A long pause as they trudged on into the darkness.
Sometimes, Aodhan said at last, I feel like I’m pretending to be the person that you want me to be.
Illium flinched. He hated that they were doing this in the dark, where he couldn’t see Aodhan’s face, where he couldn’t look into his eyes. But it was happening and he had to deal with it—only, the narrow passageway suddenly widened, the light in the walls brighter. Aodhan.
I see it. No anger or old pain in his voice now, just the acute alertness of a warrior.
Illium kept moving forward, reminded of how Elena had described finding the place of captivity of her grandparents. He didn’t allow himself to think of another cold, dark place that had been made a cell. That memory was too vivid, too painful, too much a thing that tormented him.
But why did immortals do this? Make hidden prisons underground where they did things terrible and evil? Or perhaps the tendency to go underground wasn’t so unexpected in a race known to Sleep for eons in secret places around the world, the pull toward the dark a primal impulse.
In some, however, that impulse had been badly twisted.
He looked from right to left as they emerged into a large cavern lit by the same sickly green bioluminescence. His attention was on scanning for threats, so it wasn’t until after he’d crossed the cavern to take a position by the passageway that seemed to lead deeper within that the horror of what he was seeing truly sank into him.
Aodhan had stayed at the opposite end, and now, the two of them looked at each other over the splintered remains of a table and four chairs. Playing cards lay scattered on the floor, their white backgrounds snapshots of light in this subterranean place.
At first glance, that was all there was to see: the remains of a single small table and four chairs.
No bodies. No blood. No other signs of violence.
But, when Aodhan stepped away from the tunnel through which they’d entered, and began to move around the room, he saw other things. A steel bowl lying upside down in a corner not far from a badly dented metal mug.
An instant later, his light glinted off another piece of metal: the remnants of a plate that had been twisted and torn apart from one corner to the other. He crouched over it, angling his hand so that the metal was bathed in light.
This is tough material, he said to Illium after examining it. It would’ve taken a good deal of strength to twist it into this state. Only the rare human could’ve done it. Most likely, it’d require vampiric or angelic power.
Rising, he continued to move around the room and soon discovered a bread roll encrusted in green mold. He tapped it. Hard as stone.
In the end, he found enough other mugs, bowls, and plates to line up with the four broken chairs that lay sprawled on their backs on the pounded dirt of the cavern. Also among his discoveries were what looked to be the remains of more than one set of ceramic chopsticks.
The most interesting item however, was a functioning battery-powered lamp. Should we use it? he asked after switching it on. My light doesn’t take much energy, but we may as well conserve it.
Can it be dimmed?
Aodhan worked the device again and the light turned from harsh to soft.
Illium nodded. It’s not much brighter than using your power.
After doing another sweep around the room, Aodhan joined Illium. Lijuan kept Suyin captive for thousands of years, but she did so in one of her strongholds. Why would she keep anyone in a place like this? Unless the inhabitant was meant to be kept in the cells beneath the stronghold, but it didn’t work for some reason.
No question in Aodhan’s voice that this was a place of captivity, this outer cavern a guardhouse of sorts. Illium didn’t argue with the assumption—he’d seen what Aodhan hadn’t, knew the other man was right. Lijuan was quite mad in her final years, he pointed out. Who knows why she did anything?
Then he shifted so Aodhan could take in the broken chains that lay by his feet. Each link in each chain was of such heavy metal that the entire thing would’ve been more than the weight of either one of them.
A gate, he said, pointing out the places where the anchors for the chains had been embedded into the stone on either side of the passage entrance. You and I could break that, but there aren’t many angels as strong as us, even fewer vampires.
There’s no blood, Aodhan pointed out. No skeletal or other remains.
Illium had been thinking about that. Could be the guards abandoned their post after Lijuan’s defeat. Either out of fear or out of self-interest. No one would look kindly on them for taking part in the captivity of another immortal.