Depraved (Tales of a Vampire Hunter #2) (15 page)

Before he could change his mind, and take option two—running
like hell and hoping for the best—the stone beneath them began to sink into the
temple, carrying them with it.

“Holy crap,” Miranda said, clinging to Oliver’s hand,
looking up at the rapidly diminishing sky above them.

Down and down they went, as if on an ancient elevator.
Azazel held their hands until they came to a stop before a bridge that led to a
wide set of doors. People flanked the walkway on both sides. Above their heads,
a thud sounded as the circle of stone lifted once more into place and sealed
them in what felt like a tomb.

Azazel passed by his people, all of whom bowed as they moved
down the line. Some wore clothing similar to what Oliver and Miranda wore, but
many more wore the garb of Aztecs and Spanish warriors. Some of the men were
draped in feather cloaks and others in velvet and coats with puffed sleeves.

Many of the ladies wore high-necked gowns of silk in subdued
colors and lace mantillas covered their hair. Other women were half-naked,
wearing only strips of cloth over ample breasts, tied over hips, and between
legs.

It was as if they’d fallen down into another land or were in
the middle of a costume party where there was no theme, no frame of reference
for the time-period of the costumes.

Oliver was not able to see past the throngs of people into
any of the rooms leading off the main passage. Finally, Azazel led them into a
large hall. Looking up, Oliver saw the stairs and pathways formed zigzagging
cross shapes that led up to where they’d entered the structure and down to
deeper levels.

The large, central room held a massive table, a fireplace
one could have fit an entire cow into, couches, carpets layered upon the stone
floor, shelves lined with leather-bound books and paintings in many different
styles that looked to be authentic art, the kind of things you’d see in a
museum. On credenzas and in hutches, treasure of all kinds rested like decor. A
crown covered with emeralds sat atop an old daguerreotype camera on a tripod
next to a gold inlaid sarcophagus like something King Tut might have had.
Everywhere Oliver looked was a treasure. It was an Aladdin’s cave of riches.
Lounging about, on rugs and pillows and in a few chairs, were large, black
dogs.

“Off!” Azazel said firmly to one of them, taking the vacated
seat on a couch near the fireplace and waving to Oliver and Miranda to sit in
the chairs opposite him.

“Excuse the mess. We’ve been clearing out a storehouse, and
I’m afraid I had no idea I’d become such a hoarder over the centuries. And the
damned wolves. They’re good boys, but I can’t seem to get them to stay off the
furniture,” he said, chuckling softly.

His words, this place, everything had Oliver completely
off-guard. He settled gingerly into a chair after helping Miranda remove her
sword and putting his with hers on a table between the chair she sat in and
his. Glancing at her, he saw she wore a similar expression of bewilderment and
unease over the unexpected jovialness of their host.

“I’m sure this is all quite a shock to you both,” Azazel
said when they remained silent.

Oliver glanced up. The pathways had cleared out. All of the
people had gone away and left them alone. He didn’t know if that was a good
thing or a bad one, and he struggled to get a grip on himself despite all the
odd things he’d seen these past few minutes.

Miranda scratched one of the wolves behind the ear when it
came up to her, dog-like, and nudged her knee with its nose. “Good doggie,” she
said, glancing up and meeting Oliver’s gaze.

“It’s not at all what I expected,” she said. “Or what we
were led to believe by Micah Lobo.” Her gaze flickered to where Azazel sat.

“Ah, that one. I would expect he told you much that is not
true. Just as your families did. Truth is difficult to find and even I do not
know where some loyalties lie anymore,” Azazel said. “All I wish for now is for
you to hear the things I know to be true and decide what path you will take,
for there are two sides now. The world is dividing, and the time is fast coming
where we’ll all be called upon to choose where we will stand.”

