There were no illusions between us, and yet, I could never have imagined that she would do harm to me. We were the same! I would have forgiven her almost anything.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  The heart is a treacherous thing.

  Zgavra’s current human face swam into focus. The crack of the zmeu’s palm blurred Dragos's vision, but the impact felt far away, like a wave in the ocean, merely rippling, stirring him. The beast leaned close, whuffing, then vanished.

  Good. Dragos wanted to be left alone.

  Something ashen and bitter got rammed up his nose, more shoved into his mouth by intrusive fingers. He gagged and sadly felt life coming back to his limbs. A moment later, his head pounded with a screaming agony, stomach cramping. Even his veins throbbed in pain. A froth dribbled from his chin as he struggled to get up, move.

  White spittle flew as Dragos gasped, “...tried to kill me…”

  “If I didn’t know the scent of Moarte adormit?, she would have succeeded,” the zmeu rumbled, offering Dragos a hand to his feet.

  “Need…” Dragos's mouth failed him, his limbs twitching, not quite fully under his control. How much time had passed? Terror coursed through him before he could rein it back, the storm of its hooves clattered over his spirit.

  “Something to steady you, yes. We’ve a little time. She thinks you’re dead and all that.” Zgavra waved a hand, dragging Dragos to the nearest settee to flop over.

  “Box…” Dragos murmured, curling in on himself. He wished he had died. It was lovely, in a solemn way, being dead. Peaceful. Painless.

  Breathing hurt. The rampant discomfort would pass, and he would miss his fleeting glance with death no more. He knew that much, only wished he could skip the interim misery.

  Zgavra slipped in with his old peddler’s box, full of things he’d gathered since he’d been at The Lady’s Stag. His mind fluttered like a frightened bird in a cage, confused, disoriented, but his hands knew where to go, what to grab. In a splash of water, he mixed ground herbs and drank them.

  His stomach calmed, though it didn’t quite settle. The raging bull in his head stopped ramming the insides of his skull, instead bumping it now and again. Better, but not well, was good enough. He eased back down to let the medicine do its work.

  He jerked awake to Pacha jumping on him. Even his spinal cord hurt, if that was a thing, and the cat woke his nerves to a screaming frenzy. Zgavra was nowhere to be seen.

  The clock tower tolled.

  He met Pacha’s eyes. The undercurrent of the cat’s concern broke through the haze. Elbowing himself up, his feet lit up with needles at contact with the floor. He grabbed his box and staggered through the open door.

  Pacha led the way down. The silent halls echoed the wind outside. The denizens of the house were all safe in their beds, waiting for the new day to come. Most, if not all slept curled around their warming pans. The business had the day off, for the wealthy were busily chasing debauchery elsewhere.

  The narrow stairwell led down with a tomb-like silence until Dragos reached the laundry door. It was barred from within. He pressed an ear to it. Voices, low and ghostly. Pacha meowed at the door. Dragos heard. Fane was in there, meddling in forces he didn’t understand.

  The tower’s belfry stilled. The puzzle of getting in overrode Dragos's misery for a moment. He hissed, “Zgavra, by your name-gift, open this door.”

  Smoke slid along the wood. The latch clicked.

  Dragos paused, then threw it open. In the flickering circle of green candles, Viorica stood over Fane, a dagger in hand. On the table, Katya lay still, blood already dripping from the spirit-tempered stone.

  Dragos lurched forward, bellowing, “Viorica!”

  She looked up, her wicked knife pausing. Stunned recognition crossed her gaze. Fane kicked at her leg. Viorica staggered, reaching out to catch herself on the table, then snapping her hand back, away from the blood as she reeled to the chill stone floor.

  Fane retched and rolled, his hand pressed to his throat.

  Dragos stepped carefully over a candle. Viorica shook her head, hand up to stop him.

  “It’s begun! I speak the incantation, or the Zioruluc will destroy us all!”

  Power surged; true to her words, the suck of air gave the promise of a torrent of power on its way. Dragos snarled, flicking a look at Katya. Her faraway, unblinking eyes and the sheer pool around the table explained her fate.

