81. Lazarus #2
My father told it to me when I was twelve years old, sitting in his study with the fire crackling behind us. He told me about the night the Founders spilled the blood of a king and drank it like wine. He told me about the covenant they made, the power they seized, the darkness they invited in.
“Ezekiel.” My voice is steadier than I feel. “Whatever you think this will accomplish, whatever prophecy you think you’re fulfilling, it won’t work. The Brethren will never follow you. The Guardians will never accept you. You are nothing but a splinter faction playing at relevance.”
“Am I?” He turns away from me, his attention shifting back to Leandra. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
He drags the blade across her face. There is no need for it, no significance beyond sheer cruelty.
The scream that tears from Leandra’s throat is not human. It is raw and primal, and it rips through the incense-heavy air like a physical thing. Blood wells up from the wound, a diagonal cut that runs from her temple to her jaw, just missing her eye, just deep enough to scar.
She jerks against her bindings. Her body convulses. The leather cords cut deeper into her wrists, and fresh blood joins the old.
“NO!”
I throw myself against the men holding me.
One of them loses his grip. I pivot, driving my elbow into his throat, feeling cartilage give way beneath the impact.
He crumples. The other one tries to adjust his hold but I am already moving, already swinging, my fist connecting with his jaw hard enough to send him staggering back.
I am free.
But Ezekiel isn’t watching me.
He is watching Leandra, watching the blood run down her face and drip onto her exposed breasts. Watching the way her chest heaves with terrified, agonized breaths. The other women have dropped to their knees now, their singing growing louder, their bodies swaying in unison.
“Beautiful,” Ezekiel murmurs. “Do you see now, Leandra? Do you see what you were always meant to be? You were meant to be a vessel. A conduit. Your blood will open the door. Your death will seal the covenant.”
“She’s not dying tonight.” I snarl.
I am moving again, closing the distance between us. Ezekiel sees me coming, and for the first time something flickers in his eyes. Not fear, not yet, but awareness.
I hit him at full speed.
We go down together, crashing against the stone floor. The impact jars through my shoulder, my ribs, but I barely feel it. My hands find his robes, his throat, anything I can grab. The knife clatters from his grip, skittering across stone.
Ezekiel is stronger than he looks. He gets an arm between us, shoves, and creates enough space to land a blow against my ribs. The air leaves my lungs in a rush, but I don’t let go. I can’t let go.
“Lazarus!”
It’s Leandra’s voice. It cuts through the red haze of violence, and I turn my head just enough to see…
She has the knife.
The curved blade of Saladin is clutched in her bound hands, and even as I watch she saws frantically at the leather cords around her wrists. Back and forth, back and forth, the ancient steel cutting through centuries-old leather like paper.
One wrist comes free.
She doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t pause to free her other hand. She just swings the knife in a wide arc as one of the veiled women lunges toward her.
The blade catches the woman across the throat. Blood sprays. The singing falters. The woman crumples.
And Leandra is already working on her other wrist, her ankles, her movements desperate and clumsy but relentless.
Ezekiel uses my moment of distraction. His knee drives up into my stomach.
His hands find my shoulders and he rolls us, reversing our positions, pinning me beneath him.
There is blood on his face now, mine or Leandra’s I can’t tell, and his eyes are wild with something that looks almost like ecstasy.
“You think you can stop this?” He is breathing hard, his voice ragged. “You think any of this is about you? Tonight, I will win everything. Tonight, I will kill you and I will kill her, and in doing so I will fulfil the prophecy. I will become what I was always meant to be.”
“The prophecy is bullshit.”
Ezekiel’s lips peel back from his teeth. “Then you’ll die a heretic.”
He produces a second knife. Smaller than the first, a dagger with a bone handle and a blade that gleams with something dark, something that might be rust or might be old blood.
He drives it into the side of my throat.
The pain is immediate and absolute, it is white-hot and freezing cold at the same time.
It is the feeling of metal pushing through skin and muscle and something deeper, something vital.
I feel blood, hot, wet, too much of it, pouring down my neck, soaking into my collar, pooling beneath me on the stone floor.
