Shadows fly from my own fucking face, flitting in the moonlight, and wrap around Vanison’s wrist as his sword-arm descends—
Catching his momentum like an immovable stone in midair, elbow bent, grimace and teeth bared in his gaunt face.
Skartovius flicks his wrist, twisting the man’s arm as the shadow moves.
“You fucking traitor!” Vanison screams over his shoulder as the nobleblood glides up behind him.
Skartovius plucks Vanison’s sword from his hand as easily as plucking a daisy. He releases his shadow-hold on the human and Vanison spins to him, screaming, “Why did you—”
Skartovius hacks halfway through Vanison’s neck before the human’s words end on a gargle with a wet bubbling and spraying of blood across the nobleblood’s front.
Vanison collapses at my feet. A dark pool spreads swiftly beneath him. I shudder a shaky breath. My knees feel like giving out.
The nobleblood flings Vanison’s blade away and it clatters onto the ground. “As you were, Silverknight,” he mutters, beginning to walk away.
“He called you traitor,” I call out, squeezing the handle of my sword harder. It’s hard to fathom I’m still alive, and that it’s due to Lord Skartovius Ashfen.
He freezes five steps away. I think I’ve made a mistake. He leers at me over his elegant shoulder, lips a thin line in his smooth, pale face. “Or was it you he called a traitor, for sending him to his execution?”
“No.” I shake my head. His vampiric lies won’t sway me. “He was talking toyou.Why would Vanison Shirin call you a traitor, Lord Ashfen?”
A flicker of a smile shows on his face, half-silhouetted by the moonlight creeping in through the pillars. “Because I told them they could kill you after this was over.”
My teeth clench. He says it so easily. I grasp for hope. “So it was a scheme, then? One of your many, to get them when their guard was down?”
“No, Silverknight.” He shrugs. “I simply changed my mind.”
My eyes bulge, my jaw loosens, my lips part. “The vampire behind me was your lieutenant fordecades. And you . . .simply changed your mind?”
Another shrug. So arrogant, so thoughtless, so disaffected. “It dawned on me, Silverknight: You are much more important to Sephania than Indokkus was to me. If I let you die, I’ll never hear the end of it from her.”
“So you saved me forhersake.”
He scoffs, the fucking bastard. “Well it certainly wasn’t for mine.” He plucks his sword from Indokkus’ chest and sheathes it. “What,” he mutters near my ear, “you think I did that out of the goodness of my heart? Have you learned nothing about vampires in all the time you’ve been fighting them, Captain Rirth?”
My skin crawls. I stare forward in disbelief.
His sharp chin juts down the hill behind us. “Now you’d better run along into that church, boy, before the vampires I brought see what you did to their two allies.” He gestures at the dead Shirin brothers at our feet.
I croak a sound somewhere between an incredulous laugh and a gawk.He wouldn’t dare.Then my rational mind takes hold.Of course he fucking would.
I throw the doors to the cathedral open before he can change his mind again.
Daggers come out from behind my tunic when I realize I’ll need them more than my sword. Just as quickly as my blade slams home into its sheath at my hip, I spin the daggers out from my back belt and toss them left and right.
The one on the left twirls into a vampire’s shoulder, pinning his dirty green robe against the wall. The one on the right gets an approaching vampire’s eye and sends him wheeling in place.
My sword comes back out as I march down the center aisle of the nave. There are two more robed zealots here, rushing at me in a much more coordinated effort than the sluggish beasts outside. These ones have swords, too.
Even so, I’ve been fighting all my life. Whether it was the Grimsons, the Silverknights, or for my own life at the bottom of a mug, I’m trained for these occasions. These fucking fools were reading tomes and filling their heads with nonsense before they were turned. Their swings are clumsy and disjointed.
I move into the pews to my left, barring the one charging at me, and then wheel to my right and duck over the sloppy swing from the rightmost vampire thrall. As its arm sails overhead, I crunch my fist into leathery skin and hear a satisfying snapping of ribs. The male vampire stumbles back and bares its fangs—
Just before I sweep my sword across its throat then jab it in the chest as it’s going down.
The female bloodsucker to my left has figured out the obstacle pew by now and leaps over it—
To earn my sword thrust through her collar as a reward for her misguided journey. She croaks, eyes widening, and I pull back and finish her off through the heart.