Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) Page 18

  Well, that seemed a bit cold. And most likely a falsehood. The Swede insisted that he and Rowan were alike, but aside from their shared eye color, Hex could see nothing similar about them at all. Where the Swede’s eyes were soulless vacuums beneath that thin amber veneer, Rowan’s were full of feeling—full of the best parts of humanity.

  No matter who he was or what he was, Rowan wasn’t the type of person to have no one in the world. Somewhere, someone cared for this man. She knew this down to the marrow of her bones, the same way she knew the Swede was a liar.

  She just hoped Rowan didn’t believe him.

  “What do you want from me, then?” Rowan countered.

  The Swede smiled enigmatically. “Why, your cooperation, of course. I seek only to understand these strange events, as I am sure you do as well. You have lost your memory, but that doesn’t mean you cannot be of assistance to us at the Tomb of Apophis. Beyond that…well, it would serve us both to continue our professional relationship. I have the answers you seek, and you possess unique…skills that would be very useful in my line of business.”

  Rowan looked as incredulous as Hex felt. “You’re offering me a job?”

  “Don’t listen to him, Rowan,” she cried, earning her another jab to the stomach. The pain was worth it, though, for while she didn’t doubt Rowan’s fundamental nobility, she feared he might be susceptible to the Swede’s false promises. She knew she would be if she were in his shoes, and though she made no claims to the same level of integrity at which Rowan seemed to naturally operate, better men than he had be felled by temptation.

  The Swede may have had all the answers, but he would never give them to Rowan. She just hoped Rowan was shrewd enough to deduce this for himself.

  Rowan made no comment one way or the other, which was as worrying as it was reassuring.

  The Swede sighed and stood up. “No need to give me an answer now.” He turned to Netherfield. “Escort our guests to the docks. We shall leave for the Western Sahara immediately. Perhaps there we shall all have our answers.”

  Before Hex had time to protest, Theodora grabbed her by the arm and jerked her toward the door. She glanced over her shoulder to find Rowan falling in line next to Vasily and Netherfield, his worried eyes fixed on her. The Swede brought up the rear, joined by his small army of palace guards, so she didn’t dare speak to Rowan.

  The noose was tightening around both of their necks, and escape looked more unlikely than ever. When they reached the docks and the Swede discovered the Amun Ra was long gone, there would be hell to pay.

  She could only hope Rowan had a plan, because she sure as hell didn’t.

  As they reached the front entrance of the palace, however, she noticed the odd look passing between the guards in front of her as they paused at the threshold. It wasn’t until she stepped outside that she discovered the reason.

  It was snowing.

  In Cairo. In June.

  She could see her breath vaporizing in front of her in the frigid cold. Already the surrounding street was dusted with a fine layer of white, delicate lace, as if the ground too had frozen in the space of a night.

  She wrapped her arms around her body and searched out Rowan once more. He was watching the falling snow with an inscrutable expression, but she knew he was probably thinking about the Swede’s words.

  Was Rowan indeed the cause of this perplexing weather? After all the crazy things she’d seen, she wouldn’t be shocked if the man was right. Even though she didn’t want to believe it, she had to admit that it was hard to doubt his theory in the face of such compelling circumstantial proof. The world had gone insane the moment Rowan had stepped out of that tomb.

  In the distance, a low peal of thunder rolled, long and deep like the echoes of a train in a tunnel, and she shivered in foreboding.

  The Swede stopped next to Rowan and held his hand out palm-up to catch the snow. She didn’t at all care for the sneer on the man’s face.

  “Ah, snow in summertime,” he said musingly. “I’ve not seen such a sight since Sevastopol. Do you not even remember that, Rowan?”

  A strange, distant look fell over Rowan’s face, and something very much like anguish took up residence in his eyes. “It wasn’t snow,” he said solemnly. “It was ash.”

  The Swede’s expression twisted with malice. “Very good. For a moment, I was afraid your best memories were lost forever.”

