Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

Vale had fought them.

The house was bleeding. Blood dripped down the white stone face, pouring from a broken window on the second story, where a limp body hung draped over broken glass, a sword dangling from his motionless grip.

Blood painted the front steps of the entryway—smears of it, pools. Handprints on the door, on the handles. Strokes of it ran in rivulets down the pathway, collecting in the spaces between the brick pavers. It sank into the rose bushes. Into the grass.

Was it horrible that I wasn’t horrified? Was it horrible that I was relieved?

Because it was all red blood—human blood. Blood that belonged to the lifeless bodies strewn around the property. So many I couldn’t count them. A massacre had happened here.

Farrow had told me that Thomassen had come with two dozen men. Surely few of them remained.

Maybe Vale had escaped. Maybe he…

But then, as my horse slowed to a trot beyond the gates, I saw it: the black blood mixed in with all that red. Smears in the grass, along the path. More of it down the path to the back of the house.

Too much of it.

I kicked my horse into a run toward the back of the house, ignoring Farrow’s calls after me.

And when I saw him, my heart sank and leapt at the same time.

For some reason, the phrase that flew through my mind was, Vale.

My Vale.

Only a handful of men remained alive, but Vale was so injured that he wasn’t fighting anymore. They had dragged him outside. He was on his knees in the garden, white and red flower petals around him. His head was bowed, black hair covering his face. His wings were out, the white feathers gorgeous in the daylight sun—gruesome contrast to the spatters of black blood and the open burn sores spreading across them.

He looked up as I approached, revealing a face mottled with blackened burns.

His eyes widened.

I didn’t even let my horse stop before I was dismounting, running, running—

I threw myself over Vale, tumbling to my knees before Thomassen.

“Stop! Enough!”

The world stopped. The priest, and the four men behind him, leaned back a little, like they had to take a moment to figure out if I was really here.

A rough touch folded around my wrist from behind. Concern. Restraint. It said so much.

“Mouse…” Vale rasped.

His voice sounded so hollow. It reminded me of Mina’s. Close to death.

I didn’t look at him, though I was so acutely aware of his form behind me, the faint warmth of his body where my back was only inches from him.

Instead I met Thomassen’s gaze and refused to relinquish it. The acolyte wasn’t injured, though blood smeared his robes. Had he stood back and let the others do all the fighting? Waited until they wore Vale down enough to step in and make the final blow?

“Stop this insanity,” I said.

His confusion fell away in favor of hatred again. He gripped his sword, eyes briefly falling to my axe—gods, did it even count as an axe? It was barely more than a hatchet—before returning to my face.

“Step away, child,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

“If you kill him, then you’re killing all of us.”

The priest scoffed, lip curling. “We should have done it the moment the plague began. Perhaps a sacrifice of one of the heretic goddess Nyaxia’s children would have been enough to end it. Maybe it would have been enough to appease Vitarus.”

I wanted to laugh at his foolishness. I wanted to scream at his ignorance.

“Why is it so difficult for you to understand that Vitarus doesn’t care about us?” I spat. “He has taken a thousand lives from us. Ten thousand. And that hasn’t been enough to appease him. Why would this one be any different?”

“You’re not a stupid girl,” the priest sneered. “A strange one, but not a stupid one. You know why. Because of what he is.” He jabbed his sword toward Vale. “Because of who he worships. Because of the goddess who created him. Look around you. How many of your brethren has he killed? And you expect us to let him live?”

I looked into the eyes of the men around him, and I didn’t see brethren. I saw people driven to ignorance and hatred. I saw people who were willing to kill whatever they didn’t understand just for a chance of a chance that it would help them.

Nothing would stop them from killing Vale.

They would happily kill me, the strange spinster woman that never had laughed at their jokes or indulged their mindless conversations, to get to him.

I liked solving problems. But I was now stuck in a conclusion decades in the making, helpless.

Behind me, Vale’s breaths were ragged and weak. I would have thought that he wasn’t even conscious, were it not for his grip on my wrist, still strong, even as his blood dripped down my hand.

“Please, Thomassen. Please. I—” My voice caught in my throat. Cracked. “I need him.”

