Immortals After Dark 09 - Pleasure of a Dark Prince

down the cobbled path, the totems flanking it began to topple, giant dominoes collapsing. MacRieve ducked and sidestepped while they crashed all around them.
    Then came a minefield of those huge ceiba trees exploding up from the rupturing ground, their roots shooting out like grasping arms.
    Lucia could do nothing to help him.
    When MacRieve leapt once, then directly again, she gaped down. Beneath them, crevasses in the earth fissured, opening and closing like gills….
    At last, against all odds, MacRieve made it to the levees. He scrabbled up, scaling the rock wall even as it crumbled. Vines snapped, whipping as though alive.Every time she thought he’d gotten his footing, stones would disappear, plummeting below. On each side of them, unimaginable water pressure shot rocks like they were cannonballs. Directly above them, water jetted with a bullet’s velocity.
    “Just hold on, lass,” he told her. “I’ll get us out of this.” He added in a mutter,
“Somehow.”
    With that, she blacked out once more.
    The next time she woke, he was laying her flat in the bottom of the skiff. Then she dimly heard him trying to start the engine, again and again. “Come on, fire, you little bugger!”
    It roared to life—they’d be saved!
    “Can you hear me, Lousha?” he asked as he got them under way.
    She blinked open her eyes, squinting against the afternoon sun streaming in through branches. With a frown, she lifted her head—
    Pain radiated through her neck, then down her back. “Ow!”
    “Damn it, stay put!”
    She couldn’t move her head without pain, could only look straight up. Probing her neck, she cried, “That hurts!”
    “Then stop
doing
it. Just lie still for a bit.”
    “Are we safe yet?”
    “Uh, no, no’ as such.”
    She could hear the propeller churning, could smell the engine smoking, and yet the branches overhead weren’t moving. The boat was staying in place? Ah, gods, the river was equalizing, and they were caught inthe current. “We’re about to be sucked back into the necropolis, aren’t we?”
    “Oh, aye.”
    Come on, come on!
Garreth inwardly commanded. But how much more could this engine take?
    She’d been quiet for long moments. “
Now
are we safe?”
    Just as he’d muttered, “No’ yet,” the current released them at last. The boat shot forward, freed. He briefly closed his eyes in relief.
    “MacRieve, you’re going to have to narrate. I can only look up.”
    “We’re out of danger for now—and on our way back to the
Contessa
.”
If the ship’s even there.
    “How did you get us out of that back there?” she asked.
    Sheer luck.
“Great skill. How’s your neck?” Though it was such a devastating injury, the actual break would be small and quick to regenerate. “If it’s hurting, then it’s healing.”
    “Then I’m definitely on the mend. I think I can sit up soon,” she said. “I can’t believe Lothaire gave me the neck adjustment from hell. Strike that—I can totally believe it, but I’m shocked he was right there at the tomb. Makes one wonder how long he’d been watching us.”
    Doubtless the leech watched me claiming her. Bluidy vampires!
    “When did Lothaire get so freaking
strong
?” Lucia asked.
    “He’s an ancient, the Enemy of Old.” And immortals grew stronger with every year.
    “What do you think he wants with that ring?”
    “Doona know. It was the simplest piece of gold in all of the chamber. It must have some powers that we doona know of.”
    “Do you think he’ll be back?”
    “I think he’s long gone from this place.”
Like we should be.
    “What are we going to do about the great evil getting her finger broken off? Also, I’m going to go out on a limb and say we probably got water in there on the
watchers
. Three out of three house rules broken.”
    And I’d already heard something moving within.
“I doona know that anything could have survived that impact. The city was razed and then submerged.”
But if they did survive
… Wendigos were rapacious killers. And then La Dorada—who knew what she was capable of? A warrior as strong as Damiãno had feared her.
    Lucia grew quiet for a moment, then asked, “What do we do if the
Contessa
left us? Or, um, sank?”
    “Paddle this boat for double the amount of days it took for the
Contessa
to motor here. Or attempt to fix the
Barão
.” A ghost ship. Filled to the brim with hacked-up bodies. “Let’s just hope they dinna.”
    She stretched her hand out to him. “Help me