Текст книги "The Serpent and the Wings of Night"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I considered not returning to the apartment, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was half-surprised that nobody held the door shut as I turned my key and entered. Raihn hadn’t returned, and Mische swept glass from the floor. The shattered window was still wide open, a strong breeze making her short, curly hair flutter about her face like butterfly wings.

She gave me a big grin when I walked in, like she was genuinely thrilled to see me. “You’re here!”

She seemed a little surprised. I was, too, frankly.

“Want me to patch that up?” I gestured to the window.

“Oh, no. I’ll do something with it once Raihn comes home.”

Home, she said, so casually. Like this place was a home.

I nodded and wandered closer. She had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, now just sweeping the smallest pieces into a little tray to throw in the garbage. I felt embarrassed, like a small child after throwing a temper tantrum.

“Do you need help?”

“No,” she said cheerfully. “But thank you!” She waved to the table. “Sit. There’s food.”

I wasn’t hungry, but I joined her anyway. She took a seat and sipped a goblet of blood, and though she had gestured to the chair across from hers, I still picked the one on the opposite end of the table.

Instead of reaching for the food, I pulled out the cigarillo box.

“Do you mind?”

She gave me a knowing smile. “Life is too short not to indulge.”

What an odd thing for a vampire to say. Vampire lives were not short by any measure. But then again… didn’t everyone have a short life, in here?

And besides, Mische was the most unusual vampire I’d ever met.

I watched her sip her blood, looking content as she gazed out the window. Like the fight earlier hadn’t even fazed her.

“Can I ask you a question, Mische?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Why are you with Raihn?”

Her face snapped to me, aghast. “With Raihn? I’m not with Raihn.”

“No… I know you’re not with him like that.” I’d wondered about it at first, especially since vampires fucked like rabbits, but it became quickly obvious that Mische and Raihn had a platonic relationship. They slept in separate bedrooms and treated each other far more like siblings than lovers.

Still, that only made it harder to understand. They were just so different. I couldn’t imagine dragging someone like Mische into a tournament like this. At least if they were fucking, I could understand it even if I didn’t agree with it. People did all kinds of nonsensical things when blinded by good sex.

And Raihn looked like he was probably very good at sex.

That thought shocked me the minute it crossed my mind, and I slammed my mental doors against it as hard as I could.

“He’s my best friend,” Mische said simply, as if that explained everything.

“But… why?”

She threw her head back and let out a high, full laugh.

“I’m going to tell him that sometime,” she said when she collected herself. “Your face! But… why?” Her imitation of my voice was comically low and flat, her face twisting into an expression of exaggerated disgust.

Look, it was a fair question.

“Lots of reasons.” Her insulting impression of me faded into a soft smile. “He was there for me when no one else was. He’s the most loyal person I’ve ever met. The most trustworthy.”

“Hm.” I made a noncommittal noise, probably looking as unconvinced as I felt.

Other than Vincent, I’d never truly met a trustworthy vampire. Not really. All of them would skin their own children if they thought their power was under attack.

“It’s just…” Her eyes drifted to the sky, far away in thought. “I spent a lot of time alone, before. I didn’t realize how important it was to really have someone. To have someone who would just—who would kill for you. You know?”

Killing didn’t especially seem to be a great favor or sacrifice for Raihn. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to challenge her point, because I knew exactly what she meant. For me, Vincent was that person. Even when I had no one else, I had him, and I knew beyond any doubt in this world or the next that he would do literally anything for me.

“A lot of people don’t know how to love. Raihn has a lot of flaws, but he knows how to love. Or at least he…” A little wrinkle deepened between her brows, and her voice trailed off before she jerked herself out of her thought, looked back to me, and grinned.

“That, and he’s a very good cook. A very good cook.”

I wondered if my disbelief showed on my face. I couldn’t imagine any of those things. The loyalty. The love. Definitely not the cooking.

Her voice went a shade more serious. “That wasn’t him today.”

“Oh?” I said dryly. “Then who was it?”

“The past.” She gave me a sad smile. “Maybe our skin doesn’t scar the same as yours, but our hearts do. Sometimes they never heal.”

My scoff was not as convincingly dismissive as I wished it was.

She asked, “So… was that you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Today. The, uh… window. The magic. Were you hiding it this whole time?”

I didn’t know why I found it hard to lie to Mische. She was just so uncomfortably genuine. I exhaled a puff of smoke instead of answering, because a lie was difficult and the truth was embarrassing.