  Dragos stilled.

  Viorica pushed to a stand, her arms moving from low to high, drawing the sparkling incandescent glow up from cracks in the stone. It trickled like water but disabused gravity of its power, flowing upwards to pool over the table.

  Instead of watching her, Dragos bent to Fane, whose gasping breath whistled and bubbled through his fingers. Rage surged as he knelt, wishing for something to insert to bypass the blood oozing into the man’s lungs.

  “Shh, Fane, stay very still, very calm,” Dragos murmured, easing the man to lie down. “Rest.”

  Fane’s eyes glittered with trust before they closed.

  Viorica’s chant guided the spirit-water, pushing and pulling as she intoned her greedy words.

  “Lumin? ve?nic?, curgere f?r? sfar?it,

  care c?l?uze?ti pa?ii ?i faci inimile s? plece,

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  ia sangele meu, ia suflarea mea,

  via?? pentru via??, sange pentru slav?.”

  Dragos found his blade. The touch of it to his arm stung, skin made sensitive by the poison she’d given him, but with a grit of teeth he slashed. Blood splattered. His hand shot out towards the twining rivulets of the Zioruluc Viorica had forced upwards from the earth’s innards.

  A small part of him shrank away from what he did. Pressure in his head built with the words on his lips. Madness lay close. Waiting.

  His fingers slowly clenched as the knife slipped from his hand, clanging on the floor. His soul frayed as words spilled from his mouth.

  “Prin jertfa mea voit? poruncesc,

  lumin? ce curge, lumin? ce r?mane,

  leap?d? chem?torul, leap?d? jur?mantul,

  d? ?napoi ce furat a fost cu sange.”

  Mirel said blood was a powerful conveyance for spirit. Spilt innocent blood was strong, but Fane’s mingled in it, altering its structure.

  Though Dragos lacked innocence, he had power. He lashed outwards, his spirit slipping free, luring the spirit-river to follow his command. Liquid light wavered between them, the Owl and the Stag.

  Viorica’s face froze in a mask of terror as she saw the weave she’d been making disassemble. Dragos braced against the spirit-storm, hands pulled her weave apart, correcting the distortion Viorica would have made.

  The power, once summoned, had to go somewhere. He pushed it to release.

  Unteather. This was the nature of the Zioruluc, unbound, uncontrolled, it ran rampant, its liquid sheen expanding like a bubble, redirecting spirit-matter, returning it to its rightful places.

  Light splashed to the ground, dazzling his eyes. With it, a waterfall of blood returned to the world, sold over the time Viorica had used it.

  Dark and thick, it splattered like a flung pudding, reeking of rot.

  The Zioruluc had contained it, holding it in the space where its essence had been taken.

  He could scarcely believe it worked. He covered his nose and mouth with a hand and stepped back, squinting at the noxious mess.

  The spell wasn’t one he knew. He made it up out of desperation. Stopping Viorica had been all he cared about.

  Viorica crumpled in a stinking, sticky black pool, hands over her face. A second later, a shattered scream tore from her throat. Vorica scrambled in the rotten blood, screeching like a horrified rabbit. Her eyes had glazed over with milky white.

  A price was paid.

  Dragos withdrew quickly, calling himself back before his spirit followed the lightwater back to its source. He avoided touching it directly, avoided his blood coming into contact with it. Yet, a few threads of his soul did not return, in the exchange.

  The gift was not blood itself, but spirit, the sanguine sacrifice was symbolic. The will to give was sacrosanct. It seems Viorica never understood that part of it.

  She never gave of her own spirit. Dragos had. His spell was therefore stronger.

  He’d lost a piece of himself because of that. Regret could find him later, but it did not, for now. A cold, hollow hole was left in the body of his spirit.

  Dragos didn’t feel weaker for it, strangely.

  Fane shifted on the ground.

  Dragos jerked out of his daze and twisted around to drop to Fane’s side. He looked up and cried out, “Zgavra! I need your hands!”

  Fane’s life still hung in the balance. Katya was lost. He couldn’t fail both of them.

