The Lion & the Deathless Dark — Chapter 23

C HA P T E R T W E NT Y-T H R E E

s Septimus stepped into the chamber and I closed the door behind him, Zefiah flared in protest from her place lying across the bed.A “Your sword dislikes me,” Septimus observed.

“Well, yes. She hates vampires.”

“Perhaps if you’re both lucky, she’ll get to drink my blood one day.”

I gave him a smile that was more of a baring of teeth. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to drink mine.”

Septimus’s smooth expression flickered. He took another deep inhale of his cigarillo in a way that seemed a little urgent.

Then he exhaled, and that smirk unfurled over his lips again. He looked

me up and down.

“Let’s look at that shoulder.”

I hesitated. He raised his brows at me expectantly.

“You expect me to undress in front of you?” I said.

“Come now. Don’t try to tell me that you’re shy.”

He wasn’t wrong. I’d been happy to present my naked flesh to strangers in inns far seedier than this place. Still, presenting it to Septimus seemed like a very different prospect. Worse, it would reveal my obvious weakness.

Perhaps he somehow heard this in my silence, because again, his

expression shifted.

“Turn around,” he said.

It went against every instinct to turn my back to a vampire, but reluctantly, I obeyed.

I heard his footsteps cross the room. Then the running of water. Then footsteps, until I sensed his presence behind me. I really could feel,

physically feel, his eyes on me.

“I’m going to cut this shirt off now,” he said.

Relief swept through me. Because he had spared me the indignity of having to tell him I couldn’t take it off myself.

“Are you flirting with me?” I said drily.

“If I was, you certainly wouldn’t have to ask.” I drew in a sharp inhale as he took the hem of my blouse in his hands. Even that miniscule movement tore at my wound. “And I’d be using my teeth.”

As if he expected this to distract me, a rip tore through the air.

Pain drowned everything else. Cold air engulfed my body. The shirt fell to the floor in a heap. I reflexively began to fold my arms around my chest, only to be punished by a shock of agony through my right shoulder.

“Gods fucking help me,” I breathed.

“The gods put us here. Don’t thank them for that. My back is turned. Go to the tub. Get in, if you can. If you can’t, I’ll help you. There’s a sheet in there, if you would like to cover yourself.”

I might have expected to hear a mocking note in his voice. But the words were almost gentle.

I peered over my shoulder to see that Septimus, indeed, had turned his back to me. I went to the washroom and turned off the tap with my good arm. The water steamed faintly in a way that was practically arousing. A sheet had been draped over the edge of the iron tub.

Thankfully, I was able to get in with my dignity intact. Then I lay the sheet over myself, holding it over my breasts. The wet, thin fabric clung transparently to my skin.

I scowled down at it. It wasn’t much of a modesty cover.

I adjusted, then called, “Come in.”

Septimus turned, then stopped short. His gaze darted to me, then to the wet sheet piled up on the ground. Very much not on me.

His shock, well-hidden as it was, was immensely satisfying. I was going to be exposed regardless. I’d rather own it, use it to force his vulnerability out right alongside mine, than cling to a wet sheet that didn’t hide anything anyway. In that brief shock, I reclaimed a little of the pride I’d left with my bloody clothing on the floor. A little piece of victory.

His eyes narrowed, like he knew exactly what I was doing, but didn’t acknowledge it. He dragged a stool behind me and sat. I could feel him surveying my naked skin, though I refused to shrink under that stare.

Finally, he stated plainly, “You are a mess. This will hurt.”

The water shuddered as he dipped something into it, and then warm

water caressed my back.

“Fucking hell,” I gritted out.

Hurt was an understatement. The warm water stung fiercely. My eyes squeezed shut, fingernails biting into the rim of the tub.

And yet, that pain, blinding as it was, didn’t hurt as much as the unexpected gentleness of the touch. Like my body was remembering that the last time someone had touched me this way, my entire world had been different.

When his washcloth moved closer to my wounded shoulder, my body threatened to fold in on itself.

Septimus hesitated, but I forced out, “Don’t stop. Get it over with.”

“What I always love beautiful women to say to me. Medicine, now.

Ready?”

“Just do it.”

He obeyed me, even though the harsh texture of the washcloth and every syringe of medicine was unbearable. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed tears weren’t running down my cheeks.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he murmured, “Still more to go, but the worst is done.”

The pain ebbed. I began breathing again. I chanced a glance at my shoulder. It was cleaner now, but that only made it easier to see the full extent of the damage—purple, torn skin and messy stitches.

