Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
ZRYNOK
The first Keeper dies without knowing we’re there.
He’s sleeping when I reach his bed—a massive figure sprawled across a cot that’s too small for his transformed bulk, his skin bark-textured in the darkness, flowers budding from his shoulders.
The Bloom connects us, his infection calling to mine, and for a heartbeat I sense what he senses: peaceful dreams, the comfort of routine, the certainty that his masters protect him from the horrors of an uncaring world.
Then my blade opens his throat.
Blood sprays across the bedding—arterial, urgent, the copper smell filling my nostrils before the body finishes twitching. The Keeper dies with a wet gurgle, eyes never opening, dreams bleeding out into reality.
“Two more in the adjacent chamber,” she whispers. “One is awake. Reading by candlelight.”
“I’ll take the awake one.”
We move through the doorway in tandem—two predators coordinating without words, each trusting the other to handle their target. The reading Keeper looks up as I enter, candlelight catching the confusion in his luminous gaze.
Confusion becomes recognition. Recognition becomes fear.
He opens his mouth to shout warning.
My blade enters his throat before the first syllable escapes.
The force of the strike lifts him from his chair, his body convulsing around the steel embedded in his neck.
The vibration travels up my arm—flesh parting, cartilage cracking, the specific resistance of human anatomy yielding to violence.
The Bloom drinks in every sensation, magnifying the impact until I can barely think past the intensity.
The Keeper’s hands scrabble at my wrist. Weak. Getting weaker. His transformed features twist with agony, flowers on his shoulders wilting as the life drains from his body.
I twist the blade. The last resistance fades. His eyes go dull.
“Clear. The main sleeping hall is next. At least a dozen inside.”
The infection surges the moment I lower my blade. Not the wanting—something rawer. The Bloom seizes on the violence, on the blood still warm on my hands, and amplifies it into something that isn’t thought. My body screams to move. To keep moving. To not stop until there’s nothing left standing.
“Zrynok.” Her voice. Cutting through the haze. “Stay with me.”
I breathe. Force the rage back down. Lock it away behind walls that feel thinner than they did an hour ago.
“I’m here.” The words come out rough. Barely controlled. “Keep moving.”
The main sleeping hall holds fourteen Keepers, not twelve.
They wake the moment we enter—transformation-enhanced senses registering the blood on our clothes, the wrongness of our presence, the death we’ve already dealt. Shouts echo off stone walls. Bodies surge from cots, reaching for weapons, scrambling for battle positions.
No more quiet.
I meet the first charge head-on.
The Keeper swings a cudgel at my head—a brutal overhead strike that would crush a human skull. I catch his wrist, redirect the momentum, drive my blade into his gut and rip upward. His entrails spill across the floor. He falls screaming.
The next comes from my left—a woman with bark-textured skin and flowers blooming from her cheeks, moving with the enhanced speed the transformation grants.
I’m faster. The infection burns in my blood, giving me reflexes I didn’t earn, strength that doesn’t belong to me.
My blade opens her chest before she gets within arm’s reach.
One makes it close enough to grab me.
His hand closes on my forearm. Contact. Skin against infected skin. The Bloom in his blood reaches for the Bloom in mine, and the sensation hits me with the force of a sledgehammer.
Everything explodes through my nerves. Every point where his fingers press against my flesh registers as overwhelming stimulus—pleasure and pain intertwined, impossible to separate, making my vision blur and my body seize.
The craving surges, demanding more contact, more intensity, more of whatever this offers.
And beneath the sensation—rage.
I don’t just kill him.
I destroy him.
My blade rises and falls. Rises and falls.
Rises and falls. The first strike opens his shoulder to the bone.
The second shatters his collarbone. The third, fourth, fifth—I lose count.
The Bloom screams for more, and I give it more, hammer-blow strikes that reduce his body to something unrecognizable.
Blood sprays across my face. Warm. Wet. The copper smell fills my lungs with every breath. The Keeper stopped moving after the second strike, but stopping isn’t enough. The rage demands more. The infection demands more. Everything pours out through my blade into the corpse beneath me.
Somewhere distant, someone is screaming.
It takes me several seconds to realize the screaming is coming from me.