Chapter 11 Susenyos
SUSENYOS
Susenyos would not face Arin Tawendyo unarmed.
He stood outside the red sandstone buildings of the Southern Sost, preparing to gather his weapons.
It was a beautiful piece of architecture, every inch polished and sparkling, unlike Adane House, which always seemed to be graced by a layer of dust. Usually, Susenyos enjoyed the opulence and danger of the Sost. Loved the sounds of pleasure snaking through the corridors, the smell of sweetened copper lurking from the blood courting room. Now he felt unsettled.
He tried to clear from his thoughts the soft brown eyes that reminded him of the desert at twilight as he traveled the gilded halls of the Southern Sost. But Kidan’s touch lingered on his skin, her blood calling to him. And it wasn’t just hunger gnawing at him.
Susenyos was having visions of black rot inside Adane House.
It was that name.
The three scars gouged into his lower back sent a wave of pain along his spine.
Lusidio.
He had gone decades without hearing it. Then it had come from her lips, the question in her gaze, too curious and innocent, crashing the two worlds he’d hoped would never meet. Kidan belonged in Uxlay, in safety. The greatest threat he hoped she’d face was murderous humans.
Let her leave Lusidio to him, the hellish nightmare crafted for the soulless. Susenyos would be ready this time. He wouldn’t flinch or hesitate. He’d get his people back and arm himself with the artifacts for the war on the horizon. And only his best soldier could help him do both.
Arin.
His skin grew alive and warm just thinking about reuniting with his people. Everything was within his reach. It was the same feeling he had the night before his coronation, the world ready for the taking, teeming with promise.
The Nefrasi—they were ruthless, intelligent, but most of all, his people. Not Samson’s.
The idea would be laughable if he wasn’t so infuriated.
Susenyos categorized them into three groups—his warriors, strategists, and lovers.
His warriors fought, his lovers made their bellies warm, and his strategists discerned which paths to take, which to avoid, how to make money flow, and it was their collective thinking that had led them to discover the blade artifact in the sea of the Atlantic, near a small island called Cuckoo.
When he’d had to choose whom to turn into a vampire, locked in his father’s throne room in the cool mountain air of Gojam, Arin instructed him to make the list.
“Only three hundred. No more,” she’d said, striking as a blade.
Susenyos had wanted them all. The gardener he greeted every day of his youth on the way to reading lessons, his friends and their families, his lion master, his friend Samson. Why not save them all from death?
It’d killed him, making that list. It’d killed him even more when Lusidio destroyed his people.
He reached his quarters and froze.
The door was open.
Although this space was communal, it was still considered rude to barge in uninvited on a claimed quarter. Slowly, Susenyos walked in. He half hoped it was the cockroach Makary House dranaic from the meeting. Here to finish what they started.
Even Uxlay law wouldn’t punish him if he was attacked first.
And because the day had truly been hellish, finally, the angels chose to smile down at him. It wasn’t the Makary dranaic. Sitting on the gray couch, metal-coated hand under his chin, was Samson the Usurper.
“So Professor Andreyas is done teaching you when to bite and when to bark,” Susenyos said, listening for Arin or Warde.
No one else was around.
“This—” Samson hurled the word at him with disgust. “This is the place you chose to hide in. With senseless laws and restrictions that make us no more than dogs.”
“Uxlay is restrictive but useful. But I doubt that’s why you’re glaring at me.”
A growl made his scar ripple. “You left us.”
There it was. Sixty years after he left Samson and his people in the torture cells of Lusidio’s camp. The reckoning he’d thought would never come.
“I had no other choice,” Susenyos said, the words well-practiced by now, cool and even.
Samson flew out of his chair and was on him, metal fist pulled back with all the strength of his vampirism.
Susenyos didn’t dodge. He met the impact directly.
Susenyos’s skull rang as the blow sent him crashing into a desk, then flat against the wall.
