Nema
Chapter twenty-two
Ahundred riders moved through the dark, their hooves breaking the crust of the snow and throwing it into the air behind us. We had kept the torches unlit to preserve what little stealth a hundred mounted soldiers could reasonably claim.
The moon was enough.
It was always enough in Mytharo. I had stopped finding its bright, craterless face strange sometime during my second month here.
It was also full. It was almost always full, which raised several questions about Mytharo’s lunar cycle that I had been meaning to ask Caen for three months.
Focus, Meghan Callahan.
I was galloping toward an enemy-held village to rescue the man I loved. Lunar mechanics could wait.
Cato rode beside me.
The road from Ely to Nema crossed land scattered with ancient stonework. Low walls sank beneath moss and grass. The foundations of vanished buildings appeared beside the road, their purpose long forgotten. They were older than the outpost line and older than Morvanna.
On Earth, I would have found them picturesque. Here, riding armed through the darkness, I found them melancholy.
Cato had not asked for my plan at the outpost, with the gate open and the entire garrison listening. That was discipline. Operational discussions had a place, and that place was not within earshot of every soldier expected to carry them out.
He waited until we were well clear.
“What’s your plan, Meghan?”
“New Carthage.”
Cato glanced at me.
“A battle from my world. Earth.”
“Go on.”
“More than two thousand years ago, a commander named Scipio attacked a fortified city. He pressed the gates and walls hard enough to draw the defenders toward the obvious threat.”
Cato studied me more closely. “Another Scipio?”
I smiled. “This one came from my world.”
“And what did he do while the city watched the main assault?”
“He sent a smaller force across a lagoon behind the city. The water dropped at low tide, and the northern wall was barely defended because no one believed an attack could come from that direction.”
Understanding settled across Cato’s face.
“You want me to attack Nema.”
“I want you to give Morvanna exactly what she expects. Hit the perimeter hard enough that she has to reinforce it. Make her pull soldiers from the interior to hold the walls. Keep every eye facing outward.”
“And while they’re fighting us, you enter from somewhere they aren’t watching.”
“I find Skip and bring him out. The bond won’t give me a map, but I can feel his direction. Once I’m inside, that should be enough.”
Cato stared into the darkness ahead.
“You’re asking me to commit the garrison as a diversion.”
“No. I’m asking you to fight the battle Morvanna prepared for so I can fight the one she didn’t.”
The horses thundered through the snow.
“Your riders strike the perimeter,” I continued. “Full assault. Torches, noise, pressure from every direction. Her commanders will respond because they have no choice.”
“And while they are committed?”
“Two riders and I enter through the eastern treeline. We avoid the main engagement, reach Skip, and get out.”
“Two riders?”
“Two highly capable riders.”
“I need people who can move quietly, fight in close quarters, and remember that their job is extraction, not glory.”
From behind us came a voice, steady and already decided.
“I will go.”
Gaius.
He had ridden three horses behind us since the gate. I turned in the saddle.
“I will go,” he repeated.
Of course he would. Gaius had already saved my life once and had apparently decided to make a habit of it.
From his left came another voice.
“As will I.”
Flavia.
I looked between them. “Good. One man who refuses to let me die and one woman who will never let me forget it.”
Cato looked at Gaius, then Flavia, then me.
“Getting inside quietly is your part,” he said. “I’ll make certain Morvanna has no attention to spare for you.”
His gaze returned to the road.
“Did the smaller force reach the city?”
“Yes.”
“And Scipio took it?”
“In a single day.”
Cato absorbed that.
“Good,” he said, and smiled.
Then he turned toward the formation and issued his orders in the command voice.
The garrison shifted around us.
The plan was in motion.
***
We split at the treeline.
The riders broke toward the village, loudly.
They had been ordered to be seen, and they committed to the task.
I watched them go and felt, briefly, the weight of what I had asked of them. They would draw every eye in Nema and trust me to do exactly what I had promised in the darkness behind them.
I turned Velox toward the eastern side of the village.
Gaius and Flavia followed.
We rode into the trees.
Nema lay four hundred meters beyond the treeline. I carried the war-room map in my head: the layout, the distances, the geometry of a signal village documented during two resupply rotations.
