Chapter 30 #2
Sidney sighed. “Interesting Ilyana,” she said in the blandest tone. With a hand still pressed to her midsection, she nudged Zane with her elbow and whispered to him, “I appreciate your protective streak, but I’m really okay.”
His scowl softened when he glanced down at her. “Do you feel up to scaling a wall, sunshine?” he murmured.
“Well, not yet. You’re the only one here who hasn’t introduced yourself properly,” I put in, probably ruining their moment. I was waiting, staring at him expectantly.
Zane took a hissing breath. “We’re not here to play games, assassin.”
“Wow, you really aren’t any fun, are you? Maybe we should be spleen buddies. I’ll take yours if you take mine.”
His eyes bugged wide, tanned skin reddening and hands balling into fists at his side. Temper, temper.
“Let’s go. I’ll be able to make it,” Sidney interrupted.
“Wait, you haven’t robbed me yet!” I exclaimed. “You know, so I can have money on this adventure. And clothes that fit. Not to mention socks. Don’t you know how awful it is to have ill-fitting socks?”
Finn nodded in agreement, then signed, He’s a bit of a hard sell, but I think I L-I-K-E this guy.
The shadows around me began to unravel from a gesture from Zane. I rubbed my wrist, and Sidney gasped. “We didn’t finish putting him in the spelled restraints?”
A tendril of darkness grabbed my hands and forced them apart.
With a quick snap, it closed the other manacle around my free wrist. All of my magical bits and bobs winked out at the same time.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Queenie Sabiney, who was still listing names.
It sounded like she had a bone to pick with the entirety of Sanguine.
Oh well. She’ll miss me.
Actually, she probably won’t. Still her loss.
“You were injured. It slipped my mind,” Zane answered.
As Zane moved away to shove some of my essentials into one of my spare bags, Finn and Sidney coordinated in a silent conversation.
Zane paused at my dresser, lifted my vial of phoenix blood, and studied the glow inside with a brief, puzzled frown before he slipped it into the satchel.
They signed back and forth about “ash,” which I didn’t realize was a name or belonged to an animal until a distinctively ursine roar sounded outside my window.
The trio shoved me out of that window like a sack of potatoes, a vegetable I never liked. I landed like one too, and whispered another hello at the stars behind my eyelids. Their hands and shadows pushed me along from there. Two large dogs flanked us as a pair of protective sentinels.
I caught a glimpse of their distraction as more and more guards responded to the creature tossing them around like a child with his toy soldiers.
We headed for the wall and the cover of the night forest beyond it.
With a monster bearing down on the House of Whispers’s defenses, no one noticed us make our daring escape.
For a moment, the animal that must’ve been Ash swiveled his owl head our way. I gasped in delight like a child at my first carnival. “You guys have a tytoursus?”
We spent the last few hours of night waiting for dawn in an inn room.
Zane and Finn marched me up a set of stairs behind Sidney, the three of us cloaked to hide that we were vampires in the charming human establishment.
And that I was still wearing the spelled restraints.
Those didn’t come off, even after a day’s rest.
Sidney walked at a jerking pace that suggested she was still in pain.
She fell asleep so promptly I was jealous.
I spent several morning hours staring at the ceiling.
Its wood grain shifted and warped. Lines curled into shapes I half recognized.
A mountain ridge, followed by a ruined temple, and a woman’s face I had not seen in five hundred years.
More images slipped away before I could name them, as ephemeral as a human’s lifespan.
Unmoored, I drifted through faces that blurred together. Nothing felt distinct. I had killed many vampires in my time. These memories arrived with the same weight as the moment unfolding in front of me.
Someone touched my shoulder, and I jerked, in another place entirely. The room had vanished; we were moving again. Zane lifted me onto his horse and pulled a heavy cloak over my head. The horse carried me forward. My ribs ached, but the pain floated somewhere outside my reach.
My thoughts scattered again. A battlefield. A library. A winter cliff. None of it held shape for long, flattening like sandcastles before high tide.
Sidney and Zane rode in silence. Finn kept pace beside them, his expression focused on the path ahead. I tried to focus on the sound of hooves. On the weight of the cloak. On the safety of the dark. Yet the world kept slipping, and my mind went with it.
Only stepping foot in the House of the Sanguine itself wiped the ennui from my eyes and made them focus fully on my surroundings and the faces of those around me. I bared my fangs, playing my part in a plan I vaguely knew. The trio had concocted it with me as its centerpiece, the enemy brought low.
