by Cate Corvin
White-hot fury erupted in me at how carelessly the king was treating the girl- a slayer like myself- as the endless parade of monsters poured down the concrete hall to his little amphitheater of horrors.
I realized what Càel had done: treated me like nothing more than meat, just so Thraustila would think his son was merely having a convenient snack. And it had worked.
“Go, Victoria.” His fingers dug into my shoulders with painful intensity. “Get away from here.”
“And just leave her?” I demanded.
He gave me a pitying look, like there was so much more that I didn’t understand, but in that moment it all seemed pretty simple. Somebody had to stop Thraustila. He wasn’t above vampiric Law.
“I’ll give her the mercy of a quick death if it takes too long,” he said, and opened the door. I found myself pushed out onto the stoop as the blood-red door slammed in my face.
11
Tori
The thing about wooden doors? They were pretty easy to kick down.
One hard kick splintered the handle, but no one was nearby to give a shit. Everyone was off having a great time tormenting some poor slayer who’d done nothing to deserve the horror that awaited her but be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I strode down the concrete hall and two flights of stairs. Even if I hadn’t been there before, it would’ve been easy enough to find it: the shrieks of the spectators as they placed their bets were deafening even from down the hall.
As I’d done last time, I slipped inside in the back, planning to circle the perimeter of the amphitheater.
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know the girl’s name, but she was vaguely familiar- a junior from Libra. Probably one of the older ones, if she was hanging out in Club Bathory.
This time, there was no platform. The slayer was shaking in the middle of the arena, her eyes wide and glazed with alcohol. Thraustila was in the king’s box, leaning over the rail with a boyish grin.
He snatched a pixie out of the air and tossed it to a feminine shape next to him. “What is her crime?” he shouted, all his pretense at bored teenage boyishness gone. Now there was blood smeared on his face, over his teeth.
Thraustila held out his arms wide as though he expected an answer, but the audience was too drunk and high to come up with anything coherent.
“Pulling a blade on her host,” he said, his voice low, but the intensity of his quiet words carried over the crowd. The remaining laughter quieted under the quivering fury in his voice. “This slayer has broken the Law of our Court and destroyed the sacred bonds of hospitality.”
He was fucking nuts. I pitied the poor girl; she clearly hadn’t been given a crash course on Club Bathory rules before she’d come here.
I quickly scanned the crowd, looking for any members of Tenebris, but thankfully there were none. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d seen my own kind in here, looking on while this girl suffered.
“So, we will remedy this with a method of my choosing.” Thraustila grinned down at her. “Trial by combat. Bring out the arbiter.”
The scarlet velveteen curtains behind the king’s box rippled, and Iskandar came out, hauling a slavering beast on an iron chain. The audience was so silent I could’ve heard a pin drop in here.
Ice flooded my veins. A hellhound, dense muscle covered with sleek flesh, all teeth and brutality and hunger.
Otherworldly fires burned in the creature’s eyes as its pointed ears pricked up. The slayer was shaking so hard now that the chattering of her teeth was audible from across the room.
Thraustila held up a dagger. A single drop of dark blood had dried in a crust at its point. “The blade you thrust towards your host,” he said coldly, all humor gone. That was Thraustila’s blood on the tip. “You may defend yourself with this. Destroy the hellhound, and you’ve earned your freedom.”
He tossed the dagger into the ring and the slayer fell on it desperately, even though she knew it was no help at all.
Two familiar figures stood on either side of the arena: Càel on one side, Rhianwen on the other. They gave each other grim looks, the sort of silent communication only close siblings had, and I read a little of the situation in their tense body language.
Thraustila was totally out of control and they knew it. Their hands were tied against their own Maker’s bloodthirsty desires.
The slayer let out a sob as the hellhound snarled, black drool spilling from between its teeth. It lunged at her, and Iskandar’s body was taut with strain as he held it back. Barely.
The dark sea of never-ending rage that lived in the back of my head began to bubble. She was just a girl. She’d probably just been defending herself against the unwanted attentions of a vampire.
Fucking ancient teenage vampires.
He laughed, touching the vaguely familiar hair of the woman next to him. “May the innocent live to see another night.”
I pushed forward, drawing my own dagger out of its sheath, shoving a moonspawn aside as I hit the crowd. Hellhounds had a weak point: a gap in the bone in the center of their chests, beneath which a fragile heart pumped ichor through their veins. The hard part was getting that close without their jaws latching onto the nearest limb.
The hellhound howled, a sound like the screams of damned souls, and a pale blur caught my eye as I climbed over the last row, angling myself to jump in the pit.
Iskandar released the hellhound. The chain rattled, filling the silence, and the slayer in the pit let out a strangled scream, raising her dagger.
It never touched her. I teetered at the edge of the pit, my dagger in hand, as Càel lifted the hellhound in the air. His fist was buried in its chest up to his elbow. The demonic creature snapped weakly, spewing human curses at him through canine jaws, but Càel’s expression never changed as he squeezed the beast’s heart to a pulp.