More ominous, meaningless words, Oliver thought, unable to
keep the open mind he’d promised to have, fed up with riddles and tales. “Lobo
said something similar. Something about the balance, the world as we know it
coming to an end. One of his walking dead said something too, like a warning.
She said, ‘respect the ways of others and you shall know peace’, or something
like that.”

“That must have been Adonia. I always liked that one,”
Azazel said with a slight smile. “It was advice she gave, not a warning.”

“Is it true that Lobo guards the souls of the undead who
should have gone on to some other place, like an underworld hell?” Miranda
asked.

Azazel nodded. “Yes, though the underworld is more like
another
world. A world divided from this one by
the thinnest of partitions. You and Oliver have seen glimpses of it, have you
not?”

“In mirrors. Yes, we have.” Miranda glanced at Oliver,
unease in her gaze as she admitted something they had a hard time discussing
even with one another, something they’d kept hidden most of their lives from
others.

“We’ve seen something, another place, and reflections of
some here that look like they belong there, but we’ve never known what we were
seeing. You’re saying it is this other world Lobo spoke of?” Oliver said,
deciding to follow Miranda’s lead in this and see where it took them.

“This other world has existed since the beginning of this
time we call ours. For many years the balance was kept, but cracks formed as
some found ways to escape that place and come into ours. Vampires, werewolves,
the walking dead, witches and creatures you cannot even imagine they are so
outside the realm of what you have seen and experienced.”

“Things like in fairy tales,” Oliver said, thinking of the
creatures he’d seen in mirrors his entire life, things he did not understand
except in that context.

“Yes, only real. As real as the humans here. Never meant to
be in this world, each one causing a crack in the veneer parting one from the
other.”

Miranda frowned, looking between Oliver and Azazel.

“May I give you a bit of a history lesson? It might help you
understand,” Azazel said, standing and walking to where a fat book lay open on
a long table. “Come, let me show you.”

They came to stand on either side of him, looking down at a
book that had been hand-lettered and painted and looked very old.

“This was found many years ago in Egypt. We know not who
made it. Each book in my library holds some clue, but none the complete tale.
This is the closest thing to a history of our worlds that has been found.”

“It’s beautiful.” Miranda leaned over to get a closer look
at the parted pages that showed an orb, one half light, the other dark.

Within each side of the circle were drawings of creatures
both familiar and not. A black sky and a blue one. Dragons and fire. Mothers
and children. The longer Oliver looked, the more he saw.

“According to Aztec myth, at the beginning of time, darkness
covered the earth. The gods gathered at a sacred place and made a fire. One of
the gods leaped into the fire and came out as the sun. However, before he could
begin to move through the sky, the other gods had to give the sun their blood.
This was one of several myths relating how the gods sacrificed themselves to
set the world in motion. Through bloodletting and human sacrifice people in
this part of the world imitated the sacrifices made by the gods—and kept the
sun alive, they thought, by feeding it with blood.”

“Lobo told us that the people here fear you but respect
you,” Oliver said. “Do they think you’re a God?”

“They love me. I
am
a
God to them, a father, and I take that duty seriously. Though I must feed on
them, I do it with respect, for the greater good, to keep the balance.”

“My vampire family had similar books, telling tales like
these, only of other lands. Many of them believed they should only feed upon
those in need somehow, not take innocent life. It was a code for most,” Miranda
said.

“These concepts must be difficult for you to believe, Oliver
since you were raised by hunters. But surely they too had a code, a code that
made sense to you or you would not have joined them in the killing of
vampires,” Azazel said.

“Meeting Miranda has changed my views, but it’s still hard
for me to think of any vampire as being good.”

“That’s a start. At least you have her for a frame of
reference for these new ideas.” Azazel turned the book’s pages, stopping at a
scene of a crowd at a temple, very like the one they were in. Masked men danced
around flames, and a crowd watched. Other men stood near an altar, pulling
barbed cords across their tongues, their blood flowing into chalices. A line of
young women waited on the stairs for their turn on the altar where another
already lay dead, a vampire above her, drinking her blood while all around
wolves howled at the moon.