“Ah.” She nodded. “I see.”

“It’s unpredictable.” I sounded more defensive than I meant to.

“We can work on it together.”

Mother, that was a statement that should have been terrifying to me. And yet, it was strangely comforting.

“He deserved to go out the window,” I said.

“He did,” she agreed. Then, more seriously, she asked, “Are you going to leave?”

I took a deep drag of my cigarillo and relished the way the smoke burned my nose as I exhaled.

“No.”

“That would be a stupid thing to do the day before a trial.”

“It would.”

“What do you think it’s going to be? The trial?”

I’d spent plenty of time wondering about it, but there was nothing we could do but speculate. The Waning Moon trial was one of the biggest wildcards in the Kejari. Year after year, it was drastically different. The first trial traditionally detailed Nyaxia’s escape from the land of the White Pantheon. But the second could land at so many different places in her story—perhaps when she found the underworld, her love story with Alarus, the God of Death, or any one of the many legendary adventures that they had together.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Are you nervous?”

I said nothing. I couldn’t deny it, but I wouldn’t admit it aloud, either.

She did not wait for an answer. “I am,” she sighed, taking another drink of blood.

“It might be about her journey,” I theorized. “Her journey down to the land of the dead.”

Even that gave us little to go on. A journey could take so many forms, could be interpreted in limitless ways.

“Do you think she was scared back then?” Mische mused.

“Nyaxia?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She was a goddess.”

“Barely, in the beginning. A nobody. And so young.”

I paused. Nyaxia, at this point in her story, was only one of countless powerless offspring produced by the White Pantheon; not only a lesser goddess herself, but the child of one. No one would even know if she had died alone in the wilderness, let alone mourn her. Most legends put her at only twenty, practically an infant by the standards of the deities.

People like her were born to be used and thrown away by the other gods. Fucked, feasted upon, and discarded.

Mische was probably right. She had probably been terrified.

But that was two thousand years ago, and now Nyaxia was staggeringly powerful—powerful enough to defy the White Pantheon on her own. Powerful enough to give an entire continent her gift of vampirism and create a civilization of her followers. And powerful enough that all of Obitraes now lived and died and loved and sacrificed at her feet, forever.

“Well,” I said, “that changed.”

“But think of all she had to give up for it.”

Her husband. Murdered by the White Pantheon as punishment for marrying Nyaxia.

I considered this. Yes, maybe the Pantheon took her lover. But Nyaxia also took back her own power. I could imagine far too clearly how good that must feel after a lifetime of weakness. I was a bit ashamed to admit the things I would be willing to sacrifice for it, myself.

“At least she isn’t afraid anymore,” I said.

“No,” Mische replied, thoughtfully. “I’d guess not. But she’s probably awfully unhappy, don’t you think?”

I returned to my room not long after that, but I was too nervous to sleep. Instead, I watched the color of the sky turn to ash red. I could hear Mische shuffling around down the hall, but not Raihn’s return.

I was beginning to drift off when a crash made my eyes snap open. I went to the door, listening carefully. A series of dull THUMPs and the sound of rustling fabric echoed from the living room.

“You cut it so close.” Mische was trying to whisper and failing.

“I know.”

“Gods, look at you.”

“I know.”

“Raaaaihn…”

“I know, Mische.”

My curiosity got the better of me.

Very, very slowly—very, very silently—I removed the chair, cracked my door, and slipped into the hallway. I peered around the corner to see Mische yanking the curtains closed as Raihn sat heavily on one of the couches. Or maybe collapsed was a better word, like all his limbs just decided to give up at the same time.

Goddess, was he drunk?

“I thought you said after last year you weren’t going to do this again!” Mische was awful at speaking quietly. No one could even blame me for eavesdropping.

“Fuck it. What’s immortality if we don’t use it to do the same things over and over again, forever, until the end of time?”

Oh, he was definitely drunk.

She sighed and turned to him. He now lay against the couch, his chin tipped back. He really was a mess—clothes stained with I-didn’t-even-know-what, hair tangled over his shoulders.

“So,” she said. “Today.”

She turned and I stepped back quickly to remain out of sight, so I could no longer see them, only hear them.

He let out a low groan. “What about it?”

A silence, which was presumably filled with Mische’s pointed look.

The groan became a sigh. “Too much?”

