Page 30 of Kept

She turned and looked up at me, and her skin was melting down her face. Her head smoked.

“Your Grace!” someone said next to me.

“He was right here,” the female said, her chin sloughing off and revealing jawbone. It dipped as her mouth opened on a wail. “Where did he go?”

Someone shouted in my face. Hands pulled at me. I threw them off and reached for the female.

She burst into flames.

The hands yanked me backward, pulling me off my feet. NO. The protest welled up and choked me, but I couldn’t spit it out. Like a bly’ad I hadn’t earned, it stuck to my tongue. As the hands clawed me backward, desperation clawed at me, too. I couldn’t leave. I had to save the female and her child.

Light slashed across my vision. A beam bounced, striking my face and raising fire in its wake. Blistering agony sliced from my forehead to my neck. The hands left me, and I flailed as I struggled to keep my balance.

“It’s him!” a rough male voice bellowed. “It’s the priest!”

Gasping, I looked up and saw half a dozen Sithistran knights gathered at the end of the street. Each one held a mirror shield in one hand and a bloodied broadsword in the other. For a second, we stared at each other. Then the knight in the lead charged me. He swung his mirror forward. Light flashed.

Pain.

Pain like the solstone. Pain like the Rite of Destru. Pain like standing before the gods and having my flesh peeled from my bones.

The smell of cooked meat singed my nostrils. Smoke filled my lungs. I realized I’d squeezed my eyes shut.

Weak. I was going to stand in the street and die under the sun.

I opened my eyes. The Sithistran bore down on me. Varick burst from a side street, his fangs bared in a battle cry that sent chills racing down my spine. His sword arced down, the blade flashing brighter than the mirror. Blood sprayed, and the Sithistran’s head spun into the air.

Knights charged behind Varick, their crimson cloaks flying. Within seconds, the Sithistrans were dead.

Varick ran to me and grabbed my arm. “Laurent.”

I watched his knights smashing the Sithistrans’ mirrors onto cobblestones soaked with blood. Rivulets ran toward the twin heaps of ash that marked the spot where the female had mourned over her son.

“Don’t let that blood touch them,” I rasped.

“What?” Varick asked, sounding puzzled.

“Don’t—” I pushed him aside, urgency beating at me as I rushed to the ashes in the street. I ripped my cloak off and flung it over the clothes and the vaguely vampire-shaped ashes a breeze was scattering down the street. I fell to my knees and nicked my thumb on my fang. The Rite of Death spilled from between my lips as I rocked on my knees and touched my thumb to one tiny boot. My vision blurred. I rocked harder. When the wind swept more ashes over the cobblestones, I crawled forward and cupped my hand around them.

Varick knelt beside me. “Laurent, we have to go.”

I continued praying, the words emerging with no effort. I’d said them so many times before. The cobblestones probably should have hurt my knees, but they didn’t. I was good on my knees.

“Laurent,” Varick said, and now his voice was strained. Nervous. “Laurent, we’ve lost the city. Sentries on the Serenity Tower spotted more Sithistrans advancing toward the gates. If you love Nor Doru, you will get up right now and come with me. I am begging you to get up. Don’t make me watch my men die.”

The last cut through the haze that had enveloped me. I looked up. Knights stood around me, each one from the warrior class and each one badly burned. Smoke rose from their shoulders and curled into the sky, reminding me of Rolund of Sithistra’s funeral pyre. If I didn’t move, I would kill every single one of these males. Just as I’d killed Petru.

“All right,” I croaked.

Varick had me on my feet before I drew my next breath. Moving fast, he removed his cloak and wrapped it around me. It stuck to my neck.

I wheeled around, searching the sky for the palace’s towers. “Given—”

“In Lar Budina,” he said, stopping my spinning with a firm hand on my bicep. He pulled the cloak’s hood over my head. “Come on.” He didn’t wait. Just grabbed my arm and pulled me into a run. His knights followed. The knights who’d accompanied me from the tavern followed, too. I’d forgotten about them. I’d forgotten my own men in the street.

Weak. The word pounded louder than the knights’ boots. It echoed over and over, running with me as I raced toward the tunnels and left my fallen city behind.

Chapter Eight

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