The Nightborn

by Isabel Cooper

  She would have been more disappointed when he raised his head save for two things: first, he moved to her other breast, and the contrast of his tongue through the thin silk was itself intoxicating, and second, his hands found their way beneath her skirt.

  There was no way Zelen could have believed her unmoved even before he felt her wetness: it would’ve taken a far better actress than Branwyn had ever seen to counterfeit the desire that she’d experienced from their first dance and that had all but overtaken her as soon as they’d entered the garden. Still, when his fingers brushed against her sex, the ensuing groan sounded as though he hadn’t quite been prepared for what he felt, and the sound stoked Branwyn’s passion even further. She thrust forward, begging without words for more: she wouldn’t have hesitated at using words if she could have spoken then.

  She didn’t need to. The initial gentle brush of fingertips quickly became firmer, a stroking rhythm that still teased but built as well, taking her further and further into lust as Zelen learned what pleased her most and adjusted to give it to her. Branwyn was writhing before long, everything between her legs turned to pure need.

  Zelen was quick. When he took his hands away, Branwyn had only just noticed the deprivation before he’d lifted her skirts and pressed his mouth against her sex, and then she was in no mood at all to protest. He tasted her thoroughly, with more moans that vibrated against her and drove her even closer to the edge.

  When he shifted his attention to her swollen clit, Branwyn shot toward that edge like a flaming arrow. A few circles of his tongue and she was crying out over and over, incoherent as pleasure racked her. She was conscious of her hips jerking in Zelen’s grip, but otherwise sensation was all.

  She was leaning against the statue when she came back, legs like jelly. Zelen’s head was still between them, but his mouth was gentler on her sex now, lighter.

  “Well,” she said when she had both breath and brain for words. “That was extraordinary. And I should see if I can manage its equal.”

  Zelen pulled back and rose. When he wrapped his arms around Branwyn, she felt his erection, hard as ever, press against her, but there was no forcefulness about his touch and no trace of impatience. “I have complete faith in you,” he said, and exhaled hard. “Though not quite in my own willpower. Should we—”

  “Willpower’s useful in many situations. This isn’t one,” Branwyn said. “Besides, my legs won’t hold me much longer.”

  She started to kneel, watching his face as she did and savoring the way his eyes widened and his lips parted slightly. Branwyn grinned. This was going to be most enjoyable.

  Under the circumstances, she could almost have dismissed the screams she heard in the next moment—but she had too much experience to think they were cries of pleasure.

  Chapter 17

  When Branwyn froze and pulled back, Zelen at first worried that something had gone wrong between them. He hadn’t spoken coherently enough to offend, he was sure of it, but had he moved the wrong way and caught her with a knee? Had the posture itself brought bad memories to mind?

  “Are—” He started to ask, ignoring the ache in his groin and extending a hand to help her up.

  But she was already on her feet, her speed uncanny, one finger pressed to her lips. A second later, Zelen heard the reasons.

  “Oh what is it? What is that?” someone asked, sounding terrified.

  “Letar defend us!” came another cry, from a different part of the garden, and then, “Someone help!”

  Mostly, there were screams. Zelen’s frustrated arousal quickly dwindled.

  Branwyn pulled her dress back over her breasts, but the motion was clearly an afterthought: she didn’t even look down. A casual observer might have thought her idle, but Zelen saw the taut lines of her muscles, the flare of her nostrils, and the too-regular way her breasts rose and fell. She wasn’t idle; she wasn’t frozen in panic; she was hunting.

  Zelen tried to follow her gaze. Out in the darkness he saw flickers of…he wasn’t sure what. It was darkness on darkness, darkness that sank and rose, and it tugged at the corners of his vision like a fishhook. The ground seemed to waver beneath him.

  A scream became a shriek of pain. He was a healer. The sound had come from their left. Zelen started that way, only to have Branwyn seize him by the biceps with more strength than any human should have exhibited.

