Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Valentina sat at her workbench, tightening a spring for her latest creation. She was young, like when I first met her. Her face, still round with childhood, was scrunched up in concentration.
Her work, as always, was impeccable. I thought about telling her so—that even at ten years old, she was the best machinist I’d ever met. I thought about telling her something else, too. She was angry. We’d had some argument earlier that day, about something I no longer even remembered.
But I watched her, and I said nothing at all; I couldn’t remember why I did that, either.
Valentina looked up. Her brown eyes speared through me, older than her face.
“This is going to hurt,” she said.
What? I started to say, but instead, I woke up.
“This is going to hurt, dove.”
And holy fucking gods, hurt it did. It was utterly agonizing. The pain consumed everything else, every other sense, every memory, every grounding force of any other physical sensation.
Still, I bit down hard on my scream—I had no awareness of anything, except the innate, somehow unshakable certainty that I did not want to let the person with me know just how much I was suffering.
I became conscious of a firm grip under my good arm, around my back. Someone cradling me, like a child. I forced my eyes open to see my right arm dragging uselessly over muddy dirt.
Zefiah.
Her absence struck me viscerally. I flailed, instincts calling for her, but the grip around me tightened.
“Cooperate for once in your life,” a voice said into my ear, so close that lips brushed it, “if you want to keep that sword arm.”
Septimus.
Scattered pieces of this bizarre situation assembled through the haze of pain.
Septimus was carrying me.
We were in a marshy forest. Tall, dark-barked trees towered over us, a canopy of leaves blotting out what little light remained from the stars and moon.
My human eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, especially without the help of Zefiah’s light.
The trees were dense. My clothes, I realized dimly, were soaked.
The aethergate had apparently dropped us in the middle of a swamp.
I was nestled up against Septimus’s chest, cradled in his arms, my head against his shoulder.
It was a shockingly intimate position, and I instantly hated it, but I couldn’t move.
I was pressed so tightly against him, and so little clothing separated us, that I could feel the strain of his body as he fought to drag us both up the bank.
I lifted my head just enough to see the sliver of his profile. A muscle twitched in his jaw. His teeth were gritted. His nostrils flared.
He was avoiding looking at me in a way that seemed deliberate.
We reached the top of the bank and all at once collapsed. Septimus practically dropped me, then stepped away so swiftly that by the time I lifted my head, he was several paces away, leaning heavily against a tree.
He looked like shit. Rotten, trod-on, melted shit. I acknowledged this only briefly, in some compartmentalized section of my logical mind, because the rest was consumed by the pain. My wounds were painful, but Zefiah’s magic had eased the worst damage.
Except for my arm.
My sword arm.
Fear drowned me. A child’s fear, the kind I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a decade. I tamped it down quick.
“Medicine,” I choked out. I’d meant it to be a command, but it came out like a strangled plea.
Even with the help of magic, I had minutes to repair this before I permanently lost some or all of the function in my right arm—or the entire arm itself. Even now, I didn’t know how long our aethergate travel had taken. It might already be too late.
Don’t think about that, I told myself.
Septimus still leaned against the tree trunk. He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and withdrew a small glass vial. The liquid inside glowed silvery blue. My heart leaped.
Medicine, magically crafted. Human medicine. Thank the fucking gods.
He let out a weak chuckle. “You look surprised. You really thought I’d adopt a human without the means to care for one?”
I wished I had the ability to speak so that I could come up with some kind of snarky retort for that. The best I managed was a disgusted twitch of my upper lip and a pathetic-sounding grunt, which I intended to mean, Just give that to me instead of toying with me like a gods-damned cat.
I held out my palm. Septimus tossed the vial. Poorly. It landed several feet to my left, in some tall grass.
I stared at him flatly.
“Couldn’t have handed it to me?” I wheezed.
Another raspy chuckle. “Afraid not,” he said. And it was only then that I looked closer at him—at the way his body so fully sagged against the tree, his hands folded behind him, his head drooping as if the weight of it was just a little too heavy to hold up.
Still, I didn’t appreciate the humiliation of having to drag myself agonizingly to the vial—just a few feet, but it felt like miles, and every minor jostle tugged at the delicate, precious threads of flesh that still held my arm to my shoulder.
It was a miracle that with the blood loss I was still conscious without Zefiah in my hands.
