Incubus Moon (39 page)

Inexperienced and unworthy as I might be, I had the
Dark Mother
in my corner now, for this was the name that formed in my mind, as I watched the vampire draw closer.

Her laughter echoed around and through me. “
Chosen One
…”

Haemon came to a stop between Kassandra and I and motioned in the direction from which he’d come. “Go now. I need you and the newborn at full strength tonight.”

At first she just stood there, unwilling to depart. Then she nodded with reluctance and turned to leave, though not before casting a heated glance in my direction.

It was far from over between us. She wanted me to know that.

Haemon made certain she was nowhere in sight before shifting his focus to the aperture in the ceiling. He closed his eyes and let the sunlight bathe him, his porcelain face and shaved head pale gold under its rays. For a fleeting instant, he looked almost handsome standing there, a man at peace with himself. And why shouldn’t he be? The vampire couldn’t have experienced sunlight in over two thousand years. Although if it were up to me, and it had to be, he would never again enjoy such a pleasure.

The
Dark Mother’s
energy tightened around me, fortifying me.

Through silent words she revealed that the talisman around Haemon’s neck also served as a gateway to her world, to
Scáth Talún
, the one place the
Ritual of Malum
could be performed. Through blood sacrifice he would seek to harness my incubus power in order to become the first vampire-incubus hybrid.

To become a god.

CHAPTER 40

Haemon opened his eyes and lowered his gaze from the aperture in the ceiling to fix me with a chilling stare. “Someone’s whispering secrets to you, little incubus.”

Beneath the vampire’s threatening bluster, I glimpsed a flicker of uncertainty. He clearly felt the
Dark Mother’s
presence and it unsettled him.

“Triumph,” she declared for only me to hear, “shall soon be yours.”

For the first time since I was a child, I experienced an honest-to-goodness surge of faith in a higher being. I trusted in Her promises and strength in the same way that the devout trusted in the might of their Lord. I’d convinced myself that, at least where I was concerned, the
Dark Mother
was benevolent and all-powerful. She was my Sheppard and I Her humble disciple.

In response to my surrender, her power swelled inside me. What more of a promising sign could I have asked for? Which left me with a very big choice to make. Challenge my newfound faith, break free of these chains, and bring the entire temple complex crashing down on us all, or put my trust fully in the
Dark Mother
that she would do right by me? The time to choose was upon me, because everything was about to change forever.

Haemon squared his shoulders and peered into the darkness beyond our circle of light.

“Impotent specters from a bygone age,” he said with arrogant certainty. “That is all that dwells in this forsaken place.”

“What about Mark and Kassandra?” I asked. “Will they become temple ghosts, too?”

Haemon shot me a vicious grin.

“He will maroon them here, child,” the
Dark Mother
murmured in my ear.

A flurry of images assaulted me. In them, Mark and Kassandra circled one another, then attacked, madness in their faces, their eyes hollow, cheeks sunken, their thinning lips pulling back from gnashing fangs. Eventually, their bodies hardened and toppled over, wasting away to little more than cold, living husks. Conscious, yet unable to move or speak for all eternity.

More terrifying images rolled by in quick succession.

Haemon performing the
Ritual of Malum
and sacrificing Niko on that sinister altar, before turning a jeweled dagger on me. Drunk on incubus power, he and the army he’d created—a militia of vampire-incubus hybrids of superior strength and with an immunity to silver—stormed the High Council of Vampires in Rome, slaughtering them to a one.

Lastly, I bore witness to Haemon’s ruthless and bloody victory over the mortal world, as he declared himself its new and supreme despot.

“We cannot let this be!” the
Dark Mother
told me.

Of all of his twisted machinations, one stood out as fundamental to his stripping me of my incubus powers through dark ritual: The ability to walk beneath our own sun’s rays.

Haemon fell to studying the opening in the domed ceiling again. The golden light was losing its brilliance. Soon it would surrender to twilight.

The vampire approached me, delighted by my apparent helpless state, by my near-naked body on display for him alone.

Newfound faith was one thing, but if one of Haemon’s plans involved raping me again, the
Dark Mother
was going to have a helluva time keeping me from retaliating.

“If immortality has taught me one thing, it is that the world is a throne of the weak and fearful.” He reached up to rake fingernails down my exposed chest and stomach. Blood began to ooze from the thin cuts and trickle down my torso. “And that fear,” he said, taking in an excited breath as he leaned in to lap up the crimson rivulets, “is a mouth which craves the flesh and blood of the innocent. It is upon that throne that I alone shall sit.”

If it wasn’t clear to me before, Haemon was not only sadistic and power-hungry, he was also mad as a meat axe.

The arrival of Mr. Curious and his brother, the two Slavic henchmen, interrupted an attempted repeat of Haemon’s sexual sadism. The fiend looked none too happy about it, either.

The men stopped a few feet shy of the elongated ring of fading light encircling me, their expressions uncertain. Despite the sun’s inability to incinerate them on contact, the duo chose to wait for their leader to join them. Once he had, they spoke to Haemon in hurried voices too low for me to hear. The way he was glaring at them, the news couldn’t be good.

This was my moment. The
Dark Mother
should let me kill them right here, right now.

“Patience,” she whispered.

