Slaying the Vampire Conqueror
Carissa Broadbent
1
I didn’t miss sight anymore. Sight was an inefficient way to perceive the world around you. It was a crutch. What I was given instead was far more useful.
Take this moment, for example—this moment when my back was pressed to the wall, dagger in my hand, as I waited to kill the man on the other side.
If I was relying on sight alone, I would have to crane my neck around the doorframe. I would have to risk being seen. I’d have to go by whatever I could make out in the darkness of him and his lover, squint into that writhing mass of flesh, and figure out the best way to make my move.
Inefficient. Room for error. A terrible way to work.
Instead, I felt. I sensed. Through the magic of the threads, I could still perceive the boundaries of the physical world—the color and shape of the scenery, the planes of a face, the absence or existence of light—but I had so much more than that, too. Crucial, in my work.
My target was a young nobleman. Six months ago, his father died. Within weeks of him receiving the keys to his father’s significant cityscape, he began using all that newfound wealth and power to steal from his people and build more wealth for the Pythora King.
His essence now was slick with desire. The Arachessen could not read minds, not truly, but I didn’t need to see his thoughts. What use were his thoughts when I saw his heart?
“More,” a female voice moaned. “Please, more.”
He mumbled something in response, the words buried in her hair. Her desire was genuine. Her soul shivered and throbbed with it—her pleasure spiking as he shifted angles, pushing her down to the bed. For the briefest of moments, I couldn’t help being jealous that this snake had better sex than I did.
But I drove that thought away quickly. Arachessen were not supposed to mourn the things we gave up in the name of our goddess—Acaeja, the Weaver of Fates, the Keeper of the Unknown, the Mother of Sorcery. We could not mourn the eyesight, the autonomy, the pieces of our flesh carved away in sacrifice. And no, we could not mourn the sex, either.
I wished they’d hurry up.
I pressed my back to the wall and let out a frustrated breath through my teeth. I blinked, my lashes tickling the fabric of my blindfold.
{Now?}
Raeth’s voice was very quiet in the back of my head—she was nearly out of Threadwhisper range, all the way downstairs, near the entrance of the beach house. When she spoke into my mind, I could sense a faint echo of the ocean wind as it caressed her face.
{Not yet,} I answered.
I felt Raeth’s irritation.
{I don’t know how much longer we have. He’s distracted, isn’t he? Take him and go before he starts to pay attention.}
Oh, he was distracted, alright. His woman wasn’t the only vocal one now, his grunts echoing against the wall behind me.
I didn’t answer right away.
{Sylina—} Raeth started.
{I want to wait until the girl is gone.}
As I knew she would, Raeth scoffed at this. {Wait until the girl is gone? If you wait that long, someone will notice that something is off.}
I clenched my jaw and did not answer, letting her Threadwhispers fade beneath the sounds of our target’s enthusiastic climax.
Threadwhispers were very useful. Communication that couldn’t be overheard, that could transcend sound the same way we transcended sight. It was a gift from the Weaver, one for which I was very grateful.
…But I hated that it meant I could never pretend I hadn’t heard something.
{Sylina!}
{She might not know,} I told her.
What he is. Who he is. What he’s doing, and who he’s doing it for.
I had no qualms about killing the nobleman. I would take more joy than I should in feeling his presence wither and die beneath me—and that would be my little secret, a guilty pleasure. But the girl…
Again, Raeth’s scoff reverberated between us.
{She knows.}
{She—}
{If she’s fucking him, then she knows. And if not, she has terrible taste in men. What difference does it make?}
And then I felt it.
A sudden crack through the air. Sound, yes, a distant BANG—but the sound was nothing compared to the sensation that ripped through the threads of life beneath the physical world, a force powerful enough to set them vibrating.
I froze.
My target and his paramour stopped.
“What was that?” the woman whispered.
But I was no longer focused on them. Not with the force of the vibrations, and Raeth’s wordless panic spreading slowly across them, rolling toward me like a pool of blood.
{Raeth?}
Nothing.
{Raeth? What was that?}
Confusion. Fear. I felt it, though it was dimming, because she must have been walking away from the door—then running, out into the city streets.
{Raeth!}
But she was out of range now. All I could feel from her were faint reverberations.
That is, until I heard her scream.
An Arachessen was not supposed to abandon a mission for anything, not even for the sake of saving a Sister’s life. But every thought of my dutiful teachings drained from me the moment I felt her terror, visceral and human and too familiar in ways I’d never admit aloud.
I ran.
Down marble steps, across tile floors, newly slick with I didn’t-even-know-what, through the door where my Sister had been moments ago, standing watch. The air hit me, salty and ocean-sweet.
And with it came the sensation of them.
The vampire invaders.
Decades later, I would not forget this moment. Exactly how it felt when they made landfall. Their magic sickened me, tainted and cursed, making the air taste so thickly of blood I nearly gagged on it.
Sisters of the Arachessen are trained extensively in the magic of every god. From the time we were children, we were exposed to all magics, even when our bodies protested, even when it burned us or broke us.
This, I recognized immediately, was Nyaxia’s magic. The heretic goddess. The Mother of Vampires.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them crashed upon our shores that night.
Sound was useless, all the bangs and screams and groans of crumbling stone running together like the rush of a waterfall. For a moment, I was blinded, too, because the sensations were so much—every essence, every soul, screaming at once.
In that moment, I didn’t know what was happening. I wouldn’t understand until later exactly what I was witnessing. But I did know that this wasn’t the work of the Pythora King. These were foreigners.
{Raeth!}
I threw the call as far down the threads as I could, flinging it toward her like a net. And there, near where the land met the sea, I felt her. Felt her running—not away from the explosions at the shore, but toward them.
No.
Idiot girl. Stupid girl. Impulsive. Impatient.
I ran for her.
{Raeth! Fall back!}