Chapter 26
Wroth
Leaving her felt like the wrongest thing I had ever done. Every step tugged at me, demanding that I turn back, insisting I was making the worst mistake of my long life.
But she had asked it of me, and…I trusted her.
For the first time in many, many years, there was no seething fracture in my chest, no hate roiling and waiting to spill out.
She had patched that awful crack until it no longer existed.
I was not a creature, nor a tyrant, nor a fool; I was Wroth, remade and new.
And because she had performed such a miracle, all I could do in return was give her what she wanted, the time and space to do what she did best. If she could love me as I was, fiend and lord, then I must love her as she was: not merely a woman, or my lover, but a Master Artificer.
These were her proving grounds. Leaving her behind, fully trusting her, was the only gift I could give her to demonstrate my respect for everything she’d worked for.
So I ran on all fours, leaving her behind.
Both proud of her, and sinking into despair.
Alvar’s scent trail was fresh, rich with sickness and exhaustion, acrid with fear and desperation. I raced after him, blind to all but the path she had told me to run, and found him several floors up on the main stairs, slumped in the doorway of a laboratory.
He panted for breath, emaciated limbs trembling. When he saw me coming, his eyes widened, and he threw himself sideways into the laboratory, stretching out one hand for a table covered in tools.
I picked him up by the collar and ripped him bodily back out onto the stairs.
“You go nowhere,” I told him, gritting my fangs as I throttled back the instinct to snap his neck and leave him for dead. Or…to tear that throat out right now, end that useless heartbeat, drink him dry.
“Please let me go,” he whispered, wavering as I set him on his feet. “Please. I know it went too far, but I never meant for all of this to happen.”
“Oh, no, of course not. You only meant to murder me.” I forced him to march up the stairs, irritated by his slowness. Alvar stumbled, gasping on every other step. “And in your short-sighted greed, you would have doomed all of the Rivers along with me.”
I thought of Jesamin, working desperately to open Fae Artifice for the sake of saving a single human life.
And compared to that image was the memory of the open chrysalis, the dried black liquid spattered on the floor—where a young man had awakened a Fae for his own gain, his hatred and avarice the tools of its resurrection.
“Are you going to kill me?” he whispered, and for a moment, under all the dirt and gore, even with the lines of stress and exhaustion carved into his face, he looked like the teenage boy who used to sit at Kajarin’s side, baby-faced and beaming under the attention of the lai nobles she surrounded herself with.
I forced him to keep walking, grabbing the back of his shirt and hauling him upright when he threatened to fall over.
I had to mull it over, unable to shake the image of young Alvar.
It was only after we’d passed several more laboratory entrances, bringing us close to the level of the pits, that I answered.
“No.” I thought it over, and realized it was true. If I had not met Jesamin, if those wounds were still open…I would have murdered him without a second thought, and left his body here to rot, my last insult to Kajarin. I would have wiped her entire bloodline from this earth.
Both sons were products of their mother, more so than having simply been born of her.
Perhaps I had failed them myself, in some ways; she never would have allowed me a hand in raising them, but neither had I attempted any effort at becoming a father figure, at showing them a way to live outside her fantasies of humans rising up and slaughtering us all, and a ruling class of divinely-ordained, pure-blooded Veladari.
I had seen them only as evidence of Kajarin’s blatant disrespect, not as future men coming into their own.
She had raised them into the Spear of Justice.
They had grown up being showered with praise every time they spoke of hating my kind, of burning down blood-shops, of outlawing human-vampire marriage.
The more they hated, the more attention they received from the powerful men she told them to impress, and the more affection they received from Kajarin.
Of course Alvar wanted me dead. Hating me was the only way he had ever been shown a mother’s love.
“I will not execute you.” I steadied him, watching him limp along like a hobbled horse. “You will never be free again, but perhaps in time, like your brother, you will begin to make amends.”
Alvar let out a rasping laugh that became a cough. “Rasmus has been stealing from you for years.”
I shrugged. “It was less than your mother spent in a week on fripperies. And beyond that, he has already begun his path to redemption, and I suspect, given time, he will go above and beyond. There is no true cruelty in your brother—perhaps because he’s experienced what it’s like to be the Serissan brother of the loyalists’ golden boy.
