Chapter 295: Crossing Lines
"The boy knows his place, young pup," Hamdi snarled as his golden gaze flickered between Nyrielle and Ignatious. In a movement that would have been too quick to be seen by anyone who wasn’t a vampire, the High Lord’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, baring an inch of cold Darksteel while he took half a step toward the trembling Inquisitor.
Caught in the middle between Nyrielle’s cool, reassuring darkness and the seething violence of High Lord Hamdi, Ignatious’s knees buckled and were it not for Nyrielle’s hand taking hold of his robes, he would have fallen to his knees.
Visions of Hamdi’s cruel, smiling visage filled his mind. In his mind’s eye, he could already see Hamdi’s tongue licking blood from a skinning knife after tossing chunks of Ignatious’s flesh to a pack of hungry wolves. The wounds healed, each and every time, as if they’d never been there before. At times, Ignatious wondered if he’d gone made and the gruesome torture had been a fever dream but every time he convinced himself that it hadn’t been real, Hamdi returned with his skinning knife and that sickening grin.
"Out with him," Hamdi said. He let his sword slide back into its sheath but his hand never left the large basket-hilt of the weapon. "This one never should have been let loose from his mother’s teat, but now isn’t the time for him to hide behind your skirts. No matter how reprehensible your behavior has been, I won’t discipline an unbridled descendant in front of her own progeny."
"The words you’re looking for," Nyrielle said coldly. "Are ’Your Eternity, I request a private audience.’ Since you are the sire of my grandsire, I will grant you the privilege of making your request from your feet instead of your knees."
As she spoke, Nyrielle reached out with her free hand, extinguishing half the lamps in the room with a flick of her fingers and drawing on the greater darkness to wrap a cloak of cool, soothing shadows around Ignatious.
For any of her other progeny, she could conjure the same sensation as the joyous moment she sank her fangs into their necks, triggering memories of her bliss filled bite. For Ignatious, however, every moment of his transformation had been deliberately agonizing, and conjuring those feelings within him would only drag him from one trauma to the next.
Since she couldn’t give him a grounding memory of pleasure, she instead wrapped him in the cold detachment of the grave, quashing his ability to feel pain or fear. It wasn’t much comfort for the tormented vampire, but facing off against a vampire hundreds of years older than her, it was all she could offer her traumatized progeny.
"A puffed up title doesn’t mean anything without the strength to rule," Hamdi said, his lips curling back in a fang baring sneer. "You’re barely holding on to the tiniest corner of Torbin’s territory, playing games with these pathetic humans and falling victim to their laughable sorcery. But now, I see how it is. You favor these superstitious fools. No wonder your parents burned at their hands. My most talented progeny died so you could make nice with the invaders."
"Impudent fossil," Nyrielle snapped. With a twitch of her dark wings, half a dozen shadowy feathers shot out from her wings like bolts from a crossbow, streaking across the small sitting room faster than an eye could blink.
Yet for all their speed, Hamdi moved just as quickly. Drawing the sword at his hip would have taken far too long, but his hands conjured long wicked claws of pale silvery light that tore through the air and shredded four of her six feathers. The fifth feather went wide as the older vampire moved to strike and only the sixth feather inflicted any harm, slicing through the sleeve of his tunic and spilling a few drops of blood before Hamdi stopped the flow of blood through sheer force of will.