Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “It’s stuck,” he said, yanking it hard.

  “Let me see.” She noticed the lock had rusted shut, but she gave it a hard pull anyway. It gave way, but not enough.

  “Petra, look out!” Cassian called.

  She didn’t hesitate but took up her dagger and stabbed at the first Mongol who had made it up to the gate. The man’s cry of pain made Petra’s heart stop. She would know that voice anywhere. When she looked up into his face, she knew who she would see: Lucius staring back at her from beneath the disguise of a Mongol warrior.

  26

  The Flight

  August 14, 1346

  Lucius,” Petra breathed, though the shouts and cries around them drowned her out.

  He looked no better than those dying of the Pestilence in Kaffa. His eyes had turned silver, his extremities were darkening and even the veins along his jawline were turning black. All this she saw in the gathering dusk, and yet his expression could not hold a single emotion. He seemed shocked, then angry, and then moved to pain, and all the while she continued to hold the blade she had plunged into his chest. While she had missed his heart, Petra worried she had punctured his right lung.

  “Now we are even, Petra.”

  She reached through the gate and touched his face. Told him with her eyes she could never be sorry enough.

  “Back at the Vellessentia… I didn’t mean it, Lucius. I told you to go, so I could—”

  “Could be with Clarius—” His words dissolved into a hacking cough, as he doubled over and spat out blood.

  Petra shook her head. “No. So I could save your life. Yours and Aurelia’s. Look in my eyes, Lucius. Look and see I speak the truth.”

  He stared into her face, his eyes never wavering from hers. She knew he wanted to believe her but something was holding him back. And, yet, he had come all this way to find her. Aurelia must have told him where she had gone. If only Petra had waited for him there. But didn’t this mean he still loved her? Only love would have brought him so far. The same love that had guided her. Hope slipped back into her heart, tempting her like a drug.

  Lucius finally nodded, his anger dissolving into pain as he struggled to take a breath.

  “Were you here in Kaffa all this time,” she asked him.

  “No, Aurelia told me where to find you. I came—I came as soon as I knew.”

  Petra bit her lip, trying to keep her tears from blurring her vision. He came for her. He hadn’t abandoned her after all.

  “Move aside, and I will finish him,” Cassian shouted from behind her.

  “No! Don’t touch him! It’s Lucius.”

  “You’ve killed him already,” Cassian said, dismissively.

  “I will save him,” Petra snapped, and then turned back to Lucius. “I’m going to pull the dagger out. Hold fast to the gate.”

  Lucius nodded, taking shallow breaths, his black fingers turning lighter as he gripped the steel.

  Petra hesitated as the other men reached the gate. She realized they were all Genoese dressed as Mongols. She looked back at Lucius.

  “Do it,” he said, bracing for the pain.

  She ripped it away, feeling and hearing his muscles give way. He did not cry out, but his breath came in shallow, desperate gasps.

  “Do you need my blood?” she asked, wiping the dagger’s blade on her soiled skirts and tucking it into her girdle by the hilt.

  Lucius could no longer speak, so he nodded instead.

  “Wait a few moments, and we’ll open the gate. Help me yank it free, Cassian. I need to help Lucius recover.”

  Cassian said nothing, but took a place by her side as they both yanked the gate open with a roar. They tore it off its hinges, and the heavy steel shook the ground when it fell, causing several rats to scurry from the tunnel back into the city.

  Lucius collapsed into Petra’s arms, and she pulled him outside and sat him gently on the ground against the wall. The rest of the Mongol army had not mobilized beyond them. They were lighting campfires and settling in for the night, it seemed. She was grateful they hadn’t noticed the open sallyport, though they likely would on the morrow. There was no help for it. At the least, the Kaffans could once again bar the way with the inner wooden gate. She focused all her attention on Lucius as she overheard snippets of Cassian’s conversation with the Genoese.

  Petra sliced through the side of her neck, knowing it would be easier to hide what she was doing from the men.

  She knelt before Lucius and drew close, letting him see the blood spilling from her vein. “Drink, my love, and I will make you well again.”

  The touch of his mouth to her skin made her want to collapse against him, to feel every inch of him next to her, to scream her love for him before every human in the world. But she did nothing, nothing but let him drink his fill as she felt the drain and the press of his tongue and teeth.

  “Lucius…” she said at last, “I thought you were here in Kaffa. I was desperate to find you.”

  He pulled away, and already the color was coming back into his face. His brightening eyes gazed into her own, and she saw that same cascade of emotions she had seen earlier. For once in her life she couldn’t read him.

  “I almost didn’t come,” Lucius said.

  If he had struck her across the face, the pain of his words wouldn’t have been any less intense.

  “There’s no time, Lucius.” She made a show of not responding. In truth she didn’t know what to say. “Escape must be our only mission.”

  “I have commissioned a ship. These men are the crew.” He waved at the Genoese men watching her with curious eyes. She counted ten of them. “The Veroncia is anchored off shore to the southeast.”

  His voice was stronger now. Her blood was making quick work of the injury she had caused him. She and Cassian helped him to his feet.

