Текст книги "Six Scorched Roses"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We galloped hard through the morning. My horse, the one Vale had given me, was strong and fast. Farrow’s, however, was not used to running for so long and over such uneven terrain.

“Don’t slow for me,” Farrow called after me, and I let out a rough, wild laugh that I was grateful he didn’t hear. I never planned on slowing for him. I’d ride as fast as I could.

I felt like a fool.

A fool because I had spent all this time worried about the dangers my relationship with Vale would pose to me, my sister, my town. But it had never occurred to me that I would be dangerous to him.

Thomassen had gone after Vale with several dozen men, Farrow had told me as we ran—young and strong ones. They’d brought weapons and explosives and fire. And they’d brought the most dangerous things of all: desperation and rage.

The acolytes believed that Vale was the reason for the curse. They’d convinced themselves that slaughtering him, offering his tainted blood to Vitarus, could end the plague. They convinced themselves that they could only save themselves, save their families, through this murder.

It didn’t matter that Vale had lived here far longer than the plague had. It didn’t matter that we had sacrificed to Vitarus many times before, and it hadn’t worked. It didn’t matter that they had no evidence that Vitarus even remembered us at all—even remembered he had damned us.

No, logic doesn’t matter in the face of fear and emotion. Logic falls to its knees before hatred, and hatred flourishes in fear—and my people were terrified.

I was terrified, too.

I knew Vale’s blood so intimately, now. I knew what it would look like spilled over the steps of his home, spattered over the faces of the people who came to kill him. I’d dissected many animals, many cadavers. I knew what Vale would look like with his guts pulled apart.

I raised my eyes to the sky. The sun was now high, beating down on my back and forehead through the tree leaves.

That, I did not know. What would happen to a vampire in daylight. I thought that after all I had seen, known things were the most terrifying. But this—this unknown—made me sick to my stomach.

I smelled the fire before I saw it. Burning flesh—in a plague, one recognizes that scent innately.

Finally, I saw the gates of Vale’s estate glint through the tree branches, open and gently-swaying in the breeze.

I kicked my horse and tore through it.

Behind me, Farrow shouted my name, and I ignored him.

Because before me, there was only blood.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Vale had fought them.

The house was bleeding. Blood dripped down the white stone face, pouring from a broken window on the second story, where a limp body hung draped over broken glass, a sword dangling from his motionless grip.

Blood painted the front steps of the entryway—smears of it, pools. Handprints on the door, on the handles. Strokes of it ran in rivulets down the pathway, collecting in the spaces between the brick pavers. It sank into the rose bushes. Into the grass.

Was it horrible that I wasn’t horrified? Was it horrible that I was relieved?

Because it was all red blood—human blood. Blood that belonged to the lifeless bodies strewn around the property. So many I couldn’t count them. A massacre had happened here.

Farrow had told me that Thomassen had come with two dozen men. Surely few of them remained.

Maybe Vale had escaped. Maybe he…

But then, as my horse slowed to a trot beyond the gates, I saw it: the black blood mixed in with all that red. Smears in the grass, along the path. More of it down the path to the back of the house.

Too much of it.

I kicked my horse into a run toward the back of the house, ignoring Farrow’s calls after me.

And when I saw him, my heart sank and leapt at the same time.

For some reason, the phrase that flew through my mind was, Vale.

My Vale.

Only a handful of men remained alive, but Vale was so injured that he wasn’t fighting anymore. They had dragged him outside. He was on his knees in the garden, white and red flower petals around him. His head was bowed, black hair covering his face. His wings were out, the white feathers gorgeous in the daylight sun—gruesome contrast to the spatters of black blood and the open burn sores spreading across them.

He looked up as I approached, revealing a face mottled with blackened burns.

His eyes widened.

I didn’t even let my horse stop before I was dismounting, running, running—

I threw myself over Vale, tumbling to my knees before Thomassen.

“Stop! Enough!”

The world stopped. The priest, and the four men behind him, leaned back a little, like they had to take a moment to figure out if I was really here.

A rough touch folded around my wrist from behind. Concern. Restraint. It said so much.

