The Lion & the Deathless Dark — Chapter 15

C HA P T E R F I F T E E N

efiah was still sheathed across my back. Srana’s weapon burned in my hands. Atrius moved faster than any human warrior could.Z Metal squealed against metal as his broadsword struck the staff’s handle. The force of his blow made the metal tremble—gods, it made my spine tremble. My muscles screamed, pain lighting my nerves like a spark in a drought.

Zefiah grew hot against my back. I knew she was burning with godlight, begging to be wielded. She was just as offended as I was that I’d allowed myself to be caught off-guard in a room with not one but two vampires.

I cursed my carelessness as Atrius drew back and came at me again. I deflected his next blow, barely, though the force once again had my legs buckling.

I righted myself. Spun around, dancing backward, out of his reach for precious split seconds. He was bigger than I was, stronger—hell, faster too.

I needed an opening.

He readjusted his hold, and in that half a breath, I lunged. {Let me take his heart!} Zefiah spat, at just the wrong time, distracting me.

Unintentionally, my hand slipped down the staff, sending the blade shifting just as I was about to land my strike. Fucking hell. I fell off- balance, just slightly. But Atrius was a good warrior. Maybe as good as me.

Of course he saw it.

He raised his blade and brought it down.

The flat of his sword struck me in the abdomen, sending me flying.

I hit the ground.

Everything hurt. The pain consumed all else. My muscles tightened without my permission, body curling up.

I rolled over and opened my eyes to see Atrius standing over me.

Septimus leaned casually against the wall, watching, cigarillo between his fingers. I resented that I felt his stare so acutely, and I resented even more that it was witnessing my ass on the ground.

Atrius shot him an unimpressed glance.

“It’s not her,” he said.

And there was just something about the way he said it. The way he looked down his nose at me, so dismissive, as I pushed myself up from the ground.

It reminded me of an old memory. Another voice, saying, It’s for the

best.

I hated that fucking tone.

I threw the staff down and drew Zefiah. She let out a purr of pleasure as I slid her from her sheath. Godlight flooded the room. Pain faded to an

inconsequential buzz.

I threw myself at Atrius.

He spun around, blocking my first strike, stepping out of the way of my second. But I didn’t let up. A single battle without Zefiah and now it was bloody euphoria to have her restored to my grasp. We danced around the room to a melody of metal against metal, of our boots against the floor, of ragged breaths. Zefiah nicked his knuckle, drawing drips of beautiful black. {More of that,} Zefiah sang, delighted.

I loved this part—when all the pieces worked together, straightforward, the one thing I was truly good at. I even loved the pain when Atrius opened a fresh cut below the one Septimus had given me on my shoulder.

I pushed forward, anticipating every move, blocking every strike. My next one had him receding. The one after that cornered him against the wall.

There.

I had him where I wanted him. My eyes locked to his chest, where sweat beaded at the neckline of his shirt—to what lay beneath it, skin and blood and bone and then, fallen vampire heart.

I charged.

I wasn’t sure whether I actually intended to kill him. Perhaps even if I’d wanted to stop myself, I couldn’t.

But just before the strike landed, I became distantly aware of red mist permeating the air. Of the smell of iron.

Something inside my body twisted, jolted, in a way it wasn’t supposed to.

And then, pain. Agonizing pain, as if I’d been lit on fire from within.

My limbs jolted back, revolting against my muscles.

My body reeled backward. I slammed against the wall hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. Atrius stalked toward me. His hands were open. Ribbons of red—my blood—curled between us, as if suspended in water.

“Arrogance is not the same thing as competence,” he growled. His voice was different, somehow. It seemed closer to the sound a wolf makes than the sound a man does. The amber-silver of his irises had turned bloody

crimson, his gaze glassy.

Blood magic.

Behind him, Septimus straightened, his casual stance tensing ever so slightly. But not moving. Not yet.

Another crippling wave of pain. My body jerked against the wall. The pressure was so intense that a wheeze escaped my lips as Atrius stalked closer.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” he said.

