"Sebastian." Boarstaff's voice seemed to come from far away.
Sebastian forced his eyes to focus. The door panel still flashed red, but the alarm sequence had been interrupted when Dominic died. It wouldn't last. Someone would notice the disruption soon.
"We need to move," Sebastian managed, the words coming with difficulty through the pain.
Boarstaff nodded, helping Sebastian to his feet. Sebastian swayed, nearly collapsed again as his damaged body protested the movement. Boarstaff caught him, taking his weight.
"The stables," Sebastian gasped through the pain. "Eastern corridor." They wouldn’t be able to use the tunnels they had when they rescued Sarah. That path would be sealed.
Together they moved toward the door, leaving behind the bodies of two brothers who had once been something else entirely. Sebastian couldn't help a final glance back at Zarek and Dominic, not the mechanical creatures who had just tried to kill him, but the brothers he had once known. Centuries of shared existence. Not brothers by blood, but by transformation and survival. Once, in moments he rarely allowed himself to remember, he had loved them. Before his father's most extensive improvements had stripped away what little humanity remained in them both.
The corridor stretched before them, long and gleaming with obsidian precision. Somewhere in the distance, alarms finally began to sound.
Chapter Eighteen
The termination chamber still reeked of unregulated death.
Cornelius de la Sang stood in the doorway, his mechanical eyes adjusting their lenses with soft clicks as they processed the scene. The emergency message had been sparse on details. 'Lord Zarek and Lord Dominic have been terminated. Lord Sebastian has fled.' Nothing more. Seeing the carnage himself, Cornelius understood why the messenger had struggled for words.
Zarek lay sprawled near the center of the room, his reinforced jaw torn apart at the seam where brass met flesh; the same vulnerability Sebastian had exploited in their previous encounter, but this time fatally. Dark fluid had pooled beneath him, spreading from two wounds: the ravaged jaw mechanism and a precise knife thrust between the brass plates of his chest, directly into his primary regulator. Sebastian had known exactly where to strike, using his intimate knowledge of his brother's modifications.
Dominic's body rested closer to the wall. Two fatal wounds told the story of his end. A knife wound in his back, between carefully placed components, and a savage tear across his throat where someone, not Sebastian, the angle was wrong, had severed his central regulatory systems. The orc, then. The primitive had delivered the killing blow while Dominic was already compromised.
He prowled into the chamber, his footsteps echoing with mechanical precision. The examination table lay overturned,its metal frame bent from impact. Blood patterns on the floor told a story of desperate violence. The fight had begun near the restraint mechanisms. Someone had been slammed against the wall with crushing force. The ceremonial knife used for termination procedures lay abandoned, its blade coated in the dark fluid that served as vampire blood.
The scouts who'd discovered the bodies remained at attention near the entrance, their systems working overtime to maintain composure. Cornelius could hear their components clicking, fear processed into submission, horror regulated into mere data.
"The house artificer completed his preliminary analysis," one scout reported, his voice carefully modulated. "Lord Sebastian initiated the conflict, but the orc participated in the killings."
"Both of them working together." Cornelius's voice emerged perfectly flat, each word precisely modulated. "My son and a primitive, coordinating to murder nobility."
Cornelius knelt beside Zarek's remains, brass fingers examining the destroyed jaw mechanism. The same weakness Sebastian had exploited before, but this time, he hadn't stopped at disabling. He'd torn through it completely, ripping out the regulatory node with his bare hands before driving the blade home. Twenty-three years of integration work, destroyed by someone who had observed every installation, memorized every vulnerability.
One of the scouts stepped forward cautiously. "My lord, do you wish us to prepare the bodies for component salvage?"
"No." The word emerged with enough force to make the scout freeze mid-step. "They will be preserved as they are. Evidence of betrayal."
Cornelius rose, moving to Dominic's corpse. His youngest son lay with an expression of surprise frozen on his features.Even his regulatory systems hadn't anticipated Sebastian's betrayal, couldn't process it quickly enough to respond. The wound in his back showed where Sebastian had struck first, between the third and fourth processor arrays, severing primary motor control. But the killing blow across the throat, that was cruder, more desperate. The orc's work.
"Forty-three separate enhancements over decades," Cornelius said, his voice maintaining its mechanical precision even as his brass components began clicking with increased frequency. "The most sophisticated analytical systems our artificers could devise. Crippled by Sebastian's precision, then terminated by a primitive with a stolen blade."
"The… collaboration between them is unprecedented," the scout ventured carefully. "Lord Sebastian must have freed the orc prisoner first, then they fought together against Lords Zarek and Dominic."
"Fought together." Cornelius turned to face him with such intensity that the scout's regulatory systems audibly misfired. "As if they were equals. As if centuries of evolution meant nothing."
His mechanical eyes locked onto each witness in turn, lenses adjusting with sharp, deliberate clicks.
"Lord Cornelius." A new voice from the doorway, Lady Elisandra, her own brass ornamentation gleaming with fresh polish despite the late hour. She entered without waiting for permission, her movements sharp and deliberate. "Two sons terminated. One turned traitor. Your house bleeds."
Cornelius turned to face her with glacial slowness, and despite her boldness, her components stuttered for a fraction of a second. "Choose your next words carefully, Elisandra."
She held his gaze, though it cost her. "Why? The other houses are already choosing theirs. Lord Ashborne calculates how to absorb your territories. Lady Silvervessel questionswhether your line remains viable." Her violet eyes scanned the carnage with cold assessment. "Three years of negotiations. Resources committed. Acquisition contracts with the finest human bloodlines, preparation chambers built to your son's exact specifications." Her fingers, tipped with delicate copper needles, flexed with barely controlled violence. "Your son made fools of both our houses."
"And yet you stand here, insulting me in my own termination chamber." Cornelius moved toward her, his footsteps echoing with mechanical precision. "While my sons' blood is still fresh on the floor."
Elisandra didn't retreat, but her brass components hummed with increased tension. "Because one of us needs to speak plainly. You built them to be weapons and somehow failed to consider they might turn on you." She paused, then added with calculated risk: "That demands correction."
The chamber's temperature seemed to drop. Cornelius stopped mere inches from her, close enough that she could hear the clicking of his internal mechanisms, the barely regulated fury in his frame. "You came here for something other than suicide. State it."