“Mouse…” Vale rasped.

His voice sounded so hollow. It reminded me of Mina’s. Close to death.

I didn’t look at him, though I was so acutely aware of his form behind me, the faint warmth of his body where my back was only inches from him.

Instead I met Thomassen’s gaze and refused to relinquish it. The acolyte wasn’t injured, though blood smeared his robes. Had he stood back and let the others do all the fighting? Waited until they wore Vale down enough to step in and make the final blow?

“Stop this insanity,” I said.

His confusion fell away in favor of hatred again. He gripped his sword, eyes briefly falling to my axe—gods, did it even count as an axe? It was barely more than a hatchet—before returning to my face.

“Step away, child,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

“If you kill him, then you’re killing all of us.”

The priest scoffed, lip curling. “We should have done it the moment the plague began. Perhaps a sacrifice of one of the heretic goddess Nyaxia’s children would have been enough to end it. Maybe it would have been enough to appease Vitarus.”

I wanted to laugh at his foolishness. I wanted to scream at his ignorance.

“Why is it so difficult for you to understand that Vitarus doesn’t care about us?” I spat. “He has taken a thousand lives from us. Ten thousand. And that hasn’t been enough to appease him. Why would this one be any different?”

“You’re not a stupid girl,” the priest sneered. “A strange one, but not a stupid one. You know why. Because of what he is.” He jabbed his sword toward Vale. “Because of who he worships. Because of the goddess who created him. Look around you. How many of your brethren has he killed? And you expect us to let him live?”

I looked into the eyes of the men around him, and I didn’t see brethren. I saw people driven to ignorance and hatred. I saw people who were willing to kill whatever they didn’t understand just for a chance of a chance that it would help them.

Nothing would stop them from killing Vale.

They would happily kill me, the strange spinster woman that never had laughed at their jokes or indulged their mindless conversations, to get to him.

I liked solving problems. But I was now stuck in a conclusion decades in the making, helpless.

Behind me, Vale’s breaths were ragged and weak. I would have thought that he wasn’t even conscious, were it not for his grip on my wrist, still strong, even as his blood dripped down my hand.

“Please, Thomassen. Please. I—” My voice caught in my throat. Cracked. “I need him.”

The words tasted thick. Heavy. They seemed to sit in the air. I could feel their eyes on me, on Vale, on me again, the way my own often darted between pieces of an equation, and I didn’t like the answer they were drawing.

“He could be the cure to this,” I said, desperate.

Wrong thing.

Realization fell over Thomassen’s face. Realization, and then hatred.

“I defended you,” he snarled. “When they talked about you. About your father. About your family. I defended you, child, from horrors you don’t even understand. But I was wrong. You’ll only spread this further.”

He lifted his sword.

Everything went too slow and too fast at once.

Behind me, Vale tensed, pulling me back.

I yanked my hand from his grip, rising.

It was like I was outside my body, watching someone else lift that stupid little axe—watching someone else swing it. I was a scientist, not a soldier. My swing was clumsy, but I threw all the strength I had into it.

Hot blood spattered across my face.

Numb, I pulled the axe from Thomassen’s shoulder. I stumbled backwards a little—it was hard to get the blade from the flesh.

Shoulder. Not deadly. Try again.

I swung again, this time for the throat.

It’s an interesting sound that one makes when they’re drowning in their own blood. No scream, just a gargle and the empty hiss of air. Wet, weak death.

I had moved fast, for all my inexperience. It took a few seconds for the other men to realize what was happening. The priest staggered.

I felt a strange sensation. Something wet over my torso.

Pain, slow.

I looked down to see blood all over my shirt.

Commotion. Noise. It seemed very far away. I looked up and saw familiar sandy-fair hair, a wiry figure yanking a sword from one of the guards as the priest staggered.

The priest’s? Or…

I hit the ground hard as a grip from behind shoved me away—Vale. Vale’s movements were nothing like the graceful death I’d seen in the forest that night. No, these were lurching, desperate. Survival more than skill. Like a dying animal.

CRUNCH, and a head fell to the ground. One guard, before he could turn on Farrow.

