Page 24 of Saved by the Vampire Goddess (Dark Wine Vampires #1)

Chapter twenty-four

Evelina

New Rome—Two nights later

A neon orange X literally marks the spot. The Lux have no subtlety.

I park the snowmobile close to the dome’s skin and wait for Valroy to dismount. The sky is still dark gray even though dawn is only an hour away.

I fish the Lux remote control from my pocket, but its significance makes the lightweight device feel heavy in my hand. Gathering up my courage, I press the smooth button. A round opening in the dome forms. Hearing about it and seeing it are two different things. “Those freakin’ suckers have been lying all this time.”

From behind me, Valroy presses his gloved hand to my mouth. “Shh.”

I shake him off. “Don’t shush me.”

“You’ll be quiet if you don’t want a security guard converging on us,” he says, close to my ear.

“Fine, fine,” I whisper, and point at my daylight bracelet. “Ready, set, go. Light shields on, just in case they have security cameras.”

“Unlikely they have any tech. The palace gets first choice of whatever technology your team scavenges.”

“We already discussed this. We’re taking the precaution and going in invisible.” I tap the aquamarine crystal on my woven platinum bracelet three times. “I’m in charge, remember?”

“Hey, where did you go?” He reaches out to grab me, but misses.

I grip his arm and tap his bracelet’s stone three times, but I can still see him. “Our bubbles are overlapping. Stay put. I want to make sure this is working.”

I step back until he fades away.

“Hey, come back here.” The panic in his voice is adorable.

“Just hold your horses.” If I squint and stare, I can kind of see a dark shadow where he should be with a light shimmer at the edges. The bracelets are working. I step back within his bubble. “Can you see me now?”

“Yes, thank the gods.”

“Let’s get the luggage.” From the trailer, we each grab a backpack, and he takes the wheeled suitcase containing the football. A week-old newborn can’t be trusted this close to mortals, so my plan is to keep him close. “Where’s the leash?”

“Why do we have to be tethered?”

“You saw me disappear. This is so we stay in each other’s bubble, got it?”

Despite my attempt to soothe his ego, he grumbles, but digs the chain out of our gear in the snowmobile’s trailer and hands it to me.

I haven’t missed his resentment at taking orders from me, because it’s cute the way his pupils enlarge, turning his eyes solid black when he’s angry. But my precautions are there for a reason. He still can’t go five minutes without breaking when he smells mortal blood. The Lux are idiots for saddling me with a newbie for this mission. After Valroy helped with the plan and drew the route, I could’ve done this on my own. But no. Ingvar insisted I bring him in case I need the info in Valroy’s head to pivot if something goes wrong.

I clip the snap hook to his belt and slip my hand through the chain’s loop, then I step through the opening in the dome’s skin and tug on the chain until he’s beside me. I flick the button, and the device closes the hole we stepped through.

Darn Lux.

Ingvar gave us a spray bottle of disinfectant and cloth wipes. I spray Valroy, then he sprays me, and we take turns wiping each other and the luggage clean, then I hide the opener near the Dome’s skin, just in case we get separated or the imperial guards confiscate our belongings.

The hotel is twelve miles from where we entered. New Rome built industrial buildings right up to the dome’s edge, blighting the entire outer ring. We manage to dodge the night guards who march around the perimeter of enormous warehouses.

Valroy growls, a low sound from the back of his throat. “I can hear the blood in their veins. It’s singing to me.”

The lessons I took him through couldn’t prepare him for seeing his first mortal. “Think about your sister,” I whisper. “If we don’t walk past the guard, you’ll never rescue her.”

His teeth clench so hard his jaw muscle juts out and I can hear his teeth crack. I grab his arm and shoulder, keeping a tight hold on the chain connecting us, and frog-march him ahead, whooshing past the guard.

“Deep breath, hot stuff.” I pull a clone pouch out of my backpack. “Drink.”

He sticks in the straw and sucks down the bag, a sullen look clouding his expression.

The next ring we pass through is crowded with New Rome’s poor. It’s one thing to hear Valroy describe the area, but it’s another to see the poverty with my own eyes—poverty I experienced when my pops lost everything during the Great Depression.

Single-family residences from the 1900s look like they were remodeled by a three-year-old with a bag of blocks. Without rhyme or reason, the original homes were enlarged, rooms added on using whatever materials were cheap and available, and are now multi-family dwellings, built right up to the old block wall fencing. No setback buffer zones, no protection from overcrowding, and electrical cables are strung everywhere haphazardly. One spark would start a fire and wipe out an entire block in minutes.

