Promise of Wrath (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 6) (15 page)

“Not your fault. No one expected her to come
back
to the city. She said she’d brought a gift.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t give me anything. And she came back here to give me a warning from your ex-husband. Apparently I’m to be used as a cautionary tale for those who would oppose him and his group. I don’t plan on letting that happen.”

“Hellequin!” a soldier shouted as he sprinted up the street toward me. “Hellequin!”

“Over here,” I called with a wave of my arm. “What’s happened?”

He paused and took a deep breath. “Nothing, everyone is fine. Better than fine, actually.”

Irkalla and I shared a confused expression.

“The woman, Isabel. They found her outside the city gate. She’s alive, but asleep, or something.”

We followed the soldier back through the city to the building where I’d first met Isabel when arriving in the city.

I entered the building alone, but instead of going up, I followed a set of stairs down into a room beneath the earth. A large cell had been built at the far end. Runes had been carved into the stone where the bars had been set.

“Nice cell,” I said to Nanshe and the two guards, none of whom were facing me.

All three turned around, and I got my first glimpse of Isabel, who was alone in the cell, sleeping. Her hair had been pulled up and tied on top of her head, the bite marks on her neck easy to see.

“Vampire,” I almost whispered.

“Yes,” Nanshe agreed. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Isabel has been bitten by a vampire. This whole situation gets stranger by the day.”

Isabel opened her eyes, but remained still. “Food.” It was not a request.

“I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” I told Nanshe.

“Food,” Isabel repeated.

“You’re going to want to get her something,” I told everyone. “And you’d best hurry it up, too.”

Nanshe ordered her knights to find a chicken or other small animal that wouldn’t be easily missed.

“She needs a person,” I said before they could leave. “She needs the blood of a person.”

“We have prisoners,” one of the knights said.

“Bring the most evil bastard you’ve got.
Human
bastard. Someone already scheduled for execution.”

“You’re going to let her kill someone?” Nanshe asked.

“It’s that or have her go insane in there.” I turned to the knight, who hadn’t moved. “Now.”

I returned my attention to Isabel, who had rolled onto her side, watching us. Her pupils were bright red, and I knew that if those bars weren’t there, she’d have attacked us. Newly awakened vampires don’t have a lot of patience, and most lack the ability to tell friend from food.

“I assume no one saw who dropped her off?” I asked.

“No,” Nanshe confirmed. “It was done not long after nightfall.”

“It’s possible the Siris visit was a diversion.”

“When did Siris visit you?”

I’d forgotten that Nanshe hadn’t been told about the visit, so I filled her in on what Siris had told me.

“Nergal knows about you. That can’t be good.”

“He might know about me, but he doesn’t seem to care that I’m here. He’s still off somewhere else. No, Siris came back into the city for something else. I was just on the way, and Isabel is a diversion.”

Nanshe’s sigh was one of a person having reached the end of a very short fuse. “This is not becoming a good day.”

“Also, Asag is still alive. That’s not great news.”

“Cut his head off next time,” Irkalla said as she descended the stairs behind me. “His body vanished from where we’d placed it, in a locked cell at the other side of the city. He killed two guards there. We only learned about it just before I came to see you. I was actually on the way to warn you of his escape.”

“Did he do anything? Open any gates? Steal anything?”

Irkalla shook her head. “Nothing. He got up, broke the cell, killed the guards, and left. We don’t know where he went, but no one has reported him leaving the city.”

The knight returned shortly after with a prisoner in tow. The man was covered in dirt, and scars adorned his hands and arms. He’d been in the dungeon for a while.

“You were sentenced to die?” I asked him.

“I betrayed my knight brothers during a battle. Stabbed my commander in the back, and tried to kill two more.”

“And the rest,” the knight said, shoving the prisoner slightly.

“Killed a man and women as I was trying to escape. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“And the same could be said for you,” I told him. “Everyone else, out.”

“Everyone?” Irkalla asked.

“It’s probably best. The fewer targets she has, the better.”

Everyone filed out without another comment, leaving me alone with the prisoner and Isabel, who’d now sat up.

“Isabel,” I said, and she looked in my direction, licking her lips. “Here’s your food. You try to come for me, and I will kill you.”

“Wait, what?” the prisoner asked. “
She’s
going to eat me? She’s just a little thing.”

He laughed as I opened the cell door and shoved him inside, closing the door and keeping my eyes on Isabel. His laughter stopped when Isabel’s face changed, showing the monster beneath, and she leapt toward the prisoner, taking him to the floor with a show of exceptional strength. The prisoner screamed, and I felt a tiny sliver of sorrow for him as she sank her teeth into his neck and tore out his throat, drinking the pulsing blood as it flowed freely from the gaping hole.

