No, aboveground wasn’t any better. Evil needed to die, no matter where it chose to operate.
Blade glanced over at Dare. “Which direction?”
“I can’t pinpoint it.”
Blade started toward the closest tunnel. “I’ll take this one.”
“We need to stick together,” Mace argued. “It’s almost dusk. Thevamps’ll be waking up.”
“Which means we need to hurry,” Dare countered. “We split up to cover more ground.”
“I’m with Dare,” Blade said, hating to side with the asshole, but also wanting to get away from him. And from Mace. “We split up.”
Mace threw up his hands in frustration. “Fine. Go ahead.”
“Thanks. I will.” Cloaking himself in shadows, Blade took off, moving silently along the rough-dug corridor. He slowed to peek into darkened recesses, most empty, a couple littered with the usual bones and body parts. A sleeping vamp was sprawled out next to a freshly dead human female inside one of the nooks, and Blade dispatched the monster with a shiv to the heart.
As he slipped out of the shallow cove, the sound of a sob echoed off the earthen walls. Ahead. A chamber.
He came to a stunned halt.
He’d found the humans.
Tied up like animals for slaughter, they were huddled against a wall, some crying, others frozen in terror. One female, who appeared to have been scalped, moaned into the ground, her arms and legs tied behind her back in a way that couldn’t have been done unless the limbs were dislocated or broken.
Fury boiled in Blade’s veins. Yes, he was a demon who had grown up with a slightly different concept—and, frankly, tolerance—of evil than humans. He didn’t enjoy seeing people hurt, but generally, it didn’t bother him overly much, either. But he’d also grown up with humans, like his mother, who was a werewolf but still human. Their father had taken him and his brothers to learn to fight. Their mother had made them volunteer at animal and homeless shelters, and three weeks out of the year, they’d had to help fundraise for food banks.
“Being human isn’t aboutwhatyou are,” she always told them. “It’s aboutwhoyou are.”
“But we’redemons, Mama,” Blade had argued once, when he wanted to play with his friends instead of ladling soup into bowls.
“That makes it even more important to learn empathy for those who aren’t like you,” she’d said and promptly buckled him into the minivan with his brothers for their soup-kitchen extravaganza.
So, yeah, he’d developed empathy, even if he had to keep it tamped down to preserve his sanity. But situations like this, where cruelty was the fucking point, made him lose his shit.
He took a silent step closer to the captives just as the scalped femalerolled her head to the side and opened her eyes.
And screamed.
Shit!
Suddenly, there was movement. And sounds. Like a hundred death shrouds rasping across desiccated corpses. Nosferatu crawled from out of the shadows and unfurled from shelflike protrusions above, their gleaming eyes and razor-sharp claws promising a painful death.
They launched at him, sharp-fanged monsters that moved faster than Blade could track.
He spun like a whirlwind, flashing blades that cut into flesh and bone. But for every wound he delivered, he took two. He was badly outnumbered and, potentially, in a lot of trouble.
Retreat!
Fuck. The exit was blocked, and he was surrounded.
He’d been through this scenario a million times, though, in training and in real-life situations. Quickly, he dropped a holy water bomb, and the vamps scattered, their screams of fury following him as he ducked out of the chamber. Ahead, the sounds of battle reverberated off the walls, emanating from the direction where he’d left his teammates.
Vampires tore at his back as he bolted through the tunnels and burst into the room where he’d last seen his team. They weren’t there, but a trail of fresh blood led back the way they’d originally come from.
In a near-panic, and with Nosferatu on his heels, he made it to the upper floors of the castle. Now that the sun had dipped below the horizon, the building was dark, the shadows long, and vampires were everywhere.
They were so, so fucked.