  “Lucius, this is Cassian and Nencia. I will tell you more as we go, but they are coming with us.”

  Lucius stared at them both, frowning. He even walked up to Cassian and studied his face closely.

  “You are immortal,” he said simply.

  “Yes,” Cassian said, pulling Nencia behind him as he and Petra both braced for Lucius’s reaction.

  Lucius glanced back at her with a questioning in his eyes.

  “You did this?”

  “It’s a long story, but yes.”

  He frowned again, waited a beat, and then nodded. “Men,” he said, addressing the crew in a louder voice, “We make for the Veroncia. Avoid engaging with the Mongols as much as possible. We fly under the cover of darkness.” He looked at Petra, Cassian, and Nencia, then. “Follow me.”

  Silently they moved in a single line around the North side of Kaffa’s walls, staying in the shadows and out of the way of the Kaffan guards’ arrows. For an hour they traversed without speaking. The only question on Petra’s mind was what made him decide to come find her in the end. Was it love? Or merely obligation?

  27

  The Veroncia

  The Black Sea

  August 14, 1346

  Petra waited by the Veroncia’s rail as the lights of besieged Kaffa faded into the distance. Waited for Lucius to come to her. Waited for resolution that might never come. So much had happened since the night of the Vellessentia. Since he had stabbed her. Since she had banished him.

  When he finally came to her, as the dawn’s light touched the distant horizon and the galley ship was long underway, he pulled the blood-soaked shirt off his body and used it to wipe the dried blood from his nearly healed stab wound.

  “I suppose we truly are even now. A dagger for a dagger.”

  His words took her back to the Vellessentia. To the moment he stabbed her. She almost gasped with the vivid reality of the memory.

  “No, I didn’t see. I mean, I didn’t know it was you—”

  “Are you sure?” He was asking in earnest.

  “How can you ask me that?”

  “Because I haven’t forgotten what you said to me. Your words are seared in
to my mind forever.” Bitterness edged his voice as he tossed the bloodied shirt into the sea and leaned his elbows against the railing as the crew tacked to catch the stiffening wind.

  Petra moved to join him at the rail, but he pulled away and stuffed his hands into his pockets. She wasn’t having any of that. She forced herself between him and the rail, pressing her hands to his arms until he finally met her gaze. His expression belied his anger and a despair she knew he was trying to hide from her.

  “I had to make you leave, Lucius. If you had fought Clarius, he might have found a way to kill you permanently. I couldn’t have lived with that.”

  This made him pause, but then he pushed her away to walk the length of the deck. She followed, not knowing how to make him understand.

  “Do you believe me?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t—I don’t know how.”

  “You either trust Clarius or you trust me. If I didn’t want you anymore, I wouldn’t have traveled so far to look for you. Nothing on this Earth matters more to me than your life, Lucius.” She moved around him so he had to face her. She held his dirt-smeared face in her hands as she said again: “Nothing.”

  Lucius jerked away. “You don’t think I know that, Petra? I’ve known for millennia. I’ve known it every Vellessentia when you sacrifice your life for mine. I can still taste the horror of it. But there’s something more, something that no one else on Earth could ever understand because no one else has had to experience it. I live every year knowing I breathe because you give your life for me in the most violent way possible—and there is nothing I can do to save you. If I do, I put your life at risk. Don’t you see?”

  Lucius pressed his fist to his chest where she had stabbed him, as if he felt the ripping pain of the wound again. She wanted to pull him into her arms, to kiss his wound, to erase all the madness that had come between them.

  “You don’t think I dream in blood, Lucius? I remember all of it. I’ve lived through centuries of it.”

  “You’re asking me to watch you die, Petra. Again and again and again. The one who loves you. The one who would give his life for you if he could. The one who would take your place on that altar if it would ease one ounce of your pain.”

  “All the eternae watch. It is—”

  “They don’t love you, Petra. Watching the one you love die is an agony you have rarely experienced.”

  “You know I will always rise again.”

  “My mind may comprehend it, but my heart never will.”

  “It is my gift to you. I give it freely—forever.”

  “I don’t want you to have to. I want it to be me. I want to be the one who saves you. It’s my duty to protect you. Yet with a single vow to our greatest enemy, you made it impossible for me to save you from pain.” He grabbed hold of the railing as several sailors ran past to catch some lines, frustration evident in his tense muscles and the tight set of his jaw.

  Petra looked away, then, to the morning’s fading pale-faced moon. How could she make him understand?

  When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter, more resigned. “It isn’t the same, you know. To die or watch someone die. I have experienced both. And while the pain of my own death fades, the memory of watching you die will never leave me. It is why I have always stayed away. Why I couldn’t watch as he…” Lucius squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, unable to finish the thought.

  Petra grasped his wrist and curled her body into his arms.

  But Lucius pulled back and held her at arm’s length. “Everything I am or will ever be, I owe to you, Petra. I am nothing without you. So when I see Clarius pulling you into a blood-ecstasy, when I see the pleasure on your face as he takes you places I cannot… it drives me to madness, to… helplessness. I cannot compete with his blood magic.”

