Page 1 of Sweet Venom Of Time (Blade of Shadows #6)

Chapter One

AMIR

B eneath the cloak of night, the rhythmic pounding of hooves against the hardened earth echoed like a haunting melody in my mind.

The world had become a shadow-draped tapestry—fields lying dormant, villages silent, their shapes fading into the gloom.

My men had gathered quickly, and beside me rode my steadfast companion, Moon Lee.

We charged forward with unwavering determination, our hearts united by a single purpose—the utter annihilation of our enemy—the Timehunters.

Since I had razed Mathias’ school of darkness and cast aside the vile demon Balthazar, I had become the blade of Lazarus’ will—his wrath given human form.

My men and I were more than exiles of Solaris; we were executioners, hunting Timehunters with the cold precision of a storm, wiping their taint from history.

We had been relentless. We had scorched the Timehunter society of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, dismantled their stronghold in the Russian Empire, and shattered their influence in the Habsburg Monarchy.

The Kingdom of Prussia had fallen at our hands; its Eastern Realm societies were ruined, and every trace of their corruption was purged brutally.

Now, our sights were set upon France.

“France is next,” I declared, my voice cutting through the night like the edge of a blade. My men, their silhouettes merging with the darkness, nodded in silent agreement.

Ahead, the city lights of Paris shimmered like stars scattered across the earth, a beacon of civilization and power.

Gone were the days of the modest Parisi settlement and the subdued Lutetia of Rome’s conquest. Now, it was a city reborn, the crowning jewel of the Age of Enlightenment, where philosophers and scientists sculpted the world with ideas as intricate as the opulent architecture that clawed toward the heavens.

Yet beneath that splendor lurked the rot of unchecked ambition—narrow streets choked with refuse, the air thick with the stench of unwashed bodies and festering waste.

Overcrowded tenements pressed against the city’s gilded heart, a stark reminder that enlightenment did not banish squalor, only masked it.

And within this paradox, hidden among the grand avenues and labyrinthine alleyways, lay our quarry—the Timehunters of France.

“Le Manoir de la Rivière, 14 Rue des Cygnes, ?le Saint-Louis.” The address was carved into my memory, another mark in a long ledger of doomed sanctuaries.

?le Saint-Louis, a bastion of affluence amidst the city’s decay, harbored the festering core of Timehunter influence.

The grand townhouses lining its quiet streets stood as monuments to their wealth, their facades gleaming with self-importance, oblivious to the ruin we carried in our wake.

“Prepare yourselves,” I commanded, my voice low but tinged with finality. Another society would fall tonight. Another stain on the world would be wiped clean.

We moved like shadows, slipping through the silent streets, the hush of our advance mirroring the tension thrumming in my veins.

The moon, a sliver of silver in the void, cast just enough light to glint off the steel at our sides.

I pulled the mask over my face with muscle memory—The Black Wraith made flesh.

This was more than mere cloth. It was bone. Vengeance sculpted into a grin.

The surface was a dead white, fractured with fine cracks like veins of old rage. Each line told a story—every failure, every betrayal etched into its design. The eye sockets were deep, hollow voids that swallowed light and mercy alike. No reflection, no soul—just silence.

The nasal bridge was narrow and cruel, and the cheekbones jutted out like knives. The jaw, hinged and hidden, moved if I needed it to—but mostly, I didn’t. I let the mask speak for me. And when I did open it, the sound that came through wasn’t a voice anymore. It was a ghost. A weapon.

The grin—always there, and cruel—was the final insult. Jagged teeth curled upward in a frozen sneer, as if daring the world to try and soften me.

It wasn’t just a disguise.

It was who I became when the man inside wasn’t enough.

With the mask on, there was no Amir. No doubt. No mercy.

To the Timehunters, I was not just a man. I was an omen—a harbinger of reckoning.

Only the Wraith.

The monster they whispered about in firelit corners.

The shadow they prayed never turned its gaze their way.

And tonight…

They would remember why.

Le Manoir de la Rivière loomed before us; its grandeur muted beneath the velvet shroud of night.

Its towering facade, statuesque and imposing, should have pulsed with life—the hum of conversation, the distant strains of music, the flicker of candlelit debauchery behind gilded windows.

