Page 97 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

The moonlight fell over Atrius’s face. The cottages and tents were silent. A faint breeze blew through the trees.

Atrius turned back to his soldiers, lifted a single finger to his lips, and then nodded to the huts in a silent command—search.

I started to go, but Atrius grabbed my arm.

“With me,” he said, low in my ear.

Together we peered into the first cottage, only to find it empty—not just empty, but looking as if whoever had lived there had simply disappeared. A glass was knocked over, broken into two jagged shards on a makeshift wooden table. A bedroll in the corner was half-rolled. A book was left open on the table, spilled ink beside it.

In every tent, every cottage, we found the same thing.

I still sensed no presences—or at least, I thought I didn’t. It was getting so hard to tell, that strange buzzing growing louder and louder in my head, all the threads vibrating with it. I found myself nearly staggering into a doorframe because the interference made it so difficult to make out where I was going.

At that, Atrius’s hand came to my shoulder, and didn’t let go, as if to steady me.

“Where is it coming from?” he asked.

“I don’t—I can’t?—”

Weaver, my headhurt.

Atrius’s brow furrowed. His head dipped closer. His voice lowered.

“What is it?” he murmured.

I tried to cut through the noise. Tried to distill it into something I could make sense of.

I staggered from the hut and out into the clearing—farther still, where the tree cover canopied above us again. I tripped several times, not paying attention to where I was going, only to the threads. By the end, I was crawling on my hands and knees, pressing my palms to the earth, as if to drag my way along them.

And then my body stopped.

Every muscle tensed.

Dread fell over me, icy and razor-toothed, tearing me open.

I wanted to be wrong.

I wanted to be wrong so much that I reached out through the threads, past them, out to the goddess Acaeja herself—the goddess I had given my eyes and my finger and my entire life to—and begged her:Please. Please don’t let this happen.

The goddess was silent.

The world was silent.

Save for a drop of something warm and thick and black-red on my hand.

I did not need to look up. But I heard it when Atrius did, because he let out this horrible, choked sound, strangled, like the air was dying in his throat.

Erekkus saw it next, and he wasn’t nearly as quiet.

“Fucking goddess,” he gasped. “Get them down! Get them fucking down!”

And then he kept screaming it, over and over again, in Obitraen, faster and faster, as he tried to claw his way up the trees.

Tried to claw his way up to the countless vampire bodies staked there, high in the branches above us, not quite dead and not quite alive. Dozens of them. Hundreds.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then I felt it—felt what the half-alive agony of the countless vampires had been drowning out in the threads. Movement. Lots of it. Out in the woods.

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