Page 86 of Loreblood

With the wind, I was just able to hear him. My eyebrows joined my hairline. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Garroway cleared his throat. “Just keep walking.”

“You never answered my question. Where are you taking me?”

“Somewhere safe. For now.”

For now?I didn’t like the sound of that. I also understood the sentiment—nowhere in this world was safe forever, or even for very long.

I had been surrounded by strangers my whole life, always snatched away and dumped into a new group of them. In my nineteen years, I’d yet to find a place called home.

And now Garroway Kuffich, another stranger, was leading me to another strange, alien place.

I daresay I’ll never find my lot in this life, this world.

It was a sobering thought.

Even more sobering, and somewhat alarming, was the fact a grayskin who had only ever shown me small kindnesses had saved my life. Vampires and half-vampires were supposed to be monsters—I’d grown up knowing that, learning that, and everything I’d seen so far had proven that universal truth.

So what isthisone’s scheme? Because surely Garroway has one. They all do. Every man I’ve ever fucking met has had a devious plot of some kind.

The thought brought anger to my bones. It reminded me of Baylen Sallow, Dimmon Plank—both of whom I’d seen tonight, only one of whom I’d managed to kill. And not the one I had wanted to kill, either.

The biggest culprit of them all was still out there.The man who stole any semblance of innocence I still had, completely and absolutely.

Lukain’s death also made me feel odd. I figured I was in a state of shock because I hadn’t felt any bone-crushing weight at the sight of him lying dead on the ground.

I wanted so badly to believe he had been protecting mine, Rirth’s, and Culiar’s escape. That, at the very end, he had given himself for the Grimsons he raised like his own children.

But I couldn’t be sure. And now I’d never know because he was gone. It angered me more than saddened me.

I couldn’t forget Lukain Pierken had also impaled a young boy right in front of my eyes as a youngling. He had allowed me the “honor” of ending the rapist Peltos to get out my aggression and rage. He had continually reminded us he was the master and we were the slaves.

Would a man like him really have given himself up to protect his property? Can compassion truly strike at a dire time like that?

There was the small mystery of him crashing through the window of the second story, too. I had no idea what that was about or why Lord Ashfen had been chasing him.More questions that need answers I’ll never get.

Garroway’s words rang out in my head.“I’m assuming Master Lukain did something he was not supposed to. Angered the wrong vampire.”

It was hard to deny the truth of those statements.

As we trudged closer to Olhav in silence, the memory that kept returning to me and weighing me down was the single night of softness and tenderness I had shared with Master Lukain.

I blinked at Garroway in front of me, his cloak fluttering in the wind as he walked.The same night I fought this man and lost. The night I should have died.

Lukain had shown me pleasures of the flesh for the first and only time. I’d never known anything like that, before or since. We drank from each other—me to heal, him to excite and enhance our senses as we mated.

And then it was over. Like a dream that never happened, because Lukain never called to me again.

It would always vex me—his cold indifference after that night. It was the source of bad dreams and constant notions of “what if.”

Garroway and I crested over a grassy hillock. The man stopped and crossed his arms. We stared down at Olhav in the valley of the Peaks. It was a sprawling metropolis easily the size of Nuhav, possibly bigger. It was hard to tell how large the city truly was because many of the buildings were unlike any I’d seen before.

They glittered. The entire city did. The valley was filled with skyrises—as we called them in Nuhav—that stretched up to the heavens and nearly touched the clouds themselves. Ten- and twenty-story structures of opulence and stained glass that reflected the fairylights of the city. The buildings dwarfed anything I’d seen from my flat, dreary existence in Nuhav below.

The structures were mostly vertically inclined. I was used to squat, short structures built of brick or stone or wood. These looked made from glass or iron, with winding spires and castle-like fortresses interspersed among the tall constructions.

The city was reflective at night from the moon, the copious torchlights, the fairylight lanterns. I wondered if it retained this brilliance during the day.