Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Igot out of my seat too fast. The floor tilted sharply. Mirie caught my shoulder, steadying me.
{Six bleeding blades,} Zefiah groaned. {You are drunk.}
But my attention was fixed only on Val. She crossed the room and set the necklace on the table. The gold chain pooled in a stray drop of beer.
“This was theirs,” she said. “The prisoners in the compound. Remember? Quin gave it to me. Said that the innkeeper bought it off a traveler and it was too pretty to melt down.”
Right now, I hated Quin more than I had ever hated any vampire.
Her brow knotted. “But those people would need it to get shelter at a temple. Do you think they came through here? This is the wrong direction.”
I blinked hard and saw the man who had given me that pendant. The hope in his eyes, and then the heartbroken fury.
The sober part of myself—the version that had successfully managed to keep harsh realities from Valentina for years now—was screaming the right answer.
Pretend that you have no clue. Pretend that it’s a different necklace.
Pretend that those people are still alive, safe at some temple somewhere, and she has no reason to even suspect otherwise.
Instead, in my drunkenness, I choked out a laugh. A horrible, bitter laugh.
Because sweet, naive Valentina would believe that those prisoners traveled this far in the opposite direction of the nearest temple, despite the fact that half of them had no fucking legs, and just happened to end up at this very middle-of-nowhere inn.
She would believe that rather than come to the obvious, ugly truth.
That laugh fucked me. I knew it the minute Valentina’s face fell. One sound, not even a word, and something broke.
“You had it,” she said. “You sold it.”
Marko, always excellent at finding the absolute worst time to stick his head into a conversation, sank heavily into the seat beside us, stinking of booze and petty victory.
{Tread carefully, Kyrene,} Zefiah warned. I could feel Mirie’s unspoken warning, too, in her steady stare.
“Of course I sold it,” I said. “We needed the money.”
I didn’t say anything about hixis—never would throw that in Valentina’s face, not ever. But she understood.
“But . . . why did you have it at all?” she said.
“The prisoner gave it to me,” I snapped. “A gift for saving his life.”
Saving his life. I remembered the way that old man had looked at me as he died. He had chosen death over the soulless, and he’d just kept staring at me, steady, accusing, as I ran him through with Zefiah. Seeing the truth of me.
Valentina wasn’t stupid. She knew that it was a gift no one, not even the most grateful acolyte, would offer. Certainly not one any self-respecting hero would accept.
I didn’t want to see that realization on her face. I snatched the pendant from the table and jammed it into my pocket, turning away abruptly.
“I’m exhausted,” I said. “Time for sleep.”
But Valentina said, sharper than I’d ever heard her, “Tell me what happened to those people.”
I stopped. Faced her again, against my better judgment.
The three of them stared back at me.
Mirie and Marko knew. We had never talked about it, but of course they did. Their innocence was long gone. I’d cradled Val’s like a rare flower in a delicate glass terrarium, so realistic she wouldn’t even know it was a lie.
But now, on her face, there it was. Right there in those big brown eyes. A crack.
My lips parted, but I couldn’t speak.
Marko ran a hand through his hair. “Come on, Ky. She’s not a gods-damned child.”
My gaze snapped to him, shooting poison. I wanted to scream at him, Yes she is! Don’t you remember before the sun fell and a sixteen-year-old was a child?
But had that ever been true? I hadn’t been a child then, either.
A flush had now risen to Valentina’s cheeks—embarrassment, or anger, or shame, or all three. “What did you do?”
Her voice cut through the buzz of the crowd. I’d rarely heard her speak like that, and I was embarrassed that it surprised me. A few patrons glanced at us.
My ugliest impulses reared up at her tone, her judgment, and I was speaking before I could stop myself.
“What the fuck did you expect me to do, Valentina?” I snapped.
“Think. Think. Say I save them. Say I bring them with us. They’re slow.
They’re bleeding. They lead the soulless to us.
You’re dead.” I staggered closer, and I knew that I looked like a messy drunk but couldn’t stop myself.
“I won’t let that happen. I spared the ones who wanted it from a worse death.
The best they ever could have hoped for. And the rest got what they asked—”
“You killed them.”
Valentina’s voice was small. Like a child’s. The fracture became a crack. Her innocence shattered, and horror spilled over her face. That look hurt worse than any wound I’d ever suffered.
