CHARLIE
The problem was, I couldn’t get drunk enough.
Drunk enough for the pain to stop.
Drunk enough to forget Essa.
Drunk enough to pass out and escape the torment I was feeling.
God, the look on her face when she saw me. Not happiness, but horror. Horror, when she realized what I’d become.
And what must my face have looked like when I understood what she’d done—what I’d been too late to prevent? All those men touching her. Fucking her. My Essa.
I’d been too late.
God damn Kitty for saving me, I thought, as I leaned on the bar and took another burning swallow of alcohol. I was better off dead.
After Kortoi had cast me out, I’d started to storm off.
But the ache of hunger in my belly had proved stronger than my pride, and I’d gone back and fished the gold coins he’d gifted me out of the muck.
I’d floated around the edge of the city for a while then, like my namesake—a wraith—not caring enough to keep to the shadows.
When I finally tore my eyes from the cobblestones at my feet, I saw that quite a few people were watching me with interest. I didn’t understand why until I finally looked back and saw Parthar following me.
“Go,” I’d told him. “It’s over.”
He’d tilted his head, watching me with quizzical, innocent interest.
“Go!” I shouted, kicking the air in a way that probably looked comical. “Get the hell out of here! I’m finished, okay? I’m through. I’m no goddamn dragon daddy. I’m no hero. I’m nothing, alright?”
I took the coins from my pocket and brandished them in my jangling fist. “I’m going to take these coins and get drunk off my ass—then I’m going to swim back to Admar. Or fucking drown trying. Alright? And don’t try to follow me this time!” I shook my fistful of gold coins at him.
Parthar straightened himself up primly, then gave a little puff of smoke out of his nostrils, as if in indignation. Then he turned with a flourish of his tail and left.
I’d watched him go, feeling every heartbeat in my chest like the banging of a gavel. Then I looked up and saw I was standing before an inn called Charbottom’s.
I’d gone inside and told the barkeep, an ugly, ponytailed fellow, to give me a meal and a bottle of his strongest booze.
He’d eyed me warily, then given me the best bowl of soup and chunk of bread I’d ever eaten in my life—which, despite the pain in my heart and my belly, I wolfed down.
The booze he’d given me came in a ceramic jug with a cork in the top, along with a cup that seemed to be made of copper.
I’d poured myself some of the booze, taken a drink, and nearly splattered it all over the counter as I choked on it.
The stuff tasted like petrol and pine sap.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I’d asked.
“You never had scutt before?” the man had grunted, his eyes narrowing. “Where you from, anyway?”
I’d forced myself to take another drink.
“No, sure. I’ve had scutt before,” I muttered. “Just… not this kind.”
For the next God only knew how many hours, I’d made it my mission to conquer that bottle. I drank until the world was a blur, and I was only vaguely aware as evening fell and more and more patrons began packing the bar stools and tables.
Conversations buzzed around me, and most of them seemed incoherent to my drunken mind. But occasionally, a handful of words would spatter upon me like cold rain, drawing my attention.
“So, we’re drinking to the queen’s health, eh?”
“Shouldn’t we wait for tomorrow, for the coronation?”
“I’ll drink then, too. You’ll be going to the square at noon to see it, yeah?”
“O’ course. History in the making, I’d say.”
“I’ll be there, too. I’d rather have been at the ceremony today, though.”
“What, the bydrune?”
“Sure. One arm or no, I wouldn’t have minded taking my turn on her.”
A brazen laugh. “One arm or three, they all fuck the same.”
“Why in all the hells should just the nobles get their shot with her is what I want to know? Give the common man a crack at it! I’m as good as any of those pompous, moneyed pricks. And crown or no crown, a whore’s a whore.”
I heard the sound of my stool tipping over and hitting the floor before I even knew I was on my feet.
My hand fell heavy on the shoulder of the man who was speaking.
“Did you just call Essa a whore?” I demanded.
