Descendant (24 page)

You know that isn’t true.

“…a very long dream…”

Open your eyes, and see for yourself it isn’t true.

“If I open them, I’ll just see my room. And Lora will be in hers, just down the hall …”

Open them.

“…ugh…” The side of my head was throbbing. I tried to lift a finger to feel for the gash I was sure would be there. But my hands were tied together behind my back. The rope was so tight I couldn’t even pul my wrists apart.

“No...This can’t be for real.”

My eyes opened. I was in a small , dark room that smelled a bit musty. It was sparsely furnished, with a few shelves in one corner and a twin bed against the wall directly behind me. The wall s were blank, and there were no windows. It looked like a guest bedroom of someone who didn’t care for guests.

I tried to sit up, but rope was binding my ankles, too, so I ended up toppling forward and getting a face full of the stone floor instead. I rolled over on my side, an inescapable feeling of defeat rising in my chest. My eyes fell on a closed door on the far side of the room. Bright light spilled in underneath. I stared at it for a long time, trying to find the strength to move.

It was at least ten minutes before I found it. And even then, it only came when a faint shadow moved across the rectangle of light spreading out from under the door. The shadow disappeared briefly, then came back and stood still for a few seconds. I lifted my head. My eyes widened, refocused, and I tried sitting up again with more success this time. I managed to get my knees under me, and I was working on trying to keep my balance when I heard the sound of a key being forced in and the click as it unlocked the door. I instinctively tried to scramble back, anticipating the worst. Of course, I didn’t manage to move far before losing my balance. I fought my way upright again and froze.

The door swung open, and Sera stood in the doorway looking pale and ghostly in the bright light outside of the room. She stepped into the room without a word and closed the door enough so that only a thin sliver of light shone in. She started toward me, still not making a sound.

I tried to pul my hands free, but all I managed to do was dig the rope further into my skin. I kept struggling as Sera knelt down beside me.

She frowned. “Calm down, Alex,” she said. Then she cocked her head sideways and reached a thin finger out and touched it to the side of my head.

I drew back, letting out painfull hiss, and nearly lost my balance again.

Sera grinned. “Guess it still stings, huh?”

Sera grinned. “Guess it still stings, huh?”

“Obviously,” I said through clenched teeth.

“If you would calm down, like I suggested, your body would be able to heal itself a lot better.”

“Did you just come in here just to rub this in my face?” I demanded, still struggling against the binding ropes.

“You’ve got a bit of a temper, you know that?”

I snorted. “You have no idea.”

“Well , I think it’s one of your more admirable qualities,”

Sera said with a smirk. “Actual y, I think that spunk of yours is pretty much your only admirable quality…”

“That’s nice,” I said impatiently. “But back to why you’re here?”

She raised an eyebrow. Then she shoved a hand into the pocket of her jacket and retrieved something long and thin, which glistened even in the dul light of the room.

“Is that a knife?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said distractedly as she side-stepped her way behind me.

“What are you doing?” I tried to twist myself around to face her, but she placed a firm hand on my shoulder.

“I’d hold still if I were you,” she said. “Unless you want this to hurt.”

“If you’re going to kill me, the least you could do is face me while you’re doing it. Or maybe you—” My breath caught in my throat as the blade brushed against my arm. I felt a sharp jerk on my wrists, followed by a shove. Next thing I knew, I was face first on the floor again. Only something was different this time. I lifted my hands off my back and felt the rope slide away.

“Kil you?” Sera repeated airily, shaking her head. “No. Not now, not like this.”

I sat up, and drug myself several feet away from her before focusing on the knot binding my ankles. For a few minutes I tried—unsuccessfully—to untie the knot without looking at it.

It didn’t take long for that to get frustrating though, and I was about to chance taking my eyes off Sera for a second when she suddenly held up her hands. Her right hand unclenched, dropping the knife she was holding to the ground. Then she shoved it close enough for me to reach. Her expression was stony. There was none of her usual malice, but there wasn’t anything there to trust, either.

I didn’t touch the knife. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asked. “I’m helping you.”

“But why? You’ve been trying to kill me since the day we met.”

“People change, Alex.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“What other choice do you have but to trust me?” she asked. And now her face split into a rather nasty grin.

“You’re not going to get out of here without my help.”

I didn’t have an answer for that, and the sinking feeling in my gut told me she was probably right. I picked up the knife with tentative fingers and sawed the rope away.

“So you’re going to get me out of here?” I asked.

“I’m going to do my part,” she said. “I already got rid of the guards outside your door for you. And I’ll tell you where to go from here.”