Everyone always looked at their heroes like that, in the end.
“You killed them yourself,” she said. “Or you let them be bait for the soulless. That’s what you did to them.”
“Enough of the self-righteousness.” I barely recognized my own voice. “I thought that was Mirie’s thing. Not yours. You’re too smart for this, Val. We don’t all get to survive. Every minute we go on living, it’s because someone else didn’t.”
Her throat bobbed, eyes glistened. She shook her head. “That isn’t true.”
A bitter laugh tore from my throat. “Look at us. We kill for a living. Every dose of hixis you’ve ever gotten was at the cost of someone’s head.
And I let you deny that for too long. When I was your age—” Those words were met with a vivid flash of an old memory, blood and guts and fear and pain, and I pushed it desperately away.
I ground out, “Marko is right. I’ve fucking coddled you, Val. I should have forced you to make that choice right alongside me. I should have handed you the blade.”
“Kyrene,” Mirie said, firmly, quietly, in a tone that commanded, that’s enough.
{Shut up, you fool,} Zefiah hissed, {before you say more that you cannot take back.}
Too late. I already wished I could suck the words back into my lungs. My drunkenness smeared my regret, but I could feel it looming already, worse than tomorrow’s hangover.
The petty part of me had wanted someone else to bear the weight of my own shame with me—but the part of me that loved Valentina, loved her more than I’d loved anyone, wanted it to be absolutely anyone but her.
She drew in a long breath and let it out shakily.
“I’m not stupid, Kyrene. No matter what you think of me. I know what the world is like. I just thought—” A muscle flexed in her tight jaw. Now, she looked so much older than her years—as if, between the cracks of her broken faith, I now glimpsed her as she would be ten years from now. I hated it.
At last, she finished, “You’re just . . . you’re the Vindica Ultis.”
How many times had people said that to me? Always in that hopeful tone of voice. I’d numbed myself to it. Now, hearing it from her, it hurt fresh all over again. Maybe because I so wished it was true.
But I covered this shame with fury—armed my soft heart with sharp blades. I scoffed. “Because I’m a divine warrior? The gods love this. They made us this way.”
Every damned one of them. Shiket sending me to punish every petty slight against her—never true criminals, simply people who had insulted her, spurned her.
Vitarus, god of abundance, dancing across the land dangling unfulfilled promises of harvests and reveling in the desperation of his starving followers.
Ix, goddess of fertility, sprinkling pregnancies and then letting women die in childbirth out of nothing but her own disinterest. Acaeja, goddess of fate, building her own fucking vampire army.
And of course, worst of all, Nyaxia herself. Creating an entire species for no other purpose than to revel in fucking bloodshed.
Every single damned one of them. It was a game to them. Why did they escape judgment while Val was looking at me that way?
My eyes burned. I blinked away the sensation and reached for the wine glass.
{Enough drink for you,} Zefiah chided, though there was a hint of softness in her voice.
Fuck off.
I took a swig and turned back to the others.
Marko laughed to himself and took a drink of his own. “Women. Never want to be on the wrong side of them.”
Everyone ignored him.
Mirie said, “We should turn in. We all need to rest before we travel to Yiferis in the—”
“You’re not going to Yiferis.”
What had bounced around in my head indecisively came out of my lips, spurred by my anger, in definitive statement.
Mirie blinked. Even Marko looked up in surprise.
“What do you mean, we’re not going?” Val said. “You need to go do Shiket’s—”
“I do,” I snapped. “I am. But you’re not.”
I took a breath and let it out. When I spoke again, I worked very hard to craft my voice into that of the Vindica Ultis, commanding and unshakeable.
“I’ve learned that the Shadowborn vampires are after me. They’ll be following me to Yiferis. Might cause some trouble. It’s best for all of us if you aren’t there.”
Understanding slowly fell over their faces.
“So you dragged us halfway across the kingdom instead of telling us this,” Mirie said. “When were you planning on sharing that information?”
“She wasn’t.” Valentina’s dark eyes were cold. “She was going to wait until we were about to leave. And then she was going to send us away, because it would be too inconvenient to keep us around. Right?”