  The dragon came in like a ribbon, spooling up to the circle’s edge. Dragos glanced and shifted to lash a foot out and break the circle of light that the beast could enter.

  Zgavra sucked itself inwards, reforming into its gangly draconic man figure. Dragos shrugged his peddler’s box off his shoulders. Its familiar weight lifted by the zmeu and opened.

  Catgut and needle went to work, Fane flinched, and Zgavra grabbed his arms to hold him still, pinned to the stone floor. Fane squeaked and coughed as Dragos sewed his trachea shut. It was a small cut, but nearly fatal.

  Death lurked in the shadows, watching dispassionately in wait.

  Viorica’s screams had grown ragged, weak. Thoroughly slicked in the blood she’d stolen, she squirmed like a newborn released into an uncaring world. Dragos's chest squeezed tight in silent lamentation as he worked. Perhaps he’d come to hate the memory of her. At the moment, he felt broken. Betrayed, most definitely.

  What mattered was Fane, not his feelings.

  Fane thankfully fainted at some point and stopped twitching. Pacha paced in the corner, watching with glittering eyes. A high trilling purr punctuated by short mews let Dragos know her worry. When the surgery was done, Dragos murmured to the spirits, light, dark, living, and dead.

  “Let that not have been a mistake.” He knelt beside Fane, looking down at him. If there was no infection, Fane would survive. With a soft sigh, he looked at Zgavra, its orange gaze meeting his. “We should go.”

  “You fought to save him and you’ll leave him? Now?” Zgavra said, stunned.

  Even the zmeu’s surprise couldn’t reach him. He was numb.

  Dragos stood. “I’ll gather my things. We’ll leave Fane at the orphanage. There’s been too much interference of spirit and magic, here.”

  He did not look at Viorica. She was likely driven mad, and she was most definitely blinded. If he spent too long contemplating her fate, he too, might lose his sanity. He gave a cursory glance at Katya. Her soul put to rest by his intervention, he hoped.

  “Fate will fall as it lies. Help me carry him.”

  Dragos secured his belongings, took nothing from the house, and while Zgavra—in the guise of the handsome boyer—carried Fane to the orphanage, he waited on Viorica’s windowsill.

  Pacha jumped up beside him, and gave him a headbutt to the arm.

  The wanderer scratched under the cat’s chin and sighed. “You’ve still got a home, as long as Lightfearing fools don’t come burn it down for all this. Take care of him, yeah? All of them.”

  The cat meowed, the tone and rhythm suggesting it intended to all along. Dragos gave Pacha a grim smile and nodded. The zmeu’s human figure left the lit rectangle of the orphanage’s door. It dropped the bar behind it and unspooled into flowing shadow.

  Pacha growled, ears tucking back, and jumped inside, scampering off at the sight of the monster.

  When the beast’s claws grabbed ahold of the windowsill, its body became solid. The long, snakelike thing dangled from the lady’s window, surely a bad omen to any who saw it. Dragos climbed onto its back. The zmeu pushed off the wall, wings booming outward to catch the air, and lunged into the soot-stained sky.

  “Let’s find somewhere warm. A barn,” Dragos said, as snowflakes stung his eyes.

  Winter Solstice night swallowed them. He wouldn’t linger to try to pick up the pieces, let that be for those who called the Lady’s Stag home. For him, too many pieces were lost, too much of his soul burned. He buried his hands in the dragon’s mane and turned his face away from the black wind.

  The wanderer hadn’t imagined staying with Viorica, but still, something within him must have believed, for the heaviness in his heart told him so.

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  (zmyeh-oo): Dragon shapeshifter

  Moarte adormit? (MWAR-te ah-dor-mee-TUH): Death Sleep, a poison

  Ziorluc (zee-OR-luc): The spirit river of light and growth. Without balance, it can cause overwhelming bliss, blindness, madness, and overgrowth in overabundance.

  Light everlasting, endless flow,

  who guides steps and bends hearts low,

  take my blood, take my breath,

  life for life, blood for fame.

  Dragos's counterspell:

  By my willing sacrifice I command,

  light that flows, light that stands,

  deny the summoner, deny the oath,

  return in blood what was stolen.