Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Idreamed I was seventeen, lying on a beach, covered in blood, holding a sword a vampire had given me. Above me, the Citadel burned with the blue flame of vampire Nightfire—this place that I’d been told was the last safe place in Vostis.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. I was on my knees in the dirt, covered in blood. A lot was mine, but more belonged to someone else. My hands, unscarred and young, closed around the hilt of a sword, and a voice filled my head.
{What blade denies its purpose?}
Close. Open.
Someone leaned over me. A face I’d seen before—refined and handsome, with broken-glass eyes. I smelled smoke, oddly sweet.
“You,” the man said, “are very fortunate to be alive.”
He smiled. Fangs glinted. I tried to attack him, tried to bury Zefiah’s blade in his heart, but I could not move. Death reached for me, but the vampire got there first. He grabbed my hair and tilted my head back. Something cool and refreshing flooded my tongue.
I fought the darkness. I really did.
Close. Open.
It came for me, anyway.
Close.
The memories came back murkily.
A dream. A bad dream.
Mirie’s severed hands. Marko’s destroyed body. Valentina’s corpse, still holding the weapon of her final strike.
Please be a dream.
I forced my eyes open, slowly, painfully.
Blurry reality came into focus above me. A ceiling—gold trim and cream plaster. Sensations—pain, mostly. But also, the embrace of fabric. Sheets?
With great effort, I straightened my fingers, flattening my hand against soft velvet. I was in a bed.
Real.
Not a dream.
My throat closed. I swallowed thickly. The weight of all of it—the grief, the disbelief—nearly crushed me.
{What have we done?}
Zefiah. Her voice was distant.
I sat up too fast and was rewarded with a wave of dizzying pain. I was in a bedchamber—small, but with finely made wooden furniture and polished stone walls and floors. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a room this clean or well-maintained.
Zefiah was neatly propped up in the corner, sheathed.
My heart leaped at the sight of her. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms. I jumped from the bed and nearly toppled over when my body refused to cooperate.
Everything hurt. I was wearing different clothes, linen pants and a light undershirt, and I glanced down at my bare arms to see purple bruises blooming over them like fungus.
My bones didn’t seem to quite line up right, crunching and grinding as I put my weight on them.
Still, I seized Zefiah with the relief of a lover reunited. I threw her sheath across my back and drew her.
But when my hands slid around her hilt, my body jolted. Something felt . . . wrong. Her power was misdirected and erratic, like water hissing from a pot boiling over.
{What have we done?} she whispered, over and over. {What have we done?}
What the hell is wrong with you?
{What have we—}
Focus, I snapped at her. We are going to get out of here, and I need you.
Those last three words were laced with more fear than I intended to show. I need you.
Not because she was my only source of power. Because she was my companion. And she was the only one left—
I pushed those thoughts away.
Instead, I went to the door. I didn’t bother trying the handle, instead using Zefiah to break it down. The glow along her blade, typically a steady gold, sputtered and flickered. The door burst from its hinges, slamming against the wall, and I stumbled into a long hallway.
It was empty, with several closed doors, a dead end to my left, and a single turn to my right. Flickering candles, likely eternally lit by magic, hung along the walls. The architecture was unfamiliar to me—all that smooth, sandy stone. This wasn’t Hegaella. Even the air smelled different.
Where are we, Zef?
{Hell,} she muttered. {We are in hell.}
For fuck’s sake.
A jumble of half-formed possibilities rattled around in the back of my head—that maybe the Shadowborn had taken me, or Shiket had lived and turned me over to Nyaxia as punishment, or I’d hallucinated the entire thing in the captivity of the House of Shadow.
It didn’t matter. I had to get out of here. I didn’t think before moving, Zefiah drawn. I heard the incoming footsteps seconds before I turned the corner and did not slow.
I swung Zefiah before I even saw who I was aiming at. Light burst through the hall, blinding me. Someone let out a shout in a language I didn’t understand. A sword blocked mine, then—
Overwhelming pressure invaded my skull, my thoughts. A sudden wave of dizziness sank into my bones, enhancing all my mortal pains.
A single shout of command rang out as I staggered backward, stunned.
“You are in no danger, Kyrene,” a woman’s voice said.
I lifted my head, dazed, the edges of my vision blurring.
Two male guards bearing deep red uniforms stared me down, and beside them, hand raised in command to halt, was a woman.
She wore black trousers and a long jacket of deep red.
A platinum circlet perched in a nest of black hair, which was long and unbound, streaked with a few strands of silver. A red blindfold covered her eyes.
Some kind of cultist, then. I’d heard of some sects of Acaeja that blinded themselves. They, too, could cloud a mind.
She smiled at me—an expression, I sensed, intended to show me she lacked fangs.
“You are in no danger,” she repeated.
“Where am I?” I demanded. “Why am I here?”
Despite my best efforts, I felt myself swaying. Did I look as bad as I felt?
“You were severely injured,” the woman said. “I think you should sit before we have that conversation.”
Her magic still pushed against my thoughts. Trying to sedate me, perhaps. I was so exhausted that it almost worked. But before I could respond, Zefiah sent a bolt of fury up my spine. Light sparked at her blade in erratic surges.
{Fallen ones!} she cried. {Fallen ones are here among us!}
Vampires.
The images came, unwelcome. The bodies, Valentina, Mirie, Marko, the death, the children, the—
I slammed those images back and was running again before I even knew what I was doing. I pushed past the woman and her guards. Their voices faded behind me as I sprinted down one hallway and then another.
Tell me how to get out of here, I commanded Zefiah.
But she only filled my head with garbled words that didn’t make any sense. The glow that typically lit my way sputtered like a dying flame.