He killed the second with his own sword, torso opened and bloodied over the grass.

Thomassen still stood, somehow… still stood, covered in blood, a dead man walking. Maybe his god helped him a bit, after all, because he somehow managed to turn—to—

“Vale!” I screamed.

Vale whirled around just in time. Thomassen’s sword went through his shoulder.

But Vale didn’t flinch.

A terrible damp crunch rang through the air. And when Thomassen’s body slumped to the ground, something red was clutched in Vale’s hand. It looked like a ball of blood, at first.

Then I realized, after a few seconds of dull blinking…

A heart.

Thunk, as Farrow’s sword fell to the grass.

Thump, as Vale let the heart drop beside it.

And then silence.

Birds chirped in the distance. A faint breeze rustled the tree leaves. The scent of spring was so overwhelming, it almost drowned out the scent of blood.

Nothing existed except for Vale and I, our gazes locked. For a long, breathless moment, I couldn’t look at anything except for his dark-gold eyes, staring at me through gore-streaked tendrils of hair, through smears of blood.

Then he collapsed.

I leapt to my feet, ignoring the pain of my own injuries, and ran to him. Farrow knelt beside him, too, and started to roll him over to look at his face, but I said, “No! The sun.”

Up close, the burns on Vale’s skin were stomach-turning. And gods, he was wounded… they hadn’t just come to kill him, they had come to torture him. Some of his clothing had been torn, clearly intended to expose more of his skin to the sun. A patchwork of wounds crisscrossed up his right arm, and the very tip of one wing had been cut—cut off? Maybe. It was hard to tell through all the blood.

“Help me,” I choked. “To the house. Out of the sun.”

I was only capable of assembling fractured handfuls of words at a time.

Farrow—gods bless him—did as I asked. If he was put off by being this close to a vampire, he didn’t show it. Together we dragged Vale up the steps to the back door, which led into the library—the very same room he had brought me to the first time I came here. Vale was incredibly heavy, even with both of us carrying him, and I was grateful that he appeared to be at least a little bit conscious, because he seemed to be trying to help us—albeit poorly. Still, we couldn’t hoist him onto one of the couches, and instead had to settle for laying him on the floor as gently as we could.

The wounds somehow looked even worse in here, but to my relief, they had stopped spreading once he was out of the sun.

But he wasn’t moving. He was only barely breathing.

“Lilith…” Farrow said quietly.

I looked up. He peered out the window, to the dead bodies lying in the yard. At first, I thought maybe he was sickened by what we’d just done—we’d killed, after all—but when he glanced back at me, it held something harder than guilt.

“An acolyte,” he murmured. “Vale killed an acolyte.”

The reality of what had just happened hit me.

Vale, a vampire, a child of Nyaxia, had just murdered a high-ranking devotee of Vitarus.

I had already been pushing my luck with my experimentations with vampire blood. I had been so careful at first to hide my work, to make sure I didn’t touch the blood long enough to attract the attention of a scorned god. And if a few vials of blood might have been enough to earn a god’s wrath…

…Imagine what the death of an acolyte could do.

Cold, cold dread fell over me. Some gods were fiercely protective of their acolytes. Others ignored them. Most, Vitarus included, fell somewhere in the middle, depending on their mood and your luck. He might not notice what had happened here. But if he did… few things were considered more insulting to a god than the murder of what they considered theirs—especially by someone touched by their greatest enemy.

My hands went numb, like all the blood had drained from my extremities.

“I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t mean to speak aloud. I always knew what to do. Always knew the next logical step. But right now, logic seemed so far away. There were so many problems, all so big. I couldn’t find the answers.

I turned to Farrow, wide-eyed, and swallowed a stab of guilt at the sight of him.

Farrow. Poor Farrow. I had barely looked at him before. He was covered in blood, too. One arm looked injured.

But his hand fell to my shoulder, giving it an encouraging squeeze.

“You will,” he said. “Just think.”

Farrow did always make me want to believe him, and that counted for something.

I drew in a breath, let it out, and stood.

“We need to burn the bodies.”

