Zephon laughed, despite everything. Because of everything. It was a corpse-dry cackle atop a throne of blood and bones.

Daylight seared through the splintered door and shattered windows. The human was tall enough he blocked the blazing sunlight, and so Zephon could look at him without squinting. He'd stepped back, out of biting reach.

This hollow-cheeked mess? Cloakless, covered in grime, armor battered and piecemeal. Pink scars raked across his face. He still stood with an entitled straight back and his teeth hardly smelled of decay. Highborn.

Something in Zephon twitched. He'd seen Sandulf when he couldn't have been older than fourteen, the night he came for Ghislain. This boy had the same eyes, a few shades darker, the wolfish frenzy weakened.

And right now he can kill you as easily as Kain.

"What happened to honor?" Zephon rasped, clawing to make sense of this interloping bastard. Clicks snapped down his neck and bones colluded in ways they shouldn't. "Murdering me in my sleep—" He snorted. "I remember when you nobles killed us nobly."

Gouged out our eyes and flayed our faces, but we hardly did less.

"They died."

Zephon recognized that look of glass and half-chained fury. He tasted the boy's salt-sweet fever, smelled the glimmering sweat trailing down his throat. The lordling had nothing left to lose. And what do I have? Even if a crossbow wasn't pointed at his face, he would've hated the highborn. The familiar slant to the boy's nose, the curve of his jaw, and Zephon's own lightheadedness made him almost smile. As much as the lordling was Sandulf's kin, he looked like Ghislain more.

Zephon slapped aside his nostalgia. You sit on all that's left of them. The wet bones of the throne curved along his back, sticking to the shredded ruin of his jerkin.

"Should I know who you are?" he snapped instead.

Silence.

His arms hung leaden, defiant of his attempts to curl his fingers. Even if Zephon could sit up and swat the crossbow away, the bolt would still core his brain. Then keep it from firing, you idiot. The lordling's breath had started to shake, just a little, a small whistling through his clenched teeth. A breath racing to catch up to his feverish heartbeat.

Ah, this is personal.

Get the boy furious enough to want his guts on his hands. Get him close enough to sink fangs into his sweaty neck and in the best of all worlds live to see another day. If there was a time for wild guesses, it couldn't get much worse.

Skin tightened on the trigger. It made Zephon look at the boy's hand. In front of one scabbed knuckle was a ring. One of those plain things humans liked to exchange in matrimony. Something about it was familiar—

Nachtholm. His mouth turned acrid. This whelp had to be the one who took it. Zephon would've gestured grandly, sneered his cruelest. As it was, his crooked mouth grimaced, and his fingers bent to the second knuckle. At least he now knew the boy's freshest scar.

"No wonder the Maziere girl chose us." His mouth jabbed pins into his jaw as he smiled. "Over a craven little wretch like you."

Spite, my friend. Sup on it and choke. The Raginmar yanked his sword out and lunged at his guts. Zephon almost howled in triumph.

In the best of all worlds, Zephon let him get close. Fury roared over his pain. Bones crackling, he seized the boy's wrist, dragged him close enough to bury his fangs in his neck. Poor vengeance for Nachtholm, but sometimes vengeance was sweet enough. And it was blood enough to save him. His fangs tore and his lips sucked. His savior writhed, scrabbled for balance, started to squeal. Zephon only bit harder, shuddering as his guts and bone began to knit.

But that was the best of all worlds, and Zephon's world tended to the worst.

The lordling caught himself the moment his hand touched his swordhilt. His brow rose. Such an obvious lure. Then he finally dared a bitter smile, throat pulsing and too damn far from Zephon's teeth.

The crossbow returned to his eyes.

It ends here?

That thought—truly answered—made his guts go hollow. Succumbing to his wounds after avenging his clan was…acceptable. Murdered by this horsewhipped, nameless highborn? Insulting. His pride was always brittle. Zephon snorted to himself. In no world, best or worst, would he give some bastard the pleasure of his easy death.

The sudden twitch of movement over the lordling's shoulder still caught his eye. A new shape, darkening the entry. He caught the faint scent and he knew. Well, he knew next to nothing, but the figure had a name.

"Don't stop there, girl." His broken jaw made his voice hiss. "Tell this fellow how Raziel would repay a dead brother." It hurt to speak, to rally behind a name—not that pain ever shut him up before.

The human twisted half around. The fledgling's heartbeat thrummed. As she crept into the cathedral, Zephon saw that she'd pulled back her hood, her hair wind-torn, eyes glassy and red-rimmed from daylight. Horse sweat caked her empty hands.

