Chapter One
She was still running toward him.
Blood dripped through her fingers. Seraphina squeezed the two eyeballs harder, afraid they might slip from her hand.
She did it instinctively, not thinking about it, her brain not fully registering what she was holding, only that it was crucial she didn’t lose it again.
The floor was treacherous, covered in debris.
She moved fast, jumping over the dark shadows of jagged rocks and roof beams the relic in her eye socket showed her, searching for a way out.
But every time she tried to turn a corner, voices would ring out from the distance, forcing her deeper into the castle.
She only wanted to be alone. For a moment or two, for five cursed minutes, she wanted to be alone somewhere, so she could think.
At the end of a corridor, she halted before what looked like an abyss carved at an angle, then the relic readjusted her perception, and she understood it was a set of stairs leading underground.
There were fewer chances of running into someone down there, so she started descending quickly, tracing the wall with her free hand.
She reached a landing that opened into a corridor, but kept going, moving deeper into the bowls of the schloss, until the air became almost unbreathable.
Ash and mildew clogged her lungs. She hauled herself from another landing onto another set of stairs, determined to find the deepest level of these dungeons, hoping there was a gate to hell she could pass through.
Because meeting Satan seemed like a preferable affair than facing the world above.
Seraphina slammed into someone.
The man swore and stumbled backward, dragging her with him.
He grabbed her by the arms to steady them both, and she braced herself with her hand on his chest. She felt the crossed leather straps of his uniform under her palm, and when she was secure in her footing, she shoved him away.
He didn’t let go and held her at arm’s length as he studied her face.
“God in heaven, woman!”
“Let go of me.”
“Who are you? You shouldn’t be here.”
She drove her forearm up between his wrists and knocked his hands free, then stepped back before he could grab her again.
They faced each other. Seraphina was breathing heavily, but taking in big gulps of air was a mistake when it was so foul.
She started coughing, bent over at the waist. The soldier took advantage and gripped her arm harshly.
“You’re covered in blood.” His tone was disgusted. “I’m taking you to the captain.”
“You...” Seraphina rasped.
“Come on.”
He jerked her toward the stairs.
“No... You...” But the hacking cough prevented her from finishing the sentence.
“What are you trying to say, woman? Save it for Captain Mayer.”
Still, he should’ve stood at attention, waiting for her order. She didn’t understand why the thrall relic wasn’t working anymore. Panic rose in her chest. She hadn’t lost it, had she?
Seraphina dug her hand into the pocket of her cloak, let the eyeballs slither to the bottom, and felt around with her fingers until she found the tiny bone. She exhaled in relief and gathered her thoughts. Maybe the intention was lacking.
“You,” she said firmly. She could feel the power of the relic course through her arm before dissipating.
“Walk.” The soldier pushed her upward.
This was not the time for the sacred bone to fail her.
She knew that apex relics could be complicated.
Delicate in their rules and intricacies.
That was why a Sarumite could study them for years to learn what they could do, in what conditions, and at what cost. She’d only had the vomer bone for less than twenty-four hours, and the discovery of its ability had been accidental and certainly incomplete.
It wasn’t that the bone was betraying her; she simply didn’t know how to use it.
Speech was part of it, as it made her start the command with the definite “you”, but that wasn’t all.
They reached the next landing. Seraphina could’ve drawn her daggers and had him cut in a dozen places before the man knew what was happening, but she was intrigued by the refusal of the thrall relic to do what it was supposed to.
She turned in place, wrenching her arm free, and craned her neck as if to look him in the eye.
He was tall, safe to assume almost three feet in height, lanky, with narrow shoulders and long limbs.
Strong, albeit a tad uncoordinated. She could take him, but she didn’t want to.
“What are you–” he started to say.
“You!”
Just like that, he snapped to attention.
And Seraphina learned a new thing about the bone.
Speech was part of it, but also eye contact.
She shouldn’t have been able to use it at all, but she guessed the atlas vertebra of Saint Vivia implanted in her socket made it possible.
Its power was to make one see in the dark.
Even though the extent to which Seraphina could see in her condition was debatable, the principle was there and it worked.
She straightened her back and held the soldier’s gaze in her shadowy line of sight.
“I hear there’s a whole company out there,” she said. “Do you have a surgeon?”
“There is a ghoul,” he said. His voice lacked the annoyance from before.
“A ghoul.” Seraphina exhaled sharply through her nose. “A naturalist you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Bring him to me.”
“Yes.”
He walked past her without another word, and Seraphina stepped aside to let him pass.
She listened to his footsteps fade up the stairs as she rubbed her palms on her cloak.
Were her hands ever going to be clean again?
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and felt her skin crusty.
She must’ve been a vision. The soldier hadn’t acted too surprised considering, but these days, blood was a frequent sight. He must’ve been convinced it was hers.
Seraphina spat on the floor. He’d intended to take her to Captain Mayer.
That reminded her she could still taste him on her tongue.
Now, where was she going? Downward. There was something calling to her.
She didn’t know what. She started descending the stairs again, her brain working on catching a loose thread.
It was at the back of her mind, floating, like something just learned and forgotten.
A thought not entirely formed, a piece of information she’d tucked away earlier to examine later, and later had come; it was now.
The deepest level of the dungeons opened into a large corridor with cells lining both sides. Seraphina slowed her pace, advancing carefully, counting the open maws left by shattered doors, calculating the dimensions of the cells and the thickness of the walls separating them.
Each cell was wide and deep, large enough for a man to pace in every direction without touching a wall, and the walls between them were at least two feet thick.
The corridor itself was broad enough for three men to walk abreast. Fragments of charred wood and twisted iron hinges littered the ground, and she understood that whoever had been kept down here had been sealed away in total darkness, unable to see or hear each other.
This wasn’t like the prison in Ingolstadt, where the doors had bars and the window showed a sliver of sky.
“When you say you were isolated, lived in a room and never got out…”
“It was home. They treated me well.”
The memory stopped Seraphina in her tracks. She pressed her hand to her stomach and whimpered, as if an invisible force had slammed into her. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Huddled in a cell, her back to his, spines pressed together, the rumble of his baritone seeping into her marrow.
She’d left him. She’d promised him and herself that nothing would change.
No matter what, she’d always choose him, and then she’d fled.
At the worst moment of all, too, when he’d maimed himself for her, to return what was hers, when he was sobbing on the floor, bleeding, when he needed her more than ever.
It wasn’t his fault that he’d been made from others.
That people had been killed to give him specific body parts that held the memory of desired skills and talents.
He hadn’t asked to be created, infused with life, locked in a dungeon, thrown into the world…
He hadn’t asked to meet her, fall for her, cling to her – “You are my anchor.” – eviscerate men for her.
Be her eyes, have her eyes… Touch her with her dead lover’s hands.
These things – he hadn’t done. They’d been done to him.
And she’d left him.
Seraphina dug her nails into the soft flesh of her stomach and screamed into the hollow corridor. The sound bounced off the walls and rolled up the stairs to the above levels, multiplied by every empty cell it filled.
She had to set this right. She’d run, and she didn’t know why, but it didn’t matter now, because she was going back to him. He was there, waiting, she had to hurry…
Seraphina turned on her heel and lunged forward, barely managing a few steps before tripping on a piece of wood.
She yelped as she extended her arms to brace herself and collapsed atop a half-charred board that creaked under her weight and broke in two.
Her cloak billowed around her, and the hard edges of Matteo’s journal dug into her ribs.
She tried to push herself up and felt something metallic under her palms. It was a plaque.
With her fingers, she traced the letters etched into it: CONSTRUCT TWELVE.