Maybe if we burned them fast, Vitarus would never know. Gods were fickle and flighty. They had a whole universe to pay attention to, after all. Maybe we’d gotten lucky, and this one hadn’t noticed us today.

But if we weren’t…

I looked down at myself. My blood-stained hands.

I’d make sure the blame would be mine. If Vale and I stayed away from town, I could pray that we would draw Vitarus’s attention, miles away from Adcova.

And if we only had a little bit of time before we attracted the attention of Vitarus, then we needed to use it.

“Here.” I shoved my bag into Farrow’s hands. “Take this back to town. The medicine in it…”

Did it work? Did I know for sure? It worked on the mice. Gods, I hoped it worked on…

I had to blink away Mina’s face, because the thought of her almost made me fall apart.

“It works,” I said. “Guard it. Don’t destroy it. Don’t let anything happen to it.”

Farrow’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure?”

Sometimes, those three words coming from someone else would be an admonishment. From Farrow, it was an actual question, spoken with the understanding that he would accept whatever answer I gave him.

I wasn’t sure. And I was a terrible liar. But I still replied, with as much confidence as I could muster, “Yes. I am.”

For decades, this town had thrown its faith blindly into gods that had done nothing for them but curse them. Now I’d give anything to cast that faith into those little glass vials.

“Go,” I said to Farrow. “Be quick. You don’t have much time.”

“What about him?”

Vale lay listless on the floor. Strange, how none of this—the dead bodies, the blood on my hands—terrified me as much as the sight of him in this state.

“I’ll take care of him. And the bodies.”

I heard all the judgment in Farrow’s silence.

“No arguing,” I said, before he could protest.

But it wasn’t Farrow that argued.

“Go.”

The voice that came from behind me sounded nothing like the deep, smooth sound that had greeted me when I first walked through these doors months ago. Still, my heart leapt to hear it.

Vale’s eyes were slitted, like he had to fight to keep them open.

“Go, mouse,” he rasped out.

No. The word was immediate, definitive. If there had been any shred of doubt within me, the sight of Vale, struggling to even speak, destroyed it. I would not leave him like this.

I forced a smirk. “I owe you roses,” I said. “We had a deal.”

The spasm of muscles around Vale’s mouth could barely be called a smile.

I led Farrow to the door before either of them could argue with me more. Farrow knew he couldn’t change my mind about this, either. Before he left, he reached out and took my hand. Squeezed it. I had to close my eyes. The emotion on his face made me uncomfortable.

“Thank you.” My voice was strangled and choked.

“Good luck, Lilith,” he said, in a tone that sounded a lot like a goodbye.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When Farrow was gone, I dropped to my knees beside Vale.

“I—I don’t know how to help you. Do you have medicine, or—”

“Burn them first,” he wheezed.

“Not with you like this.”

“Burn. Them.” His gaze slipped to the parted curtains—to the sky. No sign of a god’s anger now, but the longer we waited, the greater chance there was it would come.

I knew what he meant: we don’t have time.

So, reluctantly, I did as he asked. It took longer than I’d hoped. The bodies were heavy. I struggled to drag them far enough from the house to keep the flames from spreading to the building. There were many of them.

By the time I was done, the red cast from the fire doused the entire estate. It was dusk, the sky pink as scar tissue, gritty with smoke. I rushed my work and hurried back into the library the minute I was sure the fire wouldn’t take the house with it. Sooty sweat plastered my shirt to my skin. I was panting. I had worked so, so fast. But when I saw Vale lying there, right where I had left him, I thought, I made a mistake. I should have healed him first.

Still, I breathed a sigh of relief when he turned his head laboriously to look at me.

Did he look a little better? A little?

“Medicine,” I demanded. “Where?”

“Study,” he said, in a thick, scratchy voice. “Third drawer.”

The drawer, of course, was a mess—I could barely get it open for all the clutter. I cursed him for it as I rummaged. I didn’t even know what Obitraen medicine looked like. Finally, at the bottom, I came across several glass bottles. Most held blue-white liquid that glowed faintly. When I touched them, I shivered a little, like the magic was calling to some dark part of myself.

