Cronin's Key II (19 page)

Cronin closed his eyes slowly and gave the smallest of nods.

Eiji snorted. “The next thousand years with you Alec are going to be so much fun.”

Jodis put her hand up. “I’d also like to say a few words before we do this. Cronin, we will be with you, by your and Alec’s side, forever. Jacques, it is an honor to fight beside you. And Eiji, my dearest love,” she looked at him and gently touched the side of his face. “If you leave me again to go kill yourself in sunlight—if you put me through that or anything like it one more time—I will kill you myself.”

Eiji grinned at her. “And my heart belongs to you too, my love.”

Jacques gave a slow nod. “May the gods be looking upon us tonight.”

Alec put his arms around Cronin, for a long embrace. “I have no regrets.”

Cronin grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him hard. “
Beatha gun aithreachas
.”

Jodis smiled. “No regrets.”

Eiji gave a nod. “No regrets.”

Jacques joined in as well. “No regrets.”

So this was it
, Alec thought as he slid on his night vision goggles.

They each picked up a sledgehammer, stood in a close circle facing outwards, and with a deep breath from Cronin, they were gone.

* * * *

They stood in what Alec remembered from the online pictures was the reception area were tourists gathered before going inside the first pit of Terracotta soldiers. Not one second later, Kennard and another four vampires arrived, armed and armored like them. Alec recognized one of them as Lars, the pyrokinetic guy from the bar in London.

Kennard, impish yet lethal, bowed his head in greeting. He looked at each of them and the hammers they were holding and smiled at Alec. “How very
Thor
of you.”

“Thank you for coming,” Alec said.

“Nice glasses,” Kennard replied.

Alec automatically touched the night vision goggles. “Human eyesight’s a bitch.”

Just then, a wild braying sound cried out from inside the warehouse, and everyone turned to the sound. “They know you’re here, Alec,” Jodis said.

Alec took a step closer to Cronin. “Then let’s not keep them waiting.”

Eiji laughed and swung the sledgehammer. “Let’s not.”

“Strategies as discussed haven’t changed?” Kennard asked, walking toward the doors with them.

“Not a thing,” Cronin replied.

Alec held the hammer in his left hand, his pistol in his right. Jodis kicked the double entrance doors open, and they burst inside to a spectacular kind of hell.

* * * *

The hangar style warehouse was exactly like all the internet pictures showed—roughly the size of a football field, with small wings off to each side—only this was in full-animated horror.

Like his blood spoke to them, Alec watched in morbid curiosity as the warehouse full of Terracotta Soldiers turned to face him. Some were still in the long pits, hopelessly trying to climb their way out. Some statues watched in horror as their hands crumbled against the dirt walls of the pits or their clay legs would snap as they tried to climb and step. Some had no heads at all, yet they still moved as though they knew where they wanted to go.

Other soldiers moved more fluidly, easier, yet still robotic and sluggish. They spoke in dusty rasps, words Alec couldn’t make out, and they took mechanical and painful steps toward him. But most frightening were the horses. Alec could only see three of them, large and hulking. They looked like horses but were still somehow terribly deformed, as though the terracotta shell they wore hid a horrific mess inside. They made strangled braying noises that were more scream than sound. They reared their heads back, whinnying in pain.

Something wasn’t right.

Alec had expected to come under attack, swinging blades, arrows, spears, something. But these statues were clumsy and unarmed.

“Well, this is disappointing,” Kennard said.

Eiji laughed, but swung his sledgehammer at one soldier, sending it flying backwards in a spray of shards and dust.

“These are just mindless drones,” Cronin said. “We need to move to the back. There must be something we’re missing.”

“Can you hear anything?” Alec asked him. “Feel anything?”

Cronin shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Let’s move to the back,” Jodis said.

“We’ll look in the side pits,” Kennard said. He broke his team into two groups and sent them into pit two and pit three.

In the main pit, where a few hundred terracotta soldiers still fought to get out, there were long, raised dirt walkways which ran the length of the pit at head height of the soldiers still confined there.

Eiji ran first, with Jodis right on his heel, and leapt cleanly from the front of the warehouse onto the high dirt walkways. As the first of the terracotta soldiers tried to reach for their feet, Eiji swung his sledgehammer, decimating it to dust.

