{Raeth?}
Nothing.
{Raeth? What was that?}
Confusion. Fear. I felt it, though it was dimming, because she must have been walking away from the door—then running, out into the city streets.
{Raeth!}
But she was out of range now. All I could feel from her were faint reverberations.
That is, until I heard her scream.
An Arachessen was not supposed to abandon a mission for anything, not even for the sake of saving a Sister’s life. But every thought of my dutiful teachings drained from me the moment I felt her terror, visceral and human and too familiar in ways I’d never admit aloud.
I ran.
Down marble steps, across tile floors, newly slick with I didn’t-even-know-what, through the door where my Sister had been moments ago, standing watch. The air hit me, salty and ocean-sweet.
And with it came the sensation of them.
The vampire invaders.
Decades later, I would not forget this moment. Exactly how it felt when they made landfall. Their magic sickened me, tainted and cursed, making the air taste so thickly of blood I nearly gagged on it.
Sisters of the Arachessen are trained extensively in the magic of every god. From the time we were children, we were exposed to all magics, even when our bodies protested, even when it burned us or broke us.
This, I recognized immediately, was Nyaxia’s magic. The heretic goddess. The Mother of Vampires.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them crashed upon our shores that night.
Sound was useless, all the bangs and screams and groans of crumbling stone running together like the rush of a waterfall. For a moment, I was blinded, too, because the sensations were so much—every essence, every soul, screaming at once.
In that moment, I didn’t know what was happening. I wouldn’t understand until later exactly what I was witnessing. But I did know that this wasn’t the work of the Pythora King. These were foreigners.
{Raeth!}
I threw the call as far down the threads as I could, flinging it toward her like a net. And there, near where the land met the sea, I felt her. Felt her running—not away from the explosions at the shore, but toward them.
No.
Idiot girl. Stupid girl. Impulsive. Impatient.
I ran for her.
{Raeth! Fall back!}
But Raeth didn’t listen.
I was getting closer, dodging slabs of broken rock, dodging clusters of the strangest fire I’d ever felt—not hot, but cold, devouring trees, devouring buildings. My head pounded, my magic wailing with overexertion at having to constantly reorient myself, over and over.
But I didn’t miss a single step.
Raeth was at the shore. At the docks. Many, many presences surrounded her—so many I struggled to separate them from each other. Human. Vampire. I couldn’t count them. Too many. More coming. Pouring onto the shore in a wave of sea froth and magic and explosives and bloodthirsty rage that I could feel throbbing in my veins.
{Sylina!}
Asha’s voice was sharp as she called to me. Even a little afraid.
I’d never felt my commander’s fear before.
I’d never disobeyed her before, either.
Because in that moment, Raeth screamed. Another explosion of dark magic roared through the air, so powerful that when it faded, I was on my knees, splinters of the pier digging into my flesh.
And Raeth was simply gone.
It is difficult to describe what it feels like to sense the death of a Sister. I could not see her. I could not hear her voice. But when you’re near another of the Arachessen, you can simply feel them the way that one feels the body warmth of another, all their threads connected to yours.
All that, all at once, severed.
The dead did not have threads.
Raeth’s color was purple. Sometimes it was a little warmer when she was happy or excited, a glowy pink hue of delight. Sometimes it was colder when she was moody, like storm clouds at sunset.
Now it was nothing, a hole in all of us where Raeth should have been. It was strange how viscerally it reminded me of another distant memory, a memory I was no longer supposed to have, of how it felt to witness life snatched away in the unforgiving jaws of war.
Asha felt it, too. Of course she did. We would feel it everywhere.
{Let her go,} Asha said again. {Come back. We need to leave now. We’ll complete our task another time.}
Task? Who cared about that limp-dicked little nobleman now?
I had bigger game.
Because there he was.
Even in the sea of vampires and magic, he stood out. His presence was bigger than all of theirs, a gravitational force. All the rest of it—the countless souls, the grey of the sea foam, the cold of the night—framed him like a throne, as if the universe simply oriented itself around him as he rose from the surf.