Chapter 59
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Perhaps I dreamed it.
Exquisite pain in my throat. Teeth I had come to crave like wine.
The taste of iron, sweet over a corpse’s tongue.
Powerful enough to claw a soul from the dead.
The first thing to return to me was hunger.
Insatiable. Deeper than my flesh—in my bones, in my soul. Like I hadn’t eaten in a lifetime.
I felt horrible. I was disoriented. When I sat up, flailing, certain that monsters surrounded me, my entire world spun, tilted. I emptied my guts and then attempted to stand, only to find myself in freefall, and then hitting a hard floor with a thump.
Consciousness blurred. Dreams and reality intermingled. I lifted my head to see boots walking across the room to me. Someone kneeling. A familiar elegant face, and a smirk curling the right side of his lips, and eyes like broken glass.
My heart clenched.
“Septimus,” I whispered.
And that face, those eyes, that inhale of vanilla, was a tether in a churning sea. One piece of stability, one leap of hope. Tears welled up in my eyes to see him, my throat contracting around those precious words:
You’re alive.
A beat of silence. I blinked, and everything grew blurry again. Hands hoisted me up, sliding under my shoulders and my knees, carrying me back to the bed like a child.
But they were not Septimus’s hands. I knew those, by now.
I forced my eyes open as I was placed back in the bed. Everything was blurry. I saw white hair. Fair skin.
Horns.
I blinked hard to clear my vision.
“Rest,” Atrius said gruffly. “Half don’t survive Turning. Let’s not make you part of the statistic.”
I can’t die, I almost said. That’s the only reason why I’m here.
But he pushed a canteen into my hands, and I didn’t even think before I lifted it to my lips.
Blood—I knew it was blood—flooded over my tongue, and gods help me, no wonder vampires were so fucking hungry all the time.
It was exquisite. Like drinking thick, savory wine.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Not until Atrius put his hand on mine.
“Slow,” he said, “or you’ll vomit it up.”
I could already feel it coming back up. I swallowed hard as Atrius rose and went to the desk at the other side of the room.
My memories were a clumsy jumble, like a box of puzzle pieces dumped on the floor.
The emotions came to me before the details did.
The room was still spinning, so fast that I couldn’t even make out where we were.
It was dark. Curtains hung over the windows. Not much furniture.
And we were alone. Me and Atrius.
“Septimus,” I choked out.
Atrius’s back was to me. But he stopped what he was doing, as if the name had physically struck him.
“You are in a safe place in the far north of the House of Blood,” he said. “We are high in the mountains. Near the deadlands. Acaeja hasn’t come this far. Three months in, and her forces still are getting their hold on the region.” He paused, then added, “We have had this conversation before.”
It took a moment to understand what he was saying. “Three months?” I repeated slowly.
I fully expected him to correct himself. To say, Oh no, I meant three weeks, or three days, or three hours. But he simply said, “Turning is traumatic on the body. And yours already had endured trauma enough as it was. You have been lucid for brief periods.”
Clearly nothing I could hold on to. And already, I could feel my consciousness fading again, but I clung to it fiercely. Forced my mind to rifle through every terrible memory. Acaeja’s vision for the future. Her betrayal.
And Septimus.
Our final moments hit me all over again. A wave of emotion clutched at my throat.
He had listened.
“Your sword is there, beside you,” Atrius said. “That’s usually what you ask next.”
I looked at the bedside table. Zefiah—just one piece of her, now, the broken stretch of steel attached to the hilt—lay beside me, pulsing faintly. My heart warmed to see her. Gods, I wanted to embrace her.
Instead, I told her wryly, Well, we’ve seen better days, haven’t we?
Silence.
I frowned and reached for her.
Atrius caught my wrist. “Better not.”
Then I understood.
Zefiah was a divine weapon. And I was now a fallen one. I could not speak to her. I couldn’t even touch her.
Grief, breathless, tore through me.
“Septimus,” I rasped again.
“He’s alive,” Atrius said. “Somewhere.”
But his tone told me everything I needed to know. There was no relief in those words. No hope. They were grave, as if giving a terminal diagnosis.
No—as if informing of a death.
Because it was a death. Septimus’s curse had taken him. There was none of the man I’d loved left in whatever body wandered somewhere. An animal with no dignity.
His nightmare. The fate I had promised him I would not allow him to meet.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the wave of pain. Perhaps my broken body shifting into a new life. Perhaps not.
Acaeja. Gods, what had I done? The sheer scale of it was staggering.
We had rid the world of Nyaxia. But in doing so, we had become weapons for another goddess.
One who had lied to us for years. Who had used every vision, every seer, as her unwitting tools.