I sat silently for several minutes until Isabel had finished, until she’d dropped the prisoner and stared at what she’d done. And then she started to cry. Crying or vomiting was the usual response from what I’d heard, or at least it was if you weren’t insane and actually enjoyed feeding on the blood of others.

I picked up the blanket from her cell bed, a scratchy brown thing that probably offered little in the way of comfort or warmth, and draped it over her blood-drenched shoulders.

“I’m sorry for that,” I whispered.

“I killed him.”

“You weren’t you. You were the monster inside of you, an animal that only thinks of food. The animal is probably still there, but hopefully quieter.”

“I can feel the need for blood still. It’s like a tiny voice way back in my mind.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry for bringing him to you, but you’d have killed an innocent person if not him. All new vampires have to kill. Most, from what I know, try to find prisoners, or get someone to prey on them, and turn the tables. A few hunt the first thing they see.”

Isabel looked up at me, her eyes full of fear, regret, and more than a little anger. “They took me. Made me into
this
.”

“I know. They did it because, for some reason, Siris really hates Mordred, and I don’t know why. I’m hoping maybe you have some idea.”

Isabel closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m involved in this, and I don’t know why Mordred decided to come into my life. So maybe, just maybe, you should go and ask him. Because they turned me into a monster and I deserve the answers he can give.”

I for one agreed with everything she said. “Let’s go see Mordred.”

CHAPTER
16

Now. Dwarven city of Thorem.

A
fter what felt like an eternity of sliding down into the darkness all around me, I stopped worrying about the fall and began to concentrate on the landing. I dumped as much air magic as I possibly could in front of me in an effort to slow myself down, but it didn’t seem to do a lot of good.

Fortunately for me, the ride didn’t last much longer. Unfortunately for me, it ended with me going feet first into freezing cold water. The ice-cold deluge took every bit of breath away. It was as if the air in my lungs evaporated instantly, causing me to panic a little as my head went under the water.

Once above the surface, I immediately ignited my fire magic, warming my body and turning the water to steam, which rained back down as ice, forcing me to stop. I’d done enough to catch my breath, and I regained the use of my body long enough to start swimming toward Kasey, who, in her werewolf form, shouted at me from land.

The same crystals I’d seen being used as lights on the way to the trap we’d walked into, adorned the walls and pillars. They let everyone see without the use of magic or torches.

“Are you okay?” Kasey asked as I dragged my dilapidated carcass out of the water and flopped down on the dry, and slightly warmer, land. My fire magic ignited immediately, drying my clothes and warming me completely.

“Did you see William?” I asked. “He went first, and I’d like the chance to ask him some very interesting questions.”

“He’s cowering behind that rock over there.” Kasey nodded toward William, who was crouched behind several large pieces of stone, which at some point had probably been a statue of some kind.

“Where are we?” I shouted to him, but he just hugged his knees and rocked back and forth. “That’s helpful, thanks.”

“Stop shouting at him,” Kasey said. Her fur was still wet, but most of the water had been shaken off. A werewolf’s coat is designed to be waterproof and insulated from the cold. “I don’t think it’s going to work. I threatened to tear his face off and all he did was burst into tears. And start talking about someone who’s going to punish him.”

Another splash behind me signified that Mordred had finally arrived, and I turned to let him know we were there. I may have hated the little bastard, but I wasn’t going to give anyone else the joy of killing him and mounting his head over their fireplace. Not that I wanted it; I’ve always found the stuffed-dead-thing a weird concept.

As I opened my mouth to shout, I spotted a second figure falling out of the tube. The blood elf.

“Get out of the fucking water!” Kasey screamed as Mordred reappeared, looking momentarily dazed and in shock from how cold it was.

He saw us and raised his hand to wave, before deciding not to bother. It would have been funny if it wasn’t for the blood elf coming back to the surface and setting his sights on the back of Mordred’s head. My old nemesis began swimming, unaware of the nearby danger, as the elf followed in hot pursuit. I had never heard of blood elves before, but they were really fast in the water.

The blood elf caught up to Mordred before he was even halfway toward us, pulling him under the water. Mordred emerged with a large splash moments later.

“Move your ass, Mordred!” I shouted, and he began swimming in earnest while I hoped that Bruce the blood elf didn’t complete his homage to the opening sequence of
Jaws
.