He loomed over me now. Black-red bloomed over the whites of his eyes, more in the left than the right. When his lips twisted, his teeth were dagger sharp. It was impossible not to be viscerally aware of how much larger than me he was—he was taller than Septimus, and certainly broader.

My blood now surrounded us, an ominous fog of crimson like the mist on the seas. Beads of liquid red streaked across Atrius’s pale cheeks.

I eyed Zefiah on the floor. But I couldn’t even move my hands to call

for her.

“Atrius,” Septimus said warily.

That one word made my stomach twist. Because I heard it,

unmistakable, in Septimus’s voice: A note of fear, carefully disguised.

Atrius didn’t move. The red mist thickened, wrapping us in a cocoon of

blood.

He lurched forward—

A streak collided with him. It was Sylina, flying from the doorway, sliding her body between mine and Atrius’s. Droplets of red fell unceremoniously to the ground, then quivered over the tile like beads of sand in an earthquake.

“Go,” she commanded under her breath. Her magic pushed me away, sending me sliding across the floor. Instinctively, I called to Zefiah as soon as I could, and she slammed back into my grasp with a satisfying force.

The first thing she said was, {He is lost.} I let out a wordless sound as Atrius lunged for Sylina, certain that I was about to witness her death.

But he stopped short, inches from her throat. Sylina’s hands cradled either side of Atrius’s face, murmuring something to him that I could not hear. The blood that now surrounded them, ropey strings of it that reminded me of spider silk arcing from branch to branch, was Sylina’s.

A hand on my arm nearly made me jump.

“Training is over,” Septimus murmured. His voice was smooth, but I could hear the invisible cracks. “Let’s leave them to it.”

He’s going to kill her. The words stuck in my throat. I was certain they were true as Septimus swept me out the door, and I watched them, standing there in their web of blood, until it closed behind us. We rose up the stairs, steps calm but quick, and his urgency was not lost upon me no matter how calm he seemed.

“You shouldn’t leave her there,” I choked out.

We now walked swiftly down the halls. Zefiah hissed and spit in the back of my mind, like a cat confronted by a coyote. I was oddly dizzy.

“She knows what she’s doing, dove.”

“He’ll kill her.”

I expected a flippant remark. But Septimus was serious as he said, “No.

He will not.”

“What was that? What happened to him?”

“Are you so very shocked by an opponent that’s actually better than

you?”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

I stopped short. Septimus did, too, sliding his hands into his pockets. I stared hard at his face—crystalline grace, like a sculpture of glass. Yet for all its beauty, I found it just as fucking transparent.

“What did I just see?” I said.

Zefiah muttered, {A fallen one consumed by their sin.} “The curse.” I answered my own question.

The specifics of the Bloodborn curse were a mystery, though there was no shortage of salacious rumors flying around. No one, not even the most well-studied vampire hunters I’d ever met, knew what it entailed.

And yet, I was certain that in Atrius’s glazed-over, bloody eyes, I’d glimpsed it.

Something flickered in Septimus’s gaze. Something I couldn’t put a name to and yet recognized innately.

And then, just as quickly, it was gone. He dragged his stare from my feet to my head.

“You’re a mess,” he said. “Clean yourself up.”

Only now did I realize we were back at my chamber. I looked down at myself. Unfortunately, he was right. I was covered in sweat and blood. And now that my adrenaline had faded, my muscles shook involuntarily.

Embarrassing.

He reached past me and opened the door, a small movement that still somehow managed to seem infuriatingly smug.

“We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe then I’ll get to meet this formidable Vindica Ultis I’ve heard so much about.”

And he turned away and strode down the hall, leaving me alone.

THE NEXT DAYS—OR had it been weeks?—blurred into an endless cycle of training.

The following morning, Septimus knocked at my door, and I was brought back to the arena. This time, it was not Atrius waiting for me, but another Bloodborn soldier. He didn’t so much as speak, just presented me the wrapped staff and unsheathed his sword.

