Chapter 2 #2
I fumbled for a roll of bandages and wrapped the deeper gashes on my arms as they leaked fresh blood. The crude field medicine would hold for now. I should have cleaned them properly and stitched the worst wounds, but the curative formula called to me.
The door creaked open behind me. “Sidney?” I didn’t need to look up to know Carlyle stood in the entryway. His voice, smooth and easygoing, cut through the haze of pain with notes of concern mixed with fatigue. “I heard you come in. How’d it go?”
I didn’t turn around, a calculated move to hide the involuntary wince that tightened the side of my face.
My jaw burned as the catalyst kicked in at last. A concert of ruin and repair, a wet, grinding sound as a mosaic of shattered bone settled and fused.
Each piece grated into its proper place with sharp, rhythmic agony.
The temple taught me to master pain, to relegate it to a distant hum on the periphery of my focus.
Yet this was a roaring symphony of it, and I, a poor conductor, failed to conceal the tremors in my hand as I reached for a fresh vial and my measurement tools.
The pain ebbed far more slowly than it came on.
“Queen Nemea is dead.” The words slurred as my jaw protested the movement. I cleared my throat, hoping Carlyle would mistake the strain in my voice for exhaustion.
His footsteps approached, slower than usual.
Carlyle had been a mentor since I arrived at the temple fifteen years ago.
The priest who’d taken in a dhampir child with nowhere else to go.
He’d been father, teacher, and confessor all rolled into one patient package.
The gray threading through his brown hair had multiplied in recent months, each strand a testament to the weight he carried as one of the temple’s senior clergy.
He sighed. “You’re bleeding all over my laboratory.”
“Dr. Hillman’s laboratory,” I corrected, facing him. “I’m just borrowing it.”
He wore the gray robes of a servant of Aetherius, but they did little to dull the keen intelligence in his brown eyes. His practiced gaze swept over my injuries. Years of patching up slayers had given him medical skills that rivaled most doctors’.
“Sit,” he said. “Let me clean those wounds before infection sets in.”
I wanted to refuse. There was work to do. But my body swayed, and the examination stool looked inviting. I found myself sinking onto it before I’d decided to move. Carlyle gathered supplies from the medical cabinet.
“Tell me about the fight,” he said as he removed my wraps and began cleaning the deeper cuts still lingering on my arms.
“She was as tough as I expected.” I straightened, forcing my spine to cooperate despite the screaming of my nerves. “She caught my crossbow bolt.” The memory still stung my pride. “But the rupture slowed her down enough for me to get close.”
“And the intelligence about her weakened state?”
“Accurate. Her magic was compromised.” I clenched my fists as he probed a particularly deep gouge near my elbow. “She was strong enough to break my cheekbone, but not strong enough to stop me from putting a stake through her heart.”
“But she’s dead. The House of the Sanguine must be in chaos.” A slow smile spread across his face. “You did it, Sidney. You actually did it.”
“It’s a start.” I winced as he cleaned my chin.
He frowned and peered more closely at my face. “This is pretty bad.”
“It’ll heal fast.” I shrugged. “Advantages of dirty blood, remember?”
He resumed his work, but I caught the tension in his shoulders.
Carlyle had never been comfortable with the more violent aspects of our calling, despite training dozens of slayers over the years.
He preferred research, strategy, and the intellectual chess match of dismantling vampire society from within.
The blood and stakes were necessary evils to him.
To me, they were justice.
“The temple’s list just got shorter,” he said, his tone shifting with a hint of official business creeping in. “With Nemea gone, we can destabilize the entire power framework. And with the House of Whispers already pressing their advantage, the timing couldn’t be better.”
“The temple’s list and my list are different, Carlyle.”
“Sidney…” His voice rang with a familiar warning, sharp and unmistakable in its intent. “We need to discuss your targets.”
I stiffened, in no mood to repeat this argument. Again. “What about them?”
“The temple’s mission is to dismantle the House of the Sanguine’s authority structure.
Remove key leaders, destroy their infrastructure, and create enough chaos that they can’t maintain their stranglehold on Pythia and the rest of Gormont.
