Laurent

  I woke to hands on my shoulders and the sharp sound of my name, spoken too loudly and too close.

  “Laurent. Up.”

  Sir Cedric hauled me upright before my eyes had fully opened. The room lurched. Candlelight smeared across stone walls, shadows stretching and snapping back into place. My body resisted the motion, heavy and uncooperative, as if my blood itself were trying to pull me back under.

  “What—” My tongue felt thick. “What’s happening?”

  Cedric didn’t answer. He shoved my boots toward me and turned away, already reaching for my gambeson where it hung beside the bed. The air felt wrong. Charged. I could feel it along my skin, a pressure behind my ears, the way the world tightens just before a storm breaks.

  Outside, the city roared. It wasn’t just the celebration. Something else was breaking into the revelry. Shouting, distant crashes, the low thunder of magic being worked badly and in haste. Someone screamed. Another voice shouted a command that dissolved into panic before it finished.

  “Mirela?” I said, the word slipping out before I’d fully found myself.

  Cedric froze for half a heartbeat, then resumed his work with grim efficiency. He shoved the gambeson over my head and yanked it down hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.

  “Arms up.”

  I obeyed on instinct, my mind still several steps behind my body. Cold metal followed. The new cuirass settled against my chest, unfamiliar and heavier than I remembered. The straps were pulled tight, one after another, fingers practiced and unyielding.

  “Cedric,” I said again. Louder. “Where is Mirela?”

  “Later,” he said. “If there is one.”

  I tried to turn, to look past him toward the door, toward the windows, anywhere she might be. My legs tangled beneath me. I stumbled, caught myself on the bedframe, and felt Cedric’s grip clamp down on my arm to steady me.

  The last thing I remembered clearly was her voice. Careful. Steady. The way she met my eyes as if she were bracing herself.

  She hadn’t said yes easily.

  She’d told me she was leaving. That she would go, no matter what. That if I accepted the ring, I had to accept that as well. The cost. The waiting. The silence she would leave behind.

  I remembered the weight of the ring in my hand. How real it had felt. How final.

  The priestess’s hands trembling as she spoke. The sound of her voice settling into confidence as the blessing took hold. The sense of something shifting in the room when the rings were exchanged.

  I remembered sliding the ring onto her finger. Her hands unsteady, but sure.

  That was what stayed with me.

  Not the ceremony. Not the words. The moment I agreed to let her go, and chose her anyway.

  And then the memory broke, pulled apart by everything that came after.

  Her breath, close. Heat. Pressure.

  Then pain, sharp and sudden, as her fangs sank into my neck.

  I felt her drink. The pull was unmistakable, intimate in a way I didn’t have language for yet.

  “I’m a monster, Laurent. I’m a vampire.”

  There was no time to answer. The moment was torn apart even as the words finished forming. Explanations that hadn’t been finished. Questions that hadn’t been asked. Things meant for later, once the noise died down. Once the world stopped making demands of us.

  Later felt very far away.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, too slowly. Even through the fog, I knew it was the wrong question.

  Cedric finally looked at me then. Really looked. His expression was hard, the way it got before battle, but there was something else beneath it. Calculation, and worry.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  Leaving. The word didn’t fit. Not with the sounds outside. Not with the weight in my chest.

  “Leaving where?” I asked. “Cedric, Mirela is—”

  “—is not here,” he cut in, fastening the last strap with a sharp pull. “And you are not ready.”

  The room swayed again. I reached for balance and missed.

  “Not ready for what?” I demanded, irritation flaring through the haze. “You dragged me out of bed, half-dressed me like a squire, and you won’t even tell me—”

  “We do not have time,” Cedric said. He took my helm from the table and pressed it into my hands. “The oracle sent word. Enemy forces are already inside the walls. The city will not hold. Your orders are simple. Get out of the cathedral. Then get out of the city.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Out of the city.

  The words finally cut through.

  “No,” I said immediately. Perhaps too quickly. “I’m not leaving without her.”

  Cedric didn’t argue. “The Hero survives,” he said. “That is the doctrine.”

  “We are leaving,” he repeated. “Now.”

  He turned and pushed me toward the door. The cathedral corridors were already filling with noise. Running feet. Raised voices. The sharp scent of burned incense and spell residue hung low in the air. Cedric moved with purpose, one hand firm at my back, guiding rather than dragging, as if I might finally shatter if pushed too hard.

  “She’s alive,” he said as we reached the stairs.

