Page 30 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

Vampire venom. That was a mercy, perhaps.

This wasn’t a normal night. It felt like… a celebration of some kind. Maybe some kind of Obitraen festival? Some religious night? I almost wished Erekkus was around to ask him about it. Almost.

Instead, I planned to take full advantage of my newfound freedom.

I crept around the outskirts of the camp, noting the layout of the tents and guard posts. I wouldn’t try to sneak off until daybreak, but it couldn’t hurt to at least see what I was working with now.

I kept expanding my circles, until the bonfire was a distant glow and I was beyond the final bounds of the camp. Too far—I was pushing my luck while the others were awake.

I froze, scanning the horizon.

I felt something out there, not far from me now. A presence that almost seemed familiar, but twisted from what I typically knew, that stone stillness warped into molten steel—sharper and more dangerous.

My curiosity—a dangerous quality—got the better of me.

I lingered in the shadows and clung to the rocks, and edged closer.

Atrius.

Atrius, on his hands and knees, clutching the head of a stag with bare arms, his teeth sunk deep into its throat. His shirt and jacket were discarded in a pile nearby, his bare skin covered in blood.

The beast was enormous—one of the biggest stags I’d ever seen around this area. Atrius’s arms barely encircled its head, though he held it tight, muscles straining. Blood soaked the creature’s neck, matting its white fur and dripping into the gritty sand.

I stilled, unable to move.

I’d witnessed predators work countless times before. But even what I had seen the rest of Atrius’s men doing near the bonfire seemed… different than this. This was primal and foreign and yet, at the same time, deeply, innately natural. I was repulsed by it and fascinated by it and…

And, ever so slightly, frightened of it.

Or maybe frightening wasn’t the right word to describe the way the hairs stood upright at the back of my neck, the shiver that ran up my spine. It was more that something had changed in the way I saw him, a mismatch between what I had thought he was and what I was witnessing now.

Atrius’s eyes opened. Looked right at me. For a split second, we were both frozen there in our sudden awareness of each other. Then, in a movement so swift and oddly graceful it seemed instantaneous, he was standing, the stag twitching on the ground at his feet.

Blood ran down his chin and covered his bare chest, stark against the cold pale of his skin under the moonlight.

“What are you doing here?” He was, as always, soft-spoken, but his voice was a little hot with the anger that flickered at the center of his presence—quickly tamped down.

“Walking,” I said.

He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, though the attempt mostly just smeared it across his face.

“Go back to your tent,” he said.

“Why? When everyone else seems to be celebrating?” I tilted my head, pointedly, at the stag. “Feasting?”

“Exactly why you should be away.” His eyes narrowed, as if in realization. “Erekkus left you alone?”

Oh, Erekkus was going to be in trouble.

I took a step closer, curious, and Atrius lurched backwards so abruptly that he nearly tripped over a cluster of rocks, as if frantic to get away from me.

That made me pause.

He collected himself fast, so fast that maybe someone else might have dismissed it, but I saw that… that fear. Not of me, exactly. Not quite.

I observed him closely,reaching for the presence he kept so carefully guarded. His chest rose and fell heavily. Nose twitched.

Hunger. He was hungry.

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