He grit his teeth, pushing her frantic voice out of his head and pressing the blade to her palm, her attempt to throw him off no match for his own strength. Her skin yielded, soft and pliable, but he didn’t draw blood. It should have been easy, he had sliced through his own palm, his arm, his chest, hundreds of times, but he couldn’t press any harder. And then the glow of the talisman faded.
He flipped the dagger so the blade was no longer threatening and yanked up her sleeve. The crimson light was traveling up the length of her arm. It was lost at her elbow where her clothing bunched up, but he knew where it was headed.
Damien snatched the cowl off of her, exposing her head and neck as she protested. Then he grabbed the wide collar of her too-big tunic and yanked it down. At this, her grip on his arm tightened enough to remind him it was still there at all.
“What do you think you’re doing?” She threw his words back at him, her voice dropping from an ear-splitting shriek to an incensed growl. But he didn’t have to explain, they both could see the glimmer of red light shooting across her skin to the center of her chest where it halted. Both of their gazes flicked to the dagger, still in his hand, then up to each other. The girl blanched, shaking her head, voice falling to one that was small and weak, “Please, don’t.”
The crimson light intensified, and she screamed again, curling into herself. Her grip on him weakened, face going slack as she stared straight through him, then her eyes crossed, and she fell backward into a heap, unconscious.
Damien still had a hold of her arm, no longer tense in his grasp. He wiggled it, and her hand flopped to the side, totally lax. Dropping her arm, he chucked the dagger across the stone floor in his vexation, grabbing her shoulders to shake her back awake. Her head only lolled to the side, the glow disappearing entirely.
That was it. The talisman had been absorbed, and it was gone.
“Fuck.”
Damien stared up at the carvings on the walls of the Sanctum but instead saw a lifetime of studying the arcane, trekking across perilous lands, gathering precious components, learning near-impossible magics, all flashing away. Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment had been so ludicrously powerful that it begged to be absorbed, so it should have been no surprise it had latched onto the first being that wasn’t Damien to touch it. And now it was utterly wasted.
Though perhaps it wasn’t.
“Sanguinisui, wake up.”
The girl sat up so quickly she cracked her forehead right against his. He jerked back, and she wavered again but remained conscious. “What happened?”
“What happened?” he growled, rubbing at his head. “Youhappened.”
Pawing at her temple and then her chest, her voice was breathy. “Where are—who are you?”
Damien grunted, rolling his eyes. “Right, it’s meant to be forgotten.Sanguinisui, fetch my dagger.”
She jumped to her feet, eyes falling right on the blade as she went for it, picking it up with no hesitation and returning it to where he knelt, hilt first.
Damien was the one to hesitate then before taking it, looking her over as she stood there, bent at the waist and offering the weapon he’d nearly used to end her life. There was emptiness in her eyes, that spark he’d seen before in the alley gone, the will to live when he’d had her under the binding spell wiped away. When he took the dagger and resheathed it in his arm bracer, he shook his head—of course the talisman worked, but it was almost unnerving to see how well.
“Um.” She blinked, looking around the room with a renewed liveliness. “Who did you say you—oh, you’re that man from the alley? The nice one who—oh, no,yougave me bad directions.”
Well, that had been a quick pivot away fromnice. It was better that way—she needn’t get the wrong idea. “Brilliant. Remember anything else?”
“You were going to…to kill…” She swallowed, taking a step back as he stood to his full height before her. Limbs stiffened at her sides, eyes darting to his hands as if looking for the weapon she couldn’t remember just giving back to him.
“And do you know why?”
She shook her head, small and tight, frozen under his glare.
So, it had worked as intended: she had no memory of the talisman, and no awareness she’d just completed a task he had ordered. She would only know if he told her, which was perhaps also worth testing out. “You tried to steal from me, an object that became a part of you, and now you’re my thrall.”
She searched the ground for an answer, but appeared to come up blank.
“Sanguinisui, remember.”
Fear and horror broke out on her face as the memory came back, clawing at her own chest. “Oh, gods! What was that thing? What did you do to me?”
“Me?” He snorted. “You’re the thief, blindly sticking your hand in a man’s pocket, and—” Then it dawned on Damien like the brightness of Ero reflecting back the static moon Lo: she hadn’t done this blindly at all. It was no mistake they had met that morning; she’d even tried to get close to him in the alley, but he had been smarter then. If only he’d kept his guard up.
Damien grabbed the front of her tunic and yanked her to him. “Who are you?” he spat. “And who’s behind this?”
She gasped, gripping onto his arm. Significantly shorter, her toes scuffed the floor as he held her aloft, face drawn back into that pitiful, terrified look again, but this time it only made him furious, and he shook her.
“Tell me! Do you belong to Eirengaard’s holy order? A Knight of Osurehm? Have they really sunk so low as to recruit little girls? Or did Shadowhart send you? Is this what he thinks of me? That I would fall for this?” He scanned her quickly—calling her a little girl wasn’t really fair, she was just hiding a woman’s body under ill-fitting clothes—then he scoffed. “I knew I should have killed that bastard last time I had the chance.”
