That meant privacy. Room to move around without attracting attention.
My tent was placed on the outer edge of the encampment again, far from all the others except for Erekkus, who was placed right beside mine. But once the work of setting up camp was done, Erekkus seemed more than eager to go socialize with people much more pleasant than me. It was a little surprising, actually, how quickly he ran off into the rest of the camp.
I stood outside my tent for awhile, arms crossed, observing the others in the distance. A great bonfire had been lit in the center of the camp, and many of the warriors clustered around it, drinking and talking. Their presences were dim with weariness, yes, but also unusually lively. A number of deer had been hunted and dragged into camp that night, still alive and twitching while the vampires crawled over their corpses and fed on them directly, or emptied their blood into goblets that they raised in drunken toasts. I shivered as the wind shifted and I caught a glimpse of those beasts’ auras—different than the acute fear I would have expected. It was there, yes, but it was dull and fuzzy, coated instead with a thick layer of euphoric docility.
Vampire venom. That was a mercy, perhaps.
This wasn’t a normal night. It felt like… a celebration of some kind. Maybe some kind of Obitraen festival? Some religious night? I almost wished Erekkus was around to ask him about it. Almost.
Instead, I planned to take full advantage of my newfound freedom.
I crept around the outskirts of the camp, noting the layout of the tents and guard posts. I wouldn’t try to sneak off until daybreak, but it couldn’t hurt to at least see what I was working with now.
I kept expanding my circles, until the bonfire was a distant glow and I was beyond the final bounds of the camp. Too far—I was pushing my luck while the others were awake.
I froze, scanning the horizon.
I felt something out there, not far from me now. A presence that almost seemed familiar, but twisted from what I typically knew, that stone stillness warped into molten steel—sharper and more dangerous.
My curiosity—a dangerous quality—got the better of me.
I lingered in the shadows and clung to the rocks, and edged closer.
Atrius.
Atrius, on his hands and knees, clutching the head of a stag with bare arms, his teeth sunk deep into its throat. His shirt and jacket were discarded in a pile nearby, his bare skin covered in blood.
The beast was enormous—one of the biggest stags I’d ever seen around this area. Atrius’s arms barely encircled its head, though he held it tight, muscles straining. Blood soaked the creature’s neck, matting its white fur and dripping into the gritty sand.
I stilled, unable to move.
I’d witnessed predators work countless times before. But even what I had seen the rest of Atrius’s men doing near the bonfire seemed… different than this. This was primal and foreign and yet, at the same time, deeply, innately natural. I was repulsed by it and fascinated by it and…
And, ever so slightly, frightened of it.
Or maybe frightening wasn’t the right word to describe the way the hairs stood upright at the back of my neck, the shiver that ran up my spine. It was more that something had changed in the way I saw him, a mismatch between what I had thought he was and what I was witnessing now.
Atrius’s eyes opened. Looked right at me. For a split second, we were both frozen there in our sudden awareness of each other. Then, in a movement so swift and oddly graceful it seemed instantaneous, he was standing, the stag twitching on the ground at his feet.
Blood ran down his chin and covered his bare chest, stark against the cold pale of his skin under the moonlight.
“What are you doing here?” He was, as always, soft-spoken, but his voice was a little hot with the anger that flickered at the center of his presence—quickly tamped down.
“Walking,” I said.
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, though the attempt mostly just smeared it across his face.
“Go back to your tent,” he said.
“Why? When everyone else seems to be celebrating?” I tilted my head, pointedly, at the stag. “Feasting?”
“Exactly why you should be away.” His eyes narrowed, as if in realization. “Erekkus left you alone?”
Oh, Erekkus was going to be in trouble.
I took a step closer, curious, and Atrius lurched backwards so abruptly that he nearly tripped over a cluster of rocks, as if frantic to get away from me.
That made me pause.
He collected himself fast, so fast that maybe someone else might have dismissed it, but I saw that… that fear. Not of me, exactly. Not quite.
I observed him closely, reaching for the presence he kept so carefully guarded. His chest rose and fell heavily. Nose twitched.
Hunger. He was hungry.
“Go back to your tent,” he said. “Stay there until morning.”
“What’s happening tonight? Is this a… festival? Ritual?”
He let out an almost-laugh. “Ritual. No, only your kind do rituals.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a festival in the House of Blood, to celebrate the birth of our kingdom. It takes place every five years, under the waxing moon closest to the spring equinox.”
“Every five years,” I remarked. “Must be special, then.” After a moment of thought, I added, “Maybe not, considering how many years your kind have in a lifetime.”
“It is special,” he snapped. “And they—”
He cast an unreadable glance back to the camp—the bonfire, and his warriors surrounding it. His throat bobbed, then he turned back to me. He wiped his mouth again, seeming to realize all at once how he looked—half naked, blood-covered.
“Go back to your tent,” he repeated. “That’s an order.”
An order? He said those words to me with such casual authority. I bristled at them without meaning to, being reminded far too clearly of the last time they were thrown at me—the night I came so close to killing the man who stood before me now.
I bowed my head, mostly hiding the sarcasm in the movement. “Very well, commander. I’ll leave you to your…” I tipped my chin, motioning to the stag corpse on the ground, my eyebrow twitching. “…meal.”
I turned away. He watched me go, unmoving. Weaver, he was capable of being so very… still. Not just his body, but his presence, too. His inner self. I sensed that something thrashed beneath the surface of that calm, like a beast that did not so much as ripple the glass surface of the water, but I couldn’t even begin to reach into those shadows.
“Beware that curiosity, seer,” he called after me. “It’s a dangerous thing.”
I paused, turned back. Smiled at him.
And there it was—just a hint. A single wisp of smoke against the impenetrable velvet-black of his presence:
A glint of interest.
Careful, commander.
I smiled at him. “So it is,” I said, and continued on my way.