He was not so naive as to believe he had a savior.

She'd be half-blind until her eyes adjusted to the shadows. Still, she knew the lordling. There was no break in her stride as she approached. Ashen-faced and pulse galloping, the Raginmar made a sound between a growl and a sob. The crossbow leveled at her throat, his arm shaking.

The fledgling's face cocked at the loaded bolt. Annoyance twisted her mouth. She pushed down the quarrel with two black-clawed fingers.

"Why?" It might've been the question of a lost girl once. Now it was a command.

As if you can't guess? Zephon didn't understand all human contradictions, but even he saw it plain. Of all the ways he pictured his death, none were as the audience of a torrid melodrama. Get up you idiot. Zephon tried. He could twitch his fingers, speak with a mangled rasp, but his strings were cut.

"Leave. Now," the lordling managed to croak.

The fledgling's brows rose, just as she looked ready to bite his face off. "I took this curse for your castle. My existence may disgust you, but you will give me an answer!"

"I never wanted—"

Galvira swatted his cheek, enough to snap it sideways and leave a red line along his jaw. He cringed like a whipped dog. Perhaps the Raginmar always knew deep down why she was a vampire. He reeked of sweet-sharp guilt. At the least, his attention was on his wife.

"You needed me, whatever you damn wanted. You couldn't have taken that castle. Forgive me for not cutting my own throat after." As her voice caught, her fingers tightened on the crossbow and the crack echoed over stone and corpses. She let go before it snapped.

"I was weak." The boy's eyes screwed tight as he swallowed, throat taut as wires.

She smiled, more broken than kindly. "There are worse things than that."

Truly? The Raginmar would execute his wife the same day Zephon did cartwheels into the sea. But there was a difference in hearing and knowing. He saw it in the way she stood, shoulders slack, expectant and pained, even though she could carve out the boy's liver with one hand and ruffle his hair with the other. The Raginmar might've thought to kill her as a mercy, but there was a difference in dreaming and doing.

Meanwhile, the fledgling was the strongest in the room and she bore him no affection. This moment would determine how he died.

"You took Nachtholm," he said, making them both look up. "Cleverly so. It suits your kind better than mine."

'Cleverly' was bitter on his tongue. Hardly clever to follow in my footsteps.

"Bargain with you?" The lordling's lip curled, noble-bred despite the dirt and hunger. "For what I already have?"

Certainly true, if lacking a certain perspective. It was difficult to summon bravado with so many toes in the grave.

"For what you could have." Zephon dragged his broken jaw into the iciest of smiles, biting his tongue to keep from yelping. The fledgling eyed them both. Especially him, like she finally saw the broken bones and sewer-black veins. "Kill me," he breathed, "and do you think my brothers won't crucify you all?"

"They can try."

His mind lumbered over the ill-fitting pieces, of Sandulf splitting from his army with the Timestreamer's staff.

"Sandulf tried. So much blood, all a distraction, banging on Nachtholm's door. Pity it was an outpost for unfavorites."

A guess at best, but a noxious suggestion if the boy ever wondered.

"I don't make deals with your kind."

Zephon scoured for everything unsaid. Guilt, pain, simmering rage—everyone had a bruised place. The lordling had brought his wife to a siege. Zephon had little sense for love, but he could sense weakness like an infected wound.

"Protect what your uncle wouldn't," he rasped, a sneer spasming up his mangled cheek. "Or let us both die atop our kin's corpses."

"For how long?" the boy snapped in a tone that better said 'you lying fucker.'

Zephon twitched his shoulders. "The next rebellion, if you choose to take part."

Terms arrayed, gyres turning. Zephon couldn't keep that promise even if he wanted to. His brothers would not. The lordling had to know it too. Still, it was time to rebuild his uncle's army. Take the lake-guarded citadel and resume the war when his numbers were stronger. Even if vampire banners came to Nachtholm four months from now, the city could withstand a siege.

Instead of answering, the Raginmar looked at Galvira, all pain and questions. Perhaps he'd never been a self-believing sort. There was something they said in silence that Zephon couldn't read. The lordling finally met his eye again, mouth pressed into a thin line. A hard-reached decision.

"How desperate."

Choom!

Steel and wood bit through his shoulder, pierced through his collarbone and pinned him to the throne. Just as someone yelped. Is the boy's aim that piss-poor? He'd expected a bolt through his face. This pain was distant, like a knife through a frostbitten hand.