“Definitely too much.”

“She should be able to take it.”

“That was her taking it.”

“Well… not like that. Not ‘taking it’ by throwing me out a fucking window.”

“And was that you ‘taking it,’ idiot?”

Silence. I could imagine the look on his face.

Her voice grew softer. “Think about what it must have been like for her. Growing up like that.”

My nose wrinkled. Growing up like what?

I was almost insulted that this point earned a thoughtful silence from Raihn.

Then, “Well, woe is her. So? We all have our shit.”

“Yours isn’t her fault.”

A long pause.

I chanced a step closer so I could peer around the corner. Raihn’s head was tilted back, his eyes looking straight up to the ceiling. Mische now stood behind him, leaning over the back of the chair to rest her arms around his neck, her chin on the top of his head in casual affection.

“You know that wasn’t her fault,” she said again. “That was your fault.”

My eyebrows rose slightly. Raihn did not seem like the kind of person to suffer that kind of insult—few vampires were. I tensed, as if cringing on Mische’s behalf for a sharp rebuff, verbal or physical.

But instead, to my shock, Raihn just let out a long sigh.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

He patted her arm, and she pressed a chaste kiss to the top of his head.

“At least the day is over.”

“Small victories.”

“Drink some water. Now you’re going to have to survive a trial hungover, you fool…”

Their whispers faded away as I backed down the hall.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We didn’t speak to each other much when nightfall came, and I was grateful for that. I was on edge, and I didn’t trust myself not to snap at Raihn and start a whole other fight before the trial even began. After muttered good evenings, we followed our now-familiar little trail of shadow until we met with the rest of the contestants in the great room.

It was the first time I’d seen the others since the last trial. The energy had palpably changed. Gone was the excited anticipation from our first gathering, replaced with a more desperate frenetic anxiety. Several sets of eyes jumped to me the moment I walked into the room, noses twitching, the whites of their eyes bright.

I knew that look. Raihn and Mische had stolen enough blood to sustain them these last weeks, but clearly, not everyone was so lucky.

Raihn seemed to notice this too, and was surprisingly disconcerted by it, stepping a bit closer to me as he drew his sword. And equally surprisingly, I let him, my own weapons gripped tight in my hands.

No one spoke.

We knew what to expect this time. Just when the silence began to feel awkwardly long, the world fell away.

Even prepared, the roar of the crowd momentarily stunned me, violent in contrast to the Moon Palace’s silence.

I took stock of my surroundings fast.

Raihn and Mische were gone. No one stood beside me. The sand beneath my feet quivered with distant impact. I blinked into white mist, which undulated in lazy furls, illuminated by the blue light of Nightfire torches. Black stone walls surrounded me on three sides, cradling a glass ceiling, presumably to stop the winged contestants from flying above them. The ceiling wasn’t smooth, but crafted into dips and valleys like an inverted topography of the earth.

I squinted into the mist. Between the smoke and the darkness, I had only a few feet of visibility in front of me. I could see no movement, nor hear anyone else nearby. I pressed my palm to the wall and felt only rock. It was rough and unfinished. The hall before me wound into the darkness.

I inhaled the harsh scent of smoke and… something else, something light and ominously pleasant that I couldn’t place.

I took a few cautious steps. Echoes of clashes rang out in the distance, as if some of my fellow contestants had met their opponents—whoever or whatever they were.

The hallways bent to a single sharp turn to the left. Weapons ready, I followed it.

I found myself face-to-face with Ibrihim, who had just emerged from around another corner straight ahead.

We both stopped, glancing at each other, then the corridor before us. Halfway between us, another hallway veered to the right. Our path had split three ways—the route I had come from, the one Ibrihim had, and the path forward.

A maze. This was a maze. I touched the uncut stone and looked up at the strange ceiling with new insight. It was the underside of the earth—because this was intended to mimic the journey to the underworld. Nyaxia had wandered for weeks after escaping the realm of the gods before at last finding her way to Alarus’s territory. She had been lost, so we would be, too.

Ibrihim and I both stilled, the realization hitting him as it had me. I could barely see his face through the layers of unearthly mist, but I knew he watched me just as closely, and I knew better than to underestimate him.

Slowly, I edged down the hall, craning my neck to peer around the corner. A massive silver door stood there, light playing off an embossed tableau of a man’s stern, eyeless face—Alarus. It was firmly closed. No handle.

