Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Memories swirled in incomplete fragments, like those from within a distant dream.
The forest, dark and damp. Wet soil squelching beneath my feet.
Glowing chains around my wrists. My blood dripdripdriping with every step, swirling in the marsh.
One of the guards sweeping a bead of it from my arm, licking it casually from his finger as if popping a berry into his mouth.
I didn’t care. This was only a dream.
The only thing that seemed real, seemed off, was Septimus’s eyes glancing over his shoulder. Sharper than this hazy, toothless world. Reminding me of something, but I wasn’t sure what, couldn’t remember . . .
Couldn’t remember . . .
I could remember Egrette. Egrette, standing on a beach, surrounded by dead bodies. Egrette, with the blood of children rolling down her chin. Egrette, with Valentina’s heart in her hands and a silver bolt in her chest, smiling at me.
I’ll kill her, I decided.
I’ll kill her. Just like all the rest.
Kyrene, someone was saying urgently. Kyrene, you must fight it. You must—
{Kyrene!}
My eyes opened.
No—my eyes were already open. A shroud was merely pulled away, the world crashing back into unpleasant clarity.
The pain was too sharp, the voices too loud, the air too rancid and thick.
For one pathetic breath, my every primal instinct grabbed for the honey-thick pleasantness of the Shadowborn’s spell.
“—her out,” Egrette’s voice was saying.
I blinked hard as reality slid back into place. The first sense to return was smell—the smell of human waste and rotting flesh. And as the rest pieced together, I thought this had to be some kind of Shadowborn trick. Because I was in a living nightmare.
I was in what I could only describe as a prison, though the word seemed pitifully inadequate to describe this sort of cruelty.
Stone walls surrounded us, many stories high, so tall I could only barely glimpse the dark tops of trees rising above them.
Cells lined them, stories upon stories of them, encased in metal bars.
The roof was open, revealing a cloudy, starless sky.
And at the center of the room, there was what I could only describe as a pen, divided into yet more tiny, cramped cells.
Every prisoner here was human. I could recognize my own blood, even from this distance, even in the darkness.
And then the word came to me—a word that described this place better than “prison” ever could:
Stable.
These were not prisoners. They were livestock—humans who had useful skills, like machinism or healing magic or midwifery. Skills that vampires needed but lacked themselves.
It should not have been shocking to me. The practice was not uncommon, and it was not limited to vampires.
But this . . . this was staggering. There were hundreds, or even thousands, of people here.
This was human suffering twisted into machinery.
An efficient system for leveraging and exploiting mortality.
I thought of Valentina in her final moments—how she had fought so hard she’d led her attacker to kill her instead of kidnapping her. If there was any part of me that had resented it, that had wished she had survived, it died now.
Because she would have been brought here, and this place was many times worse than death.
{Depravity,} Zefiah’s voice hissed. {It is all the fallen ones know. To feast upon others in whatever ways they can.}
She was still being held by the Shadowborn guard, whose hands were now smoking and visibly burned. The guard let out a curse of pain as her light flared, burning through the layers of fabric around her, jerking toward me.
Egrette laughed softly. “Look how the leash calls to the dog,” she said. “Or is the dog calling to the leash? Do you like what we’ve built, Vindica Ultis? A shame that Shiket no longer lives. I would’ve enjoyed witnessing her reaction, if you’d told her about this.”
I already knew what Shiket’s reaction would have been. I thought of the way she’d looked at the ruins of Hegaella. Furious, yes. But furious over corpses. She would have had no desire to free these people, only eagerness to avenge them.
“My, Egrette.” The sound of Septimus’s voice behind me was shocking. I’d never heard him so weak. I turned my head to see him approaching to stand beside me, hands in his pockets, eyes raised to the cells around us. “What progress you’ve made.”
He looked like shit. He looked much more like shit than he had the last time I’d seen him.
How long had we been walking? My body hurt; but then, my body had already hurt.
Still, every one of my joints now wailed in protest. My left big toe was screaming in pain, probably bleeding, from what felt like a single piece of gravel in my boot that my spellbound self had not cared to remove, jamming into my flesh for who-knew-how-many steps.
{We have traveled many miles,} Zefiah said. {You have been entranced for nearly two days.}
Two days? Gods, my arm. I was going to lose my arm.
This thought sent a bolt of panic through me.
I craned my neck to examine my shoulder.
It was now wrapped in dirty, bloodstained bandages.
Someone had administered some form of medicine, but clearly not enough and not very well.
It was at once incredibly painful and oddly numb, which didn’t seem encouraging.
{You will not lose the arm, if I can help it.}
But soon, the damage would be so bad that even Zefiah wouldn’t be able to help me.
Egrette gave Septimus a judgmental glance. “You didn’t have to come all this way. You don’t look well.”
“And miss all this splendor?” He touched his heart. “Never.”
His gaze slipped to me. There were dark shadows under his eyes. His expression flickered, barely visible, as if mirroring something in my own.
“Welcome back,” he said.
