Chapter 54 | Sephania
Sephania
Even though I’m ecstatic to see Palacia safe and healthy, freed from the clutches of the indomitable pervert Liolen Sesk—for whom she seemed uniquely fit as his equal in that regard—there’s another truth that quickly sinks my shoulders and mars my features.
Palacia notices immediately, because she knows me so well and is at least partially tethered to me via my blood. “What’s wrong with your face?” She slightly narrows her eyes.
“Palacia . . .” I swallow a thick lump that lodges in my throat. “. . . it’s Rirth.”
Her narrowed eyes slowly grow wider, understanding, showing more emotion in that simple act than I’ve seen from the interfolk since she’s turned. I see the wheels turning in her mind, behind those ocean-red eyes. “My king . . .” she murmurs under her breath, loud enough for only me to hear.
She doesn’t move. No one does.
Then something grabs hold of me—an irritating nagging at the back of my head—and I know she’s about to do something foolish and reckless. I know it because she has the same deep-thinking, depressed look on her face I always get before I do something reckless.
I try to head it off at the pass, so to speak, but the damned girl is too small and sprightly. Doesn’t help she’s a vampire, either.
She reaches for the ladder, leaping onto the first rungs.
“Pala, no!” I scream, grabbing at her on instinct.
My fingers waft through the fine fabric of her golden gown, gripping only air as she’s already two more rungs up the ladder.
Behind me, my mates respond with a surprised commotion of “Shit!” and “Ah!”
The sunlight cast into the hold from the hole above comes in diagonally. It reaches the first four rungs of the ladder before slanting off to the ground and wall to the side of my mates.
Palacia has already climbed five of twenty rungs, and if she reaches those upper few, ascending onto the surface of Nuhav with her hood down, she’ll be dead in seconds. The sun will turn her into a vampiric torch, and she knows it.
That’s what she’s trying to do, and I desperately cry out and grab at her again, leaping for all I’m worth.
She reaches the eighth rung down, feet scrabbling, so desperate to commit a grisly suicide it’s alarming how little it seems she’s thought this through.
“Where . . . do you think you’re going . . . little pixie?”
The voice stops the commotion dead. It comes from behind my mates, a whisper of a pained grunt.
Palacia freezes first, recognizing the voice, gasping as she peers down and over her shoulder.
Rirth steps into the room with a clacking of canes he’s using as crutches—one belonging to Antones, one to Keffa. It’s safe to say neither of them need to use the canes right now.
The captain of the Silverknights limps into the room, taking his spot in the circle of sunlight against the wall where my mates can’t be.
“Got you!” I yell, breaking the silence as I grab firm hold of Palacia’s gown and tug.
Seems I didn’t think this one through either, because she slides down with a yelp and topples onto me, taking both of us to the ground.
Luckily, the vampirex is light as feathers, and all I do is let out a grunting “Oof” as I land on my back and she plops down on my chest.
Palacia proceeds to climb over me, struggling with her ridiculous dress.
She pushes down on me and, somehow, through her dress, manages to drag her damned cock over my face in the process, before crawling off my body and leaping to her feet.
She yells, “My king!” before jumping into Rirth’s arms and nearly knocking the grievously wounded man over.
If there was ever a sign more obvious that she is not the one for my coven of mates than her hauling that heavy package across my face as she scrabbles to get to her feet, disrespectfully discard me, and jump into another man’s arms, I would love to know what that sign is.
Skar can’t help but scoff a laugh at my unfortunate predicament. That, combined with his “Finally some good fucking news!” comment makes me wonder if, without Garroway present, we’ve found a new jester in the group.
“Fuck me true, girl!” I sputter, spitting out and running a hand over my face. I’m still on my back, staring up at the circle of light of the opening overhead, wondering if I should be running into the sun. “. . . If you’d let me finish my damned sentence before you try jumping to your death!”
Rolling my head back, I look at them upside down. I’m almost too tired to stand, and too humiliated to want to.
Rirth says, “You didn’t tell her I lived, Sephania? Was it suspense you were hoping for? Because it seemed to work.” His voice is serious but with a hint of mirth. He once bested me in the Firehold, and now he feels he’s bested me again by claiming Palacia.
Only the spirits and deities know she’s all his, for all I care.
His canes are discarded and he’s holding onto the small vampirex for balance.
If she wasn’t turned, she wouldn’t be strong enough to hold up his dead weight, because he certainly looks dead.
His face is almost as pale as hers, still sweaty from his near-death experience in the Faith Ward cathedral.
“I was about to!” I choke out a snarl and lift my left arm straight into the sky. Right arm for Keffa, left arm for Rirth. “Your stubborn beau wouldn’t drink the Silverblood I offered him while he was on death’s door, so I waited for the idiot to pass out and I force-fed him my Loreblood.”
Lukain chuckles. “When in doubt, tap it directly from the source.”
“The Silverblood is diluted,” Skar points out. “Makes sense it wouldn’t work to heal a human. I’m surprised you went with that first, when you know your Loreblood does the trick.”
I recall using my Loreblood to save Garroway’s life in the Temple of the True so many moons ago, after we were attacked by Alacine’s assassins or bounty hunters or whatever they were.
I wish Garro was here right now, because surely he’d be making fun of me in a lighthearted way, whereas everything Skar says has a tint of meanness to it.
He hasn’t learned Garro’s gift of gab to the same extent.
Skar’s right about one thing though: The Loreblood works. On both vampires and humans.
Vallan helps me to my feet, the gentleman that he is.
