Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Pain jolted through me like lightning through my spine. It was Nyaxia’s touch. It was Kajmar’s blows.
My eyes snapped open.
A vampire leaned over me. Her face was inches from mine, lips parted, a faint glimpse of razored teeth visible between full lips.
Every muscle of my body screamed, Fight!
My thumbs jammed into her eyes.
The vampire drew away with an infuriated shriek, and I lurched away from her. I landed heavily on the ground—I had been on some sort of bed—and scrambled to my feet, even though every muscle protested.
Two names bobbed to the surface of my churning mind:
Zefiah. Septimus.
I could sense Zefiah’s presence nearby, but I had no idea where Septimus was. The memory of his face in my last seconds of consciousness, burned and bloodied, returned to me before even the memories of the gods did.
I stumbled around in a circle. I was wearing a clean, white shift.
This was a bedchamber of some kind, though the style of it was unlike any I’d been in before—the furniture all low to the ground and carved of dark wood, accented with red velvets.
The walls were inlaid with burgundy brocade paper.
Two large windows were covered with heavy velvet curtains.
The room was shockingly ornate. More so than anything I had witnessed since the sun fell, even in the remains of great lords’ mansions.
The vampire woman rubbed her eyes, muttering curses. She had shoulder-length, white-blond hair. Her clothing was simple, leather breeches and a figure-skimming black jacket. An outfit that, especially to my still-addled mind, did nothing to tell me which House she was from.
My hand thrust out for Zefiah, but nothing happened, even though I was certain I sensed her nearby. My eyes bounced around the room to see her sheathed against the wall.
I called to her again.
Nothing.
What the hell, Zef?
With a hiss of frustration, I dove across the room and grabbed her, just as the vampire woman chased after me.
“Wait!” she started.
Zef was heavy in my hands, like trying to drag around a limp corpse. I noted this, confused, as I went to the door—
My body went rigid, freezing without my permission. I looked down. Tendrils of red dancing from my open wounds, suspended in the air.
“Take a breath and sit.” The vampire woman approached with her hand outstretched, beckoning to my blood. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
But I still gripped Zefiah, even as she compelled my body to drop her.
“Where’s Septimus?” I gritted out.
She sighed. “Sun take me, don’t give him the satisfaction of finding out those were your first words. He’ll be insufferable.”
Somewhere behind me, another door opened. “Too late.”
I was a little ashamed of my reaction to that voice. The rush of relief, like the first breath after a near-drowning.
I whirled around so quickly I nearly sent myself stumbling backward onto a coffee table. A firm, familiar touch grabbed my wrist, steadying me. “Easy, lyri.”
Septimus’s face stared into mine. His gaze started low and moved up my body. It was such a thorough, searching look. It reminded me of the way he had looked at me when I’d worn the modified habit in Bosqua, except there was no lechery in this stare.
So why did it feel just as intimate? More, even?
He was wearing clean, white clothes—a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to his neck.
But dark circles hung in the hollows of his eyes.
Bruises adorned the pale column of his throat, in a near-perfect imprint of Kajmar’s hands.
Beneath them were faint streaks of red, which seemed darker than before.
And his eyes . . . a full circle of deep burgundy encircled the silver-and-amber threads of both irises, a bit thicker on the left side than the right.
And yet, those eyes held such relief.
I had righted myself, but he still held my wrist, and I didn’t pull it away.
I said, “You look like shit.”
A smile bloomed over his mouth. Not a smirk, but an actual smile—slowly, like the unfurling of a blossom in the springtime, rare and precious and the kind of beautiful that felt like a stolen gift.
“So do you, Kyrene,” he replied, in a way that really said, I’m relieved to see you, too.
“I leave for five minutes, and you nearly blinded my sister?” Septimus said.
The vampire woman grumbled as I sank down onto a chair, as gracefully as I could manage. Nausea churned in my stomach, though I tried hard to look collected.
I cast the woman a wary stare. Now that he mentioned it, the resemblance between them was uncanny. Same sharp, elegant features.
“Your sister,” I repeated.
“Calista,” the woman said begrudgingly. Her eyes were bloodshot.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“It could have been better for me,” she replied. “But my brother speaks highly of you, and I hear you’re quite the asset, so I suppose I can forgive.”
My brother speaks highly of you. For some reason that felt borderline indecent.
