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Chapter 42 Bane
The guards were not on the wall when Ravenscry came into view. The torches flickered over empty parapets.
I launched myself from the ground, landing heavily on the stone and making it shudder, clawing my way up and over the side.
I half expected to see an abattoir as I crested the wall, slithering over the parapets with a thirst burning in my throat.
Blood. I needed the dungeons, the prisoners, and there would be no decanting, no consideration for them at all. I would sink my teeth in and suck them dry one after another, until every cell was engorged, every fiber prepared to make the full shift into the primordial beast under my skin.
The ultimate hunter, the apex predator, the one chance I had to reclaim my bride.
But the guards were gone… no, not gone.
They had abandoned the wall, surrounding something in the torchlight of the keep’s bailey.
I bared my teeth, descending into the open i
It was Koryek who saved their lives.
“My Lord.” His handsome face gleamed warily in the flickering light. “The Fae things have moved from the library—are still moving. They’ve been at it for hours.”
Several guards stepped aside, all of them frowning, and I saw why they had abandoned the walls.
The golems, Rose and Thorn, stood there, facing the gates. They were positioned strangely, like people fighting against a strong headwind—no, like people fighting a hurricane-force gale, shoving forward and yet completely still.
There was something unca
I drifted closer, looking over Rose. Her head was down, bowed against the intangible force, one foot forward, fists curled.
Perhaps it was the wavering flames, but it looked as though she were moving, as slow as a bead of sap rolling over a frozen tree.
I held my breath, watching, and as the minutes passed her foot came forward, centimeter by centimeter, the fell thing struggling against an unstoppable force…
No. She struggled against a command.
Thorn did the same; as I watched, he heaved himself forward, so inert to the eye that it was impossible to pick out any actual forward momentum.
My lungs emptied of air.
They were made of Cirri’s blood; as they had followed her through Ravenscry, they would follow her anywhere. They faced northeast, struggling against her orders to stay put.
I’d last seen them in the library, standing at the windows; had she told them to wait there? Combined with the weight of the order to never leave Ravenscry, it was astonishing they could move at all.
But they could serve as my compass. With them I would find her, unerring and unfaltering; they were neither of flesh nor blood, and would have no need to rest until they’d found her.
“Leave them be,” I said harshly, and the guards immediately backed away. “Do not touch them, and do not open the gate until I command.”
I touched Rose’s cheeks, and did I imagine it, or did I feel the golem’s head strain towards me, every line of her body screaming to be released?
Blood. My throat burned, a dusty, aching fire begging to be quenched. First—to save Cirri’s life, I had to take life.
The guards returned to the wall, keeping wary eyes on the golems.
I went to the dungeons.
The Ark was still warm, heating the cool stones of this miserable place. The warden, a vampire woman with hair the color of fresh-churned butter and a face chiseled from stone, stood from her post and bowed to me. Her brown eyes were usually as cold as frozen Nordrin earth, but there was a touch of confusion in them at my presence.
“There have been no orders to prepare a harvest, my Lord—” she began, but I held up a hand.
“Quickly now,” I said, casting my gaze down the lines of cells. How many prisoners did we have? Almost forty, at my last recall, but I wouldn’t need them all. This was not a full transformation, merely a glut. “Begin with the worst of them—the child killers. Bring them to me directly, as quick as you can. Do not stop until I tell you otherwise.”
She stared at me, the little color in her porcelain face blanching away.
All vampires knew what this meant. I wondered if it was simple disgust with fiend appetites that put them off, or envy that they were forbidden from doing the same while they fed.
I didn’t look in the cells or observe the prisoners as I passed them. I would look into their eyes soon enough, and drain them dry without so much as a last word.
Thus I would begin with those whose lives had caused the most pain, the deepest damage to others; now their blood would serve some purpose besides keeping those miserable hearts pumping.
I stepped into the room with the Ark, the heat still radiating from Ellena’s pyre. Their corpses could fill its iron gut for its next meal.
The warden shoved a human man through the door.
He was filthy, in chains, his hands clasped behind his back in shackles; she kicked out the backs of his knees, sending him to the floor, and turned her back on him even as he babbled through tears, begging her for another chance.
“Please, please,” he gasped, and I gripped him, claws sinking into the meat of his shoulder, cutting through his scalp, and wrenched his head to the side, exposing his corded neck. His pleas became cries of pain.