“But you’re not going with me?” I asked, growing more skeptical by the minute.

“You think I want to be seen helping you escape?” she snapped. “I’ve got my own reputation to protect—and I’m sticking my neck out enough for you as it is.”

I was so overwhelmed with confusion at this point that I couldn’t help but ask again: “Why? Why are you doing this for me?”

The stony expression settled back over her features. “Who said I was doing this for you?” she asked in a dead voice.

“Don’t misunderstand…I”—she pointed to her chest for emphasis—“…want you dead. And don’t you ever forget it.”

I gave her a blank stare. “Oh…I get it now,” I said slowly.

“See, before I only thought you were crazy. But now I know for a fact that you are absolutely insane—and that explains everything.”

“Spare me the cute commentary,” she growled. Then she grabbed my arm and yanked me roughly to me feet.

“Um, ow?” I jerked my arm away.

“We need to hurry up,” she said. “Kael’s waiting for you.”

“What?” I’d started following her as she headed toward the door, but those words stopped me cold.

“I said—”

“I heard what you said. But…no. He can keep waiting. I never want to see that jerk again.”

Sera turned to me with an exasperated sigh. “I don’t real y care what you want right now. Al I know is that—for reasons I still don’t fully understand myself— I promised Kael I’d get you safely to him. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

So come on, let’s move.”

But I didn’t move. “So that’s who you’re doing this for.”

There was the tiniest movement in the corner of her lip—barely noticeable. I think it might’ve been the beginning of a snarl.

“What is it between you and him?” I asked.

“That’s real y none of your business.”

“Why are you doing him favors?” I needed to know. I don’t know why—but something was driving me to keep prying, even though the tone in her voice told me I’d probably be safer poking a rattlesnake with a stick.

“Do you want me to kill you?” Sera asked.

“It’s not a hard question. And why did you come instead of him, anyway?”

She glared at me. “Because he had other things to take care of.”

“Like what?”

I could tell she was trying real y hard to stay calm. When she spoke again her lips were pursed, her fists clenched so hard her knuckles were turning red.

“Okay, you know what? I’m done with you. You want to stay here and rot, you do that.” She started back toward the door, and I almost just let her go. I didn’t want help from her, or Kael, or anybody else for that matter. I never had.

And yet I couldn’t ignore the fact that Sera had helped me, and now I couldn’t help but think—what would I have done if she hadn’t come along? Another couple of glances around the room confirmed it: this was a pretty desperate situation I’d found myself in. And while I wanted to think I could’ve gotten myself out eventual y, the truth was that a small , reluctant part of me was starting to think that maybe that reluctant part of me was starting to think that maybe that wasn’t the case. I just wished the person I’d found myself relying on could’ve been anybody but Sera.

“Wait,” I said quietly.

She stopped just as she reached the door and turned slowly back to me.

I swallowed hard, and when I spoke I tried to sound humble, tried to hide the uncertainty in my voice. “Tel me where I need to go.”

Sera’s directions rang clearly in my head, but I was starting to doubt them. For one thing, this had to have been the longest hallway I’d ever seen. And I’d yet to find any stairs. I was about to just start checking all these random rooms along the hall —I had a feeling that would be about as productive as following Sera’s directions.

With a frustrated sigh I slowed to a stop. I knew it. I should’ve just let Sera leave and tried to find my way out of here myself. This was probably her idea of a good time—giving me directions that got me nowhere. She was probably sitting somewhere, laughing her head off at the thought of me wandering around this place. And Kael was probably sitting with her.

I was staring at the ceiling, wondering why in the world I’d ever trusted Sera and thinking about how hard I was going to hit Kael if I ever saw him again, when footsteps started to echo through the hall . I looked down to see a shadow of a figure in front of me. He was still a good ways off, but closing the distance in a hurry. At first I didn’t move, desperately hoping he hadn’t seen me. That was stupid though—of course he’d seen me, unless he was blind; he was staring straight at me. And if there were still any doubts about the matter, they all vanished a second later when he broke into a sprint, running directly at me.

My first instinct was to stand and fight, but I tried to talk myself out of it just as quickly; I had a feeling reinforcements weren’t going to be far behind him—I’d be better off trying to make a run for it. To my right was a door, and I lunged for the handle and tried to turn it. Locked.

Of course it was.

I gave the door a swift kick and let out a string of words I was glad my mom wasn’t there to hear. Then I looked back and saw the figure—Markus, it turned out— was less than ten feet away.

“Hey!” he called. “What the hel do you think you’re doing?”