But tonight, there was only silence. No light.

No revelry. Just the hollow stillness of something unnatural.

“Something is wrong.” The words slipped from my lips, barely a whisper—yet they fractured the quiet with chilling finality.

We dismounted, every movement measured, every breath controlled.

The mist creeping in from the Seine curled around our steeds, shrouding them in eerie stillness.

The absence of movement—the lack of servants, of watchful eyes behind drawn curtains—unnerved the most hardened among us.

The manor should have been alive with the murmurs of a clandestine gathering.

Instead, it stood cold and waiting, like a beast already feasted.

The air itself seemed to tighten around us.

Something was waiting inside.

And it knew we were coming.

I approached the manor’s entrance, my fingers resting lightly on the hilt of my weapon, senses honed to the quiet language of deceit.

Each step carried the weight of anticipation, the air thick with unspoken dread.

Had we been expected? Or had some other fate already claimed the souls within this accursed place?

The Timehunters never shied away from their excesses.

Their feasts of flesh and indulgence were not mere revelry but a declaration of dominance—a grotesque display of power, a celebration of the lives they twisted and discarded.

And yet, where the air should have thrummed with drunken laughter and debauched moans, there was only silence—a void where their wickedness should have flourished.

“Stay alert.” The command left my lips like tempered steel, threading through my men, binding us with the weight of our purpose. We had come to purge. But first, we would unearth the truth lurking behind the manor’s silent facade.

Our gazes met in fleeting exchanges, unease settling over us like a shroud.

The hush was oppressive, broken only by the muted clink of weapons and the distant echo of our boots against the uneven cobblestone.

At the manor’s grand entrance, I lifted the lion-head knocker, its cold brass biting against my skin.

The heavy door shuddered as I let it fall—a single, resonant thud.

The door swung open with a slow, reluctant squeal.

And what lay beyond was not revelry but torment.

From within came sounds not of whispered pleasures but of suffering. Groans of anguish seeped through the darkness, chilling my blood.

We moved forward, steps cautious, the air thickening with something unseen—something wrong.

The scent of rot and a deeper, hidden malevolence clung to the walls, weaving into the air.

Ahead the ballroom doors stood, their gilded edges gleaming in the dim light.

I pressed my palm against them, pushing just enough to part the gap, enough to see.

And what I revealed turned my blood to ice.

Bodies lay strewn across the marbled floor, not in the careless abandon of excess but in the convulsions of agony. Flesh blistered and peeled, dissolving like wax held too close to a flame, pooling into mangled remnants of what had once been dancers and courtiers.

“Stay here.” The order was barely a whisper, yet it carried the weight of command. My men did not protest.

Alone, I stepped through the threshold.

The stench of decay rushed to meet me, thick and cloying, coating my throat with the taste of something vile. My boots met the floor with a sickening stick, the residue of ruined flesh grasping at the soles.

What had once been a chamber of opulence was now a grotesque tapestry of suffering.

Boils marred faces frozen in expressions of unholy agony, their eyes wide with silent screams. Limbs twisted at unnatural angles like their very bones had turned against them.

And through it all, the air pulsed with a sound that made my skin crawl—the rasping, wet gasps of the dying, each breath a futile plea for salvation that would never come.

I stood amidst the carnage; my heart hardened against compassion, yet my mind reeled. This was my duty—my purpose—to be the blade that severed the plague of the Timehunters from existence. But someone, or something, had already claimed that finality before me.

Who else possessed the knowledge of such devastation? Who else harbored the will to execute it?

“Who has done this?” My voice, muffled beneath the Black Wraith’s mask, was a whisper of bewilderment.

“Who has usurped my role as harbinger?” There was no pride in the question, only the cold realization that my vendetta had grown more complicated.

The path of vengeance had veered into unfamiliar shadows.

Stepping carefully over the misshapen remains of the Timehunters—flesh sloughed from bone, limbs frozen in nightmarish contortions—I moved toward one of the dying, slumped against the wall. His breath rattled, and each rise and fall of his chest was a battle against the inevitable.

I knelt beside him, my gaze locking onto his pain-clouded eyes.

