Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Zefiah was still sheathed across my back. Srana’s weapon burned in my hands. Atrius moved faster than any human warrior could.
Metal squealed against metal as his broadsword struck the staff’s handle. The force of his blow made the metal tremble—gods, it made my spine tremble. My muscles screamed, pain lighting my nerves like a spark in a drought.
Zefiah grew hot against my back. I knew she was burning with godlight, begging to be wielded. She was just as offended as I was that I’d allowed myself to be caught off-guard in a room with not one but two vampires.
I cursed my carelessness as Atrius drew back and came at me again. I deflected his next blow, barely, though the force once again had my legs buckling.
I righted myself. Spun around, dancing backward, out of his reach for precious split seconds. He was bigger than I was, stronger—hell, faster too. I needed an opening.
He readjusted his hold, and in that half a breath, I lunged.
{Let me take his heart!} Zefiah spat, at just the wrong time, distracting me.
Unintentionally, my hand slipped down the staff, sending the blade shifting just as I was about to land my strike. Fucking hell. I fell off-balance, just slightly. But Atrius was a good warrior. Maybe as good as me. Of course he saw it.
He raised his blade and brought it down.
The flat of his sword struck me in the abdomen, sending me flying.
I hit the ground.
Everything hurt. The pain consumed all else. My muscles tightened without my permission, body curling up.
I rolled over and opened my eyes to see Atrius standing over me. Septimus leaned casually against the wall, watching, cigarillo between his fingers. I resented that I felt his stare so acutely, and I resented even more that it was witnessing my ass on the ground.
Atrius shot him an unimpressed glance.
“It’s not her,” he said.
And there was just something about the way he said it. The way he looked down his nose at me, so dismissive, as I pushed myself up from the ground.
It reminded me of an old memory. Another voice, saying, It’s for the best.
I hated that fucking tone.
I threw the staff down and drew Zefiah. She let out a purr of pleasure as I slid her from her sheath. Godlight flooded the room. Pain faded to an inconsequential buzz.
I threw myself at Atrius.
He spun around, blocking my first strike, stepping out of the way of my second.
But I didn’t let up. A single battle without Zefiah and now it was bloody euphoria to have her restored to my grasp.
We danced around the room to a melody of metal against metal, of our boots against the floor, of ragged breaths.
Zefiah nicked his knuckle, drawing drips of beautiful black.
{More of that,} Zefiah sang, delighted.
I loved this part—when all the pieces worked together, straightforward, the one thing I was truly good at. I even loved the pain when Atrius opened a fresh cut below the one Septimus had given me on my shoulder.
I pushed forward, anticipating every move, blocking every strike. My next one had him receding. The one after that cornered him against the wall.
There.
I had him where I wanted him. My eyes locked to his chest, where sweat beaded at the neckline of his shirt—to what lay beneath it, skin and blood and bone and then, fallen vampire heart.
I charged.
I wasn’t sure whether I actually intended to kill him. Perhaps even if I’d wanted to stop myself, I couldn’t.
But just before the strike landed, I became distantly aware of red mist permeating the air. Of the smell of iron.
Something inside my body twisted, jolted, in a way it wasn’t supposed to.
And then, pain. Agonizing pain, as if I’d been lit on fire from within. My limbs jolted back, revolting against my muscles.
My body reeled backward. I slammed against the wall hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. Atrius stalked toward me. His hands were open. Ribbons of red—my blood—curled between us, as if suspended in water.
“Arrogance is not the same thing as competence,” he growled. His voice was different, somehow. It seemed closer to the sound a wolf makes than the sound a man does. The amber-silver of his irises had turned bloody crimson, his gaze glassy.
Blood magic.
Behind him, Septimus straightened, his casual stance tensing ever so slightly. But not moving. Not yet.
Another crippling wave of pain. My body jerked against the wall. The pressure was so intense that a wheeze escaped my lips as Atrius stalked closer.
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” he said.
He loomed over me now. Black-red bloomed over the whites of his eyes, more in the left than the right.
When his lips twisted, his teeth were dagger sharp.
It was impossible not to be viscerally aware of how much larger than me he was—he was taller than Septimus, and certainly broader.
My blood now surrounded us, an ominous fog of crimson like the mist on the seas.
Beads of liquid red streaked across Atrius’s pale cheeks.
