Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves (Book #4 of the Templar Chronicles) (18 page)

“But it scares you,” I said.

She nodded and drew in a shuddering breath. “I think all of their victims are in there too. When vampires feed, they’re not drinking blood; they’re drinking life. All the memories, the triumphs and failures, the joy and sadness. They consume a soul.” She wrapped her arms across her chest, hugging herself. “If I go looking into the memories, I’m going to see every one of those deaths all over again. I don’t know if I can do that.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to do it,” I said. “We’ll find another way.”

“No, I have to try. I know that,” she said. She grabbed my arm painfully hard and looked up at me. “Just make sure I come out of it.”

Without warning, her eyes fluttered backward, and only the whites of her eyes showed. Her body sagged as if all of her bones had suddenly disintegrated, leaving only a sack of muscles, organs, and skin.

“Help me,” I called.

Daniel and Will rushed forward, and we laid Eva flat on the floor. Her eyes remained open, but still rolled back, giving her a creepy look in the torchlight. No, it would have been creepy even in the full light of day.

Her body began to twitch, and small whimpers came from her open mouth. She reminded me of someone having a bad dream, except I knew she was seeing actual memories of the ancient vampires whose blood filled her veins.

Her legs kicked out straight and her body went stiff. Her mouth opened in a soundless scream.

“That’s enough,” I said, shaking her. “Wake up. Eva. Come on. Wake up.”

Her legs kicked as if something was attacking her. Her arms flailed. She found her voice and screamed, “NO!”

“Eva!” I cried. I looked to Daniel and Will. “What do we do?”

They both looked terrified.

“I don’t know,” Daniel said.

I took her by the arms and shook her. Gently at first, and then harder and harder. “Eva. Wake up. It’s Jack. I’m right here. Eva!”

Then she was back. Her eyes rolled down into place, and her body relaxed. She sat up and stared at the flame on the wall as if the light would chase away the darkness where she’d just been.

“Was it as bad as you thought?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It was worse than I could have imagined.”

The iron door to the prison cell rattled open.

“On your feet, vermin,” the guard yelled. “You four have a date with the Boros to keep. Single file line. No talking.”

Eva stood, and we all did the same, but I kept my eyes on her. “Did you learn anything?”

“You there,” the guard barked. “You hear what I said? No talking.”

Eva nodded and turned to me with a slight smile. “Yes, I think I did.”

The guards pushed us forward down a long, wide tunnel carved into the rock. A few of them dropped down into werewolf form as we walked. They separated us, forming a long line with werewolves between each human so I wasn’t able to get anything else from her. All I could do was follow the werewolf in front of me and hope that whatever Eva had discovered was going to be enough to get us through the upcoming fight.

I like to consider myself an optimist, but I have to admit, I didn’t feel good about what was about to happen. I had every reason to be scared because there was nothing good waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.

Chapter 27

We entered an enormous circular pit with a sandy floor and walls of black granite extending twenty feet straight up before widening into dozens of rows of cut-stone seats for spectators. The cavern rose at least a hundred feet from the floor, and massive stalactites that looked like giant canine teeth covered the ceiling. Only the first couple of rows around the arena were filled, reinforcing the sense I’d gotten since coming here that this place and this group of werewolves had seen better days.

Kaeden stood in his human form on a rock platform that bowed out into the arena. In front of him lay a pile of weapons. Swords, spears, axes. I recognized the weapons the werewolves had confiscated from us among the others.

Seeing him there, I realized what this place was. It was a copy of the great Coliseum of Rome carved into the solid rock of the mountain. Kaeden played the role of Caesar overlooking the games, and we were the gladiators sent out to entertain the masses with our deaths. It wasn’t a role I looked forward to playing.

“Jack, look,” Will hissed.

He pointed to the sand in front of me. I hadn’t noticed the white sticks half-buried in the sand when we first came in. Now that I saw the ones nearest me, I realized these white sticks were visible around the entire arena floor. I didn’t think much of them, just filing it away in my mind as something to look out for in the battle ahead.

