He looked up as I approached, revealing a face mottled with blackened burns.
His eyes widened.
I didn’t even let my horse stop before I was dismounting, running, running— I threw myself over Vale, tumbling to my knees before Thomassen.
“Stop! Enough!”
The world stopped. The priest, and the four men behind him, leaned back a little, like they had to take a moment to figure out if I was really here.
A rough touch folded around my wrist from behind. Concern. Restraint. It said so much.
“Mouse…” Vale rasped.
His voice sounded so hollow. It reminded me of Mina’s. Close to death.
I didn’t look at him, though I was so acutely aware of his form behind me, the faint warmth of his body where my back was only inches from him.
Instead I met Thomassen’s gaze and refused to relinquish it. The acolyte wasn’t injured, though blood smeared his robes. Had he stood back and let the others do all the fighting? Waited until they wore Vale down enough to step in and make the final blow?
“Stop this insanity,” I said.
His confusion fell away in favor of hatred again. He gripped his sword, eyes briefly falling to my axe—gods, did it even count as an axe? It was barely more than a hatchet—before returning to my face.
“Step away, child,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”
“If you kill him, then you’re killing all of us.”
The priest scoffed, lip curling. “We should have done it the moment the plague began. Perhaps a sacrifice of one of the heretic goddess Nyaxia’s children would have been enough to end it. Maybe it would have been enough to appease Vitarus.”
I wanted to laugh at his foolishness. I wanted to scream at his ignorance.
“Why is it so difficult for you to understand that Vitarus doesn’t care about us?” I spat. “He has taken a thousand lives from us. Ten thousand. And that hasn’t been enough to appease him. Why would this one be any different?”
“You’re not a stupid girl,” the priest sneered. “A strange one, but not a stupid one. You know why. Because of what he is.” He jabbed his sword toward Vale. “Because of who he worships. Because of the goddess who created him. Look around you. How many of your brethren has he killed? And you expect us to let him live?”
I looked into the eyes of the men around him, and I didn’t see brethren. I saw people driven to ignorance and hatred. I saw people who were willing to kill whatever they didn’t understand just for a chance of a chance that it would help them.
Nothing would stop them from killing Vale.
They would happily kill me, the strange spinster woman that never had laughed at their jokes or indulged their mindless conversations, to get to him.
I liked solving problems. But I was now stuck in a conclusion decades in the making, helpless.
Behind me, Vale’s breaths were ragged and weak. I would have thought that he wasn’t even conscious, were it not for his grip on my wrist, still strong, even as his blood dripped down my hand.
“Please, Thomassen. Please. I—” My voice caught in my throat. Cracked. “I need him.”
The words tasted thick. Heavy. They seemed to sit in the air. I could feel their eyes on me, on Vale, on me again, the way my own often darted between pieces of an equation, and I didn’t like the answer they were drawing.
“He could be the cure to this,” I said, desperate.
Wrong thing.
Realization fell over Thomassen’s face. Realization, and then hatred.
“I defended you,” he snarled. “When they talked about you. About your father. About your family. I defended you, child, from horrors you don’t even understand. But I was wrong. You’ll only spread this further.”
He lifted his sword.
Everything went too slow and too fast at once.
Behind me, Vale tensed, pulling me back.
I yanked my hand from his grip, rising.
It was like I was outside my body, watching someone else lift that stupid little axe—watching someone else swing it. I was a scientist, not a soldier. My swing was clumsy, but I threw all the strength I had into it.
Hot blood spattered across my face.
Numb, I pulled the axe from Thomassen’s shoulder. I stumbled backwards a little—it was hard to get the blade from the flesh.
Shoulder. Not deadly. Try again.
I swung again, this time for the throat.
It’s an interesting sound that one makes when they’re drowning in their own blood. No scream, just a gargle and the empty hiss of air. Wet, weak death.
I had moved fast, for all my inexperience. It took a few seconds for the other men to realize what was happening. The priest staggered.
I felt a strange sensation. Something wet over my torso.
Pain, slow.
I looked down to see blood all over my shirt.
Commotion. Noise. It seemed very far away. I looked up and saw familiar sandy-fair hair, a wiry figure yanking a sword from one of the guards as the priest staggered.
The priest’s? Or…
I hit the ground hard as a grip from behind shoved me away—Vale. Vale’s movements were nothing like the graceful death I’d seen in the forest that night. No, these were lurching, desperate. Survival more than skill. Like a dying animal.
CRUNCH, and a head fell to the ground. One guard, before he could turn on Farrow.
He killed the second with his own sword, torso opened and bloodied over the grass.
Thomassen still stood, somehow… still stood, covered in blood, a dead man walking. Maybe his god helped him a bit, after all, because he somehow managed to turn—to— “Vale!” I screamed.
Vale whirled around just in time. Thomassen’s sword went through his shoulder.
But Vale didn’t flinch.
A terrible damp crunch rang through the air. And when Thomassen’s body slumped to the ground, something red was clutched in Vale’s hand. It looked like a ball of blood, at first.
Then I realized, after a few seconds of dull blinking…
A heart.
Thunk, as Farrow’s sword fell to the grass.
Thump, as Vale let the heart drop beside it.
And then silence.
Birds chirped in the distance. A faint breeze rustled the tree leaves. The scent of spring was so overwhelming, it almost drowned out the scent of blood.
Nothing existed except for Vale and I, our gazes locked. For a long, breathless moment, I couldn’t look at anything except for his dark-gold eyes, staring at me through gore-streaked tendrils of hair, through smears of blood.
Then he collapsed.
I leapt to my feet, ignoring the pain of my own injuries, and ran to him. Farrow knelt beside him, too, and started to roll him over to look at his face, but I said, “No! The sun.”
Up close, the burns on Vale’s skin were stomach-turning. And gods, he was wounded… they hadn’t just come to kill him, they had come to torture him. Some of his clothing had been torn, clearly intended to expose more of his skin to the sun. A patchwork of wounds crisscrossed up his right arm, and the very tip of one wing had been cut—cut off? Maybe. It was hard to tell through all the blood.
“Help me,” I choked. “To the house. Out of the sun.”
I was only capable of assembling fractured handfuls of words at a time.
Farrow—gods bless him—did as I asked. If he was put off by being this close to a vampire, he didn’t show it. Together we dragged Vale up the steps to the back door, which led into the library—the very same room he had brought me to the first time I came here. Vale was incredibly heavy, even with both of us carrying him, and I was grateful that he appeared to be at least a little bit conscious, because he seemed to be trying to help us—albeit poorly. Still, we couldn’t hoist him onto one of the couches, and instead had to settle for laying him on the floor as gently as we could.