  “Not unarmed and not unaware. You’ll do no good.”

  “I have no weapon. Nobody here… The guards out front, I suppose…” Zelen corrected himself, but feebly. There were two guards, and while their swords weren’t exactly dull, they’d been made more for show than fighting.

  “Not quite.” Branwyn reached into the side of her gown, the place where bone and steel stays had pushed her breasts high and blocked Zelen’s touch. She wiggled, hissed, then pulled out a dagger. It was long, thin, and razor-sharp, the hilt mostly a flat place on the blade. “Here.”

  Zelen took it, noting the pattern of runes twisting down its length. “These are from the stonekin.”

  “They’re good at magic.” Branwyn was pulling a matching dagger from her gown’s other side. “Throw, if you can, and don’t engage if you can avoid it. We’ll get the civilians into the palace and work from there. Closing with these things is a bad idea.”

  “What are they?” he asked as the two of them started toward the nearest source of screaming.

  Branwyn didn’t turn her head. Zelen saw her profile as she spoke, painted red by a lantern they passed. “Demons.”

  * * *

  The darkness was full of shapes. Some were human.

  Branwyn watched them dart across her vision or run past on its edges. Many were half-naked, a few were bloody, and all were terrified. Other things followed, too many for her and Zelen to intercept. Her hands ached for Yathana, but the sword was far away, barred by rules of etiquette regarding blatant weaponry at the ball.

  A couple burst from behind an ash tree and stared at her and Zelen. “What’s happening?” asked one.

  “We’re under attack,” said Zelen. “Best get inside, and quickly.”

  One of the pair might have been inclined to ask questions, but the other yanked him away, into a run toward the palace. None of the fleeing people acted as if they were confused about where to go. Branwyn blessed the human instinct to run for the biggest structure when in danger.

  There was no chance to ask pardon or blessing aloud: Branwyn hoped the tree, or Poram beyond it, would understand. She leapt up and grabbed two long branches near each other, letting her weight help her break them off on the way down.

  “Here.” She handed one branch to Zelen, took hold of the other, and started running again, making for the nearest of the demons. “Life disrupts them. Range might save you.”

  * * *

  A man lay screaming on the grass, and above him the world was torn open.

  The demon was tall and thin and…flat? It floated in the air like paper laid on a table, and Zelen couldn’t work out how—not just how it was doing so, but how that could even be. He had the impression of a manlike shape, with a rudimentary, elongated face and not so much arms as a set of jagged edges at its side. Around it the night puckered inward, like skin around a fresh cut.

  To view it was to feel the world tilt beneath his feet, not out of terror—though he felt plenty of that—but out of his mind’s effort to reconcile what he was seeing with any part of the world he’d been born into and understood.

  If not for its victim, Zelen might have frozen there, or fled. The years of his training and those at the clinic took over, though, and said: There’s a wounded man here. That was familiar. That was knowable. And if Zelen needed to treat a wounded man, he’d need time and space to do so. The nature of the obstacles to those didn’t need to matter.

  He forced himself to look long enough to aim, raised the dagger Branwyn had given hi
m, and threw as hard as he could.

  He’d never know whether he hit squarely, whatever that might mean for such things, or whether he’d only nicked it and the knife was simply that magical. There was a flash of blue light, a sound like papers sliding together but far louder, and the demon was gone.

  Its victim, Zelen found as he dropped to his knees by the man, was missing chunks of flesh from half a dozen places. The shoulder was the worst, with almost nothing left but bone. There was very little blood, though, and it wasn’t flowing nearly as quickly as it should have been. “Do you think you can stand?” Zelen asked.

  “Wha… Verengir?”

  Zelen vaguely recognized his patient. They’d joked together at dances, gambled and hunted in the same parties. He had no time to recall names any more than he did for gentleness. “You need to run, if you can. Back to the palace. There are more of those things. Can you stand?” he repeated.

  “I think so.”