Who had directed fate itself to engineer her takeover.
The manipulation of it was staggering. It occurred to me, in a wry thought, that Septimus would admire it.
He had not been the only one playing a long game.
“Sylina—” I choked out.
Sylina was a seer. A follower of Acaeja. Surely, she had some answers.
Atrius said, “She isn’t here.”
There was an edge to his voice that made me pause. I lifted my head, looking closer at him.
He said at last, gaze carefully avoiding mine, “I cannot be near her.”
I could feel the pain in those words, failing to hide beneath his stoicism. Seeping right through it like blood through bandages.
Slowly, his eyes lifted. I let out a long breath. Now that my vision had cleared, I could see it. That his right eye was now entirely red, swallowing even the whites. Evidence of the progression of a curse that just kept marching forward, even with Nyaxia imprisoned.
Acaeja had not spared us.
His curse had advanced. He could no longer be near his own wife. Could no longer stand the temptation of her human blood.
I’m sorry. The words sat heavy on my tongue. But those words were so uselessly inadequate. I had hoped to heal his curse, not worsen it; I had hoped to heal the world, not destroy it.
But hopes didn’t matter. Apologies didn’t, either.
I thought of the first night I met him. What he had said about me, with that one dismissive look in the sparring ring:
It’s not her.
“Guess you were right about me after all, huh?” I rasped out.
The joke fell flat.
Without a word, Atrius rose and went to the other side of the room. I stood and followed, wobbly as a newborn fawn, and watched as he dragged the curtains open.
A shaky breath left my lips as heavy fabric parted to reveal the world beyond.
A world devastated.
Gods, it was horrific. It made the destruction of ten years of war look downright childish in its clumsiness. What had we been doing, all these years? Ripping apart buildings and bodies with metal and fire and pointy sticks?
Acaeja destroyed the world like an artist did.
I wasn’t sure what city I was looking at in the distance—if it was Bloodborn or perhaps even Bosquan, this far north.
It was so far away that my human eyes would not have been able to make it out in the darkness.
But now, I could see it so clearly, even from here.
The city had once been modestly sized but thriving, with several tall buildings, a castle and cathedral, reaching into the sky, and hills covered in small blocky homes sounding them.
Now, the buildings unraveled as if someone had plucked a loose thread of reality and pulled.
Delicate strings of light, hundreds of them, thousands of them, ran to every corner, every window, every turn of every piece of architecture.
And where the buildings met the threads, it simply dissolved into the night like stardust, floating away.
And when I looked closer, my heart chilled:
Because I could see that every thread of light speared a person. A person, floating as if suspended in the moment an arrow pierced their heart, drops of blood floating weightlessly into the night.
Acaeja had said she would dismantle this world in order to build her new one. It was the truest thing she had ever said.
At last, Atrius spoke. “I know Septimus like he is my brother,” he said, “and I know that he would not have Turned you unless you’d asked for it.”
I remembered my own voice, so weak I hadn’t even known if I was speaking at all.
Turn me.
“And even then,” he went on, “I know he wouldn’t have done it unless he thought that you had a purpose for it. Unless he believed, in his bones, that you were a savior. Well, Vindica Ultis, it seems that we’re in need of one now.”
I stared out over a broken world.
I thought of every injustice. Every innocent person in a cage. Every vampire trapped by their curse. Every soul suffering the consequences of mistakes that were not theirs. On and on and on, the powerful looking at the weak, and saying, so sweetly, It’s for the best.
A fire sputtered back to life in my stomach. A fire that had started burning ten years ago, and had blazed hotter and hotter ever since. I no longer cared to control it.
I couldn’t speak to Zefiah. But I heard her voice, anyway, firm and gentle as a mother’s:
{Leave the tears. Bring the anger. Only one is useful to you now.}
I turned slowly to Atrius. “I have a question,” I said. “How can a vampire wield a divine blade?”
An almost smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“I wasn’t,” he said.
“Wasn’t—?”
“I wasn’t right about you.”
And there it was, fleeting and fragile and precious. Not blind reverence. Not disappointed disgust. Respect. Not the way one would look at a hero, but perhaps, maybe, the way one might look at an ally. Perhaps, one day, a friend.
I turned to the window. Pressed my fingers to the glass. I could feel everything now, like every sense had been made twice as sharp. I thought of Acaeja. The images she had shown us of her utopia. Her lies and her manipulations.
And I vowed to her:
I’m coming for you.
Then I touched my throat. Felt two little bumps of scar tissue, and a pulse thrumming steadily beneath it. A gift from someone who had already given everything.
And I swore to Septimus, across curses and prophecies, across dreams and betrayals, across kingdoms and ruins:
I’m coming for you.