I eyed Zefiah on the floor. But I couldn’t even move my hands to call for her.
“Atrius,” Septimus said warily.
That one word made my stomach twist. Because I heard it, unmistakable, in Septimus’s voice:
A note of fear, carefully disguised.
Atrius didn’t move. The red mist thickened, wrapping us in a cocoon of blood.
He lurched forward—
A streak collided with him. It was Sylina, flying from the doorway, sliding her body between mine and Atrius’s. Droplets of red fell unceremoniously to the ground, then quivered over the tile like beads of sand in an earthquake.
“Go,” she commanded under her breath. Her magic pushed me away, sending me sliding across the floor. Instinctively, I called to Zefiah as soon as I could, and she slammed back into my grasp with a satisfying force.
The first thing she said was, {He is lost.}
I let out a wordless sound as Atrius lunged for Sylina, certain that I was about to witness her death.
But he stopped short, inches from her throat. Sylina’s hands cradled either side of Atrius’s face, murmuring something to him that I could not hear. The blood that now surrounded them, ropey strings of it that reminded me of spider silk arcing from branch to branch, was Sylina’s.
A hand on my arm nearly made me jump.
“Training is over,” Septimus murmured. His voice was smooth, but I could hear the invisible cracks. “Let’s leave them to it.”
He’s going to kill her. The words stuck in my throat.
I was certain they were true as Septimus swept me out the door, and I watched them, standing there in their web of blood, until it closed behind us.
We rose up the stairs, steps calm but quick, and his urgency was not lost upon me no matter how calm he seemed.
“You shouldn’t leave her there,” I choked out.
We now walked swiftly down the halls. Zefiah hissed and spit in the back of my mind, like a cat confronted by a coyote. I was oddly dizzy.
“She knows what she’s doing, dove.”
“He’ll kill her.”
I expected a flippant remark. But Septimus was serious as he said, “No. He will not.”
“What was that? What happened to him?”
“Are you so very shocked by an opponent that’s actually better than you?”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
I stopped short. Septimus did, too, sliding his hands into his pockets. I stared hard at his face—crystalline grace, like a sculpture of glass. Yet for all its beauty, I found it just as fucking transparent.
“What did I just see?” I said.
Zefiah muttered, {A fallen one consumed by their sin.}
“The curse.” I answered my own question.
The specifics of the Bloodborn curse were a mystery, though there was no shortage of salacious rumors flying around. No one, not even the most well-studied vampire hunters I’d ever met, knew what it entailed.
And yet, I was certain that in Atrius’s glazed-over, bloody eyes, I’d glimpsed it.
Something flickered in Septimus’s gaze. Something I couldn’t put a name to and yet recognized innately.
And then, just as quickly, it was gone. He dragged his stare from my feet to my head.
“You’re a mess,” he said. “Clean yourself up.”
Only now did I realize we were back at my chamber. I looked down at myself. Unfortunately, he was right. I was covered in sweat and blood. And now that my adrenaline had faded, my muscles shook involuntarily. Embarrassing.
He reached past me and opened the door, a small movement that still somehow managed to seem infuriatingly smug.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe then I’ll get to meet this formidable Vindica Ultis I’ve heard so much about.”
And he turned away and strode down the hall, leaving me alone.
The next days—or had it been weeks?—blurred into an endless cycle of training.
The following morning, Septimus knocked at my door, and I was brought back to the arena. This time, it was not Atrius waiting for me, but another Bloodborn soldier. He didn’t so much as speak, just presented me the wrapped staff and unsheathed his sword.
It felt wrong to fight without Zefiah, and her grumbling made it clear she was no fan of sharing either.
But beyond that, I disliked wielding Srana’s weapon.
I felt Val in every click of the gears, every smooth stretch of metal, every elegant curve of workmanship.
And yet, I felt her in none of it. Because human hands hadn’t crafted this, and the ones that did had not seen fit to save Valentina.
The soldier that first night wasn’t as skilled as Atrius.
I won easily. Once I had him on the floor, I’d called to Zefiah before I even consciously knew what I was doing.
The blade was inches away from my sparring partner’s chest when Septimus leaped between us, hands raised, my blood frozen in my veins.
“Please don’t kill my cousin’s best guards,” he said, but the smirk on his lips was all vicious delight.
The next day, when Septimus brought me down to the arena again, it was Atrius there, and he remained my training partner from then on.