"Are you adopted?" Jubal asked. "You don't look anything like your mother."
Riley pressed her lips together. She'd heard that all of her life. She was tall and curvy with translucent skin and large, very different oval eyes. Her hair was as straight as a board and as black as midnight. Her mother was slender, of medium height, with wonderful olive skin and curly hair.
"I'm not adopted. I look like one of my great-great-grandmothers. She was taller with dark hair, at least if the drawings of her can be believed. Mom showed them to me once when I was all upset because I towered over everyone in middle school."
She was talking too fast, too much, as she sometimes did when she was upset. They were asking a lot of personal questions. What did it matter if she didn't look like her mother? Why were they so interested? She just wanted to grab her mother and make a run for it. If not for the fact that the forest itself seemed intent on attacking them, she might have done just that. Her mother had an amazing sense of direction when it came to the mountain. Twice when they'd made the journey and the guides were lost, it had been her mother who had found the way.
But now, with Annabel sick and the attacks on her growing more violent, Riley didn't dare separate from the group. Jubal and Gary offered a level of protection she couldn't afford to dismiss.
"Thank you both so much for your help. I have to get some sleep tonight. I don't know why the forest has gone silent, but I don't feel any immediate threat. I don't want my mother to know about this right away. I want to tell her myself and see if she has any ideas why these attacks on her are happening."
She needed time alone with her mother, and that was nearly impossible surrounded as they were by the various travelers. The guides and porters regarded them with suspicion now, and that would make privacy even more difficult.
"Go ahead and sleep," Gary said. "We'll keep an eye on things."
Chapter 3
Far beneath the surface, buried deep in the hot, rich, volcanic soil of the Andes, Danutdaxton woke to a steady pounding in his head and heat rising all around him. His eyes opened to the familiar darkness, the sting of sulfur in his nose and the stabbing hunger for blood beating at him with stony fists.
Dax's hands flexed as he checked his safeguards throughout the chamber. He was not alone. Another pounding wave of pressure slammed into him. Despite the pain, the attack made him smile with grim admiration.
"Manners, my old friend," he murmured.
To his credit, Mitro Daratrazanoff was as relentless a foe as Dax was a hunter. They had pursued one another for countless centuries before being trapped in this volcano, and in the countless centuries since their entombment, they had continued their battle, never giving up, each constantly searching for a moment of weakness to exploit. The fight had become their entire existence. Hunter and hunted, predator and prey: their roles switched continually, but they were so well matched neither ever had the upper hand for long.
Dax drew a breath and let the heat and pain and darkness wash over him. His body calmed. The ravenous hunger subsided as the heat and power of the volcano sank into his flesh, feeding him its energy, its strength. He drew sustenance from the earth, much the way a Carpathian drew sustenance from the veins of his human prey.
Once, only blood could have assuaged his hunger. Once, only blood could have given him strength. But the last five hundred years of being locked in the heat and pressure at the heart of a volcano had changed him. He was no longer "just" Carpathian. He had become something different, something ... more.
Flesh and bone had grown denser, harder, less susceptible to injury. He had a much higher tolerance for heat and fire. He could probably stand in the heart of a bonfire without raising the slightest blister. His hair, once long and thick as most Carpathians wore it, had been singed close to his scalp, leaving a short, thick pelt, and his eyes could amplify the slightest light, enabling him to see clearly in nearly pitch-black conditions. And in caverns where not the smallest hint of light shone, he had developed the ability to see through other means. Heat signatures were clearly visible to him, and even in the coldest, darkest caves and tunnels, he could differentiate between the vibrations of energy in the rock and air and thus "see" his surroundings.
Those vibrations whispered across his skin, as he woke fully from his healing slumber, his body shifting and stretching in the heated soil. Parting the soil with a wave of his hand, he rose from his resting place into the empty magma chamber above. Cracks in the hardened black rock revealed glowing orange lava bubbling restlessly in pools below that lit the chamber with a dim orange light.
The earth rumbled beneath his feet, and the ground gave a sudden lurch that nearly knocked him off balance. Steam vented from the glowing orange cracks in the chamber floor, and with it came the familiar, decaying stench of evil.
Dax's muscles clenched. He'd grown used to the rumblings and movement of the volcano over the years, but this was different. The volcano was awakening. And Mitro was the one waking it.
Another wave of pressure slammed into him, throwing him to his knees. The ground shifted and rolled. Dax steadied himself and sent feelers stabbing into the soil, trying to locate his ancient enemy. But the clinging, oily miasma of the vampire's decay had saturated everything inside the volcano, making it impossible for Dax to track the evil back to its source. Mitro was here, working to break free of his bonds and use the explosive force of the volcano to free himself.
For too many years, Mitro Daratrazanoff had fought to escape his prison. Dax had pursued him through the caverns and tunnels of the volcano, hunting, tracking, fighting to destroy him. And for the same amount of years, first Mitro spurned his lifemate Arabejila and then her descendents, who had come to the volcano once every five years to strengthen the bonds of Mitro's prison and keep him contained until Dax could finally kill him. Without Dax constantly hunting him, fighting him, and without Arabejila and her descendents continually renewing the strength of Mitro's prison bonds, the vampire would long ago have escaped to wreak his unimaginable evil on the world.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades, the power woven by Arabejila's descendents had been growing weaker. Their renewal rites no longer imparted the same adamantine strength to the bonds as before. And with the weakening bonds, Mitro's attempts to escape had come increasingly closer to succeeding. The last three times, Arabejila's descendent had arrived just in the nick of time, renewing the bonds only scant days-even hours-before Mitro broke through.
Worry crept down Dax's spine. Judging by the volcano's increasing turbulence, Mitro had already found enough of a chink in his prison walls to work his influence on the outer world. It did not bode well. Mitro must have woken much earlier than Dax this time. He'd grown stronger-too strong.