Chapter 386
Finding out information about Daunator was still tricky. I’d tried jumping back into his head, and though the black cave wasn’t as dark, it was obvious I hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of his power, which was disappointing. He wasn’t our biggest concern right now, however, since he wasn’t a threat, so I didn’t spend too much time trying to break down any barriers.
Instead, I jumped right over to Holland and got the surprise of my life. And that’s saying something considering I was hovering a few inches above my bed as I did my investigation. Her baby wasn’t a baby at all—not in any sense I’d ever imagined. It was blood red, with no hair, and looked to be the size of a large two-year-old. Its mouth was full of razor sharp teeth, and all it did was screech, eat, and tear things up. I couldn’t blame the other Vampires for locking it in a cage while Holland was still out, and when she’d tried to take it up to her room with her, it had been a disaster. She’d returned it to the safety of what appeared to be a dungeon. I got the impression she didn’t even know I was in her head, which was odd. I thought, maybe she wouldn’t be able to force me out, either, though I didn’t care to announce my presence in order to find out.
I leapt over to Hines, who was frantic, and it made me smile to see him in such a tizzy. His thoughts were muddled, and I was having a hard time following any one train. He was concerned about Melbourne, despite the fact that he’d gotten part of what he wanted; five Guardians were being held captive in cages in the basement. I needed to get on that right away. But there was something else—he didn’t think his people could do anything with them. He was fairly certain the concoction he’d come up with wouldn’t work. And he wasn’t there to administer it, so he thought it was doomed to failure. He was worried Holland wouldn’t let him try again. For a moment, his thoughts flickered to something he’d seen in a book in the library there, wherever they were in, in Linz. Something about a passage. I saw a group of people dressed in black trapped somewhere in this tunnel, all in his imagination, and then the thought that summer couldn’t come fast enough. I had no idea what this might mean, but I knew it was important, and I needed to mention it to my sister.
There’s nothing simple about navigating Hines’s head. I could get around it more quickly now, but it was just as disorganized as before. I caught a quick thought about a plane and realized he was thinking about Laura and Sam. I understood that they were on their way back to the US, though I couldn’t catch where they were going.
I needed a name—someone in Melbourne whose mind I could latch on to. Without a name, I was wandering around in the dark. Even with a location, I needed a person.
Shifting my thoughts to my cousin Paul didn’t help in that department. He was standing outside of Larundel, most of his troops still assembled around him. I’d missed the important part of the battle, and it wasn’t just Guardians who had been captured. His second in command, Becky, a Hunter, someone I’d met when I was in Melbourne not long ago, had been captured in one of those cells and executed. Paul was beside himself on the inside but trying to keep up the appearance that all was well on the outside so that his team didn’t falter. I understood his sentiment, and I couldn’t blame him for either emotion.
Poor Becky, she was such a sweet girl. I didn’t think I needed to know how she died, but I did dig back through Paul’s thoughts, with his permission—he knew I was there—in order to study the inside of Larundel. It was the best I could do without being able to access the thoughts of a Vampire on the inside. It became clear to me pretty quickly that there was a door behind the walls that led down some stairs to a basement, and that’s where the Guardians were being held.
I dug through some online archives as quickly as I could until I found a blueprint of Larundel. It’s not hard to find that sort of thing if you know where to look, and if I could thank Christian for anything it would be for teaching me that. The blueprints certainly didn’t match what I was looking at now, and out of nowhere, the memory of a short man with a construction hat walking these halls entered my head. I thought I must still be accessing Hines’s memories, or Holland’s, even without directly being in their thoughts. So... they had remodeled the interior to meet their needs. They’d also done some landscaping. Paul’s memories were full of recent interactions with a moat, some tall barbed wire, razor sharp walls, and a few monsters I would rather not see in person if I could avoid it.
I thought I heard a knock on my door and wondered how long I’d been out. My parents were going to bed when I went into this trance. Surely, they weren’t up already. I remembered losing all track of time the last time I’d been in Daunator’s lair, though. Maybe it had happened again.
“Cass? Can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes, falling back to the bed at the same time. I hated being interrupted, even if I had found pretty much everything I’d been looking for, or at least found out I wasn’t going to be able to access it. “What?” I asked, realizing it was my sister. I glanced at the time and saw I’d been gone a long time—hours.
“Nice to see you, too,” Cadence muttered. “Sorry to interrupt, but I need to know if you figured anything out about Melbourne.”
“Not much,” I admitted with a shrug. “I can see that the stairwell is hidden behind the wall, that there’s a sliding panel that leads to it, but I have no idea how to tell Paul where to look for it, other than that it’s at the back of the building.” It was frustrating. Maybe I could make him understand if I was in his head when they went back in, assuming that was the plan.
“Have you tried looking at blueprints of the original Larundel?” Cadence asked, sitting on the foot of my bed.
“Yes. But they hired a Vampire carpenter, and he’s essentially redone the entire bottom two floors. So it didn’t help any.”
My sister sighed and ran her hand through her hair. I knew the feeling. “All right. What about the cells?”
I hadn’t spent a lot of time studying them, but when I thought about them, I realized I was able to access some information about them anyway, possibly from Hines’s thoughts. “There are ten of them. They’re made of some sort of reinforced steel with concrete outer walls a few feet thick, so even if the Guardians managed to hammer their way through, which theoretically they could do if given enough hours, they would have a lot harder time getting through the steel rebar.” I could even see a familiar face in there trying to pound his way out now. I had no idea Tanner had been taken. I pushed the thought aside and tried to stay with my sister. I couldn’t help him right now, but maybe in a few minutes I could at least calm him down if he knew I was there.
To my sister, I said, “The cells are equipped with vents that allow the Vampires to gas them with the same chemical Hines injected into Paul. It doesn’t look good.” That was their intention—gas them, move them, inject them, kill them.
Cadence looked disheartened. “We need to be over there,” she muttered, still dragging her hands through her hair.
“That would be exactly what Holland wants, you know?” I said before I even realized where the thought had come from. I was still channeling some of her thinking, too. “She didn’t let Hines build those cages for just anyone. She wants you guys—and me.” I hope she understood who I meant. In Holland’s mind, she didn’t know the names of everyone she wanted to capture, I just got a feeling for who they were. The brown-haired girl, Cadence, whose name she knew but chose not to speak. Of course she knew Aaron. Then, there was his friend who’d died once already and his son, the Healer, and “the little one who sneaks around in my head”—that would be me. I could tell by Cadence’s expression she understood what I was telling her, but she didn’t get the seriousness of the situation.
