Page 20 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

I still could not quite make sense of his presence. Alone in a room with him, it was overwhelming all over again—contradictions that I had never before experienced within a soul, and all of them roiling constantly. This was a man that was never at peace, and yet was so steadfast in his singular cause that he managed to force it all into a tightly controlled box. I had met few people who could hide the truth of their presence so well, even Arachessen.

He approached me, and I had to remind myself not to move away. My instinct was to cringe as he reached out, but his touch against my wrist was gentle and nonthreatening. He unlocked one shackle, then the other.

This close, I could sense his features more clearly. They were rigid and strong, as if carved out of stone, albeit imperfectly—his noseslightly crooked, as if it had been broken and poorly set once, his brow low over deep-set eyes, mouth thin and serious. The scent of snow was overwhelming.

He dropped to his knees. I stiffened as he lifted my skirt and slid his hands up my calf. Mission or no, I’d kick him in the face if he?—

“I’m not going to rape you,” he said flatly. “I prefer my partners willing.”

He said that, but I’m sure he saved that for the teenage daughters of the homes he burned when he conquered. I’d experienced war before. I knew what it was like.

With him kneeling, his horns were right in front of me. They were black and ridged, curving toward the back of his head, stark against the smooth silver of his long hair. I carefully reached for them with a thread of magic, testing them. They felt foreign and unnatural, like they weren’t of this world. My line of work had exposed me to many curiosities, but none quite like these. How, I wondered, had he gotten them?

He finished unlocking the shackles on my ankles. Then he rose again and offered me his hand.

“Come.”

I didn’t take it.

“I’ll follow,” I said, and took only a step before he grabbed my arm, hard enough that his fingernails—sharp, black claws—dug into my wrist.

“I know the Arachessen are skilled,” he said, “but I have lived your lifetime six times over, and I’ve spent all that time becoming better at killing. If you run or fight, it won’t end well for you.”

His stare was unyielding, hard, cold. When most people stared at me, they seemed to just look at my blindfold, where my eyes would be. But Atrius’s went deeper than that, like he was grabbing my soul itself and turning it to him, making sure I understood.

I didn’t like that. It felt like a challenge, and I, petty as I was, disliked being challenged. Another flaw the Sightmother frequently pointed out.

We held that stare for a long, long moment, a silent battle of wills playing out in the inches between our faces.

“Fine,” I said primly. “You don’t rape me,and I don’t attack you.”

The sound he made was something between a grunt and a scoff. “Did the Arachessen like that sense of humor?”

He took my arm and I decided not to fight him this time. His touch was barely there, light over my sleeve. He led us to the tent door and opened it.

The moment we stepped outside, the camp went silent. Attention was unblinkingly, unwaveringly on us. I could feel all those threads of presence wrapped around our throats as clearly as I could feel Atrius’s hand on my arm. Their curiosity. Intrigue.

And… hunger. Unmistakable hunger.

The hairs rose on the back of my neck. These were vampires, after all. Blood drinkers. Corpses of drained deer had been piled along the outskirts of camp, but I knew that human blood was the most enticing to them.

Atrius didn’t address anyone, and no one addressed us, as we walked through the camp. When we reached the outskirts, he leaned down and murmured in my ear, “Never leave your tent without permission and me or Erekkus with you. Understood?”

I wondered if he sensed what I had. The hungry intrigue.

“In case I get eaten?” I asked. “You don’t train your men to have better discipline than that?”

His lip twitched with distaste. “My men have impeccable discipline. But there will be difficult times in this war, and is there any amount of discipline that will stop you from crawling to water in the desert?”

I was the water in this metaphor. But did that mean that Glaea, a country populated by many humans, was the desert? That didn’t make any sense.

He took me far beyond the outskirts of camp, out into the rocky plains, where the grass was so tall that it tickled my thighs. The ground beneath it was rocky and uneven. “Watch for that,” he muttered, pointing out a particularly rough patch of gravel and guiding me around it.

“I know,” I said, stepping around it easily, and felt his stare grow a little more intense.

He was interested in me.

That was good—to capture curiosity. It couldn’t keep me alive forever, but it would keep me here long enough to earn his trust.Maybe curiosity was the real reason why he was willing to take the risk of having me join him.

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