Alec and Cronin ran after them. Cronin made the jump easily whereas Alec, while he made the jump, didn’t land with the grace the vampires did.

He clambered to his feet, just as a soldier grabbed at his leg. Cronin swung his sledgehammer at the soldier, knocking its head off like a football. The headless soldier stood still for a second, giving Alec enough time to get away from it, then it kept trying to grab at Alec.

“Keep running,” Cronin told him.

Alec did. He took off along the narrow dirt catwalk and Cronin followed right after him. Eiji and Jodis were stopped near the end, where there were clay brick walls built in the pit and the majority of the soldiers couldn’t reach them. There were a few select soldiers and horses, but Jodis took care of them on one side and Cronin took care of the other side.

Jacques, Kennard, and his English friends came from both sides, turning any soldiers into dust on their way back to where the others stood. “Pits two and three are empty,” Kennard told them.

“Something’s really wrong,” Alec said.

“Is it a trap?” one of Kennard’s men asked.

“Listen,” Eiji said as he tapped the ground with his foot. “Can you hear that?” He tapped the dirt ground again and smiled.

Cronin answered. “It’s hollow.”

Without another word, Eiji, Jodis, and Cronin each lifted their sledgehammers above their heads and smashed them into the ground between their feet. And sure enough, a shell no thicker that a house brick fell away to reveal a secret entrance. As they removed more dirt, Alec realized he was looking at a set of stone steps leading down into the darkness. It reminded him of the small stairways in the underground tunnels beneath the Egyptian pyramids…. And it clicked. “This will lead us to the tomb of Emperor Qin,” Alec said. “The Chinese pyramid. That’s where we’re supposed to go.”

“What about Khan?” Jodis asked.

“Maybe he wants to bring back the First Emperor,” Alec suggested. “Eleanor said she couldn’t see.”

“Our seer couldn’t tell us either,” Kennard admitted.

“And yet you came along anyway,” Eiji said.

Kennard grinned at him. “Of course I did. Can’t let you guys have all the fun.”

“Yeah, it’s all fun and games,” Alec said with a snort, “until someone gets a stake to the heart.”

Kennard laughed, and looking at Alec’s sledgehammer, said, “May I?”

Alec handed it to him, and the small English coven leader took a few dainty steps along the dirt walkway and struck at two terracotta soldiers who were still trying to climb out of the pit. Alec laughed. “Oh, Happy Gilmore style.” One of the English guys laughed, and Alec waved his hand at him. “Oh, finally! Someone who gets my movie references!”

Cronin chuckled and attention turned back to the new hole they’d made in the walkway. Jodis looked at the descending stairs. “Well, shall we?”

Jacques volunteered to go first, then Eiji and Jodis jumped down. Cronin went in with Alec, followed by Kennard and his team.

The dirt stairs were no more than three feet wide and went down maybe fifteen feet and opened out into a wider corridor. It was dirt and looked old and cut out of the earth by hand, and if it weren’t for Alec’s night vision goggles, he wouldn’t have been able to see his hand in front of his face.

“We’re headed west,” Jacques noted as they walked forward.

“Toward the tomb,” Alec said. “Yes. The tomb lay about a mile west of the Terracotta Army.”

“Stop,” Eiji put his hand up. “Listen.”

In the eerie quiet, Alec could hear it too. “Footsteps in dirt,” he said. “Slow and shuffling.”

“You can hear that?” Kennard whispered.

“He has taken on some vampire abilities,” Cronin answered curtly. “We don’t know why.”

Alec turned to Cronin. “Can you hear anything? Can you
see
anything?”

“No,” he replied. “Only the talents of those around us, nothing else.”

“What?” Kennard hissed. “What do you mean you can’t see?”

“No, see the talent of others, or sense them at least,” Alec answered. “My blood gives him transfer properties when he drinks it.”

“Well, aren’t you two just a wonderful web of weird,” Kennard said flatly.

Just then, a small platoon of terracotta soldiers came out of the darkness. They moved in synchronized formation and slowly and robotically came toward them.

“And you didn’t consider
not
drinking his blood, Cronin?” Kennard asked.

“It was a deliberate decision,” Cronin answered. He took a more comfortable grip on the sledgehammer and never took his eyes off the approaching soldiers. “If I can transfer or even detect the talents of Khan or those around him, then it will give us a clear advantage.”

