
For a moment Nuit stood still, allowing the very night itself to soak into his bones. The majesty of the stars awash in a midnight-blue velvet sky made him open his arms wide and close his eyes. There had been so much waste ... so much loss at the hands of the Neterus.
But rather than dwell on the outrage of it all, he squared his shoulders and walked up the steps, waving his security forces off. He wanted to feel the old trail of Carlos Rivera alone. He wanted to savor his archenemy's last steps as a vampire ... to feel the burn of Rivera's passion for the Neteru female while he was still trapped as an entity of the night. That was true majesty. Passion and lust, dare he call it love, that transcended the grave and challenged the realms of Hell. How Rivera convinced the female Neteru to love him like that was still worthy of envy.
Nuit glanced up at the full moon, wishing he could have been an eyewitness. Now all he could do was shake his head as he entered what had once been a grand foyer.
Cobwebs, rubble, and fallen plaster greeted him. Nuit closed his eyes, sensing, seeing the castle come alive in his mind ... a place that once held elaborate blood-gorging fetes. Delicately veined walls pulsing richly with fresh blood were now cracked and dried. Massive, sweeping staircases in shambles. The rare, leaded, beveled glass windows that still remained hung in piteous disrepair. Elizabethan-era knights, Louis XVI furnishings, Victorian treasures all rusted, stolen, dry-rotted, wasted . . . it was a travesty.
He passed the great room and the ballroom with his head held high, and then stopped and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. In a vapor fold-away, he immediately walked into the master suite two floors above that had been given to the then Councilman Rivera. Nuit looked around and chuckled softly. "You may have wanted to, but you did not love her here, did you, mon ami'?"
Hands clasped behind his back, Nuit began walking. "With all those spies and treasonous bastards about, nor would I have bedded my bride here. Where would a man of your inscrutable strategy have taken her so that she could stumble upon the seal for you?"
Frustration claimed him as he sauntered through the room, but a gentle breeze drew him out to the balcony. The trail of Rivera's old vampire energy was so weak . . . but there was still something--a pattern that he couldn't ignore. A signature that he'd never in a hundred lifetimes forget: Damali. Her energy stained the crumbling stone rail.
Nuit closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. "She is your Waterloo, mon frere. You love her more than existence itself. This I fully understand."
Touching the air before him as though blind, Nuit turned and swayed, seeming to dance alone in the darkness. . . sensing where the couple had stepped, moving as they had moved on the terrace until a shudder of heat claimed him. He gasped as the sensation entered his chest and fanned out in a quickly spreading burn that contracted his groin and sent him stumbling backward against the rail.
His eyes slid closed as he surrendered to the passion and fell. Two hundred feet above the cliffs, jagged stone yawned up, and his hurtling form began to disintegrate into pure vapor.
He landed on all fours, panting and in a desert. Red iron ore stabbed into his palms and sliced under his nail beds as he threw his head back and howled. Her scent was everywhere, causing saliva-slicked fangs to fill his mouth, and his head to be thrown back in an agonized wail.
Nuit dropped to the ground, gathering dirt in his arms, washing his face with it like a madman. Damali's scent, her sweat, her feminine essence had spilled upon this barren land. She'd rained pleasure upon his rival so profoundly that even the earth wept, leaving crystallized casings of her sweetness behind.
Euphoric, trembling, he lifted his head, eyes glowing, need carving his groin, and became wolf. There was no other choice. To remain man would leave him vulnerable to the longing. In his human form, he'd love the very ground imagining it to be her.
Time was of the essence. He had to move. Massive sinew-laden shoulders replaced his athletic human body, and his ribs splintered and cracked to allow a barrel chest to form. His spine elongated with his howl and a dense midnight coat eclipsed his cafe au lait skin. Lowering his nose to the earth, he picked up Rivera's old scent, finding the edge of where Damali's scent left off and where only Carlos's footfalls could be distinguished.
Nuit moved like black wind. Rivera had loved her, then carried her for a distance. Excitement made him heady as he dashed to the edge of a strange gathering and then skidded to a halt. Carlos's scent went beyond the perimeter, but he could not. Nuit growled quietly.
An eerie blue ring of scorching white light blinded him and made him turn away, then become mist. Old, dark-hued men with strange white markings on their bodies stood and glanced around, on alert. Nuit watched from the nothingness, but then suddenly the sound of their collective mutterings and didgeri-doos drove him away.
Dreamtime chants, twenty-thousand-year-old prayer lines-- damn the shamans. But still he smiled from the subterranean caverns.
Nuit looked up. He'd found it. Vlad's armies or Sebastian's raised Berserkers would never find it--even if the old men died of starvation. The key was a human soul. That was the only way to cross the prayer lines that ancient.
Whirring in a black funnel cloud, he traversed time and space within minutes to return to Dante's old lair. It took all his acquired reserve not to blow the marble doors off their hinges, and to coolly open the doors, then close them behind him.
Lucrezia was alone, pouting, her hair tussled. She sat up in bed and folded her arms, glaring at him. He produced a goblet and pressed it to the wall, but had to hold it with two trembling hands as he greedily drank from it.
"You promised you'd come back to finish . . ."
"And I am a man of my word," he gasped between deep swallows. "As I promised you, chine, you will not hate me for it, either."
"Sebastian will do my bidding," she said with dripping sarcasm. "Are you satisfied?"
"Non," he replied, instantly materializing in bed nude and flattening her. He brutally took her mouth with a bloody kiss and fisted her hair. "Anything but."