The pain was extraordinary but he savored it, let it warm his entire face and burn.
It would fade soon. That was the beauty of his immortality.
He could handle a thousand blows and survive.
He needed Samson to see he could not break easily.
Needed himself to remember.
Blood dripped down Susenyos’s shirt from his split skin, making him frown. Another custom Delarus shirt ruined. He didn’t mind blood, but it did spoil a lot of beautiful clothing.
Susenyos rolled his tongue, touching the silver nail piercing the roof of his mouth. The urge to shoot it straight into Samson’s thorax was nearly unbearable. But the bastard had to live until the blade artifact was secured.
Samson vanished from his sight.
Something shifted in Susenyos’s periphery, a glint of metal. He launched off the wall, seized the metal-gloved hand aiming for his face, and slammed Samson against the wall, relishing the sound of his groan.
There was also a theory he needed to test.
He yanked off Samson’s left glove, drawing out a satisfying cry.
All of Samson’s fingers were blackened. His veins, once green, were now coal-like and unnaturally thick, pulsing, an infection moving through him like a worm.
The only thing different since Susenyos had last seen it were two strips of oddly shaped leaves wrapping the length of Samson’s arm.
This was black rot. The visions that haunted him in Adane House. The sickness that killed his betrothed.
“You shouldn’t be able to stand, let alone fight me,” Susenyos said, forehead furrowed. “Half a day. That was your limit. Yet I hear you’ve been walking around all week.”
Black rot consumed everything it touched—plants, animals, humans. For vampires, it latched on like a leech, continuously feeding off eternal energy.
There was no cure.
And Samson shouldn’t have had the strength to fight at this hour of the day.
Samson raised his feet and kicked out, cracking Susenyos’s ribs and sending Susenyos flying onto the couch. He breathed through winded lungs. He had known this fight would eventually happen. And better here than at Adane House.
“How are you managing the pain?” Susenyos asked, chest heaving.
A victorious light shone in his enemy’s eyes. “You think this is like the last time we fought. Things have changed, wendem.”
The last time they fought, in the endless pouring rain of Gojam Castle, lightning had struck twice. God himself had been watching, choosing the victor, determined to banish them both to the underworld where they belonged.
They had both failed in their mission that night. The puddles had reddened with their blood, and they had ruined the castle of the late empress—Susenyos’s mother. Delivering blows louder than cracking thunder. Yet they had not killed one another. It was almost shameful—their fight.
Susenyos’s blood-licked silver would always miss a vital artery, and his claws would sink into every inch of flesh except near Samson’s heart. His opponent failed similarly. From the way Samson’s jaw hardened now, he too was remembering the mud-soaked grass and their panting breaths.
“If things have changed,” Susenyos said slowly, “why not aim for my heart right now? Or are you incapable of killing me?”
Susenyos extended his claws, ready. The bait wouldn’t work, but he wished it would. If Samson came for his heart, Susenyos would find it in himself to finally destroy his childhood friend.
When Kidan had pointed that gun at his heart, Susenyos had shifted forward, either to stop her or help her, long before he heard the name Lusidio.
“That night, I realized something,” Samson replied, an odd calm sliding into his wretched voice. “Your death would give me no joy. It is your suffering I need. That is what you deserve and that is what I will give you.”
A snarl left Susenyos. “Your existence is suffering enough.”
Samson emitted a dark chuckle, a crow’s laugh. “No. Suffering is losing the people that know you most in this world. It is being labeled a coward by your own court. A selfish, spoiled prince.”
“Emperor,” Susenyos growled.
“You stopped being their emperor the day you left them to Lusidio. But I led them out of that hell. I guided them back to the light.”
Anger tightened his veins. Samson was a mirror of his worst memories, and he would always haunt him, always revert him to his weakness if he didn’t kill him right now.
