Chapter 43 | Skartovius
Skartovius
With the manor quiet and my thoughts coming back to me, I start to feel my power swell. The notion someone has blocked by shadowwalking ability concerns me, but I have a hunch I know what is going on.
I move to make good on my promise to Sephania—to lock down the manor, make sure Keffa and the Chained Sisters are safe, and meet up with my group near the Firehold as soon as I can.
Something about this entire enterprise seems off, however. There’s a disturbance in the air I can’t place my finger on. It’s all happened too swiftly, I think, wondering if I’m going mad from decades as a vampire, or if my anxiety is well-deserved and prudent.
I leave the conference room and head for the eastern side of the estate, stopping off to check on the acolytes.
My entire coven, my court of misrepresented noblebloods and scrappy commonbloods, is away on missions of their own.
I spent a painstaking amount of time electing each of them to their duties, and I am not about to recall them due to a fucking hunch.
My thudding boots are deafening in the quiet night as I storm down the elegant halls of my home. I glance into every room, keeping the doors slightly ajar and with candles and lights illuminating dancing shadows along the furniture and walls.
Outside, the white-robed servants are docile, working in their monotone silence. In their tents, they butcher cattle from the fields and stock their latest forages from the woods—berries, vegetables, things Sephania enjoys.
I have no use for human food but my little temptress is a different animal. More akin to an animal, really, with her diet. It’s transformed my entire manor, and yet I wouldn’t change a thing since it means keeping Sephania near me at all times.
Part of me fears I’ve erred in sending her with Vallan and Garroway to the Grimsons. I hope my fears are unfounded and they’ll create a peaceful escort for Jinneth, and the crisis will be averted.
Somehow, I’m not hedging a lot on my hopes. Hopes are as useful as hunches.
After inspecting the eight steepled tents and stables in the back, and noticing nothing untoward or suspicious, I return into the manor. I make my way downstairs to the empty jail cells, rove around the ballroom upstairs, and march through the many labyrinthine hallways and corridors of my home.
I am just ready to depart when I feel it: The eerie disturbance I felt before, now louder and more prominent in my blood. I can sense it before I can see it, and my brow furrows with consternation.
I don’t have long.
Suddenly, my worries about getting Sephania away from here seem justified.
I detect a presence in a nearby room, and realize I have not been alone this entire time I’ve stalked my halls. No, there’s been someone else here the entire time.
I push into the room down the hall, where the presence blares louder than ever. She has the Loreblood all over her, and as an ancient vampire of experience I am well-versed in reading the signs of life, death, and identity.
This poor sap is very much straddling the three, unsure which direction she will fall.
“Palacia,” I say as I enter the bed chamber.
The interfolk girl looks over her shoulder at me from the window.
She is slight, frail, yet with determination in her wide turquoise-tinged eyes.
The ring of red present in all vampire irises creates a stark contrast with that oceanic hue to her orbs.
Her hair has taken on a greenish tone in her state of undeath, melding with the golden wheatfield color from her time alive.
The girl wanders toward me, stepping on skinny legs as if a newborn doe, unsure how to manage herself. She is barefoot, padding along, raising her sharp chin and slightly tilting her head to regard me like a curious morsel.
Sephania’s small vampirex friend hardly comes up to my chest, though I’ve heard every rumor imaginable about her.
“You are Sephania’s master,” she says matter-of-factly.
“No, I am the master of this manor,” I answer flatly. “Sephania has no master. If anything, she is the mistress of me, for my own master has been dead for ages.”
She sniffs lightly. “I smell her on you.”
For some reason, even with my ageless experience, this slight girl unnerves me. In a way, it’s refreshing, knowing she is not one to be underestimated. I know it’s a matter of her new bent on life—her vampirism, of which she is unaccustomed.
“I smell her on you too, little daisy,” I reply.
“Not in the same way. Why do you call me that?”