A lump rose in my throat, thick with the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Septimus seemed to hear it, anyway.

“Don’t worry, Vindica Ultis,” he said. “Your arm will go on to behead things at the worst possible time once more, I promise you.”

Oh, fuck him.

“Aren’t you lucky to have my hands to get dirty, seeing as you like to keep your own so clean,” I said.

He let out a soft laugh. “They’re not clean right now, are they?”

I eyed his hands out of the corner of my eye, barely visible as he wrung out the washcloth in the water. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing long, elegant cords of muscle. They were beautiful arms.

Beautiful hands. But now, that pale flesh was streaked with blood. Mine, and who knew how many others’.

I thought of his tongue against my open wound at the Salt Keep, meeting my dare. It no longer seemed like petty amusement to taunt him with my blood. The cost felt so much higher.

Septimus caught my eye, and I snapped my gaze forward again, staring into the bloody water. I drew in a hiss of pain as he returned to his work.

He said, “I was . . . not myself when we arrived.”

I scoffed. “That’s not true. You were very much yourself. ‘Monsters recognize monsters,’ right? Don’t apologize. It would embarrass me on your behalf. It’s the most interesting side of you I’ve seen.”

It almost surprised me that I meant it. I liked Septimus best that way: raw, free of his perpetually smooth veneer.

“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said. “Everything I said was true.”

You only wish you cared, because then perhaps it would make you as good as the ones you let die.

The pang of pain as he applied more medicine seemed to hit deeper, this time. I swallowed thickly.

“But,” he went on, “I realize now that I may have misread you, when

we first met.”

“Misread—?”

“When I first began following you, I thought they were companions of convenience. The priestess, the fighter, the machinist girl.”

My body tensed, and this time, it had nothing to do with my wounds.

Mirie, Marko, and Valentina.

Companions of convenience. A reasonable assumption. I’d treated them that way. Did they ever know how much they had meant to me? How could I expect them to, when I didn’t even let myself feel it?

“They weren’t,” I shot back. “They were . . . they were . . .”

How could I describe what they were? I’d never been able to find those words in life, and I was ashamed I couldn’t give them that in death, either.

The silence stretched. Septimus gently nudged my good shoulder. “Lean

back,” he said.

I realized he meant to wash my hair.

I didn’t want to. I’d be exposing my face to him when it felt most dangerous to do so. But I wasn’t about to show him that fear.

I leaned backward, and he cradled my shoulders, slowly lowering my hair into the water until warmth surrounded my scalp. I was very aware that at this angle, with my head tilted back, my breasts were in clear view of

him, the fullest part of them rising slightly from the water. I found myself staring at his face. His lashes were lowered, brow furrowed in concentration, mouth downturned, as he began working something that smelled delightfully like lavender into my scalp.

Even when we were under attack by a goddess herself, he hadn’t looked so serious. His eyes flicked to meet mine. A ring of red still surrounded his left iris.

Then he said quietly, “The priestess, from what I saw, was quite a warrior. More skilled than most White Pantheon acolytes I’d seen.”

The words were measured and casual. And yet, they felt like such a shocking gift. As if we both knew, but would leave unspoken, what he was offering me.

His fingers massaged circles against the back of my scalp, gently untangling snarls of hair. I hated how good it felt—that it sent waves of goose bumps rippling up my spine.

“More skilled than most? She’s better than any of them.”

“The fighter you had wasn’t bad, either. Though he seemed a bit brutish.”

“He was a piece of shit.” I said this fondly, instinctively, because I was so accustomed to speaking of Marko that way. But with those words came the memory of his dead body, legs torn off, crawling to Valentina in his final act, and I swallowed a heavy lump.

“But he surprised me,” I said softly. “In the end.”

“And the machinist?”

Valentina. I saw her as she had been the night I first met her. I saw her as she was the night she died. I saw a million failures that stretched between

them.

She was perfect.

The words were right there. I should have said them before. I should have said them often. But she was gone, and coward that I was, I still couldn’t say them now.

I smothered this thought before it set and turned my rage to Septimus instead.

“You have no right to talk about them,” I said, between clenched teeth.

“You’re the reason they’re dead, when you could have stopped it.”

The words were sharp and furious, but I hated how false they tasted. I was the one who had given the gauntlet to Mirie. I was the one who had

sent them to Hegaella. Maybe, in truth, the accusation was directed at myself: You could have stopped them. You should have stopped them.

