Page 42 of Flirting with Darkness

My Vale.

Only a handful of men remained alive, but Vale was so injured that he wasn’t fighting anymore. They had dragged him outside. He was on his knees in the garden, white and red flower petals around him. His head was bowed, black hair covering his face. His wings were out, the white feathers gorgeous in the daylight sun—gruesome contrast to the spatters of black blood and the open burn sores spreading across them.

He looked up as I approached, revealing a face mottled with blackened burns.

His eyes widened.

I didn’t even let my horse stop before I was dismounting, running, running—

I threw myself over Vale, tumbling to my knees before Thomassen.

“Stop! Enough!”

The world stopped. The priest, and the four men behind him, leaned back a little, like they had to take a moment to figure out if I was really here.

A rough touch folded around my wrist from behind. Concern. Restraint. It said so much.

“Mouse…” Vale rasped.

His voice sounded so hollow. It reminded me of Mina’s. Close to death.

I didn’t look at him, though I was so acutely aware of his form behind me, the faint warmth of his body where my back was only inches from him.

Instead I met Thomassen’s gaze and refused to relinquish it. The acolyte wasn’t injured, though blood smeared his robes. Had he stood back and let the others do all the fighting? Waited until they wore Vale down enough to step in and make the final blow?

“Stop this insanity,” I said.

His confusion fell away in favor of hatred again. He gripped his sword, eyes briefly falling to my axe—gods, did it even count as an axe? It was barely more than a hatchet—before returning to my face.

“Step away, child,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

“If you kill him, then you’re killing all of us.”

The priest scoffed, lip curling. “We should have done it the moment the plague began. Perhaps a sacrifice of one of the heretic goddess Nyaxia’s children would have been enough to end it. Maybe it would have been enough to appease Vitarus.”

I wanted to laugh at his foolishness. I wanted to scream at his ignorance.

“Why is it so difficult for you to understand that Vitarus doesn’t care about us?” I spat. “He has taken a thousand lives from us. Ten thousand. And that hasn’t been enough to appease him. Why would this one be any different?”

“You’re not a stupid girl,” the priest sneered. “A strange one, but not a stupid one. You know why. Because of whatheis.” He jabbed his sword to Vale. “Because of who he worships. Because of the goddess who created him. Look at around you. How many of your brethren has he killed? And you expect us to let him live?”

I looked into the eyes of the men around him, and I didn’t see brethren. I saw people driven to ignorance and hatred. I saw people who were willing to kill whatever they didn’t understand just for a chance of a chance that it would help them.

Nothing would stop them from killing Vale.

They would happily kill me, the strange spinster woman that never had laughed at their jokes or indulged their mindless conversations, to get to him.

I liked solving problems. But I was now stuck in a conclusion decades in the making, helpless.

Behind me, Vale’s breaths were ragged and weak. I would have thought that he wasn’t even conscious, were it not for his grip on my wrist, still strong even as his blood dripped down my hand.

“Please, Thomassen. Please. I—” My voice caught in my throat. Cracked. “I need him.”

The words tasted thick. Heavy. They seemed to sit in the air. I could feel their eyes on me, on Vale, on me again, the way my own often darted between pieces of an equation, and I didn’t like the answer they were drawing.

“He could be the cure to this,” I said, desperate.

Wrong thing.

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