Chapter 33 #2
On top of that, the empty loop on my hip was a wound, a hollow space where my stake should have been. I brushed my fingers over the leather. The absence pulsed like a phantom ache.
Early morning sun shone through scattered clouds as I made my way across the city to the Temple of Aetherius.
My animal companions waited at the forest line as I entered the human quarter.
It smelled the same—bread and horses and unwashed bodies pressed too close.
I kept my head down and my hand near my dagger.
The gates stood open. The guards tracked my approach, not hostile, but no longer offering an easy smile or friendly word on my way by.
I continued on, a manufactured purpose hiding the exhaustion dragging at my limbs. I needed Carlyle, his steadiness and logic, something to anchor me before the trials swallowed the last of my balance.
Letting the corridors guide me, I kept walking. As I turned toward his chambers, I shaped the words I would offer. Lorelei is dead. I killed her. One more name off the list.
A woman sat behind the heavy central desk that anchored the foyer outside his office.
Her muscular frame filled the pristine white and gold surcoat of a captain: Darli Stark.
Her blonde hair was pulled into a severe knot that sharpened the angles of her face and drew attention to pale blue eyes with the chill of a frozen lake.
Scars, a lattice of old battles, marred her neck, each one a reminder.
Weeks had passed since she’d crossed my mind. A flicker of warmth stirred in my chest to see her again.
“Captain Stark. How’ve you been? I was hoping to catch Carlyle.” With a smile, I stepped up to the table and reached out to clap her on the arm.
She flinched, recoiling as if my touch carried a blight, and my smile faltered.
“What do you want?” She returned, her focus remained on the ledger she was marking. “Carlyle’s in council. He doesn’t have time for reports from someone who’s spreading her legs for vampires.”
I recoiled as if she’d slapped me. The venom in her voice didn’t match the friend I remembered, and Carlyle had never refused me, not once. “I do what is necessary to keep my cover.”
Captain Stark slammed the ledger shut, the crack echoing through the room. “Necessary?” Her scarred lip curled. “We buried Dustyn, who had his throat torn out while you’ve been playing princess and sipping vintage red. Don’t talk to me about necessity.”
My stomach dropped. “I didn’t know.” I’d liked Dustyn from the start, enough to slip him a placebo before we set out to kill Ilyana weeks ago.
“Of course you didn’t.” Her pulse thrummed at her temple. “You’re too busy with your vampires to care what happens to us.”
I gritted my teeth. What else had Carlyle told her? He was the only one I’d reported to, and clearly he must’ve exaggerated the truth about what I was doing in the House of the Sanguine.
My chest tightened, stomach churning with sour bile.
Captain Stark and I had fought side by side.
I thought we were, if not friends, then sisters in arms. Now she looked at me as if I were one of them.
My mind drifted back to Carlyle’s voice at our last meeting: “Your dhampir blood has always been a liability, Sidney.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe that liability had finally tipped the scales, curdling the person I used to be into something unrecognizable. I looked at my fingers, half expecting to see them stained with a darkness I couldn’t wash away. Maybe I’d crossed a line I could never uncross.
No. I gritted my teeth, forcing away the doubts. I am still myself.
“I’m doing exactly what the temple asked.” The words came out defensively, and my hands curled into fists.
“Then why are you here begging for Carlyle’s approval instead of out there killing them?” She gestured toward the door. “We don’t need your reports. We need dead bodies.”
My breath quickened. I counted. One. Two. Three. Slow exhale. My arms trembled, but I locked them at my sides. “Tell Carlyle that Lady Lorelei is dead. Another name off the list… Justice for the temple.”
“You’ve been there for weeks. It’s not enough.” Captain Stark stood and rested her hand on the hilt of her sword.
The death of a council member wasn’t enough? One of my grandmother’s old confidantes? I huffed in disbelief.
“You think you’re still one of us? You smell like them, Sidney.
That copper tang of old blood, drowned under their crimson myrrh perfume.
” Captain Stark’s lip curled. “You look like them, move like them. Only Carlyle’s pity keeps you breathing.
If he didn't think you could be saved, I’d have put a bolt through your eye the second you walked in. You disgust me.”