I was pulled along by Sidney, who had a rope around my neck. She walked stiff-backed and proud as she jerked me along. The gossiping vampires around us flinched when I barked at them like a dog. They gasped, eyes widening, and hands flying to mouths.
“Behold, the nemesis we’ve caught,” Sidney announced as we paraded through a great hall. “Noir! An assassin from the House of Whispers. We will present him at the ceremony. The Flask of Dominion shall be pleased.”
A few onlookers clapped. Many whispered to each other. Some frightened, some impressed. And some…clearly not. They were too young or too new to remember the retired killer.
Sidney wasn’t bothered by anyone, save for one. We passed a guardsman at his post, and she flinched when she saw him. Her mask slipped, revealing something vulnerable. I just wanted to poke it. “Friend of yours, flower?” I asked in an undertone.
“Someone on my list.” She pressed her lips tight.
Ah yes, the list of Sanguine vampires she wanted to kill. Similar to the list from Queen Sabine—I think. I still hadn’t written that down.
Whoops. She’d probably be happy with a few council members and their next queen.
One dark-haired vampiress stepped into our path toward what seemed like the end of our parade. I was having fun, getting gawked at by the vampires I’d be visiting death on shortly. The irony!
She occupied the center of the hallway, her spine tempered into a column of iron. Every line of her frame echoed a martial discipline that demanded the room's submission. My head cleared instantly, the fog evaporating as my instincts screamed a warning.
“Your chances of pulling off a clean extraction of someone like him sit just above zero. Especially a specialist of his notoriety, in his own territory,” she stated, her voice a cold, measured rasp.
She appraised Ilyana with the clinical air of a general reviewing a battlefield.
“I understand the tactical cost of such an operation. I paid it myself to secure my own asset.”
Frost formed in Sidney’s tone. “How else would he be here with us, then?”
The vampiress shifted her gaze to me, stripping away my “loyal pet” veneer with a single, dismissive look.
She studied me the way a hunter studies the blade of an enemy.
“This stinks of a staged defection.” She stepped closer, stabbing a long, sharp nail in accusation.
“He didn't fall to your brilliance. He walked across that border because you offered him a better cage. Didn’t he?”
A crowd gathered around to listen. Some of them had been following us. They’d been waiting for something like this, most likely.
Sidney pivoted toward me, looking up and down in a pointed perusal. I put on a broad grin through the thicket of my beard. It probably didn’t help the case she was trying to make when I panted with my hands tucked together like paws.
She said, “I don’t know a single person who’d willingly let me bind him up and drag him around by the neck. Do you?”
A bad question to ask. A wellllll… was perched on the tip of my tongue. I’d known a few folks over the centuries whose proclivities leaned that way. But I stayed in place like a trained hunting dog. I was a very good boy.
The vampiress didn't flinch. She ignored Sidney entirely, her focus boring into me. “What terms did you negotiate?” she demanded. “Does your contract stipulate our executions while we sleep, as with Genevieve?”
“That is quite the ridiculous accusation, Tierney,” Sidney cut in.
“Keep the name of your future queen off your lips,” Tierney said haughtily. “Cheater. If you were willing to cheat on the last competition, surely you’re doing it again.”
They continued to go back and forth. My gaze bounced between them, avid to see the catfight to come.
“Candidates, please,” an authority-filled voice interrupted them. Damn. A male parted the crowd, looking unimpressed by the scene before him. “We are all on edge, but I assure you, no one’s setting a Whispers assassin loose in m—the mansion. Tierney, you should return to your business.”
She lifted her chin and stormed off.
“This is your nemesis, Lady Ilyana?”
“Yes, Lord Regent.”
My lips tilted wryly. They were undressing each other as violently as possible with their eyes and forcing the rest of us to witness it. Embarrassing, really. I barked again to break it up between them.
She startled and he cleared his throat. “In your absence, we began upgrading your accommodations,” he told her.
She stiffened. “Did you move my stuff?” she asked in a tone bordering on alarm.
He raised a dark brow. “Yes, of course. You have a Devotion now, so you are allotted more space. You can also keep your nemesis there until it’s time. Surely that is ideal?”
A muscle in her jaw twitched. “Certainly. Thank you.”
“I’ll show you to your suite, then.”