11. Emissary
Chapter eleven
Emissary
Ileft Caen’s tower and checked the sky from the landing window.
Orange. Actively dimming.
The keep stood across the courtyard from Caen’s tower. I had time, but not enough to waste.
I did not linger. I walked briskly.
Skip had told me to be in my quarters before nightfall. I was not going to my quarters. I was going to be in his quarters. I had made a decision, and I needed to tell him.
His quarters were near the top of the keep, six levels above the courtyard, just beneath the roof walk and the battlements. I crossed the courtyard, entered the keep, and started up the first flight of stairs. I calculated that I had enough daylight left to reach him.
I had made it only as far as the lower level when I heard it.
An explosion.
Stone burst apart somewhere beyond the walls, followed by the hard, uneven crash of rocks striking the courtyard and slamming into the fortress. Men shouted. Someone screamed. Steel scraped free of scabbards.
The crypt.
Boots pounded in every direction. Swords struck.
The screaming intensified. Steel clanged. Soldiers shouted orders.
The keep had two main stairwells. I was climbing the eastern one, nearest Caen’s tower.
I ran. I ran with full commitment, arms pumping, breath tearing in, sweat immediate beneath the leather. My lungs were staging a formal protest. The eastern stairs blurred beneath my boots.
I reached the upper corridor.
She was already there.
She was not breathing hard.
The vampire had come from the crypt, cut through a garrison built to kill her, crossed the keep, and climbed the western stairs ahead of me without becoming even slightly winded.
She stood between me and Skip’s quarters with composed patience, framed by torchlight, as though she had been waiting for an appointment rather than cutting her way through armed soldiers.
Her face was untouched by time. The corners of her mouth were smooth, her skin unmarked by weather, grief, laughter, anger, or sleeplessness. Nothing she had endured had written itself into her features.
Her skin had the colorlessness of something emptied. Blood no longer warmed it from beneath, leaving only a smooth, lifeless absence.
Her eyes were red. Genuinely, startlingly red.
She smiled, and every feature settled into flawless alignment. The expression had the shape of warmth without any memory of it.
“You are the woman from Earth,” she said.
Her voice wore warmth the way her body wore beauty—perfectly and without anything living beneath it.
“I am.”
“I am not here to kill you,” she said. “I want that established before we continue.”
This was exactly what something that wanted to kill me might say.
Her head tilted slightly.
“Morvanna sent me with an offer. What happens next is your choice.”
She smiled, and nothing in her face softened.
“You are not the first woman to arrive from your world,” she said. “You will not be the last.”
Her gaze moved over me with slow, precise interest.
“The others were described in many ways in the old accounts. Brilliant. Restless. Difficult.”
The smile widened by a fraction.
“Voracious was the word that appeared most consistently.”
My hand remained still at my side. The sword was on my belt. I could feel the weight of it. I could also feel, with terrible clarity, the distance between my hand and the handle.
“They came hungry,” she said. “Hungry for what your world had denied them. Hungry in ways they had not been permitted to name.”
She took one step closer.
I did not move back. I wanted to. I did not.
“They found pleasure here. Power. Bodies that answered them.”
Her eyes stayed on mine.
“You came with the same hunger. Morvanna understands pleasure as a principle rather than a pastime,” she said. “The women who joined her were not asked to be less than what they were. They were given a court of people who felt everything they felt and wanted more of it.”
Another step. Slow. Unhurried. She had time. She believed she had all the time in the world. “They did not find the arrangement unsatisfactory.”
I could still hear the garrison below, but distantly now. Boots. Orders. Someone yelling for archers. Someone else calling for the High Commander.
Too far away.
“You are here because the bridge brought you here,” she said. “Morvanna understands what that means. What it has always meant when a woman from your world arrives in ours. She has no interest in fighting the pattern.”
Her red eyes caught the torchlight. “She wants to ensure that you serve the correct purpose.”
I swallowed. The movement felt loud.
“She is not asking you to give up anything,” the vampire said.
Her voice softened. That made it worse.
“The dark bond does not require surrender. It requires the opposite.”
She let the word opposite settle between us.
