Текст книги "The Serpent and the Wings of Night"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

INTERLUDE

The wounds on the young woman’s neck had not yet healed.

Two days ago, the boy she thought loved her tried to kill her.

Today, her father came to her room.

“I have a gift for you,” he said. “Follow me.”

The king often gave the young woman gifts, though he rarely called them so. Right now, she was heartbroken. She felt hurt and foolish and stupid. She was not in the mood for gifts. But she was not in the mood for arguing, either, so she went with her father.

He led her to his throne room. It was a stunning place, a sea of marble tile in red and white and black, the Nightborn throne looming over it all. The king closed the double doors behind him and ushered his daughter inside.

She froze.

The room was empty, save for a single figure at the center of that expanse of smooth red marble—a handsome young man, kneeling, his hands bound behind his back. He looked up at her with the same eyes that she had dreamed about. Uttered a frantic apology with the same mouth that had tried to tear open her throat.

The girl could not move. The mere sight of her lover seized her heart, too many feelings thrashing in too many directions.

The king strode across the room and stood behind the boy, hands resting upon his shoulders. He turned to his daughter and said, “Come here.”

She did. Up close, she could see that the boy was trembling in sheer terror. This was strange to her. She had not yet seen that vampires, too, could be just as frightened as she was.

“Look at him,” the king commanded.

She did. She did not want to. Looking into those too-familiar green eyes was agonizing.

“He’s afraid,” the king said. “As he should be.”

The boy gazed up at his lover. He tried to apologize, tried to say that he didn’t know it would be that way, that he would feel that way—

The king shushed him. He reached to his belt, unsheathed a dagger, and held it out.

“Take it.”

A command. The young woman could not disobey her father’s orders. She had done so only once, and now look at what had happened.

So she took the dagger.

The king had trained her for years. She knew how to handle a weapon. Her fingers fell into place immediately, now second nature. But this was the first time she had held one so close to another living being. The light from the lanterns bounced on the blade, casting sparks of green in the boy’s frantic eyes.

The king said calmly, “I told you the night I brought you here that I would teach you how to wield your teeth. And I have upheld that promise. But now it is time that I teach you how to bite.”

The young woman kept her face still. But inside, panic seized her.

“The heart is the easiest way,” the king went on. “Straight through the chest. Slightly to the left. You will need to be forceful. Quick. It will be easy right now. But other times, they will try to run or fight. Do not give them the chance.”

Everything had gone numb.

The dagger was heavy in her hands.

Her lover looked up at her and begged.

“I am so sorry, Oraya. I—I’m so sorry. I didn’t know, I didn’t mean to, I don’t even remember—”

There are moments in one’s life that remain permanently distilled in memory. Some wither within minutes, and others are carved forever into our souls.

This image, of the boy she loved begging her for mercy, would follow her for the rest of her life.

Years later, when the girl was a grown woman, she would decide that the boy did not mean to hurt her that night. That he had not yet understood his newly Turned vampire impulses. It did not change what he did. It did not make it any less unforgivable. It only made vampires more dangerous. They could love you, and still kill you.

But in this moment, the girl did not know what to believe.

I can’t. The words lingered on the tip of her tongue. Shameful words. She knew better than to say them to her father.

The king stared at her, unblinking. Expectant.

“One strike. That is all.”

She started to shake her head, but he snapped, “Yes. You can. You will. I warned you long ago that you were never safe with anyone but me. I warned you. This is the consequence, Oraya.”

He did not raise his voice. The king rarely shouted. But the edge of his words was just as cutting, just as lethal, as the edge of the blade he handed her.

Now she understood.

This was more than just a lesson. It was punishment. She had disobeyed her father’s tenets. She had allowed someone else into her heart. And now, he would force her to carve it out and lay it at his feet.

“This is a dangerous world.” His voice turned soft, tender. “This is what it takes to survive.”

Perhaps another teenage girl would have hated her father for this moment. And perhaps this one, in some ways, did. Perhaps she would carry a little fragment of that hatred for the rest of her life.

But she also loved him for it. Because he was right. He was forging her. If she had listened to him before, none of this would have happened.

She was not yet cold enough, not yet strong enough. But she could hone herself a little sharper now, even if it meant throwing herself upon the unforgiving steel of her father’s command.

She swallowed.

She lifted the dagger.