I scowl at him, dusting myself off. “I thought I told you to put Rirth up and not to let him leave his bed so he could recover.”
Vallan helped haul Rirth down here after the Faith Ward incident. He practically carried the much-smaller man over his shoulder, while Rirth groaned and attempted to die and slowly healed from my Loreblood.
The giant shrugs. “I did. Then I followed you to the ant-man’s room.”
“That’s not why he was called—” I cut my words off, pinching the bridge of my nose. I’m too tired for this and my heart is too heavy. I can’t bring up Antones without my voice cracking and falling dangerously close to tears.
Someone needs to peel him off that damned wall, and it isn’t going to be me. There are many things I will do, but not that. It needs to be someone who hardly knew him.
At least when I look over to Palacia and Rirth, finding them lip-locked and very close to getting it on right in front of us, I’m filled with something like hope, something related to happiness. A distant cousin to happiness, maybe.
Because if a human who hates vampires and a vampire who doesn’t remember what it’s like to be human can fall for each other like this . . . then perhaps we actually have a chance of saving these damned cities we all call home.
Eight hours later, after much-needed rest across the board in the Firehold, we hold a twin burial ceremony for Antones and Cyprilis. They are symbols of the partnership between the Grimsons and Chained Sisters, even though they couldn’t have been more disparate people.
Perhaps that’s the point. The Grimsons and Chained Sisters themselves couldn’t have been more different and diverse. Underground gladiators fighting as entertainment for nobleblood vampires; sickly girls of various sects and denominations chained together under the unifying front of liberty.
In the end, everyone here wants their freedom. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves, what name they go by, or even if they regard themselves as human, dhampir, or vampire.
I feel the end of something special coming soon.
The end of our revolution, perhaps, which came on hot like a shooting star and is ready to crest through the sky and vanish into the heavens.
The feeling is in my bones, an ominous sensation I can’t quite articulate to my people.
Aramastun Wyvox wants to meet me, and I know nothing good can come from that.
Not if we let the Night Judge make the judgment.
The burial lasts hours, filled with food and drink in the eating room. All two-hundred-plus rebels in attendance celebrate the lives of our leader and our crazed little sister.
There are so many things I can say about Antones, but I leave that to the others.
And say what you will about Sister Cy, but she fought to her death to try and protect Iron Sister Keffa and my mother.
That says all I need to know about the vampiress’ loyalties.
She knew what it was like to lose children, even if she could never feel that same motherly instinct as she had when she was a human.
She didn’t want that same fate to befall Jinneth. I like to think she died protecting her for me, though I’m not so selfish to truly consider that idea.
I can’t stop thinking about my mother, and what we might have to do to get her back. What we might have to give up. Looking around the room, I’m hit with a sinking feeling. It’s a forlorn, melancholic sensation that creeps through my body and swells in my belly.
It’s family. Everyone here, every fight we’ve gone through, has unified us and made us something closer than I ever thought possible.
For a girl who began her life as an orphan without a family, who bobbed and weaved into numerous ill-fitting forms of family all through my formative years, I could have never expected the Firehold would be the place that holds those closest to my heart.
Late in the evening, I rise from my bench, slightly wobbly from too many mugs of ale, and make my way to where Skartovius and Lukain are speaking nearby.
I tap Skar on the shoulder. “Got your beauty sleep, nobleblood?”
He quirks a single brow at me, smirking.
Then his smirk crumples on his face, both brows rising, as he looks over my shoulder at the southern entrance to the eating room. “Graybird.”
I spin—dizzying from the drink.
Garroway stands triumphantly at the entrance. People cheer when they see him. The flamboyant jester that he is, Garro breaks into a sweeping bow. “I have one better!” he exclaims, lifting a finger.
With his other hand, he yanks a rope—
Out stumbles Father Cullard from the hallway, trussed around the neck like a trapped fucking pig.
The cheers climb higher, and I join in, punching the sky. “Yes!”
“Down with the True! Down with the True! Down with the True!” The chants start immediately, even as Garroway parades Cullard through the Firehold, letting everyone spit on him and kick him as he passes.
The flabby man is scared half to death. His eyes are saucers in his head and he keeps whining, trying to speak and plead his case before people interrupt him with more spittle in the maw.
When Garroway brings Cullard to stand in front of me, I cross my arms over my chest. “Welcome back, my love.”
“Apologies for taking so long, little honey badger.” Garro breaks into another bow. “Had to return the children this man stole back to their rightful homes in Nuhav.”
“Understood.” My lips firm into a thin line as I stare into Father Cullard’s sagging old face.
“P-Please . . . Sephanie, isn’t it? Have mercy for an old man. Have mercy for a priest of the True faith and—”
I spit in his face before he can finish. It’s a thick glob, landing on his nose, slowly trickling in twin rivers down his cheeks. He looks at me appalled, jaw agape.
“Fuck the Truehearts, and fuck you, Father,” I snarl.
To Garroway, I say, “Lock him up in the tightest cell you can find. Ask Grimsons where the rot-houses used to be—it’s time we reactivate those.
Make sure he’s watched at all times, cub.
Beat him, maim him, do whatever you want.
Actually, I’d prefer if you do. But don’t kill him. ”
Garroway smiles wickedly. “Yes, my queen.” He bumps Skar’s shoulder on the way by. “Manor Marquin looks great, by the way. Tidied up the place while I was there. It’s waiting for your illustrious return.” He winks.
Then he leads Father Cullard out of the eating room to another round of raucous cheers, dragging the filthy defiler by the rope around his neck, down a dark, dingy hall like the wounded animal he is. Never to see the light.