The last two vampire priests with daggers sticking out of them try to come at me at the same time. A quick roundhouse from my knees sends them scattering. By the time they come forward, I’m already leaping off a pew’s bench, kneeing one inthe face, and then driving my sword through its shoulder down into its heart.
The last one, with the newly missing eye and a bloody socket where my dagger sits, slices at my exposed shoulder and draws blood.
I hiss, push myself back from the bench crowding me, and force its arms up as I tumble into it. We go down to the ground in a great crash of wood chips and grime.
My fingers find its remaining eyehole and Isqueeze, screaming bloody rage, until red gore pools around my crusted fingertips andpopit goes.
Writhing, screeching, it topples into broken benches, staying on its back as I stumble to my feet. I stomp down with my heavy boot directly into its chest—once, twice, thrice—breaking skin, breaking bone, and pulverizing its heart through its weak, brittle, leathery chest cavity without even needing to open him up.
Sweating, I take a deep breath and stare ahead at the front of the nave. Somehow, all the loud banging and screeching hasn’t disrupted the woman at the apse from whatever it is she’s doing. She stands in front of an ostentatious altar with a crumbling edifice, sculptures sinking into the ground.
She’s a tall, lanky thing, like her sycophants, with a black tattoo in her forehead—a circle with an X through it. Her arms are lifted to the heavens as if in prayer, eyes completely white, and swirling tattoos and markings run along her skinny wrists and biceps.
I need no introduction to know who she is.
Overlady Valenthia Yurlyth stares up at the sky, past the stained glass of the chapel that surrounds us in a glittering sphere of angels and demons and empty promises.
Directly behind her are four humans, on their knees, facedown with their foreheads against the edge of the circularaltar. The humans look like children. They are dressed in rags, like the rest of her zealous flock, and appear unconscious in their strange state.
Through it all, I can scent the bright humanity coming from them. In a world surrounded by death and the Damned and fangs and black blood, there’s an innocence to these whelps—an aura—that can’t be denied.
“Valenthia Yurlyth!” I scream in a great echo across the cathedral. “I’ve come to send you to your Damned!”
She ignores me, speaking in tongues before switching to a dialect I can understand. Her cries to the heavens are strange to me, considering she should be begging to the afterworld beneath her feet.
“O Damned, who art divine and all-knowing. We grant you these sacrifices for the power of your wisdom! Treat us so we may know your Truth, so we may destroy the ignorance and wickedness of those who do not see!”
I stride across the nave, my boots echoing harshly off the tall rafters and walls. My sword splashes blood off its blade as I swing it. Past the transepts I go on either side, into the empty choir, and up to the elevated apse where Valenthia stands in front of her doomed prey.
My focus is wholly on those poor children behind her, oblivious and unconscious, eyes closed to the horrors of the world around them.
Perhaps it’s that focus that gets me.
I hardly hear the padding feet to my left over the crooning and chanting of the overlady ten feet from me.
By the time I whirl, bringing my sword with me, it’s too late. My sword goes high over a head as the figure crouches and runs into my chest. I let out loud grunt, stumbling back, hardly feeling the weight of the slight figure despite my own short height.
Then the pain sets in. Deep, agonizing, debilitating. It makes me gasp and backpedal in disbelief, eyes widening, a ruinous lightning bolt sliding up my spine.
I glance down, see the hilt of a blade sticking out of my belly. Somehow, this bastard managed to slide its crude point under my plated armor, through the joint, and into my stomach.
A deathblow.
I can’t speak from the pain. All I can do is look through blurry eyes at the man backing up in disbelief, a horrified shock to his face. I swing my sword anyway as I drop to my knees with an iron crash, missing completely and waving at the air as he leaps back out of reach.
Archpriest Cullard shrieks, “You cannot steal her from me, Captain Rirth! She is the only salvation I have left!” His jowls sag and wobble as he thrusts a shaking finger at me. “Finish himnow!”
With blood drooling from my parted lips, I glance over weakly and see Valenthia Yurlyth has come to. Her tilted chin levels, the whites of her unseeing eyes blinking red and menacing.
Her mouth opens wide, impossibly wide, and shows not just two fangs, but tworowsof pointed, fanged teeth.
She leaps forward, flying through the air like she is the wind itself, and descends upon me.
I reach back and feel the firm grip of my final dagger, resting in my boot. The dagger Sephania gave me, rescuing me from drink and depression. The dagger which started this whole obsession that’s claimed me. The handle is warm, wooden, nicely crafted.
And its blade is silver.
As I reach up blindly in a final swing of my arm, summoning all the remaining strength inside my veins, Valenthia falls onme, pushing me onto my back. Her overstretched jaw drips embers and ash and saliva onto my face—