down and vomited a thin stream of glittering blood upon the steps beneath me, which vanished as we moved swiftly on.
“Live among graves,” I said furiously. “Tell me, why do you suffer hell already by your own choice?”
“Silence,” whispered one of them close to me, a dark-eyed female with a witch’s mop of hair. “You blasphemer,” she said. “You cursed profaner.”
“Don’t be a fool for the devil, darling!” I sneered. We were eye to eye. “Unless he treats you a damn sight better than the Almighty!”
She laughed. Or rather she started to laugh, and she stopped as if she weren’t allowed to laugh. What a gay and interesting little get-together this was going to be!
We were going lower and lower into the earth.
Flickering light, the scrape of their bare feet on the dirt, filthy rags brushing my face. For an instant, I saw a grinning skull. Then another, then a heap of them filling a niche in the wall.
I tried to wrench free and my foot hit another heap and sent the bones clattering on the stairs. The vampires tightened their grip, trying to lift us higher. Now we passed the ghastly spectacle of rotted corpses fixed in the walls like statues, bones swathed in rotted rags.
“This is too disgusting!” I said with my teeth clenched.
We had come to the foot of the steps and were being carried through a great catacomb. I could hear the low rapid beat of kettledrums.
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mournful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention.
Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos.
I couldn’t know if Gabrielle had caught it.
We were quite suddenly thrown down together, in the dust. And the others backed away from us.
I climbed to my feet, lifting Gabrielle with me. And I saw that we were in a great domed chamber, scarcely illuminated by three torches which the vampires held to form a triangle, in the center of which we stood.
Something huge and black to the back of the chamber; smell of wood and pitch, smell of damp, moldering cloth, smell of living mortal. Nicolas there.
Gabrielle’s hair had come loose entirely from the ribbon, and it fell around her shoulders as she cleaved to me, looking about with seemingly calm, cautious eyes.
Wails rose all around us, but the most piercing supplications came from those other beings we had heard before, creatures somewhere deep in the earth.
And I realized these were entombed vampires screaming, screaming for blood, and screaming for forgiveness and release, screaming even for the fires of hell. The sound was as unbearable as the stench.
No real thoughts from Nicki, only the formless shimmer of his mind. Was he dreaming? Was he mad?
The roll of the drums was very loud and very close, and yet those screams pierced the rumbling again and again without rhythm or warning. The wailing of those nearest us died away, but the drums went on, the pounding suddenly coming from inside my head.
Trying desperately not to clamp my hands to my ears, I looked about.
A great circle had been formed, and there were ten of them at least, these creatures. I saw young ones, old ones, men and women, a young boy—and all clothed in the remnants of human garments, caked with earth, feet bare, hair tangled with filth. There was the woman I had spoken to on the stairs, her well-shaped body clothed in a filthy robe, her quick black eyes glinting like jewels in the dirt as she studied us. And beyond these, the advance guard, were a pair in the shadows beating the kettledrums.
I begged silently for strength. I tried to hear Nicolas without actually thinking of him. Solemn vow: I shall get us all out of here, though at the moment I do not know exactly how.
The drumbeat was slowing, becoming an ugly cadence that made the alien feeling of fear a fist against my throat. One of the torchbearers approached.
I could feel the anticipation of the others, a palpable excitement as the flames were thrust at me.
I snatched the torch from the creature, twisting his right hand until he was flung down on his knees. With a hard kick, I sent him sprawling, and as the