The boy wore a thin cotton shirt. It was easy to see the outline of his chest. She picked her target. Slightly to the left, just as her father said.

“You have to push hard to make it through the breastbone,” the king said. “Harder than you think.”

“Wait—” the boy choked.

The girl struck.

The king had been right. She’d had to push harder than she thought. She felt every layer of flesh, had to fight with the blade to get it through. The blood burst forth from the boy’s skin like it had been waiting for this moment.

Bile rose in her throat as her lover cried out. He lurched, but the king held his shoulders tight.

The young woman started to turn her head, but her father hissed, “No. Don’t look away, little serpent. You look them in the eye.”

She forced herself to obey. Forced herself to look the boy she had loved right in the eye until the last dregs of life seeped from them.

She held tight to that hilt long after his head lolled. At last, the king stepped back, allowing the body to flop to the floor. The boy was only recently Turned. His blood was redder than it was black. The crimson bloomed over the marble like rose petals bursting from a bud.

“Good,” the king said.

He strode away. He offered his daughter no comfort, no tenderness. Why would he? The world would offer her none, either. She should learn this.

So the young woman stood there, alone, for a long time.

Strange, that girls are so often told that the loss of their virginity marks a threshold between girlhood and womanhood, as if it fundamentally alters them in some way. It was not the sex that changed the girl forever. Not the blood that spilled between her thighs that shaped her.

The blood that spilled over that marble floor, though…

Those are the stains on one’s innocence that never fade.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I insisted on walking back to the apartment, even though I could barely move. We were far down the hall by the time Angelika, the fourth and final contestant, stumbled through the door to the Moon Palace. She must have turned back in an attempt to find Ivan. But she had come back alone. Her wordless scream had echoed in every crevice of the Moon Palace.

That sound was a mirror to something inside of me that I didn’t know how to acknowledge.

I clutched my abdomen. Blood bubbled beneath my fingers. But I didn’t feel it. I only felt the gritty ash of Salinae—or what remained of it.

I thought of thousands of humans burning in Asteris’s power.

I thought of their lungs withering in that toxic smoke.

I thought of a little boy and a little girl that I only distantly remembered—that I only allowed myself to dream might still live, somewhere—and their bodies lying deep, deep beneath the bones of a war they wanted no part of.

Raihn closed the door behind us. I stumbled, nearly falling to my knees, which seemed to jerk him back to the present. He slid his arms around me. I stiffened.

“We need to patch you up,” he said, before I could protest.

I didn’t have it in me to fight. He picked me up, brought me to my bedroom, and lay me down on the bed. Then he went to our packs and rummaged through them.

I stared at the ceiling. Blinked. Saw the ruins on the backs of my eyelids.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

“We have enough medicine for this,” Raihn said, sounding grateful to have both good news and distraction. He returned, sat beside me on the bed, and poured the potion over my abdomen. I didn’t flinch as my open wound hissed and bubbled, flesh melding to flesh.

I knew Raihn’s grief was everything mine was. Everything and more. I wanted to put my hand over that wound in his heart, even when my own threatened to tear me apart.

When he set aside the glass bottle, I let my hand fall over his. It now felt so familiar beneath mine, knobby joints and scars and the coarse suggestion of hair over the back of his hand.

At first he didn't move. Then he slowly flipped his palm up, closed his fingers around mine, and circled his thumb over my skin.

Just as intimate as his lips on my neck.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry. Sorry for what my father had done to both of our peoples.

This is war, Vincent whispered in my ear. Power demands ruthlessness. What did you expect me to do? Our hearts bleed black.

And the worst thing was, I understood it. I understood it, and still hated it.

“I almost sent Mische there,” Raihn said. “Two weeks later, and she might have been there.”

The thought sickened me even more.

I felt the bedspread shift, his other hand closing into a fist.

“Your father,” he hissed, “is a fucking monster.”

For a moment, I agreed. But just as quickly, a wave of ashamed denial rose up to combat it.

I had to be missing something. Vincent wouldn’t do it unless he had no choice. Not unless the Rishan had already done something worse, or were going to.

He wouldn’t do that to me. Not knowing what I was going to go do. Not knowing why I was in this damned tournament at all.

He wouldn’t.

“There must be a reason. He must have had no choice.”

I hated the way the words tasted. Hated myself for even saying them.

Raihn’s voice was cold and hard. “Five hundred thousand people. Half a million lives. I don’t give a fuck what reason he might have. What explanation could make that acceptable?”

