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I waited, but he said nothing more of what he intended once we reached the capital city. He almost never did, choosing only to explain himself when it suited him, and even then only speaking in vague generalities. “Might I know what happens then?”
He chuckled. “Patience.”
I drew a slow breath, determined to continue remaining calm and not give him the satisfaction of driving me to violence that would only end in my own pain. His tether still kept me from physically attacking him, same as it kept me from straying too far from his side.
He would only find it pleasing to watch me writhe in pain. After all, he’d enjoyed killing my fellow vampire witch, Stelaruna, too much for me to think otherwise.
I remained still, refusing to shiver at the memory. I’d get to the wall. I’d tear him to pieces.
Nothing would stop me from being free of this contemptible simulacrum of a man.
“You remain so eager,” he teased.
I kept my expression neutral. “I only wish to witness our plan’s success.”
His eyebrow arched as he turned his black eyes to me. “Our plan? It is my plan, pet. You are only a tool for my ends, nothing more.”
I would watch him die screaming, whatever liquid passed for blood in his body pouring out onto the cold, dry earth.
He smiled at my silence. “But you are correct. Traveling this way is taking rather long. Your vampire nature is such a hindrance in this regard.”
I bristled. My vampire nature was a hindrance? I, who was the only reason he could even exist on this plane of reality? How dare he… “You are not standing in the sunlight any more than I am.”
My caution caught up to my outrage, but it was too slow to stop the words from passing my lips.
Alaric’s brow arched, amusement flickering over his face.
I braced myself for him to step so far into the sun that his leash pulled me after him, making me burn alive. There was no telling what horrors he would inflict, merely because it entertained him to watch me suffer.
But he said nothing.
Distrustful confusion joined my caution. He was such a proud and insufferable creature. Why wouldn’t he respond to my supposed insolence?
Was he unable to withstand the sunlight as well? But how could that be? All his fellow Voidborn were there.
Rising to his feet, Alaric merely craned his neck as if searching for something beyond the horde of monsters waiting outside the rough shelter. The skin of his throat stretched as he moved, the craning motion extending his neck several inches beyond what any human body would be able to accomplish.
I suppressed a shudder, turning my eyes away. Even when he tried to look human, he failed.
And then he made a satisfied sound as if he spotted something out there that pleased him.
My apprehension surged again. I climbed to my feet, watching him warily while I brushed the dust from my dress. The fabric was becoming threadbare after so many days of travel—an insult to my station for which I would also make him pay. Likewise, my passage through the empty realms had sapped the cloth of some of its vibrancy. Only patches of the blue velvet still glimmered in the shadows of this hovel.
When I got back to Lumilia, I would have the thing burned, if only to keep it from ever reminding me I had endured such an indignity.
“What do you seek now?” I asked, adopting a bored tone, as if I couldn’t care less what he was after.
Alaric didn’t respond.
My teeth clenched. I forced them to relax, comforting myself by listing yet again the ways he would suffer before I was done with him.
On the horizon, a trail of black smoke suddenly surged up from a crack in the earth. At high speed, it zipped toward us like an eel swimming through the air.
I tensed. Another Voidborn, this time not inside a monster but instead on its own in the open. It darted across the field, wavering this way and that as if it was barely in control of itself, and yet it never stopped. Not even as it whipped between the monsters at the edge of the horde. Not even as it sped through the crowd like a dark arrow.
It was heading directly toward me.
Terror wrapped its cold hands around my throat. Surely Alaric didn’t intend to let one of those creatures take me over?
