Chapter 15 Nyssa
Nyssa
There isn’t a single part of me that regrets this encounter.
My hands shake as I pull the hairband out of my ponytail and redo it, twisting the band tightly.
A movement outside the living room window catches my attention, and I move over to it.
Taye is standing in the middle of the small square of grass, her hair standing straight up in the air as she appears to be communing with a rose bush. I cross my arms and stare at her.
She doesn’t acknowledge me standing at the window, but I know she knows I’m here. I tap on the glass, sharp enough to make her look up. Her pale eyes meet mine through the rain-streaked window, and she smiles. It’s not a warm smile. It’s knowing, and that makes my skin crawl.
Crossing over to the front door, I yank it open and step out into the drizzle, not bothering with my coat. “What are you doing here, Taye?”
“You tell me,” she says.
I blink and purse my lips. “I didn’t call you.”
“Didn’t you?” She tilts her head, rainwater streaming down her face like tears she isn’t shedding. “The veil is thin around you now, Nyssa. It whispers. It shows me things.”
“What things? What did you see?”
“I see you standing at a crossroads,” she murmurs, her pale eyes unfocused, looking through me rather than at me. “Three paths, three shadows, three choices. But only one leads to survival.”
“That’s not an answer.” My patience, already shredded by the day’s events, is wearing thinner by the second.
She blinks, her eyes regaining focus. “That is all I see.”
“So, this is a warning?”
“Of sorts. It’s what I do. For the Order. For you.”
I chew the inside of my lip. Guilt rears up as her dedication smacks me in the face. I lied to them today. I’m lying to her now by not telling her everything.
But for a reason I can’t quite figure out, I just don’t trust them with this.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. The realisation sits like a stone in my gut, heavy and undeniable.
The Order has been my anchor, my purpose, the structure that has defined my entire adult life.
But something shifted the moment I stepped into that crypt.
Or maybe it shifted when Dreven materialised in my garden.
Or when Dastian appeared on my doorstep with his infuriating grin.
Or when I wrapped my hand around a god’s cock and decided to see what would happen.
Fuck.
This isn’t me. It isn’t order. It’s chaos.
“Nyssa?” Taye’s voice cuts through my spiralling thoughts. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah,” I lie, refocusing on her pale, rain-soaked face. “Three paths, three shadows. Only one. Got it.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but she nods and then turns to leave through the garden gate, letting it fall closed behind her.
I watch her go. The rain soaks through my shirt, cold and insistent, but I don’t move. Three paths. Three shadows. I don’t need a seer to tell me what that means. Dreven, Dastian, Voren. The unholy trinity that’s crashed into my life and turned everything I thought I knew upside down.
The problem is, I don’t know which path leads to survival. Or if any of them do.
I turn back to the house, my socks soggy and disgusting. I peel them off and walk inside. The silence is oppressive. I can still smell him. Sandalwood, shadows and something darker, something that makes my pulse quicken despite my better judgement.
“Get it together, Vale,” I mutter, stripping off my wet shirt as I head for the bathroom. A hot shower. That’s what I need. Scalding water to wash away the mud, the blood, the scent of a god I just fucked against my living room wall.
The water is almost painful when I step under it, but I welcome the sting. I brace my hands against the tiles and let it pound down on my shoulders, my neck, trying to wash away the memory of his hands pinning my wrists, his mouth on mine, the brutal fucking that I met with equal ferocity.
What the hell was I thinking?
I wasn’t. That’s the problem. I let Rynna get in my head. I was reacting, not thinking. The hot water beats against my skin, but it doesn’t wash away the feeling of him inside me, the way he looked at me like I was something precious and dangerous at the same time.
I press my forehead against the cool tiles, trying to anchor myself. This is a disaster. I’ve just fucked one of the very beings I’m supposed to remove from this earth. One of the gods who was locked away by my ancestors for a reason.
“Fuck,” I whisper to the empty bathroom, the word swallowed by the sound of running water.
When I finally emerge, wrapped in a towel, I catch sight of myself in the mirror. My hair is plastered to my skull, my amber eyes bright with something I don’t want to name. I look feral. Wild. Like someone who just had the best and worst sex of her life and doesn’t know what to do about it.
I crawl into bed, suddenly cold. Shivering, I wrap the duvet around me and debate crawling back out to turn the central heating back on. But I’m too cold to emerge from under the warm and cosy duvet. I close my eyes, curling up into a trembling ball and promptly fall into a deep sleep.
I wake up after dark, sweating profusely under the duvet. The heating has kicked in, and it feels like I’m in hell.
I turn over, and my head pounds as a wave of nausea washes over me.
“Blergh,” I groan. I’m sick.
All this fucking getting drenched in the rain has made me ill.
I push myself upright, the room spinning slightly as I swing my legs out of bed.
The digital clock on my bedside table blinks 6:47 PM.
It’s not even real night yet. I feel like death warmed over, which is ironic considering how close I came to actual death earlier.
My throat is raw, and when I swallow, it feels like I’m ingesting broken glass. I stumble towards the kitchen, desperate for water, my body protesting every movement. This isn’t just a cold. This feels different. Worse.
The kitchen tiles are freezing under my bare feet as I grab a glass and fill it from the tap.
The water is blissfully cool going down, even if it does make my throat scream in protest. I drain the entire glass and refill it, leaning against the counter as another wave of dizziness hits.
