Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles) (13 page)

“I will finish you if it is the last thing I do,” the creature promises.

Kol doesn’t need to force his laugh now. “Oh, I think
I’ll
decide the last thing you do. You won’t be finishing anything—except, perhaps, this girl.”

He steps back—

“What about my meals?” My voice rings out, filling the stone room. I try not to flinch from the sound of it.

Kol starts and then swings around to stare at me. I glare at his shoulder. “Your friend here says he’s going to take his time; the least you can do is send me lunch.”
 

“Lunch,” Kol repeats, as if he can barely believe his ears.

“You don’t want me fainting from hunger, do you?”

Even without looking at his face, I can hear the sneer in his voice. “For you, anything.”
 

He swivels back towards the creature. “James will bring her lunch up. Perhaps, if you haven’t finished her yet, he’ll find another use for her.”

The creature makes no response—at least, not one that I can hear—and a moment later Kol departs, the click of the lock overloud in the silence. I rest my head against the wall for a moment, savoring the gift Kol has unintentionally granted me: the promise of a way out during the daylight hours, when most fangs will have taken shelter. Now all I have to do is make a friend of Kol’s enemy here, make sure he doesn’t kill me, and … I hesitate.
 

What is it about simple plans always backfiring with me? This one begins with the starving creature on the other side of the room sparing my life.

I glance towards the prisoner again. Without the lantern, it’s too dark to find him in the shadows. The windows allow in the first faint light of dawn, but it is not yet enough to see him clearly.

The windows.
 

“You’re not a fang,” I whisper. There’s no way he could be. The sunlight through the windows, day after day for as long as he must have been here, would have slowly burnt his skin, leaving him blistered and covered in lesions.
 

“No.”

The sound of his voice, like nails scraping stone, makes me shudder. “Then what are you?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to, because in the ensuing quiet I go through the list of every race I’ve heard of, every race that feeds off humans and uses its gaze to incapacitate us, and come up with only two possibilities. I’ve already ruled out one …

“You’re a breather.”

Silence again, but this one a tight, dangerous one. A breather. I swallow hard, my palms damp. They suck their victims dry, like fangs do, only it isn’t blood they take. It’s breath. It’s life. Some say, it’s souls.
 

I have to get out. Now.
 

Kol and his men will have reached the base of the tower by now. Pick the lock on my manacle, pick the lock on the door, and … what? If I can force the first bolt open with my magic, I will still have to contend with the second bolt below. If I manage both, it will be a repeat of the flight from Blackflame’s house, only at night. With a fang on the loose. Or rather, with a fang
lord
on the loose along with as many fangs as live with and work for him. Even with the food and rest I’ve had, I’m still not strong enough for much magic working; the bolts will drain what energy I have.
 

I glance out the window again, pulse racing. Soon the sun will rise. In daylight, I’ll be able to navigate my way out, Kol will likely be resting, and my chances of survival improve immensely. Not that fangs can’t come out in daylight; they just prefer not to—and I’d prefer not to meet any on my way out. I might be able to outrun a human guard, but fangs are another matter entirely.

All I have to do is keep the breather from attacking me. Which he hasn’t done yet. In point of fact, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t even shifted in my direction.
I am not so hungry
, he had said. But he is. He’s an emaciated husk of a creature. No wonder Kol is terrified of him.
 

“How long have you been here?” It’s not until the words sound in my ears that I realize I have spoken.

I don’t expect him to answer, but just as my attention drifts to my shackles, he says, “Perhaps a year.”

“Have you … fed?”

“Yes.”

Terror coils in my stomach. But Kol had taunted him for being kind; had
wanted
to tell him that I was an innocent. Which means that this creature, Val, may not be half so evil as Kol himself.
 

I look away, past the window, trying to reconcile this with all I’ve heard of his kind.
Breathers cannot be trusted
, my father told me, years ago, before I lost him to illness and my mother to Blackflame.
Breathers are death and darkness and all things dangerous.

The first rays of sunlight, bright and clear, break over the window sill, illuminating the far end of the room. It doesn’t seem possible that sunlight could share the same space as this starved being. “Why does Kol keep you?”

“It is a longer story than you want to know.”

“They give you innocents to feed on,” I say slowly, anger unexpectedly warming my chest.

“When they have run out of other victims.” He smiles, a ghastly stretch of parched lips over yellowed teeth. “You are only the second true innocent to be chained with me.”

My skin crawls. How many has he murdered in his time here? His only sustenance would be other lives; he would have to kill more than once to survive a full year. “Have you tried to escape?”
 

“I am bound, as you are, but my chains bear every protective charm and sigil on them our captor could buy. I cannot break them.”

My hand falls to the cuff at my ankle. I shift, bending my leg in front of me to study the manacle and the chain soldered to it. They are made of iron, a material by its very nature heavy and at odds with magic. My shackles, as the breather implied, are void of protective symbols. “What is your chain made of?” I ask curiously.
 

“Silver,” he says. From where I sit, the metal shows dark, but perhaps it’s only tarnished. Silver is soft, something that the creature, once fed, might untwist with his bare hands, unless it has been ensorcelled. What he needs is a key—or a thief with a lockpick.

I frown. How can I think of trying to free a breather when I should be concerned with my own escape? He is a thing of darkness; should I help him, I have no surety he won’t kill me before moving on to Kol.
 

I purse my lips.
Our captor
, he had said. Kol has abused him almost past bearing. As long as the breather spares me, what does it matter whether he attacks Kol or not?

“If I could find a way to free us,” I say, meeting his watery gaze, “will you swear not to harm me?”

“You cannot free us, little one,” he says. His voice would be gentle but for the harsh rasp of his throat.
 