“I couldn’t have changed Egrette’s mind,” he said. “I rushed to Hegaella when I heard of her plans because I was certain that the Shadowborn had captured you, and I was as surprised as any to find that was not the case.

And you should be grateful it wasn’t. Especially after what we witnessed tonight.”

The images of people in cages, chained up, burning alive, flashed through my mind. Perhaps I imagined that Septimus’s fingers slowed as he washed my hair, as if conscious all over again of what was in it.

“Grateful,” I repeated. “I’m not grateful, Septimus. I’m fucking furious.

What are those lives to you? You talk to me about sacrifices, but how easy it must be to make them when they mean nothing to you. In Vostis, I saw—”

A faint wrinkle between his brow. A blink of surprise. “Vostis? You were in Vostis?”

I clamped my lips shut. I didn’t like to talk about Vostis. Never to Marko or Val, and barely even to Mirie.

“Yes,” I said, without breaking the stare. “Were you?”

Were you one of the monsters I saw ripping apart children?

An odd grimness passed over his face. “No.”

“But some of your people were.”

“Because you cannot say no to a goddess. Just as some of your people tortured mine for sport. Yes. Do you really want to play this game? You were right beside me in Kastivai today. My people were in cages right next to yours. And my people have bled for this, died for this, just as yours have.”

For a fleeting moment, he wore the exact same expression he had when he’d thrown that match into the cell. The screams that had come from within, agonized and horrific, echoed in my ears.

My people. Some part of me had suspected it. But I still blinked in surprise to hear it confirmed.

He read my face, giving me a tight, humorless smile. “We are all resources to someone, dove. Do not think that vampires are any kinder to each other than they are to humans.”

“And yet,” I said, “you brag to me about all these choices you’ve made.

Because the collateral damage doesn’t matter to you.”

His mouth thinned. “Let me tell you a story, Vindica Ultis. When I was a young man growing up in the House of Blood, I had a close friend.

Angelika. She became one of the finest warriors that the House of Blood has ever seen. Skilled. Strong. Loyal. Steadfast. Tell me, are you familiar with the Kejari?”

A vampire tradition, often spoken of in fantastical stories by children. A tournament to the death held every century in honor of Nyaxia. The winner, the stories said, received a wish from the goddess herself. I had assumed that, like many vampire stories, it was exaggerated.

“It’s real?”

“Oh, it is very real. The Kejari is one of the only opportunities the House of Blood gets to interact with other Houses. Angelika was among the first picked to compete. Other vampires fight for themselves, but in the House of Blood, the decision of who enters the Kejari is a strategic one, because the entire House has so much to gain or lose.”

I considered this. “Because if she had won, she would have asked Nyaxia to lift the curse on the House of Blood.”

Septimus’s hands paused.

“Nyaxia would not have granted such a wish,” he said. “Perhaps she wouldn’t have granted a wish to a Bloodborn victor at all. We are not her favorite children.”

My brow furrowed. “So why enter at all? Why spill your blood for a goddess that hates you so much?”

“It was not Nyaxia that Angelika spilled her blood for.” He resumed working at the tangles in my hair. “Angelika was a good warrior. A great one. Better than any other damned soul in that competition. She progressed

to the final round.”

“Did she win?”

“She could have.” Then, quieter, “She should have.”

“But she didn’t.”

He was silent. He gently pushed my shoulders up. “Sit up. Your hair is too long to get at from here.”

I did, relieved to no longer be staring into his face. His fingers danced over my bare back, now working at the snarls near the ends of my hair.

“Angelika did not win,” he said curtly. “She couldn’t win, because we needed to make sure someone else did, instead. I told you that I have been

working on this plan for a very, very long time. She was merely the hands that would force the right outcome.”

The right outcome. Seers and prophecies.

“Before the final trial, I met with her,” he went on. “Not as a friend, but as her prince. And I told her every card dealt in this intricate game. Every move she was to make until the moment she would let herself fall in that ring. I sat down with my oldest friend, and I commanded her to kill herself.”

His touch on my back stilled, like he’d slipped into the past.

“As a prince,” he said, “I understood that this was a necessary decision.

As her friend, though, I wanted her to fight for her own life. But she merely told me, ‘I understand, my prince, that I’m merely one small piece of something greater.’”

It was the sort of thing I had heard Mirie say so many times. No doubt this was what countless desperate people thought when they looked at me, the Vindica Ultis, chosen savior.

It will all be worth it. There is some grand plan.