Somehow I didn’t think he’d believe me if I told him I was just out for a stroll . So I did the only other thing I could think of: I turned and ran as hard as I could back the way I’d came. Markus’ footsteps pounded behind me, a lot closer than I would’ve liked; apparently there were others just as fast as me.

“There’s only so far you can run, you know!” he said. His voice sounded so close he might as well have been whispering into my ear. And I knew what he said was true. I tried not to think about it, but after a minute it got kind of hard not to —because soon a dead end was looming straight ahead of me. There were doors on either side of the hallway’s end, but my guess was they were both locked.

Because that’s just how my luck worked. Not that I would’ve had time to try and open the doors anyway; Markus was so close that the second I stopped he was going to be right on top of me.

The irony, of course, was that—for once— I real y didn’t want to fight. Yeah, I could be reckless. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew this fight was probably not going to end well . But all of a sudden I’d reached the end of the hall , and now there was nothing to do but turn and face Markus head on.

He was a lot bigger than I’d realized—that was the first He was a lot bigger than I’d realized—that was the first thing I noticed when I turned around. His smile was triumphant as he closed the space left between us with confident strides. I braced myself and lifted my gaze to his.

“What are you running for?” he asked with a smirk. “Not quite as brave as you were the other day, huh?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You gave Sera a nasty black eye, you know that? Only lasted a couple of hours, but still … I don’t think it should go unpunished.”

His hand shot towards me, but I managed to move fast enough to catch his fist. He overpowered me easy enough though, and got a grip on my wrist and twisted it hard, until it made a sick sort of popping noise. That couldn’t be good.

I managed to fight my way out of his grasp, but it didn’t do me much good; he’d backed me up against the wall , and he was so close to me I could barely move—which is why, when his hand shot at me again, there wasn’t much I could do to avoid it.

He went for my throat this time. His fingers wrapped around my neck and tightened so much I could barely gag, and then he lifted me up and slammed me against the wall . I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t breathe. My head was pounding. I was hanging there, vaguely thinking that this had to be the most painfull way anybody could possibly die, when the claws came out. I felt them slide into the side of my neck, cutting right through the skin like it was made of air. I tried to scream, but I could barely even get a weak cough out.

My vision started to dim. I heard what sounded like a gunshot. At first I thought I’d lost too much oxygen, that I must’ve been imagining it. But then Markus’ grip on my throat relaxed and his body slumped against me and slid to the floor. My hands braced against the wall behind me as I watched him fall . I took several deep, painfull breaths before I found the nerve to look up again.

Kael was walking quickly toward me, the lowered gun at his side. He didn’t say anything as he approached, just bent down and grabbed Markus by the arm and drug him toward the nearest door, leaving a trail of bloody streaks in his wake. The door turned out to be unlocked after all .

Figures.

He threw Markus inside the room, then turned back and grabbed me, too. I was still shaking too hard to put up much of a fight. Kael shut the door quietly behind us and turned to me. He reached out a hand and ran it across my neck, just below where Markus’ claws had dug in. Kael’s touch was gentle, but I couldn’t keep myself from flinching.

“It’s not that deep, at least,” he said quietly, more to himself than me. Then he looked straight into my eyes. And again I flinched. “You should calm down,” he said. “So it can heal faster.”

“You…you shot him.” That was all I kept thinking, all I could manage to say.

“Yeah,” Kael said, looking away. “He’s not dead though, if it makes you feel any better,” he muttered.

I stared at Markus’ lifeless figure. “He looks…looks like he…”

“It was just one bul et. I don’t have a whole lot to spare. And it wasn’t pure silver. He’l be unconscious for a while, and have one hel of a headache when he wakes up, but other than that…” He trailed off with a shrug.

I don’t know what made me do it, but I dropped to my knees beside Markus and placed two fingers over his neck, checking for a pulse. It was faint. But it was there.

“…He tried to kill you,” Kael reminded me.

“I know,” I said, climbing back to my feet. I stumbled a bit, “I know,” I said, climbing back to my feet. I stumbled a bit, still feeling a little shaky, but Kael caught me before I could fall .

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

I straightened up again, and managed to keep my balance this time. “That depends,” I said, massaging my hurt wrist. It felt like it was starting to swel .

“On…?”

“On what the heck is going on here?”

“I had a feeling you were going to ask that,” Kael said, stepping back over to the door. He cracked it just enough so he could look out.

“What are you doing? And what was Sera doing? Why did she help me?”

“…Because I asked her to.”

“But why? You’re the one that brought me into this place—only so you could help me escape? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“If I hadn’t brought you here, you would’ve ended up here anyway. I just worked it out so the circumstances were a little more in our favor.”