None. There was none.

“We don’t know what happened.”

“I know enough,” he snapped. “I saw the ruins. I could smell the bones in that dust. That’s enough, Oraya. That is enough.”

My fingernails were biting into Raihn’s skin, my knuckles trembling. My jaw ached because I was clenching it so hard.

And when a voice in my head whispered, He’s right. Isn’t that enough?

It wasn’t Vincent’s voice.

It was mine.

The line between anger and sadness is so thin. I had learned that fear can become rage, but rage can so easily shatter into devastation. The fractures spiderwebbed across my heart.

“There has to be something I’m not seeing. He couldn’t have—He wouldn’t—”

“Why not?” Raihn spat, mouth curled into a sneer of hatred. “Rishan lives. Human lives. What the hell are those worth to him? Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

“Because I was going back for them.” I didn’t mean to say it aloud. But the words were too close to the surface, ready to spill forth. “Because he knew. When I became his Coriatae, I was going to go back, and he knew I—”

Raihn went still. His grip tightened around my hand, then released abruptly as he stood, rod-straight.

“Coriatae?” he said, calmly.

My jaw snapped shut.

Do not, Vincent whispered in my ear, tell him this.

But I had already let Raihn see too much. As I always had. As he always did. And he could not un-hear what I said, what I had just shown him this time.

“Coriatae?” His voice had the same danger to it as the sound of a blade being pulled from a scabbard. “You were going to ask Nyaxia for a Coriatis bond?”

Judgment bit into every syllable, a sharp prod to all my weeping wounds.

“I’m not strong enough to go as I am now,” I snapped. “And he knew that as well as I did.”

Raihn only laughed, dark and humorless. “A fucking Coriatis bond. You were going to become Vincent’s Coriatae and march into Salinae to liberate your human kin. You were going to bind yourself to him so you could go be a hero.”

Was he mocking me? Or was the dream so outlandish that the words just sounded like a mockery aloud?

I said, “We all do what we have to—”

“You’re too damned smart for this, Oraya. Do you know how many humans were left in Salinae? Almost none. Because your father had been taking them, just like he took all of Salinae’s resources, for the last twenty fucking years.”

Resources. Like humans were fruit or grain.

No. That wasn’t true.

“Rishan territory was protected. He couldn’t—”

“Protected,” Raihn spat. “Like the human districts are ‘protected?”

The truth of his words slipped through the plates of my armor like a too-sharp blade.

When my fingers tightened, I could feel that gritty ash of what had once been Salinae against my palms.

I had never seen Raihn like this. His rage pulled taut every line of his form. It wasn’t like when I’d seen him in a bloodlust—that had been unnerving, but this was petrifying. He’d just gone utterly still, every angle of his body rigid, even his breathing too-steady. Like every thread of muscle needed to unite against holding back whatever wild thing thrashed within, visible only in the rising fire of his rust-red eyes.

“He sent you into the Kejari,” he said, “with a promise of being a hero, all so he could fucking use you? That’s what this is for?”

He’s making you do this, Ilana had told me.

I was so, so angry at Vincent. More angry than I had ever been. Yet, so quickly I jumped to his defense, like every attack against his character struck me, too.

I leapt to my feet, rewarded by a stab of pain in my freshly healed abdomen. “Use me?” I scoffed. “He’s giving me his power. Giving me—”

“You cannot possibly be this naive. Giving you his power and taking yours. Making a deal with a goddess so you can never hurt him. Never act against him. And sending you into this depraved cesspit to do it. What a saintly, loving father—”

My weapons were out before I could even stop myself. “Enough,” I hissed. “Enough.”

Vincent had given me everything.

He had taken me in when he never had to. He had cared for me when no one else did. He had made me a stronger version of myself, even when I didn’t want to be. He had turned me into something worth fearing.

And above all, he had loved me.

I knew this. There was nothing Raihn could say to convince me that he didn’t. Vincent’s love was truth like the moon was truth.

Raihn didn’t even look at my blades. His eyes only met mine. He took one step closer. “He killed them all,” he said quietly—and just for a fractured moment, the rage in his eyes shattered to grief. Grief for the Rishan, his people. Grief for the humans, mine. And grief for me. “He killed all of them. They were nothing to him but tools or obstacles. It doesn’t matter what he promised you. What he told you. That is the truth.”