  The words barely registered at first. They slid past the fog and caught somewhere deeper, lodging there.

  “What?” I breathed.

  “She was seen,” Cedric said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  He didn’t slow. There was no elaboration. When he felt my footing steady, he took the steps two at a time, forcing me to keep pace or be left behind.

  The night swallowed us whole.

  The doors to the gardens loomed ahead, one hanging crooked on its hinges, stone chipped and blackened around the frame. We crossed the threshold at a run, heat and noise crashing into us all at once.

  Firelight flickered across the courtyard. Shadows twisted and broke apart as people scattered in every direction. I caught glimpses of motion at the edges of my vision and nothing long enough to understand it.

  Cedric pulled me hard to the side, steering me away from the open paths and into narrower streets. I stumbled once, then again, my body still slow to answer, my thoughts slower.

  Somewhere behind us, metal rang against stone.

  I twisted, trying to look back, but Cedric’s grip tightened.

  “Eyes forward,” he said.

  I obeyed, jaw clenched, every step carrying me farther from the cathedral, farther from the room where she should have been.

  ***

  It had taken some time, but by the fourth day, the city had learned how to breathe again. The fires still smoldered in the poorer quarters, and the bells rang less often than they once had, but people had returned to the streets. Shops reopened behind scorched shutters. Bread carts rolled where funeral wagons had been. Life, stubborn as ever, pressed forward. We moved with it.

  Cedric led us through alleys and half-remembered roads, changing our route twice before the same corner, watching reflections instead of faces. When he was satisfied, he turned down a narrow lane and knocked once on a door that looked abandoned from the street. It opened just wide enough to admit us.

  The Copper Finch sat half-buried between a cooper’s shop and a collapsed shrine, its sign taken down and its windows shuttered from the inside. The owner, a narrow woman with iron-gray hair and a scar along her jaw, never asked our names. She called Cedric “sir,” called me “boy,” and kept her questions to herself. We paid her, and in return, she brought food, passed messages, and listened in the places that mattered.

  Slowly, the tavern stopped smelling like smoke and fear and began to smell like bread again. That was how I knew the city was pretending to heal.

  We had claimed the back room. A table, four chairs, one candle kept low. Cedric stood near the wall as he always did, arms folded, eyes tracking the door through the warped reflection of a cracked mirror. The old paladin, Edgar, sat with his back straight despite the bandage across his ribs, his helm resting at his feet, never out of reach.

  I leaned over the table, tracing a map scratched into the wood by someone who had thought these streets would last forever. Maybe they would.

  They said she’d saved him. Pulled him back from the brink of death with the power of a saint. The wounds would still take time to close, but no one cared about that part. The story had spread fast. Faster than the truth ever did.

  Mirela, the saint who stood against the darkness. Mirela, who bled for the city. Mirela, who sacrificed herself to stop the curse.

  She wasn’t dead. I knew that much.

  Everyone said she’d been sealed inside a ruby crystal no magic could penetrate. We’d heard other versions too. Fragments. Whispers passed secondhand. One of our informants claimed Nadine had spoken under a truth stone. That it hadn’t been a gemstone at all, but blood. Crystallized blood, bound into the ritual itself.

  None of it fit cleanly. None of it ever did.

  No one was going to convince me that Mirela had died there. Not surrounded by blood. Not after everything I’d seen.

  I’d said as much aloud. Cedric hadn’t argued. He hadn’t agreed either. He rarely did.

  The door opened.

  The woman from the bar slipped inside and closed it behind her, sliding the bolt home. The look she carried was not one of good news.

  “There’s talk,” she said. “New talk.”

  Cedric turned his head just enough to see her.

  "From where?” he asked.

  “From the south quarter. From men wearing some new symbols of faith.” She glanced at the paladin, then back to me. “They’re calling themselves Redeemers.”

  The word settled badly.

  “They say the oracle’s silence proves the rot ran deep,” she went on. “That the miracle was a lie. That the city burned because of the Saint.”

  My hand stilled on the table.

  “She saved people,” I said. It came out flatter than I meant it to.

  “Aye,” the woman said. “Some of us know that.”

  “But they’re louder,” Cedric said.

  She nodded.

  “They mean to take her,” the woman said.

  The words landed heavier than I expected, dense as a stone dropped into still water.

  “From whom?” I asked reflexively, already knowing the answer before she spoke.

  “Nadine,” she said. “They’ll do it today. They’ve been watching her house, watching who comes and goes. They don’t want a fight there. Too many eyes, too many questions. They’ll move her once the bells turn.”