The scoff escaped me without permission, and I immediately clamped

my lips down on it.

“I didn’t mean—” I started.

“No. I agree with you.” Septimus’s voice changed in a way that, at first, I couldn’t quite name. “I made the decision that I had to make. But perhaps I am not as noble as Angelika was. Because there is not one single night that has passed in the last eleven years that I don’t resent that I had to make it at all. And I despise every single being, every single twist of fate, that made that sacrifice and all the countless ones that came before or after it necessary. Despise them. So don’t tell me, Kyrene, that I do not care about the collateral damage.”

That was when I understood the tone in his voice: Hatred. Utter, scalding hatred.

And gods, how deeply familiar it was. What a strange relief to hear that feeling echoed in another soul.

I turned around, ignoring the protest of pain in my right shoulder. Some of the bathwater sloshed over the edge of the tub. A few wet tresses of hair covered my breasts, and only partly, but I wasn’t self-conscious at all.

I wanted to catch it before he had time to throw it back into that box.

Septimus’s anger. Raw and unfiltered and ugly and petulant. His eyes were

bright in the darkness, as if lit from within, and suddenly all those broken- glass shards of silver and amber no longer seemed discordant, but fully unified in their rage.

It was like looking into a mirror. It scared me, actually scared me, how deeply I saw myself in that expression.

“Then why are you doing this?” I asked. “All to please the goddess who put you in this position to begin with?”

His gaze locked to mine, unblinking, broken in all the same ways as mine. His hand was still on my shoulder, fingertips light against my bare skin, hands still covered in my blood.

“I understand now that I misjudged you when we first met,” he said.

“We have failed so many people. The one thing we have left to offer their memories is blood. I told you once that I believed we shared a penchant for making the right beings bleed. And I will help you do that, dove, if you will help me.”

Gods. If only he knew how right he was. A moment stretched to an eternity, and words evaded me, as if I were breathlessly hanging over the edge of a cliff.

But then I gave him a clumsy half shrug with my good arm. “It’s the only thing I’m good at, after all,” I said. “But doves don’t make anything bleed.”

He laughed softly. “True. I’m long overdue in coming up with something else, should we continue working together.”

Should we continue working together. I knew, in the end, there was no choice. But I appreciated that he offered me the illusion of one. Perhaps more than his doomed friend Angelika had gotten.

“About that,” I said. “So, you’ve made it very clear that I fucked up our shot at Srana. What does your little prophecy say about that?”

“You still sound so disbelieving.”

“I know what I’m capable of, and I believe in that much more than I believe in whatever your friends hallucinated in the Salt Keep. Besides, I’m not the religious type.”

A flicker over Septimus’s face—like he was considering what an odd thing this was for a supposed divine warrior to say. But then he chuckled. “I like you,” he murmured, as if to himself. “No, Kyrene. Our misadventure does nothing to contradict my seers’ ‘hallucinations.’ Fate is fluid. A web, not a single road. There are multiple paths to these outcomes.”

“And where do those paths take us next?”

“Kajmar.”

The god of illusion, seduction, and performance. In the vision, his blood had dissolved into flower petals.

I shrugged. “No great loss. Not much beauty left in this world, anyway.”

Septimus’s gaze lowered, dancing over my body before returning to my face—so quick that perhaps I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching him so closely. So close it might have been unintentional, which was the most interesting thought of all.

“Not much,” he agreed. “I think he’ll be no match for you.”

An unspoken agreement passed between us. The two of us, imperfectly united, choosing once again not to acknowledge the collection of corpses we dragged behind us.

I glanced down at the water. It had turned a murky burgundy. A piece of

gore lazily bobbed by.

Ugh.

Still, I couldn’t help, however briefly, thinking of who that piece of flesh had probably belonged to. Thinking of that boy running into the forest.

“Do you think he made it?” I murmured.

It surprised me that he knew exactly what I was talking about.

“I do,” he said, and, as if it were second nature, he laid his hand over my shoulder.

Perhaps it was a lie. But it was the lie I needed to hear right now, and the fact that he knew that counted for something.

I was the one to, at last, break the stare. “I already feel better. You can go instead of staring at me as I dress.”

“What a shame,” he remarked, and stood up. He looked me up and down, gaze lingering on my shoulder. “We’ll re-apply in six hours. The wound will heal.”

He went to the door, and I blurted out, somewhat reluctantly, “Thank you.”

He paused, and I was already bracing for a snide, Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

But instead he just said, “Lyri. That’s what you are.”