A shudder of disgust went through me as my teeth sank in, cutting off his sobbing screams. After Cirri’s sweetness, it was like drinking sewage, unclean and filthy.
But now he could do some good with his worthless life. Remorseless, unfeeling, I drained him dry, and waited for the next.
The world was torn between satiation and agony.
The soothing warmth of blood in my throat, overridden by the pain of my body melting, warping, expanding; and then my teeth would batten on another throat, a new hot flood, and the relief of the blood would soothe the pain—only to fuel my transformation further, a fresh wave of agony swamping the relief.
In this form, the world was simple.
It was a tapestry of scents, rich and abounding, from the cooling ashes of the furnace to the chill stone, the sharp fear-sweat of the prisoners, the warden’s floral perfume mixing with the musty scent of her anxiety at being near me.
From this killing ground I smelled the fever slowly killing a man, the dusty pages of a book, the faintest aroma of baking bread from the kitchens far above.
I tossed aside the dry bundle of bones and meat I’d been clutching, drawing from greedily, and sat upright on my haunches.
Nothing could destroy me; I was the deliverer of death, the hand of punishment, every muscle corded with strength, my body a bristling tower of organic armor. Let the wolves come; I would have her back, and gorge myself on their blood.
The warden moved aside, eyes averted, as I prowled from the dank pit where I’d had my feast.
None would look upon me without disgust, without terror, but let them see. Let them fear.
None mattered but the woman, my mate, the one who was lost. I was her monster, her creature, and it seemed to me now that it was futile to resist this fate. Why had I wanted to pretend to be a man?
This was what she needed.
I climbed into the world above, where the sun just touched the horizon. The golems were nearly at the gates, still forcing themselves headlong against a binding of commands.
Pain slivered through my back, muscles quivering as new appendages tried to tear themselves free. No, not yet. Hunt by land, find her scent, follow it.
The golems twitched, trying to push past the invisible barrier in the air, and three horses emerged from the stables, their riders upright and grim.
Visca, on a fresh horse, and Wyn at her side, freshly-fed, her blonde hair no longer streaked with silver and what few wrinkles she’d cultivated smoothed from her face. She wore light armor instead of robes, blood sigils dripping on her forehead and the backs of her hands.
I blinked, time shifting around me for a moment; it was like the old days had returned, the three of us stepping out of the past and into the present.
But as Visca rode forward, raising her hand for the guards to open the gates, Wyn’s horse danced by, and the bloodwitch nodded to the golems. “Your blood is in the guardian, so you’ll have to give them the orders. We’ll be behind you. The horses can’t stand to be near you in that form.” She held up a palm to show me the bleeding mark she’d carved into herself: an open eye. “I’ll see you.”
No, no living creature had been able to stand me. Even now, holding still and silent, their mounts gave me a wide berth, refusing to come close—but a tantalizing scent drifted from one of them.
Roses, and skin musk, the softest whiff of soap.
Wyn raised her chin in the air as I crept closer, her horse’s eyes rolling wildly. “Bane… I’d rather not be thrown from the horse and die of a broken neck before the hunt begins.”
The scent emanated from her saddle blanket; I crouched, nostrils flexing as I considered the padded wool.
Cirri had touched it, somehow; sat on it, or laid on it. She never went near the stables, completely disinterested in them. And yet she’d touched that horse blanket, her scent relatively fresh, the comforting smell I’d grown accustomed to breathing as she slept.
By will or by force, she had left the keep on a horse or a wagon, and now I was sure I knew which one.
I looked to the thorned golem, the darkness of his looping, coiling body straining to run. The gates creaked open, revealing the road.
“Follow her,” I ordered, the words struggling to force their way past distended, overgrown jaws, a mouth meant for rending, not talking. “Find her.”
For three seconds that lasted an eternity, the golems remained frozen in place.
Then Thorn shook his head, his body jerking like he was breaking free of unseen chains, and Rose followed suit. With eerie grace they went from stillness to movement, dashing through the gates and into the waning night.
I followed, my strides bringing me to their speed with ease. They ran faster than the average man, cutting through the forest, leaping trees and brambles like deer, never stopping, never faltering.
And as they led the way, I breathed deep, taking in the scents that mattered: the fading sweat of a horse, of fresh wood splinters dug into the mud and stone of the road.
The scents that meant Miro… and Cirri.
Without warning the mist opened on a sharp slope, the northern road below us.
Rose and Thorn leaped as one, landing lightly on the balls of their feet, following the paved stones.