Chapter 4 #2
“Ren!” The cry rang out over the sea of warriors. Somewhere, Lorreth sounded like he was fighting for his life, and yet he still called out to our brother.
The feeder snaked forward, its tongue lolling out of its mouth, snagging on its serrated teeth. I spun and whirled to its right, fast as I could, plunging the dagger through the side of its skull.
I needed to take its head, but I wasn’t going to be able to do that with it swiping at me with those fucking claws. “Fire!” I shouted. “Light them up!” We were running out of options. If fire didn’t work, we were fucked.
My warriors answered the call. In seconds, bright orange flames cast monstrous shadows along the banks of the river. Hundreds of torches appeared, glowing hot and spitting embers. A normal feeder would have balked at the sight of the open flames, but this one just kept coming.
“Stand back, Commander,” called a tall warrior with dark hair. He ducked around me, hoisting his torch forward, and I moved out of his way as he hurled the torch at the feeder. Fear whispered in my ear, or maybe it was the remnants of the quicksilver . . .
It won’t work. Won’t work, won’t work . . .
But the monster went up like bone-dry kindling as soon as the fire made contact with its moldering flesh.
The feeder didn’t make a sound as it was engulfed. Not a peep.
It didn’t flail or flee. It just crouched there, burning. Time slowed as the feeder pivoted and turned, sailing through the air and landing on the warrior who had set it alight.
“No!” I moved as quickly as I could, but it turned out I wasn’t as fast as the cursed creature after all.
I was too late. It grabbed the warrior and Elroy still had a little speed left in him yet.
He grabbed my arm, holding me back long enough to look me in the eyes.
Pleadingly, he said. “What if they track you down and realize what you can do? The way you can affect metal—” sank its claws into his skull, crushing bone as it wrenched his head to the side and plunged shattered teeth into his neck.
The fight was over in an instant. The warrior who had come to my aid had his head caved in and blood drained dry in a heartbeat.
The feeder was a torch now. It didn’t seem to feel the pain or notice that it was slowly incinerating.
It hurtled off into the gathered crowd, falling on other warriors, unfazed by the blades and swords they plunged into its chest and at its throat. I watched my men fall as it rampaged.
“Flank it!” someone shouted. Danya. She was there, on the other side of the melee, running fast to meet me.
I ran, too, and we both crashed down on the feeder at the same time, grabbing it and forcing it to the ground.
We held it, and it burned. The flames licked up our arms and danced as it caught on our clothes. The heat was unimaginable.
“Take it!” I bellowed. “Take the fucking head!”
I had no idea whose axe completed the task.
As soon as the feeder’s head was cleaved from its shoulders, I was dragged back from the flaming corpse by a multitude of hands.
The sky overhead swam with streaks of light.
The ground ran thick with churned mud and stinking ichor.
A thousand knives sank deep into my chest as I was thrown backward into the Darn.
Being stabbed hurt. Being poisoned by a feeder’s toxin, too. But burning alive? That really fucking hurt.
I hissed in the war tent as Te Léna administered a cooling salve to my hands.
She was doing as much as she could for me, but she had exhausted her supply of magic healing Danya.
Healing was her birthright magic, though.
Unlike mine, it would replenish soon. She’d tried to help me when I’d been rushed into the tent, but I’d insisted she work on Danya first. I had gone up pretty quickly, but Danya had flared like a living torch.
Her injuries had been significant. They would have killed her had the healer not tended to her immediately.
Her blistered skin had been transformed to raw meat, her face badly burned.
And her hair? Te Léna had done her best to soothe the angry burns all over Danya’s body, but her long pale hair was gone, leaving only singed stubble behind.
“In a couple of hours, I’ll be able to take a look at these,” Te Léna murmured in a hushed tone, gently applying another layer of the mashed poultice she had created from her store of medicinal healing herbs. I gritted my teeth, giving her a lopsided smile.
“It’s all right. I can barely feel a thing.”
“Liar,” she chided. Her eyes shone bright with unshed tears. “I know how bad that must hurt. You’re not doing anyone any favors by hiding it.”
“Okay, then. I’ll cry about it, shall I?” I winked at her playfully, letting her know that I was just teasing.
She said nothing to that. Just gave me a sorry smile as she went about tending the other open wounds on my hands and my arms. “A few hours,” she said again, when she was done. “As soon as I’m about—”
I closed my hand around hers, hissing a little when my skin split. “It’s okay, Te Léna. I’ll bear it fine.” She would never know it—thank the gods—but I had endured far, far worse.
Renfis and Lorreth passed the healer as they entered the war tent.
Their faces were both soot stained, their armor plastered with ichor.
It had taken them a long time to put down the other feeders.
From what I’d been told, they had lashed them with ropes and pinned them in place while they sawed off their heads.
