I glanced at the main door of the mess hall, hoping Dorian would join us soon. He could be resting, but I wanted to ask him what he’d heard about Castral. Maybe he would know what could have caused that kind of damage. The Bureau had never managed to land a serious blow on the vampires, so what the hell did? Even the X-75s couldn’t do that. My feet felt restless, and I considered going to search for him.
The cook—a tall, broad woman with a thick braid of dark hair—stuck her head out of the kitchen and pounded a frying pan with a mallet. “Food’s done!” she bellowed.
The vampires winced at the explosion of sound, but it had the desired effect. Humans and vampires began appearing through the main doorway to congregate in the mess hall. They couldn’t eat with us, but the vampires had taken to gathering for discussions among themselves. Dorian said vampires could be quite social. I pressed a hand against my stomach, my hunger a pleasant reminder of my run.
I grabbed a clean metal tray and inhaled the homey, simple scent of bread and stew, with an undercurrent of something fruity. Maybe they’d made crumble again. After our time on the run, it felt like such a luxury to be somewhere with a designated cooking staff. The servers, all volunteers or junior guards on kitchen duty for the day, stood on the other side of a buffet line, serving food.
“Thanks, Eskra,” I said to the female vampire who had been part of our fugitive group not so long ago. She’d taken up cooking duties as a way to give back to the group, citing the time we saved her and her child. She gave me a healthy portion of hot, rich stew, a jumble of roasted potatoes and turnips known locally as “tatties and neeps,” and a hunk of warm brown bread. Much nicer than starving in a cave. “How’s Oten?” I asked as she returned the plate, referring to her toddler.
“He’s doing fine,” she replied with a sweet smile, a wisp of her long, deep blue hair escaping the hairnet required for all food staff. “Sleeping now, but he’s been playing outside all day with Ayless and Kren. I know those girls are a little older, but he loves running around after them. They don’t seem to mind.”
I smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.” I grabbed a cup of water. “Please tell Corporal Fraser her food looks delicious.”
Eskra saluted me playfully and went on to serve Louise.
Roxy nudged me when we sat back down and pointed toward the entrance. I looked over to see Kane and Harlowe coming in through the set of doors closest to the medical trailer. Kane walked with a swagger in his step but a scowl on his face. The light caught the scar running along the edge of his eye socket. Both looked healthy from their recent feed, their pale skin dancing with deep shadows, but the tightness around Harlowe’s gray eyes told me she was stressed.
“Castral is finally stable, and his wounds are being taken care of,” Kane announced as he threw himself down beside Louise. He had a little trouble working his long legs under the low cafeteria table. Louise scooted up the bench a few inches to avoid his elbows. He glanced at me with a look of pointed expectation. “Ready for my horrible tales from the Immortal Plane?”
He read me like a book. I leaned forward, unable to help myself. “Please.” I didn’t mind that I was giving Kane exactly what he wanted by giving him the spotlight. For the most part, I’d stopped caring about his cocky attitude after he saved our asses on the roof of the Chicago HQ.
“Well, there we were. We flew to the stone circle Harlowe found when we first arrived.”
I nodded along with the others. Dorian had explained it to us a little. The vampires were the only creatures who could cross the barrier between planes without going through the tear. But they couldn’t do it on a whim; they required a place where the barrier was thin enough to slip through without getting lost inside forever. They flew there on redbills and left the birds in the Mortal Plane while the vampires jumped through to the Immortal side. Dorian had shown me the stone circle area once when we were surveying the camp and surrounding mountains from the back of a redbill. It was a circle of standing stones on the other side of the peaks that surrounded us, long forgotten in a small valley about half an hour away.
“It’s always been funny to me”—Harlowe’s voice sounded less than amused—“how humans spent millennia protecting vampire gateways without even knowing what they were. They sensed the spot was important somehow, that it was a place where things traveled and changed, yet had no concept of what existed on the other side.” She rested her head against her hand, as though exhausted. “It’s strange every time I see it from this side, unguarded. Maybe it’s just because that used to be my job in the Immortal Plane before the breach.”
Her job? I remembered Dorian had once said that Laini had trained as an architect, so maybe most vampires used to have positions besides purifying souls. Mentally, I made a note to ask one of the other vampires later.
“Strange or not,” Kane broke in, apparently uninterested in Harlowe’s musings, “we passed through to the Immortal Plane on foot, keeping stealthy. But as soon as we came through, they were waiting.” Anger crossed his face in a pulse of shadow.
“They?” Zach echoed, egging him on. Kane knew how to tell a story.
“The immortal rulers. Our enemies. A group of their hunters found the circle on the other side and set up an ambush,” Kane relayed bitterly. “Well, tried to. We sensed them immediately. We slipped in so quickly and quietly that they didn’t notice while they set up their ambush. Luckily, we caught them in the middle of final preparations. We darted to a hiding spot and fanned out in the opposite direction to look for something to feed on. There was nothing close, and going farther into the Immortal Plane to feed would risk alerting the patrol, which would make it even harder to escape. We didn’t have a lot of options. And… we needed to feed. So we decided to chance ambushing the ambush.”
Harlowe’s mouth twitched restlessly. “In hindsight, not an amazing plan, but we didn’t have any other options. The vampires back here needed to feed.”
“Also, the irony was too strong a temptation to resist,” Kane added, blunt as always.
I imagined the immortal enemies as something close to vampires, but scarier. The vampires were reluctant to talk about them but not about the monsters we’d fought a few weeks ago: the soul-scourger, a burning black mist, and the shrieking decay, an acid-spewing lizard that Dorian and I had killed. The immortal rulers had to be worse than these creatures for the vampires to fear and hate them so much, but when I’d pressed for details, Dorian told me that rulers looked more like humans than anything else. Their magic was the deadly part.
“We took down three, at most, before they noticed us feeding,” Kane continued, sounding bitter. “The ambush party was more heavily armed than we expected. One of the soul-bound beasts got Castral before we could retreat back to the Mortal Plane.”
“They didn’t let it kill him,” Harlowe interrupted in a speculative tone. “They had the opportunity, but it seemed like they wanted to take him away. Castral pretended to be unconscious after the beast got its teeth into him, so it dropped him. Then, before they could get any restraints on him, he surprised them and dove for the circle so we could come in for a quick rescue.”
“Harlowe, Neo, Drinn, and I still fed on plenty of dark energy. We have enough to pass around to the other vampires in the compound after that fiasco. After that ambush, though…” He shrugged, but I could sense his frustration. “We need to find a new spot to send our feeding parties through. They’ll double down on watches at that stone circle.”