” He set down his medical supplies and fixed me with the stern look that preceded his lectures.
“Your list takes time away from what needs to be done.”
I thought of Razira. She’d been the first person to teach me how to fight back. She’d shown me that I didn’t have to cower in the shadows like my mother had. Through her, I found Aetherius’s light.
She was gone now. Another victim of the coven’s cruelty.
The faint scars on my arms told the story of those years, not just from my recent experiments, but from the bloodletting they’d forced on me as a child. Servant’s marks, they’d called them. Permanent reminders of my “place.”
Instead, I forged them into proof of my worth. I’d wield the queen’s legacy as the weapon that would raze everything she’d built.
“My list serves the same purpose.” Ultimately, every vampire in that House would die. All that mattered was the order I went in, but that was where we truly differed.
“Your list is revenge, Sidney. There’s a difference between justice and vengeance.”
I stood abruptly, ignoring the pull of fresh bandages. “They took Zane. They turned him into one of them and made him scream for days while his humanity burned away. You want me to be strategic about that?”
“I want you to be smart about it.” His tone remained calm and patient. “Emotion clouds judgment. Dr. Hillman taught you that.”
I curled my fingers against my stomach, trying to soothe the anxious churn building behind my ribs. Dr. Hillman could preach detachment because she’d never had to know about the person she loved begging for a death that wouldn’t come.
Carlyle remained silent for a moment, studying my face in the gaslight. Finally, he sighed. “The temple will support your infiltration mission. But Sidney…promise me you won’t lose yourself in there. The vampires have a way of corrupting everything they touch.”
He lifted his gaze to the transparent glass face of a clock fixed high upon the wall.
The emblem of Aetherius sat just underneath the surface; behind it, an intricate dance of interlocking gears and cogwheels marching with the passage of time.
I had installed it as a declaration of my devotion.
The gears shifted with a soft, rhythmic clicking, a reminder that faith evolves and never stands still.
“I survived it before,” I insisted.
“The temple didn’t choose you for this task because of your hunger for vengeance,” Carlyle said quietly. “Your pain gives weight to our purpose.”
I pulled a crumpled piece of parchment from my robe’s pocket. The ink was smudged in places, but the names stayed clear. I picked up a nearby quill and dipped it in the inkwell, crossing out the first name.
KILL LIST
·Queen Nemea
·Lord Elliot
·Lady Lorelei
·Steve
·Bruvor
I smoothed the paper against the lab bench.
“The temple’s wisdom and my wrath—perhaps that will be the combination that finally puts an end to this coven.
Name the rest of the vampires I need to kill.
” I added the temple’s political targets to my personal vendetta as he listed them.
Important bloodsuckers, some names I recognized as Sanguine council members or the leaders of influential Born families. “Consider the lists combined.”
He shook his head. “And what about Zane?”
The name struck like a physical blow. My hand moved to my throat, fingertips finding the pulse that jumped there.
The rage I had held at bay in Nemea’s garden threatened to boil over.
“He’s not on the list,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet.
“I have a different plan for him. This serum…maybe I can reverse what she did to him.”
“Sidney—”
“Don’t,” I snapped. Something raw twisted in my chest. Grief, maybe. Or hope. I couldn't tell the difference anymore. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible. Dr. Hillman taught me that ‘impossible’ is just a problem you haven’t found the right variables for yet.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Carlyle raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I was going to say the timing is perfect. With Nemea dead, Eona’s tradition dictates that the Trials of Succession must begin. The other houses will stand down and observe. It’s our best chance to get you inside.”
This was it. The core of our plan. “I need a target. A contestant I can replace.”
Carlyle nodded. “The temple has eyes on several prospects. Only one will survive the trials, and every vampiress who enters knows it. But vanity and ambition will make them try.” He stepped closer, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“But you are not most. We’ve located your way in.
There’s a lesser daughter of the Krudelbach family, named Ilyana, who plans to enter.
Ambitious, cruel, and with fledgling abilities to manipulate water.