I wasn’t sure if there was a difference between them, so I filled my arms and brought all of them back, dumping them on the coffee table beside Vale.

“Which?”

Vampires did have incredible healing ability. Vale was able to move a little bit now—at least enough to select the bottle he needed. He shot one back like strong alcohol, hissing and cursing.

“Upstairs,” he said.

“You shouldn’t move—”

He glowered at me. “Up. Stairs.”

I rolled my eyes, but managed to get him into his bedchamber, though he leaned heavily on me the whole way. I helped him strip off his bloodstained clothes, conscious of every wince as coarse fabric clung to raw skin. Vale had lit the candles in the room with a wave of his hand when we walked in—the flames were strange and white, and moved a little differently than fire did. They cast silver over his bare flesh, and as I watched him withdraw another glass bottle and tend to the worst of his wounds, a knot formed in my stomach.

I’d come to admire Vale’s form so much—his blood, his body. But now, the blood that I had found so breathtakingly entrancing covered the flesh I had found equally stunning in grotesque smears. A dark, taunting mimicry of everything I’d grown to find so beautiful.

He didn’t want my help, at first. But he was being ridiculous—he couldn’t even reach the worst of his burns. I snatched the medicine from his hands, and after a few minutes of grumbling, he let me take over dabbing the potions onto the wounds of his back and shoulders.

Honestly, I was grateful that he had the energy to argue. And maybe he was grateful that he didn’t have to do much of it.

Nyaxia’s magic must have been powerful, because the healing was miraculous. Still, Vale’s wounds were deep, brutal. The cuts from swords were bad enough, but the sun had inflicted the worst of it. It had been a bright day today. It left seeping, blackened patches over his skin. The potion helped, closing the open patches of skin, but still leaving behind dark purple marks.

It was my fault this had happened.

This thought solidified in my mind fully formed, a single truth.

I should have been more careful. My colleagues at the university, my parents, my sister had always been right about me—my enthusiasm made me careless. I had been so excited about my discoveries—about Vale—that I hadn’t hidden my work. I forgot to be afraid.

A mistake.

“I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen,” I said, quietly, as I worked.

“None of this was your fault, mouse. Do you think this was the first time humans came to my door blaming me for whatever tragedy they faced that decade?” He glanced back at me with a wry smile. “Humans. All the same.”

I hated my own kin in this moment. But not as much as I hated myself.

I moved on to another burn, watching Vale’s skin twitch and burn beneath the silver liquid.

“You should have left,” he said. “I would have survived.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“Your friend wanted you to go with him. More than he expressed, I think.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter what Farrow wanted me to do.

Then Vale added quietly, in a tone of voice I could not decipher, “He is in love with you.”

My eyes stung.

I couldn’t even deny it. And what good had it ever gotten him?

“It’s just old feelings,” I said. “We were together for a while. But it ended.”

“Why?”

“He wanted more than I could give him.”

A life I couldn’t live. A heart I couldn’t free. A role I couldn’t play.

Vale nodded, as if this made sense to him. We didn’t talk for a long time. I was working on the last of the burns when he finally spoke again.

“I decided to go back to Obitraes.”

My heart stopped. My hand slipped. Just as well, because he turned around, his amber eyes cutting through me.

Why was it suddenly hard to breathe?

“Why did you change your mind?” I asked.

His fingertips ran back and forth over the back of my hand, absentmindedly. His gaze slipped away, to the strange white flames.

“Have you ever been in love?”

My brows leapt. I wasn’t expecting that question. I didn’t know how to answer.

I loved Farrow. He was one of my closest friends. But was I ever in love with him?

Strange that it wasn’t Farrow’s name on my lips as I watched Vale’s serious profile, silhouetted by the white firelight. And I was grateful that he didn’t wait for my answer—or perhaps, heard the truth in the lack of one.

“I had only one great love,” he went on. “The House of Night. I helped build an empire. I shaped it with my blade and blood. I gave my king, my men, and my kingdom my unquestioning and all-consuming devotion. If you have ever loved something that much, you know that there’s no wine sweeter, no drug stronger. And when it fell…”

His throat bobbed. He stared into the fire.

