"As a matter of fact"a"she jerked the car into gear and it surged forwarda""yes."
Johnis looked at her. "A good choice."
"You"re the expert?"
"Granted, I"m useless in most things here, but I know a thing or two about Chevys."
"It"s a bit disorienting at first. I found some clips from your episode in Vegas. You"ve done just fine." Darsal forced a smile.
The last ten years had made her a hard woman, he could see. Elyon only knew how she"d managed on her own for so long.
"Billosa""
"I don"t want to talk about Billos," she snapped. "Only one thing matters now."
"Silvie," he said. "They have Silvie and Karas."
"The books," Darsal said. "First we lock your book so deep in a vault that no one finds it. Ever, if need be."
"And then?"
She stared ahead and blew out some air. "Then we go after your girlfriend."
he night air smelled of Shataiki. It was all Silvie knew for certain.
Miranda had chained their wrists and ankles, taped their mouths with gray cloth, and pulled seamless black hoods over their heads before summarily dumping them into a jets cargo compartment.
She could hear Karas"s breathing beside her, locked in darkness. And as the jet screamed down the strip and angled for the sky, her last hopes of Johnis coming to their rescue fell like a rock.
All was lost. Silvie allowed herself silent tears. Her ploy had failed miserably. She replayed the events in her mind over and over and concluded that their mistake had been in underestimating Miranda. Who could have guessed that she would have been able to overpower so many guards and catch them with the books without having to trade Johnis? Johnis"s warning had come too late.
His voice echoed in her head. I hit her with enough force to break her hack. She"s infected.
Infected by Alucard? This is what gave her the strength to overcome the guards. Their only hope, however slim, now rested in the other words he"d spoken into her ear. I have one. I have one, Silvie.
He had a book. But one book was no advantage against Alucard.
The flight had lasted hoursa"how many, Silvie could not estimate. She only knew that the air was cool and quiet, which led her to believe it was night, when hands had jerked her to her feet and had pushed her from the aircraft.
They"d traveled up twisty roads for an hour and finally came to a stopa"still night, as far as she could tell. Still not a word from Miranda, or anyone, for that matter. They were hustled through cool, damp air into what she guessed was a stone chamber or hall. She could tell because of the feint echo that came with each breath Karas took.
A door thumped shut behind them. Still no word.
They were led by chains down the hall into a stairwell. Down, down, feeling their way along the stone walls on either side. And she knew when the first scents of Shataiki reached past the hood that they"d entered Alucard"s lair.
The floor flattened, and they slogged over wet ground. Beside her, Karas protested with a m.u.f.fled cry. The odor of sulfur was strong enough to make one blancha"unlike Silvie and Johnis, Karas had been away from the Shataiki scent for ten years.
A soft popping sounded high overhead. Worms nestling in their own gook. Silvie swallowed. A hand tugged on her chain. She stopped. For several long seconds they just stood there. She could hear a flame crackling, could smell the smoke mixed with the scent of rotten eggs. Heard the worms she imagined overhead.
The sound of someone breathing. Nails clicking on the stone floor.
"Take them into the main chamber." Alucard. Silvie"s blood froze in her veins. The voice was low and breathy, backed by a growl that reached into the pit of her stomach.
They were led deeper, down another flight of stone steps, wetter and slipperier than the previous one. She could hear the same squealing they"d heard below the monastery in Paradise. Worms in torment, far away.
Her desperation deepened with each step she took. They must be a hundred feet below the earth"s surface now. Maybe twice that. Even if Johnis did find a way to the castle, there was no way he could save them.
She"d loved him. She"d kissed him, and she"d known with that kiss that she would marry him. If she died in the next ten minutes, she would cling to that memory, that single moment of comfort between them.
I love you, Johnis. I love you.
She slid, caught herself on a rail, then eased her foot to the next step. Her chain tugged.
I love you, Johnis. I love you.
The cry from the tormented worms grew at an alarming rate. And with the clunk of a latch and the protest of rusty hinges opening, the squealing became a scream, directly overhead.
Silvie gasped under the tape. Again someone pulled her forward.
They entered the room of screaming worms; she could smell them, hear them, feel their slime underfoot, taste their foul odor. It was a vast room, judging by the echoes off the stone walls.
A hand stopped her. The chamber fell to silence.
It occurred to her that she was panting through her nostrils. Dizzy from the hyperventilation, she tried to calm herself.
"Move," a gruff voice commanded. Hands shoved her.
She stumbled forward, tripped over a ledge, and fell headlong onto a three-foot-high riser. Karas grunted beside her. They were hoisted to their feet and clamped into brackets on the wall.
The hoods were ripped from their heads, tape from their mouths. A hooded guard with large red lumps on his face turned and walked away from them.
Silvie gazed at the chamber near the guards torch as he slumped toward the large black door through which they had entered.
The room was perhaps one hundred feet per side. Dozens of columns bridged the span from the wet floor to the ceiling. The worms nested there: gargantuan worms that looked like white logs twisting slowly in their own mess. Thousands of them, interwoven in a blanket that looked twenty feet thicker on one end than on the other.
A sizable table engraved on all sides with Teeleh"s winged serpent image sat squarely in front of the wall adjacent to them.
Larger worms clung to three of the walls, including the wall they were chained to, but the wall facing the single ornate table was free of not only worms but also their mucus. Dry stone ran from floor to ceiling. And on this wall a Silvie blinked. She"d seen this. These concentric circles. Exactly like the circles on the covers of the seven Books of History.
"Its a gateway," Karas said. "They"ve built some kind of a gateway!"