The sight of Raihn’s sadness hit too deep. I shook my head, the words sticking in my throat.

“You need to ask yourself some hard questions. Why is he afraid of you, Oraya? What does he get from this?”

Afraid of me. Bullshit. What could Vincent ever hope to gain from me? What could this plan be other than a gesture of his love—to make me every bit as strong and powerful as he was? I was a human. I had nothing to offer him.

Yet Raihn’s concern for me, too raw to be false, hit the places I could not protect. His hand lifted, as if to brush my cheek. A part of me longed for that touch. Longed to let myself fall apart and let him keep me together.

Instead, I jerked away.

“I can’t,” I choked out—even though I knew he deserved more. “I—I just can’t.”

I threw the door open, and he let me go.

He didn’t come after me as I walked down the hall, each step fast and purposeful. I kept going until I left the Moon Palace. And I kept going straight past Vincent’s meeting place.

No, I was done waiting for my father to come to me. Done waiting to meet on his terms.

This time, I was going to him.

I walked, and walked, and walked, until I reached Vincent’s castle.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Had the castle changed, or had I?

Before, this place had always made me feel so small, like I was too weak and impermanent to live somewhere of such grand, enduring strength. But maybe I’d mistaken brutality for strength and stagnancy for agelessness.

How, exactly, had I not noticed that its elegant scent of rose was just a little rancid? How had I not noticed that it masked the sour smell of rotting blood, like the whole damned building had been soaked in it? The flowers that adorned every table were withered at the edges, the wallpaper stained with faint death-brown blooms of old blood, the plaster cracked with the stress fractures of a kingdom that had gotten too heavy.

There were many vampires here, far more than I was accustomed to seeing roaming the halls. All Vincent’s warriors. It was wartime, after all. They stopped to stare at me as I passed. I didn’t even notice if their nostrils twitched. Didn’t even give a fuck if they did.

I’d never once gone to Vincent’s office without being invited. Now, I didn’t even knock as I threw open the door.

Jesmine was there, arms folded and red-tipped fingers playing thoughtfully at red-painted lips as she observed a military map pinned to the wall. Her amethyst eyes slid to me and shone with curiosity.

“Oraya. How lovely to—”

“Where is he.”

A demand, not a question.

Her perfect lips closed. The only sign of surprise. “Meetings. Busy times, as you—”

“Where?”

“He’ll be done—”

“I need to speak to him now, Jesmine. Tell me where or go get him for me.”

Her flicker of annoyance became a flame of irritation. She looked like she was running two calculations in her head, the first being, “Should I kill Oraya today?” and the second being, “Does she, as Vincent’s daughter, outrank me, as his general?”

“I don’t want to fight with you,” I spat. “If you want to, it won’t end well for either of us, but I’ll do it. So which is it?”

Apparently, she decided that the answer to the second question was too close to call, and thus decided that the answer to the first was, Not today. She said, “I’m the king’s chief general, not his errand girl, but I’ll indulge you,” and left the room.

I waited. Vincent’s office was usually meticulously neat, but tonight, it was a mess—open books and papers and maps everywhere, all spattered with black and red. My hands were shaking. Shaking with anger? With grief? Or maybe with fear. Not of Vincent, but of what he might say to me.

The door opened.

Vincent came alone. His clothing was more disheveled than usual, the collar of his jacket crumpled on one side, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. A few strands of fair hair fell into his face. His Heir Mark pulsed at a slightly faster rate than before, as if his slow heartbeat had quickened a beat since I’d last seen him.

He closed the door behind him and stood before it for a long moment, just staring at me.

I knew how to read Vincent by now, and I knew that his annoyance fought with his relief—as if Vincent the king and Vincent the father waged a silent battle behind his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

That was Vincent the king.

“You made it back from the Crescent trial.”

And that—that thankful exhale—was Vincent the father. He stepped closer, a strange uncertainty flickering over his face. Maybe he saw the difference in my expression, too.

“Salinae.” My voice was hard and too rough. “You destroyed Salinae.”

A hint of confusion. “I—”

“I saw it. It was the location of the fourth trial.”

He tried to hide his wince. I could practically hear him utter the curse: Nyaxia and her fucking sense of humor.

And yet that little flinch, the expression he mostly succeeded at hiding, hurt the most, because it confirmed what I didn’t want to believe.

I let out a pained, ugly laugh. “You weren’t going to tell me.”

