Page 55 of A House of Fangs & Deceit

I said carefully, “Look, I’m more than a little freaked out right now. I’m not exactly used to being around dead bodies. My magic is acting weird, and you fucking scare the shit out of me. Can you just… not right now?”

“Fine, but this conversation isn’t over.” He glanced back at the body, lips twisting into a grimace. “I’ll take you back to the village and then come back for the body. We’ll have to examine it further to figure out what he died from. Most of these wounds are from scavengers.”

I was grateful he didn’t ask me to help him carry the Moroi corpse back. My stomach was still queasy, and if I had to touch the body again, I was fairly certain I would be vomiting up everything I’d eaten today.

We swiftly made it back to the village, where Emil and Adrienne left to help Vail fetch the body.

Alaric, Nyx, and I crowded around a table in the tavern, the paper with the symbol on it stretched out between us. Neither of them had recognized it, but I knew that I had seen it somewhere. But no matter how hard I wracked my brain, I couldn’t remember.

Chapter Thirteen

Alaric

Exhaustion tuggedat me as I stretched out on my bedroll the following morning. Nothing had bothered us during the night, but I’d had a hard time sleeping, knowing that the wraiths could get past the blood wards.

Technically, that was true of all our outposts, and probably our fortresses too, but at least in those, I was able to lie to myself about them being safer because of how many rangers patrolled the grounds and the strange Fae magic that still lingered in our perimeter walls.

It had only been the six of us last night, and the encounter with the Strigoi had unsettled me more than I had let on.

Unlike Kieran, Samara, and or even Vail, my bloodline was one of obscurity. My parents had originally been born in an outpost where they eventually fell in love and became the leaders of things when they were older. My mother was incredibly sharp, and nothing ever slipped her memory. She could remember the exact amount of wheat harvested from the previous five seasons in an instant.

And my father absolutely loved to solve problems and was always level-headed. Their strong aptitude had eventuallycome to Carmilla’s attention, and she in turn recruited them to be her advisors.

I was born after that, so House Harker was all I knew. My mother’s family died when she was young, but my father still had family in several different outposts, and we’d occasionally go and visit them. Faolan was a cousin who was close to my age, and we’d gotten along well. The only kids my age at House Harker, before Kieran had arrived, were Samara and Vail.

Samara and I had never gotten along, a situation that hadn’t much improved, and Vail was almost always gone with his parents or training with the rangers. Even from a young age, he’d been determined to be one of them.

The outpost that Faolan lived in with his parents wasn’t the same one my parents had been from. It was a newer one that they were trying to build up and secure. The first few years of a new outpost’s existence were always the riskiest. Most of the monsters that prowled the wilds of Lunaria had specific territories, and they didn’t like it when something encroached on them.

Faolan’s outpost was under frequent attacks, and it caused a lot of stress amongst the townsfolk.

My parents had pleaded with them to move back to the outpost they’d all been born in, which was older and far more secure, but Faolan’s parents had been determined to make it work.

It didn’t.

We’d arrived for one of our regularly scheduled visits only to find the outpost gate torn open.

Most of the residents were dead, their bodies shredded and partially eaten by whatever beast had broken through the defenses. Those who hadn’t died to the monsters coming from the outside had fallen to those within.

Some of the Moroi had given into their bloodlust in aneffort to survive. Their attempts to survive were successful… but they couldn’t come back from it.

I still vividly remembered standing in the center of the town as my parents wept next to me and seeing Faolan peel away from the shadows of a partially collapsed house. As a Moroi, he’d always been cheerful and boisterous. But as Strigoi, he’d prowled towards us in complete silence, his eyes locked on his prey with an intensity I’d never once seen on his face.

I’d been too terrified to say anything until I saw three more dark forms moving in the house Faolan had emerged from. His parents and younger sister.

A scream tore out of my lungs, but it was too late. Faolan and the other Strigoi in town ripped into us.

We’d only survived because of pure luck. The outpost had built a secure bunker, and its door had been only a few feet away from us. It hadn’t saved the residents of the town, but it had saved us. My mother shielded me as best she could while my father shoved us all towards the sanctuary.

Both of them had been severely injured, and I bore a long scar down my back where Faolan’s claws had ripped into my flesh.

Eventually, the Strigoi had left to find easier prey, and we’d fled. My parents rarely left the walls of House Harker after that, and I only did so when I absolutely had to. I didn’t know if Faolan was still out there somewhere, stalking in the dark forests of Lunaria, or whether he’d fallen to a ranger’s blade.

It might make me a coward, but I didn’t want to know. I usually preferred to deal in absolute certainties but when it came to my cousin’s fate, I found an odd comfort in the ambiguity of it all. He was both alive and dead and until I knew which I preferred, I’d rather not know.

The rangers had handled keeping watch so that Samaraand I could sleep. Although, based on the way she tossed and turned, I think she got even less sleep than I did.

Vail made everyone stay in the tavern so that we were all in one location, and we all pulled down mattresses and blankets from the rooms upstairs. Eventually, I’d given up on sleeping and simply stared up at the ceiling, trying to figure out what that symbol could mean. Samara claimed to have recognized it, but I’d never seen anything like it. Granted, I hadn’t studied blood magic beyond the basics that everyone knew.

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