She turned and walked away. I watched her disappear around a corner, reeling. If Captain Stark, a former sister in arms, felt this way about me…what was the consensus amongst the other slayers?
I found it hard to breathe. The air in the hallway was too thin. I fled to my laboratory, skin prickling with every step. This sacred space had always smelled of incense and candle wax. Now it carried the tang of suspicion.
The door to the lab slammed behind me, and I clicked the lock into place as my heart hammered. Pressing my forehead against the cool wood, I waited for my breath to settle.
Had the entire temple turned against me?
Maybe it was just Captain Stark, raw with grief and looking for someone to blame. I lingered on the possibility for a hopeful moment.
No, the guards also watched me differently. The temple didn’t feel like a sanctuary anymore. It would never be again if my name was already so tainted.
I’d never come here to make friends, though. My time amongst the followers of Aetherius had always been a matter of mutual survival. And if they didn’t want me here…I would survive without them. I focused on the only thing that remained of consequence: science.
My equipment waited exactly as I’d left it.
Glass beakers. Copper tubing. The microscope Dr. Hillman had helped me acquire years ago.
I slipped out of my cloak, prepared my tea, and let the herbal taste of it settle my nerves before turning to the tasks ahead.
The formula was close—so close I could taste it.
I pulled out the heated vial Noir had given me. If he was right about the creatures being immune to vampirism, this could be the missing piece, the catalyst that reversed the turning process.
I laid out the components of the serum. Each step, each measure, each drop carried me toward a future I’d dreamed about…a cure. My dhampir essence sat at the center, flanked by the compound I’d been perfecting. The final piece waited beside them: phoenix blood.
Vampirism was a disease that rewrote the body from the inside out. The cure needed to be equally invasive and absolute.
I worked with frantic, rhythmic precision. Minutes bled together as I tested, adjusted, and tested again. The mixture swirled, crimson swallowed by the brilliant blue that bloomed through it.
The microscope’s eyepiece pressed cold against my face, narrowing the world to a field of my jagged dhampir cells. Their membranes bristled with corruption, edges black and barbed, each one a tiny snarl of violence.
After adding a drop of catalyst, it touched the first cell.
A shiver ran through the structure. The spine drew inward.
Black faded to gray, then to a raw, living red.
The once jagged membrane softened, rounding into the familiar curve of human blood.
The change spread—one cell, then another, followed by a cluster blooming outward in a widening wave.
I didn’t breathe or blink as the final corrupted membrane healed. The cells held their shape.
The phoenix blood worked!
Gripping the edge of the workbench, I steadied myself, yet the pressure in my chest grew. A sound rose in my throat, caught between a laugh and a sob, and I let it escape before it choked me.
After years of failure, months of revisions, and more dead ends than I cared to remember, the cure finally held. I did it!
I could save Finn and Zane. I could give them back their sunlight, their breath, their lives. The vial blurred as I wiped the dampness from my eyes with the back of my hand. My triumph thinned as reality settled over me: A quarter of the vial of phoenix blood had given me only two uses.
Using it on my Devotion before proving its safety would be dangerous and reckless.
The clock ticked on the wall. There was no time to test it. Their cure would come later. Their humanity could be restored once the throne was secured and the Sanguine vampires were ash. I could return what had been taken from them and still have my revenge.
It was a future that warmed me, a promise held close but not yet within reach.
Doubt crept in, occupying the cracks left by the fading rush. What if the serum failed when it mattered, in the veins of a fully turned vampire? I needed proof before I dared hope.
After labeling each vial, I set them into the reinforced holder. I then prepared another batch, filling a syringe and securing it, ready for the moment I could use it. Then I gathered more of my healing serum and stuffed the vials in my pocket.
For a moment, the cold reception of the guards and Captain Stark made me consider taking the rest of my work with me. But I lacked a safer vault than this laboratory, and I refused to flee like a thief when I had done nothing wrong.
Instead, I slid the journals and the cure into a secret compartment in the workbench. The wood clicked shut, burying my hope in the shadows. Only when everything was sealed and stored did I allow myself to breathe.