Chapter 40 Judgment
JUDGMENT
SAERIS
BLACK.
Stinking.
Foul.
The blood on the ground was an inch deep and slippery as hell.
I barely kept my feet beneath me as I raced for a thrall who was stooping down and pressing something to a female high blood’s lips.
The female’s eyes flashed with silent recrimination as she batted his hand away, rejecting the salvation he offered her, even as she drowned in the putrid blood she had stolen.
“Here, give it to me!” I held out my hand, waiting for the thrall to pass me a vial from the leather bag it was carrying, but the thrall shook his head. “Not for him,” he said. “He told us not to.”
“I don’t give a fuck what he told you.” I snatched the bag and turned back to where Tal was on the ground, kicking and shaking . . . but Foley was already there, jamming his fingers between Taladaius’s teeth.
“Fair . . . turn around,” he gritted out. “I told him I didn’t want to come back as a vampire. Well, now he doesn’t get a choice. He’s coming back Fae whether . . . he likes it . . . or not!”
Taladaius did not like it. He raged and he spat, but in the end, Foley forced the clear contents of one of the vials down his neck and massaged his throat until he swallowed.
The vampire stopped vomiting, then . . . but the blood was replaced by an awful white foam that frothed up from his mouth, forming a bubbling pool on the ground. I couldn’t decide what was worse.
There were others lying on the bloody floor, foaming at the mouth. Not as many as I might have thought. One in eight high bloods? No, less. One in ten had made the choice to live and face the consequences of their years in Ammontraíeth.
Foley stood, panting as he watched Tal shiver on the ground.
“How are you all right?” I asked him.
“He told me not to drink the wine. I thought he was warning me about the blood in it. I could already smell it. I—I wasn’t going to drink, anyway.”
“He made sure none of the thralls gave us wine with blood in it,” I added, rubbing my forehead. “He—fuck, this is why he wanted to disavow me!” I closed my eyes, shaking my head. “It’s all linked. The blood, I mean. Malcolm’s blood turned these high bloods. It must be some kind of magic.”
“Not magic. A spell,” Fisher said. “Something to affect Malcolm’s line. He severed you from his blood so that it wouldn’t affect you. He’d already done the same with you a long time ago, Foley.”
“And . . . what about me?”
I rounded on the voice, my mind fighting to make sense of what my eyes were seeing: Zovena, not as she had been earlier, when I had used her as a footstool.
There was color in her cheeks. Her eyes were blue.
I could hear her heart beating from where I stood, ten feet from her.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she flared her nostrils, staring down at Tal.
“He dragged me into an alcove while you were dancing. I wasn’t feeling well.
I was dizzy. I . . .” She blinked. “He took me by surprise. I tasted it, whatever he tipped into my mouth, sour and . . . sweet, and then my eyes were full of stars. I woke up and . . . and . . .” She looked at me, as if I might be able to provide an explanation for what had happened to her.
I had none to give her.
Tal hadn’t mentioned a word of this to me. Not a peep.
“He’s having some kind of seizure,” Foley said.
“Give him something to bite down on,” Fisher fired back. “Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.” He was busy scanning the floor of the Hall of Mirrors, looking for something; whatever it was, he couldn’t seem to find it. Turning to me, he said, “You’re okay? You’re feeling okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Good. Can you wait here for me? Please? Help Foley with Tal?”
I nodded. “Yes. I—”
He whipped around, grabbing Zovena by the arm, and charged up the length of the hall, picking through the bodies as he went.
Everything was happening so quickly. Hundreds of vampires lay dead or dying on the ground.
The air was thick with cloying copper, the scent so pungent that I wanted to throw up.
Lying on his side, Tal’s body trembled violently; his eyes were rolled back into his head.
His pale skin was spattered with blood, his beautiful dove-gray suit ruined.
“Is he going to be okay?” A stupid question. Absolutely idiotic. No, of course he wasn’t going to be okay. Tal had not wanted to drink the contents of that vial. He’d orchestrated this literal bloodbath, and he hadn’t wanted to stick around to see how it played out.
Foley’s dark expression said all of this and more. But there was a grim determination in his eyes, too. One that said he wasn’t about to let the Lord of Midnight go without a fight. “He’s calming now,” he said through gritted teeth. “He’s coming through the other side of it.”
