Page 108 of Incoronate
“Put that away and I'll come,” I ground out, eyes still pinned to the satchel in his hand.
Alford studied me for the span of a breath, his expression unreadable, the faintest gleam of something cold and knowing flickering behind his pale eyes, as if my surrender had never been in doubt. Then he tucked the satchel back inside his coat. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Drop fucking dead,” I muttered bitterly as I crossed to my desk chair and scooped up my jacket, the familiar weight of the Sword of Angelus shifting against my ribs in its hidden lining as I pulled the jacket on.
Whatever was waiting on the other side of this port, at least I wasn’t walking in entirely empty-handed.
Alford extended his hand.
I stared at it for a moment. I didn't trust him. I hadn't trusted him since Huntington Manor and nothing in the last ten minutes had changed that. But Trace and Dominic were on the floor and the satchel was in his coat and trust had nothing to do with it.
I walked over to him and took it.
His palm was cold. Not the familiar cool of a Revenant's skin. This was something older. The kind of cold that came from a man who had been doing terrible things for long enough that it had soaked through to his bones. His men picked Dominic and Trace off the floor, their bodies hanging limp in their arms and making my stomach drop, before each man laid a hand against Alford's shoulders.
Then the room began to blur.
The temperature plummeted the way it always did when you moved through space, that sudden vertiginous drop that preceded every port, the world folding in on itself and then unfolding again somewhere else. I felt it in my teeth and behind my eyes and in the base of my spine, and then everything went briefly, completely nowhere.
And then it came back.
Only we weren’t at Temple. We were somewhere else entirely.
The first thing I registered was the heat. Dense and dry and sourceless, closing in against my skin from every direction at once like the inside of something that had been sealed shut for a very long time. The second thing was the light. Not sunlight or anything that came from a single source, but a deep, saturated red that seemed to bleed from the sky itself, as though the atmosphere had been wrung out and what remained was the color of something that had been hurt and never healed. It bore down over everything, over the cracked, rust-colored ground and the still, airless horizon, turning the world the color of an open wound from one horizon to the other.
Turning slowly, I spotted hills rising in the middle distance. Small and uneven and oddly varied in color against the red backdrop. I squinted, trying to make sense of them.
“What is this? Where are we?” I asked, taking in the peculiar landscape.
In every direction, the terrain was flat and cracked and rust-colored, broken only by those hills. Small at first glance, irregular, oddly varied in color against the red. Almost like formations of rock. I found myself thinking, distantly and absurdly, how strange the geology was here, how the colors didn’t quite match anything I recognized.
Then my eyes adjusted, and my stomach dropped right out of my body.
They weren’t hills or rock formations. They were piles of bodies. Towering, incomprehensible piles built so high and so dense that from a distance they had fooled me into thinking they were part of the landscape. Mountains upon mountains of incapacitated bodies, stretching toward that bleeding sky in every direction I looked.
“What the fuck is going on? Where are we?” I shouted, the fear icing my veins despite the oppressive heat pressing in from all sides.
The two men flanking Alford tossed Trace and Dominic toward me. They hit the ground hard and I instinctively dropped to my knees between them, my hands going to their faces and then their chests, making sure they were still intact. That they were still with me.
“Welcome to Sanguinarium, Miss Blackburn. Feel free to make yourself at home.”
My spine straightened as though he’d thrown ice water at me. For the first time since I’d known him, something moved across Alford’s face that wasn’t clinical or controlled or carefully managed.
It was pure, unadulterated delight.
“William sends his regards,” he said, and with that, he was gone.
35. A ONE-WAY TICKET
For a long, suspended moment, I couldn’t move. I just knelt there between Trace and Dominic, staring at the space where Alford had been standing, as though if I looked hard enough the air would give back some kind of explanation. Some reason. Some logic I could fold into something that made sense.
But there was nothing but empty space.
The sky bled overhead a deep crimson red that covered everything, soaking into the cracked earth beneath my knees and the still, airless distance in every direction. All I could hear was my own breathing coming out too fast, too shallow, the sound of it too loud in a place that was otherwise completely and unnaturally silent.
We can’t be here. We can’t be. This isn’t real.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, felt my nails dig into the skin just below my sleep shorts as I tried to stop the trembling. The heat was wrong here, the way it sat against my skin without source or direction, pressing from everywhere at once like the air itself was trying to suffocate me. My chest felt like something had lodged inside it, like my ribs had drawn inward and were slowly, deliberately, closing around my heart.