A main road ran north to south. The council hall stood at the center. It was the largest structure and the easiest to defend, which made it the most likely place for Morvanna to hold a valuable prisoner.
Through the bond: Skip.
His fear was still there, but something had changed beneath it.
He could feel me now. Resolve. The forward motion. The certainty that I was coming.
Hope answered.
Then fear surged again, sharper than before. Not afraid for himself.
Fear for me.
Beneath it was something else.
Pride.
He could feel what I was doing. He could feel me choosing courage and committing to it.
And he believed I was equal to the choice.
I followed that feeling the way you follow a sound through the dark.
***
The assault struck Nema’s perimeter.
The vampires answered at once.
From the trees came the sound of the garrison making contact: steel crashing against steel, shouted commands cutting through the dark, the hard, disciplined violence of soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing.
Torchlight erupted between the buildings. It flared across walls and rooftops, throwing the village into fragments of fire and shadow.
Men moved through the streets.
And among them, faster than men should have been able to move, darker shapes flashed from one patch of night to another.
The command layer had taken the field.
Morvanna had committed them.
Exactly as we needed her to.
I looked at Gaius and Flavia.
“Now.”
We moved.
***
Nema was quiet, and the quiet was wrong.
The buildings still stood. Snow lay undisturbed across the roofs.
At the center of the village, the council hall rose exactly where the map had placed it.
It was larger than the surrounding buildings and was built of stone rather than timber.
It had survived everything that came before and now served a purpose its builders could never have imagined.
Skip was inside.
I could feel him. Close. Confined within those walls. The sense of his direction had become clearer with every step.
The closer we came to the council hall, the less I had to search for him. A pull. Directly ahead.
Something shifted in him as the distance narrowed. Hope rose through the fear.
He knew I was near.
I looked at the council hall. He was in there.
He knew I was coming.
I could feel panic rising in him. Sharp. Immediate. Something was wrong.
The door was not locked.
I should have registered both of those things before I opened it.
***
They had bound him to the council chair, the massive seat at the head of the table built to project authority and now repurposed as a restraint.
His wrists were tied to the chair’s armrests, and a short length of rope bound his ankles together. A gag had been pulled tight across his mouth.
His armor was gone. His shirt had been cut open.
What remained beneath it was the record of hours spent hurting him.
Shallow cuts crossed his arms and chest in precise lines, each one placed to cause pain without weakening him beyond use.
Between them, darker marks mottled his skin.
Burns. Blistered at the edges, red and raw where heat had been pressed against him and withdrawn before it could do permanent damage.
Something inside me tore open.
For one terrible second, I could not breathe. The room narrowed to the blood on his skin and the ropes around his wrists. To every mark they had put on him while I was somewhere else, unable to reach him.
Grief struck first. Rage followed so quickly it burned the grief clean.
I wanted every person responsible for this dead. Fucking dead.
But Skip was still alive. That mattered more.
I forced air into my lungs and made myself look at him instead of what they had done to him.
His face was pale. His eyes were not. They found mine the instant I entered.
Gaius moved left, sweeping the room with his hook raised. Flavia slipped right, checking the shadows behind the council table and the narrow passage beside the hearth.
Nothing moved.
I crossed half the room before the warning reached me.
The warning did not arrive through the bond. It arrived through Skip’s eyes.
He was not relieved. He was trying to stop me.
Gaius glanced toward the rafters. Flavia turned toward the door we had just entered, sword coming free in one smooth motion.
The room was too still. The entrance had been too easy.
The ropes around Skip’s wrists were too visible. The chair had been placed too perfectly in the center of the room.
A display. A lure.
I stopped.
A voice came from the shadows at the back of the hall. Quiet. Almost contemplative.
“The one with the red hair.”
The words carried through the silence as if the room itself had been waiting for them.
“Morvanna described her,” it continued. “The red hair. The ring that glows.”
Two figures stepped into the light.
Both wore fitted black armor. Both had red eyes. Command layer.
They stood with the stillness of predators who had already measured the room, calculated every outcome, and found no reason to hurry.
Skip’s panic crashed through me.
Too late. The vampires moved as one.
The first came for me. Gaius stepped into its path, his sword already clearing its sheath.
“Get to Scipio.”
The second vampire moved between me and the chair, cutting off the center of the room.
Then everything happened at once.