Mordred reached us before he was attacked again, and Kasey almost hauled him out of the water single-handed, throwing him behind us without a word, while she kept her eyes on the water, ready for Bruce’s attack.

I motioned for Kasey to take a few steps away from the water’s edge, which she did without taking her eyes off the glass-like stillness in front of us.

“Where is he?” she whispered.

I was about to answer when the water erupted and the blood elf launched himself out of it, several feet from where Kasey and I were looking. He sprinted toward Kasey, ducked under her massive arms and drew a blade from his belt.

Kasey saw the danger and leapt away. The elf crouched down and looked between Kasey and me, presumably deciding which one of us was the least threatening. He was slightly taller than I was, and thin, with long, dirty, black hair that cascaded over bare, muscular shoulders. His skin was mostly mauve in color, although there were blotches of lighter or darker skin across the torso. The elf smiled, showing sharp teeth like a piranha’s, although his were a light red.

He blinked twice, his bright red eyes containing nothing close to emotions I wanted to know about. He was a killer—a monster—and he enjoyed it. Eventually, his gaze settled on me, and he attacked, brandishing his curved dagger. A plume of flame left my fingers. I hoped it might slow the elf down, but as the flame died, only his bandages were on fire. He smiled—an evil, wicked grin. Apparently uninjured, he lunged at me.

I dodged the blade and rammed my fist into his kidney, causing him to gasp and dodge back, but he swiped with the blade at the same time, cutting my tricep.

Kasey darted toward the elf and caught him in the ribs with a punch that lifted him off his feet and dumped him on his ass. She growled at him, a low, menacing noise that set the hairs on the back of my neck upright.

“I wonder,” I said, as a shimmering battle-ax appeared in my hand, “whether you’re as good at stopping necromancy as you are at stopping fire magic.” I tested my soul weapon, feeling the weight of it in my hand.

“You got this?” Kasey asked.

I nodded. “Make sure that William doesn’t run away. I’d like to talk to him when I’m done with Bruce the elf.”

“Blood elf,” the elf corrected, his voice deep and full of arrogance. “Better than elves. Better than you, sorcerer. Maybe you’d like a nice stay with us? We could ask you questions. Peel the skin from your face, make you watch while we eat it.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Why don’t you come get me? Unless you’re afraid of a little old sorcerer like me?”

The elf screamed and charged forward. I avoided the first swing of his blade, and he avoided the battle-ax, although only just, and I thought I saw a look of concern cross his face. He turned his head slightly, but saw that between him and any escape was Kasey, and a seated Mordred, who appeared to be watching the contest with interest.

The blood elf screamed something I didn’t understand and charged at me once more. He didn’t even get the chance to strike. I swung the battle-ax, stepped around him and buried it in his shoulder. The elf cried out and dropped to his knees. I spun the ax and brought it down with every ounce of strength I had onto the creature’s skull.

He was dead before his face hit the ground, and I kicked his dagger aside before placing my hand just above him, looking for his soul. Soul weapons hurt the spirit, killing the opponent without ever leaving a mark. A few years ago, when the first of my blood-curse marks vanished, so did my ability to use blood magic. It was replaced with necromancy, a powerful, but for me, limited ability. Most necromancers can disrupt the souls of living things, moving the soul inside the person just enough that it sort of shorts out. It causes the victim to collapse. It’s a dangerous and difficult trick to learn, so most necromancers just stick to absorbing the soul to make them more powerful. Some can track people by feeling their soul, using it like a dog would a scent. It was another trick I’d never been able to do. I could use my soul weapons, but I could only absorb the souls of those who’d died fighting, which made sense, considering my mother had turned out to be a Valkyrie. It meant I was capable of bolstering my magic with the souls I’d taken: a rare and powerful talent in its own right.

There was a problem with absorbing the souls of the departed, however: I got their memories—all of them. No matter how evil or depraved that person had been, I got to see it. On more than one occasion, I had wished I hadn’t been forced to take the soul and see the things they’d done. Unfortunately, with our current predicament, taking the blood elf’s soul would give me more information than blindly stomping around. And I doubted that William, in whatever subservient position he held for the elves, knew anything.

The second the first sliver of soul reached me, I knew I’d made the wrong decision. It burned as images of death and destruction tore through my head, showing me acts of depravity and violence that made my stomach lurch. I saw the blood elf murder humans and dwarves, feed on their flesh and drink their blood, all the while laughing with his blood-elf kin. I saw battles with hundreds of elves fighting against dwarves, and I watched helplessly as he butchered innocent people. He loved being able to inflict pain and death on those who were different from him.