  “Why would you want to, Lucius? It is a pleasure that can only come from anger, from madness, from the greatest source of pain. It lasts only moments, and then it kills me. He kills me. I cannot love him or forgive him. He is my ally in protecting you, but he will only ever truly be my enemy.”

  “Yet you bow to him and let him have his way. You force me to follow his will.”

  “To keep you safe, Lucius. I have no other choice.”

  “You had a choice back then. And you chose him.”

  “I chose you, but I also chose to protect the world against him. My blood is the tonic to his madness. You and I saw what he is capable of, the man he becomes without my blood running through his veins.”

  He scowled. “I have not forgotten.”

  “Lucius, if my death is the price of peace, then I will gladly keep paying it. For you, for Aurelia, for Cassian and Nencia. For the world.”

  “I don’t know how to keep from trying to kill him.”

  “You will do it because there is no other choice.”

  He shook his head but did not reply.

  “Someday we will have a better understanding of the nature of my blood, but until then, we will bide our time.”

  “What happens on that fateful day?”

  “I alone will choose.” Petra stopped his reply with a kiss. He tried to pull away again, but she would brook no refusal. Her kiss deepened, and his tense muscles under her hands relaxed as his arms circled her waist. He was as needy as she was, and they ignored the stares of the sailors as they let the world fall away into the background.

  Petra felt the wind and smelled the sea; she tasted heaven on a tongue; and remembered the ecstasy of his sex. She wanted him—all of him—now.

  “Take me below, and then take me all day,” she whispered into his ear when they broke apart.

  “Petra, there is…” Lucius shook his head as desire seemed to consume him. “There is something you must know. I—”

  “Forgive the interruption—Lucius, is it?” Cassian asked, and Petra noticed Nencia hid well behind him.

  “Yes?” Lucius snapped, which was unlike him, but Petra knew he had other, more pressing, thoughts on his mind.

  “Nencia here wondered if it was safe for her to eat food. One of the sailors offered her some, but neither of us has felt hunger since—since the change.”

  As Lucius attempted unsuccessfully to recover his equanimity, Petra answered for him with an encouraging smile for Nencia.

  “Human food will not harm you, though you will not crave it as you once did. It is not necessary for you to function and thrive.”

  “Thank you, Nobildonna.”

  “You may call me Petra, Nencia. We stand on no ceremony in the Essentiae eternae.”

  “Essentiae?” Nencia asked, stumbling over the strange word.

  “Yes, it is what we call ourselves.”

  “There are others among us who call themselves the Sanguinea. They drink blood whereas we do not, save once a year.”

  Nencia’s eyes grew round with shock.

  “Have no fear. I will share everything with you over time.”

  “Why did you turn them?” Lucius asked.

  “Cassian here feels no physical pain.”

  Lucius frowned. “Truly?”

  “Yes. I was born this way.”

  “Neither hot nor cold? Not a stab wound in the heart?”

  “Nothing, Signore.”

  Lucius seemed to shake off the last of his desire and irritation and faced Cassian full on, studying him. It was obvious to Petra he was contemplating the usefulness of such a man. He glanced at her and nodded his approval.

  “Yes, I see why you turned him. And the girl?”

  “There was no time. Both of them were expiring from the Pestilence. I had to choose for them.”

  Cassian watched their exchange coolly. He was obviously still angry with her for making that choice without his consent.

  “Come, Petra. I need rest,” Lucius said, and she did not miss the suggestion in his voice. He pressed her to accompany him, but she held back.

  She went to Cassian and touched his arm. “The answers are coming. You and Nencia rest. Recover your stren
gth and rest your minds. Tomorrow you will know all—I swear it.”

  “And if my questions disturb my sleep?”

  “Let only one question occupy your thoughts, Cassian: do you want to live forever, or do you want to die? Beyond that, nothing else matters for you now.”

  He looked away, then, to the sea, and she left him to his thoughts and followed Lucius below.

  When Lucius pulled Petra inside their cabin, his kiss moved from feather light to a bruising press to the burning rush of an Essentian draw. It took her breath away, made her fall heavily against him. He carried her to the tiny berth and there drew her over and over, taking her to the brink and bringing her back down to herself again.

  Petra let him do what he would, relaxing into the pain, the terror, the pleasure, and the sheer rapture he wrought in every nerve and muscle in her body.

  “You are mine, Petra,” as he released her from the draw and pressed his lips gently to hers, as he finally moved to enter her.

  She flipped them over and straddled him, pressing his wrists down as she forced him to look in her eyes. “No, you are mine.”

  * * *

  “Do you ever wish we could go back?” Lucius asked her as they lay side by side in the berth, finally sated.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, rising on one elbow so she could study his face. His warm brown eyes were back, replacing the silver of his blood-need. His skin was radiant with the flush of new life inside him, and his body was strong beneath her.

  “Back to where we began. Before the blood rites. Before our alliances blurred right and wrong. When Clarius was still…”

  “Our enemy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you want to go back there? We were slaves. Powerless… helpless… no, I would never go back.”

  “Do you never have regrets?”

  His words reminded her she had yet to tell him of Clarius’s threat. She didn’t respond for a long time, searching for the right words and finding none.