“Everything you have ever wanted from a man, felt through the bond by everyone at once. Amplified. Returned to you doubled. Every want answered the moment it surfaces. Every sensation shared and multiplied,” she said.
“And you would not age. Your beauty would be preserved. What humans measure in years, you would measure in centuries.”
Her eyes moved down me, not crudely. Clinically. As if she were determining whether I was worth preserving.
“Morvanna has been waiting for someone like you for a very long time. Not to fight her. To stand beside her.”
The torches hissed. Below us, something heavy struck stone. She did not flinch.
“The mind and the body,” she said. “She is offering you both.”
I had one advantage. She needed something from me.
“And not with one man,” she said, reading something in my face and smiling again.
Her gaze flicked toward Skip’s door. Then back to me.
“The dark bond does not work that way. Everyone feels everything. Men and women both. All at once. All the time.” Her smile sharpened. “Without the ring.”
My fingers twitched once. Her eyes dropped to the movement. Then lifted again. She had seen it. Of course she had seen it.
“In another life,” she said, “before I understood the beauty of the dark bond, my name was Mira.”
The corridor went silent inside my skull.
Mira.
Skip’s claimed mate.
The woman whose ring he had removed from her finger in a field. The woman he had grieved. The woman he had loved.
Only then, with the detachment of a brain refusing to stop analyzing during active crisis, did I register the rest of her.
Small waist. Significant rear. The architecture of a woman who was petite everywhere except where she was emphatically not.
I looked down at myself. Then back at her.
Skip, I thought, had a type.
Mira looked at me with knowingness.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind her. Heavy. Armored. Purposeful.
Skip filled the far end of the corridor in full armor, hunter’s hook ready. He was breathing hard.
Then his eyes found Mira.
His face locked into absolute stillness, every trace of expression vanishing at once.
Stillness in the way a man goes still when grief steps out of memory and stands in front of him wearing a face he loved.
“My beloved,” she said.
His hand tightened on the hook.
“This cannot be,” he said.
“You left me in that field,” she said. “You removed the ring.”
She took one unhurried step toward him.
“I lost you. But I gained something else.”
“This is a deception!”
“It is no deception. Morvanna found me before I completed. I joined the dark bond.”
Skip went very still.
“You were not alive,” he said. The color had left his face. “When I removed the ring, you were not alive.”
“I was not yet gone,” she said. “Not entirely.”
His face shifted through several things at once. Disbelief first, then something rawer underneath. Grief pulled at his mouth before he managed to still it.
“I did not know.” The words barely came out. “I thought…” He stopped. Swallowed. “I thought you were already gone. I would not have left you. I would never have left you.”
“I know.”
For the first time, her coldness shifted. Recognition surfaced beneath it.
“I know you did not know,” she said. “Morvanna found me before I completed. She offered me the bond before the dark had fully taken me. I had a choice, at the end.”
Her red eyes held his.
“I chose.”
Skip did not move. The hook stayed ready, but his face had broken open around the wound of her. Mira watched him and softened her expression into something he might remember, one that might still mean something to the man who had loved her.
In that moment, I understood the cruelty of these creatures. She knew exactly what the face would do to him.
“Do you remember when you claimed me?” she asked.
Skip’s expression changed. Pain, immediate and visible.
“I have not forgotten,” she said. “I will never forget the feeling of that bond forming. Looking into your eyes and feeling everything you felt. Every depth of it.”
A tear moved down Skip’s face. He did not lift a hand to stop it. He did not look away.
“Do not speak of our claiming,” he said. “You are not Mira. The woman I loved is gone from this world.”
“The woman you loved has returned.”
“No.”
The word cracked through the corridor.
Mira’s eyes shifted to me.
“Is this the new woman you want to claim?”
Her gaze moved over me with deliberate assessment.
“She is very similar to me. The same size. The same…”
Her eyes lingered on my body. “The same architecture.”
My skin went cold. Skip said nothing. His jaw was tight. His hand on the hook was not.
“I am here to offer you both something,” Mira said.
Her voice changed again, settling into reason. Terms. Diplomacy with blood still drying somewhere below.
“Both of you should come to Druvenfall,” Mira said. “Scipio, bring me what you know of this garrison—its defenses, its weaknesses, every habit it has mistaken for strength.”
