Page 19 of A Heart of Ice and Shadow

The mage rolled her eyes. “As if dragons don’t have stupid traditions,” she reminded him.

“Nae this daft,” he grumbled.

Sirus wasn’t sure how they’d found out about the challenge, or if they knew the extent of the rules, but it was obvious they were both nervous as to how it would unfold.

Rath stood next to the dirt ring to oversee, as he had on the other rare occasions a challenge had been called. “Niah,” Rath began, loud enough that his deep voice echoed through the hall. Levian’s gaze moved to him with pure wonder. “You have challenged your brother to the death. Do you confirm?”

“You were there,” Niah snapped. Rath gave her a withering glance, and she straightened her posture. “Yes.”

Rath nodded with satisfaction and turned to Sirus. “Sirus, do you accept your sister’s challenge?”

He had no wish to fight his sister to the death. He doubted she wished to fight him to the death either. But Rath had been right. Niah was wound up, and he could tell she wouldn’t be satisfied until this was done. “Yes,” he replied, only loud enough to be heard.

Rath nodded once more, Levian sucked in a breath, and Barith grumbled curses under his.

Sirus readied himself and pulled his swords. He knew what he must do, but there was no doubt in his mind that Niah would not hold back in this fight. The air in the room turned stilted and heavy as Rath looked between Sirus and Niah one last time, his expression not nearly as serious as it should be given the circumstances.

“Commence!”

Before Rath could finish the word, a knife came hurtling toward Sirus like a bullet from a gun. He tilted himself just enough to avoid being pierced and turned when the second came whizzing by his ear a moment later. He used one of his swords to deflect the third. Barith pulled Levian out of the way with a curse as it went flying past her nose and stuck into a post that held training weapons.

Niah came forward with silent speed, not a crunch of her footsteps audible despite her heavy shoes—as he’d taught her. More thrown knives preceded her. With precision, Sirus deflected each one. He heard Barith swear again and Levian gasp. His eyes were locked on Niah.

Metal clashed in flashes of silver blurs when she came upon him. He parried the first five strikes of her hooked karambit blades before she sliced his arm. She’d improved her speed. She struck his thigh next. It was obvious she’d been training while she was away. When she only missed striking his stomach by a hair’s breadth, he recognized her sharp movements. With renewed vigor, he managed to capture her two blades between his swords and shove, sending Niah’s boots sliding backward several feet along the dirt ring.

“You’ve been training with Sabien,” he accused, ice laced over each word, ignoring the sting of the fresh cuts on his skin, the invisible one in his chest. She had actually gone to the Clan of Serpents. The betrayal cut deep.

Niah’s eyes narrowed. “He wasn’t so quick to discard me,” she hissed.

Sirus’s blood grew hot. “You left,” he reminded her, keeping his tone cool after centuries of practice. Even after she’d disgraced herself by taking freely given blood, he’d not forced her to go. She’d chosen to leave.

Her nostrils flared as she released a knife toward his eye. Sirus raised his sword to deflect it. “You left Sabien as well,” he observed with targeted precision. Another knife. He shifted in time to save his skin, not his shirt.

She came at him again, her movements sharp and furious. Blade met blade in quick succession; he knocked one of her daggers away. Niah only doubled her efforts, slicing and feigning and moving more like the wind than a living being. Sirus kept up with her until he was forced to drop one of his swords in order to grab her wrist before she stabbed him right in his gut. If it wasn’t for his renewed strength, she might have succeeded. Niah snarled at him in her fury, both of them breathing fast and short. Beneath the rage in her bright eyes, Sirus could see the raw truth—the pain. Niah was well-schooled in concealing her emotions, but Sirus had always known she felt more than most of their kind. He thought it her greatest weakness. When their numbers had begun to dwindle, she’d become more and more absent and removed. After Kane’s death, she’d withdrawn completely. Not long after, she cast aside their clan’s traditions and set out on her own, determined to save vampires from their fate. He’d thought her young and foolish, that her emotions had gotten the better of her. He’d been wrong. He’d been the fool.

Sirus shoved Niah away, knowing her impulse would override her control. She spun and sliced him clean across the stomach on the opposite side of his bandaged wound. He’d left himself open on purpose. He kneed her the moment her blade touched his skin. Niah fell to the ground and tried to recover. Sirus’s blade was already under her chin.

She glared up at him, her eyes full of fire. “Do it,” she snapped without a hint of fear. Sirus pressed the blade close enough to apply pressure but not cut skin. “I’m ready.”

To his shock, neither Levian nor Barith said a thing as the silence stretched.

The vivid memory of Niah’s rebirth flashed in his mind as he looked down into her young face. She’d fought disguised as a man during the eighteenth century uprising in Scotland. Even when she was young and small she’d been skilled beyond what was natural. The ferocity in her eyes had been striking. When she’d been dragged broken and dying from the field of battle and given the choice to become a vampire, she’d hesitated for only a moment. “Yes,” she’d told them, without a trace of fear. “I am ready.”

For the first time, Sirus felt like he saw Niah for who she truly was. A fierce and passionate warrior. A woman who’d not been cowed by traditions in her previous life or this one. A woman determined to fight for her people up to her dying breath.

Sirus pulled his sword from her neck, and Niah glowered up at him.

“Perhaps it’s time to take our leave,” Rath said to Barith and Levian. The mage gasped, but Barith managed to keep her from speaking.

Once the others were gone, Niah hissed up at him with pure venom, “I don’t want your pity.”

Sirus threw a knife of his own then. It thunked into the dirt next to Niah’s neck. A small trickle of blood fell along the porcelain skin it’d passed. “You stole nothing from me, Niah,” he declared, his breathing finally steadying.

Her expression shifted to one of harsh confusion. “I pushed Rath,” she confessed. “Pushed Gwendolyn.”

“Why?” he demanded. He wanted to hear it from her own lips.

Niah’s face tightened, her lips pressing into a hard line. She looked sharply away from him.

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