I fumble in the cupboard for some paracetamol and down two tablets, hoping they kick in before I leave for my patrol. No sick days for the slayer, after all.
I lean my forehead against the cool cupboard door, waiting for the room to stop tilting. I guzzle back some more water and straighten up. I don’t have time for this. I shake it off, telling myself to feel better through sheer force of will.
It works.
Kind of.
Enough to get me back to my bedroom and to pull on an oversized tee and some leggings. I peek out of the window and sigh in relief that it has stopped raining. For now. But still, I pull on a hoodie, hat, and scarf before I grab my waterproof jacket and my hiking boots.
Decked out like it’s mid-winter and not just late autumn, I grab my blade and shove it in the back of my leggings.
Knowing I should eat something, but really not wanting to, I turn my nose up at the kitchen and leave through the front door, going from sweating to shivering and back again before I’ve reached the end of the road.
I make it to the cemetery gates before the shakes get so bad that I have to grip the cold iron to steady myself. My vision swims, doubling the familiar path ahead of me into two wavering tracks. I blink hard, trying to force the world back into focus.
“Come on, Vale,” I mutter through chattering teeth. “You’ve fought demons with worse.”
Have I, though? I can’t actually remember feeling this spectacularly shit. My legs feel like they’re made of wet sand, and there’s a strange ringing in my ears that won’t go away.
I push through the gate anyway, because that’s what I do. Rain or shine, healthy or dying, the slayer shows up. It’s the one constant in my life that makes sense.
The graveyard is eerily quiet tonight. No wind rustling through the ancient yews, no distant sounds of traffic from the main road. Just silence, thick and oppressive, pressing in on me from all sides.
“Slayer,” a voice hisses behind me.
I turn with an eyeroll that nearly makes me retch. “Vampire,” I say in the same creepy-arse tone. “Can we just fight without the trash talk or monologues tonight?”
The vampire, a male in his late twenties, like me, I’d say, looks disappointed. Like I ruined his night because I don’t want to chat before I kill him. I just want to decapitate him and go home to bed.
“Fine,” he huffs, clearly put out. “But you look terrible, by the way.”
“Thanks for the observation.” I pull my blade free, hoping no gods are lurking about to witness me fighting a basic vampire while I’m sweating through my clothes. “Let’s get this over with.”
He lunges, fangs bared, and I sidestep on pure muscle memory. My body knows the dance even if my brain is currently swimming in a fog of fever. The blade comes up, a clean arc that should catch him across the neck as he passes.
My timing is off by a fraction of a second, and instead of removing his head, it bounces off his skull. He hisses, spinning faster than I can track in my current state. His fist connects with my jaw, and I go down hard, my arse hitting the wet grass with a bone-jarring thud.
Stars explode across my vision. The world tilts sideways, and for a horrible moment, I think I’m going to pass out right here in the mud.
“You really do look terrible,” the vampire says, looming over me, fangs bared. There’s genuine concern in his voice now, which is just insulting.
“Says you who crawled from the grave,” I spit out and stumble as I get to my feet.
He doesn’t wait for an invitation. He lunges again, moving with that blur of supernatural speed that usually slows down for me, but tonight looks like a smudge of grey against the black.
I duck, my knees buckling ungracefully into the mud.
My stomach does a somersault that would impress a gymnast, and I have to swallow back a wave of bile.
“Just die already!” I shout, thrusting my blade upward blindly.
It connects. Not with his neck, which would be the clean, professional kill, but right up under his ribcage, piercing the dead heart. He gasps, looking down at the glowing steel protruding from his chest like he’s never seen a knife before.
“That’s… cheating,” he wheezes, before exploding into a cloud of ash.
I cough as the dust coats my face. “There are no rules in love and slaying,” I mutter, swaying on the spot.
I wipe the ash from my eyes, but the world refuses to stop spinning. The tombstones are doing a conga line. My skin feels like it’s two sizes too tight and boiling hot.
“One down,” I slur to the empty air. “Bed. Now.”
I turn to leave, aiming for the path, but my legs decide they’ve had enough of this vertical nonsense. The ground rushes up to meet me, wet and cold against my feverish cheek.
I don’t black out completely. That would be too merciful. Instead, I drift in a grey slush of consciousness where the cold mud against my cheek is the only thing tethering me to reality. Even that is fading, replaced by a furnace heat that seems to be radiating from my own bones.
“Well, isn’t this tragic?” a voice draws gracefully through the ringing in my ears.
I try to tell Voren to sod off, but all that comes out is a pitiful groan.
“Sleeping on the job, slayer? The dead won’t be impressed.” The air around me grows colder, but it’s a crisp, clean chill, not the feverish clamour of my own body. Strong hands grip my shoulders, hauling me out of the muck with insulting ease and slinging me over his shoulder, fireman style.
“Put me down,” I slur, my tongue feeling too big for my mouth. “I’m working.”
“You’re drooling in the dirt,” he corrects. “And you are burning up.”
“Just a cold,” I mutter, leaning my head against his questionably fashionable coat. “Took some paracetamol.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it’s not working,” he says.
The next second, I’m placed gently down on a bed that smells of dust and must. “Eww,” I groan and try to crawl off, but Voren places a hand on my forehead that stills me. Mostly because the coolness seeping into my sweaty forehead is bliss.
“Stay there,” he says. “You’re not well.”
“No, shit, Sherlock.”
“It’s Voren,” he murmurs. “You are far gone.”
I don’t have the energy to explain, so I grunt and close my eyes.