The door slammed shut, pitching them into darkness once again.
She could hear the worms writhing in wetness. The thought that one or more might slide over them made her shiver. She tugged at her chains and was rewarded with nothing more than a rattle to break the stillness.
"Are you okay?" Karas asked.
"No. Honestly, I think I might be dead."
Silence.
"You heard him," Karas said.
Another shiver went through Silvie. "It"s him."
"Alucard."
"He doesn"t have all seven books," Silvie said.
"He"s going to use them to open a gateway," Karas replied, casting no confidence behind the notion that Alucard wouldn"t soon have the seven if he didn"t already.
"You can"t know that."
"Don"t you see?" Karas was whispering with urgency now. "The Books of History are a gateway to truth, to understanding, to knowledge, to history! They connect what can"t be seen with what can be seen. The other world with this worlda"we experienced that ourselves."
"That doesn"t mean he"s going to use the books to connect the two worlds," Silvie said, though she wasn"t so confident.
"Why else would Teeleh send him here? What can he do here that he can"t do there? Teeleh intends to wipe out Earth with a virus that makes the Raison Strain virus look like a common cold."
"With Shataiki," Silvie said. "He invaded the Colored Forest exactly as the legends say. Now he will invade this world."
"With Shataiki."
hatever Darsal has done during the ten years since the books deposited her in this world, it has brought her wealth and resourses that might be as extensive as Karas"s, Johnis thought.
She"d whisked him to the airport, where a jet waited, fueled and whining on the runway. They would make one stop in a city called New York, where she kept one of her homes; then they would cross the Atlantic for Romania.
Stopping to secure the sole book in their possession would cost them an hour, but Darsal was unwilling to risk putting all seven books in the same country, particularly Romania.
Johnis agreed. They were only two or three hours behind Miranda, if their calculations were right. Securing the book would put them into Bucharest four hours after Silvie, a.s.suming Alucard had taken her to the same mansion he"d taken Johnis to.
"Which he has," Darsal said, spitting to one side on the runway as they boarded the jet. Alucard had done many things in his time, but none of it compared to what he intended to do now in that unholy place.
The jet flew at twice the speed of sound, faster when it climbed out of the atmosphere. This meant little to Johnis, as long as the book was safe and they reached Silvie while she was still alive.
"Tell me, Darsal," Johnis said. "Tell me everything."
She sat across from him in a black leather chair, legs and arms crossed. Her eyes diverted to the night sky over the Atlantic.
I cant.
There was enough emotion in those two words to strike fear into Johnis"s heart. "You can"t? Why not?"
"Because not everything can be spoken of easily, Johnis!" she snapped. "You"ve spent a month or two of your life frolicking about on this grand adventure. Try ten years and see if you can survive!"
She pressed her fingers together to cover her nose. Closed her eyes. "I"m sorry; that wasn"t called for."
"Well a" Well what, Johnis? You have no clue what horrors Darsal has suffered these past ten years. "We"ve all paid a price."
She was about twenty-seven years old now, he realized. But ten years without the harsh sun had been kind to her face. Her hair was very dark next to her pale cheeks. Something about her had changed, but he couldn"t put his finger on it. Her nose, perhaps? No, it was that she"d lost weight.
Karas had been a child in the other world and had grown up here without the benefit of fighting the Horde. Darsal had been a well-muscled warrior, who"d thinned out in a world without constant battle. In some ways, she was more beautiful than he remembered.
But life here had hardened her in other ways.
He wanted to ask her about Billos. About what she knew of Alucard. The books. Karas. All of it. But Darsal looked distraught, tapped out, nearly ruined.
So Johnis told her about their own journey, starting back in the forest, chasing her and Billos into the desert. Finding the Black Forest. Landing outside Las Vegas. Stealing the Chevy.
Instead of grinning at their antics, Darsal unsuccessfully fought back tears, managing only a smile or two when he described how he"d mastered the Chevy.
He told it all, hoping to remind her of home. To reconnect. And then he sat still, letting her process.
"I have something I have to tell you," she said softly, refusing to look Johnis in the eye.
"Then tell me."
"I cant. Not yet. It"s too terrible."
"Will it affect our mission?"
Darsal sighed. "Is there nothing but the mission for you?"
"Yes! There"s Silvie. There"s getting back to Middle! There"s life, because if we fail, I have a feeling there won"t be any."
"Fair enough," She paused. "When I arrived in Las Vegas, I was as lost as you. Karas was a young child then, and I had no way of contacting her. By the time I learned that the entertainment mogul was actually our Karas, I had already made the connection with Paradise and tracked the books back to Turkey and then from Turkey to Romania, where I learned that Alucard had been sowing his disease. I got too close to him and exposed myself. It was then that I decided that he and Miranda, that witch he"d taken up with, had to think I was dead."
"Sounds dangerous."
"Dangerous? Is there anything about this mission that hasn"t been dangerous? I managed to pull it offa"amazing what a pile of money and the right medical clinic can do for you these days."
"So what do you know about Alucard?"
"I know he plans on opening a gateway for the Shataiki. I"ve been in the chamber where he keeps his worms."
"The library," Johnis said.
"You"ve been in his dungeon?"
He told her.
"Then you know where we"re going. The gateway chamber is deeper than the library you were in. That"s where he"ll do his deed. And that, my friend, is where we"re going."
She stopped then, as if she"d come to the end of it.
"That"s what you needed to tell me?" Johnis asked.
Darsal set her jaw. "This is all a bit much. We"ll have time later." She reclined her seat and closed her eyes. "Get some sleep. We"re going to need it."