Will must have not been satisfied with my reaction because he walked up to the nearest stick and kicked it with the toe of his shoe. The sand fell away, and I saw that it was part of a rib cage half-buried in the sand. I turned and saw Eva nudge something with the bottom of her foot. The object rolled forward. It was a human skull, sand pouring from its eye sockets and its gaping mouth.

The white things weren’t sticks. They were bones. Hundreds and hundreds of them. And that was only the top layer. As far as I knew, the bone pile might have been thirty feet or three feet deep. There was no way to tell.

What I could tell was that the werewolves had played this game here for centuries and, based on the amount of bones, they were likely not very worried about us winning against the Boros.

I scanned the werewolf faces around the arena edge, mostly in animal form, some choosing to appear as humans. They stared at us with all the excitement of a crowd watching fish about to be shot in a barrel. They clearly did not expect this to be a very entertaining fight. I hoped they were wrong.

“Any sign of them?” Daniel whispered.

Before he asked, I didn’t realize why I’d been searching the crowd – I was looking for T Rex and Xavier. I felt a weird mix of relief and disappointment that they were nowhere to be seen. I half-expected some kind of sign left for us to know they were there and waiting for the right moment to help. But I found nothing. They were safely outside the Keep’s walls where they should be.

“Eva,” I said. “Were you able to see anything in your memories? Anything that might help? Like how Kaeden and the Boros are linked?” I should have asked as soon as we stepped into the arena, but my brain was overloaded.

Eva’s eyes scanned the sand surface. I thought the sight of the bones had gotten to her, maybe reminded her of the catacombs in Paris with its millions of dead inhabitants. But when she looked up, she looked neither panicked nor scared.

“I don’t know the connection,” she said. “No vampire witnessed that. But I know how it attacks. It’ll come from under us. Up from the sand.”

The three of us backed up, watching the surface of the sand more carefully.

“Is it as bad as the stories?” Will asked.

“No,” Eva said. “It’s worse.”

“Brothers and sisters,” Kaeden intoned, holding his arms wide. “We gather to bear witness to a challenge. This vampire…” He paused as the spectators broke out of their eerie quiet with a sudden eruption of howls and snarls. Kaeden smiled at the reaction, clearly pleased by it. “This vampire is newly made but carries the blood of our ancient enemy, Ren Lucre.”

This time the growls were twice as loud and angry. Kaeden waved his arms to get the others to fall silent.

“And these humans, who call themselves members of the Black Guard, one of them with Templar blood in his veins, wish to try their luck against the beast of the mountain, the Boros.”

Kaeden pushed the pile of our weapons forward with his foot until it tipped over the edge of the rock promontory and fell the twenty feet to the sandy floor below. The werewolves erupted in a frenzy, snapping the air with their fangs, scratching their claws against the rock where they stood.

“He makes us sound like we wanted to do this,” Will grumbled. “Last I checked, it was this or be killed back in the forest.”

“It’s part of the theatrics. Either way, we’re here,” Daniel said. “Come on, let’s get our weapons and make a fight of it.”

He took a step forward, but Eva shouted at him, “Wait! Don’t move.” She turned an ear toward the center of the arena and listened, head tilted.

“What is it?” I whispered.

She pointed toward the sand out in middle of the floor.

“It’s already here,” she said. “And it’s hungry.”

Chapter 28

We hung back, staring at the floor of the arena, searching for any indication of where the Boros might be hiding. I glanced back at the entrance to the tunnel we’d used to enter the pit to size up whether escape in that direction was possible if we needed it. A heavy metal gate had slide into place behind us.

“How do you know?” I whispered to Eva.

“Can’t you feel the vibrations?” she asked. “Or smell it?” She held a hand to her mouth, looking nauseated from some kind of stench.

I drew in a long breath of air through my nose. There was the dampness from the cave, the gritty smell of the sandy floor, and the not-so-pleasant smell of my own clothes after two days without a shower. But nothing that would have warned me of a giant monster nearby.

I looked to Daniel and Will. They seemed just as puzzled. Eva’s heightened vampiric senses were at work, and I realized they might be the edge we needed to be successful.

“We need to get our weapons,” Daniel hissed.

