Chapter 44 Nadje
Nadje
Seven days till the Hunter’s Moon
Ash choked her lungs, filling the tent.
Her mother’s muffled cries were right beside her ear, her body shielding Nadje’s own even as it burned. Rapier beams of sunlight knifed through the canvas above them.
Another wing talon ripped across the roof. Slash, slash!
Nadje screamed in terror.
Her mother’s crumbling hand clamped across her mouth. “No, baby, shh,” she rasped, her very voice turning ashen.
Hunger and hatred had driven the creatures from Strigoi Gorge to hunt this encampment of vampires even beneath the rising sun. Their fur and wings sheltered them as they attacked the tent. Slash, slash!
Nadje whimpered.
“Shh.” Mam? rubbed her other hand over Nadje’s face, using her own charred skin to protect her daughter’s. Ash smeared across Nadje’s cheeks like paint. “Run out back. Get to…hiding place.”
“We can both make it!”
“Silly girl,” she murmured, a ghost of her old tone. “Love you. Now go!”
Slash, slash! Light flooded in.
Mam? clenched her fangs against a scream, but the burn wrenched a wail from her embered lips. “Goooo!” Her body collapsed into ash over Nadje, burying her.
Once Mam?. Now char.
Slaaaaash! A talon hooked the tent and ripped it skyward. The covering spiraled off like desert weeds in a gale.
Light. Blinding. Her heart raged in her ears. Mam? gone. Dispersed on the winds.
Coated in ash, Nadje sprinted away from the hunting strigoi—small, fast, slipping between tents and shadows, unseen. Her lungs burned as she strangled back sobs and ran for her hiding place, a cubby dug deep into the sand. She wrenched the hatch open and hurled herself inside.
Blackness crushed in. Her breaths hitched hard, body shaking as shock took hold.
A canteen of blood and a small bag of ground talon awaited her. As Mam? had taught her, she mechanically rubbed herself with the talon dust to disguise her scent. But each fleck of ash that drifted from her palms felt like a last whisper of her mother.
Sobs racked her as she clawed at the ground, as if she could gather the scattered pieces back—
She shot awake, chest heaving.
Wheezes whistled from her lips. She forced herself to calm, to regulate her breaths. Just a nightmare. The nightmare.
Breathe in. Out. In. Calm.
She could survive a thousand years, and this nightmare would still live fresh.
Bloodreach’s bell tower tolled, and she jolted again. She’d be late for her other job!
She spilled out of bed and grabbed her maid’s uniform. It stank of the cleaner she’d used to scrub out blood yesterday. She ignored the itchiness of the fabric as she tied on her apron.
Inkletter’s visits usually gave her something to look forward to all day, but he’d been gone this week, off studying a new acquisition.
Nadje hadn’t had a pressing mission for them, so she’d tried to shrug off his easy absence from her.
Yet as of last night, she’d landed a new job, had met with a promising contact in Umber during her feeding field trip.
He wanted information only found in this castle, information she could get. For a price.
She grabbed her chamber keys and a pile of folded linens, then debated bringing her other tool—a small, glass vial.
Was she only going to clean? Or to work on her next getter-of-things mission?
Inkletter had warned of the dangers of snooping around the castle alone. Maybe she should wait for him. He could watch her back, teleporting her out of danger in a flash.
But she didn’t know when he’d be back, and time kept passing.
Mam?’s words echoed: We’ll save up some gold and buy passage out of here. One night, we’ll be free.
She’d had four days before she’d burned to death.
With that memory in mind, Nadje pocketed the vial, then climbed ten stories from the servants’ ward to the royal floor.
The abandoned hallway stretched before her, lined with luxurious rugs. The doors to the princes’ and princesses’ chambers loomed like gaping mouths.
A prickle crawled across her nape. Ever since her exchange with Baelor the Unraveler, she’d felt watched, but the sensation hovered even more intensely here…
Outside, rain pattered. Inside, moans leaked through thick doors, pleasure and agony intermingling.
The eldest daughter of Neculain and Sereth had an amputation fetish, was aroused by regeneration. The youngest prince spent every hour all but attached to an intoxispell vaporizer. Another son drained donors to death, then forced revivals. Prince Resurrector’s success rate was questionable.
This floor was a level of hell—the bleeders, the feeders, the deviants, all locked into sin. If Lia hadn’t escaped Bloodreach, would she have become like her siblings?
