Free Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) by Eve Paludan Page B

the ruins, I knew that she had been here before. Many times. I wondered how she had gotten this far. Perhaps before the children came into the world she had been a vampire hunter with Lucian. She just knew way too much for a sausage maker and mother of three.
    On page two of the maps, she had drawn for me a floor plan of the dungeon area, which was at the lowest part of the ruins and was the likeliest place for me to find captives. According to Uta’s drawing, offices, kitchens, and a weapons armory was on the ground floor. The third floor of the small ruined castle contained bedchambers, bathrooms and some sort of workrooms where she was not sure what they did there, but guessed that it was something significant.
    In the fading afternoon light and with my small flashlight, I pulled over to memorize the schematics and then carefully put the papers away in my backpack.
    I still had about a half hour of sunlight to make sure that I could get past any booby traps, make my way past the locked gates and descend toward the dungeons that Uta had described to me. I wanted to be ready when they woke up.
    More than that, I wanted to be ready if Vlad showed up. Had we killed him or not?  Or had it been one of his henchmen we had killed, sent in first to see if it was safe, as Uta had assumed? It was true that Vlad had survived many attempts on his life as a vampire. I supposed I would find out tonight if he was still alive. I really hoped he was not. We had killed two vampires last night in the trap, but I confessed to myself that we only knew for sure that one of them had been Gabrielle Dubois.
    When the sun got right on the edge of the horizon, I heard something that chilled me to the bone.
    Children singing. Not kid-type songs like row-row-row-your-boat , but they were singing a praise song to vampires to the melody of a popular worship songs. Only they were singing things like, “Yes, vampires love me, yes, vampires love me…”
    I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
    I was utterly shocked at the level of evil by the vampire perps.
    I had come here to rescue Kristen, but now, I had a whole different picture in my mind of how happy the victims were going to be to get out of Dodge and how we could all run out of here together. I hoped to God that they were just faking their enthusiasm for the vampire culture, in order to escape…only God knew what horrible things were indoctrinated into them through brainwashing.
    The first rule of being a captive was: Figure out what you need to do to stay alive. The second rule of being a captive was: Don’t compromise other people’s safety and well-being to save yourself. Third rule was: Escape!
    As I looked at the ruins of the castle, which was mostly rubble above ground, I saw candles being lit on the top floor of the Raven Citadel. I surmised that most of the previous rescue attempts had the rescuers heading right for the dungeons where they thought the captives might be.
    Instead of doing that, I thought that I would start from the top of the castle ruins and work my way down.
    Nobody inside the castle would be expecting that.
    Now for the hard part.
    Parkour IRL. Parkour in real life.
    Shielded from view of anyone in the castle by piles of dark rubble, I stretched and bent and got my special parkour gloves on. I took deep breaths and let them out and focused on the goals of a traceur , or one who does parkour.
    Two movements at a time was the way my parkour free running needed to proceed. I needed to stay light on my feet and climb the rough walls, find handholds and make it to the top level of the castle ruins before anyone saw me.
    But someone did see me. Lots of eyes saw me climbing the wall like a jumping spider, jumping and leaping and pulling myself up and up. Just like our own Blackstone Castle, the Raven Citadel had…well, ravens. They kicked up a bit of a fuss, but only for a minute or so because when the sun goes down, those birds go to sleep and they are no longer such good