I fixed him with a hard stare. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. “Where is ‘here’, anyway?” I said.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he said, closing the door again and looking back at me. “This is where Emily and the others were taken. This is where your sister was taken.”

It took a minute for the full meaning behind his words to sink in. “If this is…then that means…He’s here? Valkos I mean.

Here.”

Kael nodded.

“Where?” I started toward the door. “And why are we still standing here? Where is he?”

“He’s probably looking for me,” Kael said. He grabbed my arm and drug me back away from the door. “I think he might be starting to get suspicious.” The pain in my wrist might’ve been making me delusional, but I’m pretty sure Kael sounded amused. Myself? I didn’t see anything funny about the situation.

“Suspicious? Why?” I stopped trying to fight my way back to the door and looked up at him. “Just who exactly are you, anyway?” Kael stared into my eyes for a second, but instead of answering my question he nodded toward a door on the other side of the room.

“That gunshot’s probably not going to go unnoticed,” he said. “We’ve got places to be, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to go back the way we came. I think the room this one connects to has a door to the basement. Or at least I’m hoping it does.”

He started across the room.

I stayed where I was, shaking my head. “You expect me to just follow you? Just like that?”

He stopped and turned half-way around. “Yeah. And if you could speed it up, that would be great—because I don’t real y want to be here when they find him,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun toward Markus.

“Yeah, well I don’t real y want to end up like him,” I said, pointing at Markus myself.

“What are you talking about?”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Maybe,” he started, taking an angry step back toward me.

“Maybe,” he started, taking an angry step back toward me.

“Because I saved your life just now? And maybe because it’s not the first time I’ve done it? Look—I don’t have time to explain what’s going on. And it’s too dangerous for you to know, anyway.”

“Too dangerous? That’s the best you can come up with?”

He walked back to my side and cast an anxious look towards the hallway. When he spoke again, it was in an impatient voice just louder than a whisper.

“You need me to spel it out for you?” he snapped. “Fine.

We both know you still can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, so if you know what’s going on then so does the enemy.

Got it? So you’re just going to have to follow my lead and do what I say, and just trust me on this, alright?”

I folded my arms across my chest, still not willing to budge —though I had to admit Kael did the pleading look surprisingly well .

“I know you think you can do everything yourself,” he said.

Some of the anger faded from his eyes. “But you can’t. Not this. If you can’t trust anybody else, ever, just please…just trust me this once.”

I don’t know what I would’ve said to that, but I didn’t get the chance to say it anyway. Because at that moment I heard voices, voices so loud they had to have been just outside the door.

Kael and I exchanged a quick glance. “Look—I’ll fil you in on what I can on the way,” he said.

That familiar feeling came back, urging me to trust him. But I couldn’t. Not this time. It didn’t matter though, because he was right—it wasn’t like I could turn and go back the way I came. Whether he was telling the truth or not was beside the point; following him still seemed like a much better idea than facing whoever was coming down the hall . So when Kael turned and started across the room again, I followed.

“Are Emily and the others okay?” I asked, jogging a few steps to catch up with him.

Kael waited until we’d reached the next room to answer.

“Yeah,” he said, heading for the far corner of the room. “I made sure they got out before I came looking for you. They went back to tell the others what’s going on, and to hopefully bring some help.”

“But how did you get them out?”

We reached the corner and he dropped to his knees and felt along the stone floor, until his hand fell on what I suddenly realized was a handle, almost perfectly camouflaged against the grey and white rock. He gripped it and shoved until it slid open, revealing a long staircase fashioned crudely out of rock. I thought about making a lame joke about heading “to the batcave, Robin!”. But I managed to contain myself.

“I know my around this place better than just about anyone,”

Kael said. He stepped down into the darkness and offered me his hand. I didn’t take it. “When the war was still going on, it was used as a fortress, and its structure’s pretty complicated—lots of stuff like hidden doors, and paths, and tunnels like this one underneath it all .”

“Good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” I muttered as I ducked to avoid hitting my head on the low ceiling.

“The path opens up a little more ahead,” he said.

“Why exactly do you know so much about this place?” I had theories, of course. But I didn’t real y want any of them to be true.

Kael didn’t answer at right away. The stairs final y came to an end a few minutes later, and after walking for a little bit on the leveled ground we came, as Kael had promised, to an area that was a lot roomier.

“Well ?” I pressed. “Why?”

“Because,” he final y said. “I was the one in charge of building it. It was a hel of a job too—most of it’s underground and cut straight out of the mountainside. It was a serious pain in the—”

“You mean you built it for Valkos?” I interrupted.