Ibrihim had come closer, too, and I kept one eye on him as I approached the door. Something shifted beneath my feet. I looked down. I’d stepped on a block of stone, which now sank slightly into the sand.

A dull grinding sound shook the air.

The door before us opened, leading to another hallway. In the foggy distance beyond, I could make out another turn, the sounds of distant violence closer.

Ibrihim and I peered at each other warily. He made no move for me, so I didn’t move, either. Instead, I stepped closer to the door—

–and it immediately slammed down with enough force to shake the ground.

I lurched backwards, nearly tripping over the slab. When I stepped back onto it, the door began to rise again.

Oh.

I stepped off. The door slammed back down.

Shit.

I looked at Ibrihim. Understanding settled over us at the same time.

The door would not remain open without weight on the stone. But it needed to be dead weight, because whoever was left here wouldn’t be able to make it to the other side alone.

He gave me a weak, lopsided smile, revealing scarred gums.

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t here to win,” he said, somewhat apologetically, before he hurled a fucking star at me.

This was what Ibrihim’s parents, after all, had been so worried about. He had been a quiet child, but he was also an innately talented warrior. So they did everything they could to make him a less efficient killer. They ruined his legs. They tore his wings. They took his teeth. But they couldn’t take away his use of magic.

Which, unfortunately, was also very, very good.

I dropped to the ground just in time to keep my face from becoming a scalded mass of flesh. His magic, which drew upon the power of stars, wasn’t as strong as Asteris, but it was still plenty deadly. He flung those streaks of light like they were nothing.

I dove around the corner, heading back to my dead end. I pressed to the wall, listening—waiting. My arm ached, the burn blistering where he had grazed my shoulder. Two minutes into this thing and I was already injured. Fabulous start.

He couldn’t shoot me here without coming after me. And he would need to, because he needed my bodyweight to get that door open.

Long seconds passed. Ibrihim wasn’t stupid. He knew what I was doing. Knew he was putting himself at a disadvantage, and that he had to do it anyway.

I strained over the sounds of the crowd and the distant fighting in a futile attempt to hear his footsteps—fuck, what I wouldn’t give now for that vampire hearing—

The moment he approached, I leapt on him.

I had one shot. I needed to hit skin before he had time to react.

He hadn’t been expecting the poison, reeling away with a gasp of pain as it ate through the first wound, a slash across his forearm. Our fight devolved into wild chaos immediately—him forcing himself not to pull away as the poison scorched his skin, me suffering through the burns of his starlight on my hands as I tried to pin his down.

Normally, I would be trying to bury my blade as deep into his chest as possible. Impossible now. I didn’t have the time, distance, or leverage for a shot powerful enough to get to the heart. But I could still devour him with a hundred little bites. Let that poison do its work, slowly.

Injured or no, he was bigger than me. I got him to the ground, crawled over his body, opening mark after mark after mark in his armor. But that lasted only for a couple of minutes before he flung me away. I let out an oof as my back smacked the sand, knocking the breath out of me.

No time to catch it as he crawled over me. I barely managed to move my left hand down, so it was trapped between our bodies as his weight pinned me. Suffocating. I couldn’t move. He grabbed my right hand and wrenched it above my head with a violent CRACK.

“I always liked you,” he panted.

“Me too,” I said, and twisted my left arm just enough to bury the blade in his gut.

His eyes widened. He opened his lips—maybe he intended to speak, but the only thing that came out was a wet, wordless grunt of pain. The poison worked fast, sizzling as it dissolved his skin. It ate at my hand, too, where his blood dripped down.

I pushed him off me. He was alive, but barely conscious, clawing at his abdomen. It had become a disgusting mess of tattered leather, pus, and blood.

I grabbed his arms and pulled. Fuck, he was heavy. I dragged him over to the slab and dropped him onto the stone.

The door opened behind me, but I stared down at Ibrihim as his head lolled, eyes slitted to meet mine.

He’d live. Miserably, and even more maimed than he was before, but he’d live. I had to put an end to that.

It shouldn’t have been hard. I had killed countless times. I didn’t know why I found myself hesitating as Ibrihim looked up at me. Maybe because we had always seen something familiar in each other, even if we never acknowledged it.

“I’m sorry.” The words slipped from my lips without my permission as I prepared to slide my blade through his chest.

But before I could bring it down, the ground shook. A deafening groan filled my ears.

