Curse the Dawn (19 page)

“I’ll leave with you and Pritkin,” I repeated, deliberately keeping my voice even. It wasn’t easy. I felt like I wanted to jump up and down and scream at everyone to
move
, damn it! To stop creeping and start flying out of here. I knew that wouldn’t help, that they were already moving as fast as they could, and that starting a panic would only slow things down even more. But it still wasn’t easy to simply stand there.

“You’re the Pythia,” Caleb told me. “You can’t die in here.”

“I’m Pythia?” I did a slow blink. “Since when? The last time I checked, I was a rogue initiate you were trying to hunt down.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” I told him honestly. “I don’t.”

Caleb put a meaty hand behind his neck and rubbed it as if he had a headache. “There might have been some kind of . . . miscommunication . . . about you.”

The panic of a dozen near misses in the last twenty-four hours crowded the back of my throat, jostling for room with more current fears. Like Pritkin not making it out of the death trap I’d dragged him into. Like the fact that that little speech of his was suddenly sounding a lot like good-bye. And the fact that there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it as drained as I was.

I really needed somebody to yell at, and Caleb was handy.

“A miscommunication?” I asked him furiously. “Which one would that be? When the warrant was issued for my arrest? Or when the shoot to kill order was given? Or, hey, maybe it was when the huge freaking
bounty
was put on my head!”

It was Caleb’s turn to do the slow blink thing. “If a mistake was made, you have a legitimate grievance,” he said. “But dying to prove a point won’t help anybody. Pritkin was right: there’s a war on and we need a Pythia. If you’re it, you have a responsibility.”

“My responsibility is the people I brought down here!”

“Pritkin and I will get out!” Caleb said, looking exasperated. “And when you do, I’ll be with you.”

“Cassie!”

“I can shift away if need be,” I reminded him. “Shouldn’t you send someone in the car who doesn’t have a life preserver?”

He regarded me narrowly. “You can still shift?”

“Absolutely.”

Caleb didn’t look happy, but he nodded. “All right, then. Stay here. I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”

“I’d rather be doing something.”

“All right. You could help by getting people sorted into a vehicle with a competent driver. They don’t have to navigate—there’s only one way out. But they have to be able to drive a stick.”

“Got it.”

Caleb took over at the tunnel’s mouth again, while Tremaine and I grabbed the dust-covered prisoners and stuffed them into cars. The line was moving swifter now, a blur of color and noise as cars made their way along a tunnel that was scarcely wider than some of them. I assumed the Consul’s chauffeurs were vampires, and with their reflexes, a tight squeeze didn’t matter. But some of these drivers weren’t as skilled. I saw more than one fender get crushed as the car behind it got a little overly enthusiastic, and a number of polished side panels were going to need repainting from scraping against unforgiving rock.

And then the end of the line rolled into place, the last car for the last group out the door. I slipped toward the tunnel’s mouth in time to see a familiar blond head and pair of broad shoulders emerge. For some reason, Pritkin was facing backward.

“Pritkin!” I ran toward him, almost dizzy with relief, only to hear a thundering thud overhead and to have him obscured by a billowing cloud of thick red dust.

“In the car! Everybody in the car!”

I distantly heard Caleb’s voice, but I couldn’t find him. The exhaust fumes and the dust were a choking, blinding mist, the floor shook violently under my feet and rocks and gravel rained down on my head. Then something hit me in the temple, driving me to my knees, and the world went red.

And then nothing.

I woke up to find myself lying in a backseat, draped over a couple of smelly red men. Tremaine and Caleb looked like the Blue Man Group would if they’d suddenly changed their color scheme—completely coated in a thick red paste from head to foot. Dust and sweat, I realized as my eyes managed to fully focus. And I was in no better shape myself.

My lungs felt caked with about an inch of desert and I was having trouble breathing. I managed to cough, and that was both good and bad, because it opened my airway a little more, but then I couldn’t stop. I coughed and hacked and gagged and coughed some more until I was sure I was going to bring my lungs up.