I didn’t deny it. Because that was exactly what I had been planning to do, though not at all for the reasons Val said. Instead, I said, “Don’t act like I’m doing something selfish by keeping you away from hordes of Shadowborn.”
“We’ve dealt with vampires before.” Val crossed her arms tight over her chest, now. She looked like such a sullen teenager.
“Not like this. Let’s not give them more blood to track. Or thoughts.”
I could see that Mirie was offended by this, as someone who had worked her whole life to train away her weakness to vampires. And to her credit, she had done an excellent job. But she was still human. Human without the benefits that wielding Zefiah brought me, a half step closer to godhood.
And it wasn’t Mirie I was worried most about.
“If it’s so dangerous, then maybe you shouldn’t be going, either,” Valentina said.
Mirie and I exchanged a glance. She did not try to tell me I shouldn’t go. More than anyone, Mirie knew that not going and risking Shiket’s wrath was far more dangerous than any vampires.
“I’m not about to let some vampires stop me from fulfilling my god-given mission,” I said, as if I hadn’t already made all kinds of excuses for not fulfilling my god-given missions. Then, to Mirie, “You’ve been meaning to pay a visit to your temple, yes?”
“In Hegaella. Yes. But that is many miles east.”
Only now did I fight a brief uncertainty.
I imagined the three of them traveling alone through some of the most dangerous territory in the human kingdoms. They’d have to cross lands that had been completely overtaken by soulless.
Worse—if what Septimus had told me was true, it may soon be overrun with Shadowborn, too.
And they would not have Zefiah to protect them.
But if they made it all the way to Hegaella, they’d be safe. Hegaella was one of the few remaining major human strongholds. They’d be with great warriors, like Mirie, who had trained their whole lives. And Mirie would be with the closest thing she had to family.
Still, anxiety tightened in my stomach. I thought of a stone fortress I’d once gone to because I had thought it was the safest place in the world, and I’d been very wrong.
“This is stupid,” Valentina said. “You’re sending us across the kingdom, and then what? You’re going to trek a few hundred miles back to us all by yourself?”
The answer was right there—yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do—but the words that came out of my stupid, drunk mouth were a shock even to me.
“Maybe you should just stay there.”
Mirie’s brows rose, but she remained silent. Valentina’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of her head. Even Marko choked on his swig of beer.
“Stay?” Valentina’s voice rose to a pitch, and in that moment, she sounded like such a little girl. “What the hell are you talking about, stay?”
“Your skills are in high demand. Hegaella is one of the biggest cities left on this continent. You could make a good living as a machinist there.”
The more I talked, the more certain I became.
Because sending them—sending Valentina—away meant that she would never again look at me the way she just had. It meant she could hang on to her innocence just a little longer.
And right here, right now, it had become terribly, inescapably clear that if Valentina remained with me, one day she would become me. And what a tragedy that would be.
“No,” she said. “This is stupid.”
She looked at Marko, then Mirie. “This is stupid,” she repeated, in a tone that really said, Tell her that you think this is stupid, too.
But they didn’t. Mirie only held my gaze, and right then, with a searing hurt, I knew that she saw what I did.
She said, “The Brotherhood would take us in. I can write to let them know of our arrival. If you’re certain.”
I always was. This was no world for wishy-washy uncertainty.
Still, I hesitated as I looked at Valentina’s face—a hurt face that seemed so young, so childish.
I hated that I’d put that hurt there. I missed the version of her I’d seen half an hour ago, delighting in music and the attention of some teenage boy.
I missed a thousand versions of her, in this moment.
Versions I’d seen evolving every day, every hour, of the six years we had spent together.
All at once, their absence struck me, the grief suddenly unbearable, a pain worse than any wound I’d suffered.
I could comfort her. I wanted to. A better version of me would have—could have, without falling apart myself. Perhaps the version of me that little girl had thought I was. The hero.
But that hero did not exist, and that little girl was gone, and Valentina stood before me. All I could do was protect her.
In my drunken haze, the words I wished I could say were mushy, stuck in my throat like thickened oatmeal. So I only said, “You will go to Hegaella tomorrow. I’ll go to Yiferis. Alone.”
Valentina looked like I had struck her. “But you need us.”
I shook my head and turned away.
“I’ll go alone,” I said again, this time quietly, as if to myself.