  The gooseflesh on her arms returned at the bizarre exchange, and it hadn’t anything to do with the cold. Whatever Rowan was remembering had him looking like he was on the verge of casting up his accounts. Or attacking the man. But after one glance at Theodora’s firm grip on Hex’s neck, the fight went out of him.

  A weight she’d not even realized she was carrying inside was suddenly lifted. She’d needlessly question his motives. The temptations offered by Netherfield and the Swede had not swayed him at all, and he’d only played along because of the danger to her.

  She felt a little guilty for doubting him even for a second, but how could she not? All of her past experiences had taught her caution, and she would have been a fool to so wholeheartedly trust a man she’d known barely a month. She could probably count on one hand the days they’d actually spent together. All of her common sense had told her that it was much too soon to trust him.

  All of her instincts said otherwise.

  The thunder rolled again, this time closer, and the ground began to vibrate beneath them. She heard the distant, cacophonous boom of stone falling against stone and the crack of splitting wood resounding like a clap of lightning through the air.

  A roar arose alongside these other sounds, steadily growing in intensity, as if moving in her direction. It took her several moments to identify what she was hearing, but it finally came to her. It was the sound of people screaming. Hundreds of people. And the booms and the cracks were the sounds of the city collapsing in on itself.

  Then she realized the thunder had yet to stop. It had blurred into that bone-chilling, collective wail for a moment before overwhelming even that, growing closer, the ground beneath her shivering like a wet dog. Theodora’s hand slipped off her throat, and Hex fell to her knees and clutched at the stone pavement to steady herself, a momentary feeling of seasickness washing over her.

  When she felt as if she were not seconds away from losing the meager contents of her stomach, she lifted her head and tried to figure out what the hell was happening. The buildings on the opposite side of the wide boulevard swayed like reeds in the wind, and behind her, the walls of the palace began to groan, rubble raining down on their heads.

  “Earthquake!” someone yelled, right before a tremor rocked the earth so hard the pavement beneath her began to fracture.

  She glanced to her right just in time to see Theodora being thrown away from her as the ground erupted between them. Her momentary elation at getting rid of one obstacle was quickly replaced by another, however, when she happened to look upward. She cursed and dove out of the way just as a large chunk of stone plummeted down from the palace ramparts. It landed with a loud bang right where she’d been kneeling only seconds before.

  For a moment, she lay on the crumbling pavement, stunned, as all around her chaos reigned. That had been too narrow of an escape, but she hadn’t the luxury of dwelling on it. Here was the opening she’d been waiting for.

  Dust and snow clouded her vision as she raised her head and searched for Rowan. A tangle of palace guards, servants, the Swede’s men, and other inhabitants of the district stumbled all around her, covered in dust and blood. She could see no one familiar but Netherfield, unconscious beneath the doorway of the palace, and Theodora.

  The vampire was struggling to stand as the earth continued to tremble, a huge gash on her temple leaking blood down her face. She looked uncharacteristically disoriented, so she must have received quite the blow. It wouldn’t deter her long, however, so Hex knew she had only a few seconds at most to make her move. She hefted a large chunk of stone lying next to her
and stood with a groan.

  The rumbling beneath her only grew worse, and she pitched about from side to side as she scrambled in Theodora’s direction, dodging falling debris and blocking out the chaos surrounding her as much as she could.

  She managed to sneak up close enough behind Theodora that her legs brushed the other woman’s skirts. She drew in a breath and heaved the rock high over her head. She didn’t give herself time to think too much about what she was going to do, for she knew Theodora wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same. But she had to shut her eyes as she brought the stone down upon Theodora’s skull as hard as she could, unable to bear what she would see.

  She fought back her rising gorge as the sickening crunch of bone cracking and tissue squelching reached her ears. Something hot and wet splattered against her face and arms, and the smell of raw iron and something else that was sickly sweet and wrong hit her nose. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, breathed through her mouth, and struck out again and again until her arms felt as if she’d been hitting them against a brick wall for hours.