It hurts my heart to see such poverty, just like it shredded my heart to see the hordes of mortals who were trapped outside the domes. They were the unlucky ones who didn’t get to live in a dome and died painfully from starvation and anarchy thanks to the climate collapse.

But the fortunate folks who lived where the Lux dropped domes, well, the Lux provided sufficient resources for all the inners to be housed, fed, clothed, and provided with health care.

Instead, greedy mortals in New Rome hoarded everything, creating extremes of poverty and wealth. Pain shoots right through me as I think about all the people suffering. It’s a crying shame to see overcrowding and such poor housing conditions.

During our journey, we pass a child’s sock lying in the road, covered in blood. Someone painted the emperor’s sigil next to the sock.

“What the heck?” I whisper.

“A warning. The emperor cleans out the parasites periodically.”

“The what?”

“If the plebeians won’t work—”

“But that’s a child’s sock.” I glare at him. “You knew about this? Forced child labor?”

He shudders. “Not children, not like this. Only adult parasites. I swear.”

“Quit calling them that. No human is a parasite. Did you—”

“No. I served on his personal guard—I heard about the crackdowns, but I wasn’t part of them.”

I tsk and plan on reaming Ingvar about the situation next time I see him.

A few deep breaths later, and my heart rate slows despite my anger. Our hike from the entry point to the hotel takes all morning because it’s not a straight line. We stick to the busy interstates, weaving invisibly through the early morning traffic. Horse-drawn carts and electric cars move slowly, sharing the center two lanes. Person-powered carts and bicycles are in the next two lanes, and pedestrians have the outer lanes, one for each direction.

Post-Collapse roads outside the domes are marred by potholes and covered by abandoned cars, trucks, and debris. Weird doesn’t begin to describe how strange it feels to see a former interstate repurposed for horses and pedestrians.

Traffic signals control off-ramps, so pedestrians stop to let the cars and horses cross their lanes, which is why traffic is so slow. Rickety light-rail electric trains run overhead in the center. We reach the exit Valroy marked on the map, and when the signal turns green, he grabs my hand and pulls me along the off-ramp, dodging the other pedestrians who can’t see us whoosh by.

The closer we get to the center of the dome, near where the palace stands, the nicer the homes become. These sit on expansive lots with lawns and trees. Quaint storefronts line what appears to be an old-fashioned main street, but I get the sense that only the rich shop there.

When Valroy told me the name—Terra’s Tavern—I pictured a two-story budget motel with rooms on the second floor, and a first-floor restaurant with a fireplace and long wooden tables. I still can’t believe we’re about to barter for a room in one of the fancy hotel chains that ninety years ago would have cost six hundred dollars a night.

“Back here,” he says, guiding me off the main street to a parking structure behind the hotel.

I groan. What we hoped for isn’t there anymore. The enclosed walkway connecting the multilevel garage to the hotel, which would have allowed us to turn off the shields and safely pass through while the sun is still out, is gone. “Looks like Plan A’s a bust.”

“Then we’ll have to split up and change in the lobby bathrooms.”

As much as I hate the idea of splitting up, of leaving him alone to go inside the men’s room without me, the bathrooms are my reluctant Plan B. Before we leave the garage, I dig out two clone pouches from my backpack. “Drink up.”

“Are you sure I need another so soon?”

“You do until your control is better. Now slurp that down.”

When he’s done, we circle back to the front of the hotel and enter the lobby. Whoever owns it has patched the glass exterior with a molten inferior product, creating ripples in the glass. Rather than remodel the insides, they did a decent job of maintaining the original marble floors, hardwood wainscoting, and granite check-in counter. The wallpaper is newish—my guess is that someone farms bamboo plants for the fibers.

Here, our luck returns. The bathrooms are down a windowless hall. Still invisible, I slip inside, reappear in a stall, and change clothes, then meet Valroy in the shadows of the lobby, skirting the shaded windows, and he stops and gives me a once-over.

“I guess that will do,” he says, a big grin on his sappy face.

I’m wearing a backless sundress with a short skirt, making it easier to get at the knives I’ve strapped to my thighs. “Oh fer cute. I’ve been professional arm candy since before your great-great-great-great-grandpappy was a gleam in his pappy’s eye.”