Page 36 of The Bloody Ruin Asylum & Taproom (Sam Quinn #7)

Thirty

Getting to the Bottom of Why Cadmael Hates My Guts

I tapped the wall where Vlad had earlier. When the door slid open, I darted in and closed it behind me. Vowing to take the longest shower known to man later, I sat on a filthy step, closed my eyes, and found the green blips in my head.

Three strong blips. Without all the other vamps around this joint, though, I could now see two more. Shit. They were a pale, sickly, yellowish grass green. Fae. We had company.

I focused on Cadmael’s blip and pushed my way in. Normally, I’d never have been able to do that, but with the prince screwing with Cadmael’s head, it was easy.

Synapses fired around me, but it was the voice in his head that worried me. Cadmael was staring uncomprehendingly at Clive and Vlad. Kill them! the voice kept saying. I felt Cadmael struggling.

I needed to distract the prince, but how?

I had no influence over the fae. Then again, he was currently possessing a sort-of dead vampire and I had power over the dead.

If he pulled out of Cadmael, yes, we’d be physically safer for the moment, but only until he decided it was more expedient to take control of a scary-powerful ancient vampire again.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I hadn’t let that stop me in the past. I brought up an image of Gloriana in all her regal authority and pushed it into Cadmael’s mind. The urging to kill Clive and Vlad faltered.

My voice was nothing like Gloriana’s, but while pushing her image, I demanded he tell me what he had done with Cordelia.

Like a boxer being pummeled, I was hit with a barrage of memories of girls and young women being snatched, of fury and shouts, of backhands and closed fists.

Finally, I saw Cordelia being held aloft by him, his hand around her neck.

Tears streaming down her face, her golden skin turning blue, she clawed at his hand before he dropped her through the trap door.

It was too much. These last few days of seemingly unending violence toward women had me screaming in rage. I hadn’t been able to do anything to help the women when it was happening, but I could do something about this now.

Dave had once put me in a mental cage to keep me safe from a demon. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but sheer will and innate magical ability had me erecting walls around the prince while he lurked in Cadmael’s mind. He’d put himself in my domain and I wasn’t letting him out.

Locked in tight, the prince’s influence over Cadmael disappeared.

Get out! Cadmael roared.

Fuck off, you asshat. An ageless fae prince has been possessing you and I’m the one you yell at? How about, Hey, Sam, thanks so much for keeping me from being a fae puppet and killing my friends? I’ll never understand how I’m somehow always the problem.

I didn’t think I could maintain the prince’s prison if I left Cadmael’s mind, but I moved away from his hissy fit and accidentally stepped into a flare of memory.

Cadmael, bare-chested, wearing a hip-cloth, is carrying a baby, holding him up to the others crowded around his hut. Pride gleams in his eyes as he makes a pronouncement in a language I don’t understand. The message is clear enough, though.

The memory goes dark and jumps to Cadmael moving silently through the rainforest, a spear in his hand as he hunts. A small child follows. Cadmael stops, waits for the child to stand beside him, and then crouches, pointing through the trees at a boar snuffling in the leaves.

The child nods, stepping to the side to watch his father. Cadmael changes his hold on the spear, sending it speeding through the air, hitting the boar in the neck. The animal squeals and charges farther through the brush and trees, but Cadmael and his son are in pursuit.

Cadmael leaps, landing on the boar, driving it to the ground. A blade is already in his hand as he finishes off the kill. The child watches intently, his arms moving in imitation of his father’s, learning what to do when the time is right.

I feel Cadmael’s heart swelling with each new memory, with his son’s first successful hunt, with his growth into manhood, until there was nary a difference between father and son, save for a few gray hairs.

I feel Cadmael shying away from the next memory, not wanting to touch it, to revisit the horror. His son and a hunting party of two other men went to bring down a deer that had been spotted from a distance.

Only one hunter makes it back to the village as the sun is setting.

People gather around the frantic young man who is bleeding, his eyes wild.

Cadmael looks for his son. The hunter’s out-of-breath rantings and wild gesticulations become background noise.

Grabbing his weapons, Cadmael runs into the rainforest.

He’s able to easily track the one who made it back to the village. The ground is disturbed, branches broken. In a panic, the young hunter did nothing to hide his path.

Eventually, Cadmael finds a second hunter. The man is face up, a broken branch dropped on his face. Cadmael studies the scene. The hunter’s abdomen has been ripped open, organs torn out and eaten. An animal wouldn’t feel shame over a kill, wouldn’t hide his meal’s face.

Sickened, fearing what he’ll find, Cadmael races silently through the forest, following the sounds of yips and growls.

When he bursts into a clearing, he sees a deer with his son’s spear in its neck.

The deer’s eyes roll while its legs try weakly to push itself up, to escape.

Cadmael barely glances at the deer, though.

His attention is focused on a huge wolf, his snout in his son’s abdomen, feasting.

Cadmael throws his spear. The wolf senses the change in the clearing and moves, dodging the tip. It stands over its kill, claiming Cadmael’s son as his own. Refusing to acknowledge his son’s unseeing gaze, Cadmael leaps in with a blade in his hand.

The fight is vicious but short. Cadmael cuts the animal many times, but he’s no match for the huge wolf. Bleeding out on the same ground his son has stained red, Cadmael watches as the wolf begins to transform. He assumes in his state he’s hallucinating. How could a wolf become a man?

When the transformation is complete, his friend stands over him, eyes wild with excitement.

The werewolf, though Cadmael had no word for such a thing, looks between the dead and dying, wiping the blood from his face.