“We have their bodies trussed to a tree,” Renfis spat, throwing his gloves onto the chair by the fire. We’d been sitting here, only hours ago, joking about my misfortune and discussing my new inkwork. It felt like an age had passed. “They still won’t fucking die,” Ren seethed.
“We have their heads in a sack down by the river. They’re currently trying to chew their way out.
” Lorreth looked weary to his very bones.
He sank into a crouch, leaning his back against the wall; he held his head in his hands for a moment, his breath making rushing sounds as he inhaled and exhaled through his fingers.
He struggled to find the right words when he surfaced again.
“What in all five hells was that? Centuries, we’ve been posted here.
Only once before have they ever reached this side of the river.
That wasn’t ideal, but at least we put them down quickly.
Half the camp is in ruins right now, thanks to eight feeders.
Eight. And we still haven’t officially managed to kill them. ”
“I feel sick,” Ren said quietly. “In the pit of my stomach. I feel connected to them, like . . . the magic they took has tied me to them. I can feel them tugging on it, trying to siphon off more. Do you feel that way?” he asked me.
I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but yes. That was what it felt like. I nodded. “We need to figure out who was controlling them.”
“Do you think anyone was?” Lorreth asked. “They seemed feral. Wild.” He shivered.
“At the end, maybe. But at the beginning . . .” The way they’d moved together, in unison, implied that they were under some sort of control. Even Malcolm hadn’t been able to work that kind of magic on his feeders, though. It would have required an exorbitant amount of power.
“You know who it was,” Ren said. “There’s only one person capable of something like this.”
I shook my head. “Tal hasn’t sired any feeders.”
“And you believe that simply because he told you so?” A sharpness rose in Ren’s voice.
“Why would he lie, Ren?” Gods, I was tired. My whole body felt like it had been chained to a horse and dragged three miles over rocky ground.
“Because that’s who he is. He’s a liar. He’s never been honest with us about anything. Foley’s where he is because of him. And he was there, the other night. With Everlayne. He had her on a fucking leash, Fisher.”
“Malcolm commanded him to do that—”
“Why do you always defend him!” Ren brought his fist crashing down on the table.
His shout echoed off the walls of the war room.
His pallor had turned from ash to a furious red.
“At every turn, you deny what’s staring you right in the face.
He abandoned you. He left you over a thousand years ago.
He willingly chose to leave us all and go with Malcolm.
How do you think he is still walking the realm, hmm?
The only way he is still here, proving to be a thorn in all our sides, is because he feeds from the living.
He is everything we despise, and yet every time something like this happens, you make excuses for him. ”
I let him pant away his fury. It wasn’t worth trying to speak until he burned through the anger gnawing at him.
It struck me, as I watched him, his shoulders hitching up and down as he glared back at me, that the only time I had ever seen Renfis angry was because of Taladaius.
In some ways, he was right about him. But in all the ways that really mattered, he was not.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know that there can never be anything but bad blood between you and him. But you’ve never been bound by a curse, brother.
You’ve never been forced to act against your will.
And you have never been so in love with someone that you’d sell your soul to the devil to protect them.
I pray that when you find your mate and you fall in love, you’ll know nothing but an everlasting peace with them.
But for others . . .” I added sadly, “it isn’t that simple. ”
Hours later, when Te Léna had returned to heal me and the sun had broken over the crest of the black horizon beyond Sanasroth, we ventured out to inspect the damage that had occurred in the night.
The section of the camp closest to the river had been destroyed.
Tents lay in ruin, fabric shredded, supplies strewn all over the churned-up ground.
The dead lay along the bank of the river with Widow’s Bane blossoms resting over their closed eyes.
I was numb to the core. “How many did we lose?”
“A hundred and fourteen,” Lorreth answered.
The number didn’t make any sense. We’d never lost that many at Irrín. During open battle, yes, higher losses were to be expected. But not here at our outpost. And not to eight feeders. “We’ll bury them back at Cahlish,” I muttered. “I’ll open a portal, and we’ll carry them through one at a time.”
My brothers said nothing. Frustration still radiated from Ren as we crossed the bank to the large oak tree, but he kept the peace. We would talk again, he and I, when tensions weren’t running so high. That was the way it had always been with us when we were at odds.
The oak tree had been there for as long as I could remember, tall and proud despite the cold.
Now, its trunk was shriveled, its bark sloughing off in thick slabs.
From its roots to the tips of its branches, it festered with slimy mushrooms. The charred, headless bodies of the feeders struggled against their ropes, trying to wrestle free, but thankfully their restraints held true.
“These fell things aren’t of Yvelia,” Lorreth said in a hushed tone. “Nothing in our world could produce this kind of evil.”
But we had thought that once about the vampires. And power was an addictive drug. It never surprised me, the terrible things a corrupt soul would do to garner more of it.