I muttered curses through my teeth as I stretched, groping around in the tall grass, and sighed a silent prayer when my fingers wrapped around the glass.
I looked down at the vial in my palm. It wasn’t large, perhaps the length of my hand, small enough for me to close my fingers around it.
And yet, so very precious—precious in the human kingdoms, and even more precious here, in Obitraes, where vampires would have no need or want for human medicine.
It was clearly fine stuff, perhaps crafted by a practitioner of Ix or Vitarus, the gods with magic best suited to the art of healing.
But would it be enough to save my arm?
What if it wasn’t?
Again, I didn’t allow myself to answer that question.
I scanned the forest. Zefiah was close—she’d been in my grip when we went through the aethergate, and besides, I could sense her. But the forest was so dense, I couldn’t see her glow.
Zefiah!
Nothing.
My consciousness blurred, and the next thing I was aware of was Septimus’s voice snapping, “Kyrene. Focus.”
More of my blood dripped to the forest ground, floating in the dirty marsh water.
I’d heal better, and faster, with Zefiah near me.
But I couldn’t go find her in this state.
I craned my neck to look down at my shoulder.
Nausea churned at the sight of it. A mess of blood and gore and a few bright white pieces of broken bone.
I needed to close the wound as much as I could before I applied the potion.
“I need help,” I said through clenched teeth.
The words were nearly as painful as the wound.
“That medicine was difficult to get,” Septimus said. “That isn’t help enough for you?”
His voice was, as always, smoothly casual. Yet there was a slight strained edge to it that made me pause, looking a little closer at him. At the way his eyes kept drifting to my bloody shoulder. Lingering. Then moving away, abruptly, like he had to force them to.
I choked a laugh. “Oh. I see.”
His eyes leaped from the bloody mass on my arm and narrowed at me.
I said sweetly, “Are all vampires so weak?”
The fury that flashed across his face was startling. Unlike anything I’d ever seen in his eyes.
“You call me weak? Me, while you couldn’t even control your own impulses long enough to make sure you weren’t throwing yourself to the wolves?”
“You hired me to kill gods. So that’s what I set out to do.”
“Did you?” He spread out his hand at the swampy forest floor. “Ah yes, here she is. Srana’s corpse, successfully slain. Right next to the weapon my people risked their bloody throats to get.”
Someone was feeling a little spicy in the wake of defeat.
A satisfying change from Septimus’s constant smug calm.
Despite our circumstances, it sent a thrill up my spine, like one small winning move in a losing game.
A nice distraction. I’d rather think about the disruptions in Septimus’s mask than those in my own.
“That acolyte was going to kill you,” I said. “And if you hadn’t interfered, I would have finished Srana.”
Septimus’s face was still again, that smirk painted back on, though I noticed, with some smugness of my own, that it seemed pinned to his lips by force. “As much as I love watching you work, it should have occurred to you that I had a plan. A plan that you chopped up. Literally.”
I should have ignored this. But Septimus had a way of igniting my curiosity. I paused. “A plan for the automaton army that showed up at your doorstep.”
The smirk began to look a little more genuine. “I told you, dove. I’ve been preparing for this for a very long time.”
“Preparing with your seers. Seers and prophecies.”
“Something like that. I prefer to avoid surprises.”
I felt a little less foolish now. The prophecies, of course, were bullshit.
I flashed him a grin that probably looked a little delirious. I could taste the blood on my teeth. “But I surprised you.”
A beat of silence. A long sigh. “Yes, Kyrene. I’m afraid you did.”
He didn’t sound happy about this, which was satisfying to me.
{It should not be, you reckless child,} a familiar voice slithered, weakly, through the back of my mind.
My heart leapt. My head snapped up.
“What?” Septimus said.
Where the hell are you? I demanded.
Silence.
Gods-damn it.
My arm. I looked down at it.
“I need to patch this,” I said. “Right now. Come help me.”
Septimus was silent for a beat too long.
“That is not a good idea,” he said.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I thought you had all this incredible self-control.”
Even in the darkness, where what little remained of the moonlight slithered over the elegant lines of his neck, I saw his throat bob.
He said, at last, “The fact that I am standing here, Kyrene, is evidence of my self-control.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes, muttering under my breath. My entire body tensed as I took my good hand and wrapped it around my dangling forearm, and a blinding wave of pain passed over me.
