Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
ZRYNOK
“Zrynok.”
Her voice. Arwen’s voice. Close. Urgent. Cutting through the red haze that’s consumed my vision.
I stop mid-swing. The blade hovers in the air, dripping with blood and things that used to be inside a living body. My chest heaves with exertion I don’t remember spending. Every muscle burns with exhaustion and need and the Bloom’s desperate demand for more.
Arwen stands a few feet away. Her knife is wet with blood—she’s been fighting while I lost myself in the frenzy—but her attention is fixed on me. Her expression holds something I can’t immediately name.
Not fear. I expected fear. Anyone watching what I just did should be afraid.
Recognition. That’s what I see in her face. Understanding.
“The infection?” Her voice is steady despite everything.
I force words through a throat that doesn’t want to cooperate. “Getting worse.”
“I noticed.” She doesn’t step back. Doesn’t flinch. “Can you keep going?”
I look around the sleeping hall. Bodies everywhere.
Blood pooling on the stone floor, dripping from overturned cots, spattering the walls in patterns that speak to violence beyond tactical necessity.
The surviving Keepers have fled—I can hear shouts echoing from deeper in the barracks, doors slamming, the sounds of organized response beginning to form.
We’ve lost the element of surprise. But we’ve also eliminated more than half their force in a matter of minutes.
“I can keep going.” I wipe blood from my face with a hand that trembles despite my efforts to steady it. “The leadership. We need to finish this.”
“Then finish it.” She moves toward the corridor that leads deeper into the barracks. “Cael says the command quarters are through the next hall. Mallus will be there.”
I follow her. Step over bodies I don’t remember killing. Try not to think about what I just did, what I’m still capable of doing, what the Bloom is turning me into.
The need pulses patient in my blood. Waiting for the next opportunity to feed.
The barracks’ central corridor is chaos.
Keepers pour from side chambers—some armed, some still groggy from sleep, all of them moving with the desperate urgency of soldiers who know their defenses have been breached.
Shouts echo off stone walls. Orders conflict and overlap.
The air fills with the sounds of transformation-enhanced voices calling warnings, demanding action, trying to organize a response to the slaughter we’ve unleashed.
I wade into them.
Trained reflexes take over—bypassing thought, turning combat into a series of problems with physical solutions.
A Keeper lunges from my right. I sidestep, open his throat, move to the next target.
A pair approaches from the left, coordinating their attack.
I take the lead one in the chest, use his falling body as a shield against the second, finish her with a thrust through the eye.
Arwen fights beside me.
Not in front—she doesn’t have the training or the strength for the vanguard.
But near enough to guard my blind side, to take the enemies who try to flank me, to handle the threats I miss while I’m buried in the main assault.
Her knife work is efficient. Practical. She doesn’t waste motion on excess violence the way I do.
She kills because it’s necessary. I kill because I can’t stop.
“There.” She points toward a reinforced door at the corridor’s end. “Command quarters. Mallus will be rallying the reserves.”
“How many reserves?”
“Maybe ten. Maybe less after tonight.”
Ten more. Ten between us and the leadership that holds this barracks functioning. Once they fall, the remaining Keepers will scatter—leaderless, demoralized, easy prey for whatever comes next.
“Cael?”
“Working on the armory. Keeping them from reaching weapons.” She glances at me, reading something in my face I’m probably not hiding well. “Can you handle ten more?”
The Bloom surges at the thought. Ten more deaths to feed on. Ten more opportunities for the violence it craves.
“I’ll handle what I have to,” I say. “As long as you pull me back when it’s done.”
We breach the command quarters with Cael’s help.
He appears from a side passage as we approach the reinforced door—his altered features splattered with blood, his luminous gaze bright with battle fever or horror at what he’s witnessed tonight. He carries a ring of keys in one clawed hand.
“The armory is secured. Most of their weapons are under lock, and the lock is now mine.” He fits a key into the command door. “Mallus has six guards with him. The rest fled through the back exit.”
“Then we finish the six.”
The door swings open.
Brother Mallus waits on the other side—a massive Keeper whose transformation has gone further than most, his body almost entirely covered in hardened skin, crimson flowers blooming from his shoulders and down his arms. He holds a weapon that’s somewhere between a sword and a club, heavy enough to crush bone with a single swing.
His guards fan out behind him. Three on each side. All of them armed, all of them transformed, all of them ready to die defending their commander.
“The executioner.” Mallus’s voice is deep, resonant, distorted by whatever the Bloom has done to his throat. “The Abbot warned us you’d come. Said you’d be more dangerous than you look.”
“He was right.” I step into the room. “Surrender, and I’ll make it quick.”
Mallus laughs. The sound is wrong—too many harmonics, like multiple voices speaking at once. “Surrender to an infected mongrel? I’ve served the Abbot for thirty years. Watched him build this order from nothing. Do you think I’ll let you destroy it?”
“I think you’ll try to stop me.” I raise my blade. “I think you’ll fail.”
He charges.