Vanquished Gods (Hallowed Games #2)

Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19

O n Poppy’s back, we rode along a road that curved up the coastline on the western coast of Merthyn.

I licked my lips, tasting the salt of the sea spray, but that was all I noticed. My mind was spinning. There wasn’t anything to the kiss, of course. It was just the vampiric need to drink blood, the inexorable survival instinct and the unrestrained pleasure that went with it. I’d be stupid to think too much of it. What I should be thinking about was that we’d saved an entire city from meeting a horrific end. Not just the physical torment, but the psychological warfare of forced accusations, the corrosive guilt of those who survived. Today, at least, we’d won the battle.

We just needed to win the war.

And before we won the war, I desperately needed food and sleep. Hard to think straight when I could hardly keep my eyes open and hunger was carving a hole in my stomach. As my eyes grew heavier, images of delicious food from Gwethel drifted through my mind—the salmon, the cod, the buttery potatoes.

Iron-gray clouds covered the sky, and the churning sea was a dark slate blue. Exhausted, I gave in to my body’s demands and slumped into Sion’s unyielding chest. I heard the faintest of growls from deep in his throat.

My stomach rumbled loudly, and I felt Sion’s muscles tense around me.

“We need to get you food,” he said sharply. “I know how you get when you’re hungry.” A cold note of fury laced his voice.

“First of all, how would you possibly know how I get? And second, why do you sound so angry about it?”

“I’m not.”

He absolutely sounded angry. “Are you still mad that I made you swim?”

“No.” His body somehow stiffened impossibly more behind me.

“Have you always been scared of the water?”

“What difference does it make?”

He very much did not want to talk about this. Obviously, that made me want to pry more. “Is it the only thing you're scared of?” I asked.

“No.”

Now I only had more questions. “But why swimming? You’re immortal. You can’t drown.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Lucky for you, we are stuck on a horse together on a long, empty seaside road with no food or shelter. So, why not tell me the long story? Tell me everything. You know my history. All the dirty secrets. My mum died, and I started killing people with my touch. My fiancé left me for my former best friend, and then her dad burned my wrists and forced me to work for him. What else? Oh, you already know about that time you murdered my dad in the woods. You know all my horrible history, so maybe you owe me the story of Sion. Tell me about little Sion, the boy in Lirion. Tell me everything.”

Shadows coiled off his body, and the air seemed to grow colder. “Well, first, I wasn’t from Lirion. Not when I was a kid.”

“Where were you from?”

He was quiet for so long, I wasn’t sure that he was going to answer, until finally, he said, “Wormwood. A town called Wormwood on the west coast, not far from Lyramor. Not very different from Lyramor, either.”

“Wormwood, like the poison?”

“Well, as it happens, it grew all over the town walls, and the people there were very poisonous, so it was fitting. The Tyrenians had taken over our town. They brought their one god and their authoritarian rule. My grandfather died fighting them, and that left my mother destitute, so you can guess what happened from there.”

I frowned. “Not really.”

“Well, obviously, she started working in a whorehouse, which is where I was fathered by gods-know-who. I grew up in the whorehouse, and she continued to sell herself to the Tyrenian soldiers who’d killed her family. And she died inside, every day, little by little. I grew up loathing the Tyrenian invaders more and more with every day that passed. But no matter what she did, there was never enough money, never enough food. And then she grew addicted to poppy water. It was the only way she had to get through the day, because it numbed it all. It was a way to live in a waking dream world—blessed by death’s brother, sleep.”

I swallowed hard. “And when did you leave Wormwood?”

“Well, I was always starving. We had no money, and Mum would forget to feed me, anyway. Food was all I could think about. I hated being hungry. I hated my mother being hungry. I hated that she didn’t seem to care about food anymore because she only cared for the poppy water. All I dreamt about was food, and then I’d wake with an empty pit in my stomach. So, one day, when Mum and I were out in the market, I could smell a fresh- baked steak pie, and I couldn’t get my mind off it. I was mad with hunger. When I thought the baker wasn’t looking, I just grabbed the pie. But the baker realized right away a pie was missing, and he called for a soldier. A Tyrenian Luminarus. My mum knew I’d be caught, so she grabbed the pie from me and acted like she was the one who stole it. She told them it was her.”

As he spoke, a sick feeling started to sink into my stomach. “Oh, gods.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if that was her way of ending her pain. Instead of the dull sleep of poppy water, she could have the eternal sleep of death. They didn’t really do trials at all back then. The people of Wormwood and the Luminari kept saying people like us were filth. Back then, the Tyrenian punishment for theft was being tied up, thrown in a sack, and tossed into the river, and I think they considered throwing me in, too. I remember them saying I was rotten, filthy, and I was, because I was the one who stole it, not Mum. So, she died, drowned in that river. They threw Mum in a mass grave for criminals. And if you believed in the Archon, that meant you’d be eternally tormented after death. I used to believe that. I always wanted to fix it. I wanted to prove them all wrong, that I wasn’t rotten. I wanted to become something great and find my mother’s jumbled bones and bury them outside the Archonium.”

My stomach clenched. “I’m so sorry. That’s heartbreaking. But you weren’t rotten. You were just a starving little boy. The adults in that town letting you starve were the filth.”

“Well, it was centuries ago. And I did become something, and I never needed to move my mum’s bones because when I grew up, I learned that the Archon and his afterworld of torment are made up. That it’s all a myth to make us fall in line.”

I found my head nestling into his throat, and the intoxicating scent of him wrapped around me. “So, how did you end up in Lirion, with Maelor?”

“There was nothing for me in Wormwood, where everyone thought I was filth, trash, so I stowed away on a ship to Lirion—the one place in Merthyn the Tyrenians hadn’t conquered. And I lived there, working for food on people’s farms, taking care of their animals, until I was old enough to run the stables of a young viscount who lived in a castle.”

