Chapter XV. Bleed for Me #3
“Dior rose to her feet, gazing at the soldiers around her. The fire in her burned with a brightness we’d never seen; as if all that endless, restless energy she’d harbored those months at sea had at last been unleashed in the coming dusk.
But the men around her were torn, bruised, battered near to exhaustion.
Most had already used the blood she’d given them, draining the vials about their throats to keep themselves upright.
“‘Hear me now!’ she cried. ‘I know you’re tired, you’re bleeding, you’re ready to fall! But I ask nothing of you I won’t give myself! One last breath! One last drop! For all you hold dear, fight with me now, and let no man or woman here sheathe their blade ’til we reach those fucking gates!’
“The Grail raised her dagger, still wet with her own blood, and gazed at the warriors about her. She was streaked in gore and ash, but her beauty still struck us to our heart. A daughter of heaven she was, the blood of God’s own son in her veins, and there in Rive Nord, as the sun slunk lower toward that endless horizon, as the doom of this whole world gathered its cloaks about us, one girl stood tall against that bitterbleak dark.
“And she told it No.
“‘As I bleed for you, bleed for me!’
“‘San Dior!’ came the roar in reply. ‘FOR THE GRAIL!’
“The breakout began, Unbound stabbing through the alley mouth onto a blood-soaked thoroughfare.
We led as best we could through that maddening maze, dashing across rooftops, skipping over alleymouths, seeking the swiftest path to the bridge.
Capitaine á Connell fought in the vanguard, Phoebe at his flank, claws dripping blood.
Dior stood in the heart of the push, Reyne beside her, but as her men slashed at the Dead with their stolen silversteel, the Scion of Heaven drew no blood save her own.
They would fall, her Unbound, her sworn, her tiny legion—strong as thralls, but in the end, just as mortal as any other man.
But as they fell, their comrades would push forward, ever forward, leaving the wounded in their wake.
And Dior would kneel beside those fallen men, slicing her palm and laying bloody hands upon them.
“There was something beautiful about that. Something pure. That even in the midst of this brutality, this crashing, roiling, reeking machine of carnage, Dior Lachance took no life. She only gave it. Saved it. Smiling as the light returned to her men’s eyes, hauling them to their feet and kissing their brows, hale and whole once more.
“She was not destruction, but salvation.
“Not an ending, but a beginning.
“The one true hope of this world.”
Celene hung her head, dragging a lock of ink-black from her unmarred cheek.
“But the cruelest angel in God’s legion is not Mahné nor Phaedra nor Sarai. It is Fortuna, Marquis. Grim Lady Chance. And as we led Dior’s fighters out into a wide crossroads, at last within sight of that final bridge, the angel turned her back on us.
“The crossroad was called Place San Antoine.
It was named for the Third Martyr, a lowly monk who led a band of persecuted believers out of Sūdhaem by parting the Bay of Tempests—later renamed in his honor.
And looking about his square that day, the sun creeping ever closer to its rest, we could not help but laugh at the irony.
“A sea of wretched filled that square, Marquis. Soldiers and bakers and farmers and fletchers, all dragged into the hell of forever. They wore tattered rags or rent mail, dripping with the blood of Augustin’s slain. A gore-soaked, reeking ocean of vampires.
“And at their heart, astride a great black stallion, a highblood sat.
“There were other Ironhearts about the square—strands in the Forever King’s great tapestry.
But she was the one we saw first. She was tall, pale as winter’s cloak, dreadful as the dark before dawn.
Her cheeks and the hollows of her eyes were daubed with blood, so her face resembled a death’s-head.
Black hair was bound in braids long enough to touch her waist. And her eyes …
oh God, those eyes. Eyes that had seen years in their hundreds and murders in their thousands.
Cruel and hard and utterly bereft of soul.
“The eyes of a Prince of Forever.
“Four vampire knights sat beside her on thralled horses, and all wore suits of dark plate armor.
Skulls adorned every surface, and the Prince bore a scythe of that same dark steel, sharp and cruel and twice as long as a man; the same borne by Mahné, Angel of Death.
And so she must have seemed to the mortal men she fought—not a daughter of Forever, but of Death himself, come to sow red ruin among them.
Her mighty black steed was decked in barding of the same design, and turning toward our tiny band, the vampire stared across that rolling ocean of corpses, midnight gaze falling like hammers on Dior.
“As she blinked, we saw another set of eyes painted upon her lids in fresh blood. And she whispered then, her smile as bleak as the ending of the world.
“‘Lachance.’”