“Lyri?”

“Old Bloodborn,” he said. “It means lioness.”

And then he was gone.

WHEN I DID MANAGE to drag myself out of the tepid, bloody bath and back into the bedchamber, Zefiah was on the bed sputtering light. {You thoughtless child,} she hissed, as soon as I stepped into the room. {Allowing a fallen one near you in such a weakened state. What were you thinking?} I didn’t have much of a choice, Zef. Unless you were about to grow some

arms and help patch me up. {You let him handle your blood.} She said this the way someone might say, You let him shit on you.

I was, despite myself, annoyed.

I didn’t have a choice, I repeated. Besides, look at me. Whole. He didn’t eat me even a little.

I said this sarcastically, but as the words left my lips, I felt his fingers in my hair, gentle and firm. Felt his gaze lingering on my breasts—or, somehow even more intimate, meeting mine as he washed my hair.

I pulled the towel tighter around myself with a flash of weakness I didn’t quite understand. {I have been by your side for ten years, Kyrene. Do not think I am fooled by you. I know how you are.} I scoffed. How I am? He’s a mark. A vampire. {Humans. The lines are always so thin with you. Enemy, friend, mark, lover, employer. Do not let him see so much of you. He will use it against

you in the end.} I bristled.

Right, that’s me. So trusting. I go around opening up my poor little wounded human heart to every handsome cock that wanders by. For fuck’s sake, Marko warmed my bed for years and I never even told him my birthday. {And yet, you told the fallen one about him.} I paused halfway through unfolding the shirt on the bed. I wasn’t sure why I felt caught, like a child with her hand in a box of candy, realizing that Zefiah had been close enough to hear our conversation.

What the hell are you so worried about? I threw the shirt on, awkwardly one-handed, wincing at the tug on my stitches. I could go knock on his door right now and fuck him for the next six hours and it would be none of your damned business.

As the words formed, the image latched onto me, uncomfortably vivid.

How would he look at me, I wondered, if I did? Would he look at me the way he did when I opened my palm in front of him? With such hunger?

It still surprised me just how powerful I felt every time Septimus’s self- control wavered around me. It reminded me of the way I felt when flesh parted beneath my blade. I’d put vampires to the brink of death and it still did not make me feel as strong, as completely in control, as one involuntary bob of Septimus’s elegant throat. {I have never mistaken you for any nun, Kyrene,} Zefiah spat. {If you wish to defile yourself in that way, so be it. But I know you. You have found a distraction. Someone in whom you believe you see your own hungers. But those very similarities you cling to are the stakes that will pierce your heart.

Do with your body what you please. But your heart has been promised to me, and me alone. He does not deserve to break it. Remember who you truly are, Vindica Ultis.} The steel-sharp edge of the sarcastic title cut down to the bone. I slipped the clothes on with my back turned to Zefiah, feeling the urge to hide my face—even though of course, there was never any hiding from Zefiah. She saw all of me, even the ugly animal urges and unflattering emotions I kept from everyone else.

Finally, I returned to the bed and lay Zefiah over my lap. I ran the clean, dry washcloth over her length, polishing the glowing steel. My flesh showed every mark of my mortal weaknesses, but Zefiah’s was perfection.

The platinum gold of her blade was so radiant it almost hurt to look at it, rows and swirls of ancient divine glyphs dancing up her length. The whorls of gold that comprised her hilt and hand guard were so elegant that they seemed to dance in the breeze. She was, despite everything we’d been through, so pristinely beautiful. Blessed, holy, perfect. My hands, small and dirty and blood-covered, had never looked so pitiful as they did the first time they wrapped around her hilt.

You’ll have all the blood you crave, Zef, I said. God blood. Vampire blood. Septimus’s blood. And one day, my blood, too. That’s all you need to worry about.

Zefiah—ever weak for a good massage—let out a shiver of reluctant pleasure. {It is not your blood that concerns me. I know better than any how soft that creature is that lies between your ribs. No one has earned the honor of piercing it. Do not allow them to.} A smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. Only you can make a threat sound so sweet.

Still, that lump of flesh in my chest did ache. I pressed my free hand to it without intending to. Its beat was a weak, dull rhythm—a heart that belonged not to a god-chosen warrior, or a destined crafter of fates, but an unremarkable human, soft and fragile and perhaps lonelier than its bearer would ever admit. Funny, that it limped on, when it already felt so

pathetically broken.

I won’t, I murmured.