Chapter 37 | Vallan #3
With a quick twist, the vampire’s neck snaps. He goes limp, dead weight on me, and I toss him off. He’s still moving, trying to readjust his broken spine, because even though I’ve made him incapacitated, he still isn’t dead.
Agelessness is a curse in that way. He can’t fight, and he can’t die until someone squeezes the black blood from his heart. So he’s left there to rot in agony, twitching and flopping on the ground. Eventually, in days or weeks, he would recover.
We’re not going to give him that much time.
I look up, past him, wiping my blood off my neck. Sephania is gone, past the initial wall of soldiers, with her other mates and the army of Gilded Ghosts behind her. Kimera’s corpse is trampled on, which can’t be helped in the dusty, grimy, bloody setting of battle.
“You’re a fool for this, Vallan Stellos!”
The voice comes from deeper in the rows of tents to my side.
Cordea draws a thin shortsword, seething at me and bending her knees. She lunges from twenty feet away, black cloak fluttering along with her jet-black hair, closing the gap in mere seconds.
I bend, kick out with my boot, and flip my axe on the ground onto its head. The weapon wobbles and I spin, grabbing it at the hilt at the last second as Cordea charges at me. I swing roundhouse for a cleave that will separate her torso from her legs. She leaps high over my arc, unnaturally high—
Comes down on me blade-first, and stabs it into my shoulder from above.
I roar, bloodrage unleashing, and stumble. Her sword plunged deep through the bone and into my chest—not far from my heart.
My face lurches forward and I smash her with my forehead. She leaps off me, leaving the blade stuck in me, and draws another one.
My left arm feels useless now, no matter how painless and numb I feel from the bloodrage. My senses heighten and thoughts swim away, replaced by the bloody necessity to kill and maim and destroy.
I blink through the red curtain, waiting for my former second-in-command to come at me again.
She hesitates, seeing the pure red in my eyes, and clenches her perfect jaw. “You should have never gone against the Night Judge, Vallan. Aramastun is too powerful an enemy for you and your ragtag group.”
“You aren’t,” I roar in a guttural, throaty voice, and then decide I’m finished waiting for her to act.
I charge at the forewoman and she slides back on her heels, as if surprised I’m taking the offensive. She skitters to the left to avoid my bull-charge, bringing her sword down on my one useful arm.
I let the blade sink into my forearm, deep and jarring against the bone, and adjust my momentum to grab at her at the last second.
My axe falls from my hands. She gasps when I close my fist around the hem of her cloak and pull back.
The clasp of the cloak chokes her and sends her flailing back toward me. She swiftly undoes the pin and lets the cloak fly off her body, fluttering into my face.
I charge through the blackness, feeling another surge of pain in my thigh this time as she dips low and skewers me.
Her sword pins into my flesh.
It was that greedy stab to my thigh that makes her falter. She should have run away while I battled with her distracting cloak in my face. Now she’s right in front of me, eyeing the axe at my feet.
I ignore the axe, lunging at her.
She scampers right, into the guard of my useless impaled arm and shoulder—
Except it’s not useless anymore. My bloodrage made sure of that.
My hand closes around her arm and she lets out a wheezing sound, stabbing wildly into my body. One, two, three times, drawing blood with each attack.
I ignore any pain, roar spittle and rage into her face, and bring her body into me to meet my other fist.
My gloved hand breaks the brittle bones of her perfect face. I wrap her hair around my wrist and punch her again, crunching cartilage, snapping her neck back, stunning her.
She’s not so perfect-looking anymore.
Cordea spits a broken tooth at me, eyes wild as she tries to concentrate. For some reason, she’s still focused on my axe on the ground, as if terrified that’ll be the thing that cuts her in half.
But I don’t need my axe when I’m in my barbaric bloodrage. No, my fangs will do.
They puncture her neck, deep and gruesome. The sound is slippery, slurping, as I tear a hole into her flesh and feast on her blood.
Cordea whimpers, she struggles, squirming in my grip as I crush her against me in a hug.
When I drop her onto the ground, steaming veins and torn muscle flop out of her wound, a wave of blood spraying upward. She staggers onto her knees, futilely gripping the cavernous gash, and falls onto her back.
I lift my boot and her eyes flutter and then widen—
As I smash my boot into her face, her neck, and bury her upper half in a crater of dirt and mud and blood.
For good measure, with a roar I punch down, rip past her sleek leather tunic covered in gore, past her breastbone, and mangle a yawning hole in her chest, reaching inside her, past her ribs.
I finish by popping her slippery dead heart in my fist.