“Many people, in many cultures, have practiced human
sacrifice or bloodletting, but the Aztecs made it the centerpiece of their rituals.
In the days of the Spanish explorers, there were ceremonies in which hundreds
of people met their deaths on sacrificial altars. Though the Spaniards abhorred
the practice, their swords killed many times more innocent people in the name
of their god,
their
beliefs.”

Miranda shuddered. “I’ve never seen anything like this in
our time.”

“I pray we never do,” Azazel said. “These things happened
the last time the door between our worlds was opened, and foul beings from the
other side almost overtook this world.

“What stopped that from happening?” Oliver asked.

“Someone able to convince people to stand on the side of
right even though the dark ways called to them. The first time this world was
threatened by the other world, some also tried without success to breed
creatures from both worlds, trying to create an all-powerful God capable of
opening the door to the other world for good so that all the Gods they
worshipped could vanquish the humans of this world and create the one true
universe. A dark one.”

“That sounds totally insane.” Miranda rubbed her eyes and
looked away from the horrific images in the book.

“Yes, about as insane as the experiments that gave us you
two. To answer Oliver’s question, what stopped the otherworld from snuffing out
this one, was someone much like one of you—one of their creatures of light and
dark, of this world and that one who turned on their maker instead, to save the
good they saw in this world and convince others to join him and turn from the
dark side.”

“So, Miranda and I were not created so vampires and hunters
could use our blood to help vampires and hunters the way our parents claimed?
They did it so we’d help them open some sort of portal to this other world?”
Oliver asked, his head pounding. Once more, stories and tales and no way of
knowing what to believe.

“There were many reasons. Some
did
want to see what your blood could do. They
found it did miraculous things for some of them and killed others. Others want
to use you to open the door between worlds again.”

“Why did you take part in such a thing if you knew what the
result would be?” Miranda asked.

“It was happening with or without me. I had some shred of
hope that if one of the children was of my blood, I could convince them to do
the right thing when the time came to make a choice.” Azazel’s voice had
lowered and his eyes clouded. “As we all know, I was never given a chance to
know you, teach you. All I am asking for now is that chance.”

“I’m willing to listen, but neither
of us will just accept what you say as truth. You have to realize that,” Oliver
said.

“I do. They’ve had your entire life to sway you, to form
your thoughts whether you knew it or not. But they never expected you two to
come together the way you did. They never expected you to be so strong, or to
have such open minds, or the strength of character I’ve seen in only this short
time knowing about you. I ask only for a chance. When the day comes for you to
choose, if you are the one who holds the key to unlock the other world, I want you
to make a choice fully informed of what your simplest actions could mean for
the fate of the entire world as you know it,” Azazel said, turning another page
in the book.

This section was divided into squares spread over two pages.

“Many Aztec myths tell of the five suns. The Aztecs believed
that four suns, or worlds, had existed before theirs. In each case,
catastrophic events had destroyed everything and the world had come to an end,”
Azazel said.

He pointed to the first square. “The first world was the one
in which the sun was made. It was destroyed when a God struck down his sister,
who shape-shifted into a jaguar and, in her pain, destroyed all the people of
that world.”

Miranda paled. “That’s horrible.”

Azazel merely pointed to the next square. “The second world
was born of the remaining sun; however, another god threw the new king from his
throne into a fire. The fallen god and the sun were carried off by a hurricane
of wind. People turned into monkeys and fled into the forest. The third sun
belonged to a new god until his twin destroyed it with fire that fell from the
heavens, turning this world into molten lava that was extinguished by a water
goddess who ruled the fourth world until it was destroyed by a flood with waves
so high they extinguished the sun and turned the people into fish.”

“This all sounds even crazier than the stuff we’ve been told
before. You’ll have to excuse me for having more than a bit of skepticism,”
Oliver said with a wry smile.