  The wounded man managed with help from Zelen, if a sort of braced shove upward could be called helping, and then stared at Branwyn. She was standing, facing the darkness with knife in one hand and branch in the other, her hair falling tangled down her back. She didn’t look as though she even noticed the existence of the men behind her, and yet Zelen knew that she was alert for the slightest hint of matters going wrong.

  “Gape later,” he suggested. “Move now, or are you that tired of life?”

  That suggestion got through. The man started moving, limping in a way that made Zelen want to turn and assist—but he wasn’t the only one out there. Branwyn was already moving, tracking the next set of screams, the next writhing human form.

  “Not nearly enough blood,” said Zelen, catching up to her. “Do they drink it?”

  “No, but they’re very cold. That’s why they’re here, I wouldn’t wonder. The heat of living things draws them. Many people in one place, particularly people exerting themselves, would have been a beacon as soon as they broke through.”

  Her grip on the branch was different than the one she used on her sword, and the contrast made Zelen think of the blade. His mind, clarified by nearness to death, seized on the great jewel in the sword’s hilt and snapped it into place. It was the missing detail, the feature that made a portrait recognizable as a person.

  The sword.

  Branwyn’s strength and speed, more than any human could have possessed.

  Her knowledge of demons and how casual she was about it.

  The blow, fighting assassins, that should have left her dead and yet she’d shaken off easily.

  Her comment afterward: she hadn’t killed people before.

  No detail alone would have been enough to draw conclusions, but now Zelen saw the whole portrait before him. “You’re a Sentinel,” he said.

  Branwyn didn’t even turn. If she blinked, Zelen missed it. “Yes.”

  * * *

  She didn’t have the time or energy to make up a good denial. Honestly, Zelen would more than likely see through any lie she did put together, even a painstakingly crafted one. The man was perceptive.

  He said nothing in response to her answer, but that might have been simply a lack of opportunity. The demons, aware of their fellow creature’s forcible return to the outer darkness or attracted by motion and greater heat, were moving toward Zelen and Branwyn. That gave some of their victims a chance to escape, but it also required a certain amount of focus.

  The first to approach caught Branwyn’s branch hard on the side of what passed for its head. Yellow-green light flickered through its pallid form, webbing out from the point of contact, and it reeled. Branwyn ducked low, past its guard, and plunged her knife into its chest. As the demon dissipated, the magic buzzed through her fingers and up her arm.

  To her side, Zelen fended off two others, wielding the branch he carried like a quarterstaff. She noticed flashes of motion as he blocked and dodged, then a more vivid burst of yellow-green as he caught one of the demons with a fatal blow.

  They kept moving, killing when they could but mostly trying to keep clear of lashing claws, heading toward any human bodies they could see or screams they could hear. To Branwyn’s mild surprise and distinct gratitude, they met with others on the same errand: one of the palace guards wielding a gold-hilted sword and an older man who carried a fireplace poker in his remaining hand.

  Branwyn threw her knife to destroy a demon and buy them time while Zelen picked up a young woman with her right leg in tatters. The guard helped a man with a badly clawed face to his feet and propped the man’s shoulder under his arm while Branwyn and the man with the poker smashed down the appendages that flailed toward them.

  Their mission became a fighting retreat soon enough, when Branwyn stopped seeing human figures in motion. The demons massed around them, seeking the remaining prey outside the walls. By Branwyn’s estimate, at least six remained when the small group of rescuers and rescued made it to the side door.

  It was the man with the injured face who hammered on the oak and shouted. Branwyn didn’t even make out what he said, for she was thrusting the sharp end of her branch into the middle of a demon, and the rustling sound of its death was overwhelming up close. She pulled her weapon back and ducked another creature’s strike, aware that the door behind her was opening and Zelen and the guard were going through with the wounded.

