The Vampire & Her Witch

Devlin shook off his worries about Albyn, cursing himself for getting distracted before they reached the safety of their destination. He blamed it on the later hour and the cold that pulled him toward sleep, but the truth was that he wasn’t the young man he’d once been, and the years were catching up with him.

”When this is over,” he muttered under his breath. ”I want a giant mug of hot tea and a soft bed.”

”I’ll join you for that,” Sir Elgon said lightly as he came to stand next to the former sailor. ”Is everyone accounted for?” Elgon asked quietly. ”I’d hate for anyone to get locked out in this cold.”

”Every last one,” Devlin said, shaking off the weight of the memory. Albyn’s face lingered behind his eyes like an afterimage, that ghost of a smile and the grip of his forearm, but he couldn’t afford to dwell on it. There were thirty-seven people standing in the cold behind him, and every moment they spent in the open was another chance for a guardsman’s patrol to stumble across them. ”Let’s get them inside before someone freezes.”

He approached the back door of the Gilded Horns and rapped his knuckles against the heavy wood in the pattern Jean had taught him. Three quick, two slow, one hard. Then he waited, his hand drifting to the hilt of his curved fighting knife out of habit more than any real expectation of danger.

The bolt drew back with a muffled clunk, and the door swung inward to reveal a face that Devlin hadn’t expected to see again this side of the Heavenly Shores.

”Master Isabell?” Devlin said, blinking in disbelief.

The woman standing in the doorway was and wasn’t the Isabell that Devlin remembered from the journey out of Blackwell County. The spectacles were the same, round-lensed and slightly crooked on the bridge of her nose, and she still wore trousers instead of skirts, which had drawn no end of muttering from the more traditional members of their escort when she’d first joined the caravan.

But the steel-gray hair that Devlin remembered had been replaced by something brighter, a glossy silver that caught the lamplight from within the doorway and seemed to glow with its own quiet luster. Her face, which had carried the deep lines and weathering of a woman who had spent decades working with her hands, looked fresh and smooth, as though years had been lifted from her features.

She looked, Devlin thought with a mixture of relief and unease, like a woman who had spent the months since her disappearance growing younger instead of older if such a thing were possible. Or perhaps a woman who had been blessed by a miracle unattainable by ordinary folk.

”Captain Devlin,” Isabell said, adjusting her spectacles with a familiar, practiced motion as a warm smile broke across her face. ”You’re late. I finished my work hours ago,” she chided him, as if he were one of her children who’d stayed out past curfew before her tone turned even more motherly.

”I was starting to worry,” Isabell said, sounding much more like the woman Devlin knew than she looked.

”We had to wait for the last of the kitchen staff to slip out,” Devlin said, stepping forward to clasp her hand. The grip was firm, warm, and unmistakably real. Whatever had happened to her, she wasn’t a phantom conjured from the fog and the mists.

”Light above, Isabell,” he said with a heavy sigh of relief. ”We thought you were dead. When the demon raids hit the frontier, and you didn’t come back with the others...”

”It’s a long story,” she said, squeezing his hand before releasing it and peering past him at the group of servants and soldiers gathered in the street. Her expression shifted from warmth to the brisk efficiency he remembered from watching her manage the great cranes of Blackwell Harbor to load or empty cargo holds, her lips moving slightly the way they always did when she was tallying numbers.

”Thirty-seven, with Sir Elgon and his knights, and the Templars,” Devlin confirmed for her. ”Everyone on the list.”

”Good. That matches what Marcel told me to expect,” Isabell said with a satisfied nod before she stepped back and held the door wide. ”Come in, all of you. Quickly now. Stay quiet through the kitchens.”

The servants filed past her in a shuffle of cold feet and grateful murmurs, several of them doing a double take when they recognized the woman they’d last seen weeks ago before she vanished into the wilderness of the frontier. One of the older maids stopped short and pressed both hands to her mouth, her eyes brimming with tears.

”Don’t,” Isabell said gently, placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder and giving her a firm push toward the interior. ”Save the tears for later. There’ll be plenty of time for all of that once everyone’s warm.”