I jerk. I kick. My body is trying to reject what has happened even as my mind struggles to process it.
Ezekiel is smiling. He is leaning close, his face inches from mine, and I can smell his breath, like something rotting.
“The prophecy,” he whispers, “is everything.”
And then a weight slams into him from behind.
Leandra.
She has the curved knife in both hands now. She drives it through his back, through his robes, through his skin, through the cage of his ribs. I hear the sound it makes. Wet. Grating. The sound of steel finding the thing it was made to find.
Ezekiel’s eyes go wide.
His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. His hands reach back, grasping, clawing at the hilt protruding from his spine.
Leandra pulls the blade free.
Ezekiel topples sideways, and then the other women are on her.
They are no longer singing. They are screaming, a discordant, furious sound, and they are swarming her like insects.
There are four of them now, four veiled figures with grasping hands and hate in their eyes.
One of them grabs Leandra’s hair. Another tears the knife from her grip. A third drives a fist into her stomach.
I try to move.
I can’t.
The dagger is still in my throat. I can feel it with every heartbeat, a foreign object lodged in the most vulnerable part of me. Moving could kill me. Pulling it out could kill me. But Leandra is fighting four women alone, and I am lying on the floor bleeding out and—
One of the women grabs a torch from its sconce.
The flame is bright, too bright, searing against my vision. I see the woman raise it. I see Leandra turn. I see the torch come down, and it drives into her face.
Oh God, the sound she makes, I will hear it for the rest of my life. However long that is, however many minutes or seconds I have left.
The smell hits me next. Burning flesh. Burning hair.
The woman is still pressing the torch against Leandra’s face and Leandra is still screaming.
I am still lying here with a knife in my throat and this is not how it was supposed to end, this is not the plan.
I was supposed to protect her, I was supposed to save her, I promised her revenge, I promised her safety, I promised her…
“ENOUGH.”
The voice doesn’t come from me. It doesn’t come from Ezekiel, who is lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, his eyes glassy, his chest barely moving.
It comes from the doorway.
The chapel floods with men. My men. My guards. They pour through the shattered doors in a wave of black tactical gear and drawn weapons. They move with precision, with purpose, sweeping the space like they’ve trained for this exact scenario.
The women are pulled away from Leandra. I hear one of them screaming, not in fury now, but in fear. Another is trying to run. A third is being forced to her knees, her veil torn away to reveal a face I don’t recognize.
Leandra collapses against the altar.
I can see her face now. One side of it is, God, one side of it is burned. The skin is blackened and blistered, already beginning to peel away. Her eye on that side is swollen shut. Blood from the cut on her face mixes with the burns, creating something that doesn’t look human.
“Kill them,” she gasps, her voice raw from screaming. “Kill them all.”
The guards hesitate, looking to me. I try to give the order.
I try to tell them to do what she asks, to butcher those women where they stand, to spill their blood across the stones until the chapel runs red, but the words won’t come.
There is a knife in my throat, there is blood filling my mouth.
There is darkness creeping at the edges of my vision.
Leandra tries to stand, to get to me, and her legs give out beneath her. One of the guards catches her before she hits the ground and she fights him, weakly, desperately, her burned face twisting with pain and fury.
“Get her medical attention,” Someone barks. “Now.”
They start to carry her out.
I try to reach for her. My arm doesn’t work.
Nothing works. I am staring up at the vaulted ceiling, at the torchlight dancing across ancient stone, at the shadows that have witnessed so much blood, so much pain and so many centuries of men doing terrible things in the name of gods and prophecies and power.
Leandra. I try to say her name.
The sound that comes out of my mouth is wet. Wrong.
“Don’t try to talk. Just hold on.”
They’re lifting me now, carrying me. The ceiling moves above me, stone giving way to darkness giving way to the cold night air. I can hear footsteps, urgent voices, the crackle of radios.
Somewhere behind me, Leandra is screaming.
Or maybe that’s just in my head.
Maybe that’s just the sound of her scream when the torch touched her face, playing over and over again in the darkness that is swallowing me whole.
I was supposed to protect her,
I was supposed to save her.
I promised.
Everything goes black.