The First Vampire Part 15

She woke with a start, knowing she'd drifted off, but unaware of how much time had pa.s.sed. She'd dreamed of James. A smile formed around the corners of her mouth. If things weren't quite so dire, he'd probably laugh at the mess she'd managed to get herself into.

"Rise and s.h.i.+ne, heart of mine." Ash's malevolent sing-song greeting told her he was in the room somewhere, but she couldn't see him. How long had he been there, watching her?

She heard movement off to her left and knew he'd intended for her to hear him. He could certainly move silently if he chose.

A light flared in the distance, hurting Ariana's eyes and seemingly illuminating a giant's form. Ariana knew he was no giant, but from her vantage point on the floor, he might well have been.

She pulled again at the chains. Did she imagine one of them gave slightly? It was hard to tell. Her arms were totally asleep. If she ever got out of here they were going to hurt like h.e.l.l.

"Are you finding everything to your liking, Del?" His tone mocked her.

"Not quite what I'm used to," she bit back.

"Believe it or not, you do get used to it." Ash knelt in front of her. She could barely see his face, but she knew it was hard and twisted. "I did."

Her heart ached as he said the words, confirming what she'd already guessed. This was what she'd done to him.

"Ash," she said, sympathy filling her voice.

He reached above her head and gave more length to one of her chains. Her right arm fell lifeless into her lap. For a moment, there was nothing. Then fire started at her shoulder and began a slow, unbearable course down her arm.

She writhed, trying to lessen the pain. "Ash," she pleaded.

Ash smiled, but stood and turned away from her. Ariana suddenly didn't want him to go.

"What, no snack for you this time?" she taunted.

He returned to stand in front of her and hauled her to her feet. One arm was still tightly tethered and the other she could barely move. Ash smiled, his fangs just visible.

Ariana sucked in her breath and tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go except up against the hard wall. Ash dropped his head, and she felt his firm lips nuzzle the side of her neck.

"d.a.m.n it, Ash" she said, hissing the words through gritted teeth.

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" he asked softly. "You don't like being in chains?" He reached up and cupped his hand lightly over her breast. "You don't like me touching you?"

Yes, she liked it; she couldn't stop the thought. Oh G.o.d, she had always liked it, but it didn't change anything. She needed to stop this.

"You still haven't remembered me, have you?" she asked.

Ash's removed his hand and drew back to look at her. She could see the furrows in his brow.

"We met before Sorek," she explained, swallowing hard. "My father tried to offer me to you as a consolation prize, but you wouldn't take me." She couldn't keep the ire from her voice. "Instead, you had to set the village on fire."

Finally, realization dawned for Ash, realization that she was the much younger sister of his wife. The wife he'd married as a young man and left at their wedding feast in a fit of ego.

He had returned for her months later only to learn she'd been given to his best man. Her father offered to let him take her younger sister instead, but she was only a child. In his rage, he'd set fire to the village and crops-and the villagers had retaliated by burning his wife and her father in their beds. Then he retaliated again by slaughtering them all to the last man.

About 20 years later, in another city, he'd seen the woman Delilah. Her dark beauty and frightening intellect had bewitched him from the first. How could he have known?

"I was not the same man the second time we met, Delilah," he whispered. "Could you not see that?" His voice was heavy with stale regret.

"Me?" Ariana scoffed. "How many times were you in my bed?"

Ash tried to remember. A lot.

"Did you ever ask about my childhood? Ever inquire about my feelings, my thoughts?"

Her words d.a.m.ned him, even in his own mind. "No, I suppose not." He thought for another moment and offered up a quiet defense. "It's no excuse, I know, but I was so ecstatic just to be with you that nothing else really seemed to matter."

Ariana hesitated, but then shook her head. "You mean you were so certain that I had no further thought other than how I would pleasure the great Samson next, that you just didn't feel the need to bother with the niceties."

The silence between them stretched taut, holding back a myriad of unkempt emotions.

"What's the matter, Ash?" Ariana taunted. "Things not turning out like you planned?"

That is the understatement of the millennia, Ash thought as he turned on his heel and left the little cell. He needed to think.

CHAPTER 32.

