drank him dry?”
Naomi bowed her head. “There is very little chance the human survived their encounter. Eamon was not in his right mind. It would’ve been… a brutal feeding.”
“I have to find him before we leave,” I said. “Which way was the tunnel?” Sulfur still clung to the air, making it impossible for me to scent anything.
She pointed back behind the dais. “There is a small opening in the corner. Follow the tunnel for a few meters. You should be able to scent him there.”
I looked at the group. Danny lowered his gaze and Tyler set himself onto an old wooden chair that had somehow survived the carnage of the room. I took a step forward and Rourke made a move to follow me. “No,” I said, reaching back to place my hand on his warm chest. All I wanted to do was crawl into his arms. But that would have to wait. “I just need to say goodbye. He was a thorn in my side, but he was a decent guy in the end, however misguided.”
I crossed the room and entered the tunnel.
It was no more than a crack in the wall at the beginning, easily missed from the wrong direction. I stepped over Eamon’s bones at the entry point. The only thing left was a skeleton wrapped in his clothes. The bones were old and rotted looking. Vampires must degenerate to their actual age, because those bones looked five hundred years old.
“Ray?” I called. I knew he wouldn’t answer, but it made me feel good to think he might. I moved through the tunnel slowly. As I walked, it opened up. There were boulders jutting out from each side, closing the circumference considerably in places and making it more like a maze than a tunnel. As I paced farther in, I began to scent blood. The sulfur smell was less concentrated in here, and my nose was clearing.
It was Ray’s blood.
There was no mistaking it. I came along the edge of a shallow boulder and closed my eyes. He was behind it. His scent was all over the place. I didn’t really want to see. He was human, and therefore his weakness had always been a liability. This was the probable outcome of the journey. I’d known it going in—not that he would be eaten by a vampire, but that his chances of surviving this were slim to none. I had no idea how he’d found his way in with Tyler and Danny. I’d have to ask them. My best guess was that Naomi must have inadvertently dropped him by a backdoor entrance and they had met up in the maze of tunnels. This mountain clearly had many.
If he’d stayed on top of the mountain like we’d instructed him to, he’d be alive right now, complaining about how long it had taken us to get back. But, in the end, he’d done his best to help me. “Ray, can you hear me?” I called. There was no answer. Of course.
I stepped slowly around the boulder.
His broken body lay on the ground. His neck had been ripped open in several places, savaged and mutilated. Even his hands were bloody and torn. He’d tried to fight. Eamon’s persuasion, a vampire’s automatic defense, must not have worked. I didn’t doubt it, because Eamon had become unhinged in the end. His love for a goddess who had tortured him had been his undoing.
But Persuasion had never worked on Ray as long as he’d lived, and if Eamon had used it, Ray would’ve hated every minute of it. I grinned in spite of the situation, enjoying the fact that it must’ve pissed Eamon off as this human fought for his life.
I drew closer and knelt. “Oh, Ray,” I said on a small breath as I crouched down by his side. “I’m so sorry it had to end like this. If you can believe it, I was actually beginning to like you.” I placed my hands carefully on his broken body and cocked my head. His heart had just given one single, strangled beat. “What are you doing, Ray? Trying to survive at all odds?” I smiled. “You are one stubborn mother. I’ll give you that.” I lowered my head to his sternum. There wasn’t another beat for several long seconds. I lifted my head. “Ray, I can’t fix this.” I swallowed, angling my face up toward the ceiling in frustration, trying to clear the ball in my throat. “Even if you’re holding on