Would you have defended him? Or, when the Spear had finished massacring vampires and began on foreigners, would you have let him be run down like a dog in the street?
I suppose it’s not so much the actual purity that matters, but the appearance of it, given your father’s Héllénic origins.
All the plotters seemed willing to gloss over that little scandal, but if they’re good at anything, it’s gilding shit. ”
Alvar opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally closed it.
“It’s good to know you would have allowed your brother to be driven out or murdered if it furthered your own ends.
I never told you of my brothers, did I? None of us are related by blood.
One was a farmer from Nordrin. One escaped the blood arenas of Pharos.
One was a priest, raised so from the orphanage he grew up in, and he didn’t even believe in damn vampires until he became one.
All of us mongrels, none of us with a damn thing in common but loyalty to each other. Something you lack in spades.”
I tired of his pace, his silence, the knowledge that he would have allowed Rasmus to be trampled underfoot if it furthered his selfish agenda. Always his mother’s son, in the end.
But Jesamin would believe that some good, some small justice, might still be able to come of this. She wanted him to face the consequences, not escape into death.
So for her sake, I heaved him over my shoulder, ignoring Alvar’s gasp of pain and outrage as a bony spur dug into his gut, and began to move at a gallop.
As the stair twined up and curved, the wall fell away into a massive gap, revealing the Gates and the small city below. From the streets beneath us, this gap had been invisible in the darkness of the ceiling. Alvar made a small sound of despair at the sight of his camp’s remains.
“All that gold,” I said, almost cheerful. “All that chthonium. Endless Artifice…out of your hands forever.”
I might not be able to mangle him about, but his despair over the loss of everything he had was nearly as good.
We kept running upward, until a light illuminated the darkness ahead.
Marrion’s lamp. The entire group sat or laid on the stairs, some panting for breath like they were dying, others on the edge of unconsciousness.
Nikos was dribbling water into a man’s mouth, massaging his throat to make him swallow, and Rasmus was cursing as he shook a small glass bottle.
“There’s only a little left. It’ll help the pain for maybe an hour, maybe less. ”
My niece was pale as she looked at me, her eyes shifting over my shoulder and widening when she realized we were alone.
“Where are they?” she demanded, standing upright and swaying slightly.
I came to them and stopped, dropping Alvar.
“Jesamin stayed behind to amplify the crystcore’s effects and destroy the city. We need to start moving now, as fast as we can, or we’ll all be swamped in the crystcore’s miasma.”
To her credit, my niece didn’t waste time on asking questions. She took the threat at face value, clearly already calculating plans as she eyed the group.
“I can carry at least three.” I looked over the thin, starving humans. “Maybe four.”
“Two,” Nikos said grimly, moving on to minister to another. “Any more and I might as well be crawling, for all the speed I’ll make.”
Rasmus licked his dry lips. “I think I can handle one,” he said quietly. “I don’t have the stamina for more than that.”
Marrion rubbed one temple, tapping a finger as she began counting through the humans.
“It’s a shame we had to leave Talos,” she said briefly, and began rummaging in her robe’s sleeve.
“Very well. Uncle and Nikos must carry the most injured among us.” She rattled off names, pointing to my responsibilities.
“Now, these five, I can walk. Uncle Wroth, give them several drops of your blood, please. You will all swallow this,” she added sternly to her flock.
“I can walk your bodies for you, but I’d prefer you to be alive by the end of it.
Steering a corpse is much less enjoyable than you’d think. ”
“Marrion, you cannot expend that much blood,” I said, just as a human woman reeled back from the expectation that she’d have to swallow my blood—or that Marrion would be controlling their bodies like puppets.
“I can, actually.” She withdrew a bottle from her sleeve, holding it up to the lamplight; viscous and dark, it looked like nothing more than a bottle of ink, but I knew what it was: distilled fiends’ blood, from all four of us.
“I’ve been saving this for the most dire of emergencies.
I will almost certainly collapse at the end of this race, but I will be able to run them out of here. ”