It felt wrong to fight without Zefiah, and her grumbling made it clear she was no fan of sharing either. But beyond that, I disliked wielding Srana’s weapon. I felt Val in every click of the gears, every smooth stretch of metal, every elegant curve of workmanship. And yet, I felt her in none of

it. Because human hands hadn’t crafted this, and the ones that did had not seen fit to save Valentina.

The soldier that first night wasn’t as skilled as Atrius. I won easily.

Once I had him on the floor, I’d called to Zefiah before I even consciously knew what I was doing. The blade was inches away from my sparring partner’s chest when Septimus leaped between us, hands raised, my blood frozen in my veins.

“Please don’t kill my cousin’s best guards,” he said, but the smirk on his lips was all vicious delight.

The next day, when Septimus brought me down to the arena again, it was Atrius there, and he remained my training partner from then on.

Time flattened to a steady, dull rhythm. Eat enough to sustain myself, but no more. Sleep the bare minimum, and try to forget the dreams I had when I did. Spar every other moment—Atrius and me, clashing until one or both of us was spitting blood into the sand and he was already commanding, “Again.” Again. Again. Again.

All while Septimus leaned against the wall, exhaling vanilla smoke, that permanent smirk affixed to his lips. He watched like he was committing every movement of my body to memory. Like he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.

I felt that stare constantly. I tucked away every weakness under it— swallowed my gasping breaths and clamped down the tremble of my muscles. My body was weak. In my rare time alone, I would strip naked and stare at myself in the mirror, counting my wounds. The bruises that crawled across my tan skin like black mold, the burns of Shiket’s final vengeful light, the gouges her fingers had left on my arms—deep enough to scar. Sylina sent in a healer to work on me every day after training, and Zefiah’s magic helped me recover faster besides, but the marks of what I’d done were still etched all over my flesh.

I counted those wounds, and I thought of the ones that would never heal. Valentina’s, Mirie’s, Marko’s, and so many others.

So perhaps it was a twisted sort of relief that I rarely got alone time at all. Septimus got into the infuriating habit of accompanying me to my chambers and planting himself in the armchair next to the hearth like some kind of stubborn cat. The first time, when I’d asked him what, exactly, he thought he was doing, he’d given me a pitying look.

“I’m watching over my investment,” he said, extracting a slim pair of silver-rimmed glasses from his breast pocket. “Can’t have you doing anything rash.”

Zefiah practically quivered with distaste. I knew the feeling.

“And what exactly would you do to stop me if I did do something rash?” I said.

He flipped open a small, beaten-up book in his lap and slid the glasses on. “I’m sure inspiration would strike me.”

Inspiration wasn’t the only thing that would strike him. But I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even argue with him. And shamefully, perhaps a part of myself appreciated having the silence interrupted. Before, I’d escaped too-quiet nights with alcohol and strangers’ breaths. Now, there was nowhere to go.

“Fine,” I huffed. “But you stay here, in the sitting room. Never in the bedchamber.”

“It’s not often that I’m asked to stay out of beds,” he remarked, without looking up from his book. “But I suppose, for you, I can abide it.”

He flipped a page of his book. I stared at him. I didn’t know why it seemed odd to witness him reading. He seemed like the kind of being whose entire existence was limited to turning up at inconvenient times and smirking conspiratorially. I wondered what he was reading. Perhaps The Art of Dissecting Living Prey.

At that thought, my mind immediately went to Hegaella, and my private joke to myself no longer seemed funny at all.

The nights were long, the days longer. I was grateful that I had little time to sleep, because when I did, the nightmares came. I dreamed of Valentina dying at the hands of that vampire. Dreamed of Marko’s legs getting ripped off as he crawled to her. Dreamed of Mirie torn apart by a soulless. And I dreamed of all of them crying out for me, and though I tried to tell them I was coming, that I’d be there, I never was.

