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Breath cleaving and heaving, I make my way to the end of the corridor, hoping the retreating vampires don’t scent me. I have an infinitesimal chance of escape. I recognize that. Even hiding in a coffin seems foolhardy because the blood crest on my body must still bind us. Does it mean Malachor can find me any time?
All my thoughts disintegrate when I crash into the solid body and fall hard. The knife clatters to the ground a few feet away. Groaning, I clutch my side, already sensing the bruises forming. But when a familiar crooning chuckle fills my ears, all my blood runs cold, and the pain in my side disappears.
“It seems I’ve caught a little bird trying to fly away...” Reaver mocks as he leers down at me, his shadow towering over my body. That conceited chin. His gleaming brown eyes. Arrogant nose held high and lofty.
Rising to a stand and balling my hands into fists, I spit at him. “What a pity cowardly chickens like you can’t fly.”
In one second, he has me up against the wall, one hand locked around my throat as I struggle and kick at him. But he’s a vampire. I’m a human. Even if I could reach the knife, I wouldn’t reach it in time.
Cocking his head to one side, Reaver clicks his tongue while curving his fingers along my dirty slip, roaming them to the ends. “That pathetic crest on your skin won’t help you now, Your Highness...”
Bile rises in my throat, searing it with acid as he licks the side of my neck and follows with a dragging of his fangs. “And I’ll wager Malachor won’t care if his new little pet has a few marks on her...or in her,” he hints while grabbing the ends of my slip and wrenching them upward. He squeezes my throat tighter, thinning my breath, leaving marks from his claws.
A deeper pain throbs in my chest, deeper than the violation I endured in the Court by his hand. I close my eyes as I breathe in his bloodthirstiness and lust. The thought of his fangs in my skin, of him inside me, rots my stomach, turning everything to ash until I want to disappear into numbness.
Then, he screams. I smell the fire. Hear the crackling flames. I open my eyes at the same time that Reaver drops me and thrashes with the inferno attacking him. I clutch my wounded throat, coughing while more flames assault the vampire, melting his skin, sizzling his flesh, burning clear through to the bone.
It doesn’t stop until Reaver is a burnt husk on the ground.
Out of the shadows, Bartie appears, adjusting the bow tie of his new red and orange checkered print suit while nodding to the random little flames trimming his figure. “Excuse the violence, my Lady, but...no one fucks with my family,” he finishes while lowering a hand to me.
I take his hand, my relief so abundant, that it takes more to stand. The next thing I know, he retrieves the dagger from the ground and puts it in my hands. Then, he gestures to Reaver’s burnt form.
“The only way to truly kill a vampire is through their heart, my Lady. Given enough time, the asshole will resurrect. But I wanted you to do the honors.”
Closing my hand around the knife, I mouth a silent ‘thank you’ and turn around. While the notion of carving his chest to bloodied strips is appealing, I don’t need it.
I kneel beside the damned traitor who hurt me and used me—and with two hands, I grip the blade and drive it down hard into his chest. Blood bursts from the heart, splattering the air, but I arch out of the way, not wanting any of his cell matter on me.
I jerk the knife out, wincing at the squelching sound and the blood pooling around the chest.
“Well done, my Lady,” Bartie says as he helps me to a stand. “Justice well served.”
I manage a soft smile, feeling some of the ache from those three nights in Court fading with Reaver’s death. But the distant sounds of approaching vampires warn me there’s no time for a grateful embrace.
“Come,” Bartie says.
He lifts me into his arms and carries me down the next passage. I don’t protest. As a vampire, Bartie is stronger and faster than me with more endurance. Deja vu consumes me as he carries us through passages beneath vaulted rock ceilings, away from the massive cavern of Merikh’s wing with its labyrinthine stairways.
The hundreds of candles riddling the cavern surge to life before Bartie snuffs them out. I cough from the smoke clotting my nose.
With no fatigue or strain showing, Bartie sweeps my body between rows of lit iron torches jutting from cavern walls—ones he also siphons as soon as we slip past. Part of me registers that he’s working to cover my scent with the smoke.
I shiver from the nearly full wall of skulls with the ghost-light eyes watching us.
Through dark passageways and past those bone pillars and balustrades, crested by skulls, Bartie carries me. No other thought or purpose but getting me out of the Court of Hollows, where the wetlands and crypts will help conceal my scent.
My heart almost gives out at the thought of leaving this eerie, beautiful nightmare. It mourns at the thought of leaving Merikh. If there is even a trace of him inside Malachor, how can I just forsake him?
Bartie reaches the halfway mark of the ascending staircase, the one that sweeps to Merikh’s crypt, his human coffin, when the air around us seems to grow darker, colder.
“Little dove, little dove.”
The voice cooing from the darkness below paralyzes my bloodstream, crystallizing my heart.
“No...” a whimper escapes my throat because...it’s not Merikh’s voice. My hands are sweaty from fear, but I grip the knife even harder.
Sucking a deep breath, Bartie rushes me up the staircase, as high as he can go until he presses something along the cavern wall ceiling. I shudder at the collapsing wall opening to Merikh’s crypt.