Information about the other blood elves, the layout of the city, and the underground lake location flashed through my mind. And just as I thought it was over, there was a picture of Mordred in a dungeon, chained and beaten, while unseen faces laughed and threw things at him.

When my mind was once again my own, I threw up. It’s not enough that I got to see everything that the person had done; it was as if I had lived it, and those memories, those thoughts and feelings, stayed with me forever. Taking a soul was not something I did lightly, and I felt as if I should bleach my brain in case I’d been tainted.

“Nate?” Kasey asked, standing a good few steps away from me. It was a bad idea to touch someone who’d taken a soul. Sometimes we lashed out at something that was no longer there.

“Nate, are you okay?” she asked again.

I raised a hand asking for a moment while my mind settled down.

“Who’s Bruce?” she asked after a second.

“Shark from
Jaws
,” Mordred explained. “And
Finding Nemo
.”

“You’re a Disney fan?” Kasey asked, astonished.

“Who isn’t?”

“That wasn’t fun,” I said and spat on the ground, trying to get the taste out of my mouth.

“What did you discover?” Mordred asked, pulling William along by the scruff of his neck.

“He’s a Judas goat,” I said, nodding toward the terrified human.

Kasey looked between Mordred and me for a few seconds. “Um . . . a what?”

“You get a goat that leads sheep somewhere, then one day that goat leads those sheep into a slaughterhouse while the goat is spared that same fate. Judas goat.”

“So he leads people to the room above, and they drop them down into this lake?” Kasey said, disgusted. “How can you kill your own people?”

“He doesn’t have a choice. Do you, William?” I said. “I saw what they do. I saw you being chosen.”

William stared at me, his eyes all but consumed with fear. “What are you?”

“A sorcerer.” I got back to my feet. “And a few other things. How many people have you led here?”

“I don’t know. Dozens. They come through into the city, which has enough dangers in it to force them to stay near the fountain.”

“Who brings them to the realm?”

“Different people. They live in your realm and send the victims through. People no one will miss, or—” He stopped.

“Or what?” Kasey asked.

“Or people who have crossed those in our realm who need to be removed,” I finished.

“Yes,” William admitted. “There are some people who come here because people in this realm wish to deal with them personally. Or because they’ve angered the wrong person in your realm. At the end of the day, it’s all the same. People from your realm come here and die.”

“Who sent us here?”

“No idea. We were told to wait for a group to arrive in the city and bring them down here for collection. Originally a larger number of blood elves were stationed here: dozens of them. But you were late, and blood elves aren’t very good at waiting, so they were taken away to keep them busy. They’ll return soon. I doubt you’d be able to defeat them all.”

Mordred released William, but spoke before walking away. “If a smile crosses your lips at any point as you talk about what happened here, I’ll slit your face open from ear to ear, and I’ll leave you for whatever vermin comes to find your screams. You hear?”

William nodded.

“Your life is one of pain, suffering, and threats,” I said. “It’s all you understand. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry they took your parents when they chose you. I’m sorry you get to live a good life, a life where you’ll die of old age rather than on the whim of some monster. I’m sorry all of this happened to you. But you
choose
to do this. You could stop.”

“They’d kill me, kill my parents. Make me watch.”

“Didn’t you already say your mother was dead?”

William forced back a smile.

“Either way, I get the feeling you don’t mind,” Mordred said. “I can always spot someone with a fucked-up mind-set. And I think you’re pretty close to it, William. You like the feeling of power you have over these people. You enjoy knowing they’re going to die slow and hard.”

“So?” William asked, his eyes never leaving mine.

A low growl emanated from behind me. “Calm, Kasey. Like you said, hurting him won’t do anything. He gets hurt enough by people who enjoy it a lot more than you ever would.”

“What’s with the water then?” she asked.

William looked past me to Kasey as he spoke. “Humans come down that tube and into the freezing water. The shock usually knocks them silly. Sometimes it kills them, but most of the time they make it to the edge: wet, freezing, disoriented, and terrified. And then the elves hunt them, take most of them back to the pens. They’re using them for something.”

“What?” I asked.

“They have these scrolls that they make people read. I don’t know what happens after that.”

I searched the blood elf’s memories but found nothing to corroborate what William was saying. But then there was nothing to say he was lying, either.

“We can’t take him with us,” Mordred said. “He’ll betray us first chance he gets.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not entirely sure it would make much of a difference to him if he lived or died.”

William shrugged. “If you’d been human, we wouldn’t be having this conversation; you’d be prey, or slaves for the elves. They always pick some out of the group to hunt.”