Page 149 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I stared at the words, tapping my pen on the page.

Very well. I could, on some surface level, accept the similarities. But the fact remained that I had asked Miro for that information, and I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

I knew Bane had killed before. I’d been there when he sentenced Derog to death and carried out that sentence himself.

But I struggled to imagine him performing the ritual he’d described… forcing torment upon an innocent person.

Why?I asked myself.Because he leaves you poems and roses? You truly can’t imagine him acting the monster?

No… it was that I didn’twantto imagine him acting the monster. I was so used to seeing him in a certain way that the idea of extreme, rabid violence, not a tidy execution, seemed anathema to me.

I couldn’t envision Bane doing the things the wargs had done in Tristone. But if Miro was right… he had. He’d done absolutely forsaken things.

For a good reason, I reminded myself. The wargs were powerful, fast, far more so than the average vampire. If Bane had chosen to perform such a rite… it had to be for the sake of being able to stand against them.

I looked back at the deciphered ritual, struggling to place it with this unwelcome knowledge, considering similarities.

Languages, goddesses, monsters… maybe they all shared a root, sprung from the same fertile soil, watered with blood and pain. Maybe the page I’d been deciphering was the ritual to convert a vampire to a fiend.

Or I was just being ridiculous and leaping to conclusions. My translations had hardly even begun, and I was already trying to link Wargyr and the vampires, making them out to be the same thing.

The answer was simple: more research. I tore the page with my accusing revelation out of the journal, fully intending to throw it in a fire the first chance I got.

But my feet didn’t turn towards the library. I was tired, worn out from endless hours of research and translation, and from a sleepless night contemplating the unthinkable.

I took a deep breath. I trusted Bane with my life, did I not? Itrustedhim.

So I needed to ask him if he’d done it. If he’d once been like a warg himself, or if Miro had lied. If the ritual to become a fiend was gentle, with freely given blood… or a nightmarish bloodbath full of horror and despair.

I looked at the page I still held, torn from the precious journal—I didn’t want to deface my journal by comparing the fiend I adored to the wargs. I folded it and shoved it deep in my pocket.

It would hurt him terribly… but the similarities were undeniable. He would tell me the truth of how he’d been created.

All I had to do was work up the courage to ask the fiend himself.

Chapter 36

Bane

The map spread before me, showing all of Veladar, the Rift a long valley to the east. And in the Rift I saw every weak point, every village and keep left open to the whims of the wargs.

The news had spread like wildfire. The minor nobility had opened their houses to the people, and I could finally breathe a little easier knowing they were safe in the walls of fortified keeps.

For now. The fields, the mines, the livestock… none of it could be left unattended for long. Eventually the Rift-kin would have to leave the safety of the fortresses and return to their own lives.

And then they would, like the people of Tristone, be left out as bait. I clenched my fists, examining the map with gritted teeth, pushing the little red stones we used to denote the legions.

In a time of peace, they would’ve been more than enough. In a time with Hakkon producing seven newborn wargs in a single night… not nearly enough.

Too many gaps in the legions, too many crumbled walls, too many stretches of endless, empty wood for the wargs to slip through.

I could not be everywhere at once.

I nudged a stone into place and closed my eyes, planning my route through the Rift. Someone had to watch the border on foot. I would have to leave Cirri alone, but I trusted her not to be angry. She wouldn’t put emotions over the safety of the Rift-kin.

My level-headed lady. Already I could see her giving me that look, the one that said,what are you waiting for?Telling me to get on with it, to do what must be done.

Truly, I was the luckiest fiend in the world.

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