  The paladin pushed himself to his feet with a sharp breath. “That’s madness,” he said. “They’ll never get her out clean.”

  “They think they will,” the woman said. “They believe the city’s ready to listen.”

  “Listen to what?” I asked.

  “That the miracle was a lie,” she said. “That the disaster has a face. They want her crystal in the square, in front of everyone. At fourth bell, they’ll make a show of it. A pyre is already raised. They’ll call it judgment, and say the gods would never have let a true saint burn.”

  The room tightened around her words.

  I was already moving, chair scraping back across the floor.

  “We stop them before they reach her,” I said. “Now.”

  Cedric’s hand closed around my arm.

  “No,” he said.

  I turned on him, heat flaring in my chest. “They’re going to take her.”

  “And they expect interference at Nadine’s door,” he said evenly. “That’s where they’ll be ready.”

  “They won’t be ready for me,” I said.

  Cedric met my gaze without raising his voice. “You won’t reach her in time.”

  The truth of it settled in despite the urgency pressing at my chest. The city between us and Nadine’s house was already thickening with movement, people drawn toward rumor and spectacle. Every step would cost time we didn’t have.

  “They’ll move her fast,” Cedric continued. “Quietly. In a cart. Once they believe they’re clear, they’ll head for the square.”

  I forced myself to breathe.

  “Then we don’t stop them there,” I said slowly.

  Cedric nodded once.

  “We wait,” he said. “At the square.”

  The paladin’s brow furrowed. “You mean to let them take her?”

  “I mean to let them think they’ve succeeded,” Cedric said. “They’ll relax once they arrive. Once the cart is inside the cordon, and they believe the danger has passed.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Then we strike,” he said. “When their hands are on the crystal and their focus is on the crowd.”

  It wasn’t a clean plan. I could see the gaps already. Too many unknowns. Too much reliance on timing and luck. But there was no better one waiting to be found.

  I nodded once.

  “Then we move,” I said.

  Cedric released my arm and turned for the door.

  “Now,” he said.

  We reached the square ahead of the crowd.

  Cedric chose the edge of it, close enough to see without being seen, where the streets narrowed, and carts were forced to slow. Sir Edgar took position farther in, blending easily with the men hired to move barriers and direct traffic. If the cart came through, he would be the one to take it. Horses already hitched. Weight already accounted for. Turning it around would be faster than trying to force a way out through a gathering crowd.

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was the only one that fit the time we had.

  So we waited.

  The square filled in pieces. Curious locals first. Then the faithful. Then the restless ones who smelled spectacle and wanted to be close when it broke. Men wearing borrowed authority took their places, arranging ropes and torches as if the order of things had already been decided.

  No cart arrived.

  Minutes stretched. The bells marked time without any change. Cedric’s posture shifted, almost imperceptibly, the way it did when something failed to align. He wasn’t alone. The crowd, having expected a show and left waiting, was beginning to thin at the edges.

  Then the shouting began. Not the kind meant for a crowd. Sharp. Fractured. Moving.

  A knot of men broke from one of the side streets, running hard, faces pale and voices tangled over one another.

  “She took it!”

  The cry cut clean through the square.

  Another voice, louder. “Who?”

  “A girl. Nadine, we think. She jumped the driver while we were loading it. Took the cart and fled.”

  “Which way?”

  “West gate!”

  The words landed, sparking memory.

  “I was kidnapped near Angelshade, outside the Dark Forest, by pirates.”

  West. To Angelshade. The long road that curved toward the Dark Forest, where civilization thinned, and rules grew uncertain. Of course Nadine would go that way. She wasn’t hiding Mirela. She was taking her home.

  Cedric was already moving. Sir Edgar swore and broke into a run, shouldering past the first wave of confusion as the square dissolved into shouting and accusation behind us.

  “If we go, we’ll have no way to contact the Oracle,” Cedric said as we cleared the far street.

  “I’m certain she has eyes on us,” I said. “And I’m done letting things be decided without me.”

  We headed for the gate anyway. Too late to stop what was already in motion, but not too late to follow it. Nadine did not fail. By the time the truth reached us, we were already gathering our belongings and horses, setting out before nightfall.

  The west road opened ahead, wide enough for speed, empty enough for flight. What mattered wasn’t what she was. It was the distance between us. Mirela had always planned on leaving the city, one way or another. She thought I would let her go.

  She was wrong.

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