“Him and everyone else,” you said smartly. I scowled, so you continued, “I understand your mistrust, but Hyas and Aretha have been our strongest allies since the very beginning of all this. It doesn’t make sense for them to turn on us now, does it?”
“No,” I said with some reluctance.
“Strategically, what would be gained?”
“Your lands,” I said.And you as well.
“You know Hyas warned me against going to the under realms with Orcus.”
“Because he wants you for himself,” I said sourly. “And he wants his claim on you to be legitimized by the other tribes.”
You rolled your eyes. “Not everyone is as obsessed with me as you are.”
Hyas was just as obsessed and for all the wrong reasons.
“What does your spy say about the warborn?” I asked. Perhaps Stefan had some useful intel.
“Nothing suspicious. Aretha is focused on capturing Azrael, and Hyas doesn’t say much at all. Come to bed.” Your voice dropped a register, and I stared at you, laid out like a banquet with your inky hair spilling over the white, satin pillow and your dark eyes tracking me. My lovely, black-eyed beauty. I certainly wanted to indulge your passions, but I couldn’t shake this ill feeling.
“I can’t.” I hadn’t taken off my armor or removed my weapons, and I didn’t plan on it. “I’m going to visit Orcus. Perhaps he has some information.”
You groaned but didn’t make a move to get out of bed.
“Lock the door behind you,” I reminded. Even with the beastborn on duty, it didn’t hurt to be extra cautious.
Orcus wasin the middle of a feed when I visited him in his rooms a little while later. A half-dozen attractive young men lounged about his quarters in varying stages of undress, all with dazed and vacant expressions.
Orcus trailed one skeletal hand across the exposed abdomen of one such youth where they reclined together on a chaise. He had the darker complexion of a Neapolitan, perhaps even Greek. Laid out like a sacrifice, he was clearly enraptured by Orcus’s thrall as the shadowborn subdued him in a soothing cadence, all the while drawing down his soul. Perhaps not all of it, not right away. We’d insisted he temper his appetite and leave enough for his servants to recover, though I worried they might not. Once a human had experienced the thrill of a soul feed, they tended to go seeking whatever rush they could find to match it.
“Henri,” Orcus said amicably and gestured to the young man who only glanced over at me in a stupor. “Care for a taste? He is a quite delectable, his soul so young and unspoiled. I’d imagine his blood is the same.”
“I’d like to talk to you in private.” Despite their obvious impairment, I couldn’t trust that any one of these youths weren’t also serving as spies.
Orcus nodded and after having one more pull of the young man’s soul, patted him gently and told him to take the others with him to their sleeping quarters. They roused like half-dead specters, and I was reminded of the condemned house many years ago when I’d tracked Orcus as a fugitive of the Imperium.
“I believe the warborn are plotting against us,” I said. “It’s too convenient that Azrael would choose the cyclops as his host right after mysteriously escaping.”
“Quite serendipitous,” he agreed.
I’d long ago lost my patience with the shadowborn’s ambiguity. “What do your visions tell you?”
He gave me a sly smile. “I don’t recall being brought into your employ. Shouldn’t it be the Parousia making this demand? Or the Tribal Council?”
“Vincent is too trusting. He doesn’t believe there’s a plot in the making. And the Council… any one of them might be a traitor, including you.”
“You certainly can’t exclude me from suspicion.” Orcus dragged one hand along his sunken chest, where the sallow skin of his torso hung like a wet bag on his spindly ribs. Even flush with the euphoric effects of a feed, the difference in his constitution between here and the under realms was remarkable.
“Can you point me to the betrayer?” I said, impatient for results.
“I won’t tell you my visions, Henri, but I will tell you where you made your first mistake.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Illuminate me.”
“Vincent should have allied himself with the warborn when the opportunity presented itself. That would have given him influence over their tribal dealings and slaked Hyas’s thirst, but you were selfish.”
I’d known it at the time, had even warned you, but neither of us was willing to make that sacrifice. “I won’t give him up and he’ll not go willingly. If anyone is to possess him, it will be me.”
“Until your last, dying breath,” Orcus said ominously.
I shrugged off his warning. “Is there nothing we can do to remedy that slight?”
Outside his chambers, footsteps thundered toward us like a galloping herd of beasts. My grip tightened on the hilt of my gladius. A moment later, the door burst open and warborn soldiers flooded the room, their burgundy capes flapping behind them. Their weapons were already drawn and aimed, not at Orcus, but at me.
“I wish there was,” said the shadowborn, “but I fear you are already too late.”
