Slaying the Vampire Conqueror(50)

I quickly ducked back behind the corner and nodded to Atrius.

He leaned close, so close I could hear him while he was barely speaking.

“How many?” he murmured, lips brushing my ear.

I couldn’t count. Not exactly. “Many.”

His lips curled. “Too many?”

Ah. This was our game now.

Despite myself, I found myself returning the smirk. I shook my head.

“No,” I whispered.

This, once again, was the answer Atrius was looking for.

He raised his hood, covering his horns and his hair, casting a harsh shadow over his face. I took his arm, donned once again my best teetering stumble, and the two of us emerged around the corner.

We stopped before the double doors and the guards. I inclined my head. Atrius kept his tipped down, hiding his face beneath the hood.

“I am here at his behest,” I said.

There was no need to use names or titles. There was only one “him.”

Hidden beneath my scarves, my hand crept to my dagger.

The guards glanced at each other. Then at each of us—skeptical when they looked at me, and even more so at Atrius.

“We had no word of anyone coming today,” the guard said. “Let alone at this time of night.”

I had been able to fool the guards at the front door. Those were expendable. These, though, were Tarkan’s personal guards. Carefully chosen. Well-trained.

“Are you sure?” I said, letting my uncertain pout slip into my voice. “I—I’m very late, but I don’t want to disappoint him. He wanted me here tonight.”

The guards exchanged another glance—

And then blood painted the space between us.





24





Atrius and I moved the moment the guards’ eyes left us. He took the one on the left, stabbing him through with his sword and snapping his body aside with a flick of his blood magic. I took the one on the right, driving my dagger through his throat. We tossed the bodies to either side of the doors like sacks of flour.

Within the chambers, commotion stirred immediately. The threads trembled, like the reverberations after a sudden discordant strum of an instrument, as those inside responded.

We didn’t give them time to prepare.

We burst through the doors. Tarkan’s wing was large, much more an apartment than a bedchamber. He kept his most trusted warriors close, even in the dead of night, though apparently still did not respect them enough to give them beds to sleep on—most of the men who jerked awake from their drug-laden sleep now had been sprawled out on sofas and armchairs, and a few even on the fur rug. I wondered if Tarkan had increased the number of people within his chambers in light of Atrius’s movements across Glaea.

Several of the guards inside had been awake, stationed to watch for an attack. They were ready.

But so were we.

We dismantled them. Then continued to carve our way through the men who threw themselves at us. We naturally fell into position, back-to-back, covering the areas that the other couldn’t reach. I stretched threads between our opponents and slipped between them, disappearing and reappearing at their throats before they had time to register the movement.

So quickly—so disconcertingly easily—Atrius and I fell into a rhythm. Smoother, even, than what we had done in Alka. I struck, stunned, crippled. He finished.

Through the carnage, as we cut through the first wave, Atrius rasped at me, “Where?”

Where is Tarkan?

That was the only thought in my mind, too. I could feel him there, like a splinter wedged into my fingertip.

I pointed my blade to the bedchamber. “There.”

There were other guards there, too—just a few. I sensed them rushing into Tarkan’s bedchamber from the opposite wing of the apartment. Arming him, perhaps, or maybe attempting to help him escape.

They wouldn’t get the chance for that.

The two of us stepped over the freshest bodies toward the bedchamber door.

But Tarkan wasn’t Aaves. He wouldn’t meet his death cowering at the foot of his bed. Tarkan had gotten where he was today because he was a warrior.

The door swung open.

After so many years without eyesight, one starts to forget what it feels like to see something in that form. Yet there were some images that remained seared into my mind as I had once seen them—some that I didn’t want to remember, and some that I wished I could remember more. I was not supposed to hold any of those memories, whether in love or hatred. I was supposed to wipe them all away like the Arachessen taught me.

But the memory of Tarkan’s face remained with me, another mark that still stubbornly remained on my slate.

I experienced him differently now, of course. But the image of him as I’d seen him nearly twenty years ago still struck me when he opened that door. He was a tall man, hair neat and slicked back—even in sleep, apparently—and beard well-groomed. I could sense the age in him now, the way it hollowed his cheeks and weighed down the fragile skin around his dark eyes. And yet, so much was the same. The hard angles to his appearance, brutal and selfish. The way he looked at the world like it belonged to him.

Strange, how the past didn’t feel so strong until all at once it surrounded you again, like the tides swallowing the tunnels of Alka.

Tarkan didn’t say a word to us. He just nodded, and the two guards with him lunged at us.