Devlin waited until the last of the servants had passed through before he entered himself, with Elgon and the four Blackwell knights bringing up the rear. Sir Beathan and his Templars filed in after them, the young Templar pausing at the threshold just long enough to touch his fingers to the radiant sun embossed on his breastplate before stepping through.

The kitchens of the Gilded Horns were dark and cold at this hour. The great ovens had been banked for the night, and the counters had been scrubbed clean, but the smell of good cooking lingered in the stone and timber, along with something almost nostalgic lingering in the air that made Devlin’s empty stomach clench with longing.

Isabell led them through the kitchens without pause, past pantries stacked with casks of salted meat and sacks of grains, down a short corridor to a heavy curtain. As she moved, Devlin found himself once again feeling like there was something... off about the engineer. There was a spring in her step that hadn’t been there before and a gait that seemed unhindered by the aches or pains of age, though perhaps that was simply his envy speaking after spending so long in the bitter cold of the Lothian night.

The sounds of a crackling fire and the faint murmur of quiet conversation reached Devlin’s ears before she pulled the curtain aside, and for a moment, the warmth that washed over him from the room beyond was so welcome that it nearly buckled his knees.

The dining room beyond was a handsome space, larger than Devlin had expected, with high ceilings supported by massive timber pillars carved with scenes of legendary hunts and battles. Gold leaf gleamed on the carved horns and claws of the demons depicted in the woodwork, catching the firelight from the great hearth at the far wall. The floor was strewn with rushes and dried herbs that released a faint fragrance under their boots, and the benches and trestle tables had been rearranged to open up the center of the room.

But it wasn’t the room that made Devlin slow his pace. It was the people already inside it.

A tall young man sat near the hearth in a jade-green sleeveless tunic with a long-sleeved undershirt that looked like it had been pulled from a painting of knights at court a hundred years ago. His wild mane of flame-red hair caught the firelight like a torch. As soon as he noticed Sir Elgon and the knights entering the room, the young man stood and offered a short bow with one foot tucked behind the other that was every bit as old-fashioned as his tunic.

Beside the knight, a sturdy boy of fifteen or so was arranging cups and bowls on one of the trestle tables with the focused efficiency of a squire who had been given a task and intended to complete it to the letter. He glanced up at the arriving group with shrewd, watchful eyes set in a broad, honest face.

There were others, too. Devlin could see additional figures at the edges of the room, shapes that resolved into faces as his eyes adjusted to the warm light after the darkness of the streets. But two of those faces stopped him cold.

They were seated at a table near the far wall, partially obscured by one of the carved timber pillars, and they wore robes of a kind that Devlin would recognize in his nightmares for the rest of his life. Crimson and gold. The colors of the Inquisition.

One was a younger man with a ruddy complexion and dark, steady eyes who wore his crimson robes in an older style, marked with antiquated sun symbols that looked like they belonged in a museum rather than on a living man. The other was a slightly older, hawk-nosed and lean, with coal-black hair pulled back in a tight braid and the sharp, searching gaze of a man who was accustomed to looking for things that other people wanted to keep hidden.

Inquisitors. In the place where he’d just delivered Lady Jocelynn’s people.

The warmth of the room, which had been so welcome just a heartbeat ago, suddenly felt oppressive and sweltering. Everything he’d heard about what the Inquisition had done to Lady Jocelynn and Confessor Eleanor flooded through his mind in a single, searing rush. The dungeons. The cold. The acolytes who had forced Lady Jocelynn to do embroidery until her fingers bled.

And worst of all, Eleanor’s body, withered to a husk and clutching the charred remnants of her sacred robes. Tragedy didn’t begin to describe what Lady Jocelynn and Confessor Eleanor had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition...

And Isabell had led them straight to them.

His hand dropped to the hilt of his fighting knife before he’d made a conscious decision to reach for it, and when he turned to face the woman he’d been so relieved to see alive just minutes ago, the look in his eyes could have stripped the polish off a ship’s deck.

”Isabell,” Devlin spat. ”How could you?”