The silence in the wake of its death was almost painful. Thraustila glared down at his son, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
Càel never looked at me, but I knew he must have seen my approach and guessed my intent. He’d done it to stop me. Otherwise I would’ve been the one pinned in place by Thraustila’s glare.
Rhianwen was in the pit too, lifting the crying slayer by the nape of her neck. She tossed her up over the side of the arena’s walls, almost into my waiting arms, making a little shooing gesture as she did so.
I grabbed the girl’s wrist and hauled her away through the groaning crowd, all disappointed they wouldn’t get their blood sport for the evening. Until I heard Thraustila speak, his voice tight with barely repressed fury.
“You have so much pity for mortals, my son, you can be treated as one.”
Against my better judgment, I paused at the back of the amphitheater, my hand still clamped around the girl’s wrist like an iron vise.
Càel didn’t glare, didn’t snap back at his Maker. He just inclined his head, fists white-knuckled at his side, as a slighter vampire male with chestnut hair strode into the arena. He carried a bullwhip, the fall studded with small barbed hooks.
My stomach plunged to the floor as Thraustila nodded. All the king’s attention was on his son.
Just as Càel wanted it.
The slayer next to me hiccupped on a sob, her eyes wide and glazed. I flinched at the first crack of the whip, the sight of flesh split open and blood trickling in dark rivulets. My own back ached with phantom pain at the sight, tears prickling the backs of my eyes.
Another crack, and the rivulets became stream, then a river.
He was enduring this for me.
I gazed at the vampire brandishing the whip for a long moment, memorizing his face, contorted in a grin of pure pleasure as he took out Thraustila’s wrath on Càel’s body, then pushed the door open and dragged the girl through.
She was almost hysterical, pulling against me and being an almighty pain in the ass, until I shoved her against a wall and grabbed her face, forcing her to look at me.
“Listen to me,” I hissed. Her eye
s rolled in their sockets. “That’s my vampire in there getting the piss beaten out of him just so I could get your ass out of there. Now shut the fuck up and stop crying before their king decides he wants you back. Are we clear?”
I didn’t like being mean to younger slayers, but my words finally penetrated her fog of panic. She nodded, her mouth mashed shut by my grip on her jaw, but at least a hint of clarity had come back into her eyes.
We shoved out of Bathory’s broken front door. Most of Tenebris was already piling into the cacodemon-driven limousines, and I shoved the girl into one, right into Sura’s lap.
He was drunk, but he looked up at me with the wide-eyed guilelessness I’d come to trust so deeply last semester. “Tori, you’re here.”
“Get her home,” I said, gripping the door with white-knuckled hands. Sura’s dark eyes glittered like jewels, and his words from Korso’s bar drifted back to me: there’s a hole in me. It eats everything and nothing fills it.
Oh, how well I was acquainted with that emotion.
“Come with us,” he said, his words a little slurred still. “Will’s grabbing everyone else- there’s something going on in there.”
“Yeah. This one stabbed the king. She’s lucky anyone was there to intervene at all.” The slayer who’d almost met her death tonight curled up against Sura, still shaking with the aftershock of an adrenaline rush.
I tried not to think about how pleasant it was to curl against Sura like that, especially given how much I hated him.
Sura raised his eyebrows. “She stabbed him.”
“Yep.”
“And she’s not dead.”
“Clearly not.”
He looked down at her. “That was really fucking dumb,” he said, and the girl nodded. I wasn’t sure she was actually comprehending anything at all at this point.
“I’m sure she’ll understand the full ramifications tomorrow.” I leaned down so she could hear me, snapping my fingers so she’d look at me. “You can never come back, hear me? Vamps have a long memory.” She nodded, the best I was going to get right now.
Thing was, some slayers had a long memory, too. I knew the face of the one who was presently whipping Càel like a dog.
Will came striding out of Club Bathory, with another junior, and several minutes later Apolline followed. She stumbled down the stairs, barely able to hold herself upright, so high on pixie dust her pupils had eaten her entire iris.
I stood back as my stepbrother coaxed her into the limo, impatience and stress written on every line of his face and body. Apolline finally crawled to the front, leaving the way clear, and Will looked at me, his lips pulled into a grimace.
“You need to come with us, Tori,” he said, an irritable bite in his tone. “They’ve emptied the upper clubs. Bad shit’s happening tonight.”
I took a deep breath, the air shivering through my lungs like ice. Càel was still there, and the bad shit that was happening was happening to him.
I couldn’t leave him to it… but if I went back in and ended up a part of Thraustila’s blood sports, taking the whipping would’ve been for nothing. He’d done it for me.
Will reached out for me, and I slapped his hand away. “I’m coming. Don’t touch me.”
I climbed into the limo, putting as much room as possible between me and them. Even with the others here, talking loudly about what had happened- theories seemed to range from the banal to the utterly outlandish- I couldn’t help but ponder that I was trapped in a very small space with the four people I hated most on this earth. Well, besides Thraustila.
Will didn’t try to touch me again. Sura watched me, his onyx eyes unreadable and remote. Apolline and Lydia giggled like it was all still a party.
