Chapter 243

Calix

He came at me.

He was fast, faster than I’d expected for a starved man in silver burns, and he crossed the gravel in two long strides with his hands hooked like claws and his fangs bared. I’d watched Julian for years. I knew how he fought, the same way I knew how he dressed and how he lied. He threw his whole body behind his first strike and left his left side open every time, because nobody had ever made him pay for it.

I stepped inside his reach and turned my shoulder into his chest. The silver stiletto slid out of my sleeve and into my hand with a flick of my wrist, and I drove it up under his ribs on the open left side, straight into the heart.

Julian stopped.

His whole body jerked against mine and locked there. His hands caught the front of my jacket and fisted in the fabric. His mouth opened against my shoulder, and a wet, choked sound came out of him that wasn’t quite a word.

I held him up. I turned my face toward his ear and spoke too quietly for Gideon to hear.

“He was never going to be yours,” I said. “He was always mine.”

The silver did its work. I felt it burn through him from the inside, felt his heart seize around the blade and shudder twice and stop. His fingers loosened on my jacket. His knees went out from under him. I pulled the stiletto free and let him fold onto the frozen gravel at my feet, and he lay there on his side with his dyed hair in the dirt and his eyes open, staring up at the dry fountain.

His crooked mustache had come unstuck at last. It clung to the corner of his mouth by one end.

I looked down at my jacket. He’d bled on it, a dark smear across the lapel that would never come out of the wool. I sighed.

Behind me, Gideon made a sound.

I turned. He stood rooted beside the fountain with his borrowed coat hanging open and his knife finally out in his fist, a long hunting blade with a bone handle. His face had gone the color of old paper. He was staring at Julian’s body as if he’d never seen a dead man before, and I supposed that, as a vampire, he hadn’t.

“You…” Gideon’s voice cracked. “He was…”

“Yes,” I said. “He was.”

Gideon’s horror broke apart, and something wild and hungry rushed in to fill the space. His fangs dropped. His eyes flooded red at the edges. He came at me with a raw, animal snarl, his knife swinging in a wide, ugly arc at my throat.

I stepped back and let it pass.

He was strong, far stronger than Julian, with six weeks of fresh blood in him and none of the control that comes with time. He didn’t fight like a swordsman. He fought like a dog let off its chain. He hacked at me again and again, and each blow carried enough force to split a door, and each one missed by the width of a hand while I moved around him across the gravel.

He snarled and lunged. I turned away from the blade, and it whistled past my ear.

“Your father should’ve waited longer before he let you out of the house,” I said. “You’re not ready for company.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re leading with your shoulder. You’ll tear it out of the socket if you keep doing that.”

He roared and threw himself at me, and I let him drive me back toward the hedge. I could’ve ended it then. I could’ve opened his throat with the stiletto the way I’d opened Julian’s heart, and he’d never have seen it coming.

Then I heard the footsteps.

They came from the far side of the hedge, from the path that led back to the colonnade. Heavy and fast, crunching through the frozen gravel. I’d know that stride anywhere. I’d known it for longer than Lysander had been alive. I’d listened for it outside doors and down corridors and across empty rooms for more years than I could count, and I knew every way it could sound. Right now it sounded like a man in a hurry, looking for the one person he trusted to stand beside him.

Drake was coming to find me.

Gideon swung again, a wild, high slash aimed at my face. This time, I didn’t move away from it. I turned into the cut and lifted my arm just enough, and the hunting knife tore across my side, through my jacket and my shirt and deep into the meat beneath my ribs.

The pain was bright and clean. I let it show on my face. I let my hand fly to the wound and my knees buckle, and as I went down, I let the silver stiletto slip from my fingers and skitter across the gravel to land at Gideon’s feet, beside Julian’s outflung hand.

I hit the ground hard on my good side. Blood soaked through my fingers, hot and dark.

“Calix!”

Drake came around the hedge at a run, with Valen and two of his men at his back. He stopped dead at the edge of the gravel, and I watched him take in the garden all at once, the way he took in a battlefield. Julian lay dead beside the fountain. Gideon stood over him, wild-eyed, his fangs bared and his knife running red. A silver stiletto lay at his feet. And I lay on the frozen ground at the foot of the hedge, holding my own blood inside my body with both hands.

“Drake,” I gasped. I let my voice shake. “Drake, he… Gideon was waiting here with Julian. They asked to speak with me. I thought… I thought they wanted to surrender.” I dragged in a breath and let it rattle. “Gideon had a blade. Julian tried to stop him, and he… he killed him, Drake. And then he came for me.”

“That’s a lie!” Gideon whipped around to face Drake. “He’s lying! He killed Julian! He just stabbed him with…”

He looked down at the stiletto by his foot. He looked at the knife in his own hand, slick with my blood. I watched him understand what Drake was seeing.

Drake’s face changed.

I’d seen that look perhaps a dozen times in all the years I’d known him. Every one of those dozen men was dead.

“Valen,” Drake said. His voice had gone very quiet. “Take him.”

Valen’s men moved. Gideon raised his knife and backed toward the fountain, snarling, but Drake was already moving faster than any of them, and he crossed the garden in a blur of black wool. He hit Gideon like a falling tree. The hunting knife flew out of Gideon’s hand and clattered against the fountain’s dry basin, and Drake drove him face-first into the gravel with one knee planted between his shoulder blades.

Gideon screamed something into the dirt. Nobody listened.

Drake looked back over his shoulder at me, and the fury on his face cracked for one heartbeat into something raw and frightened.

“Calix,” he said. “How bad?”

“I’ll live.” I pressed harder on the wound and let my eyes flutter. “Go. Find Lysander. I can feel… you were so afraid, Drake. Go.”

He turned away to shout at Valen. I lay back against the frozen ground and let the pain wash through me, and I listened to his voice snapping orders above me, strong and furious and frightened. It was frightened for Lysander, and it was furious on my behalf.

Then I turned my head on the gravel.

Gideon lay pinned under Drake’s knee, his cheek ground into the stones, blood trickling from his split lip. His red-rimmed eyes found mine across the dark garden and held there, wide and desperate and burning with hate.

I smiled at him.