She looked at me. “Meghan, bring what you know from Earth. All of it.”
Her gaze moved between us. “Bring it all into the dark bond.”
Her eyes slid back to Skip.
“What we would give you in return is beyond anything your little claiming bond can offer. The dark bond is not cold. It is immersive. Every thought, every desire, every sensation shared across all of us simultaneously. What you call the claiming bond is a candle. What we have is…”
“Blasphemy,” Skip said.
“Desire is sacred, is it not?” she asked lightly. “We honor it more than your theology permits.”
She looked at me again.
“Morvanna herself. Her beauty. Her power. The full depth of the bond.”
Her voice dropped, intimate now.
“Every sensation felt by every member simultaneously. Every desire known before it is spoken. Every want met the moment it surfaces.”
Her eyes returned to Skip, and the quality of her attention became obscene.
“And I…”
Her gaze moved down his armored body with the unhurried recognition of someone identifying territory she had once known well.
“I have not forgotten what it felt like when you were inside me. The way you looked at me in those moments. As if I were the only thing in the world worth seeing.”
She let that hang in the corridor.
The audacity was, objectively, extraordinary.
I looked at Skip. His jaw was set. His hand was on the hook. His eyes told the truth.
He had loved her. Claimed her. Removed the ring. Grieved her. Went back to work.
And now she stood in this corridor using the most sacred thing they had ever shared as a weapon.
The tear on his face was the most honest thing in the room.
“Do not speak of our claiming, you blasphemous beast,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I think about our claiming often,” Mira said. “The dark bond amplifies everything. I have shared the memory with Morvanna personally.”
Skip’s face went white with rage.
Mira smiled.
“She is very interested in meeting you.”
The garrison below roared suddenly. A shout. A crash. A cry cut short. Closer now.
Mira’s head turned slightly, listening.
Then her eyes came back to me.
“All of us,” she said. “Together. Through the bond, you would feel everything we feel, and we would feel everything you feel. Every sensation. Every want. Every response. No end. No night spent alone with your own imagination.”
She looked between us slowly.
“We do not do anything by half measures.”
“Stay back,” Skip said.
His command voice had returned. Flat. Final. The hook ready.
“I can see that you will be difficult,” Mira said.
Her eyes moved from him to me. Something in her expression resolved.
“But I can see how you look at this Earth woman. If she joins us, your position may become more flexible.”
She turned fully toward me.
Everything Skip had taught me arrived at once.
Pain slows them. Throw the sword. Buy seconds.
My hand moved before fear could finish its argument.
I threw the sword.
It hit. The blade sank through leather and flesh. Mira stopped. Only for one second.
One second while pain traveled through whatever remained of her body faster than her mind could dismiss it. One second while her red eyes widened.
Skip crossed the corridor in four strides.
The hook completed its arc. The head fell from the body.
I was shaking. Violently.
The corridor filled with the smell of blood and something colder beneath it, something old and sealed and suddenly opened.
Whatever Mira had been before Morvanna found her in that field, whatever had remained of her frozen and waiting, finally left the prison of her body.
She was gone. Properly, finally gone.
I felt it.
I felt her leave the way I felt pressure change before a storm.
Mira’s soul was free. The thing that had stood in the corridor belonged to Morvanna, but the actual Mira—the woman Skip had loved and lost in a field two years ago—had escaped Morvanna’s reach.
Whatever held her had lost its grip. Mira had gone somewhere beyond the corridor and beyond the dark bond.
I had never considered myself a spiritual person. I had considered myself an empiricist. Standing in that corridor, shaking so hard my teeth nearly touched, I began to think those two things were not mutually exclusive.
The corridor was quiet. The body on the floor was no longer a threat.
Skip crossed the remaining distance to me. His arms came around me, and I went into them.
For a moment we stood there in the wreckage of what had just happened, holding on to each other with the wordless urgency of two people confirming the same fact.
Still here. Both of us. Alive.
He pulled back enough to look at my face.
His eyes were wet. He did not seem to be managing that fact.
Neither of us said anything. There was nothing in me capable of language.
I held him tighter.