Chapter XXIV Loren
Chapter XXIV
LOREN
‘ D o you hear that?’ asked Aurelia, and only the abrupt silence that followed made Loren snap from his daze.
All the way out from Pompeii, she’d kept up a running chatter.
First an analysis of the weather, which morphed into some fantastical romance of nymphs and wine and demigods, clearly invented as she told it, and – well, Loren filtered her out.
Nothing personal. But he recognised his own strategy: talking to mask an uncomfortable silence.
Sometimes he saw too much of himself in her.
Now Aurelia stopped, head cocked, and Loren perked up, too.
‘Hard to hear anything over your stories,’ Livia said, not unkindly.
‘No, listen.’ Aurelia tugged the reins in Livia’s hands. Their horses slowed to a halt on top of a hill, edged on one side by a steep ravine. The afternoon fell into a deep hush. Wind rustled leaves. Somewhere far off, a dove cooed.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ Loren said with a twinge of annoyance.
‘Quiet!’
The pounding beat of racing hooves, quiet but growing. Loren turned in his saddle to squint down the road. A dark blur against the pale horizon, an indistinct figure approached .
Livia whistled. ‘They’re in a hurry. What do we think it is? Urgent news?’
‘Oh! A war declaration. A flood. A coup in the city.’ Aurelia nearly bounced.
Loren winced, thinking of Julia and Servius and poor Umbrius. Anything but a coup. ‘Perhaps we should get off the road.’
Once their horses were situated in a pine’s shade, he dismounted for a better look. That, and to escape Livia’s suffocating concern. She hadn’t said a word, but between the tender half glances and tilted mouth, her overwhelming motherly energy gave Loren a rash.
He wasn’t being avoidant. He was safeguarding his gnawed heart.
The rider disappeared behind a rocky outcropping. Behind Loren came the sound of Aurelia riffling through supplies. She’d returned to blabbering about her nymph story.
Parting from them come morning would kill Loren all over again, though he hadn’t yet determined where he’d go.
Returning to Pompeii was the sensible choice, but he couldn’t force the city to want him back.
Fleeing across the sea would offer a fresh start, but one he didn’t deserve.
If he hadn’t shirked his familial duties, tried to pave a path perpendicular to his father’s plan, he wouldn’t be nursing a hole in his stomach, raw from acid.
He ought to go home, where he belonged. Where his visions couldn’t hurt anyone else. Loren deserved this. He’d flown too high, and now he suffered the burns.
Wooziness washed over him, an aftereffect of riding too long under the hot sun. He turned to ask Aurelia to toss a waterskin, but his vision blurred, slipped, and he saw – a sword slinging through empty space.
Hooves of a rearing horse overhead.
A determined brow beneath a helmet, and a familiar crest glinting.
Loren gasped awake, palms against the dirt. How long had he drifted ?
‘Aurelia, go!’ he shouted.
The rider burst over the hill, sword glinting cold in the afternoon heat. Loren had no time to think, to scurry from the stampeding horse, before the blade swung. He rolled aside, gravel shredding his tunic.
Livia screamed. Feet crashed through the underbrush.
Let them get away. Please, gods, let them escape.
Ahead, the mercenary wheeled for another swing. Loren lay frozen in the road, terror clawing through his chest. The sword came down.
Something red and round hurtled through the air, striking the mercenary’s helmet in a clean shot.
Knocked askew, the sword’s arc fell short.
The horse panicked at the abrupt jerk. It reared back with an angry whinny, and the mercenary lost his grip on the saddle, hitting the ground hard.
The thrown object tumbled to a stop by Loren’s foot: an apple missing a solitary bite.
Foolish, brave, brilliant Aurelia.
Loren’s senses kicked in. He rose, scrambling from the hooves of the riderless horse as it took off down the road. The mercenary pushed to his feet, flinging his helmet aside.
Maxim, Darius’s companion from the vineyard.
Terror gripped Loren. He never expected to be followed this far from Pompeii, but in hindsight, the countryside had no witnesses.
Only the quiet road, where bloodstained dirt would soon wash clean.
Servius must have found out about the contract already.
Guilt coursed through Loren. What had he done to Julia, left alone in their empty estate?
Maxim stalked nearer, wicked sword glinting. For every clumsy step Loren stumbled back, Maxim took two strides forward.
‘I won’t return to Pompeii,’ Loren tried. ‘You have my word. The contract—’
The blade slashed, curving where a heartbeat ago Loren’s stomach had been.
‘Let my friends walk free, and I’ll do any— ’
Metal sang through air.
A blade appeared at Maxim’s neck. ‘Don’t you touch him.’
