Page 99 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

Until, all at once, it wasn’t.

Distantly, as if in another world, I heard Atrius shout something—my name?

My palms were pressed to the dirt. I tried to get up. Failed. My hand went to my abdomen and felt warm blood bubbling between my fingers.

Shit.

I crawled over the sand, groping for my weapon. I couldn’t feel the threads. Couldn’t orient myself.

When I managed to grasp them, I sensed?—

Sensed—

Atrius, standing over my attacker, hacking into him brutally, strike after unforgiving strike, long after flesh was beaten down into formless gore.

All around us, there was death. Death everywhere.

And yet when Atrius abandoned his very, very dead target and whirled around, he wasn’t looking at any of that—not his own warriors or the people he had lost.

Only me.

His presence was an anchor. I held onto it tight, like a raft in a stormy sea.

But I was slipping.

Atrius fell to his knees beside me. When he pressed his hands to my wound, it took me a moment to realize the keening whimper I was hearing was mine.

He let out a wordless sound through his teeth.

My brow furrowed.

Surely I was hallucinating, to think that Atrius’s presence, forever unbreakable, forever solid, forever silent, was now screaming—screaming in utter terror.

Over me.

Ridiculous.

I had the strange urge to tell him this, the way as a child I always wanted to tell my brother amusing or outlandish things, but when I opened my mouth, I felt as if liquid was flowing into my lungs.

Warmth surrounded me. It took me several long seconds of half-consciousness to realize Atrius had lifted me. The sound of the battle fell into a distant, fuzzy din.

“Sylina,” Atrius was saying to me. “Stay right here. Stay right here.”

And then, closer to my ear, “Vivi. Stay right here.”

Stop shouting at me, I’m trying,I wanted to tell him.

But I was falling farther and farther from the threads.

The last thing I heard was Atrius’s voice, screaming so loud it cracked, hurling three words of Obitraen to his men over the sound of the battlefield.

It was in Obitraen, and yet somehow I knew exactly what he was saying:

Kill them all.

My fingers tightened around Atrius’s shirt fabric. A sudden wave of anger rolled over me.

In my fading consciousness, I thought of another explosion barely survived by a nine-year-old girl.

---