Page 44 of Flirting with Darkness

And then silence.

Birds chirped in the distance. A faint breeze rustled the tree leaves. The scent of spring was so overwhelming, it almost drowned the scent of blood.

Nothing existed except for Vale and I, our gazes locked. For a long, breathless moment, I couldn’t look at anything except for his dark-gold eyes, staring at me through gore-streaked tendrils of hair, through smears of blood.

Then he collapsed.

I leapt to my feet, ignoring the pain of my own injuries, and ran to him. Farrow knelt beside him, too, and started to roll him over to look at his face, but I said, “No! The sun.”

Up close, the burns on Vale’s skin were stomach-turning. And gods, he was wounded… they hadn’t just come to kill him, they had come to torture him. Some of his clothing had been torn, clearly intended to expose more of his skin to the sun. A patchwork of wounds crisscrossed up his right arm, and the very tip of one wing had been cut—cut off? Maybe. It was hard to tell through all the blood.

“Help me,” I choked. “To the house. Out of the sun.”

I was only capable of assembling fractured handfuls of words at a time.

Farrow—gods bless him—did as I asked. If he was put off by being this close to a vampire, he didn’t show it. Together we dragged Vale up the steps to the back door, which led into the library—the very same room he had brought me to the first time I came here. Vale was incredibly heavy, even with both of us carrying him, and I was grateful that he appeared to be at least a little bit conscious, because he seemed to be trying to help us—albeit poorly. Still, we couldn’t hoist him onto one of the couches, and instead had to settle for laying him on the floor as gently as we could.

The wounds somehow looked even worse in here, but to my relief, they had stopped spreading once he was out of the sun.

But he wasn’t moving. He was only barely breathing.

“Lilith…” Farrow said quietly.

I looked up. He peered out the window, to the dead bodies lying in the yard. At first, I thought maybe he was sickened by what we’d just done—we’d killed, after all—but when he glanced back at me, it held something harder than guilt.

“An acolyte,” he murmured. “Vale killed an acolyte.”

The reality of what had just happened hit me.

Vale, a vampire, a child of Nyaxia, had just murdered a high-ranking devotee of Vitarus.

I had already been pushing my luck with my experimentations with vampire blood. I had been so careful at first to hide my work, make sure I didn’t touch the blood long enough to attract the attention of a scorned god. And if a few vials of blood might have been enough to earn a god’s wrath…

…Imagine what the death of an acolyte could do.

Cold, cold dread fell over me. Some gods were fiercely protective of their acolytes. Others ignored them. Most, Vitarus included, fell somewhere in the middle, depending on their mood and your luck. He might not notice what had happened here. But if he did… few things were considered more insulting to a god than the murder of what they considered theirs, especially by someone touched by their greatest enemy.

My hands went numb, like all the blood had drained from my extremities

“I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t mean to speak aloud. I always knew what to do. Always knew the next logical step. But right now, logic seemed so far away. There were so many problems, all so big. I couldn’t find the answers.

I turned to Farrow, wide-eyed, and swallowed a stab of guilt at the sight of him.

Farrow. Poor Farrow. I had barely looked at him before. He was covered in blood, too. One arm looked injured.

But his hand fell to my shoulder, giving it an encouraging squeeze.

“You will,” he said. “Just think.”

Farrow did always make me want to believe him, and that counted for something.

I drew in a breath, let it out, and stood.

“We need to burn the bodies.”

Maybe if we burned them fast, Vitarus would never know. Gods were fickle and flighty. They had a whole universe to pay attention to, after all. Maybe we’d gotten lucky, and this one hadn’t noticed us today.

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