The Blood Witch

The Exception

Only when I refused to make a celebratory speech and the Grand Cardinal had declared my behaviour "most selfishly childish" was I allowed to retire back to Ash and Emity in peace.

Ash looks older under the moonlight. Even as he tilts his head back and allows the dregs of the wine to drip onto his tongue with his usual lightheartedness, the silver light carves dark shadows across his brow and greys his curly hair. It sends a painful lurch through my stomach to witness it, the sudden vision into a future where I lay beside a man and not a boy.

The only thing keeping Ash from manhood now is how little the world has injured him.

I'm too drunk. The sad thoughts begin to blur themselves together and I open another bottle to try and wash the images away entirely.

Surely, I've seen Paige under the same pale moonlight. I'd certainly created some image of a future with her, from a different life where witchcraft wasn't a death sentence. She'd be wizened with kindness, face lined with laughter. The red in her hair would still shine through like rivulets of copper among the silver.

But this is not a different life, and now her amber hair rots in the filth of a dead-ridden fort.

I turn away from the moon's light so Ash can't see it in my tears.

"What will you do now?" I ask, as much to the open night sky as I do to Ash. "Now that you're free?"

Ash takes his time before responding. "I want to see my country. I want to serve it, too. I'm not running because I'm afraid of what it takes to stop this affliction of vampyres. It's just that... I know this wedding is not the path to do it. I may not be one of the princes of the prophecy, but I know I'm no brood mare either. I'll ride through the frontlines themselves if that's what it takes to help fix this curse."

There I was hoping his words would distract me from the death in my wake. Rage slithers through the grief. I want to reach out and choke him. I want to throttle his parents. The Church. Everyone who has had a hand in feeding him the lie of some kind of noble fight against the undead, in giving him such a naïve, fatal hope.

"Don't you fucking dare."

Ash doesn't reply, but glances at me with a pointed look that says he'll follow his gut regardless of any words I use to stop him.

"If it were a matter of simply walking up to the closest vampyre and dueling it to the death, do you really think I'd be here? Do you think so many witches would be dead?"

"Sasha," Ash says softly.

"There's so much we still don't even understand about the cursed. So much they won't even tell you. There's more than one type of vampyre, you should know."

"I know," he assures me calmly. "All I did after Marcel's death was read briefing after briefing on the war. I know, Sasha. I know there's a difference between those vampires who wash up with the original curse and the victims they turn. They're faster and stronger and more potent-"

"There's three types," I interrupt and kill the words on his lips. When I look at him, however, it's not the intended concern widening his eyes. No. It's that Abyss-damned curiosity I see in them, the same eagerness that had watched me use my magic just seconds after he'd removed the prison irons from my hands. The same meddlesome instinct that's going to get him killed.

"Three?"

I've only seen the third kind once, a month ago when the moon hung just as full and when Paige bled out into my arms.

Even as the memories have haunted my dreams and every waking thought in the days since, I haven't uttered them aloud since first recounting them to the commanders at Laminus Regiment. My tongue is thick with the weight of the words and the wine it takes to get them out of me.

"In Brightwell's Keep there was one vampyre unlike the others I've seen. It was... It was like it was lucid. It could feel. It... it could speak."

At first glance, the thing had been no different to any other monster the witches of Laminus Regiment had put an end to. It had the same pinched, grey skin, gnarled as bark around its sunken mouth. The sclera of its eyes was stained an inky black, all the more at contrast with those glowing, feline yellow irises that too often formed the last sight a Pyrthian ever saw.

Its hair hung long and knotted around its dark, ashen face. When it spoke, the sound was raw and bloody as though its crowded mouth of fangs hurt to move.

"It asked for us to help it. It... It begged. It didn't even attack. No vampyre does that. Through fire and spell and blade they'll throw themselves to get to human blood, but this one just... fell to the ground and begged. It was so much smarter. It was so much crueler."

"Crueler?" Ash asks curiously.

The pitch black of the distant palace lawn seems to press in against the balcony, so dark and empty it's almost possible to believe I'm back there in the Keep. That my witches are at my side, with the monster at our mercy. I'd almost begun to dismiss the words it had uttered as a fever dream, but how else could I explain the deaths that followed. Esra, Hadvar and Paige. Three of the brightest witches I'd ever led. The three dozen other soldiers who had filled the lower floors of the keep. Myself.

Even against vampyres, we were not a threat to be taken lightly. Not until that one, impossible monster.

I'd begged Paige not to engage it. As commanding officer I'd even ordered her when that failed, thrust all the weight of our friendship into my words as I demanded her to retreat so I could kill it.

It hadn't begged for us to spare its life. It had begged for us to kill it and to leave. I completely agreed with it.

Fuck the implications of a sentient vampyre, the first real change we'd seen in years. Fuck any chance to communicate with the enemy. I've been bred for one thing only and by the Father I've grown good at it. Then that stupid, over-curious bitch I love got in the way.

"My- my... Paige. The witch I knew. She... She tried to talk back," I stammer, pausing to down another sip of the scalding, mind numbing wine. "She reached down like she knew who it was and she- she touched it."

"It was human?"

"It was a trap."

_________________________________________

Dropping this chapter almost a year after the last one was published. This is only half of the original chapter. The second half is just being wrapped up now, but I decided to post them separately as together they come to over 5k words.

I'd like to thank @blackxnote for leaving that sweet, sweet comment on the last chapter. I'll be honest, it was the main thing motivating me to pick this back up. You're an angel and I hope you're feeling better!

I'll drop the rest of the chapter in the next 24 hours, once I start getting some likes/comments so I can tell people are actually still following the book. <3 <3