Jacques and Eiji stepped forward and swung at the terracotta soldiers. They weren’t armed, but they moved better and seemed to have some mental capacity compared to the ones they’d encountered in the main warehouse pit. It only took eight swings of hammers and they were nothing but dust.

“A clear advantage indeed,” Kennard said, stepping over the broken shards of soldiers as they walked. “Alec, I cannot wait to see what talents behold you, my friend. A transfer, I suspect.”

“How about we just get through this first?” Alec said, dismissing the idea. “I have a feeling we’re walking right to where he wants us.”

Eiji looked back at Alec and gave a nod before crouching lower and walking a little faster.

The next platoon of terracotta soldiers moved faster again, with more strength and agility than the previous ones, and the platoon after that even more so. It was clear to Alec the weaker—maybe the soldiers created earlier—were sent out first.

But still, they were hardly any match for them. Glorious and imperial but useless in combat.

Cronin licked his lips and furrowed his brows. “Can anyone else taste that?”

“I thought I was imagining it,” one of the Englishmen said.

Jodis nodded. “I can. It’s not metallic. It’s not chemical.”

Eiji crouched down to a shattered terracotta soldier. He picked up a shard of broken clay, smelled it before he crumbled it to dust, and put it to his mouth to taste. He stared at Cronin. “It’s gu. Baked into the terracotta.”

Cronin hissed and ripped a shred of his shirt off. He handed it to Alec. “Put this to your mouth and nose. Now.”

“What’s gu?” Alec asked as he covered his mouth and nose with the scrunched up material.

“Ancient poison,” Eiji said. “Made specifically by putting venomous animals like centipedes, snakes, scorpions in a closed vessel until only one remains. It will have eaten all the rest and ingested all the combined toxins—the toxin is then extracted from the surviving animal and used on weapons or in drink.”

“Or baked into the Terracotta Army,” Jodis said quietly. “A silent defense to those who would try and destroy them.”

“Alec,” Cronin whispered. He put his hand to Alec’s cheek. “Are you well?”

“I feel fine,” he said, when the truth was he wasn’t sure how he felt. He was hot and it was hard to breathe, but he’d just basically run half a mile carrying a sledgehammer, he was wearing night vision goggles and a backpack, and the air in the tunnel wasn’t exactly fresh. “I’m fine.”

“Are you certain?” Cronin pressed.

Alec nodded and put the ripped cloth to his face. “Let’s keep going.”

Cronin’s eyes hardened but he didn’t say anything. Alec took his hand, and they kept on their way. The platoons kept coming faster, one after the other, and Cronin kept Alec at the rear to be as far away from the poisonous dust as possible. Jacques and Eiji swung hammers into them and the English took care of others with their stakes. Jodis hung back like a personal guard to Cronin and Alec.

When the next wave of Terracotta Soldiers was decimated and they’d gone over half a mile, Cronin stopped walking. Alec pulled on Cronin’s hand to keep him moving forward. But he stayed still. His grip on Alec’s hand tightened and his eyes were unfocused.

“What is it?”

“Something’s not clear,” he said cryptically. “I can see something, but it’s obscured from view.”

“What do you mean you can see something?” Jodis asked. “In your head?”

Cronin nodded. “Another vampire is close.”

“And you can see in their head?” Kennard whispered.

“I can see their talent. They’re a cloaker.”

“Shit.” Alec knew from what they’d told him that cloakers were dangerous. They could hide events or other vampires, depending on their exact talent. “Can you see what they’re hiding?”

Cronin shook his head quickly. “Imagine a room with windows, you can see out of all them but one is opaque and obscured.”

“Okay then,” Alec conceded. “Can you feel their talent?”

Cronin closed his eyes. “I think so. I’m not sure. It’s very strange.”

“Can you use it to cloak us?” Alec asked.

Cronin opened his eyes and shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t know how.”

“Or our plans, at least,” Alec continued.

“We don’t have any plans, Alec,” Eiji said flatly. “I seem to recall your grand plan was to leap here with a sledgehammer and smash shit up.”

Kennard laughed and Alec shrugged at him. “And that’s worked pretty good so far.” Alec squeezed Cronin’s hand. “Keep trying, I know you can do this. But we have to keep moving forward.” He put the cloth to his face and looked down the tunnel.