Tegan growled her name in warning as she rolled free of his arms. She came up to her feet and took quick aim, then brought her hand back and let the blade fly.
The Minion roared as the dagger embedded deep under his arm. He fell back with his weapon still firing, sending a spray of bullets high into the rafters. Some of them hit the black ceiling, the sound of shattering glass an ominous counterpoint to the battle taking place below.
“Oh, God,” Elise gasped as painted shards dropped from the broken skylights.
The ceiling was glass—recently coated with black paint to blot out the sun. Marek must have taken that immediate precaution when he set up camp in the humans’ house.
Now, as another large piece of glass broke away and fell to the floor, Elise stared up at the sky overhead.
A sky that was slowly pinkening with the first early light of dawn.
CHAPTER
Thirty-four
They’d been scouring the steep, jagged crag for some hours and still no trace of the crypt. Night was starting to fade. None of the warriors scaling the rocks had any real affection for the sun—particularly Dante, after a nasty UV tangle a few months ago—but as later generation Breed, they could each withstand daylight for a short amount of time. With the aid of their solar-protection gear, they might be able to double that exposure.
But not so for the Ancient they hunted now. If the Gen One offspring of that alien being began to blister and burn in under ten minutes, the Ancient’s UV-allergic skin and eyes would incinerate in seconds. That made for a decent backup plan, if the Order somehow failed to take the creature’s head.
Assuming they could even find the suckhead’s hiding place amid all this inhospitable rock.
Dante shot an assessing glance up at the sky. “If we don’t get a hit on something in the next half hour or so, we’d better start heading back down.”
Chase nodded. He stood beside Dante in the mouth of a shallow cave that had yielded nothing but some discarded beer bottles and the days-old remnants of an extinguished campfire. “Maybe we’re off somehow. Some of us could branch out along the farther ridge and check closer to the summit.”
“It’s got to be here,” Dante said. “You saw the tapestry. That range Kassia sewed into the design is this one, right where we’re standing. We’re close, I’m telling you—”
“Hey, D.” Nikolai was perched on a rocky promontory several yards above the mouth of the cave. “Rio and Reichen just found another opening up here. It’s pretty tight, but it goes deep into the mountain. You might wanna have a look.”
Dante and Chase made a quick scramble up to where the others had gathered. The mouth of the cave—if you could even call it that—was a vertical slit in the rock. Small enough to be concealed unless you were right on top of it, yet wide enough for a man to sidle through with care.
“Chisel marks,” Dante observed, running his hand along the edge of the opening. “Based on the weathering, they’ve been here for a while. This could be the place.”
Six sober gazes held his as he drew the sword he carried and quietly gave the operation’s commands. He would go in first, see how far the opening went and if there was anything on the other side. The others would wait for his orders—two on guard outside the mouth of the cave, and the rest ready to move in behind him on his signal if they had in fact found the crypt.
He squeezed between the vertical plates of rock, his head turned toward the pitch blackness ahead of him. The smell of bat dung and mold offended his senses the deeper he crept inside. The air in here was cold, damp. There was no sound at all, only the soft scrape of his movement as he progressed.
Somewhere along the way, he noticed that the crush of stone was easing. The walls began to widen incrementally, then, at last, they opened up onto a cavernous space deep within the mountain.
Dante stepped on something that crunched beneath his boot.
His eyes were keenest in the dark, and what he saw made the blood drain from his head.
Holy hell.
They’d found Dragos’s secret. No doubt about it. Dante was standing in the middle of the Ancient’s hibernation chamber, a crypt carved into the side of a mountain, just like Kassia’s tapestry had said it would be.
Dante didn’t recall speaking—hell, he wasn’t even sure he was drawing breath in that moment—but within moments he was joined by his brethren.
“Jesus Christ,” one of them murmured, hardly audible.
Rio’s whispered prayer in Spanish spoke for everyone: “God help us all.”
Tegan lifted his head, turning a fleeting, uncertain gaze up to the broken skylights above their heads.