When the limo disgorged us in front of the Caitland-Moore Museum, I waited until everyone else had left the limo and straggled up the stairs. I had more than half a mind to demand the cacodemons take me back, where I would… what, exactly? Challenge Thraustila to combat? Take on most of the Clouded Court myself?
I had no idea how long I sat in the back of the limo, rigid as a board, until the seat trembled under me. The cacodemons were displeased with my hesitance.
The limo drove away, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, torn in indecision. I wandered up the stairs, half of me still straining to turn and run across the damn city to Càel, even if it was the opposite of what he wanted- but two shapes waited for me inside the museum.
Sura and Will. For a second it felt almost like last semester, when it was just the three of us, making jokes against the strained tension between us all… but instead of happiness when I saw them, all I felt was that sweeping rage.
“What did they do with you?” Will asked, his voice clipped. He didn’t smell of booze, his movements were precise; he hadn’t had alcohol or pixie dust. Of course. As the prefect, he would’ve taken it on himself to remain sober so he could get his team home safely. “The Morrígna.”
“Nothing,” I murmured. I was so tired and heartsick, I couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry. All I saw was Càel, his back flayed open and dark blood sluicing downwards. “They just wanted to talk.”
About losing my mortality, becoming one of them… the kind of creatures who set a fucking hellhound on a girl for the crime of defending herself. I had no doubt that Thraustila had probably done something to deserve being stabbed.
But Càel had interceded for her, a girl he didn’t even know. Rhianwen had lifted her out of the pit and given her to me. For a crew of vampires whose modus operandi was death and destruction, they had a level of compassion that unsettled me.
Everything I thought I knew about their kind was wrong. They weren’t all remorseless, reprehensible killers. Some of them felt things, same as I did.
And if I was wrong about them… what else was I wrong about?
“Did you see what happened with Thraustila and the junior?” Sura asked, his voice gentle and coaxing.
“No,” I snapped. “I saw him carry her down to the arena. That’s it. If you’re going to let younger slayers hang around with Shadowed Worlders, you need to explain to them the consequences of their actions. She’s lucky she didn’t die tonight. You’re lucky you won’t be explaining to Burns that a girl died on your watch- again.”
Will’s face went white, but I didn’t even have room for satisfaction. Something else he’d said tonight flashed into my mind.
“And you know what? I do want you to crawl, Will. You can show me how sorry you are by getting on your knees in front of that junior and apologizing for not doing right by her. She was your responsibility. Thraustila put her in a pit with a goddamn hellhound- you can do that much.”
I pushed between them, not stopping to hear their answer. All I saw was blood, a sea of red, and Càel in it.
As I laid in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling alone in the silence, I thought about the ache in my heart when I pictured Càel hurt, the depth of glowing happiness I felt when he was near me, the depth of trust I had for him and his choices.
I thought about the vampire with the bullwhip.
What do we do when someone hurts the ones we love? James’s ghost whispered in my mind.
“We hurt them back. Worse.”
12
Tori
The next morning, a lazy Saturday morning where most of Libra’s students had books and unfinished homework spread across the cafeteria tables alongside their breakfasts, Will took me by surprise.
Several juniors were eating quietly in the corner table. The girl from last night was among them, reporting to her enthusiastic friends exactly what Club Bathory had been like. They didn’t seem to sense her reticence, crowding around her, until a tall man strode their way.
I looked up from my demonology textbook, pen poised on the page, and watched in surprise as Will knelt in front of the girl and took her hand in his.
She flushed red, and then went white as all the blood drained from her face. He was, after all, the heir to a massively rich clan, a prefe
ct from the senior class whose name would soon be on the hallowed walls of Libra, on his knees before her.
The other juniors were giggling, but I watched with surprise a Will spoke quietly to the girl, apologizing for not being better mentor to her.
The fucker had actually listened. Half of Tenebris was watching open-mouthed as their prefect got his knees for a junior, and some of Lux was taken aback as well.
When he got up, he didn’t look at me, just went back to his own homework without the slightest hint of shame. In a way, I respected him a little more for that.
He was still going to get ground up and crushed under my heel, but at least he’d do it as a man who’d learned empathy for others.
I went back to my homework, trying my hardest not to watch the ticking of the clock. Around noon, I found myself sitting outside the Caitland-Moore, hidden in an alcove on the pink marble steps between the columns.
Humanity passed by in a crush of people, their eyes sliding right over me. The glamour on the Caitland-Moore was a nice little cloak for slayers to hide behind, making us look like normal people. I could’ve had my crossbow aimed at any one of them, and they never would’ve seen me.
Neither Apolline Moreau nor Lydia Hurst saw me, either, but I chalked it up to inattentiveness rather than glamour. They wore their day clothes, expensive things; silk shift dresses, designer heels, diamonds.
The Libra taxis had condensed themselves back into sleek black sedans, which both women climbed into, talking animatedly. I stood up in the shadow of the column, watching the car pull away from the curb.
I climbed into the other taxi when they were out of sight, lovingly placed my crossbow on the other half of the back seat, and leaned forward. Even though I couldn’t see the cacodemons, I felt their presence; like a breeze swirling in empty space, scented faintly with brimstone.