She was surprised she even remembered the way to the cavern. She'd only followed her mother here the one time.

Delilah once again pondered whether she was making a mistake. She thought not. She had finally reached a station in life where she had connections and influence, at least in Sorek. If she could get Samson here, she could find a way to avenge her family.

Getting him here was the problem. Her influence didn't extend so far or so high as the circles Samson usually traveled, and she couldn't count on mere chance to come to her aid. She needed a.s.sistance of another kind.

Surely she would help avenge a sister's death at the hands of a philanderer who held himself out as a man of G.o.d and a servant of the law.

Darkness was all Delilah could see before her as she moved past the entrance to the cavern. Her gait slowed as fear bloomed within her. Echoes of whispers and a memory from long ago had brought her to this place. She really had no idea what she would find.

A cold breeze pa.s.sed over her and, as the goose b.u.mps began to form, she was forced to her knees by an invisible presence.

What do you seek, Delilah?

The words were not spoken aloud, but she heard them clearly in her mind, intoned in a strange voice, distinctly feminine, yet hard and cold. She wanted desperately to raise her head and look at the creature that now stood before her. All she could see was a robe, but every instinct told her it was not being worn by a person.

"I seek the aid of Lilith," Delilah said, "as one woman to another, in the cause of the unjust death of my sister, Anora."

"You want the death of Samson."

It was jarring to hear it spoken by another. "Yes," Delilah admitted. "I need Samson to come to Sorek."

There was a long pause before the creature spoke again. "He will come. After he arrives, one of my acolytes will come to collect my payment."

Delilah nodded. "I will pay," she whispered.

CHAPTER 33.

Ariana leaned her head back on the hard wall of her cell and concentrated on the past. She needed to remember more about her bargain with Lilith, but when she was awake, no new memories would come. She decided to put the past out of her mind and focus on finding a way out of her current predicament.

Unfortunately, both her arms were asleep again. She tilted her body to the right, allowing more blood to flow into that arm. The pain went on for what seemed like hours, but she knew it was less.

When she could move her fingers, she reached her right arm over to her left and pulled with all her might. It hadn't been just her imagination. The left manacle was a little loose.

After another hour of pulling and straining, the pin holding her left manacle to its chain slipped free. The heavy links clattered against the stones behind her head, and her arm fell forward. She waited for the inevitable burning pain.

When it came, it sent her crumpling into a ball, but she used the time to figure out how to get her other arm free. She'd never be able to pull the manacle loose now that Ash had put so much length between her hand and the point where the chain was anch.o.r.ed to the wall.

She'd seen the knife sitting on the rock when Ash lit the torch earlier. With her left hand free, she thought she could reach it. She systematically inched her fingers over each rock in the wall around where she thought it should be. The manacle, its few links of chain and the dangling pin all clanked noisily along the bricks as she searched. Ariana gritted her teeth. Finally, she found the little outcropping and then the knife. Now, for the hard part.

A little light would be a big help, she thought, trying to take her mind off the pain of the first cut. She took a deep breath and made a second vertical cut in the back of her hand.

Blood poured out of the dual incisions, and Ariana spun her hand around in the manacle. Fire coursed through her arm, but her hand slipped in the metal ring.

She forced herself to flex her fingers, keeping the blood flowing. She relaxed her hand and pulled harder. Her knuckles slipped down inside the ring. One more pull, and her butchered hand was free.

She fell over onto her side, clutching her hand between her thighs. The pressure would help stop the bleeding, and the pain was so raw that the fetal position was all she could manage for a quarter of an hour.

As her brain and hand adjusted, she found she was able to stand. She took off her tee s.h.i.+rt and wrapped it tightly around the wound.

She thought two long steps should bring her to the door. Her first step had to be finding the torch. Hand outstretched, she found the doorway easily enough. The torch wasn't hard to find either, but lighting it was another story.

Where were the matches? Maybe Ash brought them with him when he came down. No, she thought, that didn't make sense.

She ran her good hand, still dangling its manacle, over the wall all around the torch, and finally found what she was seeking. Between two stones there was a slight gap, and in the gap were four matches.