“And who’s asking?” the man replied.
With a screech of stool legs, the two men I’d been addressing stood up. They were each a head taller than me, burly as a pair of oxen. My hands went to my weapons belt, but I found my sword missing and my holster empty. That bastard Kortoi hadn’t given my weapons back.
It didn’t matter.
“Look at those clothes,” one man said to the other.
“Talks funny, too,” the bartender put in.
“Not from here, are you?” one of the men said, cracking his knuckles.
“I’m gonna need you to take back what you said about the queen,” I told him.
Though the world was blurred and spinning, I could still make out the man’s ugly smirk.
“Or what?” he said.
My fist hit him squarely in the teeth, sending him stumbling back into the bar. His buddy jumped on me, grabbing me in a bear hug and pancaking me to the floor. Fists the size of winter melons fell on me, and I covered, squirmed, rolled, and finally stumbled to my feet.
The first guy straightened up, licking blood off his shattered teeth. It sent a shiver of blood hunger through me, that hollowness that could never be filled. I felt my teeth growing long and held my mouth clamped shut to hide them as the man pointed a fat, trembling finger at me.
“This here is an Admite,” he said.
Every head in the place turned toward me—at least fifty working men and rough-looking women.
This would have been the moment to make a hasty exit. To apologize and slink away. To run. But I didn’t give a damn if I lived past today. I didn’t give a damn about anything—not without Essa. So instead of running, I brought up my fists and slurred:
“Fuck all of you! Let’s go!”
There was half a second of stunned stillness.
Then, a cry of fury went up from the crowd.
Almost instantly, a thrown tankard hit me in the back of the head.
I stumbled a step forward and the man with the busted teeth intercepted me with a fierce gut punch.
I folded like a towel over a bar, but when he tried to bring a knee into my face, I caught his leg and lurched forward, tripping him.
I landed on top and brought an elbow crashing down onto his nose, but everyone was making a ring around us.
I got to my feet fast. As I straightened up, a skinny young fellow threw a jab at my face.
I ducked it and clocked him in the jaw, putting him to sleep.
But three more assholes were there to take his place.
One caught me on the cheek with a wooden club.
Fists were flying at me from every direction, pummeling me until the world was awash with shooting stars.
My fight training and my vampyre strength made me formidable, even drunk and blood-starved as I was. But there was no way in hell I was beating fifty guys.
I didn’t care.
In the pain, the rage, the chaos—for a merciful half a second, I almost forgot about Essa.
All I wanted was for it to keep going. For them to beat me to sleep, to take me apart.
To end the pain. And I could feel an end coming.
With each blow I took, darkness was creeping into the edges of my vision, the blurred, spinning world bleeding to black, like water running down a drain.
There came a sound of shattering glass, a rush of heat, a flash of white. Someone screamed, and then the din of shouting voices gave way to a hush. I realized my eyes were shut and forced them open.
A red dragon stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by the glass of the shattered window. The wood of the bar smoldered from his fire. All the patrons who’d been pummeling me a moment before huddled at the far end of the room, terrified.
“Oh. Hey, Parthar,” I slurred.
I reeled on my feet, then fell to my knees with a crunch of broken glass. In an instant, Parthar was looming over me. He grabbed me by the back of my shirt, like a mother cat taking a kitten by the scruff of the neck, and with a flap of wings, he leaped out the window.
I lost time, bobbing and dragging along, but when consciousness came back to me, I was looking up at a canopy of evergreen trees and beyond them, a night sky full of stars.
Parthar’s warm body was against me, his wing thrown over me like a blanket.
I reached over and embraced him, my arms wrapping around his long neck and pulling him close. I felt my cheeks wet with tears.
“I don’t deserve you,” I said, my words slurred with the scutt. “God… I’m sorry. It’s just, Essa… Essa…Ah, God. I love you, kid.”
Parthar gave a low hoom and put his wing around me tighter as I drifted off to sleep.