The stretch of bone-filled sand was about the length of two basketball courts. That may not seem like much, but when your vampire friend tells you there is a giant monster lying in wait under the sand to devour you, it starts to look like a long distance run.

“Eva, we can’t feel it or smell it,” I told her. “You’re our eyes and ears. Can we make it to the weapons?”

Her eyes darted back and forth, as if she was seeing something I couldn’t. Then even I spotted tiny ripples in the floor. A bulge of sand. A bone fragment twitched from something moving beneath it.

“It’s massive,” Eva whispered.

“We can’t very well just wait here for it to come get us,” Will declared. “I’ll draw it this way. You guys go for the weapons.”

“Will, no!” I cried.

But it was too late. Once a thought entered Will’s mind, it was usually only a matter of seconds before he acted on it. That impulsiveness had gotten him into a lot of trouble over the years but probably saved his life on more than one occasion. I was sure running off to attract the attention of the Boros by himself was in the trouble category.

“Hey, Boros!” Will shouted as he ran along the base of the circular wall to our left. “Over here!”

“Come on,” Daniel said. “We can’t help the crazy bugger when the Boros comes if we don’t have our weapons.”

He was right. We turned and sprinted to our right, working our way the opposite direction around the circle. A few seconds later, Eva whisked past us as if we were standing still, her vampiric powers making her two to three times faster than either Daniel or me. She reached the stack of weapons when we were still halfway around the edge. She didn’t even break stride. Running at full speed, she bent down, grabbed two swords and a shield from the pile, and continued around the outer circle. Right toward Will.

Before she could reach him, and just before we reached the weapons, the Boros attacked.

The monster burst from the ground with such fury, sand and bones exploded into the air. The force of it blew me off my feet and threw me hard against the rock wall. Daniel hit the wall next to me and crumpled to the ground with a grunt.

A high-pitched shriek filled the air, so loud that I had to cover my ears from the pain. After the first burst of sound, it changed into a lower register and became a roar like from a lion or tiger. Well, maybe from a few dozen lions or tigers. I felt the roar in my chest in a low vibration that I thought might shake the bones right out of my body. At least it wasn’t the piercing scream that felt like it would shred my eardrum.

I crawled to my knees and tried to get a look at the creature. At first, the cloud of sand and bones made it impossible to see. Dust hung in the air, a giant shadow in the center of the arena. But as this cleared, terrifying details of our adversary came into few.

The Boros was a mash-up of several creatures all in one body. It stood on thick hind legs, like a dinosaur’s, and reared back, clawing the air with smaller arms that had wicked, barbed claws on the end. An armor-plated tail with spikes on it extended behind, thumping on the sand as the Creach moved.

Dark red scales covered the heavy body, glistening in the light from dozens of torches around the arena. Two sets of leathery wings stretched out from its spine and spread in the air like an insect flaring its wings. All of that sounds like I’m describing a dragon, but trust me, this was no dragon.

First, there was the head. While everything about the body suggested some kind of serpent or dragon, the Boros’s head was a complete surprise. It looked like an enormous bull with bulging eyes, a snout with flaring nostrils hanging with long strands of thick mucus, and black, curved horns. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I realized it was just the first head.

The Boros’s second head had been hidden behind the first, and I didn’t see it until it leaned back and let out a blood-curdling howl. This head was even more bizarre. Covered with coarse black fur, it had forward-facing beady eyes that glowed yellow. It had a long, fang-filled snout that would have made it look like a wolf except for the corkscrew horns on either side of its head where the ears ought to have been. I’m not sure which head, the bull or the wolf, was crazier looking. Bottom line, this thing was one ugly looking Creach.

“Jack, catch!” Daniel called.

Looking up, I saw my sword flying through the air toward me. I snatched it by the well-worn hit and sprang to my feet.

I didn’t need to say anything to Daniel because he was already charging at the Boros with all his might.

As I ran toward it, the ground beneath my feet crunched from all of the bones brought up from the depths. I wondered how the beast was able to burrow through the earth, but I didn’t have much time to think about it before the Creach tried to burrow one of the spikes on its tail through my chest.