{Fallen ones,} she repeated, over and over. {Kill them, kill them. Fallen ones—}
I rounded a corner and collided with a figure.
Zefiah let out a high-pitched, wordless hiss that slid up my spine.
I inhaled the sweet scent of smoke. The iron tinge of blood. A shock of pain I barely noticed, as something sharp pierced my shoulder, right where fingers dug into my bare flesh.
The world slowed. My body threatened to give out—my consciousness threatened to slip from my grip. The figure enveloped me so completely that it almost seemed like an embrace. Like some kind of twisted tenderness.
I swung Zefiah and didn’t stop to see what I’d hit as I wrenched free. Voices echoed behind me, and an Obitraen command I barely heard: “Let her run. I have this under control.”
At last, I turned a corner to see windows—a wall of them carved into the stone, iron-lined, revealing a misty night sky. At their center stood a set of heavy wooden doors.
I burst through them.
A gust of cold, salty air struck me. The sea stretched across my vision, endless beneath a dark, cloudy sky. Jagged cliffs, bare and bone-white, jutted up from the frothy waves.
I was on a balcony, several stories above the ground. I turned. Taking in the sea. The mountains. The building I’d just run from was a blocky stone structure of sandy stone, as if it had been crafted from the cliffs themselves. No roads. No other buildings. No escapes.
Step by step, I approached the edge until my toes hung over the sheer drop. I stared down at my bare feet. Below, foamy waves crashed violently against the rocks. The black water beckoned.
In the darkness, I saw Mirie’s severed hand and that cursed gauntlet.
Marko’s shredded body, crawling back just as I had commanded him to.
Valentina.
Valentina.
My chest burned, as if I’d swallowed fire. Every mortal pain folded around me at once.
{What have we done?} Zefiah whispered, and this time, I felt it, too.
What have we done?
“That would be a terrible waste,” a voice called over the ocean breeze.
I knew the voice this time. I didn’t need to look away from the sea.
Septimus.
Past a lump in my throat, I said, “Did I kill her?”
“Her?”
“Shiket. Did I kill Shiket?”
“Yes, dove. You killed her.”
{What have we done?}
My cheeks hurt. I realized I was grinning like a madwoman.
“Good,” I murmured.
The ocean called. My friends were waiting. A sharp burning sensation tugged at my shoulders, but I barely noticed.
“You killed a goddess and lived,” Septimus said. “Surely you must understand, Vindica Ultis, how few people can stake that claim. None, in fact.”
I lived.
And yet, so many didn’t.
I imagined what my body would look like falling into that churning sea, crashing upon the rocks hundreds of feet below. It would destroy my flesh. And since I could not die by anything but Zefiah’s blade, I would feel it all for eternity.
“She deserved it,” I said.
And maybe I did, too.
{What have we done?}
“I don’t doubt it. The vacuum of power Shiket left will throw the White Pantheon into a feeding frenzy. What, I wonder, will come next?”
Yes. The gods would crawl all over each other for just a single gulp of that displaced power. Just like animals. Like vampires.
Hell, like humans.
I don’t care. The answer was right there. And mostly true.
But there was still a single thread holding me to this world, to that future. A single, burning tether of rage.
I lifted my gaze to the sky of soupy darkness. I thought of how I’d seen Nyaxia on two of the worst days of my life, in a sky just like this one.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked, without turning.
“The myths say that Shiket chose you to be Vindica Ultis because she saw your ability to reshape the future. I am no acolyte of the White Pantheon, as you might imagine. But I believe that to be true.”
“I don’t need riddles.”
“Then I’ll speak in terms you understand. You are a bounty hunter, yes? I have a job for you.”
I choked a laugh. A job. The very word sounded ridiculous.
“What makes you think I’m interested in a job?”
“Because it is no ordinary job. And because I believe you and I may share a propensity for making the right beings bleed.”
There was something in his voice, jagged like broken glass, that made me pause. An uncomfortable kinship.
He was right. I did enjoy making things bleed. Perhaps it was the only thing I was good for. And at those words, I felt a sharp, visceral longing for blood, and the way it ran thick and dark enough to wash away all unwanted pains. The sweetest drug I’d ever tasted.
In the darkness of the water, I saw their reflections, beckoning. The grief was an open embrace, ready to swallow me up and drag me down if I took its hand.
But fury was a blade, and my hands already fit around it so nicely.
An easy choice.
At last, I turned around.
Septimus stood in the doorway wearing a spotless white suit.
His hands were loosely open at his sides.
Delicate ribbons of red pooled in their palms, running between us like the silk of spiderwebs—coming, I realized now, from the cuts he had opened in my shoulders.
His blood magic, preparing to pull me back if necessary.
“You thought I was going to jump?” I said dismissively. As if it was a ridiculous thought.
He gave a half shrug. “Like I said. It would be a terrible waste.”
He was collected, calm, his clothing impeccable and a knowing gleam in his eye, like he was playing a game by rules only he knew. Smarmy, even by vampire standards.
I wondered if he had been there, in Hegaella. If he’d watched it happen—or helped.
You and I share a propensity for making the right beings bleed.
And bleed they fucking would. Every last one of them. One day, even him.
“Tell me about this job,” I said.
He smiled, bearing fangs.
“Gladly, Vindica Ultis.” He threw his cigarillo on the ground, crushing it with his heel. “I suppose I should formally introduce myself. Septimus. Prince of the House of Blood.”
Only now did it hit me why the name had sounded familiar when I first heard it. Because he was one of the most powerful—most dangerous—men in Obitraes.
He held out his hand to me.
{What have we done?} Zefiah moaned.
What indeed.
I did not hesitate as I pushed past his open hand and stepped through the door.