Vanquished Gods (Hallowed Games #2)

Chapter 34

CHAPTER 34

B ack at the castle, Sion immediately swept into action, taking charge as if he hadn’t been impaled to a tree for several days. In the great hall, standing before his throne, he issued sharp commands to the seneschal. He wanted provisions for the families of the six dead soldiers. He wanted Aveline interrogated, and for reports on anyone seen talking to Epona in recent weeks.

Sion had found his traitor.

The scent of cinders wrapped around us both—as did the tension, coiling tighter with each passing moment. He knew what I’d done, that I’d killed Bran and lied, and we still hadn’t spoken of it.

I hadn’t wanted to talk about it on the way back to the castle. Not with Maelor around. Not until we were alone.

Just as I started to turn away, Sion’s hand shot out and gripped my bicep, his fingers like iron. His gold eyes flared. “I need to speak to you. In private. Come to my room in thirty minutes.”

I sighed. “I’ll be there.”

As Sion turned to Aelius, I dragged myself back to my chambers. My thoughts were tangled briars, twisted and thorny. Maelor was right. It really wasn’t easy to talk to someone about murdering someone they cared about.

I pushed through the door into my room, stripping off my filthy clothes. I marched directly into the bathroom and filled the tub.

After days in a cage, dirt and grime covered every inch of my skin.

I slipped into the bathtub as moonlight poured in through the high arched windows, catching the steam in coils of silver. Heat from the bath warmed my body. I ran the lavender-scented soap over my skin.

I tried to relax, but Epona’s screams still echoed in my thoughts. She was gone, but I felt her loneliness deep in my chest.

She’d said I didn’t deserve Sion. I’d shagged his best friend, murdered another friend. Admittedly, it didn’t sound great when it was summarized that way.

I sank deeper into the bath, the water warming me up to my shoulders.

When I thought Sion had killed someone I loved, I’d looked at him like he was a monster. Now, I had to wonder how he would look at me, knowing the same.

The steam curled around me as I stepped out of the bath, water dripping down my bare skin. I dried myself and flung open my wardrobe, frowning at the dresses Epona had brought me. How had no one else noticed that she was doing the job of a servant?

I pulled on a long red dress and turned to catch sight of myself in the mirror. I looked like another woman—smoother, stiller.

I hurried out, crossing through the torchlit castle to get to Sion’s room. The walk felt longer than it should have as my thoughts spun.

When I reached his door, I hesitated. My fist hovered over the wood for a few seconds before I finally knocked.

Sion’s voice carried through the wood. “Come in. I’ll be out in a moment.”

I pushed the heavy door open, then stepped into the room and found it empty. I’d never been inside before. As I would have expected from his room, everything was tidy and controlled. But what I hadn’t expected was the warmth in there. His bed, neatly made with dark burgundy and gold, was tucked all the way up to the intricately carved mahogany headboard. It smelled like him, too—dark spice and warmth, making my pulse race. A fireplace crackled to the side, casting flickering light that washed the room in orange and gold. Everything was perfectly ordered, down to the placement of the neatly arranged books on his shelves. It was a stark contrast to Maelor’s utter chaos, his open books and half-written poems that littered his room.

But Maelor had grown up in wealth. Sion? He’d had to create order for himself from a chaotic world.

I turned as a wooden door opened and Sion stepped out, wearing only a pair of trousers. My breath hitched. A few droplets of water gleamed on his muscled shoulders, reflecting the moonlight, each one seeming to trace the hard lines of his body. His eyes met mine, and they flickered with shadows for a moment, dark and dangerous. I felt heat rush to my cheeks.

“We need to talk.”

I took him in as I started to move. He’d already healed from the vines that had pierced him. As I stared at him, the room suddenly felt warmer, the air charged between us.

I sat at the edge of his bed. “I take it you know about Bran.”

He stepped closer. “You could have mentioned it, perhaps, at some point during the past several weeks, seeing as I sent out valuable manpower to search for him.”

His voice had a low, dangerous calm, and it vibrated over my skin.

“I know. Well, I know that now. But I didn’t know that I could have told you when I first arrived. I only knew that you’d killed my father, and that you’d picked me up by the throat in Ruefield, and that you liked killing people.” I exhaled sharply. “I mean, I thought you killed my father. Maelor told me the truth.”