Was this what it had been like in the maze, after Malcolm had attacked me? My blood, staining the ground. Tal, undertaking dire actions to save me? Yes, it must have been like this, in a way. But . . .
Fisher had acted as my proxy. He had given consent on my behalf. Here we were, forcing an outcome onto the silver-haired male at my feet explicitly against his will.
I didn’t care.
I wasn’t about to let him go, and neither were any of his friends.
Tal let out a wheezing gasp, back arching. His eyes snapped open, and Foley fell backward onto his ass, covering his face in his hands. The confidence he had spoken with just now must have been for show, because the strangled sound he made was all relief.
“What . . . did you do?” Tal croaked. His eyes rolled wildly up at us, though his body was at last still. He pressed a hand against the ground, ringed fingers sticky with blood, as if the room was spinning and he was worried he might not be able to hold on much longer.
“You can’t just do—do this . . . and then leave!
” My emotions were all over the place. Any moment now, I was about to start sobbing.
A part of me saw the carnage that surrounded me and was glad.
The vast majority of Sanasroth’s high bloods were gone.
They had accepted their true death, rather than return to what they once were.
But we’d had a plan, damn it, and Tal had gone and made his own plan without telling any of us.
“Why?” I crouched down beside the male and brushed his silver-spun hair out of his face. “Why do this?”
But Taladaius only closed his eyes, as if I already had the answer to that question and he could not bear repeating it.
A tear formed in the corner of his eye, crystal clear as water, welling before it rolled over the bridge of his nose and fell into the blood.
“You have to let me go. I can’t stay,” he whispered.
“Hypocrite.”
Tal’s eyelids opened again, his eyes the same thunderhead gray they had always been. He looked at Foley, despair carved into the lines of his face. “You don’t understand—”
“I understand perfectly,” Foley spat. An anger had come upon him, swift and unforgiving.
He shunted himself forward so he could take Tal’s jaw in his hand and force the male to look at him.
“You told me time and time again that becoming a vampire doesn’t alter the foundations of who you are, only highlights them.
Look around you. These bastards are crumbling to ash right now because they’re evil down to the festering marrow.
They choose death over life because they don’t want to lose their power.
There was no oath forcing them to carry out the atrocities they committed.
It was in their nature. You—” Foley broke off, shaking Tal’s head, forcing him to focus when he tried to turn away.
“You are blameless. Whatever horrors you committed were forced upon you. Malcolm knew how much it would tear you up inside.”
Tal closed his eyes, more tears cutting tracks down his cheeks, his features crumpling. “You have to let me . . .” he whispered.
“You’ll forgive yourself,” Foley insisted. “You will. And in the meantime, you can take that misplaced sense of guilt and use it to make amends. Help fix what Malcolm used you to break, Tal. There is still hope.”
Taladaius’s head kicked back. Another seizure gripped him, twice as bad as before. He shook, face contorted into a rictus of pain.
This was worse than watching my friends in Zilvaren die. There was a tangible enemy there, but it seemed as though Tal’s own body was his enemy, and there was nothing I could do to fight that. “Why isn’t he getting better? The others . . .”
There were other high bloods, former high bloods, picking their way through all the death.
They bore the stunned look of sleepers woken from a bad dream.
They stepped over the bodies of their lovers and their friends, frowning in confusion at the scene before them.
They seemed fine, aside from the fact that most of them were sobbing.
But Tal had started foaming at the mouth again.
He flinched, clutching at his chest as if he were in agony.
“Come on. We need to get out of here.” Fisher had returned, Zovena with him.
He pushed the blond forward, and she staggered, nearly losing her balance.
She’d lost her shoes at some point, and her beautiful red dress was torn and filthy.
“I can’t find Algat anywhere,” Fisher said.
I’ve searched high and low. I saw her in the hall not long before I pulled you off the dance floor, though, Osha.
She didn’t have time to leave before Tal’s little stunt came to fruition. ”
“Which means . . .?”
“Which means she probably drank from a vial and isn’t a high blood anymore,” Fisher said. “And trust me, if you thought she was bad as a vampire, you definitely do not want to run into her as a witch.”
Tal’s ring; Zovena’s ring; a golden chain bearing the Briarstone family sigil: three new relics, made in the blink of an eye.
No jokes. No secrets. No memories.