  Cold brushed against her neck, feeling wet even with no substance. Branwyn ducked before the demon’s talons themselves made contact. They sliced open one arm of her dress from shoulder to wrist. The skin below was only scratched, but it felt as though she’d plunged her whole arm into an icy pool. She hissed and brought the branch upward. Close range made it awkward, but the blow took nonetheless, slamming into the demon’s “head” and bursting it apart.

  A hand closed around her other shoulder—fingers, not talons, so she didn’t wheel and strike immediately—and yanked, pulling Branwyn back through the open door. She grabbed the handle on the way, slammed the door behind her, and then stumbled to a stop.

  Unsurprisingly, it had been Zelen who pulled her in. Now he and what looked like everyone in Heliodar stood, in fear and formal clothing, staring at her.

  Chapter 18

  Claws made of nothing scraped against the doors and tapped at the windows. Those inside had done what they could by way of overturned tables, but the palace had never been made to withstand a siege. It showed, and all knew it. Zelen, doing what he could for wounds that didn’t bleed but also appeared too dead ever to heal, fancied that he could hear the press of demons even over the moans and the weeping that filled the room.

  He, Branwyn, and their recent allies weren’t the only ones who’d rallied, though. Small groups stood at every possible entrance: guards with broken table legs, servants with long kitchen knives and platters, even one person who’d tied their sash around a heavy crystal vase and was swinging the result idly as they guarded their window. Near every two or three of the armed sentries stood one other. They held no weapons, but Zelen recognized a few and knew they were wizards.

  Near the center of the room, Mezannith stood, draped in sunset-pink taffeta and carrying a jeweled sword. It was a relic from the portrait gallery, and neither the edge nor the balance was probably much to speak of—but Zelen had been fighting with a tree branch, so he was in no position to complain.

  “You say you know these things?” she was asking Branwyn.

  “Not socially, but yes. You might call them scavengers, bits of the darkness that were left over when Poram made the world. They’re not very bright—they don’t even properly exist as separate beings when they’re not drawn here—or much sturdier than a human, but they don’t feel much pain, and they can do a great deal of harm, as you’ve seen.”

  Zelen had seen them dancing earlier. With an artist’s eye, he’d noticed the pleasant contrast between Mezannith’s curls, still more pepper than salt, and the
bright gold of Branwyn’s hair. Now the pairing reminded him of patterns in temples: light and dark, fire and ice, air and earth, each deadly on its own and more so when balanced.

  Either that or he was babbling to himself out of terror. He could believe it likely. “Fire?” Mezannith asked.

  Branwyn shook her head. “They consume heat. Iron, silver, magic, or things that had life in them are good. Failing that, hit them hard enough and they’ll leave the world—though I suppose that’s true of most things, in a way.”

  “We could wait for the city guards, in that case,” said Mezannith, tapping her fingers against the skirt of her gown, “but I’d just as soon not. Too much danger of the demons getting bored and seeking other prey, or of some poor soul wandering in unsuspecting. How many did you leave out there?”

  “Five was my count, assuming they all converged on us. I’m reasonably certain we could handle them if we have that many to go out as a purely fighting force.”

  “Count magic in that number, and we certainly do. You and I should take point—”

  The conversation turned into a discussion of tactics. Others entered into it—one of the nearby mages and the guard who had joined Zelen and Branwyn’s party among them—but many of those in the ballroom simply stood well away and gawked. Branwyn was the center of their attention, and that held as much fear as it did admiration.

  “…Criwathi woman,” said someone, only slightly hushed and more than a shade accusatory. “Made no secret of being a soldier, but…”

  Zelen didn’t search for the speaker. No response on his part would help Branwyn’s cause. He had other matters at hand.

  He tied the last knot in a tablecloth-turned-bandage, then checked his patient’s heartbeat. It was steady enough. They’d probably live, though their arm would always be missing a patch of flesh.

  A mage who wasn’t guarding doors or windows was holding some of the most badly injured in stasis until a Mourner could arrive and repair them. Her skin was paper white, and beads of sweat ran down her forehead to her cheeks.