The words tasted thick. Heavy. They seemed to sit in the air. I could feel their eyes on me, on Vale, on me again, the way my own often darted between pieces of an equation, and I didn’t like the answer they were drawing.

“He could be the cure to this,” I said, desperate.

Wrong thing.

Realization fell over Thomassen’s face. Realization, and then hatred.

“I defended you,” he snarled. “When they talked about you. About your father. About your family. I defended you, child, from horrors you don’t even understand. But I was wrong. You’ll only spread this further.”

He lifted his sword.

Everything went too slow and too fast at once.

Behind me, Vale tensed, pulling me back.

I yanked my hand from his grip, rising.

It was like I was outside my body, watching someone else lift that stupid little axe—watching someone else swing it. I was a scientist, not a soldier. My swing was clumsy, but I threw all the strength I had into it.

Hot blood spattered across my face.

Numb, I pulled the axe from Thomassen’s shoulder. I stumbled backwards a little—it was hard to get the blade from the flesh.

Shoulder. Not deadly. Try again.

I swung again, this time for the throat.

It’s an interesting sound that one makes when they’re drowning in their own blood. No scream, just a gargle and the empty hiss of air. Wet, weak death.

I had moved fast, for all my inexperience. It took a few seconds for the other men to realize what was happening. The priest staggered.

I felt a strange sensation. Something wet over my torso.

Pain, slow.

I looked down to see blood all over my shirt.

Commotion. Noise. It seemed very far away. I looked up and saw familiar sandy-fair hair, a wiry figure yanking a sword from one of the guards as the priest staggered.

The priest’s? Or…

I hit the ground hard as a grip from behind shoved me away—Vale. Vale’s movements were nothing like the graceful death I’d seen in the forest that night. No, these were lurching, desperate. Survival more than skill. Like a dying animal.

CRUNCH, and a head fell to the ground. One guard, before he could turn on Farrow.

He killed the second with his own sword, torso opened and bloodied over the grass.

Thomassen still stood, somehow… still stood, covered in blood, a dead man walking. Maybe his god helped him a bit, after all, because he somehow managed to turn—to—

“Vale!” I screamed.

Vale whirled around just in time. Thomassen’s sword went through his shoulder.

But Vale didn’t flinch.

A terrible damp crunch rang through the air. And when Thomassen’s body slumped to the ground, something red was clutched in Vale’s hand. It looked like a ball of blood, at first.

Then I realized, after a few seconds of dull blinking…

A heart.

Thunk, as Farrow’s sword fell to the grass.

Thump, as Vale let the heart drop beside it.

And then silence.

Birds chirped in the distance. A faint breeze rustled the tree leaves. The scent of spring was so overwhelming, it almost drowned out the scent of blood.

Nothing existed except for Vale and I, our gazes locked. For a long, breathless moment, I couldn’t look at anything except for his dark-gold eyes, staring at me through gore-streaked tendrils of hair, through smears of blood.

Then he collapsed.

I leapt to my feet, ignoring the pain of my own injuries, and ran to him. Farrow knelt beside him, too, and started to roll him over to look at his face, but I said, “No! The sun.”

Up close, the burns on Vale’s skin were stomach-turning. And gods, he was wounded… they hadn’t just come to kill him, they had come to torture him. Some of his clothing had been torn, clearly intended to expose more of his skin to the sun. A patchwork of wounds crisscrossed up his right arm, and the very tip of one wing had been cut—cut off? Maybe. It was hard to tell through all the blood.

“Help me,” I choked. “To the house. Out of the sun.”

I was only capable of assembling fractured handfuls of words at a time.

Farrow—gods bless him—did as I asked. If he was put off by being this close to a vampire, he didn’t show it. Together we dragged Vale up the steps to the back door, which led into the library—the very same room he had brought me to the first time I came here. Vale was incredibly heavy, even with both of us carrying him, and I was grateful that he appeared to be at least a little bit conscious, because he seemed to be trying to help us—albeit poorly. Still, we couldn’t hoist him onto one of the couches, and instead had to settle for laying him on the floor as gently as we could.

The wounds somehow looked even worse in here, but to my relief, they had stopped spreading once he was out of the sun.

But he wasn’t moving. He was only barely breathing.

“Lilith…” Farrow said quietly.