He opened his eyes to see the girl's fingers clamped around the lordling's neck and wrist. Knees buckling, her husband slumped into her free arm. His weapons clattered.

"I'm sorry," the fledgling murmured into his temple as she eased him into a blacked-out heap.

Daylight blazed over the boy's sinking shoulders. Zephon had to twist away, eyes narrowed to slits. The bolt through his shoulder kept him from turning far.

"At least you have some sense," he muttered, blinking and squinting, trying to flex the hand of his arrow-pinioned arm. Two fingers twitched.

"Sense enough to know he'd die," she said. Steel scraped off stone as she picked up her husband's sword.

"Lovely way you choose to show affection," Zephon snapped. "If he's out much longer, you probably scrambled his little brain."

The black feathering in the corners of his eyes wasn't going away. She seemed to smile as she stepped closer, more like baring teeth. Her nails clicked around the sword's pommel, even if she held it like a novice. "Was there any truth to it?"

"Hardly matters for you—fangs and the like."

She rammed the flat of the blade into his throat, raking skin off his jaw. It snapped him slightly back to lucidity.

"Nachtholm?"

Her breath reeked of watery horseblood. Blood. It was a threnody in his veins, murmuring without stop. A dozen times louder than on that demon-infested island. Holding a blade to his throat had gotten her close though.

"Really…" he wheezed under her weight. His ribs hurt like a bastard. "What use to a vampire is a castle stuck in a damn lake?" His grin mocked himself most of all. He snorted, blood crackling down his throat. "I took it to make a point, nothing else."

The fledgling scoffed. The force against his throat lightened a small bit. "And still Alaric took it with twenty men."

It was pride rotted to pretension. I know, you damn bitch. Even brittle pride had its sharp edges. Zephon snapped at her throat.

Her blood didn't pulse like a human's. It was closer to a dirge, beautiful and sonorous.

He didn't expect her to grab the crossbow bolt in his shoulder and twist. It scraped something, made his neck seize up like a sprung trap. His fangs hardly grazed her skin. The quarrel snapped, half still in him. It stung more than hurt…not good. Pain meant the possibility of healing.

"That was ungallant. Not that I expected more." She grabbed his face, wrenching his neck back, her thumbnail digging into the highest part of his cheek. "Sandulf told me the Zephonim oft go for the eyes." Hers were narrowed, glittering silver. "What Sandulf said he'd do to your eyes, though…"

Her nail was starting to cut. A little more and she'd have his eye out. Eyes didn't grow back.

"Don't—" he breathed. Don't. Please. But he couldn't say that. He wouldn't. Sharp, brittle things cut both ways. "Sorry," he croaked.

She let go, more guarded than before. "I haven't the same hunger as either of you."

"I won't have the numbers to retake it for years, even if I wanted the swampy heap." He coughed, wondering if she could hear his flagging heartbeat. "They do. Help me here and they won't retake it."

He was sincere in that. Sincerely desperate. Her head tilted. Considering. Only one hand held the sword down, but his strength was close to a week-old kitten. She knew what he asked. Her bitter smile returned.

"The last time I gave part of me to save my husband, I wound up here, and he's hardly better off."

"Better off than the grave. I only need—"

"I don't care," she snapped. "Even if you weren't a liar, I'm of you, not with you."

Gods I should've snapped her neck. Of all his clan, this was the one who survived?

She pulled away, back to her lordling, and hauled him up against her, his neck lolling.

Zephon understood her path to cold rancor. He couldn't hate her for it. Didn't like her for it either.

"You'll be with no one soon enough," he rasped. "He wouldn't harm you. But his people?"

He could barely see her amidst all the sunlight, too bright and grating. His only recompense was the stumble of her heartbeat as he spoke. It steadied as she carried the lordling from the cathedral. She heard him, but she never looked back.

Galvira left the vampire to his fate. A part of her snarled she was burning every bridge that might keep her alive. But she was damn tired of feeling like she had to cut herself for any good to come.

Alaric's pulse steadied as she dragged him onto his ill-tempered horse. She let her exhausted mount trail behind, reins clipped to the stallion's saddle. So much exhaustion. Alaric hadn't slept a full night since they left Nachtholm together. The stallion's rocking walk, her husband's long-staved fatigue—perhaps together they kept him slumbering.

At the cathedral, there was a fleeting smile on his face when he twisted around. It vanished when he remembered everything else. She'd always loved that smile, his uneven grin like he barely knew what to do with it. Now, it wasn't half so pretty as his neck. Her eyes had been so weak before, blind to the way muscle twined with bone and veins weaved under skin. He had the most beautiful throat in Nosgoth and she'd never realized. Part of her wanted to sink her teeth into it. But only a small part, easily shooed away like a child from cakes.