“I might,” I say.

“There is a sigil in the stone between us. I cannot pass it even if my chains are released.”

Of course.
That was why Kol dared to enter as far as he had. My eyes scan the stone. A sigil. What are the chances that I’ll recognize it? And be able to change it? And how much can I trust this breather not to attack when he learns what I am?

His hands press against his knees. “I grow ever hungrier,” he says softly. “I do not wish to take your breath, but eventually I will.”
 

I can’t free him. Not only will he despise me for my magic, but he’s too ravenous to spare my life. I don’t let myself think about it any further. Sliding my improvised tools from my pocket, I make quick work of my manacle’s catch. It’s surprising, really, what simple locks rich people use—but then I guess the possibility of escape never occurred to either Blackflame or Kol.
 

I can feel the breather’s milky-gray gaze on me as I snap open the cuff and scramble to the door. I keep my back to him as I work the lock. By his own admission, he can’t reach me. The only dangerous thing about him is his breather’s gaze. Between his own weakness and my turned back, I have little to fear.
 

My hands slow. I stare blindly at the door. He is weak, just like the fang I left behind in Blackflame’s dungeon. And, just like the fang, he will die in his prison. As much as I tell myself that it isn’t I who will have killed them—that the blame lies with Kol, or Blackflame, or someone else entirely—the truth is that this is my choice, now: to leave him behind.
 

And he is letting me go. He has made no attempt to stop me. He hasn’t tried to trick me into turning around so he can catch my gaze and keep his meal from leaving. I’ve been hungry. I know what it feels like when your stomach is so empty it gnaws at itself. I’ve tied a strap around my waist and cinched it tight, because the pressure gives some small relief. The pain consumes your awareness, nibbles at the edges of your mind.
 

I’ve begged and pleaded and stolen—and been beaten—all for a half-rotted fruit. But I’ve never, never been as hungry as the creature behind me.
 

I rest my forehead against the door and close my eyes, wishing I could make a cocoon in the darkness behind my eyelids, spin a tiny shelter to keep myself safe from my thoughts. But it’s no use. I’ve already damned one fang to his death because I feared him. I’m not leaving this creature behind as well.
 

“Val, right?” I say, facing the breather.

He nods.

“I’m Hitomi.” Introductions: check. I am a person, not a meal. “If I can do something about that sigil, or whatever it is, and free you, do you swear not to harm me?”

His brows rise with disbelief. “You are a mage?”

“No, but I’ve seen a thing or two. If I can do it, we still have to wait for them to bring my meal. They’ll unbolt the door and that’ll be our chance. Just promise you won’t turn on me.”

He smiles, a quirking of cracked lips that raises the gooseflesh on my arms. “Is that why you asked for food?”

I shrug. “I figured if I could evade you, then I needed to make sure the rest of the way out would be clear.” I wave my hand towards the window.

“Is it?”

“If they unbolt both doors, we still have to get through the main gates—or find a back door. But I think it should be possible.”

He nods, the wiry tips of his hair brushing his shoulders. “All right.”

I take a breath and let it out.
 

I cross the floor to the symbol and hunker down to study it. It seems to be nothing more than a dark ink permanently staining one of the stones. I trace the intricate pattern it makes with a finger, following the twists and curves that form an unending knot. That doesn’t seem right, somehow. My mother taught me sigils; we had barely begun when Baba fell ill and our lives fell apart. Still, no sigil she ever showed me—and she let me flip through her books more than a few times—looked like this. Sigils are symbols, characters, not knots.

I press the tip of my finger against the center of the pattern and open myself up to the magic that pulses through it.
A flash of teeth. Screaming. Blood spattering on the floor. Pain pain pain—

I snatch my hand away and clutch it to my chest, my heart racing. The breather neither moves nor speaks, but I can feel his milky-gray gaze on me. I take a moment to catch my breath, compose my mind. Then I ask him, “When you try to cross this, what happens?”

“There is pain.”

I figured that. “What kind of pain?”

He shifts, tilting his head slightly. Finally, he says, “My blood stops in my veins, my lungs cannot draw breath, and my eyes see nothing but red.”

I look down at the knot on the floor. “Did you see how they made this?”

“A woman,” he says. “Not much older than you are.”

There it is. I wrap my arms around myself to keep in the horror. Blood magic. Blood taken by force and spilled here to make this spell. “Did they kill her?”

“Of course.”

I don’t know enough about blood magic to be certain he’s right. Is killing necessary to make such a spell? And then I realize Val meant that of course Kol killed the woman. What else would a monster like that do? That’s not to say the casting required it. Unless it did. I stare down at the knot, wishing I knew more about blood magic. It’s not exactly the sort of thing either of my parents would have taught me.
 

I study the knot until its image is imprinted on the backs of my eyelids when I blink. I chew my lip and scratch a bite on my leg and fidget until I glance up and catch the breather’s stare. He leans against the wall behind him, watching me. Which doesn’t help at all. I stand up and begin pacing, trying to decide what to do.
 

I could still just leave him—except that I can’t. He’s granted me time and safety; he clearly doesn’t want to kill me. We have the same enemy. And now
I’ve
given
him
a hope of escape. Which leaves me with the unsavory option of dabbling in dark magic for the first time in my short life.

“Do you have anything that will draw blood?” I ask the breather.

He shakes his head. Saira’s hairpins, the sharpest things I have, are still too dull to do the job. I try and fail to work a splinter off the door, though I do manage to rub the tips of my fingers raw. But I need more than a drop or two of blood. With a muttered curse, I walk to the window. I can see a portion of the castle keep, the outer wall rising up to embrace the base of our tower, and then beyond that lies a land of hills, low meadows, and forested slopes.