Chapter 1 #2
I rolled to grab Zefiah’s hilt as another wave of howls rang out. Closer now. We were fucked. This was such a mess.
Where the hell was—
“Marko!” Valentina cried cheerfully.
{Useless buffoon,} Zefiah sighed.
I was inclined to agree.
Marko stumbled through the back door, barreling through the crowd of cultists like a bull through a pack of sheep. He swayed slightly as he swung his axe from side to side.
Where had he been?
{It appears that he was drinking,} Zefiah said disapprovingly.
Zefiah did not like Marko. Who could blame her? He was a piece of shit. And he was definitely drunk.
But he was also good with his hands. Good at using them for killing, and good at using them for—
A high-pitched screech drowned out all else.
Freeze. Pain.
Four doors. Seven windows. Twelve chairs. And—
I lifted my head to see Marko freeing himself from the paralysis, sweeping through the rest of the cultists. And Valentina—
She was on the ground, struggling to rise. She was such a small person, easily affected by the soulless on her best days, and more susceptible than ever now, when she was in such dire need of hixis. My heart went cold when I saw the pool of blood beneath her.
Blood. Dangerous.
{Kyrene, pay attention!} Zefiah bellowed.
I turned around just in time to see the cultist—the leader, the first man I’d threatened—looming over me.
And before I could prepare my own strike, a blade erupted through his gut.
He let out a wet garble, then fell limp to the floor as my savior yanked the sword free.
Mirie frowned at her weapon with a line of disgust over her nose, smoothing her freshly bloodstained white robes with her free hand. Then she looked around with obvious distaste.
“I take it that none of these severed heads belong to our mark,” she said drily, not bothering to hide her judgment.
It was quiet now. Far too quiet. The cultists who’d chosen to fight were dead, and the rest had fled. The soulless were surely near, still. Perhaps just temporarily distracted.
I gave Mirie an unamused look as I pushed myself to my feet. She only smiled in response. She had a beautiful smile, warm and calm, framed by just a hint of lines around her dark eyes.
It was also a very self-righteous smile. A requirement for joining any priesthood, from what I could tell. Acolytes were attracted to me for obvious reasons, but Mirie was the only one who stuck around. I had come to be secretly grateful for it.
“Enough judgment,” I muttered. “You can always go back to the church, priestess.”
I turned to Valentina, who now stood unsteadily.
“That was fun,” she said, and I genuinely was not sure if she was being sarcastic or not.
My gaze locked onto her torso. To the blood soaking through her shirt. When she turned, I spotted it in her hair, too, pouring from the back of her head. And she was swaying.
Valentina had not had a dose of hixis in five days and thirteen hours.
She did not tell me this—she hid it, in fact—but I was keeping track.
The cruelty of Val’s illness was that it was so easily managed if she had the right medicine.
A dose every day, and she was fine. One every week, and she could survive.
But she was feeling its absence, even if she’d never admit it.
The stuff was so damned expensive.
Mirie was already making quick work of Val’s wounds, binding them with cloth bandages.
“That was fun.” Marko grabbed a curtain, wiping gore off the edge of his axe.
I spun to him. “Where the hell were you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were late.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“And you’re drunk.”
“No, I’m not,” he said coolly, looking at me like I was the crazy one, and I bit my tongue.
Arguing with Marko was useless. Especially when he was drunk—which he was.
Mirie peered through the window. The compound was isolated. The nearest town was many miles away, and when we’d arrived, it had only been visible in faint little dots of light right up at the horizon.
Now, there was more light, and closer. Not the warm glow of torches, but blue—blue of Nightfire, vampire magic.
Shit.
Mirie and I exchanged a glance, and without a word, I could hear her I told you so.
She had told me so.
We were far from civilization. Low on supplies and low on money. Shiket had been after me for weeks about a string of heads she wanted me to bring her. But you couldn’t eat divine favor. Nor could you trade it for hixis.
When I’d initially picked up the job for Vinwest, I had thought the compound would be closer.
And the vampires were moving north, when they had spent the last six months concentrating on the south.
To make things worse, our new healer had died last week, and in the stupidest possible way—a gambling squabble in some backwoods village.
Which meant we had no way to quickly stop bleeding.
But I tried to never show nor feel uncertainty. I learned the hard way, when the sun first fell, that the darkness was no place for indecision. Often, taking no action at all was more fatal than choosing the wrong one. Even the vampires knew it. Terror was their greatest weapon.
Still, as I looked at the blood soaking Valentina’s clothing, I felt it anyway.
“You alright, kid?” I said.
She gave me a crooked smile, wide enough to reveal a hint of her copper tooth on the left side.
“They can’t get me that easy.” She pulled up her sleeve and fussed with the machine built around her arm—the spear gun that had saved me when I caught her.
Mirie gingerly pulled the silver dart from the eye of the fallen cultist, who spasmed with the wet POP, and handed it back to Valentina, who re-mounted it in the machine.
Valentina was the best machinist I’d ever met—a follower of Srana, goddess of science and machinery, which gave her the ability to craft technological weaponry. Her skill was pure artistry, even though she was barely sixteen and self-taught.
“The mark’s long gone,” Marko said, putting his hands on his hips and looking out the back door. “We going after him?”
Yes. The answer was on the tip of my tongue, immediate and obvious. Never once had I let a mark escape. It would be a branding nightmare. Imagine. The Vindica Ultis, bested by some common criminal.
But then I looked at Valentina, and her blood, and the spot beside her where our healer would have been if he’d still been alive. At the window overlooking the darkness, which I knew held beasts that were only coming closer.
Gods fucking damn it.
I thought briefly, fondly, of the simple years I had spent alone. How had I ended up in charge of all these people?
{Humans are pack animals,} Zefiah said unhelpfully.
Please shut up.
“He’ll get tired eventually,” I said. “Not many places for him to go out here. We have time before we go after him.”
“Really?” Valentina said. “You don’t want to go right now?”
“Fuck that,” Marko grumbled. “We’ve got five hundred riding on this.”
The soulless shrieked again in the distance. It was a calculation with only one answer. We’d have to get Val out of here, and fast, if those soulless didn’t find a distraction.
We made our way back to the front entrance. Valentina paused at one of the ajar doors.
“Do you hear that?” she said, not waiting for an answer before she pushed it open and let out a gasp.
It was the cage that I’d glimpsed earlier.
It was an ugly, makeshift creation, rods bolted into the ceiling and the floor, adorned with rusted nails.
There were perhaps ten or twelve people inside, all of them cowering against the wall except for one: a middle-aged man, who looked up at us with a delirious gap-toothed grin.
The blood of the three headless bodies had seeped into this room, though it took me a minute to realize that there was more blood than those corpses could have produced.
“Prisoners,” Valentina said.
Maybe. Sometimes groups like this would imprison trespassers.
Or they could be slaves. Bodies were valuable, especially if any were magic wielders of a god that the group lacked.
Followers of Vitarus, god of farming and famine, or Ijakai, goddess of animals, were especially valuable.
Srana, too. I’d barely saved Valentina from being carted off by traffickers half a dozen times now.
But Mirie nudged my arm. She nodded down at the crusted red on the floor. At the injuries on the prisoners.
My stomach turned.
Most were missing limbs. The wounds were fresh.