I looked up. He peered out the window, to the dead bodies lying in the yard. At first, I thought maybe he was sickened by what we’d just done—we’d killed, after all—but when he glanced back at me, it held something harder than guilt.

“An acolyte,” he murmured. “Vale killed an acolyte.”

The reality of what had just happened hit me.

Vale, a vampire, a child of Nyaxia, had just murdered a high-ranking devotee of Vitarus.

I had already been pushing my luck with my experimentations with vampire blood. I had been so careful at first to hide my work, to make sure I didn’t touch the blood long enough to attract the attention of a scorned god. And if a few vials of blood might have been enough to earn a god’s wrath…

…Imagine what the death of an acolyte could do.

Cold, cold dread fell over me. Some gods were fiercely protective of their acolytes. Others ignored them. Most, Vitarus included, fell somewhere in the middle, depending on their mood and your luck. He might not notice what had happened here. But if he did… few things were considered more insulting to a god than the murder of what they considered theirs—especially by someone touched by their greatest enemy.

My hands went numb, like all the blood had drained from my extremities.

“I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t mean to speak aloud. I always knew what to do. Always knew the next logical step. But right now, logic seemed so far away. There were so many problems, all so big. I couldn’t find the answers.

I turned to Farrow, wide-eyed, and swallowed a stab of guilt at the sight of him.

Farrow. Poor Farrow. I had barely looked at him before. He was covered in blood, too. One arm looked injured.

But his hand fell to my shoulder, giving it an encouraging squeeze.

“You will,” he said. “Just think.”

Farrow did always make me want to believe him, and that counted for something.

I drew in a breath, let it out, and stood.

“We need to burn the bodies.”

Maybe if we burned them fast, Vitarus would never know. Gods were fickle and flighty. They had a whole universe to pay attention to, after all. Maybe we’d gotten lucky, and this one hadn’t noticed us today.

But if we weren’t…

I looked down at myself. My blood-stained hands.

I’d make sure the blame would be mine. If Vale and I stayed away from town, I could pray that we would draw Vitarus’s attention, miles away from Adcova.

And if we only had a little bit of time before we attracted the attention of Vitarus, then we needed to use it.

“Here.” I shoved my bag into Farrow’s hands. “Take this back to town. The medicine in it…”

Did it work? Did I know for sure? It worked on the mice. Gods, I hoped it worked on…

I had to blink away Mina’s face, because the thought of her almost made me fall apart.

“It works,” I said. “Guard it. Don’t destroy it. Don’t let anything happen to it.”

Farrow’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure?”

Sometimes, those three words coming from someone else would be an admonishment. From Farrow, it was an actual question, spoken with the understanding that he would accept whatever answer I gave him.

I wasn’t sure. And I was a terrible liar. But I still replied, with as much confidence as I could muster, “Yes. I am.”

For decades, this town had thrown its faith blindly into gods that had done nothing for them but curse them. Now I’d give anything to cast that faith into those little glass vials.

“Go,” I said to Farrow. “Be quick. You don’t have much time.”

“What about him?”

Vale lay listless on the floor. Strange, how none of this—the dead bodies, the blood on my hands—terrified me as much as the sight of him in this state.

“I’ll take care of him. And the bodies.”

I heard all the judgment in Farrow’s silence.

“No arguing,” I said, before he could protest.

But it wasn’t Farrow that argued.

“Go.”

The voice that came from behind me sounded nothing like the deep, smooth sound that had greeted me when I first walked through these doors months ago. Still, my heart leapt to hear it.

Vale’s eyes were slitted, like he had to fight to keep them open.

“Go, mouse,” he rasped out.

No. The word was immediate, definitive. If there had been any shred of doubt within me, the sight of Vale, struggling to even speak, destroyed it. I would not leave him like this.

I forced a smirk. “I owe you roses,” I said. “We had a deal.”

The spasm of muscles around Vale’s mouth could barely be called a smile.

I led Farrow to the door before either of them could argue with me more. Farrow knew he couldn’t change my mind about this, either. Before he left, he reached out and took my hand. Squeezed it. I had to close my eyes. The emotion on his face made me uncomfortable.

“Thank you.” My voice was strangled and choked.

“Good luck, Lilith,” he said, in a tone that sounded a lot like a goodbye.