Page 73 of When We Lost The Moon

“I take it not everything went smoothly?” Augustine asked.

“Not everything,” I said, composing my expression, but I saw Augustine’s dark eyes soften in response to my pain.

“We’ll hold them off,” Tate snapped. “Get a move on.”

I bit my lip, as they turned to fight the reinforcements rushing up the stairs toward us. I hated lying to them, but the three elite should have no trouble dealing with the guards on their own. And they were right. Even without Damien, I couldn’t stop now. Nigel had taken everything from me. First Quandom, and now Algrave. Even the rebellion, started by him to sow discord between Damien and his father. The death of my grandfather; what he’d done to my siblings. There were so many reasons I wanted to kill him, but mostly it was because of what he’d made me do to Damien.

He’d clipped all the branches of my family tree, and I was alone. The fruit of a dead family, the last survivor of his treachery. He called me a poisoned chalice, and maybe that was the point. All of his decades of nefarious machinations, had resulted in me; a pawn in a game of vampires I had no knowledge of. But he’d pay. Whatever else happened, he couldn’t survive the night.

“Stakes kill elite fastest,” Camina said, handing me a staff of splintered wood. “Unless you take their head off with a sword. Either one is damn near impossible, unless you’ve had so much elixir you can’t think straight.”

“What about the chosen?” I asked.

“They’ll have to be incapacitated. If they’re wounded, they won’t heal as quickly. Most of them carry their own elixir; or have access to it.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Give them an injury they can’t walk away from,” she shrugged, “and they’ll be out of the fight until they can heal.”

With the sun down, the citadel was plunged into a deep purple shadow that spread like a bruise, but there was still plenty of light to see, at least for my sharp eyes. We crossed over to the side of a stone barrier and used the ridge to sneak up alongside the main passage, through a grove of rose bushes, but it was only a few moments until we were spotted again. Camina jumped down and twisted the guard’s neck before he could shout out, but the other guards were already charging toward us, shining flashlights.

It made them easy targets. I took out seven with my arrows until they were close enough to strike, wishing I’d kept the large sword from before. But it was too heavy to carry and imprecise.

When they got too close to shoot, I moved like a shadow through their attacks, my attention hyper-focused and alert with elixir. If I fixated on one at a time, I could freeze them or shift their attack, causing them to stab each other. I felt like a blowing leaf, occasionally sprayed with a light mist of blood. If I timed it right, I barely had to lift my weapon. But then a sword came down hard on my shoulder, nearly cutting to the bone. I kicked the guard in the stomach and then slammed him to the ground with one hand. I dodged as an axe swiped at my head, just in time for the blow to cut into the man beneath me, severing his neck. I grabbed the decapitated head by the hair and swung it, blinding them with blood before tossing it at them. I punched one in the mouth and felt a stab of pain as his tooth embedded in my knuckle. There were two or three more, but they blended together. A flash of armor, a dark beard, a sharp blade. A moment later, they were a pile of bodies.

We slipped away into a dark alley, making our way around the side of the palace. At one end, small wooden alcoves were set up with fancy tables, for the nobles to relax and drink tea with a view of the city.

“Give me a minute,” Camina said, breathing heavily. She pulled out one of the vaporizers from the strip. She took a long drag and blew out a cloud of sparkly blue vapor. Her lips parted to speak when she was torn away from me, thrown into a pile of trash near a dumpster. The elite snarled down at me, his fingers clawed like talons, ready to strike.

But a bright flash of pink light blinded us both. The elite hissed and turned away, shielding his face, just as a shotgun blast threw him against the window behind us, cracking it. I turned to find Luke and April. Camina, on her feet again, shouted a warning as the elite straightened, apparently annoyed at the rather large, smoking hole in his chest. But his expression froze as a blade cut through his neck. Tobias stood several paces away, his back to us as he put away his wet sword. Penelope appeared next to him, her wavy hair and figure silhouetted in the moonlight. Curate Marcus darted forward and grabbed my hand.

“Where are we heading?” I asked.

“The palace,” he said. “We need to get inside before the coronation.”

“It won’t be much of a party.”

“Anybody with any sense will stay indoors. Which leaves the guards and the elite. If they attack us, we’ll defend ourselves, but they aren’t our enemy. Is Damien meeting us there?”

He flinched when he saw my face, and nearly stumbled. He looked at the ground for a moment, stroking his chin.

“We’ll figure that out later. Sometimes if you don’t risk anything. You risk everything. Are you ready for this?”

I nodded. I was tired of playing it safe.

“Let’s burn it all down.”

We shuffled up the cobblestones, our footsteps a whisper against the smooth marble. A few stars shimmered between the dark clouds in the purple sky, and the moon was a crescent sliver that hung like a scythe. Sparks hissed from the fires below us, and the clashing of gleaming swords marked skirmishes yet unfinished.

Around us I could hear grunts as Penelope and Tobias cleared our path, silently executing the guards. I saw a shadow on the rooftop and drew my bow, as half a dozen elite tried to block our path. They moved quickly, leaping and jumping. But slow enough I could track them with my eyes, and more than one was surprised when my arrows found their mark. I missed half of my shots, but a few flung true and at least one, I was pretty sure, pierced a heart.

Another vampire jumped out the window above me and knocked me to the ground. I put five arrows in his chest, two in his heart for sure, but he was still moving. Curate Marcus took a torch and lit the bundle of arrows on fire, and the flames leaped up from the wood, consuming his face. He screamed away, a burning pillar in a fancy black suit.

Another latched onto my neck from behind, gouging a deep bite and gripping me with vice-like fingers. Luke sprinted towards us, his palm extended, shooting a beam of light purple from his wrist. The vampire recoiled, his flesh turning red in the ultraviolet rays. Half a dozen bullets tore through his skull, and his head exploded, splattering me with blood and brains.

“Neat trick,” I said, nodding at the UV device on Luke’s arm.

“I light’em up, she takes’em out,” he said, nodding at April’s shotgun. “Or sometimes they do.” He said, casting his eyes towards our allies on the upper ramparts, with sniper rifles too far away to see.

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