  She wanted to live, damn it.

  When she opened her eyes, she was on her knees, blood and gore up to her elbows. Theodora was face down in front of her, the back of her head a mangled mess of blood and bone and what she very much feared was brain matter.

  It was an image she was never going to be able to erase from her mind, and for the first time, she didn’t think it would be such a bad thing to have her memories wiped clean like Rowan’s had been. She certainly didn’t want to carry this memory around with her forever.

  She crawled away from the lifeless body and retched. Theodora seemed dead enough…had she been human. But Hex didn’t plan on finding out whether she’d truly managed to kill the vampire. She rose unsteadily to her feet and swallowed down her bile, contemplating her next move as the ground beneath her started quaking once more.

  A deafening crack rent the air behind her, and she turned to find the edifice of the palace crumbling to dust. People swarmed out of the doorways in an attempt to outrun the fallout, though she was not sure they were any safer out on the streets.

  Finally, in the chaos, she caught a glimpse of the Swede and Vasily in the middle of the thoroughfare, boarding a horseless hack that had somehow managed to escape the carnage unscathed. They were separated from her by a sizeable tide of humanity, and she held her breath and prayed they had given up on her.

  But just as Vasily mounted the step up into the vehicle behind the Swede, he froze. Her heart plummeted in dread as his head slowly swiveled around in her direction. His amber eyes locked on her, and he smirked.

  “Damn it,” she muttered.

  With one last futile glance around her to try and locate Rowan, she turned and ran flat out in the opposite direction down the teeming street, her hands still bound awkwardly in front of her. The quake finally subsided, and an eerie stillness descended as she ran, broken only occasionally by the sound of someone crying or showers of rubble shifting from fallen buildings.

  The crowd thinned as she sprinted down the dirt-packed thoroughfare, dodging overturned steam cars and fallen debris, the scent of Theodora’s blood still thick in her nostrils, grit and snow stinging her eyes. She ran as fast as her bruised legs could carry her, until her lungs were burning, and even then she pushed through the wall of fire.

  She focused on the memory of Helen’s face and imagined she was running to her, that she actually had a chance of seeing her again.

  Just when she’d begun to let herself hope that Vasily had lost interest in chasing after her, however, a hand clamped down like a vise over her injured shoulder. Her vision whited out from the agony, and she gasped. Her forward momentum was arrested, nearly pulling her arm from its socket in the process, and she cried out in pain and rage.

  Before she could pull in another breath, she was being lifted off her feet and flung sideways through the air as if she weighed no more than a sack of flour. She crashed into an abandoned costermonger’s cart, sending pomegranates rolling into the dirt and stunning the air out of her lungs.

  After an interminable moment of breathlessness, she was able to draw a single gasp, but alongside the oxygen came an upwelling of pain in her back and head. She managed to raise her head just enough to see Vasily stalking in her direction, fangs out, eyes glowing. He was taking his damn time about finishing her off, but she supposed that since he finally had her all to himself he wanted to savor his meal.

  She looked up and down the street but could locate no one close enough to intercede…not that anyone would have, when the world was literally falling in on their heads.

  Vasily looked very satisfied with himself as he crouched over her, running a hand down the side of her cheek and neck in a rough grope. He paused at the top of her Iron Necklace then wrapped his fingers around her throat. His grip tightened, and he shoved her head hard into the ground, jarring her teeth.

  She gasped for air and struggled fruitlessly beneath him, beating at his chest with her bound hands and kicking out with her legs. But she might as well have been kicking a chunk of rock for all the good it did her.

  His head descended, his mouth opening obscenely wide, his fangs dripping with spittle. His grip on her throat slackened, though she’d almost rather it hadn’t, for she got a sudden whiff of his breath as she inhaled. It smelled like a dead animal.

  “Jesus, what have you been eating?” she managed to choke out.