Livia stepped around as Maxim stilled. Her approach had been so silent, Loren hadn’t registered it until she stood right there, shoulders tense in wrath. She gripped her husband’s gladius, hand lethally steady.
‘You plan to stop me, woman?’ Maxim said with a thread of mirth.
Wrong choice of words.
Livia sliced Maxim’s forearm, and he hissed. His sword thudded to the ground. Deep purple blood sprayed from the cut. She edged the hilt of his fallen weapon with her foot, then kicked it in Loren’s direction. It took a moment to recognise her command. Trembling, Loren picked it up.
Another moment, and he realised the ground was shaking, too.
The horses, tied under the pine tree, stirred. Aurelia, somewhere in the underbrush, shouted a warning. Beneath Loren’s feet, the earth rattled, violent.
An aftershock, stemming from this morning.
Ghost-Felix’s ragged voice: This is far bigger than just you.
Loren turned to face the direction they had come.
Vesuvius, proud and distant as an old stone sentry, shattered.
‘Jupiter,’ Maxim muttered.
Every piece of the world apart from the mountain froze as a plume of debris rocketed skywards, a curled fist punching heaven. Tongues of red lightning forked through the cloud, muffled crackling like faraway thunder.
Watching the storm unfold from Vesuvius’s maw, Loren felt both removed and excruciatingly near.
He couldn’t break away. A tear streaked down his cheek.
He’d been there, barely a day earlier. He’d stood on those same rocks, walked in the same crater, felt the sting of steam and burning gravel.
Had knelt there, touched Ghost-Felix’s face, and failed to make the right choice once again .
His first thought: the helmet. Without Loren to stop him, had Felix put it on? But as soon as it crossed his mind, he knew in his heart it was wrong. Felix had said he wouldn’t. And despite his claims otherwise, Loren was far more the liar than Felix had ever been.
His second thought: he should have listened to the ghost.
Black wave. Copper streak. His mind raced to sift through what he thought, what he knew and where those diverged.
He filtered his catalogue of visions through this new lens, the death and ash and the ghost’s tears.
Vesuvius, present in all his dreams, the ghost’s wordless warning.
Had Ghost-Felix ever been as cruel as Loren accused?
Or had he been another victim of Loren clinging to control, desperate to prove himself a hero?
In doing so, he’d doomed them all.
A force barrelled into Loren from behind. Though disarmed and bloody and facing the world’s end, Maxim wasn’t out of the game yet. He tackled Loren, and together they tumbled off the steep hill.
Loren dropped the sword, arms flying to protect his face.
Shards of rock sliced his flesh. Momentum propelled him in a tangle of grabbing hands and kicking feet, landscape and sky swirling sick, but Maxim refused to let go.
They slammed to a stop at the bottom of a harsh ravine. A dull echo thudded in Loren’s ears.
Maxim rolled Loren on his back, pinning him to the ground, knee digging into his stomach. Loren thrashed against the weight, but Maxim was built like a bull.
Hands closed around Loren’s throat.
Panic swallowed his senses. In the back of his air-starved brain, Loren wondered if Clovia and Umbrius and Julia’s father had felt this same fear, an invisible strand connecting the four of them in death, if nothing in life did. Loren’s vision bled black.
He couldn’t breathe.
He did all he knew to do. He fell, and let impulse catch him .
With the last of his conscious strength, Loren curled limp fingers around a stone and dashed it across Maxim’s temple.
Pressure on his neck lifted. Air rushed into his starved body.
Every inch of him hurt. Loren threw his weight into a roll, so Maxim, face oozing red, now lay below him.
Maxim grunted and struggled, big hands grabbing, but Loren brought the stone down again.
And again.
Time blurred.
Maxim stilled.
Loren’s throat closed off.
‘Loren, love, that’s enough.’ Gentle hands pulled him back, prised the stone from his numb grip. Livia had picked her way into the ravine.
‘I killed him,’ Loren gasped. His cheeks were hot. Wet. A moment passed before he registered he was crying, chest heaving in painful sobs. Nothing felt real. Nothing felt like him.
‘Let’s get you cleaned up,’ Livia said, terribly soft.
Cleaned up? Loren looked down and fought back vomit at his own hands coated in bright blood. Impossible to tell how much was his and how much was Maxim’s. He gagged, shivering, and emptied his stomach into the gravel.
When it was over, Livia coaxed him away, and they climbed to the road. Neither mentioned the body cooling below.
Up top, a streak of dark curls assailed Loren, arms wrapping tight around his middle. For a horrible moment, Loren flashed back to Maxim’s lunge, but it was only Aurelia, seeking comfort. He had none to offer.
Livia drew her off. ‘Give him space.’