Page 108 of A Legacy of Poison and Lies

What was that?she asked Holt as she moved through the aether. She’d found the edges of what she was certain was Jesper’s compulsion at the border of Holt’s mind, as if it were a snag in a piece of clothing.

“We never wanted to go with them,” one of the acolytes pleaded as Zylah handed them over to the waiting guards. She didn’t wait to hear the rest of their claim to innocence.

The priestesses are using old magic. More spells,Holt told her as she reappeared beside him at the entrance to the mine, just in time to see him swipe his sword through a thrall’s torso.

Ranon.Her sword was already in her hands, slashing and moving and swiping again at the thrall in front of her. A fire was blazing at the base of the pulley system, and part of the rock face had shattered somewhere above and to the side of the mine’s entrance, an almighty boom following it. Miners had started to rush out, all human, panicked cries escaping them as they took in the fighting and the fires.

A vampire darted forwards, fangs sinking into the neck of a woman, tearing the flesh from her throat and shoving her aside to reach for another.

“No!” Zylah screamed. The thralls were brutal, but they lacked skill. The vampires, however, she’d seen too many times already to know what damage they could inflict, and humans would be nothing but insects to them. They’d suspected there were at least five thralls for every vampire, but they’d been wrong. There were dozens of the cursed creatures tearing at flash, rending the air with their cries as they circled the humans.

Take them,Holt told her, taking out two thralls at once. Zylah sheathed her sword and did as he asked, reaching for the nearest humans, hands grappling for hands, smoke clouding her senses as she evanesced them to safety. She kept going, sheathing and unsheathing her sword to attack the thralls, moving back and forth between the fight and the camp with as many humans as she could grab hold of, over and over until her head spun. There were so many of them.

A blast of red almost struck her as she took down a thrall, and she glanced over her shoulder to see a priestess, arms extended, palms facing towards her.

“Why are you loyal to Ranon?” Zylah asked, eyeing the priestess as she sidestepped the thrall’s corpse. She needed to buy herself a little bit of time, just a moment to clear her head. There were far more thralls than vampires; Zylah had only laid eyes on two vampires since the explosions started, and one of them lay dead somewhere behind her. A small comfort, at least.

The priestess laughed bitterly as Zylah continued to move. “I am loyal to no man. It’s Sira we do this for. Everything is for her. To reunite her with her daughter will be our greatest honour.”

“Aurelia?” Zylah had suspected Raif’s mother had been the driving force behind every step Marcus had made, and a dip of the priestess’s chin confirmed it. Her light-headedness had already faded, but she wanted answers, and she wasn’t going to waste this opportunity. “Why fight, then?”

The priestess’s top lip curled up in a sneer. “Bringing them your blood will earn me their favour.”

Bitch.Zylah didn’t need to duck to reach for the dagger in her boot, and without so much as a blink it was in her fingers, then it was whistling through the air, aimed right for the priestess’s heart.

The woman barely managed to stutter the first word of a spell before the dagger hit its mark, hands frozen halfway as if she’d been reaching for the blade.

There were still humans to evanesce away, but they were surrounded, and Zylah used the opportunity to attack another thrall, all the while pulling and pulling and pulling at the compulsion in Holt’s mind, frantically searching for a way to obliterate it. Another vampire darted through the smoke, fangs sinking into one of Nye’s soldiers.

“Zylah, we’re ready!” Rin called out from among the fray, just as Zylah stepped forwards to help. She was the only one of them who could enter the mine, and Rin was part of the group in charge of flooding it.

Three more soldiers joined to help the first, and Zylah raised a hand to her face to wipe sweat from her brow. There was too much smoke to see Rin, too many snarling thralls and screaming humans to waste time trying to figure out where she was, and time was running out. Zylah didn’t waste a second more on hesitating, evanescing directly into the heart of the mine to check for any remaining humans.

The minute she was inside, the hum of the vanquicite pressed at her skin, smoke filled her nostrils, and she threw a hand over her mouth to stifle a cough. There were no flames, but the smoke was pooling thick and fast above her, and though her body reacted to the vanquicite, it was nothing compared to the pain it had caused her when it had been poisoning her body. The healer had been right; she’d built up a tolerance to it, but she knew it wouldn’t last long.

A cluster of humans cowered beside an upturned cart. “Help us!” one of them cried.

Zylah reached for them, evanescing them away before returning as fast as she could. She strained to listen as she moved, wood cracking and splitting somewhere in the passage behind her, but there were no humans left the way she’d come.

Movement caught her attention as she evanesced to another tunnel thick with flames, a flash of blond hair that moved far too quickly for it to be human.

Jesper.

Her eyes were watering from the smoke, her head pounding from the vanquicite, but there was one more tunnel she wanted to check before leaving, and though the temptation pulled at her to follow him, she wouldn’t risk any more lives for him.

Zylah, get out of there,Holt pleaded.

He’s here.

The final tunnel was a mess of debris. A supporting beam had snapped and fallen, the ceiling above beginning to cave in, a mop of red hair poking out of the rubble. And a groan.

Zylah was beside the human in a heartbeat; a boy, no older than thirteen, eyes fluttering, chest rising and falling. She pressed her hand to his, and his eyes darted open.

“My sister,” he wheezed. “She’s underneath. I can hear her.”

Zylah paused to listen, a muffled scream sounding from the debris beyond. He was right.

Zylah.

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