Curse the Dawn

Page 25

“Whatever one leaves last.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” I said, folding my arms and leaning against the wall.
“You said you were leaving!” Tremaine reminded me, putting a hand under my elbow.
“I never said anything of the kind. And get your hand off me.”
Tremaine looked at me helplessly and then at Caleb. “Take over for me here,” the older war mage instructed him. Tremaine moved to the tunnel in time to help out a middle-aged woman who sent him a luminous smile through the tears running down her face. Caleb led me down the line of cars and into the shadow of a doorway. “What the fuck?” he demanded.
“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.
Chapter Ten
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.”