Still young enough that she lacks a Devotion, so no mates to sense her untimely end. ”
Ilyana. I added the name to my list. Soon, she would be a corpse, and I would be her ghost. I would walk the halls of the House of the Sanguine not as a sullied dhampir, but as a contender for the throne.
“Good.” The pain in my body continued to recede, banking to a dull, healing warmth. “The sooner I get inside, the sooner I can start crossing more names off my list.”
Carlyle reached into his robes and withdrew a leather pouch. “Payment for completing the contract.” He set it on the lab bench with a soft clink of coins. “The temple honors its debts.”
I stared at the pouch for a moment before handing it back. “I tithe half to the temple. The rest goes toward supplies for the infiltration.”
He curled his fingers around it and placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Get some sleep, Sidney. You’ve earned it. Let the temple handle the logistics. Just be ready.”
I looked back at my list on the wrinkled paper. This wasn’t just a mission. It was a reckoning.
“I’ll keep an ear out for when the Trials of Succession begin,” Carlyle said. “Sanguine won’t remain leaderless for long. Are you prepared to do what needs to be done?”
I recognized the irony of planning to wear a crown built on murder and betrayal. Yet sometimes, one must embrace the darkness to destroy it from within.
“I promise I’ll complete the mission.” It fell short of the vow he sought, but it remained my only recourse.
As he left, I returned to my research table. The serum needed more work. I couldn’t afford to fail again, but perfection couldn’t be dictated at my convenience. I’d forged version after version relentlessly, chasing perfection until it bent to my will.
To purge the corruption from vampiric veins.
To make a monster human again.
My hands trembled as I reached for the blade. Blood loss had already left my body weakened. I had nothing to spare, yet I pressed the edge to my skin and watched a crimson bead spill into the mixture that would save Zane.
Science thrived on asking the right questions. Tonight, only one mattered: How do you remove venom from the envenomed?
The answer lay in understanding how vampire toxin worked. My dhampir blood was still the key, suspended in time at the point of transition when a human became a vampire.
Sleep took me despite my intentions to keep going.
A brief collapse onto the narrow cot, where I dreamed of nothing but blessed darkness.
When I woke, the healing serum had worked its magic.
My cheekbone mostly healed, the deep gashes on my arms had closed to thin pink lines, and for the first time in months, I felt… restored.
I brewed Dr. Hillman's favored tea: moonroot petals for clarity; thornspice bark to stave off sleep; a whisper of goldleaf bloom, sharp and bitter; and a few other herbs. She'd never named the blend, but it always smelled like vigilance and stayed long on the tongue.
The ceramic mug warmed my palms as steam curled upward, carrying the familiar scent that always meant late nights in the lab, breakthrough moments, and quiet conversations about the impossible. The first sip hit my tongue with bitter comfort.
Then, I toiled through the rest of the night, testing and adjusting. Each failure brought me closer to success.
I leaned over the arcane lens, an enchanted glass that hummed softly as I adjusted the focus.
Beneath its magnified glow, my blood swirled on the strip of glass, rich and dark, shifting with unnatural energy.
Sparks flickered within the crimson depths, reacting to the serum, but the power never quite went inert as I intended.
Faint light crept through the tiny windows of the basement as dawn broke over the temple spires. Carlyle arrived, balancing breakfast and fresh news, his presence a quiet disruption to the dim sanctuary I had carved for myself.
“The vampires will begin to assemble for the trials four days from now in the Sanguine mansion.” He placed a tray of eggs, fruit, and tea on the nearby table.
“Good. That gives me time to prepare to take out Ilyana.” I accepted the tea gratefully, letting the warm liquid soothe my parched throat. “What else?”
“Our intelligence suggests Zane is still in the castle.”
My hands tightened around the teacup. Five months since he’d been taken. Five months of wondering if anything of the man I’d loved remained in the monster he’d become. “Is he…himself?”
Carlyle’s expression softened with sympathy. “I don’t know, Sidney. The reports are conflicting.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice. I would face the answer firsthand. The next game loomed on the horizon, and I intended to be the last player standing.