Page 113 of Incoronate
There were more of them than I had anticipated. Figures moved along the perimeter. Silhouettes passed between structures, unhurried, going about whatever passed for daily life in a place like this.
“There’s too many of them. I think we should turn around.”
“Too late,” said Trace, ticking his chin toward the entrance.
Two figures had already broken away from the entrance of the settlement and were walking toward us with the unhurried purposefulness of people who had done this before. As though they weren’t even half as surprised to see us as we were to see them.
Well, so much for hauling ass out of here.
I watched them as they closed the distance, their gait cautious and controlled. For a brief instant, I felt relieved because I knew ferals wouldn’t have walked like that. Ferals would have closed the gap in seconds, all instinct and momentum, no calculation behind it. These two walked like they were thinking about where they were going. Like cognition was still something they had access to.
“At least they’re not ferals,” I muttered quietly, more to myself than to them as my arms wrapped around my waist,my fingers pressing against the Sword of Angelus still tucked at my side.
The taller of the two was broad-shouldered and lean, his posture rigid in a way that read as discipline rather than tension. The shorter one moved half a step behind, though it felt less like deference than formation. Like they’d done this enough times to have developed a system.
I knew what they were before they reached us. It moved through me the way it always did, that specific, wordless awareness my Slayer blood carried like a frequency, a pull in the chest that had nothing to do with instinct and everything to do with what I was. Revenants. Both of them. And if I could feel them, I already knew they could feel me right back. The taller one’s eyes confirmed it, bleeding to black as the distance between us closed to a few feet.
The shorter one stepped forward. He appeared more in control of himself, his expression measured where the other’s had slipped. His hair was shaved close on the sides and left longer on top, tied back in a thin, dark strip. A narrow piece of bone pierced cleanly through his septum, polished smooth and pale against the red of the sky behind him. His eyes were sharp. Assessing. Intelligent.
He looked at us without expression. “State your House.”
My eyes moved over them as he spoke. Their clothing was scraps of mismatched fabric that might once have been coats, shirts, trousers, faded beyond color and bleached into variations of rust and ash by whatever light existed here. The cuts were uneven, sleeves shortened and resewn, hems reinforced with crude stitching that looked practical rather than decorative. Over that, pieces of dark metal had been fastened strategically. Not full plates, but segments. Bracers along the forearms. Shoulder guards hammered thin andriveted into place. Small, curved plates stitched or wired across their chests like reinforcement rather than armor.
Between the layers, binding everything together, were strips of something that made my stomach tighten when I looked at it too closely. It wasn’t cloth or leather. It had a pale, stretched quality to it, faintly translucent in the red light, stitched along the seams and moving naturally with them when they moved.
I looked away.
“House?” asked Dominic, his tone carrying that familiar brand of polite curiosity he used when he wanted information without giving any away.
The two men exchanged a look. “First day in Sanguinarium?”
“Something like that,” said Trace, his dimples pressing in as a muscle flexed in his jaw.
The shorter one studied him for a moment with the patience of someone who had learned that silence was a more reliable tool than questions. “You came through together?”
“We did,” answered Dominic.
“Voluntarily?”
What a strange question.
“Not especially,” answered Dominic, giving nothing else away.
Another look passed between them, quick and unreadable. The taller one’s eyes had bled back to something closer to normal, though they kept drifting, almost involuntarily, to me. Not to my face. Slightly lower. To the pulse at my throat. I resisted the urge to pull my collar up.
“How long have you been out in the open?” asked the shorter one.
“A little over an hour,” said Trace, his tone even.
“Interesting. Most things that come through the seam don’t last long out in the open.” His eyes moved to me again, just briefly. “Especially not things that bleed.”
My pulse ticked up despite myself. It wasn’t a threat. Not a direct one anyway. It was more a statement of fact about how things worked around here, casually shared by someone who didn’t particularly care whether you were comfortable receiving it or not.
I straightened. “Well, we seemed to manage just fine.”
“You got lucky,” he corrected, without any emphasis. “Those aren’t the same thing here.”
I held his gaze and said nothing, which seemed to satisfy him more than a response would have.