It would have helped to have had some water, but there wasn’t any. Because we weren’t out of the woods yet. I slid into the modest gap between the two mages and peered over the seat. A red man who I vaguely recognized as Rafe was at the wheel. The speedometer said eighty-six despite the fact that the narrow red tunnel we were hurtling down couldn’t have been more than half an inch away from the car on either side.

Pritkin was riding shotgun, but he didn’t turn around to look at me. I sat back and tried not to stare at the almost hypnotic tunnel arrowing out in front of us. I heard a distant thud and the walls shook. No one said anything, but Tremaine’s hand gripped the door handle tight enough to crack his coating of mud.

“What was that?” I asked when the shaking finally stopped.

“Another level collapsing on top of us,” Tremaine answered, sounding a little choked.

“We had to go down a freight elevator to a lower level to avoid being crushed,” Caleb added. His voice was expressionless, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching on his thighs.

“Only the Senate level is below us now,” Rafe chimed in. He sounded the same as always, although I noticed he had a pretty good grip on the wheel. “And it is completely flooded. I am afraid this is as far down as we can go.”

Pritkin still didn’t say anything.

We were in some kind of bulbous mid-century car, huge and gray and probably made of solid steel. Too bad that wouldn’t hold against a few thousand tons of rock. “How many levels are still on top of us?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

“That was the last before ours,” Tremaine said, and a small giggle escaped his lips before he clamped them shut.

“Can you shift?” Pritkin suddenly asked me, his voice harsh in the stillness.

“Why?”

“You told Caleb you can shift. Was it true?” I licked my lips and saw him watching me in the driver’s mirror. “You lied.”

Tremaine looked slightly shocked, as if surprised that a Pythia would do such a thing. He obviously hadn’t known Agnes. Caleb put a hand to his head.“I should have knocked you out and shoved you in a car.”

“Yes! You should have!” Pritkin snapped.

Rafe merely sighed. “You shouldn’t tell lies,
mia stella
,” he reproached, and floored it.

The car leapt ahead, its gas-guzzling engine tearing through the tunnels at what the speedometer now reported was in excess of one hundred miles an hour. I decided not to look at it anymore. I only hoped it was going to be enough.

At that speed, even vampire reflexes aren’t perfect, not to mention that I’m not entirely certain that the tunnel was actually wide enough in places for the car. Dirt and rocks went flying, along with the two side mirrors and part of the back bumper. The rest of it trailed along behind us, hitting enough sparks off the stone floor to have started a fire if there had been anything to burn.

Then something hit the panel behind my seat hard enough to bruise my lower back. I sat up and twisted around to find a man’s fist poking through the upholstery. “Who is that?” I demanded, sliding lower to get a look.

“The man the commander was forced to shoot,” Tremaine told me as the mysterious hand wrapped around my throat.

Caleb took out a gun and smashed the butt down on the man’s wrist. I heard a howl, and the hand was withdrawn. I sat up, careful to stay well away from the back of the seat. “I thought he was dead,” I said.

“Not yet,” Caleb replied.

“So you put him in the
trunk
?”

He shrugged. “This was the last car.”

We hit a particularly narrow patch, and everyone slid to the center of the seats as the doors on either side buckled like a soda can in a giant’s fist. “Who designed this tunnel anyway?!” I screamed, as the side windows shattered.

“It hasn’t been in use in years,” Rafe said. He burned rubber and we shot out into a slightly broader area in a burst of rubble and glass.

“Why not?”

“It was shut down in the thirties after Lake Mead was created. The lake bisected the old route.”

“What do you mean,
bisected
?” I didn’t get an answer, because there was a rumbling and a groaning behind us and another billowing wave of dust. And suddenly we were flying out into dazzling sunlight.

The ride immediately became incredibly smooth, with no traction at all other than the wind whistling through the missing windows. I realized why when I wrenched my neck around to look behind us and saw a small cloud poofing out of the pale side of a cliff. The cliff we’d just fallen out of.

“Oh, shit.”

