“Brother? Are you all right?”
I choke a sound. Clear my throat. Try again, but my blackened heart is humming wildly in my chest. It’s not supposed toeverbeat this loudly. Vampires don’t circulate blood like humans do. It’s a different process, keeping our bodies cooled like reptiles except when we’re fucking or fighting—and I’ve made sure to train my body to remain cool even during those moments.
So what’s fucking wrong?
Amid the cheering Grimsons and Grimdaughters, who are starting to crowd the mat now, Lukain kneels in front of me. His voice lowers so only I can hear it, and he cups a hand behind my neck. “Skartovius, can you hear me? What’s—”
I snarl and slap his hand and arm away, not wishing for any pity or concern from my weak, half-human brother. Staggering to my feet, I put on a mask of indifference, proclaiming so all the watchers can hear, “There’s a first for everything, brother. I suppose c-congratulations are in order.”
My voice stutters—a mortifying moment—and I shrug him away and push through the audience crowding us. The stuffiness, the swell, I’m starting to sweat and I don’t know why.
It’s only when I’m out of the sparring room, out of the press of bodies and warmth, that I can begin to think straight. I realize whatever happened to me came directly from my mind. Or my soul.
It’s clear something is abruptly missing inside there, and the effect was so sudden and sharp, it caused me to falter mid-combat.
I don’t have to reach too far into the shadowy recesses of my mind to figure out what’s missing. With a simple sweep of myprobing neurons and synapses, I realize what is causing such a violent, worrying, visceral reaction. A thunderstorm inside me.
For the first time in seventy years, my connection with my bloodthrall, Garroway Kuffich, has been severed absolutely.
The thread connecting my blood to Garroway’s had suffered for months now. Years even, since we first tasted Sephania’s Loreblood. It has been a source of great trepidation, concern, and agony for me.
Yet it’s never been likethis.
This is . . . different. Cavernous. Yawning. A hole in my soul that wasn’t there before—right around the place where Lukain stabbed me in the belly. That’s still bleeding, too, and the wound isn’t particularly shadow, though I couldn’t be bothered less by it.
I feel no physical pain. No, this isspiritual.This is all-encompassing and complete. It’s a deep, digging depression I haven’t felt since I was that thirty-year-old man getting turned by Kavorin Mortis along with my mother Alacine.
There’s emotion inside me—emotions I haven’t felt in just as long. Roiling and rocking and battering against my ribs and heart, like an unseen force wants to rip out my insides and put them outside to freeze in the wintry chill.
That’s what it is: winter. A steep, sharp winter with endless blackness and bleakness. There’s no light on the fringes of this dark, snowy forest. Only a downward spiral I can’t seem to shake, no matter how far I walk or how quickly I go. Deeper and deeper into the crevice of a cave that I’m hoping I can use to hide.
An hour after the initial shock, my thoughts aren’t even making sense at this point. I’m walking slack-jawed, like a damned gods-touched fool.
I don’t know where I’ve walked to—somewhere underground, which is obvious by the curved stone ceiling over my head—though I’m not sure if I’m in the Firehold or somewhere unaffiliated with the Grimsons, deeper in the subterranean network of Nuhav’s underground.
During my blind, confusing march through the web-like warrens of the labyrinth, I find a room. Well, it can’t be called a room. It’s a shallow cave dwelling gashed in from the side of the narrow corridor. A dark opening for me to stand inside and ponder my relevance and future.
There’s a roughly hewn protrusion of stone near the back of the shallow cave. Almost like a bench, at chest height. I put my hands on the craggy rock and squeeze tightly. I can feel the porous rock biting into my palms. I can’t feel much else.
It’s there that I sink my head. My chin dips to my chest. My auburn hair flutters around my face, long and thick and hiding my pale, elegant features.
It’s a good thing it hides my features, too.
Because for the first time in over a century, I begin to weep.
Chapter 34
Sephania
“Soooo . . . How do you feel?” I ask Garro.
He’s lying on a bench in the Chained Sisters’ expanded room, which has become an infirmary, alchemical lab, and manufacturing hub, as well as sleeping quarters.
It’s been a few hours since Garroway drank the Silverblood proof. He’s been lying still ever since. He doesn’t look bothered. Rather peaceful, really, with his hands folded on his chest, staring up at the ceiling with unblinking eyes. Like a patient who has just gone through a traumatic surgery and is playing over every little moment of their life that brought them to this point.
“I feel fine, little honey badger. You don’t have to keep checking in on me.” He gives me a dashing smile.
It’s that damned smile that makes me want to straddle him right here on the bench. Even though the curtained partition separating us from the rest of the Chained Sisters is thin and practically translucent. Which means they’d see and hear every moan and grunt and . . .