When Susenyos received a hint about a group of Uxlay researchers who were close to discovering the second artifact—a mask—he’d chosen to flee the tortures of Lusidio with Iniko and Taj and find the mask himself. It had been selfish, leaving his people behind.
But he had no choice.
The artifact always came first.
At least, he told himself that. Slowly, a year melted to another, then another, and he remained, playing the role of a citizen at a university. Searching the Last Sage’s settlement in Axum with Yodit Adane, the previous dean of Uxlay.
It’d been… peaceful. Then shameful.
That was before he heard about the Great San Er Fire and the sun fell from the sky.
“Twenty years ago.” Susenyos spoke slowly, feeling his ribs knit and heal. “I heard you all died in the Great San Er Fire. I came looking for you all.”
Susenyos had experienced all kinds of pain during his long life, but none equaled the grief that had set upon him, unending and miserable, on that day.
He remembered where he was when he heard the news—reading Ebid Fiker in Hanna’s Garden, and there’d been a bee resting on a rare black rose.
Iniko stiff-backed, face wrought with anger and sorrow as she told him.
A horrible war had broken out between the Lusidios and the Nefrasi, and the Nefrasi were defeated.
Burned in holy fire.
Taj and Iniko went with him in search of their old Nefrasi court, but there had been no trace.
Not one survivor. Although Susenyos suspected some had to have survived.
Iniko had taken five years of silence for their fallen people.
Taj had drowned himself in copious amounts of blood and weed.
And Susenyos… Susenyos had locked himself in the artifact room of Adane House, polishing each and every one of his people’s belongings.
Keeping them close like a ghost librarian.
Last semester, after Titus Levigne had mentioned the word “Nefrasi,” a dangerous hope had struck him.
A hope that he could finally fix his mistakes.
“You used the fire to fake your deaths and escape Lusidio,” Susenyos continued, unable to keep the impressed tone out of his voice. “You did well.”
“I don’t need your approval,” Samson spat.
“Do you think we should reward you for coming to examine our charred bones? What about the forty years before that? When we were skinned and defanged and tortured? What did you do, wendem?” He stretched out his arms, pointing to the carpeted walls.
“You languished in a hidden paradise as all spoiled princes do.”
Susenyos knew better than to show his irritation at being called a spoiled prince. Yet the snarl and intention behind it—emphasizing the word like a punishment as his father did, boiled his blood.
Fuck Uxlay’s laws. He was about to murder Samson here.
It was Taj who rescued Susenyos from the carnage he was about to unleash. His friend knocked on the open door, tipping his head in. “Sorry to interrupt, but the Sicions are coming this way. Maybe table your lovely reunion for another time?”
Samson marched toward Taj, bowing his head to snarl, “You’re the scum of the earth, you know that?”
Taj cracked a smile. “Your words cut me deep, but I sort of like it?”
“You think you’re special because he took you along,” Samson said.
“I am special. More special than you,” Taj muttered.
Samson hissed, fisting Taj’s shirt and pulling him close. “He will abandon you soon.”
With one last glower thrown at Susenyos, Samson left the room, retrieving his metal glove and sliding it on as he went. Taj whistled, shaking his locs. “He’s still obsessed with you.”
Susenyos worked his jaw and went to his closet, fetching his silver weapon, the wavelike edge sharp against his touch.
“I’m meeting Arin. Then I’m taking my people back from Samson.”
Taj nodded slowly, taking in Susenyos’s dangerous tone.
“Tell us what to do.”
Susenyos slid the weapon into the hidden stitch inside his Delarus-made coat.
The blade settled next to his copy of Ebid Fiker by Chimand Alizo.
The Mad Lovers. He traced the edge of the cleaved grapefruit on its hard cover, anchoring himself.
Every battle, he carried this book and his dragon blades with him.
If he died, though Susenyos had no plans on it, he wanted to be buried with this book. That way, he would see her again—the Sage that saved his life. The one he’d painted a portrait of and hung in the artifact room. Truly know if she was real or not.