Anisa. Stross. Lenos. Vasry. Jinnar. Rhy. Delilah …
The tournament tents sat empty, the fog reaching inside for signs of life. The streets were abandoned, the citizens forced into their homes, as if wood and stone would be enough to stop the spell. Maybe it would. But Alucard doubted it.
Down the road, the night market was on fire. A pair of guards worked furiously to put out the blaze, summoning water from the lightless Isle while two more tried to wrangle a group of men and women. The dark magic scrawled itself across their bodies, smudging out Alucard’s vision, engulfing the light of their own energy, blues and greens and reds and purples swallowed up with black.
One of the women was crying.
Another was laughing at the flames.
A man kept making for the river, arms outstretched, while another knelt silently, head tipped back toward the sky. Only the guards’ mounts seemed immune to the magic. The horses snorted and flicked their tails, whinnying and stamping hooves at the fog as if it were a snake.
Berras and Anisa waited across the river, the Night Spire bobbed in its berth, but Alucard felt himself moving toward the burning market and the guards as a man rushed toward one of them, a metal rod in his hands.
“Ras al!” called Alucard, ripping the pole from the man’s grip right before it met the guard’s neck. It went skittering away, but the sight of it had given the others an idea.
Those on the ground began to rise, their movements strangely fluid, almost coordinated, as if guided by the same invisible hand.
The guard shot toward his horse, but there wasn’t time. They were on him, hands tearing blindly at the armor as Alucard surged toward them. A man was beating the guard’s helmeted head against the stones, saying, “Let him in, let him in, let him in.”
Alucard tore the man off, but instead of letting go, tumbling away, the man held fast to Alucard’s arm, fingers digging in.
“Have you met the shadow king?” he asked, eyes wide and swirling with fog, veins edging toward black. Alucard drove his boot into the man’s face, tearing himself free.
“Get inside,” ordered the second guard, “quickly, before—”
His voice was cut off by the scrape of metal and the wet sound of a blade finding flesh. He looked down at the royal half sword, his sword, protruding from his chest. As he slumped to his knees, the woman holding the sword’s hilt flashed Alucard a dazzling smile.
“Why won’t you let him in?” she asked.
The two guards lay dead on the ground, and now a dozen pairs of poisoned eyes swiveled toward him. Darkness webbed across their skin. Alucard scrambled to his feet and began to back away. Fire was still tearing through the market tents, exposing the metal cords that kept the fabric taut, the steel turning red with heat.
They came at him in a wave.
Alucard swore, and flicked his fingers, and the metal snapped free as they fell on him. The cords snaked through the air, first toward his hands, and then, sharply away. It caught the men and women in its metal grip, coiling around arms and legs, but if they felt its bite or burn, it didn’t show.
“The king will find you,” snarled one as Alucard lunged for the guard’s mount.
“The king will get in,” said a second, as he swung up and kicked the horse into motion.
Their voices trailed in his wake.
“All hail the shadow king….”
* * *
“Berras?” called Alucard as he rode through unlocked gates. “Anisa?”
His childhood home loomed before him, lit like a lantern against the night.
Despite the cold, Alucard’s skin was slick with sweat from riding hard. He’d crossed the Copper Bridge, held his breath for the full stretch as the oily slick of poisoned magic roiled on the surface of the river below. He’d hoped—desperately, dumbly—that the sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t reached the northern bank, but the moment his mount’s hooves touched solid earth, those hopes crumbled. More chaos. The people moved in mobs, the marked from the shal alongside the nobles in their winter fineries, still done up from the last of the tournament balls, all searching out those who hadn’t fallen to the spell, and dragging them under.
And through it all, the same haunting chant.
“Have you met the king?”
Anisa. Stross. Lenos.
Alucard spurred the horse on.
Vasry. Jinnar. Rhy. Delilah …
Alucard swung down from the borrowed horse and hurried up the steps.
The front door was ajar.
The servants were gone.
The front hall sat empty, save for the fog.
“Anisa!” he called again, moving from the foyer into the library, the library into the dining room, the dining room into the salon. In every room, the lamps were lit, the fires burned, the air stifling with heat. In every room, the low fog twisted around table legs and through chairs, crept the walls like trellis vines. “Berras!”
“For saints’ sake, be still,” growled a voice behind him.
Alucard spun to find his older brother, one shoulder tipped against the door. A wineglass hung as it always did from his fingers, and his chiseled face held its usual disdain. Berras, ordinary, impertinent Berras.
Relief knocked the air from Alucard’s lungs.
“Where are the servants? Where is Anisa?”
“Is that how you greet me?”
“The city is under attack.”
“Is it?” Berras asked absently, and Alucard hesitated. There was something wrong with his voice. It held a lightness, bordering on amusement. Berras Emery was never amused.