Septimus cleared his throat awkwardly and seemed to very deliberately not be looking at me.
“And what pitiful outpost have you dragged me to now?” I said to him.
The corner of Septimus’s mouth tightened. He went to the windows and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled back the velvet curtains. I rose and approached them. My breath warmed cloudy puffs of condensation on the frigid glass.
Outside, jagged peaks of gold reached up to the starry sky.
Snow-drenched hills rolled in all directions, tinted blue and purple beneath the moonlight.
The sea was visible, just barely, in the distance, icy stone rising from the waves.
Rocky sheer cliffs cradled stone buildings, painted red, with white carved columns and triangular peaks outlined in gold.
A few spires stood above all others like gold knives stabbing the stars, though some were broken, moonlight dripping down jagged edges.
“Welcome to the House of Blood,” Septimus said. “This is Vaktrana. The capital.”
His home.
“I thought that outsiders weren’t allowed in the House of Blood,” I said.
“They’re not. But I’m a prince. I’m allowed to make exceptions.”
The words—the way he said them—skittered up my spine.
This was . . . odd. This was all so odd.
I glanced down at Zefiah, limp and heavy at my side. I expected a snide retort, or at least some kind of protest at being in the realm of the fallen ones, but she was silent.
“Lucky for you,” Calista said. “You would be dead otherwise. Our healers worked hard on you.”
My gaze slipped to Septimus, and the way he was looking at me sent a bolt through my chest. I wondered if this was how it felt for a vampire to be staked.
With that look, the memory of our battle against Ix and Kajmar returned to me. What he had seen of me. What I had seen of him. That image of him standing over Nyaxia’s dead body. And his urgent words in my ear:
Not yet.
Nyaxia had been right in front of me. Right there, and I’d held perhaps the only strike I’d ever get. All because of the vision I’d seen of Septimus’s desires. All because of those two words.
I heard the echo of Zefiah’s final cry before I lost consciousness: What have you done?
Holy fucking gods. What had I done?
I pulled away from the window, facing Septimus fully. “Not yet.” I drew the words out, looking him right in the eye. “Want to tell me what that means?”
He was the one who danced around pretty words and convoluted bargains. Life was too fucking short for that. Shorter than ever, now.
A smirk lifted one corner of his mouth.
“I do appreciate your bluntness, Kyrene.” He held out his hand. “So long as you get to be one of the few outsiders to ever witness Vaktrana, perhaps you’d like a tour.”
“I don’t want a tour, I want—”
“To talk,” he finished. “Then fine. Let’s talk.”
I stared at his hand. I remembered the first time he had held it out to me. Then, I had been struck by how elegant and unmarked it was. The hand of someone who, I was certain, had never known true suffering.
Now, his perfectly trimmed fingernails were caked with red, like he still had not managed to get the blood out.
Purple mottled his palm. White bandages wrapped four of his fingers and his wrist, black seeping through.
A persistent tremor lurched his little and ring finger, both of which were slightly curled in a way that seemed to not be of his own volition.
The harp and Ix’s bow had taken their toll on him.
I don’t like to get my hands dirty, he’d said so many times. But these belonged to someone who had been in the dirt right next to me. Maybe in more ways than I’d realized.
I took his hand.
Septimus and I limped down the hall. We were, he explained to me, in the Bloodborn palace.
I had been in many grand buildings, though never palaces.
None of them had looked anything like this.
The ceilings were tall, the walls lined with red paper and punctuated by gold columns and molding of dark wood, all intricately carved.
Long tapestries bearing the crest of the House of Blood hung from the high ceilings, that weeping woman staring sadly over the goings-on below.
But the Bloodborn palace was not opulent perfection.
Yes, it was beautiful, the craftsmanship evident in every detail of the molding and tapestries and mosaics.
But it was also incredibly old, and it showed.
Cracks wove through stained-glass windows.
Missing pieces interrupted the mosaics like gap teeth in a vicious smile.
Stunning marble statues lined the hallway, but many were missing their swords, or arms, or even heads.
I might have imagined that vampire palaces would have held all the finery that had been sapped away from the human lands over the last ten years.
That they were bastions of prosperity, thriving on the blood of the humans Nyaxia had slaughtered.
Instead, like Septimus’s battered hands, this one bore the marks of a vicious fight for survival.