Page 69 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

I shrugged and motioned down the hall—a wide open passage for us now, bringing us that much closer to Tarkan. We moved unobstructed through one hall, and then another. At last, I peered around the next corner to find a set of majestic double doors, two guards standing before them.

I quickly ducked back behind the corner and nodded to Atrius.

He leaned close, so close I could hear him while he was barely speaking.

“How many?” he murmured, lips brushing my ear.

I couldn’t count. Not exactly. “Many.”

His mouth curled. “Too many?”

Ah. This was our game now.

Despite myself, I found myself returning the smirk. I shook my head.

“No,” I whispered.

This, once again, was the answer Atrius was looking for.

He raised his hood, covering his horns and his hair, casting a harsh shadow over his face. I took his arm, donned once again my best teetering stumble, and the two of us emerged around the corner.

We stopped before the double doors and the guards. I inclined my head. Atrius kept his tipped down, hiding his face beneath the hood.

“I am here at his behest,” I said.

There was no need to use names or titles. There was only one “him.”

Hidden beneath my scarves, my hand crept to my dagger.

The guards glanced at each other. Then at each of us—skeptical when they looked at me, and even more so at Atrius.

“We had no word of anyone coming today,” the guard said. “Let alone at this time of night.”

I had been able to fool the guards at the front door. Those were expendable. These, though, were Tarkan’s personal guards. Carefully chosen. Well-trained.

“Are you sure?” I said, letting my uncertain pout slip into my voice. “I—I’m very late, but I don’t want to disappoint him. He wanted me heretonight.”

The guards exchanged another glance?—

And then blood painted the space between us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Atrius and I moved the moment the guards’ eyes left us. He took the one on the left, stabbing him through with his sword and snapping his body aside with a flick of his blood magic. I took the one on the right, driving my dagger through his throat. We tossed the bodies to either side of the doors like sacks of flour.

Within the chambers, commotion stirred immediately. The threads trembled, like the reverberations after a sudden discordant strum of an instrument, as those inside responded.

We didn’t give them time to prepare.

We burst through the doors. Tarkan’s wing was large, much more an apartment than a bedchamber. He kept his most trusted warriors close, even in the dead of night, though apparently still did not respect them enough to give them beds to sleep on—most of the men who jerked awake from their drug-laden sleep now had been sprawled out on sofas and armchairs, and a few even on the fur rug. I wondered if Tarkan had increased the number of people within his chambers in light of Atrius’s movements across Glaea.

Several of the guards inside had been awake, stationed to watch for an attack. They were ready.

But so were we.

We dismantled them. Thencontinued to carve our way through the men who threw themselves at us. We naturally fell into position, back-to-back, covering the areas that the other couldn’t reach. I stretched threads between our opponents and slipped between them, disappearing and reappearing at their throats before they had time to register the movement.

So quickly—so disconcertingly easily—Atrius and I fell into a rhythm. Smoother, even, than what we had done in Alka. I struck, stunned, maimed. He finished.

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