CHAPTER5
I swingthe sickle up and toward those haunted, horrible eyes. One jab is all it would take to end this. My strike nearly connects with sagging flesh when the vampire collapses into nothing more than mist. I fall through the dissipating shadows, bracing myself.
There’s a whisper of movement. I can feel his essence re-condensing with a whorl of shadow and blood magic. Mist gathers and the vampire lord emerges.
“You are an abomination,” he snarls.
I say nothing in reply, lunging forward to close the gap. The vampire dissolves again. My senses tingle and the hair on my right arm raises. The vampire lord materializing feels like the air right before a lightning strike. Shadowy haze collects and his red cape billows around him as he reappears.
He grabs for me and I drop to a crouch. I twist the sickle in my hand, rotating it so that I can stab with a pull. I try for the small space behind his knee. The chainmail should end at his hips. Greaves end just below the knee. I know enough about making armor to know there should be a vulnerability here—my blade sinks in but doesn’t find flesh before he reaches for me.
I abandon my sickle, still wedged in his armor, to grab him by the shoulder and use his awkward positioning against him. We tumble on the cobblestone. My nails crack as I rip up a rock to smash against the lord’s temple. He reels back.
I scramble for my weapon, but am too late. A plate-covered greave steps on it and kicks it back, sliding the sickle into the muck of the swamp. I go to grab for my other sickle as the vampire lord reaches down for me, hand wide. He’s going for my neck. I twist away. Our eyes lock once more. Breathless.
“They have made you a monster.” Disapproval—hatred bleeds into his words. An emotion we share.
“If I must be a monster to kill one then so it shall be!” I leap up.
He’s faster. Angry black mist follows his movements and when he stops before me it radiates off of him, enveloping my face with unseen hands. The lord grabs me by the throat, slamming me into one of the crumbling walls. I grab with my outside arm for his hand, gripping over his thumb. In a swift movement, I’ve peeled his hand away.
Usually I would bring my knee to his stomach, but it would do little against his plate. Falling, off-balance again, we grapple, rolling across the ground. I swing for him, but he disarms me once more.
Blow for blow, we match each other. One strike after the next, neither of us can seem to land much more than grazing hits. My knuckles meet the hard cobblestone, cracking and splitting as he dodges a punch, rolling me off of him and pinning me down with both hands.
The gnarled, living corpse of the vampire lord hangs over me. The bright red moon frames his haunted face as he stares down with those burning, unnatural eyes—all black save for the bright, yellow irises.
“You’re a truly tenacious beast,” he growls, the words spoken around those razor-sharp fangs. His mouth is not like a normal vampire’s. Most of his teeth are humanlike. Only his canines are elongated.
My mind races as I try to think of a way to escape his hold. The time is drawing near. I can feel it. He will take me into his arms and will drink from me until I am dry. Then, he will use my face to infiltrate Hunter’s Hamlet.
Mother, forgive me. I don’t even have a collar to stop it.
“But, damn it all, Callos was right. You will serve for what we need,” he proclaims.
Before I can process what he’s said, mist envelops us.
I inhale and choke, sputtering, coughing. It tears at my lungs, rips through my veins and threatens to explode out my flesh. I am undone and remade in a blink.
We are no longer in the ruins, but back on the main road of the marsh. Are we closer to or farther from town? I barely have time to wonder before I am ripped apart again. My ears pop, the night collapses on me, condensed by magic. I am nothing more than a thought in a void.
Red light once more. We’re elsewhere again. We stand on the crest of a foothill, the fogs of the marshes thinning. It swirls around us like an ocean. We must be at the highest point in the Fade Marshes. Far, far in the distance is a lonely point of light. It is Hunter’s Hamlet, made small by how far we are. Everything I’ve ever known, every comfort I’ve ever had or scrap of hope I could even dream of, is being swept away as I’m pulled farther and farther by this monster.
Yet again, just as I catch my bearings, we move. I grit my teeth to keep myself from letting out a shout. Every time he drags me through space with him is more painful than the last. Every time I am more winded. Living magic surrounds me, an endless tunnel of night. We pass by faintly glowing stone markers that look like a graveyard before it all becomes too much.
I press my eyes closed. The air shifts and I inhale sharply. The lord glances back as we materialize at the foot of a mountain I have never seen.
Where are mountains?I have never heard any of the hunters speak of mountains. I spin, looking behind me. A splintered coast dots a tempest sea. Waves crash foam against jagged rocks that dot between islands like stepping stones. Ocean spray mingles with the low clouds that carve against the horizon, blocking everything beyond from view.
I’m at the sea. Finally, at long last…and it’s because of this monster.
A lonely, crumbling bridge stretches across the waters, suspended on those islands, connecting the wall of magic smoke to a heavy portcullis blocking the tunnel before me.
The walls of Hunter’s Hamlet extend toward the sea to keep the vampires in their lands. Seeing this ocean has only ever been a dream—now turned into a nightmare. I look back up to the mountain, outlined by a crimson moon that hangs low.
“We’re not far now,” he murmurs, almost reassuringly. The tone is a jarring contrast to the monster I have been fighting.
Not far from what?I’m reeling. It doesn’t matter where I am. I have to—
