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CHAPTER FIVE

T he vampires noticed the seer was gone right away—apparently the old woman didn’t often leave on her own during the night. I watched them search for her. At first, they were irritated. My Obitraen was poor, but I could grasp fragments—profanities cursing that the old woman had been so absentminded. They thought she’d wandered away and was just late returning.

Eventually, he came out.

If the others were irritated by her absence, he was outright furious. When he emerged, all the others went silent. He demanded that they search for her, immediately, and not stop until she was found.

They did. A night passed.

I waited another night. Another. The search continued. The conqueror’s burst of fury faded to a constant simmer, obvious even from my distant vantage point, radiating from his presence like steam off hot coals.

Days passed. They were growing anxious. They needed to move on. But he didn’t want to go without her. I watched him snarl commands at his men every night, every few hours, when their search came up fruitless. But everyone knew, by now, that the seer was not coming back.

This, I decided, was the perfect level of desperation.

There was a town not far from here—or maybe “town” was a generous word. It was more like a little collection of trading posts and buildings. A single inn, a few marketplace stalls, a watering hole. At nightfall, I went there, ordered a drink, and waited.

Eventually, as I knew they would, the vampires showed up. Two of them—foot soldiers, it looked like. They came asking the businessmen about their seer, if she had passed through.

I sat there and sipped my wine, in my highly visible seat, right at the edge of the street.

Secretly, I was enjoying the wine. We didn’t often have it at the Keep, considering what it did to the senses. It was what a typical traveler would be expected to be drinking, though, so it was what I drank as well. I took only the tiniest sips, barely allowing it to touch my tongue.

The barkeep was not being cooperative, which the soldiers did not appreciate. After a heated exchange that went nowhere, they released him, and he staggered back against the wall with a gasping breath. They looked at each other—I could sense their mutual frustration, and even more powerful, their dread as to what they would find when they returned to camp empty-handed.

And then I felt their eyes on me.

I took another sip of wine, seemingly oblivious to them. But I didn’t move. Didn’t shy away from their gaze. I let them stare right at me—me, and my blindfold, and my dress that looked so perfectly befitting a seer of Acaeja.

Remember me, soldiers, I thought, waiting to smile to myself until they were gone.

Most of the time, my unusual appearance made things more difficult. I was, of course, happy to offer my goddess my eyes. Over the years, she’s taken my little finger on my left hand, too, and etched several scars into the skin of my abdomen. All gifts that I gave her freely, and it was an honor to allow my reverence for Acaeja to mark my flesh so permanently. There’s a strange sort of kinship in it, too, among my Sisters and I—we all turned ourselves into something foreign to the outside world, forever branded as Arachessen.

From a logistical perspective, though, sometimes being so prominently marked… had its challenges. We stood out. It was difficult to maintain any kind of disguise. The eyes, after all, usually gave it away quickly.

So, it was a nice change of pace that this time, my appearance worked in my favor. From the moment those Bloodborn soldiers saw me, they knew exactly what I was.

All I had to do was wait for them to come back for me.

I got myself a room in the inn that was the least secure place I could possibly choose—right in the front, with big windows that I left uncovered. The innkeeper didn’t even try to stop my would-be captor. I didn’t blame him for that. Some misguided attempt at noble chivalry wouldn’t be worth laying down his life.

The vampire didn’t knock before forcing open my door. Whatever he did to it made the rickety piece of wood fly open with a BANG , the iron knob gouging the plaster of the wall. If that was brute strength alone, I was almost impressed.

He stood in the doorway. I recognized him as one of the soldiers who had seen me the night before. He was stocky and broad, with pale skin and shaggy ash-blond hair, and a neat, trimmed beard. He wore the uniform of the Bloodborn soldiers—it had probably been a fine jacket once, dark red and double-breasted with silver buttons, but it was a bit worse for wear these days.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. His voice was deep and heavily accented. It echoed the same weary exhaustion I felt in his presence—spurred, I’m sure, from days of fruitless searching.

I didn’t move. “I—excuse me? What are you doing here?”

My voice notched up an octave, emphasizing the depths of my shock.

“You’ll come with me,” he said again. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Up to you.”

I rose, staggering a little, pressing myself against the wall like I was truly terrified of the man before me.

“I—I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He heaved a dramatic sigh. Then he crossed the room in two strides and grabbed my arms .

Immediately, I struggled. Not too hard, of course. Not as hard as I could. Just enough to make it convincing. “Get your hands off me!”

He didn’t, predictably. Instead, he dragged me across the room. Even though all of this was going exactly as I’d hoped it would, my heartbeat quickened despite myself when my captor flashed a smile at me and revealed two sharp fangs—so sharp I could practically feel it through the threads. A sudden spike of claustrophobic fear wrenched through me, reminding me far too much of decades ago, and I had to stop myself from succumbing to the instinct to slip his grasp.

Instead, I flailed like a fish on a line and let him drag me.

“Let me go!” I demanded. “Get your hands off me! Let me go! ”

For effect, I managed to free one of my hands, then grabbed the metal candle holder from the bedside table, and swung it across his face.

He spat a string of Obitraen curses. His face darkened. I’d opened a gash over his cheek, which now dripped black blood. He glared at me.

“You’re trouble,” he muttered. “You’re not worth any of this.”

Then, without hesitation, he held me tight with one arm, used the other to withdraw a dagger from his belt, and opened a long slice down my forearm.

I hissed in pain, stunned. At first I was confused—if his intention was to either subdue me or kill me, this made no sense. But moments later, as blood bubbled to the surface of the wound and dripped down my skin, I realized:

The vampires of the House of Blood used blood magic.

A slow burning sensation started at the wound, then intensified, slowly, slowly, until it left my teeth grinding and my breathing shaky. The vampire lifted his hand, and without my permission, my arm jerked closer to him—a genuinely disconcerting sensation, like my muscles were no longer under my control.

Then he flicked his fingers up, and suddenly my face was hot, and my head felt like it was splitting in two.

I had trained through worse pain than this. Experienced worse. But this—the feeling that my body was turning against itself?—

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“That’s enough,” my captor said, annoyed, as I slumped back into his arms, and everything went dark.