What reason would anyone have to be out here?
Unless, of course, you were a fugitive.
“Well, I think this is you, princess,” Raihn said, hands on his hips. “Go on over and shout hello. We’ll kill whatever runs out at you.”
I approached the nearest opening, squinting into the dark. I conjured Nightfire in my palm, though the white flame did little to illuminate that darkness—unending darkness, the kind that swallowed up light itself. It reminded me of Vincent’s wings. Reminded me, I supposed, of my own.
“I don’t know about that,” Mische said from behind me. “Looks… ominous.”
“I wouldn’t go in that way,” a smooth voice called from above, distant against the desert breeze.
I looked up to see a slender figure standing in the mouth of an upper tunnel, leaning against the wall. She wore all tight-fitting black—Nightborn leathers—and her ash-brown hair, bound in a single long braid, flew out with the wind.
“Demons everywhere,” Jesmine said. “Better to come up this way, Highness.”
I wasn’t totally convinced that Jesmine and Raihn weren’t going to stab each other to death the moment they were left alone. After seeing the wounds on Raihn’s back, I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. But as Jesmine led us through the tunnels and into the settlement she’d built here with those that remained of the Hiaj army, she was surprisingly respectful of him, despite a few wary glares.
The tunnels were dark and hot. I imagined that baking clay must feel a whole lot like this. But they were also hidden, and they were shelter. It was no wonder that I’d had such a hard time communicating with Jesmine, even through Vincent’s mirror. Aside from the fact that the thing would never be perfectly cooperative with my blood, Jesmine was in such a remote location that I had to imagine we were stretching the range of that magic.
Remote, in this case, was good. Remote was exactly what we needed.
It was unnerving to see what had happened to the Hiaj army over these last few months. What I had always known as an all-powerful regime of warriors had now been reduced to a few hundred men and women sheltering in caves. Others, Jesmine explained, had dispersed into the kingdom, taking shelter elsewhere after the armory battle—while her most loyal forces remained here, hiding, waiting.
The caves were dim for my human eyes, though they were sparsely lit with Nightfire lanterns. Warriors had erected tents in the offshoot tunnels, claiming some semblance of privacy for themselves, while common areas had been staked out in the main paths. It stank in here, the heat rotting the carcasses of the vampires’ prey—foxes, wolves, the occasional deer, and even a demon or two, though I couldn’t imagine how repulsive that must’ve been. Surely an act of total desperation. I’d been trained to recognize hungry vampires my entire life, and these ones were hungry indeed, their eyes tracking me as Jesmine lead us through the camps.
Still, the way they looked at me, even on the cusp of starving, was… different now. They noticed my human blood. Smelled it. That was biology. But they didn’t look at me as prey anymore. Maybe the red ink on my chest had something to do with that.
Jesmine took us to her private dwelling—a collection of objects stored in a dead-end enclave, covered with a demon-hide flap. She’d stacked a few crates to create seats and pushed several more together for some semblance of a desk, upon which she’d spread a number of papers, most of them scribbled and bloodstained. It reminded me of what Vincent’s office had looked like, near the end—chaos. This, I supposed, was what it looked like to lose a war.
Jesmine settled on top of the desk, long legs crossed. Up close, in more light, I could see that her once-fine leathers were now in rough shape, the fabric torn and patched. Several buttons were undone, revealing the top of the long scar between her breasts.
I’d admit it: I hadn’t thought much of Jesmine when Vincent promoted her, seeing little more than her sultry voice and low-cut dresses and delicate, well-tended beauty. Now, looking at her like this, my image of her from back then seemed laughably two-dimensional. I wasn’t sure that I liked Jesmine, but it was hard to deny that I respected her.
She looked us up and down, one by one—me, Raihn, Mische, Ketura, Vale, Lilith.
Then she said, “You all look like you crawled out of a sewer.”
“Fitting observation,” Vale grumbled.
Mother, I couldn’t wait to get out of these clothes. I’d gotten used to my own stench, but I had no doubt that it was putrid. Probably like someone who had drenched themselves in shit and then moved nonstop across the baking-hot desert for a week.