Jael flailed at the spiders falling onto him from above, washing over him in a constant cascade. He winced as fangs sank into his skin in numerous places, but their bodies disappeared as soon as they struck. The white light winked out, the waterfall of spiders vanished, and he was left wondering if they had been real. He blinked to clear his vision and froze.
Viktoria sat in a chair across the room, her head tilted back by the man from the gallery. He stood behind her, one of his hands tangled in her long hair, a gun in the other, pressed to her temple. Her dress was ripped to bare her shoulder, and a spider perched on her chest, its head close to her neck. A white-eyed mage sat on the arm of the chair, a spelled knife in his hand.
His Draga's eyes accused him of everything he'd ever felt responsible for.
Two swords and too many threats to Viktoria. Even if he threw his blades across the room he couldn't take out all the dangers before one of them hurt or killed her.
"I've been expecting you. Throw your swords in the fire." The mage shifted the knife so the point lay against Viktoria's skin. "Or I will kill it."
So this is how it would end. Three thousand years of killing mages because they murdered his wife and daughter, only to find his Draga and have her end up in the hands of a mage and die himself. Why hadn't she listened to him? He'd rather be dead than live with failing yet another person he cared about and had vowed to protect, but he had to make sure Viktoria got away.
The blades in his hands tugged towards the fireplace, as if offering to sacrifice themselves.
"Let her go." Jael inched forward, eyes darting around the room, searching for something, anything else he could use. "Give her, and the others she came with safe passage out, and neither you nor any other mage will so much as think about her or any of her family ever again. I'll stay."
"I think not." The mage sliced the knife down, cutting through skin and cloth, straight towards Viktoria's heart. The spider lunged, fangs aimed at Viktoria's neck.
"No!" For the first time, Jael dropped his swords. Unwilling to see them burn, he opened his hands, expecting them to fall to the floor, but they soared through the air and clattered into the fireplace.
The fire blazed the same blue that had burned down his village. His blades withstood the heat, holding their shape in defiance for a few moments before they curved and bent in the unnatural flames. That was almost enough to break Jael, but he stood, stoic until the hilts melted, freeing the medallions. The clinks as they landed on the floor of the fireplace fractured his very being.
A gurgle, the sound worse than any scream, tore Jael's eyes away from the destruction of his swords, back to Viktoria. The mage's knife was lodged in her chest.
Jael's world crashed down around him.
A ghostly image of Viktoria rose from her body and hovered over the floor. She looked back at herself, and when she faced Jael again her face was full of pity.
"It's okay Jael," Ghost-Viktoria said. "It's not your fault you can't save anyone. I don't blame you. I'm just the last in your long line of failures to protect those you've said you would, aren't I?"
Jael and Riordan rode their horses through what was left of the fifth village. Limited by their low tolerance for daylight, they'd arrived too late, and no one had been spared. The bodies of men, drained by vampires, shredded by shifters, and blasted by mage magic, lined the way to what they knew they would find at the end of the path laid out for them—the women.
"I never thought I'd see mages, vampires and shifters working together." Jael said. "I wish I hadn't seen it now."
"I think the mages have forged this alliance with the aim of annihilating those they cannot control. The strygoi have always been rare, never so numerous as they've become. Strygoi magic is wild and resistant to being taken. For mages to use it, it must be surrendered." Riordan waved a hand at the bodies. "Who wouldn't surrender for the chance to save their loved ones?"
They reached the end of the village and stopped. Riordan swore and Jael's sword hilts burned hot in his hands. Mage magic lay heavy in the air. A pyramid of women's heads stood piled on a rock, their eyes open stared at Jael in accusation. The rest of their bodies, the pieces of them, lay scattered around the clearing. At the foot of the boulder lay three heaps of ash, a set of mage manacles atop each one.
Riordan knelt, sifting through the ashes until he came up with a torque. "He won't have made it easy for them. They will have taken losses to do this."
"I told him I would stand by him," Jael said. "I should have come with him."
Riordan stood and offered the torque to Jael. "He chose to live here with his Draga. We all thought everyone would be safer if most of us scattered and hid so they would focus on us in Dacia. We came as soon as he sent word."
Jael turned the torque over in his hands. "I will avenge him. I will avenge them all."
"If they intend to slaughter all the strygoi it won't be long before they come seeking the first. As long as Selene lives, there is always the possibility of more. You must return to Dacia. I will continue searching for the others. Any I find alive I will send to Selene. I will do what I can to whittle their army's numbers as I go."
"But—"
"I can take care of myself," Riordan said. "Selene is preparing to take us somewhere else, but she needs time, and I need you to make sure she has it, in case I do not return. I will hold them off as long as I can. Your job is to protect Selene, Tazraus and Resquiescere. And my sons." Riordan took Jael by the shoulders. "Above all, make sure my family is safe."
A naked Viktoria assembled herself out of the pieces of dead women and sauntered towards him. "Didn't save your friend, did you? Where are Resquiescere or Tazraus, Jael? No one's heard from them in a thousand years. And Riordan, where is he? Killed after you abandoned him to fight on his own? Selene may as well have been dead for years, her sons without both of their parents, because she had to save herself and you." She shook her head in disappointment. "But no one should be surprised, right? You destroyed your family, too."
Faba held onto his arm, her eyes filled with tears and pleading with him."Don't go. They are treacherous men. You cannot believe anything they say. Let's leave this place and find a new home."
"Don't worry foolishly, wife. I'm going to negotiate peace. We are under a truce. If we cannot come to an agreement with them, we'll talk about leaving when I return."
"Shame on you, Jael. She wasn't a Draga, but she was your wife. She deserved to be protected, didn't she? And yet you left her alone. And not just her, your daughter, too."
"You could have been there to protect them. She begged you to stay," Ghost-Viktoria said. "They didn't deserve to die like that, did they? But even that's not the worst of what befalls those under your protection, is it?"
Everything around him burned in blue flames as he knelt in front of his house, too much of a coward to end his life in the flames that had robbed his wife and daughter of theirs.
Jael blinked, the face of a red-haired woman coming into focus. Not Ember. This woman resembled his Draga, but had a gap between her teeth.
"He's waking up! Is he well?" His Draga's voice, so rich before, cut into his soul.
"No," the red-haired woman said. "Worse is coming."
Jael closed his eyes as pain seared through his body and he screamed.
"You're not real," Jael said to Ghost-Viktoria as she materialized beside him again, wearing a tailored dress in black.
"It doesn't matter if I'm real. It matters that all your failures are." Viktoria flashed him a brilliant smile. "Show me how you protected your daughter, Jael. She would have been strygoi."
Jael made his way down the corridor, swords in hand. Magic pressed in around him, forced and corrupted. Weaker than when he'd first entered, but still present. He'd killed four mages as they slept, but least one mage, Mordecai, the Jackal Mage, still lived.
He gripped the hilts of his swords tighter, once again grateful to the witch who had spelled them for protection.
Finding no one on the upper floors, he stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the lower levels. Mages liked their cellar rooms. He'd never found anything good in the underground spaces of a mage's residence.
He searched each room. In what was some sort of workshop he found numerous scrolls and sheets of papyrus, all written in a language he didn't understand. Some were kept in neat rows on shelves, but many were strewn in a pile in front of the shelves, like someone had searched for something in a hurry and dropped everything else on the floor. Across the room a long table held potions of all colors.