“And you seduced his wife?”

“I wouldn’t really call it a seduction. And in my defense, Epona was very lonely. She was also very beautiful, and she loved to laugh and be happy, but she wasn’t getting any joy from Maelor anymore.”

“Were you in love with her?”

He sighed. “It was hard not to fall in love with her back then. She was beautiful, always happy. Since when are you interested in my love life?”

“I just don’t understand how you and Maelor stayed friends after you seduced his wife.”

I felt the muscles in his arms tighten. “We are bonded. We were turned by the same sire, and we crawled from the dirt together, fighting the ravening hunger that turned our blood into flames and our stomachs into empty, bottomless pits of craving. It really does bond you to someone.”

“What happened with you and the Mormaer who turned you?”

“I never completely trusted him, to tell you the truth. He left us alone after he turned us. It’s not what a sire is supposed to do. He abandoned those he turned. Maelor and I had only each other. We were together when we first went into a place beyond language. In those early days as the living dead, it was just us and our instincts and the never-ending yearning for blood, and the first thing I saw when I started to remember words again were Maelor’s pale silver eyes, and the first thing I remembered was his name. It was the first word in my thoughts. We were there with each other when we first looked at ourselves and saw what we’d become, what we’d done. We were with each other when we learned what it meant to live like a monster. Turning into a vampire can break a person’s mind if they’re not strong enough.”

“And since those early days, how often have you gone to a place beyond words?” I asked.

A silence stretched out between us for a long moment. “More than I care to think about…are you going to keep interrogating me? Because we are rather stuck here together on this horse, and I can’t get out of this.”

Something familiar sparked in the depths of my mind. “Why do I feel like you feel guilt over the people you’ve killed? You pretend to not care about anything, but you do.”

“I’ve killed innocent people, and some of their deaths haunt me,” he said darkly. “There’s not much I can do about that. It’s in a vampire’s nature to hunt. But there are some things I’ve done I’d much rather forget, and all the fucking and blood drinking and wine guzzling in the world won’t make those memories go away—I know, because I’ve tried. Centuries of memories haunt me…it’s a gift, really, to be able to forget things that might haunt you. Don’t you think?”

My breath quickened. “I’m not sure. Things like what?”

“Hang on. I can smell roasting vegetables coming from that cottage.”

Was he avoiding my question?

“What are you going to do about roasting vegetables?” I asked, hoping it wouldn’t involve more dead bodies, more black marks on his conscience.

Sion pulled Poppy to a halt and dismounted, leaving me seated in the saddle.

“Sion! Don’t kill anyone,” I shouted after him as he stalked up to the door, his dark cloak caught in the wind.

He knocked on the door.

A man opened the door, dressed in simple white and brown clothes. His forehead wrinkled as he looked up at Sion.

Sion spoke softly at first, his voice quiet, almost soothing. The man’s shoulders began to relax, but only for a moment. Within seconds, Sion’s demeanor shifted, and shadows spilled into the air around him. The man took a step back.

While I couldn’t see Sion’s expression, I could tell exactly what was happening by the look of abject terror on the stranger’s face. I had no doubt that Sion had flashed his fangs, his eyes turning black as ink.

Sion shifted, his shadows streaking the air as he disappeared inside the cottage. The screams from inside raised the hair on my nape.

“Sion?” I called out.

Moments later, the man stumbled out of the cottage, dragging a woman who must have been his young wife with him. She clung to him, trembling. “What was that thing? What was he?”

Sion’s head emerged from the doorway, the darkness I was sure had been there now gone from his eyes. With a sly smile, he beckoned for me to come in. “There’s food in here, and a place to sleep.”

My jaw dropped. “Sion, you can’t just kick them out of their house!”

“And why not? We have a higher mission. We are saving the bloody kingdom.”

I was too tired and hungry to come up with a good argument. So, I simply said, “Because.”

A few moments later, Sion was leaving their house with what looked like a freshly baked pie, steam still curling off its surface. The better part of me wanted to tell him to leave their food for them, that we weren’t going to steal. But the darker, hungrier part of me just wanted the fucking pie.

Maybe Sion was bringing out the dark side in me, or maybe that was the hunger itself.

“Pay them for it, will you?” I shouted to Sion.

This was my moral compromise. Sion reached into his pockets, pulled out a few gold coins, and tossed them at the couple. They scrambled to pick them up. Gold coins were worth little to Sion, apparently, but for this couple in their peasant cottage, it would feed them for a year.

So, when Sion got back on the horse and handed me the pie, all my moral qualms had gone. I’d never been so hungry. I couldn’t think of anything except the pie before me. And although it was too hot to eat, I started eating it anyway, not caring if my tongue was burning. The crust was flaky and buttery, and when I bit into it, I tasted potatoes, leeks, and some sort of rich cheese. I moaned as I ate.

“I knew I’d satisfy you at some point,” Sion said from behind me.

“Thank you for the pie,” I said, my mouth full. I’d been so intent on it, I hadn’t even paid attention to the fact that Poppy was already moving again.

“A brutal storm is rolling in,” Sion said.

I looked out to see a wall of rain across the sea like a dark, misty beast consuming the water in its path. Iron-gray clouds churned in the sky, and a strike of lightning touched down on the waves in the distance—waves that were growing wilder, hungrier.

Sion nudged Poppy, and she sped up as we climbed a hill, thunder rolling over the horizon. As the wind rose, I huddled into Sion.

Another strike of lightning—this time closer, a blinding white light.

The boom of thunder rumbled through my bones.

“Elowen, darling,” Sion murmured, “you and I are going to stop for shelter in someone’s house, whether you like it or not.”