Epilogue
SEPTIMUS
Istill taste her blood.
Who? I don’t remember. I just know she tasted rich and fragrant and bitter, exquisite in her complexity. I know I crave her now.
I am starving.
I smell blood everywhere. The cloying blood of birds above rushing through tiny breakable bodies, so easy to open.
The gamey blood of the deer fleeing through the forest, throbbing fast with their frantic hearts, running down my chin as I tear them out.
The sour blood of snakes in the grass, spurting as I crack their spine.
I smell blood everywhere. I taste it. I am still starving.
None of it tastes like her.
At times, I smell the blood of humans—thick and sweet and almost offensively pungent. They almost smell like her. But they do not taste like her, no matter how many of them I drink.
I am starving.
Blood is the only language I know how to speak. The only name I understand. Sometimes, when all is quiet, when the constant wail of hunger ebbs, I hear someone begging in the silence—please, wake up, please, pull yourself together, please, they need you! But it is so easy to ignore.
I still taste her blood. I search for a name that lies out of reach.
How long has it been? I do not know. I walk and walk. I follow blood and none of it is hers. I travel through forests and mountains and plains.
I am somewhere in the desert when the winged ones attack me. Spears pierce my back. My blood spurts, escaping beyond my control. I thrash and fight. But more and more spears bury into my flesh. More and more chains loop around my throat.
I do not know how many of them I kill, only that their blood now soaks the sand. But by the end, I am on the ground, breath wheezing. In my exhaustion, the hunger is momentarily sated.
Merciful silence.
I hear the voice: Pull yourself together, Septimus. Get control of yourself.
And at last, I recognize it. The voice used to be mine.
The winged ones hover over me. I realize, in this flash of lucidity, that they are vampires.
I think I knew them once—a woman with long black hair and silver eyes, a man with dark red eyes and feathered wings.
Threads of silvery light, like puppetry strings, run from their wrists and shoulders, fading into the sky.
“We’ll have to get her next,” the woman says to the man, who nods.
Her. I know who they mean, even if I can’t find the name. I still taste her blood, rich and fragrant and exquisitely bitter.
And just as the man brings down the pommel of his sword on my head, just as the world goes black, it finally comes to me, desperate and urgent:
Kyrene.
END OF BOOK V
Kyrene and Septimus will return in the finale of the Crowns of Nyaxia series.