My head snapped up just in time to see the walls crumbling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I narrowly dodged a falling boulder as I dove through the door. The walls undulated. Not just collapsing, I realized—moving.

I almost laughed. Of course. In legend, Alarus’s realm was ever-evolving. The path to morality was forever changing, and thus the path to the afterlife was, too. If this trial was meant to represent the underworld, the changing maze was just one more thing to conquer.

I ran. With the stone crumbling and floor shifting, I didn’t know how long I had before my path through would be cut off completely. The mist was thicker in here. That strange smell was stronger now, too—that sweet scent.

I made decisions based on nothing but gut instinct—left, right, right, left, right, left. I skidded to a stop as I rounded a corner to see another door, this one bearing an engraving with Alarus’s eyes wide open and a fistful of flowers in his hand. Beautiful—though I had no time to appreciate it, because standing before it was Kiretta, the Shadowborn.

Neither of us hesitated.

We hit each other at the same time—my body slamming against hers as her magic encircled us. I hadn’t gotten the full force of it during the last trial. Green-tinted smoke enveloped me. Pain burst through the back of my head, her magic cracking open my mind.

I pushed her to the ground as she clawed at me. Squeezed my eyes shut.

Don’t look at her. Don’t listen to her.

Open your eyes, a sing-song voice whispered within my thoughts. Look at me, pretty girl. Look at me.

No. If Kiretta was as good of a caster as Vincent warned, she would be able to charm me this close. The Shadowborn’s gift for mind magic was just as dangerous as any weapon.

It took all my focus to hold her down while resisting her call.

Shadowborn magic was an open passage—they controlled the door, but the hallway went both ways. I pushed through her distractions, turned my mental gaze to the other end of the corridor that connected us.

Pain. Hunger. She was injured. Weak. Reckless. And I saw exactly how sloppy that desperation made her. She was a stronger magic user, but right now, I was the better fighter—and I could see all too clearly how she had underestimated me.

I let her think that she won. Slackened my mental walls. Let my head roll back. Let my eyes open. Her stare, hypnotic and mesmerizing, was so close that even that split second was almost too much. A satisfied smile began to spread over her lips.

And then I drove my dagger into her throat.

Instantly, the poison did its work. A fleeting stab of her agony rushed through my mind before I pulled away from her, severing our mental connection. She clutched her throat on the ground, which heaved and billowed with the shifting halls. She was still fighting for breath, fighting for her feet, when I dragged her onto the stone slab. I didn’t give her the opportunity to pull herself up before I dove through the door.

The scent hit me in a wall, intoxicatingly sweet.

I was now in a field of poppies. Dense white fog hung in a gentle curtain over the flowers, an expanse of bleeding red. The thunderous grind of stone echoed behind me, but here, it was eerily still. Light rippled in delicate dapples over the flower fields.

Poppies were the flowers of the dead. If the hallways behind me had been the path down, then this was the threshold of the underworld. Four arched silver doors stood before me, each revealing paths that soon faded into silver fog. The clash of steel against steel rang out ahead, as did grating rumbles that told me I wasn’t done dodging falling stone.

I had to be near the back of the group. Which meant, as much as it pained me, running towards the sounds of fighting was probably my best choice. I pushed through the middle hallway. Halfway through, I passed a bloody body, which made be hesitate in confusion.

At a glance, I assumed it was a contestant. But the blood was very, very red, and the corpse wore not battle leathers but plain once-white robes, now in tatters. The red smear on the wall implied that he had been flung against it and left to slowly die on the ground.

Human. That was a human body.

I didn’t understand. Why were there humans here?

A strange sound echoed in from down the hall. A sound like—like a cry. At first I thought I must have imagined it, because it didn’t make any sense. Maybe it was a warped noise from the crowd or another contestant, or—

Another quake of the ground jerked me from my trance, a reminder that I didn’t have time to waste. I sprinted down the rest of the hallway, until I reached another arch leading to another field of poppies—fuller now, a sea of red.

The cry echoed once more.

Not imagined. Very real.

A door stood open on the other side of the field. I stepped closer. Another lifeless—distinctly human—body lay on a stone slab. And beside her, clad in the same white robes, was a child.

My mind stopped working. Froze. Stuck on that little girl, who kneeled beside the mutilated body.

This was why my blood didn’t seem to be a draw for the other contestants, even those that were hungry. Because there were many humans here.

