Page 2 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

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 distantBANG—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 faintreverberations.

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 ofthem.

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.

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