  He growled in response and jabbed his knee into her gut, cutting off her breath once more. She was getting damned tired of people hitting her in the stomach. But just before he could sink his fangs into her throat, a shadow fell over them.

  Rowan.

  It was about damn time.

  His fist connected with Vasily’s jaw, knocking him off of her. She rolled away and breathed in great gulps of freezing, dusty air, trying to ignore the ominous creaking in her bones. She didn’t think anything was broken. Yet. Though her body felt like one giant bruise.

  The sound of something shattering drew her attention from her own sorry state, and she turned just in time to see Rowan pulling Vasily through a broken shop window across the street, raking the man’s back over the shards of glass sticking up from the frame. Thick, viscous blood splattered on the ground beneath them.

  Vasily howled in pain and kicked Rowan in the stomach with such force that Rowan flew halfway across the street. He landed against the side of a steam car, collapsing its metal hood inward like an accordion bellows. His strange, toxic blood leaked out of his wounds, burning through his clothes and hissing against metal, though only for a moment.

  He healed even quicker than Vasily, however, so just moments after landing, he was on his feet again, looking extremely annoyed but thankfully unscathed.

  Vasily sneered at Rowan from the shop front, wiping blood from his eyes, and charged him with super-human speed. Rowan easily matched the assault and delivered a blow straight to Vasily’s throat before the other man could even raise a fist.

  It all happened so quickly that Hex could barely process it between blinks. Vasily buckled to his knees and emitted a horrible gurgling sound, his throat caved in, his face turning a horrible vermillion. A few seconds later, he collapsed to the dirt, twitching and foaming at the mouth. A few seconds after that, he fell still.

  It had been a dirty move on Rowan’s part, but Hex had never been much for gentlemanly codes of conduct when it came to fighting for one’s life.

  Rowan rushed to her side and helped her to her feet.

  “Where’d you learn to fight like that?” she gasped.

  He gave her a dark look and tore away the rope at her wrists as if it were made of cheap newsprint. “Can you move?”

  “I can try,” she retorted.

  Suddenly, her wristwatch began a cycle of clicks. It paused, then repeated them, allowing her enough time to puzzle out the code.

  Over Abdeen. Where are you.

  She cursed and turned in the direction of the palace. She
must have run farther than she’d thought, for the Amun Ra was just a tiny speck of brown in the hazy sky.

  She fixed Rowan with a stern look. “The Amun Ra is in Cairo,” she said. “Did you know about this?”

  Rowan just shrugged defensively and used the edges of his tattered shirt to wipe at the grime on his face. He’d long lost the stolen uniform jacket.

  “Simon might have mentioned returning here once he’d seen to your sister,” he said.

  She didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious. “If Helen is on board, in the middle of all of this, I’ll skin the pair of you alive. I wanted her away from the city.”

  She tapped out a response to Simon, giving their location as accurately as she could. Just as she finished, however, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked over Rowan’s shoulder, and her heart sank. Vasily was on his feet once more, looking even more deranged than before.

  Rowan followed her look and groaned in frustration. “How the hell do you kill it?”

  She wished she had the answer to that. She had a feeling she’d done little more than piss Theodora off even more by bashing in her head earlier. She glanced up and down the street but saw no sign of the other vampire. She thanked God for small mercies.

  “Stake to the heart?” she quipped. It always worked for the heroines in gothic novels.

  “Tried it,” he said, completely seriously.

  “Fire?”

  “Unfortunately, there is none to hand,” he ground out.

  “Beheading? Surely he can’t grow another one.” He gave her a long, skeptical look, and she shrugged. “It’s worth a try anyway.”

  He sighed wearily. “Stay here,” he said, then ran back in the direction of Vasily.

  The ground started to rumble beneath her once more, and a terrible swell of noise she was becoming all too familiar with rose up behind her—terrified screams, the dull thud of falling stones, the sharp, echoing peal of the very earth cracking open. But this was even worse than before and moving in her direction with the speed of a freight train.