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I didn’t do that. Instead, I pushed myself off the desk, and Yexue backed away. As he stepped back, the consuming heat on my skin began to quiet.

“It’s been a long day; we should go to sleep.” I went to the bed and threw him a half-shaped pillow that was just a sack and a couple of bird feathers. “You can sleep on the floor.”

“You are makingmesleep on the floor?”

“Do you expectmeto sleep on the floor?”

“We can share.”

I grabbed the other pillow. “Fine.I will sleep on the floor.”

“You’re not going to crawl into my bed and seduce me for military secrets in the middle of the night?”

“???????,????.”Never trust a weasel who tries to get cozy with a chicken, his attentions aren’t pure.

“?????????”Scared I’m going to eat you?

I didn’t respond.

Yexue sighed. “My plan has worked: I now have the bed all to myself!”

He didn’t let me sleep on the floor, in the end. He offered the bed to me and went to sleep downstairs with his guards.

48

I was flying, high in the sky as dawn bled fast across the land until everything was scorched into a shade of bloodstained gold. Rong’s soldiers in their crimson uniforms were changing shifts when blurs of deep blue materialized on the horizon. Lan’s soldiers in their uniforms of indigo, dark as midnight, crossed no-man’s-land—human soldiers, not vampire soldiers. Blades drawn.

Behind them were cannons and archers. The formation of an army ready for battle.

But they did not charge as I had expected. They hovered on the horizon.

A golden scripture passed from trembling hand to trembling hand until it landed on Siwang’s desk. He opened it, glanced inside, and huffed. He grabbed his sword, and the furious tempo of war drums rang through camp.

My stomach twisted as the comrades I had trained with, the comrades who were not ready for battle, picked up their swords.

The sun rose higher, and higher.

Two armies, one red and one blue, meeting from opposite sides of a crimson-stained field that should be green and blooming with wildflowers this time of year. Instead, it was trampled by horses’ hooves and wheel marks.

When Siwang looked across the field and saw human soldiers, he smiled and rode forward alone, leaving his army behind.

He and Yexue stopped a hundred yards apart. Close enough to hear each other, far enough that they had time to run if one army suddenly advanced.

“I knew you had spies in my camp, but I didn’t think you’d be this stupid,” Siwang mused aloud.

“Let her go,” said Yexue, his voice stern and cold. The tone of a man whose patience was on its last thread.

“Or what? Or you will attack?” Siwang cast a glance behind Yexue. “You are nothing without your hellish creatures.” He raised his hands, and the army behind him shifted into their battle formation.

Yexue’s lips tightened into a scowl. “I don’t want to kill you. She would never forgive me if I did. This is your last chance. We can end this the easy way, or the hard way. But be warned: if we do it the hard way, I will takeeverythingfrom you. Your name, your honor, your empire, and all that rotten pride. The only thing I’ll leave you with will be a pitiful life in chains, as a dog at my feet. Is that what you want?”

Siwang laughed at this. “I am not going to be the one who loses everything.” Then, at a wave of his hand, his men charged.

Yexue grimaced but drew his sword when Siwang drew his. “You should have listened to her,” Yexue whispered, and I braced for the vision to shift into a clash of swords, the spray of blood, and that never-ending symphony of bone-splintering screams, a sound that haunted me long after I woke from the nightmares.

It never came, because before the two armies could clash, Yexue threw his sword across the field, and it pierced straight through Siwang’s throat. So fast that no one had the chance to scream before Siwang’s headless body fell off his horse with a stomach-turningthud.

“No!” I jerked awake, panting and covered in sweat.