His muscles coiled tightly, his body going eerily still. Shadows licked at the air around him. But instead of addressing that, he said, “I have questions. Let’s start with why you murdered one of my oldest friends.”

“He threatened Leo,” I said quickly. “He said—he said if I didn’t go with him to Gwethel, I could say goodbye to that little boy?—”

Sion let out a short, cold laugh. “He meant the Order would capture you. That’s what he meant about saying goodbye to the little boy. That the Order would kill him. And then you spent all this time judging me for doing what a vampire does…”

“I’m sorry I killed him. In the moment, I really thought that I had to kill him to keep myself and Leo safe.”

His eyes darkened, but I read in them a flicker of something else—something like comprehension—as it passed through his gaze. “I always knew you understood the survival instinct.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and he stared out at the sea through his window. “Well, it’s done. And we can’t let anyone else here know that it was you. He was very well liked.”

My fingers curled into his soft velvet blanket. “But I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets, was I? You took my memories from me.”

Shadows seeped into the air around him. Suddenly, he looked strangely lost. “So, Maelor told you.”

“And what, exactly, did you take from my memories? My father’s last moments? Maelor only told me that he was the one who killed my father—he said the rest would need to come from you.”

He reached for me, wrapping his hand around mine. A look of agony shone in his eyes, and I felt, with a strange certainty, that no one else saw this side of him—not even Maelor.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to remember his last moments,” he said softly.

My chest ached. “You don’t know that. But let’s not focus on that right now. How did we even meet ?”

“Long before I met you, I was captured by the Order. This was even before the Pater took over. Early on, they tortured me as they demanded names. I grew to know humans as utterly evil. Then, they forgot me. I lived, if that’s what you could call it, utterly forgotten, withering in a dungeon for decades by myself. I shriveled into nothing. I lost my mind, turned into an animal. I forgot how to speak. The guards changed over the years. They no longer knew who I was, or what I was. They only knew me as a weak, shriveled demon.

“When the Pater took control, they started arresting more and more witches. The dungeons grew crowded. And they no longer knew me, thinking I wasn’t much of a threat at all. They threw two witches into my cell with me. I killed them immediately, drained them of blood. By some innate, animal instinct, I arranged their bodies to look like they were sleeping, and I hid under my cloak until they opened my cell again. And once they did, I smashed through the iron door. I drank the blood of every guard I encountered until I broke free of the dungeon. It was still night. I crawled to a cave not far from the Baron’s manor house.”

“And I found you there?”

His fiery gaze seemed to devour me. “As I started to remember who I was, I strayed from the cave one night, stripped off my clothes, and bathed in the river. That was when you first saw me, out on a walk by yourself in the forest. And something stopped me from killing you. I remember thinking that you looked sad. We didn’t speak. You just stared at me. I moved closer to you, rushing at the speed of a vampire. You seemed…overwhelmed.”

A memory of him, naked and bathed in moonlight, flashed through my thoughts. Water had dripped down his muscled body, every hard line sculpted like a marble statue, defined with a perfection I could only describe as divine . I remembered his broad, powerful shoulders caressed by silver moonlight.

My eyes widened, and heat ran over my skin at the memory rising to the surface. It felt uncanny, real and dreamlike at the same time, like something I could almost touch, but it slipped through my fingers like smoke. “It almost seems familiar.”

“The next day, you started bringing me things. Offerings. Fruit, trinkets. Even clothes. At first, you thought I was one of the old gods. And you remember that a little, don’t you? You later thought you were cursed because you left an offering for the old gods.”

“I thought you were an old god? Was I stupid back then or something?”

The corners of his mouth twitched in a faint smile. The sight of it sent an unexpected jolt of warmth through me. “No, I’d say you’re very wise. You recognize perfection when you see it. You thought I was a god.”

“Very convenient for you that I have no memory of this, so I can’t exactly argue.”

He shrugged slowly. “I’m sure you’ll think the same again soon when you finally recover your senses.”

“And what happened next? Did we fuck, and I told you that you were the greatest lover of all time?”

He arched an eyebrow. “So, you remember? Back then, I’d started remembering words, and how the civilized world worked. I dressed myself again in the clothes you brought me. And then we started to talk. I told you I wasn’t a god. I told you I was a vampire. I just didn’t entirely explain the blood-drinking because I thought you might find it distasteful. But you were the first person who’d been nice to me in decades. I left the woods after that, but I kept coming back to see you at night.”