One night, I awoke already upright, dripping with sweat, my mouth open with the final dregs of a strangled cry. I blinked away the images of death. Blinked away Valentina’s lifeless face. And then, to my horror, I saw that my door had been left slightly open.

I rose to close it, and when I did, I saw a pair of broken-glass eyes peering over those reading glasses.

Septimus didn’t move. He didn’t speak. But we both knew he had heard me cry out. And though, in what might have even been a strange kind of mercy, he didn’t acknowledge it at all, I hated him for it.

I slammed my door shut and went back to my room.

I hated all of it. The Keep. The training. Septimus. All of it serving to keep me locked up here, trapped with nightmares and no blood to drown them in. Sparring was, as far as I was concerned, useless. Once, more than ten years ago, someone had told me how to kill a vampire—push really hard, right here, right over the heart—and over the years Zefiah had taught me how to use her efficiently to that end. You do not waste your blood on sand or your blade on flesh you don’t intend to carve from the bone.

More than a week passed. My patience was growing thin. Even Zefiah now echoed my frustration with every heartbeat.

“You hired me for a job,” I snapped at Septimus as we left yet another sparring session. “How long do you plan on keeping me from doing it?”

He laughed softly, lighting up one of those gods-damned cigarillos. He had an infinite supply, it seemed. “There are many things I appreciate about you, dove, but I have to say, your eagerness is among my favorites.”

Eagerness. Like I was an overly excited puppy.

“Come now,” he said, reading my face. “It’s only practical of me. A god’s teeth will be at our throats before long. Only wise to use what little time we have to make sure you’re in prime fighting shape.”

“And what about you? Are you in prime fighting shape?”

I gave a pointed stare to the cigarillo between his long fingers.

He laid a hand over his chest and raised his brows.

“Such concern about my health from the Vindica Ultis herself! Should I be flattered?”

“If I need to choose between taking down a god and saving your sorry ass when you’re on the ground wheezing, I’m choosing the former. Let me establish that now.”

“I make it a point to know my collaborators, Kyrene. I am well aware that you will not save anyone but yourself.”

He spoke so smoothly, so calmly, the words casual. But they slid between my ribs like freshly forged steel, burning all the way.

I stopped short. Zefiah was sheathed across my back, and my hand was halfway to her hilt before I even realized I was moving. That was my

instinct—to lash out at whatever hurt. And, gods help me, those words hurt more than I ever should allow a vampire to inflict.

Septimus merely continued walking. {His time will come soon enough,} Zefiah said. {Think of the way his blood will feel on your hands. His words will mean nothing then.} But she didn’t tell me that he was wrong. After all, she did not lie.

I bit down so hard on my tongue that I drew blood and wished I were tasting someone else’s instead. Still, the tang of iron was a welcome distraction.

And just as that blood flooded over my tongue, Septimus’s steps faltered.

It was such a subtle movement; carefully masked, barely an interruption, but my gaze seized it. I was used to finding weaknesses in my prey.

Weakness. Weakness in this man who acted as if he were so damned untouchable.

I clung to this. My sadistic delight drowned out my unwanted hurt. A welcome trade.

I wanted to make him feel that weakness. I wanted him to look me in the eye and know that I held power over him. An appropriate punishment for the way he had just made me feel.

We reached my chambers, but I didn’t open the door. I just stopped and stared at him, tongue still bloodied. It was impossible to deny that he was almost offensively pretty. And that was the word for it: pretty. Like a flower.

Painstakingly cultivated.

It would be satisfying to disrupt it.

“Maybe I should keep training,” I said, with forced nonchalance. “If we have as little time before the gods come for me as you say we do, I should be using every minute of it.”

“And here I was thinking that you had so little leisure time. I’m sure

Atrius would be willing to—”

“Not Atrius. You.”

A jump of his brows. The smile bloomed over his lips, so bright it was actually jarring, before he tamped it back down to that permanent smirk.