She pulled one out and awkwardly managed to strike it on the handle of the torch. Quickly she lifted it. Light flared and the scent of burning oil filled her nose. She blew out the match, put the rest of them in her pocket, and picked up the torch.

Turning to her left and right, Ariana strained to see anything that would indicate an exit. In both directions, the pa.s.sageway curved quickly into darkness. And she'd never heard Ash coming or going, so she didn't even know which way to start.

s.h.i.+t, she thought. What good was getting out of her chains if she was going to bleed to death in a rat maze? Wait. Maze. What had Eric told her? Pick a wall and follow it without fail in any direction. Eventually it would lead her to the exit.

Ariana held the torch with her left hand and raised her right hand close to the wall opposite her. Surely she didn't need to actually touch the wall, she thought. It was filthy and her hand was killing her.

She took two steps and then turned back to the doorway of her cell. With the end of the torch she scratched a triangle into the hard dirt floor as a marker. Then she turned to her left and stepped forward into the darkness.

The corridor went on, twisting and turning for what seemed like miles, connecting a series of rooms whose purposes Ariana didn't even want to guess. She tried to keep her eyes only on the few feet of path the torch illuminated in front of her. At one juncture, she traded her fading torch for a fresh one, using her dying flame to ignite the replacement. Who stocked torches in a vampire's dungeon? she wondered absently. Talk about a thankless job.

Finally, she came to the exit. It had to be the way out. Stairs led her up two or three stories. She lost count.

Unfortunately, when she got to the top, it looked like a dead end. A stone wall blocked any farther progress. She sat down, carefully balancing the torch against the wall beside her, and considered where she had gone wrong.

Finally, realization dawned. She hadn't gone wrong. This was the door. It had to be. It was just camouflaged as a wall. Ariana dropped her head into her uninjured hand. She was so tired. How long would it take her to figure out the mechanism to open the door? Could she get it open before Ash came back?

She unwrapped the blood-soaked tee s.h.i.+rt from her hand and wiggled all her fingers, glad to see that she could, even though it was painful. The movement set one of the cuts to bleeding again, so she rewrapped it as tightly as she could manage.

Leaving the torch where it sat, Ariana stood and examined the wall. Of course there couldn't just be a big "PUSH" sign, she thought. Nevertheless, she tried leaning hard against the wall, first slightly to her left and then to her right. No s...o...b..-Doo spinning-wall action here, she thought, smiling slightly despite the dire circ.u.mstances. Then, remembering the matches, she set about pus.h.i.+ng and poking at every stone and every crevice between them, but nothing worked. Exhausted and out of ideas, she slumped against the wall and sank into any uneasy sleep.

CHAPTER 34.

Delilah studied the woman before her for a moment, wondering how she had come to be in the service of the demon Lilith.

"A life for a life," the woman said.

Now that Delilah had heard the price, she had no doubt of Lilith's true nature-but this servant was another matter. She was younger than Delilah and quite pretty, at least the half of her face that could be seen under the hood of her cloak.

Delilah nodded. "Lilith has kept her word and brought Samson to me," she replied. "My sister will have her vengeance and the Philistines will have his life. My life is hers in payment if she wishes it."

The strange young woman shook her head. "Not your life," she said. "The life of your child."

At Delilah's confused look, the woman pulled a water skein from the basket she had set at her feet and handed it to Delilah. "You and Samson must each drink half," she said, "and you must lay with him this night."

Delilah took the proffered skein. "What does it contain?" she asked.

"The blood of Lilith," was the surprising response. "Lilith's current form has served her well," the woman explained, "but it is not long for this world. When her blood combines with flesh in your womb, her soul will be drawn into it and she will be born anew."

Delilah couldn't hide her surprise. Her mouth dropped open, and she stared wide-eyed at the girl in front of her.

"You will be the mother of a G.o.ddess, Delilah," the girl said. "It is a great honor."

Delilah turned and laid the skein on the table across from her bed. She supposed she could object, but, strange as it was, it was not a higher price than she was willing to pay. She suspected her mother and baby brother had paid a dearer price.

"It must be tonight, then?" she asked.

"Tonight," the woman repeated. She picked up the basket and turned toward the door. "And when it is time for the child to be delivered, you must again return to us. It will not be long."