My newfound faith was on shaky ground. No small wonder. I’d essentially gone from being Haemon’s prisoner to someone else’s. Correction: I was now hostage to
two
supernatural beings.

Doubt and anxiety forced me to test the chains attached to my manacled wrists. Nothing. They were as firmly fixed as ever, despite renewed incubus strength pulsating inside me.

“Impetuous child,” the
Dark Mother
chided. “Know that I shall set you free when the time is ripe. When triumph and revenge shall be ours together…”

Like it or not, I was going to have to do as she instructed.

And just as I began to pray that I hadn’t placed all of my trust apples in the wrong basket, a profusion of orange blossom wafted through the colossal interior to allay my doubt.

The scent quickly soothed the tension I’d been holding onto in my back and shoulders. The numbness in my outstretched arms diminished as well, and with it I found myself better able to focus on Haemon and the two vampire henchmen. If they sensed the Dark Mother’s presence, or the intoxicating citrus perfume it carried, they gave no indication of it.

In fact, the more I concentrated on the three vampires, the more centered and relaxed I became. Until I was actually standing right next to them! Not in physical form, but as thought projection. Then, I was suddenly everywhere at once. I saw myself at the center of the temple, my semi-naked body shackled to the ancient stone wheel in a perverse “X” shape and straining to listen in on the vampires’ conversation.

Was this my doing, or was the
Dark Mother
trying to guide me, trying to get me to—

“The mortal has escaped,” I heard one of them confess in a tentative voice.

Niko was still alive!

My relief was short-lived. A series of gruesome visuals flashed behind my eyes. In them, a rabid Haemon was punishing those responsible for letting Niko get away. It wasn’t vampire torture and death that so alarmed me as much as to
where
Niko had escaped. We weren’t in our own dimension anymore. If he’d managed to flee the temple, was he in worse danger now?

I knew nothing of the
Dark Mother’s
world. Was it devoid of life or did sentient beings inhabit it? If so, would they be receptive to an outsider or attack and kill him on sight?

Mr. Curious and his brother exchanged anxious glances.

Haemon left the two bodyguards standing there and stormed toward the rear of the temple. The two henchmen reluctantly followed him, with my ethereal body in hot pursuit.

We all hurried into and along a narrow corridor, the air warmer and drier here, with a layer of smoke from the odd torch fitted into niches that was somehow able to sting my ghostly eyes and throat. The flickering light exposed strange glyphs carved into the thick stone walls that should have been alien to me, but weren’t. Unfortunately, there was no time to study them.

“We don’t know how the human escaped,” Mr. Curious said, “but we—”

Haemon spun around and lunged at him, the look in his dark, glittering eyes truly terrifying. “Better find out.”

I made to follow the retreating vampires, but an invisible force stopped me, drawing me instead into a cooler, unlit chamber. It had to be the
Dark Mother
guiding me.

Why then could I no longer detect her signature scent or feel the weight of her presence?

Foolish or not, I chose to enter this new space. Once my eyes adjusted, I made out a second doorway—no, a stairwell, where a blast of frigid air greeted me at the base of the curved shaft leading up into yet more darkness.

I glimpsed another flash of my physical self in shackles, of the oculus high above me. The sky was darkening, streaked now with slashes of reds, oranges, and pinks in between splashes of deeper violet. Night was coming on fast. And with it, Haemon and the other vampires would return to perform the
Ritual of Malum
.

Whatever I was supposed to do or see, I needed it to happen fast!

An image of Niko exploded in my mind. One of his eyes was still badly swollen and sealed shut. His good eye was large and frightened and staring back at me, his dark, wavy hair wind-tossed. An instant later, I saw him silhouetted by the same vibrant sky I’d glimpsed earlier. Everything else around him was shrouded in darkness.

As it began to lift, I realized that he was navigating a long, curved passage up and around the temple’s colossal dome, wind howling through the narrow channel. I could feel its cold buffets striking his goose-fleshed skin, hear him telling his body to ignore the discomfort and compel his legs and feet to carry him toward the fading light up ahead.

My God, we were both in the same stairwell! Only he was much higher up.

“Niko,” I called out to him in my mind.

Startled, he tripped, the wind a deafening roar in his ears. He thought he’d hallucinated the sound of my voice, the intense streaks of color in the sky deepening with the rapidly setting sun and framing Niko’s form nearing a large, arched doorway.

“I’m coming for you!” I called to him.

He definitely heard me that time and looked even more panicked because of it. Using both hands to brace himself against the thick stone walls from the intensifying wind, he said, “Don’t!”

Why was he so terrified by the thought of me reaching him? I wasn’t planning to wait to find out and sent my essence racing up the stairwell.

Nothing could have prepared me for what awaited me once I reached the arched opening through which Niko had only just passed. The temple’s great dome was even more massive from this vantage point, and the sky had become an angry sea of red and orange flames. But it was what lay beyond the rim of the colossal rooftop that left me shaken and speechless.

Perfect desolation.

The shrine had been built on a jagged precipice high above a valley floor, the landscape beyond so foreign and unwelcoming that I had no real point of reference with which to associate it. A vast, scarred plain of deep ocher and rust stretched as far as the eye could see, with no relief to the barren backdrop—no plant life, no hills or dwellings. No sign of life whatsoever.