His back tensed then. His pulse quickened. And she felt the slow, inevitable plunge as Alaric came to with a groggy roll of his head. Then he realized. Galvira wondered if he'd go for a blade. She'd taken them away in any case.

"You?" he croaked.

"Me," she said with a sigh.

"You…" His thoughts sounded like they were scrabbling. "You saved him."

She almost hit him. "I saved you. You would've been dead in a fortnight."

He coughed before she realized it was a choking laugh. "And now I won't?"

Galvira sighed. She didn't trust the vampire for a moment, but even he couldn't lie his way out of the fact his clan was gone. Alaric saw a wounded wolf; she saw a vicious creature crumpled to desperate pride and scrabbling pain. Any attack on Nachtholm had to come from his brothers. The two she'd met never mentioned it. Zephon himself spoke of it like a vainglorious misstep.

She'd seen enough of the vampires' camp to know that while their lives were endless, their resources were not. Sandulf had almost won through outmaneuvering them. What gain in retaking Nachtholm? It couldn't expand much. Better to pool all the defiance into a single, limited spot.

"Obviously. the vampires would not forget you. But seize upon the chance. You must lead the survivors."

"Lead them to an early death, more like. I'm not the general my great-uncle was—"

"Was. He's dead, you're not." Not a death she would mourn. "Sandulf came close but he would've drowned Nosgoth in blood. You wouldn't."

"Where are we...?"

"Nachtholm." It was her turn to steady herself. Whatever she said, there was only one way he'd answer.

"You can't. They'll kill you."

"And you wish it?" She couldn't help chuckling against his neck, a small twitch at her mouth when he flinched.

"No," he said flatly. But he still squirmed against her. "My men know."

"Sandulf could leave a company of footsoldiers to slow an advance and they'd thank him for the honor."

"Sandulf didn't drink blood." He'd shaken off enough stiffness to twist around and say it to her face. There was still something warm and pained in his eyes. Knowing his ancestors would roll in their graves…and that the living were a different matter. "You still…"

"Eat people?"

With the time to know everything, she'd rather know something. Halfway between amused and sardonic, she dipped her mouth to his neck. His heartbeat bolted and she tasted his salty cringe. She wanted to bite down, terrorize him for suspecting the worst of her, just as it made her sad. Instead she teased, kissing the skin under his jaw. She pulled back enough to murmur, "Blood is blood, from man or beast."

Galvira had no idea if horses would keep her. Her mount from Raziel's camp had small scars along its neck. The watery blood eased the sun's claws, but there was no joyous rush like with the highwayman. Nachtholm had room enough that perhaps no one would notice why crones and grandfathers never lingered in pain too long.

Alaric's eyes had closed in thought. Scraping for a way to save everyone. His hands wrapped over hers. The fingers from his broken arm barely curled.

But she couldn't just go back. Imagining days of milling around a war camp, waiting to be needed. Acrid distaste flooded her throat. There would be things to discuss.

"You'd best choose, my love. I'm the one who'd get the crossbows through my neck."

How does one act when all ideas are burned to ash? Zephon didn't know. And he hated the answer that was gathering strength. Nothing. She'd…cheated. Instead of volleying back terms or spitting threats, she'd turned and left. Even humans weren't usually this insufferable.

Any stolen strength was bleeding away through any wounds not dry and blackening. And what now, when all virtues are mocked and all curses said? Soft, numb darkness.

Something brought him to. Who else to expect at the end of the world?

Claws clamped down on his shoulder, too close to his bitten throat. Kain stood there, no second glance for the dead vampires strewn around him. His black armor was mottled in dried blood and the Reaver jutted over one shoulder.

"Did I say you could return?"

To think he'd get to sleep in peace. Zephon's neck cracked as he tried to straighten. His jaw popped, but couldn't be forced to grin no matter how hard he tried. "Still wish to send me back to my soulless corpse?"

Kain's mouth went crooked. "There are times I want to send you all back to the tomb you crawled from."

Zephon coughed on something stuck between his lungs and ribs. Probably a rib. "A disgraced exile still found the Seer."

Kain nodded to himself. "I thought she had hidden there, to vanish so completely."

"A friend?"

"That is doubtful." His voice steeled. "What did she say?"

"She disliked your manners."