The white robes. The white cast on their faces. The humans were not accidents. They weren’t even prey. They were… decorations. Playing the part of the souls that occupied the underworld.

A gift. A distraction. Or simply a dramatic flair.

The little girl wept, tears streaking chalky white over her cheeks. She looked up at me and her eyes went wide—watery blue, peering between oily tendrils of black hair.

Where did these come from? There were no human children in the inner city of Sivrinaj. Did she come from the human districts?

Why was a child here?

Behind me, the sound of grinding stone drew closer. I needed to go. I needed to go right now.

I took several steps towards the door.

Leave her, Vincent’s voice commanded.

And with that came the echo of Raihn’s, from the first night of the Kejari: They’re dead, little human. And if you go after them, so are you.

True. And true.

And yet, I found myself turning back, crouching before the child. She scrambled away from me, terrified.

“Come with me,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”

She didn’t move, save for terrified shaking. She was stuck, I realized—she had been pressed to the wall when the stone shifted last, leaving her ankle wedged between two slabs of black marble.

How did one interact with a child this young? What was she, four, eight? I’d never even seen a human child up close like this.

“We need to go now,” I pressed.

No time. The floor began to quiver. I grabbed the girl’s tiny body as tightly as I could and pulled.

She let out a cry of pain. Resistance, then release, as I wrenched her leg free. I tucked her against me with a silent apology, and then I wondered exactly how insane I was as I ran.

A mistake. A mistake on so many levels, Oraya. You can’t fight like this. Can’t evade like this. You’re slower. You smell twice as human. You lose a sword arm. Leave her. She’s dead anyway.

I bolted through three more doors, already open, corpses of humans or contestants mangled over their slabs. I passed several more humans cowering against the walls, donned in white. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them.

The poppies grew denser, each step sluggish through the foliage. The scent was overwhelming. Carvings plastered the walls now, huge eyes that spanned from floor to ceiling, suns and stars spiraling in their depths—the symbol of Alarus, because death always watched.

Another door stood ahead, this one closed. The light had grown bright and feverish, dancing over us at the same pace as my quickening heartbeat. The girl grabbed fistfuls of my hair as she clung to me, trembling. She leaned forward, her head blocking one critical sliver of my peripheral vision.

The Bloodborn man lunged for me before I had the chance to move.

I dropped the child, cringing as I tried to push her out of the way in time for me to whirl to meet the attack. He knocked me to the ground, teeth bared. He got the first shot in, a bone-steel rapier right to my already-injured thigh, which left me jerking in pain. I leapt back to my feet with everything I had, throwing myself against him to regain control—but I only made it a few inches into my attempted blow before he grabbed my wrist and sank his teeth into it.

I ripped it away, my own blood spattering over my face. Too slow. The hesitation cost me. My back cracked against stone as my opponent caught me and pushed me to the wall. He was small for a vampire, only a few inches taller than me, and I looked right into his stare as he encroached—red-rimmed pupils dilated, glistening with hunger and glee.

Time stopped. I tried to grip my blade with my injured hand. Couldn’t move fast enough—

The Bloodborn lurched backwards.

I sucked in a sudden gulp of air. Raihn yanked my attacker off me, nearly splitting him in two with a devastating follow-up strike from his Nightsteel sword. In return, the Bloodborn leapt on Raihn like a dying animal in their final throes. Wounds along his arms shivered, the red mist of blood magic surrounding them. Raihn was hurt. The Bloodborn would be able to manipulate his blood, too.

Raihn got in two more hits, but the Bloodborn retaliated with enough force to send him careening against the stone. Still, Raihn gripped his opponent’s arms tight, not letting him pull away—and leaving his back wide open, exposed to me.

Raihn’s gaze met mine over his attacker’s shoulder—now.

I thrust my blade hard into the Bloodborn’s back, sinking to the hilt. Even from behind, I knew how to pierce a heart.

The man slumped.

Raihn let the body fall as I struggled to free my weapon. He looked me up and down. “So you do know how to be helpful,” he said, already turning to the door. “Let’s go. I saw flames up ahead. Probably Mische. I think we’re close to—where the hell are you going?”

I wasn’t listening. The child had made it halfway across the poppy field. Her leg was clearly broken, more obvious than ever now as she struggled to run away from me. I grabbed her, muttering a hurried apology, and ran back to Raihn, who stared at me.