“I was angry for a very long time. I came here to escape the memory of my failure—but then I spent every day dreaming of returning to the House of Night. Dreaming of rebuilding what I had let fall.”

“Then it’s good you’re going back,” I said, my mouth dry.

It’s good, I had to repeat to myself.

Vale needed to leave. He needed to leave to save himself and to save us. He’d murdered an acolyte of the White Pantheon. Maybe Thomassen had been right. Maybe Vale’s presence here—his presence as a tainted child of Nyaxia—did only worsen our fates.

What did it say about me that, despite all of that, the thought of Vale leaving made my soul ache?

I fidgeted with the rag because I needed something to do with my hands. “You must be happy to go home.”

Vale’s gaze turned to me.

“I thought I would be,” he said. “But perhaps they, like your friend, want something I can’t give them. Maybe they want some part of me I have already given to someone else.”

I let my eyes fall down to the bedspread—to my hand pressed against it, and Vale’s atop it, those graceful fingers stroking the shape of the delicate bones at the back of my hand the way a musician stroked the strings of an instrument.

My heart thrummed so loudly in my chest.

And looking away didn’t save me from Vale’s stare, because I could feel his eyes the way one can sense a wolf stalking them in the forest.

Except I wanted to be caught.

The bed shifted as he turned to face me fully. He leaned a little closer. His scent surrounded me.

“Why did you come here,” he asked, “when you realized they’d come for me?”

“Because my work isn’t done.”

A lie. It was as done as it was going to be.

“Look at me, Lilith.”

Vale rarely said my name. The sound cut me down to the bone, shivered and swirled just as it did when he wrote it over the page.

Look at me, my sister had begged.

And I felt just as frightened now, as I forced my eyes to lift, forced myself to meet Vale’s stare.

Once it had me, I was utterly ensnared. I couldn’t hide.

Run, a voice inside me whispered.

Stay, another begged.

As Vale’s fingertips reached for my cheek. Stroked my cheek, my jawbone. Brushed the bridge of my nose. He wore the same expression that he had the day I showed him his blood—the day I realized, for the first time, that the only thing more beautiful than his blood was the expression of amazement on his face.

Tears pricked my eyes.

“You want more than I can give you,” I whispered.

“I can’t imagine that ever being true,” he murmured. “Because I want only you, Lilith. Whatever of you I can have. I’ll take one night. One hour. One minute. Whatever you want to give me. I’ll have it.”

My breath was ragged, choppy. It burned in my chest with all the emotion I realized I could no longer smother.

I had never been enough.

I had never been able to give any of them enough—enough time, enough love. Everyone gave up so much trying to get more from me, and now I did the same for them. From the moment I was old enough to understand my eventual fate, I made every decision knowing this. Knowing that I couldn’t be enough. Knowing that I would wither too fast, like a flower in an early frost.

I didn’t realize how much I had liked that Vale didn’t see that in me until this moment, when I knew that it had to end.

“I’m dying,” I choked out.

I didn’t know why I said it. It didn’t really matter, now, when he was leaving and the gods were damning us and the whole world seemed to be ending.

“I’ve been sick my entire life. Every year I don’t know if it’s the last. I’ve been leaving this world since I was brought into it. No one wants to believe it, but it’s the truth. It always has been. I’m—I can’t stay.”

You’re asking for more than I can give.

His hands had come up to my face. He held me firmly, so I couldn’t look away from him.

I could always see the moment things changed, once they knew—the moment they started grieving me while I was still alive, the moment me standing in front of them stopped being enough.

But his gaze was firm.

“Whatever you wish to give me,” he repeated, slowly, like he wanted to make sure I understood. “I’ll have it.”

I didn’t know that I had been waiting my entire life to hear those words until now.

I wasn’t accustomed to goodbyes. I never thought I would need to be the one to say them. It’s so much easier to be the one who leaves first.

I could leave now and spare myself a goodbye I wasn’t ready for.

But instead, I put my hands on either side of Vale’s face, a mirror of how he held me.

I pulled him close, and I kissed him.