“Because you’re wispy, hardly there, and a strong wind will blow you away.” My shoulders rise in a shrug. “We do not have much time to get acquainted—”
“I think I’m wrong,” she blurts. The girl begins to circle me. I allow her to inspect me like I’m one of her soldiers—like she is the general, when I am so used to filling that role with my own people. “It’s not Sephania I smell on you, sir.”
The diminutive vampirex is behind me now, and I don’t bother turning around. The marker of her presence is too loud in my head; if she tried anything violent or foolish, she wouldn’t get within a foot of me.
“It’s the man who turned me I smell on you, somehow,” she finishes. When I finally glance over my shoulder at her, she reels, sniffing the air unpleasantly. “How is that possible?”
My lips curl. “It’s complicated.” I reach out and pat her arm, so frail it’ll snap in two if I squeeze too hard. She is not built like my little temptress. “I came here because you are not safe. We must move quickly.”
She blinks. “Not safe, sir?”
I nod gravely. “If you can smell my scent, or Sephania’s, and can recognize it, then you can sense my marker—a link to find me anywhere in this huge house.”
“I . . . think so. But I don’t know how to use it.” her thin brow arches helplessly. Before, she seemed so sure of herself. Arrogant, even, like me, with her newfound power and strength. Now, she looks like little more than a child. Weak, helpless, needing direction.
“You will sense me when you need to,” I say.
The thin line of familiarity—dangerous familiarity rolling through the house—becomes brighter and louder in my head. It’s a tinge of power I’ve felt for ages and can identify easier than my own hand.
“For now,” I tell Palacia, and gently hold her chin so she’ll listen. “Flutter to my study room when you hear my warning, little daisy.”
The infiltration is suitably silent. I have to give the intruders respect in that aspect: They’ve planned this well.
I know these invaders won’t underestimate me. Vampires for generations have stopped doing that, which fuels my arrogance and confidence. I’m not blind to my own qualities.
And yet, there is something essential these bastards are missing: They haven’t accounted for my shadows, because the ability to manipulate and weave them is so new to me.
They haven’t had time. It’s a fragile ability, windswept and unprotected until I know more about it and spend years acquainting myself to it.
In my mind, closing my eyes, I feel the dead hearts of at least six infiltrators. I decide to call them what they are: hunters. They are not here to spy, not here to scout and report. They are here to kill . . . or capture.
The six malevolent assassins roam my halls unbidden, like they own the place, and that makes me angrier than anything. How dare they try to claim my land as their own.
I’ll not have their tainted boots scuffing up my rugs a moment longer than I have to.
So I get to work.
I start at the southern end of the manor, furthest away from Palacia. Moving into a well-lit storage room, where a lantern flickers on a wall sconce, I draw my saber with one hand, and with the other I twist my wrist.
My shadow curves, blooming into a portal. When I tentatively step in, I smile, because my foot disappears.
My power has returned.
I hop into the shadow portal with my entire being—
Emerging in the southern kitchen closest to my quiet acolytes outside. The room had been empty before, but it isn’t anymore.
A crouched vampire in a gray cloak stalks from the entry toward the exit door past a large covered work table.
I emerge from his shadow, deciding on stealth rather than brute force. The last thing I need is a blazing, hissing, screeching vampire in my own damned house, burning the place down.
So I draw a dagger from my belt and keep my silver saber poised behind me like a fencer.
Perhaps it is the tiniest rasp of steel he hears from my dagger being drawn, or the shadow on the wall near him, abruptly darkening the room. Whatever it is that makes him notice me, the vampire wheels around quite fast—
Only to earn my dagger in his chest.
As the knife plunges and cracks through breastbone, I twist, feel his heart give out, slide the dagger out, and he collapses dead on the ground.
I flare my nostrils at the intruder and spit on his corpse. Then I grab a cleaver from the kitchen table and behead the bastard for good measure.
I wipe my dagger off, sheathe it, and disappear into my shadow.
The next hunter is located in the conference room, getting suspiciously close to the only other inhabitant of this fortress, yet without knowing it.
