His childhood home loomed before him, lit like a lantern against the night.
Despite the cold, Alucard’s skin was slick with sweat from riding hard. He’d crossed the Copper Bridge, held his breath for the full stretch as the oily slick of poisoned magic roiled on the surface of the river below. He’d hoped—desperately, dumbly—that the sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t reached the northern bank, but the moment his mount’s hooves touched solid earth, those hopes crumbled. More chaos. The people moved in mobs, the marked from the shal alongside the nobles in their winter fineries, still done up from the last of the tournament balls, all searching out those who hadn’t fallen to the spell, and dragging them under.
And through it all, the same haunting chant.
“Have you met the king?”
Anisa. Stross. Lenos.
Alucard spurred the horse on.
Vasry. Jinnar. Rhy. Delilah …
Alucard swung down from the borrowed horse and hurried up the steps.
The front door was ajar.
The servants were gone.
The front hall sat empty, save for the fog.
“Anisa!” he called again, moving from the foyer into the library, the library into the dining room, the dining room into the salon. In every room, the lamps were lit, the fires burned, the air stifling with heat. In every room, the low fog twisted around table legs and through chairs, crept the walls like trellis vines. “Berras!”
“For saints’ sake, be still,” growled a voice behind him.
Alucard spun to find his older brother, one shoulder tipped against the door. A wineglass hung as it always did from his fingers, and his chiseled face held its usual disdain. Berras, ordinary, impertinent Berras.
Relief knocked the air from Alucard’s lungs.
“Where are the servants? Where is Anisa?”
“Is that how you greet me?”
“The city is under attack.”
“Is it?” Berras asked absently, and Alucard hesitated. There was something wrong with his voice. It held a lightness, bordering on amusement. Berras Emery was never amused.
He should have known then that it was wrong.
All wrong.
“It isn’t safe here,” said Alucard.
Berras shifted forward. “No, it isn’t. Not for you.”
The light caught his brother’s gaze, snagging on the ropes of fog that shimmered in his eyes, turning them glassy, the beads of sweat beginning to pool in the hollows of his face. Beneath his tan skin, his veins were edging black, and if Berras Emery had had more than an ounce of magic to start with, Alucard would have seen it winking out, smothered by the spell.
“Brother,” he said slowly, though the word tasted wrong in his mouth.
Once, Berras would have knocked the term aside. Now he didn’t even seem to notice.
“You’re stronger than this,” said Alucard, even though Berras had never been the master of his temper or his moods.
“Come to claim your laurels?” continued Berras. “One more title to add to the stack?” He lifted his glass and then, discovering it empty, simply let it fall. Alucard caught it with his will before it could shatter against the inlaid floor.
“Champion,” drawled Berras, ambling toward him. “Nobleman. Pirate. Whore.” Alucard tensed, the last word finding its mark.
“You think I didn’t know all along?”
“Stop,” he whispered, the word lost beneath his brother’s steps. In that moment, Berras looked so much like their father. A predator.
“I’m the one who told him,” said Berras, as if reading his mind. “Father wasn’t even surprised. Only disgusted. ‘What a disappointment,’ he said.”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” snarled Alucard. “I only wish I could have been in London when it happened.”
Berras’s look darkened, but the lightness in his voice, a hollow ease, remained.
“I went to the arena, you know,” he rambled. “I stayed to watch you fight. Every match, can you believe it? I didn’t carry your pennant, of course. I didn’t come to see you win. I just hoped that someone would beat you. That they would bury you.”
Alucard had learned how to take up space. He had never felt small, except here, in this house, with Berras, and despite years of practice, he felt himself retreating.
“It would have been worth it,” continued Berras, “to see someone knock that smug look off your face—”
A muffled sound from upstairs, the thud of a weight hitting the floor.
“Anisa!” called Alucard, taking his eyes off Berras for an instant.
It was a foolish thing to do.
His brother slammed him back into the nearest wall, a mountain of muscle and bone. Growing up without magic, his brother knew how to use his fists. And he used them well.
Alucard doubled over, the air rushing from his lungs as knuckles cracked into ribs.
“Berras,” he said with a gasp. “Listen to—”
“No. You listen to me, little brother. It’s time to set things straight. I’m the one Father wanted. I’m already the heir of House Emery, but I could be so much more. And I will be, once you’re gone.” His meaty fingers found Alucard’s throat. “There is a new king rising.”
Alucard had never been one to fight dirty, but he’d spent enough time recently watching Delilah Bard. He brought his hands up swiftly, palm crunching into the base of his brother’s nose. A blinder, she’d called that move.
Tears and blood spilled down Berras’s face, but he didn’t even flinch. His fingers only tightened around Alucard’s throat.
“Ber—ras—” gasped Alucard, reaching for glass, for stone, for water. Even he wasn’t strong enough to call an object to hand without seeing it, and with Berras blocking his way, and his vision tunneling, Alucard found himself reaching futilely for anything and everything. The whole house trembled with the pull of Alucard’s power, his carefully honed precision lost in the panic, the struggle for air.
His lips moved, silently summoning, pleading.
The walls shook. The windows shattered. Nails jerked free of boards and wood cracked as it peeled up from the floor. For one desperate instant, nothing happened, and then the world came hurtling in toward a single point.
Tables and chairs, artwork and mirrors, tapestries and curtains, pieces of wall and floor and door all crashed into Berras with blinding force. The massive hands fell away from Alucard’s throat as Berras was driven back by the whirlwind of debris twining around his arms and legs, dragging him down.
But still he fought with the blind strength of someone severed from thought, from pain, until at last the chandelier came down, tearing long cracks in the ceiling as it fell and burying Berras in iron and plaster and stone. The whirlwind fell apart and Alucard gasped, hands on his knees. All around him, the house still groaned.
From overhead, nothing. Nothing. And then he heard his sister scream.
*
He found Anisa in an upstairs room, tucked in a corner with her knees drawn up, her eyes wide with terror. Terror, he soon realized, at something that wasn’t there.
She had her hands pressed over her ears, her head buried against her knees, whispering over and over, “I’m not alone, I’m not alone, I’m not alone.”
“Anisa,” he said, kneeling before her. Her face flushed, veins climbing her throat, darkness clouding her blue eyes.
“Alucard?” Her voice was thin. Her whole body shook. “Make him stop.”
“I did,” he said, thinking she meant Berras, but then she shook her head and said, “He keeps trying to get in.”
The shadow king.
He scanned the air around her, could see the shadows tangling in the green light of her power. It looked like a storm was trapped in the unlit room, the air flickering with mottled light as her magic fought against the intruder.
“It hurts,” she whispered, curling in on herself. “Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t leave me alone with him.”
“It’s all right,” he said, lifting his little sister into his arms. “I’m not going anywhere, not without you.”
The house groaned around them as he carried Anisa through the hall.
The walls fissured, and the stairs began to splinter beneath his feet. Some deep damage had been done to the house, a mortal wound he couldn’t see but felt with every tremor.