Page 79 of Hellbound

She tripped over her feet and leaned heavily against a lantern post by the wall. A throbbing resonance picked up in the corner of her mind, and she squeezed her eyes shut as it grew louder and louder until it became an unmistakable, discordant toll that looped into a continuous, foreboding hum.

Her gaze snagged on a thin gray ribbon, caught on the sharp leaves of the hornbeam hedges at the edge of the maze.

Petra. She’d been hovering nearby when Ksenia woke from the poison—what was she doing here?

Ksenia’s chest hollowed as she heard a child’s scream split the air from within the hedges. She could hear the accompaniment of rapid but heavier footfall. It sounded like several people were running between the hedges, their clothing catching on the prickly branches, leaves fluttering to the ground in their wake.

Ksenia leapt over the partition wall and ran into the maze.

A chill breeze swept between the hedges, and her hair tangled with the dense shrubbery. She swatted it free, pricking her hand in the process.

Her vision had strengthened from her last kill, illuminating every detail before her: a knobbly root sticking up in the grassy path. A severed finger in the corner of the hallway she bounded down. Sections of the hedge splattered with something dark.

The air was thick and metallic with the smell of stale blood.

Ksenia bounded around a corner, but then ducked back when she reached the source of the hellbound resonance.

Several paces away, a young nobleman dressed in a steel gray and navy vest retracted a polearm that’d skewered a servant man to an oak tree in the center of the maze.

“Something about this old tree always gets ’em.” He looked wistfully up into the foliage as if he were tending to the garden with blood.

Another man joined him with a laugh, his crossbow slung against his shoulder. “They always think they can climb to it to get out, or that if they reach it, the game is over.”

A third man approached the corpse to kick its foot. “That was hardly a good chase.”

Ksenia’s bloodlust was reaching a fever pitch. Her breath was slow and steady, her mouth slightly parted—the lingering scent of their victim’s fear mixed with the hunting party’s adrenaline.

Her pupils were blown wide, leaving only a bright yellow ring.

She caught the slightest movement in the swaying branches. A small hand clutching around the trunk in the upper reaches of the oak.

She glimpsed a small, scared face peering back at her.

Ksenia stepped out from the shadows of the walls and into the open.

“Where did she come from?” The nobleman staggered back and brandished his weapon in her direction.

“Did you pick up another one? I thought it was just the girl left!” his compatriot shrieked.

Between the polearm and Caromir, the cacophony of discordant notes began to harmonize and crescendo.

“I heard you were playing a game.” Ksenia’s head cocked. “I’m joining.”

Her eyes flicked from one target to the next. His two compatriots gaped at her, stepping backward, while the ringleader spun his polearm with ease, flicking blood from its gleaming blade.

“Of course, girl, we have room for one more,” he crooned. “We just lost one of our competitors.” He gestured with the butt of his polearm at the man, whose body had slid to the base of the tree with a gaping hole in his chest.

“Excellent.”

Caromir split the air and sank into the skull of the man closest to Ksenia. Her movements were so fluid, economical, and precise that no one registered that she had even unsheathed her dagger.

The remaining two screamed as blood sprayed in torrents and their friend collapsed to the floor.

An intoxicating rush flooded her system, a euphoric high that made bloodshed feel like the most natural, necessary thing in the world.

Careful, you don’t want to enjoy yourself too much, do you?

Maybe she did.