He goes to the now dead deer, hefts it over his shoulder, and heads back toward the village.

Cadmael stares up into the canopy of trees, uncomprehending. How could his friend be a wolf? Moreover, how could he kill Cadmael’s son? Betrayal courses through him as his blood soaks into the forest floor beneath him.

Later, as he feels himself drifting on to a warrior’s welcome in the afterlife, his son waiting for him, a man steps into the clearing. Eyes black, he breathes in the scent of blood and falls on Cadmael, fangs in his neck.

When Cadmael wakes, bursting out from under dirt and branches with a fiery, uncontrollable thirst, he’s somewhere else.

He experiences a brief moment of worry over his son before he’s mindlessly racing through the trees, the forest and all its inhabitants alive to him, their scents and sounds making the hunt laughably easy.

He brings down a boar and feeds, draining the animal, finally cooling the fire in his throat and allowing him to think. He finds a break in the canopy, checks the stars, and slowly, through the night, makes his way back to his village, to the hut of his friend.

Silently, he pads across the packed earthen floor to the sleeping skins and rips out his friend’s throat.

Eyes bulging, clutching his neck as blood gushes between his fingers, his friend watches as Cadmael kills first the man’s mate and then his child.

Cadmael does it fast, knowing the former friend has only a moment left of life.

Cadmael wants to make sure, though, that his last moments are filled with a crippling grief that will match his own.

Get out of my head! Cadmael roared. My memories are my own.

I can’t. I’m what’s keeping the prince contained. You’re going to have to put up with me a little longer until we can figure out how to free his prisoner.

“Clive?” I called.

The door must have opened because light fell across my face.

“Hey, listen. I’m holding the prince captive. I have no idea how long I can do this.”

“How can I help?” Clive asked.

“Can you take me down to the basement? The tub room?” That room had felt important from the beginning.

Clive swung me up like I was a backpack. “Should we be concerned about Cadmael?” he asked.

“No,” Cadmael responded. Looking through his eyes, I saw him look down at his raw hand and drop my axe, letting it clatter onto the marble floor beside him.

“Can you grab that, please?” I asked Clive. “I don’t want to lose it.”

I felt Clive dip to pick it up and then hand it to me, jogging to the secret door. I kept one arm around Clive’s neck and held the axe away from his body, not wanting to accidentally hurt him. As Clive went down the stairs, I heard a high-pitched tone I’d never heard before.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Alarm,” Vlad said.

“At a guess,” Clive added, “the werewolves are trying to break in.”

Awesome. I looked through Cadmael’s eyes as he walked back to an office and watched the security monitors.

“The pack is circling the building,” I said.

“How do you know?” Vlad asked.

“Cadmael’s watching the security monitors,” I replied.

“Sam,” Clive said sharply.

Patting Clive’s shoulder, I said, “He already knows there’s something up with me and I trust him.”

“Thank you,” Vlad said. “And, yes, my guess is you’re a necromancer. My mother was a wicche too. You needn’t worry. I’m no threat to your mate.”

“I’ll take that as a promise,” Clive said, his voice hard.

“Take it anyway you wish,” Vlad said. “It’s your wife I like. You, I don’t much care about.”

I was only sort of listening to them. My focus was on the monitors Cadmael was watching. The wolves looked to be attaching things to the building.

Cadmael relaxed, thinking the time had finally come.

“Uh, guys?” I said. “We appear to have a suicidal ancient vampire and a pack of wolves planting explosives all around this building.”

I felt Clive rush back up the stairs and I unleashed my claws, digging them into the wall to slow him down. “Stop. We’re not done here. Go back down.”

“I’m not risking your life for whatever is down there,” he said.

Holding tight to the prince’s prison, I opened my eyes and climbed down off his back. “Enough,” I said, stomping back down the stairs, turning on the flashlight again. “It’s here. I know it is. We have to find the way in.”

“Damn it, Sam,” Clive growled, following me back to the tub room.

“I’m supposed to do this. I know it.” I waved him away. “You guys go check out the other rooms down here. See if you can find a way into the prince’s dungeon. I’m searching in here.”

Cursing, Clive flew out of the room to check the rest. I didn’t see Vlad, so I assumed he was doing the same.

“Léna! How do I get to her.” I went to the back wall where I’d heard sloshing sounds and ran my fingers over the moldy, spongy wall. “I swear,” I muttered, “if I get sick from mold poisoning because you wouldn’t help me, I’m going to be really pissed off.”

I remembered that she was easier to see in the dark, so I turned off the flashlight and waited for her to appear. There! In the far right corner, she hovered behind a thick water pipe.

The pipe was only a few inches from the wall and corroded in too many places. Léna pointed to a spot high up on the wall behind the pipe, waving me closer.

Oh, sure. No problem. I gripped the axe hard and then tried to shimmy up a rotting pipe, pulling myself up off the floor, hoping like hell the pipe could carry my weight. I squeezed my running shoes on either side of the pipe and pushed myself farther up.

When my head was close to the high ceiling, I stopped climbing, wedging my feet between the pipe and wall. I had to hold the pipe with my right hand, meaning I had to swing the axe with my nondominant left hand. I was hanging on by a thread and was sure I’d end up hitting myself with the damn axe.

My left leg started to shake. I was not taking it easy on that poor leg.

I tried my best to get my torso out of the way and swung the axe.

The hit was pitiful and only served to dislodge a section of wet, moldy wall material.

My bad leg throbbed but I reached back to hit the spot Léna had indicated again.

“What are you doing?” Clive demanded.