Some said the drugs that kept the donors docile had the opposite effect on the royals who drank from them, making them crazed.
Or maybe this castle was as dangerous as the Badlands, twisting any occupants who couldn’t get free.
Nadje frowned at a small figure curled up on the floor down the hall, then hurried to help. But as she approached, her steps slowed.
A donor’s corpse. Discarded beside a tray of broken bottles. Trash for pickup.
The female’s face was blank. Glazed eyes. Pierced jugular. Not much older than Nadje had been when her mother had died.
Would this one’s mother ache for her child? Or be unaware of what had been stolen?
Nadje leaned against the wall, and her breaths shallowed, the smell of ash thickening in her nose.
Not now. Not now.
She shoved the waking nightmare aside and hurried to the last door on the hall, the heir’s suite. She pasted on a fake smile and knocked. “I’m here to service the room!”
Silence.
Every entry into Co?tin’s chamber risked her life. But more than her maid duties pushed her onward.
She unlocked the door and slipped inside. Flickering light from lanterns cast shadows over the open curtains and the untouched bed. Co?tin wasn’t here.
She locked the door behind her, dropped her linens atop the spread, then headed straight to the closet.
A safe sat on the floor, a matte black cube with golden embellishments.
Golden. Like Co?tin’s infamous sword. Even the General of Nothing had taken a head here or there.
A chill slid over her skin.
The first time she’d discovered the safe during her cleaning rounds, she’d wondered what a royal needed to protect. No one dared steal from him. Something valuable must lie within. Something she might need.
Her new patron, a Berserker related to Shieldchief Arctos, had hired her to gather intelligence on the blood donors—their number, their condition. He hadn’t mentioned the queen overtly, but he must wonder why Yrsa hadn’t stormed Bloodreach to liberate her people.
Prince Co?tin had boasted about having influence over an entire faction. What if he had some kind of unholy leverage over the queen?
Again, Co?tin was the epicenter. And Nadje sensed the safe held the answers.
She recognized the mystical sigil locking the safe. She’d once smuggled a similar one from rogue witches to a client. Only Co?tin’s blood could open it.
His fangs often sharpened outside his control—like wayward erections—and he never cleaned up after himself. His blood was usually everywhere.
She’d brought the vial to collect any trace. Yet the newly cleaned floors gleamed back at her.
“Lia,” a voice moaned from the bathing chamber. “Need you, sor?…”
Nadje froze.
He was here.
Out of his mind on an intoxispell!
Silence resumed. No movement sounded. Passed out?
Some impulse carried her closer to the chamber. Steam curled in ribbons, redolent with the tang of blood and the musk of magic.
Nadje nudged the door open an inch. The hinges gave a small whine, stealing her breath. But the sound didn’t rouse him.
He lay submerged in a large tub, head tipped back against the marble rim, the pale line of his throat gleaming in candlelight. His lashes fluttered against his cheeks as he dreamed. His chest was still. His neck belied no pulse.
A decanter had rolled from his hand to the tiled floor, where it leaked its last drops. His lips were cut. A trickle of crimson threaded from his bottom one into the water.
Drip…drip…
For a long, careless moment, she watched him—the sheen of damp lashes, the cruel beauty of his face, the chiseled perfection of his body.
Drip…
Her brazen hand found her vial, uncorking it. Her reckless feet shifted her closer.
Madness!
The glass in her palm felt impossibly small for the danger it would hold. But his fresh blood could save her weeks of scavenging. Her mother had died dreaming of escape. Nadje refused to die dreaming. Deciding to steal now and reckon later, she eased down, close enough to feel his heat.
She tilted the vial to his lips. The glass kissed him as softly as a lover. One bead slid in, then four more.
She drew it back and trapped the glimmering garnet with her cork.
He moaned again. The sound scorched her nerves.
Nadje backed away, disbelieving what she’d just done. She slipped through the door, closing it with infinite care—
—and nearly stumbled at the faint shift of water.
He’s waking.
Heart hammering, she flew across the room, her feet ghost-silent over stone. She escaped to the hallway, vial clutched tight like stolen gold.
She pressed her back to the cool wall and stared at her prize. The key.
So valuable, she was tempted to dip her tongue and take a taste. She shook away the urge, tucking the vial deep into her bodice.
A shiver of triumph—and lingering terror—ran through her. How could she have risked herself like that?
Straightening her shoulders, she strode down the hallway of sins.
Because this is passage.