Beloved Vampire Read Online Free PDF Page B

position of the stars. Stared at Persephone and struggled to remain conscious.
    Farida, name your price. Anything you want, anything in my power to give, is yours. Just let me find you. Let me know there was something that makes everything that’s happened to me worth it. Dearest Jack . . .
    She stretched her arms out to either side. From the sight of the heavens she hoped it was obvious she was offering herself up to whatever spirits were listening. The only fear she had left was of finding out darkness was all there was.
    As she lay there for several minutes, she fought growing despair with a soft murmur, a vague lullaby of no words. She moved her twitching hands, passing them through the sand like the dip of a ladle, sifting in a soothing rhythm. She would find it. She would . In her frustration, she dug deeper, clutching the sand in a tighter fist . . . and her knuckles scraped something solid.
    Struggling to her side, she found the tiny marker, no bigger than her palm. Pushed up by the movement of another stone a quarter mile away, just as she’d researched, though if she hadn’t fallen in this exact spot, she never would have found it. While the top of the obelisk had been decorative, this one was unadorned, made to look like the sand itself, blending in unless one was on hands and knees like this, going by touch alone. A day’s worth of sand had buried it a handful of inches back under the ground.
    Digging down around it, she found it had a spring trigger that released easily, surprising and heartening her. She’d hidden a prybar from the men in her belongings in case, though she hadn’t known if she’d have the strength to use it properly. The marker slipped from her grasp as the door beneath it ground open, letting sand tumble down into the narrow opening.
    Clicking on her flashlight, she saw a small tunnel, barely big enough for a man’s body to wriggle through on his stomach, leading into the dune at a downward incline. When she put her head inside, she inhaled, and her vitals tightened. An unmistakably fragrant smell.
    Did it linger from flowers or incense left down in the tomb all those years ago, the scent trapped and waiting to give the memory to the first person to visit?
    She’d found it. Hot damn , she’d found it. The adrenaline got her into the shaft, struggling over the gritty layer of sand drifting in with her. She used her elbows, her toes, her hips, whatever it took to keep going, stopping when she had to do so. When she reached about eighty feet, she guessed from the increasingly steep grade and coolness that she was past the base of the dune and going even deeper into the earth. Thank God it was all downhill. The initial walls of the tunnel had been braced wood, remarkably undamaged by rot, perhaps because of the Sahara’s lack of humidity. However, as she descended, the tunnel became rock. It widened after those first eighty feet, and she was able to lift from her belly and proceed on hands and knees again, keeping the flashlight beam in front of her until the tunnel dead-ended and emptied into a sudden hole. When she came to the edge of it, the light showed she’d found a large chamber.
    She swept the beam over it slowly, for she didn’t want to minimize anything about this moment. Her heart was thumping, even as ebullience paralyzed her. Safe. God, she hadn’t felt safe in so long, and here she felt she was, at last. Even the darkness of the tunnel didn’t bother her. She’d found it.
    The drop into the chamber was about five feet. She managed it, landing in a clumsy heap that set off a paroxysm of coughing and jolting pain through her chest. She fumbled out her handkerchief to make sure she didn’t spatter the chamber with blood or worse coming from her lungs. Here in the circular space, the wheezing of her breath was a harsh sound. Out in the desert, she’d been able to trick herself, lose it in the sound of the wind. It was okay, though. The end might be close, but she’d