I’d come to recognize that expression—a delighted sort of surprise. He made it look elegant, but it was at its core the same expression I’d witnessed on countless gambling addicts when they saw a card table.

Septimus, I knew, liked the rush just as much, and I suspected that no matter how much effort he put into making himself seem in control of it, he was no more dignified than the men hunched over those chips.

“Me,” he repeated.

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, dove. That isn’t my job. I’m a prince.”

“Atrius is a king and apparently he’s not too good for it.”

“Clearly you don’t understand Atrius’s . . . complicated situation,”

Septimus said, with a suppressed smile that implied this was some kind of inside joke I was not privy to.

“I do understand,” I said. “Other people pull the triggers. Other people get their hands dirty. But not you.”

“There are many ways to fight that don’t involve a sword at all.”

“Spoken like someone who knows they’d lose.”

He let out a tsk. “Come now. Are humans so weak that this kind of

goading works on them?”

“It works on vampires too.”

His eyes really were something. They glittered now like rough cut

gemstones.

“Not on—” he began.

And then I reached back and slid my palm over Zefiah’s blade. Blood gushed down my hand.

I relished the way Septimus’s smile disappeared.

He jerked sharply back across the hallway. There was nothing calculated about that movement. None of his typical performance. I watched the graceful muscles of his throat flex. Watched those eyes go sharp, lingering on the smear of blood on my hand. A few little ribbons of red rose into the air between us, his magic calling to it. {Kyrene, do not be foolish,} Zefiah warned.

But I just smiled. I could taste the iron between my teeth as thickly as I could taste his hunger in the air between us.

Now, all his smug facades had been ripped away. In the end, he was an animal. Just like the rest of them.

And I loved that, in this moment, we both fucking knew it.

I drew my brows together in faux concern. “Are all vampires so weak?”

I said sweetly.

A blink, and he crossed the hall in three long, smooth steps, effortless and graceful, his hand raised. I had to steel every part of my body against flinching, because I was so certain that hand was coming to my throat.

Instead, he planted it on the wall behind me, his head ducking down against mine.

I didn’t move. Didn’t break eye contact. This close, I could see all the different shards that made his eyes that unusual color. I realized that they so shifted between silver and amber because there were countless threads of each woven into his irises—silver and steel grey, and then those flecks of amber curling around his pupils, reaching out from the center like desperate souls from the underworld.

What, I wondered, had made them that way?

I just met that stare and smiled. And a part of me, flawed, human, exhausted from the world I’d been enduring this last decade, dared him to do it—go on, end me. Let me rest.

“Tell me, Vindica Ultis.” His words were warm on my face. “What do you see, when you look at me right now?”

I noted his pupils—dilated. His breath—quickened. His eyes—lingering on my throat. Flicking down to my wet fingertips.

“I see weakness,” I said.

He laughed softly. “Maybe.”

His fingers curled around my wrist, cradling my bloody hand. Lifting it. {Kyrene, stop him!} Zefiah barked, burning across my back.

Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was pride; yes, maybe it was even just stupidity that made me stand there, back straight, unmoving, as I allowed Septimus to raise my hand between us. Because damn if I was going to be

the first one to break.

I watched him raise it to his mouth.

A shock of pain, as he pressed his lips to the open wound on my palm. I tensed at the soft, full press of his tongue against the cut—a caress to the sharp sting.

He held my gaze the entire time, those shattered eyes peering at me from beneath fair, thick lashes, daring me to react.

I didn’t. Not so much as a flinch.

His tongue slowly ran from one end of the cut to the other. And then, just as gently, he lowered my hand back to my side.

“Hmm.” He made a show of licking his lips, one fang digging into the lower curve. The red of my blood smeared at the left corner of his mouth, and his thumb darted up to wipe it.

Then he leaned closer to whisper into my ear, “Tastes like desperation,

Vindica Ultis.”

I opened my mouth to respond— And then a crash shook the ground, drowning us in white.

Through it, I heard only Zefiah’s voice: {They have come!}