Kain's face tilted. To see his sire surprised and affronted was perhaps his greatest achievement. Zephon would savor it for a century, even if he lived minutes more. Pity it only lasted a moment.

"Zephon." His name was dredged in frost. The wolf behind the icy fall, ready to spring and sluice the snow with blood. Good gods, I am delirious. "You will answer me now."

Now, before I go under? He'd woken this side of life too many times; the world tired of the same trick.

"Why is my life important?" he'd asked the Seer, her neck wet from his mouth.

"I never said it was."

Perhaps she would've been less enigmatic if he'd buried his fangs in her wrist instead of her throat…he was a tad rude. Why arm him with her blood? Perhaps something he knew? A messenger has little importance unless he dies on the road with a crucial order.

"Just one question, sire."

Kain's eyes narrowed. He'd probably guessed—his eyes flicked downward, to the crypts below, where the ancient wretch howled in a new mad eternity.

"If you killed my fledgling with the Soul Reaver…" It was only exhaustion that kept a snarl from Zephon's misaligned mouth. "How could that thing survive?"

Kain was still as the grave. "I never used the Reaver."

"Instead you set it loose." Something sickened in his throat and belly.

There was no pity, no shame, but he never expected any. Kain looked almost curious now. Godplaying bastard! You move us around not thinking we'd stumble into your insane plots? But Zephon had no strength to screech. Kain couldn't have known Ryszard would lead his party to the damnable cave. Zephon still brought Kain the fledgling. Of course he sought a cure, but devils take him if he wasn't also preening to show off a new discovery. His memory wasn't perfect, but what he recalled in crystal-sharp memories, he knew he'd seen his clan's doom and been too stupid to realize.

"I could count on you not to heed reason," Kain said at last. "I knew you would find something. If prodded enough."

"My exile was an errand?"

"No." His eyes narrowed. True annoyance at wounding his favorite. "Banishment made you useful." Zephon thought his sire about to grab his jaw and gift some half-remembered pain, but his fingers only grazed his cheek. His voice was almost soft. "Be useful to me. What did she say?"

Useful for what? This deep in the grave, Zephon realized another truth. What in a dozen black hells could Kain threaten him with? His clan was gone. He wouldn't survive the hike to a torture chamber. As for pain—ah, pain—Zephon had higher standards now.

"No."

He would've laughed. He would've raised a glass to the Maziere fledgling. How easy and free our paths are, when we stop caring what matters. Perhaps that was the only way to keep going when everything else was gone. Spite, pure and simple. Zephon had all the time in the world to sit back and watch. Kain had until the moment his fifthborn died.

"You are in no position to argue."

This is an argument? Zephon could always make it one.

"I want my clan back!"

Kain's temper crackled around him as that growl came to his breath. He reached for something—someone. "Take it back then," he snarled as he hurled the corpse at Zephon. "I see little difference then and now!"

The cold body sprawled against him. His healer, his torturer. His mutilated husk. He didn't have the strength to push her corpse away, only bury his head in her ashen neck as his shoulder clacked against hers. It was somehow easier when he couldn't tell one from the other. The entire cathedral swayed around him, and Zephon wondered why Kain didn't notice. You're fading, of course.

Fading into dreams? He thought of Rahab, when they were gangly fledglings and had stolen away for adventure. The abandoned Sarafan Stronghold was a relic of a sanctified age. They had found a pane of glass, brindled in dust but still bright with the sun. A rose-and-steel lord fighting a pale assassin.

"Kain in his younger days," Rahab said with a shrug, sitting against the catafalque.

"Why does the other one have the Soul Reaver?" Zephon asked as his brother pulled him down beside him.

Rahab's eyes narrowed, but he always had that smile-scowl when he stumbled across a puzzle. Half challenge, half glee at being challenged.

"One isn't the Reaver? Merely a common style, or a fanciful artist. What else…" he shrugged.

Just how important was the Seer's little note? Surely she could've crossed the sea. And what of time and paradoxes?

Kain wrenched the body away. His claws snapped Zephon's neck upright. "You fool," he growled, something low and strange in his voice. "I can't bring you back from this again."

Afraid of what secrets might die with me?

His turn to throw down an icy ultimatum. The freedom in it was not caring overmuch what happened. His mind was flagging. Perhaps he didn't care. It wasn't so much the idea of dying he refused, only that of being beaten.

Zephon hoped he laughed in those final moments. He'd never know for sure. Everything was too slow and fuzzy, and while he'd prefer to drown out the sour note at the end of his story…

A/N: Psst, not quite over...