I didn’t know what to say, my breath catching as I tried to reconcile the Sion I knew now with this man in the woods. A person I’d apparently been more than just connected with. Someone I’d wanted. I felt a tug in my chest, pulling me closer to him. “So, we were together.”

“I have never forgotten it.” There was a rough, hungry edge in his voice, like the memory of the kiss had branded him. Firelight gleamed in his eyes, an unspoken invitation that stirred something dangerous inside me.

For a moment, my body heated with the memory of Sion kissing me against a tree, his hand around my neck, my body on fire for him. The way he’d tasted me, savoring me…

“I think some memories of you are returning.”

“I wish I’d left the good memories of me. But I knew I couldn’t return to you after you saw what I was. I couldn’t keep meeting with you, knowing who killed your father, that I was there for it, that I kept it from you. It was the way you looked at me after you saw what I really was. You looked at me like I was a monster, and I never wanted to see that expression in your eyes again.”

“So, you erased it all.” My voice broke with the weight of it, the lost pieces of myself.

His jaw tightened, his eyes flickering with a vulnerable edge. “It was the way you looked at me after you saw me snap Maelor’s neck to stop him. We’d fought viciously, tearing at each other, and you knew I was just like him. I wanted you to forget seeing your father die at Maelor’s hands…” His voice was barely a whisper, and the pain there—so sharp, so unexpected—sent a jolt through my chest.

I inhaled sharply. But before I could say another word, there was a knock at the door. The sound shattered the charged air between us, and Sion’s eyes slid to the door, the vulnerability disappearing like shadows chased off by the dawn.

He crossed the room and opened the heavy wooden door. A servant stood there, his eyes wide.

“Your Majesty,” the man said, his voice tense. “Another letter has arrived. Our spies have seen ships belonging to the Order, and the Luminari are boarding at the coast of Merthyn. They’re getting ready to sail. They’ll be here by morning.”

“And the pendants for the vampires?”

The servant shook his head. “We only have enough for three hundred.”

“And we will be fighting a force of thousands.” Sion’s face darkened, his fingers tightening around the door handle until the wood creaked. “Dismissed.”

The servant bowed and left without another word.

Sion scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “We can create a shield around the entire island, but all the Order has to do is wait for our magic to burn out. They’ll have a full infantry, cavalry, archers. Thousands of soldiers against our three hundred.”

“What if we wait until they get closer?” I suggested. “They won’t know we have that ability until it’s too late. We’ll summon a veil of death as they dock and kill them the moment they land. We’ll create utter chaos as the first troops reach the shore.”

A dark shiver ran up my spine at the thought of it. Our magic was the best defense we had—the power of death to meld with the shadows, to create a barrier that would wither any person it touched.

“The shadowy wall will create chaos and weaken their numbers quickly, but we won’t be able to maintain it,” I continued. “The magic will burn out long before they all die. Maybe we need to bring in the other witches. Fire magic, shifting rocks. Surely Percival can set some of the ships on fire.” My stomach tightened, but I pressed on, knowing this plan was a good one. “But we need to be careful with the witches. They can’t get anywhere near my magic.”

Sion paced away from the table, his silhouette blending into the shadows. “I think that after the first wave lands, we need to lure them into the woods. The other vampires, those with pendants, will be waiting there in the forest in an ambush. Those without pendants will be defending from inside the castle. The Order wants you, I’m sure. They want your power for the Pater. They will want to capture you, and they will want Maelor and me dead, and I suspect they’ll be under orders to hunt us down. To make a spectacle of our deaths, the way the Order likes to do. So, we lead them after us into the forest. Our magic is strongest there, anyway, and their cavalry won’t be able to manage well with the rough terrain. They’re trained to fight in fields, not between oaks. In the forest, we can use another pulse of shadows and death, spread it out between the trees. Our three hundred vampire soldiers will meet the rest of the troops at the shoreline. They’ll still be outnumbered, but vampires are far superior to human soldiers in every way.”

I swallowed hard. “Do you think it will be enough?”

“It has to be. I’m not letting them get anywhere fucking near you.” He held my gaze, his eyes uncharacteristically unguarded once more.

Once, I’d thought he didn’t feel fear at all. Now, I knew how wrong I was.