And why wouldn’t he hide it? Just a few weeks until I was out of the Kejari, one way or another. I was isolated. He thought I didn’t even spend time with the other contestants.

“I have to make difficult decisions,” Vincent said. “This is war. The Rishan were a threat. They attacked our eastern outposts. I needed a strong—”

“You were going to let me believe that they were still out there. That I could still go after them.”

Was it better or worse that he didn’t even deny it? “There was no use in you knowing the truth.”

“Just like there was no use in keeping them alive? Easier to just kill them all?”

His face hardened.

Vincent the father stepped back. Vincent the king stepped closer.

“The decisions that I make for my people and my kingdom are beyond your judgment.”

“For your people?”

I was lucky I was drunk on my own anger and hurt, or else I never would have been able to speak to him this way. Even now, the shock on his face had a part of me shrinking back. But another part of me liked it the same way I liked it when my blade hit a mark.

“Who are your people, exactly?” I snapped. “Are they the ones whose ashes are in that city? Those were my people, Vincent. And I—”

“I did what was right for my kingdom.”

“Salinae is part of your kingdom. Half a million people. I could have been one of them. It could have been me in those slums—”

“It was never going to be you.”

He always said that. But how could he not understand? It was pure chance that brought me to him that night, all those years ago. The fibers of fate twist a different way, and I never make it here at all.

“I am human, Vincent. I am human.” I said it twice, just because he never liked to hear it, never liked to acknowledge it. “I was born in Salinae, to human parents, to a family who—”

Vincent’s restraint rarely buckled. Now, it outright shattered, the wave of his temper unleashed.

“Family. What does that word mean? That you were yanked from between human legs? You don’t even remember them. If they had lived, they would not remember you. Perhaps they’d be grateful you were gone. What would you have been to them? Another unwanted child to keep alive? Or maybe another lost one to grieve, when the world inevitably crushed you.”

Each word buried deep in my chest, skewering another unspoken fear.

His lip curled with disgust. “And yet this is your dream? This is the life you long for? And what does that make me? The cruel man who ripped you away from—what, this great life of love? Is that how you see me? As a captor?”

I swallowed a writhing twist of guilt. Even through my anger, my impulse was to apologize to him—No, I’m sorry, that isn’t what I meant. I love you and I’m grateful and thank you for saving me.

But then, he strode to the door and threw it open so hard that the silver knobs banged against the wall. “Look,” he snarled.

He grabbed my wrist and dragged me down the hall to the railing that overlooked the feast hall. It was crowded, busy with men and women wearing the deep violet uniforms of Vincent’s Hiaj army. Long tables were set up below, dotted with overflowing plates. Most of the plates were untouched, though. Because instead, the warriors fed on the humans.

There were a dozen in that room alone. Some lying on the table, heads lolling, barely conscious. A few, clearly drained, slumped discarded against walls. Some had been bound to the table with rope. One man, who must have struggled fiercely, was pinned to the table with daggers piercing his flesh.

My chest burned. Stomach churned. I couldn’t breathe. Even swallowing would make me vomit. How long? How long had he been doing this? I wanted to deny it. Wanted to pretend I didn’t see it. This brutality was so much worse than anything I had witnessed in this castle before.

But it made sense, didn’t it? How does one feed one of the biggest armies in the world? How does one keep morale up when waging an endless war? How does one entice warriors who value nothing more than blood?

A nice perk of wartime, isn’t it? Endless death.

And perhaps it did not happen out in the open like this before. But maybe, like so much else, it had rotted beneath the surface, and I had chosen not to see it.

“Look, Oraya.” Vincent’s fingernails bruised my arm. “Look at them. These aren’t people. They are livestock. You never would have allowed yourself to be one of them, because you are better than them. I made you better. I gave you teeth and claws. I made your heart steel. Do not pity them. They are less than you.”

I couldn’t tear my gaze from the humans below. Their blood ran over the tables in rivers of crimson.

He was right. I would never be human like they were. Just as I would never be human like the people I saved in the slums, or the ones who occupied the pub I went to with Raihn.

Just as I never would be as human as Ilana.

And maybe that was a blessing in some ways. A curse in others. Maybe Vincent had stolen something precious from me as he stripped away my humanity.

And I’d fucking let him.

Not only that, but I’d done such a wonderful job deceiving him that he thought I would see what he did when he showed me this sea of savagery.

