Page 25 of Eternal Ruin

You have no choice,a voice whispered. And he hated having no choice.

His phone buzzed, cleaving his thoughts. A message from Arin. Deadly as a black thorn. The vampire that had helped turn him.

Professor Andreyas kept the three rogues quite busy, but Arin must finally be ready to talk. Finally, he could start on his plans.

Kidan was watching him curiously as he pocketed his phone.

“I’ll find the blade artifact,” he told her. “You get the mask.”

“So you’re leaving?” Something else lurked in her voice but he couldn’t decipher what.

“Yes, I’ll be back soon.”

“And then? After we get the artifacts?”

He recalled her sleeping in the hallway, trying to read pages of the Abyssi myth he’d destroyed. Susenyos looked to the ominous beast that was Adane House and back to the human girl that could bring it to heel.

“One of us will surrender to the other,” he said.

And Susenyos would be damned before he did such a thing.

11.

SUSENYOS

Susenyos would not face Arin Tawendyo unarmed.

He stood outside the red sandstone buildings of the Southern Sost, preparing to gather his weapons. It was a beautiful piece of architecture, every inch polished and sparkling, unlike Adane House, which always seemed to be graced by a layer of dust. Usually, Susenyos enjoyed the opulence and danger of the Sost. Loved the sounds of pleasure snaking through the corridors, the smell of sweetened copper lurking from the blood courting room. Now he felt unsettled.

He tried to clear from his thoughts the soft brown eyes that reminded him of the desert at twilight as he traveled the gilded halls of the Southern Sost. But Kidan’s touch lingered on his skin, her blood calling to him. And it wasn’t just hunger gnawing at him.

Susenyos was having visions of black rot inside Adane House.

It was that name.

The three scars gouged into his lower back sent a wave of pain along his spine.

Lusidio.

He had gone decades without hearing it. Then it had come from her lips, the question in her gaze, too curious and innocent, crashing the two worlds he’d hoped would never meet. Kidan belonged in Uxlay, in safety. The greatest threat he hoped she’d face was murderous humans.

Let her leave Lusidio to him, the hellish nightmare crafted for the soulless. Susenyos would be ready this time. He wouldn’t flinch or hesitate. He’d get hispeople back and arm himself with the artifacts for the war on the horizon. And only his best soldier could help him do both.

Arin.

His skin grew alive and warm just thinking about reuniting with his people. Everything was within his reach. It was the same feeling he had the night before his coronation, the world ready for the taking, teeming with promise.

The Nefrasi—they were ruthless, intelligent, but most of all,hispeople. Not Samson’s.

The idea would be laughable if he wasn’t so infuriated.

Susenyos categorized them into three groups—his warriors, strategists, and lovers. His warriors fought, his lovers made their bellies warm, and his strategists discerned which paths to take, which to avoid, how to make money flow, and it was their collective thinking that had led them to discover the blade artifact in the sea of the Atlantic, near a small island called Cuckoo.

When he’d had to choose whom to turn into a vampire, locked in his father’s throne room in the cool mountain air of Gojam, Arin instructed him to make the list.

“Only three hundred. No more,” she’d said, striking as a blade.

Susenyos had wanted them all. The gardener he greeted every day of his youth on the way to reading lessons, his friends and their families, his lion master, his friend Samson. Why not save them all from death?