Slaying the Vampire Conqueror(86)

Erekkus had paused at that one, a brief, powerful stab of sadness in his threads.

“Why would someone bring a child—” he’d started, and then shut his mouth abruptly, as if halfway through the question he’d understood exactly what the answer was.

Of course he did. We all did. Desperation. Perhaps the same desperation that would make a man bring his child to wander the world to strange foreign countries, searching for a new home.

Atrius laid his hand on Erekkus’s shoulder, gently nudged him forward, and we didn’t look at that tiny little corpse again.

As we drew further north, I began to sense the slyviks more frequently. With every branch in our route, I was now checking not only for dead ends that would have us walking in circles to our deaths, but also for the beasts. This far north, they tended to congregate in groups, which made them slightly easier to avoid but also much more dangerous to encounter. Sometimes, I took us on dangerously convoluted detours in order to avoid clusters of them that I sensed nearby. Though it slowed us down, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision when we’d hear those not-distant-enough screeches.

Atrius kept track of the days with marks in a little, bloodstained notebook he carried in his pocket, though I was skeptical of how accurate his sense of time was. I was convinced that none of us, him included, were really sure how much time had passed.

The cycle was endless. Walk. Sleep. Walk. Hold our breaths. Change course. Walk.

Atrius’s totally unreliable estimation was that seven days had passed when I felt it.

We had come to yet another fork in our path. The elevation had started to ramp up, and the space between the rocks had gotten even narrower, so our two-by-two path of soldiers had become a long, winding single-file line. I’d turned my ankle some miles back the day before, and I wasn’t the only one who had injured myself on the terrain. We were moving slowly.

Worse, we were running out of food.

A terrible question had started to nag at the back of my mind—what if I had brought us the wrong way?

Those doubts were whispering loudly in my ear at this particular fork in the road, when I leaned against the stone and felt for the threads...followed them...

I jerked upright, nearly sending myself toppling backwards into Atrius’s chest.

“What?” he asked, alarmed.

“Sh,” I hissed.

I pressed myself to the cliffs again.

I was terrified I had imagined it. Terrified I’d just made a mistake.

But no.

No, I hadn’t imagined any of it.

I turned my face against the cold, dusty rock and let out a shaky breath that sounded more like a sob than I meant for it to. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I ended up doing a little of both.

Weaver damn us.

Atrius gripped my shoulder and leaned close. “Vivi, what?”

I shouldn’t like it when he called me that. But I did. Life was too short to lie to yourself. Very short now.

I straightened and turned to him.

“We’re less than a few miles from the end of the pass,” I said.

Gods, I had never seen Atrius grin like that. I thought he was going to weep with joy.

“But there’s an entire nest of slyviks between us and the end,” I said.

Atrius’s face fell.

“Right,” I said.

The slyviks liked the colder air. Most of their nests were near the northern border of the cliffs. We’d gotten lucky and stumbled upon a whole damned mess of them. I couldn’t count exactly how many I sensed, but I knew it was a lot. The best I could give Atrius was, “More than fifteen.”

His expression didn’t change at all, but I could tell just how hard he was working for that stoicism. “And less than?”

I didn’t answer for a long moment. And then guessed, “Fifty?”

Atrius hissed a curse, and Erekkus threw back his head and laughed and laughed.

I couldn’t blame him. I wanted to laugh too.

So how could an exhausted, half-starving, injured group of soldiers, forced into narrow, slow lines, defeat as many as fifty of some of the greatest predators nature or gods had ever produced?

We’d stood together, silent, for a long time, all mulling over that question.

“We’re overdue for rest,” Atrius said at last, which I knew was his way of saying, I have no idea what to do and I need time to think about it.

No one had any better ideas.





After thinking it over for a few more hours, the main conclusion we came to was that we were screwed.

We couldn’t fight our way through the slyviks—a single juvenile had nearly killed Atrius and me. Even prepared, there was no way we could handle dozens of them, especially with no space to maneuver. They were aggressive creatures. They wouldn’t just let us pass.

Erekkus, Atrius, and I talked in circles, trying to find a solution. Which really meant that Erekkus and I talked, and Atrius sat there stonily, staring off into the middle distance, looking furious, and occasionally chiming in with some idea we all knew wouldn’t work, including him.

Eventually, in a fit of frustration, I went back to the stone and felt it, reaching through the threads again.

“What are you doing?’ Erekkus snapped. “You said there was no other way.”

He was getting very, very testy.

I shushed him and leaned against the wall.