“Who did this?” The demand left my lips in a controlled murmur despite the chaos that thickened the air around us.

The dying man’s lips cracked apart, a whisper like brittle parchment escaping.

“A vat… of smoke,” he croaked. “Nobody saw… It filled the room, and then… darkness. The poison was?—”

His head lolled. Silence swallowed the rest. He would speak no more.

A jolt of something primal shot through me—terror, nausea, a dread that curled through my veins like ice. The macabre distortions, the bodies dissolving like wax under a flame… I knew this work. This was no earthly poison.

This was something far worse.

The only place I had seen alchemy of such unnatural malevolence was Solaris.

A shiver coiled down my spine—not from fear but understanding. Someone else possessed knowledge of those ancient mysteries. Someone else had brought that power into this world.

But who?

“Amir?” The voice of one of my men interrupted my thoughts, laced with quiet unease.

I exhaled slowly, my fists clenching at my sides. The hunt had just changed.

Turning, I found them framed in the doorway, black garb stark against the dim light, their expressions taut with trepidation.

Their loyalty was unwavering, yet they could sense the wrongness of what lay before us.

One of them staggered forward, dropped to his knees, and retched.

When he had emptied his gut, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, cheeks flushed with both revulsion and shame.

I cast him a fleeting look of sympathy before addressing the five of them.

“Do you want the good news or the bad?”

A beat of silence. Then one of them answered. “The good.”

I nodded. “The good news is that someone took care of our job for us.” The words felt hollow as I spoke them, my mind churning with questions that had no answers. “The bad news is we don’t know who did this.”

My gaze shifted past them, just in time to catch a flicker of movement in the hallway—a shadow, clad in black garb eerily identical to mine, a mask that mirrored my own.

A phantom. A reflection. Or another harbinger of doom.

“Get out of here.” My command came swiftly, clipped. I gestured toward the macabre ruin before us. “Burn it. End their suffering. I will return.”

They hesitated only for a breath, then moved to obey.

Their masks slipped into place, the faceless executioners they had been trained to be.

The air grew thick with the scent of oil and smoke as they set to work while I stepped away from the dying embers of our mission and toward something far more dangerous.

The hunt was not over. It had merely veered into unknown terrain.

I pursued the enigmatic figure down the dimly lit corridor, my boots whispering against the polished marble. The manor’s grandeur loomed around us, a mockery of civility against the darkness we both carried—me, the hunter of shadows, him, a phantom clad in the same guise.

Then, without breaking stride, he moved. A hand emerged from his cloak, swiftly uncapping a vial. He flung its contents behind him, and in an instant, the air thickened with a rolling, choking vapor.

The moment it touched my lungs, I knew.

Poison. The kind only known in Solaris.

It seared like fire, scorching through my veins, setting every muscle ablaze. I staggered, doubling over as my body rebelled against itself—bones twisting, muscles coiling like serpents beneath my skin.

When I looked up, my quarry had vanished, swallowed by the darkness we both wielded.

The only proof he had ever been there was the lingering black cloud curling in the space where he had stood.

And the agony that was tearing me apart from the inside.

“Can’t… breathe…” The words scraped from my throat, raw and ragged, as I clawed at the stone floor. My limbs warped, grotesquely reshaped, betraying their human form. Every nerve blistered, and every muscle rebelled.

Then, from somewhere beyond my spiraling senses, a voice bellowed?—

“Pasha Hassan!”

My men. They had fulfilled my command and torched the manor and its wretched inhabitants to the ground. Now, they had returned to find their master undone.

“Can’t… breathe…” I grated again as they came closer, their faces blurring into a shifting haze of shadow and firelight. Every word felt like a battle waged against the poison devouring me from within. “This has no cure… Made on Solaris.”

No cure. Only death.

They wasted no time. Strong hands gripped me, dragging me from the ruins of that cursed place. The cool night air hit my sweltering skin like ice, but it was a hollow relief against the torment searing through my veins.

“Get him to Lazarus immediately! We return to Anatolia at once!” The urgency in their voices was ironclad, an order carried by desperation.

Through the haze, through the writhing agony, one thought prevailed, sharp and insidious?—

Who was this man?

And how did he possess a poison that should not exist outside Solaris?