He chuckled. “That was merely in exchange for coming to speak with me. I have been alone for so very long.”
Maggie pondered what five hundred years like that must be like and found she couldn’t even fathom it. She shook her head. “You must be super bored.”
He laughed again. “You have no idea.”
She looked back at the rest of the vault. The idea of walking away, leaving him trapped there, didn’t sit right. Let alone however many other creatures were stuck inside the vault. Killing the monsters was one thing. But imprisoning them in the darkness because they might be useful someday?
That was evil.
The church was evil. The necromancer was evil. The vampire behind her? Definitely evil. What did that make her? If she left him there, it was evil to him. If she set him free, it was evil to everyone else.
“This is how villains are made,” she muttered.
“Oh, yes, my dear. Very much so.” He didn’t sound gloating. He sounded…sad. As if he pitied her.
“So, walk me through this. I let you go. You rip my throat open, and then go on a killing spree? Take over the world? Bring a new end of the ages?”
Radu laughed. “I love your imagination. No, little beauty. You, I shall not touch. I feel the mark of another powerful magician upon you. He is nearby, and in this state…I would not wish to cross him, I think.” He hummed thoughtfully. “As for the rest…? The world, I wish no harm upon. But these priests? They, I think, deserve to suffer for the crimes wrought upon the souls within this place.”
She shook her head.
“That includes you, my little beauty. Do you think they will set you free? Do you think they will ever let you go? You are the same as I—the same as any lurking within these walls. A dangerous weapon to be kept until the moment you become useful. Or”—he paused, his tone growing dark—“the moment you cease to be.”
Maggie shivered and shut her eyes. She knew he wasn’t wrong. She knew the moment she either was too much of a risk or she “ceased to be useful,” they’d lock her up. The proof of it was right in front of her. She had suspected they were capable of such a thing, but now she knew it was fact.
“Burn this place down. Make sure everyone trapped here is released. Dead or otherwise. Do you understand?” She clenched her fists and glared at Radu’s corpse. She didn’t know where she got the balls to order him around, but she did it anyway.
“Yes,” he purred out in little more than a hiss.
Walking up to the coffin, she gripped the pommel of the sword. It was a wicked-looking thing. Long and thin, the blade looked razor sharp. The handle was a delicate swirl of metals, designed more like a rapier than a broadsword. It was meant to kill with finesse, not strength.
She was going to cause a bloodbath.
But what choice did she have? What choice did she really have? Rinaldo and Ally might want to help her, but what about everyone else? “The two priests who are down here with me—well, a priest and a sister, and she’s a demoness, and—whatever, it doesn’t matter. They go unharmed. And everybody else, you only kill as many as you have to. No joy riding all over the place. Do your…vampire thing, and then get the fuck out of here.”
“I shall obey.”
“Give me your word.”
“I give you my solemn vow as a sacred janissary of the Conqueror himself, as brother to the King of the Vampires himself. I, Prince Radu, am now and forever your servant, my Lady of Bones, princess to the throne of graves.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t have to be so melodramatic about it.”
He laughed again. “I adore you.”
She began to pull on the blade. She grunted and strained. “That’s great, but—” She yelped as the blade suddenly slid free. She squeaked as she landed hard on the packed dirt ground, the sword thumping down beside her. She reached for it, grabbed the pommel, and scrambled up to her feet.
She jolted in surprise, hissing a sharp inhale through her nose in shock. This was her life now. Corpses. The dead. And all doing things dead bodies should really, really not do.
Radu was standing right there in front of her, only inches away. Holy shit, he was tall. She found herself eye-to-ribcage with a mummified body of a vampire. She had to crane her head to look up at him. She watched as he snapped his lower jaw back into place.
He moved smoothly and gracefully, as if he were a jungle tiger, not a dried-up husk of a man. As if he had not spent the past five hundred years chained inside a casket. She could almost picture him screaming in rage, thrashing, only to have the years drain him dry until there wasn’t a point in trying any longer.
Where did those images come from? They weren’t hers. She shook her head, trying to clear the thought from her mind.
His lips, still torn to pieces, now moved as he spoke. “A gift of my lineage. Forgive me.” Before she could react, he took her hand in his, carefully pulling the sword from her fingers, before turning her hand palm up and leaning down to place a scratching kiss against the sensitive spot in the center.
The light overhead flickered. And in the space of one of the sputtering blinks of shadow—he was gone.
She heard a scream from somewhere inside the vault. And then gunfire. Maggie was shivering as she began to walk to the exit. At least some well-meaning priest had put up arrows on the shelves.
Down one aisle, she could see the flicker of fire. Radu had made good on his promise—he was going to burn this place down and free all the things inside, one way or another.
Now she had a new question she needed to answer.
What have I done?