My eyes stung. I wrenched my hand from his grip, turning away from the feast and retreating down the hall. “You lied to me.”

“I indulged your childhood fantasies, knowing that one day you’d grow past them.”

He thought I would become like him, and I would no longer care, just as he no longer cared. But he was wrong. I thought of Raihn, who had been a vampire for more than two hundred years and yet still so clearly mourned his humanity with every heartbeat.

Suddenly, I mourned my humanity, too. I mourned it the way I mourned Ilana.

I stopped short just within Vincent’s office door. I turned to him, let out a trembling breath.

“Why do you want me to be your Coriatae?” I asked.

I knew the answer. Vincent wanted me in the Kejari, wanted me to become his Coriatae, because it was the only way to turn me into something acceptable for him to love.

My father loved me. I knew this. But he loved me in spite of what I was. Loved the parts of me that he could make like him.

Vincent’s jaw tightened. Again, a glimpse of the silent battle between king and father. He closed the door behind us and leaned against it. “Because I want you to fulfill your greatest potential,” he said, at last. “I want you to be strong. I want you to be powerful. And I want—I want you to be my daughter. In every sense. Because you are more like me than you ever have been like them, little serpent.”

He was right, and I hated it.

My voice was strangled, on the verge of breaking. “Today, I am ashamed of that.”

The words hit Vincent like a blow to his heart. Hurt careened across his face for a split second, replaced immediately by ice-frigid anger.

Vincent the father disappeared.

Vincent the king approached me, rage rising in his silver eyes with every slow, predatory step.

“Ashamed?” he said quietly. “Ashamed? I gave you everything. I made you all that you are. I could have killed you. Many said I should have. And you… you say that you are ashamed of me?”

I was a decent fighter, but no one was as good as Vincent. When he grabbed my arm, I didn’t have time to move. And I was too shocked to, anyway, when he wrenched it, hard, and slammed me against the wall. He was so close that I could see every pulsing line of his Heir Mark, every glowing wisp of magic unfurling from each stroke of ink, just as harsh as the hateful lines on his face.

“What would you rather be, then, if you don’t want to be my daughter?” His fingernails bit into my skin, tighter, tighter—drawing blood. “Do you want to be my enemy, instead? Is that what you’d prefer?”

I had never, ever been afraid of Vincent before. I was now.

Because now, he didn’t look at me like I was his daughter. He didn’t even look at me like I was human. No, this was worse.

He looked at me like I was a threat.

“Let me go, Vincent.” I tried to keep the waver from my voice and failed. “Let me go.”

But maybe the waver saved me, because Vincent the king disappeared all at once, and Vincent the father was appalled with himself.

A wave of horror fell over his face. He looked down at his own hand, wrapped tight around my arm, red blood and purple bruises pearling at his grip.

He released me and took several steps back. He ran his hand through his hair.

He was shaking.

“Oraya, I—I—”

He wouldn’t say he was sorry. The Nightborn King apologized to no one. And if he was going to, I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say ever again.

A part of me thought he would stop me as I threw open the door.

But he didn’t.

There were more out here than ever now. With Raihn and I unable to come to the human districts since the Halfmoon, the place was crawling with vampires. They were lazy. Easy to kill.

Before, I’d found this satisfying. At least I could ease the unpleasant thoughts in my head with the plunge of a blade into a chest over and over again. Now, it just made me angrier. They thought so fucking little of us that they didn’t even think they needed to be careful. Whatever joy I found in the dying light of their eyes was fleeting, each one a weaker rush than the last.

I killed my fourth for the night in an alleyway close to the pub that Raihn and I would frequent. It had been a very long night. It was probably close to dawn.

I couldn’t bring myself to care. Not about any of it.

I didn’t toy with this one. I went straight for the heart. He was so afraid that he pissed himself in the end. I stepped slightly to the left to avoid the puddle at his feet.

He’d been going for a child. A little girl. He was preparing to go through the window for her. That was rare. I didn’t often see them ready to crawl into houses for their prey.

The body sank to the ground. I kneeled over him as he lay limp in the dirt, ready to pull my blade out.

He thought he was entitled to these people. Their houses weren’t homes, just dens to be rooted out. Chicken coops to stick his hands into and pull out whatever he wanted. Maybe the haze of death over these recent weeks had made them believe that there was no such thing as protection, no such thing as consequences.