I take him next, appearing out of his shadow with cleaver and dagger swinging, slicing off both his hands at the wrists before he can even raise his blade.
He cries out—a deafening sound meant to alert, and alert it does. I curse my foolishness and hear boots heading toward me immediately.
Just as a third vampire bursts into the wide conference room, I disappear into my shadow again.
Through the black gate and tunnel I go, gliding past walls and stone as my head begins to throb from using my ability so frequently.
The circumstance calls for it, however, and I come out at the fourth blood marker, a vampire in the northeastern section of the manor, upstairs. He’s systematically going through bedrooms with a sword drawn, the blade blackened by pitch.
I fly out of his shadow like a bat, and he swings wildly at me as I backpedal. His blade thuds into the door frame of Sephania’s bedchamber, and I wonder what brilliant tactician gave the vampire with a longsword jurisdiction over the tight quarters upstairs.
I smile as he works to wrench his blade free from where it’s stuck in the wood. Just as he does, my dagger punctures the rubbery flesh of his throat. He gurgles, choking, grabbing at his neck and trying to squeal but failing because I’ve severed his vocal cords.
As he reaches for his weapon again, I finally draw my silver sword and stab it into his chest, knowing it can’t be helped.
The inferno is immediate, the wheezing hiss and sulfuric scent clouding the hallway in a great gray billow.
Twisting my wrists left and right, I cover the heaping, fiery carcass with a blanket of shadows that snuffs out the flames and leaves a white, ashen residue behind.
Boots sound behind me and I spin—
Just as the fifth vampire charges at me with a roar.
Suppose there’s no use being quiet anymore, what with all the ruckus I’ve caused.
The assassin is shocked when I’m no longer in front of him, dipping into my shadow, submerging into blackness.
He stares down at his feet when his blade strikes nothing but air, confused.
And he stays confused when I pop up beside him from the wall, out of his sconce-lit shadow, to plunge my blade between his ribs.
The instant I make silver contact with his flesh: firestorm. I douse the flames in shadows as he topples to his death, and scowl at the way my rugs and floorboards are getting blackened and ruined. Worst part is, it’s all my doing, since I’m the one swinging a silver sword around.
With a sigh, I note the placement of the sixth and final vampire in the manor, who is methodically moving through the rooms downstairs, close to the study. The sixth vampire is clearly searching for something specific, and I have a mind to give it to them.
First, I return to the conference room where I vanished from the second and third hunters—
Oh, never mind, I think, realizing the assassins and their shadows have brought me to the next room over.
I quickly put the defenseless vampire missing his hands out of his misery. His angry comrade manages to get a few parries and lunges in since he’s seen my shadowwalking ability already, but I finish him off swiftly with a few well-placed strikes.
Then I calmly walk through the room, down the hall, and into my study.
“Now,” I say in my mind, pushing out the word in every direction.
Light, bare footsteps pad swiftly down the hall, muffled from their distance. I sit at my chair, staring down at the oak desk in front of me, waiting. My fingers tap on the well-worn edge of the desk.
The door flies open and Palacia charges in, her pale face plastered in a sheen of scared sweat.
“Run into the wall, little daisy,” I command, and fly my shadow to the bookshelf behind me, creating a circle of undulating blackness.
A second figure is seconds behind, chasing her, glimpsing a final gaze at the interfolk girl before Palacia vanishes in my shadow portal.
I close my eyes, making sure she emerges from a safe shadow: one of the acolytes outside, who will undoubtedly be shocked to see her sudden presence around the butcher’s table.
When my eyes open, I tilt my head.
I have to admit to being surprised by who I see in front of me. Slightly surprised, anyway.
“I expected Madame Mortis. Not you.” My hand falls on the hilt of my curved saber at my hip.
The dhampir frowns at me. “Sorry to disappoint.”
With my free hand, I run a gentle touch over the spine of a leather-bound book on the desk in front of me.
“Oh, don’t be,” I say. My gold-flecked eyes become alight with menace, my wicked smirk equally vile. “I’m thrilled you’re here, Lukain.”