We fell more than fifteen feet before nose-diving into a boulder the size of a VW Bug, cartwheeling over and finally hitting a shining expanse of water. The car was built circa 1955, which meant that it had no air bags, and I wasn’t even wearing a seat belt. We should have been dead. But Tremaine somehow managed to get a rudimentary shield around us, which popped shortly after encountering the boulder, but spared us the worst.

We survived; the car wasn’t so lucky. But at least it sank slowly enough for us to slither through the windows and for Caleb to drag Red out of the trunk. He accomplished that by kicking out the partition between it and the backseat, and I think he might have kicked Red a few times, too. Either that or the guy couldn’t swim, because he didn’t give us too much trouble on the way to shore.

Cell phones don’t work all that great after being drowned, leaving us with little choice but to hike around the side of Lake Mead. In one direction, heat shimmered off miles of dusty earth, scrub brush and distant purple hills. In the other were towering clay-red cliffs with a stark white mineral line striping them near the water’s edge. There was little vegetation to soften the austere canyon, giving the place an oddly alien vibe: a big body of water in an almost bare landscape, like a lake on the moon. But with the cobalt sky and the deep azure of the river, it was undeniably striking.

I trudged through the shallower water near the shore, the high heels that were miraculously still strapped to my feet catching on underwater rocks and threatening to trip me. I didn’t care. I just kept gazing around in something like awe. Everything was blisteringly hot and breathtakingly beautiful.

It took me a few moments to notice that everyone was looking at me oddly. I just laughed, almost giddy. We’d made it—dust-covered, red-faced and dripping wet, but
alive
. Rafe grinned with me, and a second later, even Caleb had cracked a smile.

We eventually came to a small trailer park. Most of the plots marked off by white stripes of paint were empty except for some windblown gravel. It was summer, and few people thought that 120-degree heat equaled a fun vacation.

I watched dust devils blow across the sand like miniature cyclones while the guys broke into one of the trailers that stayed there all year round. It looked like it came from the same era as the car, miniscule and vaguely round, with white aluminum sides and a small covered patio. A bedraggled honeysuckle vine was trying its best to decorate the latter, along with a wind chime made out of old forks.

They rattled in the strong breeze coming off the lake as the door opened and Rafe came out. “No phone,” he told me. I shrugged. I hadn’t really expected one. He had a large yellow and white bottle in his hand that turned out to be sunscreen. “I left some money on the counter,” he told me, as if worried that I might think less of him for stealing.

“Blocks eighty percent of UV rays,” I read. I looked at him skeptically. “Think this is going to help?”

“At this point, I am willing to try anything,” he said, slathering the milky stuff all over his face and hands. Despite the fact that most of the dust had washed off on the way here, Rafe was still bright red. Noonday sun is hell on vampires.

“Here.” Pritkin poked his head out of the trailer and handed me a bottle of warm water. Since I’d already swallowed half a gallon on the swim to shore, I passed it to Red, who was looking a little shaky. Pritkin’s shot might not have been fatal, but the guy had lost a lot of blood. He needed medical help and we all needed to get out of the heat.

Tremaine emerged a minute later, carrying some plastic deck chairs. “I’m going to hike up the road to the ticket office, see if they have a working phone,” he announced.

“You going with him?” Caleb asked Pritkin as Rafe and I got Red off the concrete and into a chair.

“Hadn’t planned on it. Why?”

“He’s a convict. None of this changes that.”

“Cassie and I also have warrants out for our arrest,” Pritkin pointed out. “Are you planning to turn us in as well?”

“I’m planning to do my job,” Caleb retorted. “Or do you think I should let this one go, too?” He nudged Red with his knee. Red spit out a mouthful of water and started looking slightly hopeful. “Where do we draw the line, John?”

“You know what he did.”

“And I know what they say
you
did.”

“And I thought you knew me better than to believe it.” The two men stared at each other for a long minute while Red and I watched and Rafe smeared himself with more SPF 80.

Caleb swore. “You have to go in. You have to
end this
. If there’s been a mistake and she really is legit, people need to know.”

“Then tell them,” Pritkin snapped. “Not vague rumors or memos from higher-ups, but what you
heard
, what you
saw,
what you
experienced
. But don’t be surprised if you end up in a prison cell for your trouble.”