“If you’re going to insult me,” he said, “at least allow me the pleasure of reveling in it.”
“I was just musing to myself about how terrifying and vampiric you are,” I said, “and how lucky I am that such a big bad chain-smoking monster is kind enough to stay all the way over there while I sew my own fucking arm back on all by my—”
As if in the hopes my own tirade would distract me, I pushed my arm back up.
This plan did not work.
My vision went white. A pathetic near-sob choked from my lips.
And immediately, my grip failed, leaving my arm dangling again. Fuck.
I couldn’t do this by myself.
“Sh!” Septimus whispered.
I froze. I hadn’t realized I’d cursed aloud. When the haze faded from my vision, I looked up to see him pressed against the tree, body rigid, face turned to the forest.
In the back of my mind, Zefiah’s distant voice warned, {Fallen ones are near!}
Fallen ones?
For the first time, I actually took in our surroundings. The fact that the trees were dark and tall, covered in ivy—unlike any that I’d seen in Glaea, or, for that matter, in most of the human kingdoms I’d been to.
It occurred to me to ask:
“Where are we?”
A wince rippled over Septimus’s face. He didn’t answer.
“Ah,” I said. “So this wasn’t part of the plan either.”
He was not joking anymore. “Hush.” His silvery amber eyes were steady, a finger over his lips. “Hush,” he said, more quietly.
He said nothing else. But he didn’t need to. His seriousness cut right through the haze of my pain-addled delirium.
Fallen ones, Zefiah had warned. Not Bloodborn, clearly, if Septimus was worried.
Shadowborn, then?
Then he whispered, urgently, “Don’t do anything foolish.”
I hissed back, “Why?”
An uncomfortable vulnerability—panic—began to clench in my chest, though I stuffed it back down. I was suddenly very, very aware of my fragile humanity without Zefiah’s hilt in my hands.
But Septimus just straightened. His expression went placid, though I could sense the effort in the rearrangement of muscles. All at once, all visible evidence of his pain drained away, leaving only disaffected, lazy confidence.
It was mere seconds before the figures melted from the darkness.
Gods, I fucking hated the Shadowborn. I hated the way they moved so silently. I hated the fact that they could simply slip from the shadows as if stepping from behind a curtain. I hated the way their magic jammed its fingers into your mind, as invasive as an unwanted hand up my shirt.
And above all, I hated that I feared them.
Unwillingly, the sight of all those Shadowborn soldiers, wearing uniforms that looked exactly like they had that night, appearing around us like dusk falling, dragged me back to my seventeen-year-old self.
Septimus’s lips curled. His hand slipped inside his coat, as if instinctively reaching for a box of cigarillos, and his expression only barely flickered when it came back empty and he slid it into his pocket instead.
“Mother help me,” he said with a silken chuckle, “I didn’t expect such a welcoming party. What a pleasant surprise, Egrette.”
Egrette.
Queen Egrette, of the House of Shadow.
My heart went cold at the name.
Slowly, slowly, I turned, until I saw her emerging from the forest, flanked by half a dozen guards—a vampire woman with a beautiful, angular face and braided dark auburn hair, a copper crown woven into its intricate knots.
She carried a spear that I knew was god-touched in some way—copper that matched her crown, with an elaborately carved hilt, and a blade that glowed slightly, just in the right light.
When there was blood on it, it brightened.
I knew this, even though the weapon was now sheathed across her back.
I knew it because you don’t forget a thing like that on the worst night of your life. And I still remembered vividly what Queen Egrette had looked like, covered in the blood of my friends and innocent children, the night the vampires had come for Vostis, ten years ago.
Even with the distance between us, Zefiah, wherever she was, screamed a wordless cry for Egrette’s blood.
Egrette barely looked at me as she smiled at Septimus, canine teeth glinting in the darkness.
“Prince Septimus,” she said. “What a surprise indeed. Coming into the House of Shadow’s borders uninvited. Terribly presumptuous of you.”
My heart stopped.
That bastard had brought us to the House of fucking Shadow?
Septimus returned Egrette’s smile and bowed his head.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I thought it would be worth it.”
One elegant hand swept out to gesture to me.
“I heard it was your birthnight soon, and so, I couldn’t resist bringing you a gift. The Vindica Ultis. I heard it was exactly what you wanted.”