One of the guards nudged me forward, and we began walking down the main hallway cutting through the courtyard. The starving eyes of prisoners followed me. A few stood and pressed themselves to the bars. “That’s the Vindica Ultis!” I heard one of them whisper.
Egrette looked up at the excited prisoners, visibly amused. “Look,” she said. “You really are famous, aren’t you?”
I had the sudden urge to slip my hand into my pocket, press my thumb to the imprint of Shiket’s face.
Instead, I licked my cracked lips. My voice was raspy when I said, “Where are we?”
“Kastivai,” Septimus said. “Where the Shadowborn conduct their less acceptable experiments.”
“You make it sound so grotesque,” Egrette said. “The Shadowborn are scholars. And there is no innovation without experimentation.”
Septimus made a wordless noise. We passed one turn in the hall that, unlike the others, was barred with a thick, solid metal door. He paused in front of it. Again, that hand slipped under his jacket. Reaching for a cigarillo box that wasn’t there.
“What’s this?” he said, so very casually.
Egrette barely glanced at him. “Nothing exciting. Prisoners who require more security.”
Septimus didn’t move. He just stood there, white suit stark against the dark metal of the wall.
Do you know what’s back there? I asked Zefiah, and she shivered in response.
{Dark things linger beyond that wall, though I cannot sense what.}
“Come,” Egrette said, without stopping. “You can help show your gift to her new room.”
Septimus, at last, turned and followed. He matched pace beside me and said, very quietly, “How do you feel after the journey?”
A carefully worded question. He meant, Can you fight?
I looked down at my shoulder. Patched and stitched, albeit not very well. I tried to move it and was rewarded with a staggering wave of pain and nothing but a twitch in my hand.
I gritted out, “I’ve been better.”
He let out a too-casual chuckle. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your journey is almost over. Be ready for some rest.”
“Rest,” Egrette remarked. “That’s one word for it.”
But I heard only the two words:
Be ready.
I shot him a glance out of the corner of my eye, which he did not meet.
If he really did always have a plan, now would be a fantastic time to prove it. Because I was failing to come up with one myself.
Now more and more of the prisoners pushed up against the bars, staring at me.
The whispers grew louder. A door loomed ahead.
Darkness clustered around it. A cell, though a thicker one than those that surrounded us.
My cell, I knew. Just as I knew that if I allowed myself to be shut within, I would not be coming out again.
I eyed the guard ahead who held Zefiah. Smoke now plumed constantly from the bundle of fabric, and she held it in the crooks of her elbows, not in her hands, which were now so rotten with burns they stank. Septimus had been right. She’d certainly lose them.
If I called to Zefiah, could she come to me? She was close enough, but I was weak.
{They have stifled me,} she said. {But I could go to you. If you were strong enough.}
That was a big “if.” Still, I told her, I’m strong enough.
Her silence indicated that she was not convinced.
I slayed a damned goddess. Have a little faith in me.
{I did most of the work.}
My steps slowed, dragging out this last stretch.
We don’t have a choice, Zef. I’m not going into that box.
It occurred to me that maybe Septimus really had simply sold me out. That maybe all of this was some elaborate ruse to gain some kind of access to the Shadowborn or some other vampiric political bullshit I wasn’t privy to.
But then, a warm, low voice murmured in my ear, “Wait.”
One of the guards shot Septimus a wary look. He shrugged, smiled.
“Just bidding goodbye to my guest.”
But there was something about his tone that made Egrette, several strides ahead, stop and turn. She shot Septimus a suspicious stare. Her lips parted.
. . . shush . . .
The sound was barely audible. A faint rustling of air overhead. A brief sweep of darkness over the cobblestone ground.
I looked up to see an empty, dark sky. Still. But Zefiah flared, on alert, hungry for blood.
What was that? I asked her.
The human prisoners didn’t react. But the vampires all heard it, too, or felt it. Swords slid from sheaths. They tilted their faces to the sky.
Egrette spun around, ready to bark a command.
And then—
Shush. Shush. Shush.
It was such a peculiar sound. Almost comforting. Like the hush of a mother to a baby at night.
Another shadow swept over the floor. Another. Another.
I squinted up at the sky through the overcast cover, cursing my human eyesight. Something was moving up there. As if the clouds were rippling like the surface of a dark ocean.
The sounds grew louder, running together:
Shushshushshushshushshushshush . . .
The sky grew darker, and darker, and darker, and those shadows drew closer, and all at once I could see what they were.
Wings.
Countless wings.
Zefiah screamed her realization into my mind:
{Fallen ones!}
One of the guards shouted, “The fucking Nightborn!”
I knew an opening when I saw one. Septimus caught my eye, his chin inclining in a barely there nod—now!
I thrust out my hand and dove for Zefiah, who, in a burst of golden light, flung toward me, sending her captor sprawling and me staggering against Septimus. He grabbed my good arm and dragged me backward, hissing into my ear, “Run!”
I barely heard the command. The Nightborn descended upon us, and everything devolved into chaos.