Arc 1: Chapter 29: Catrin
“You’re wounded.”
Normally, those words would have held a note of concern or panic. Catrin said them like it was something erotic. She stepped forward on light feet, heedless of the chimera blood on the floor. She left one purplish footprint on the stone as she advanced.
“I’m fine,” I said, heart quickening in my chest. The young woman — was she truly young? — brushed my left arm with her fingers. The chimera had left two deep, ugly gouges just above my elbow. The elven armor I’d received from the oradyn was of an archaic design, not a full set of plate, and there were parts of me it didn’t protect. In this case, I only had metal covering my upper arm from the spaulders and short sleeves of the hauberk, then a gap until the vambrace strapped to my forearm. The monster had found that gap.
So did Catrin. Her fingers curled around my elbow, her red eyes fixing on the wound. They were unnaturally bright in the gloom, a feverish shade of crimson. She seemed to be breathing quicker.
Then, before I had even quite realized what was happening, she brought her face down to nuzzle the wound. Her tongue ran across the slashes and her whole body shivered.
I shoved her. I did it harder than I meant to — the stress of the cave had us both not thinking straight, and I didn’t truly believe she’d meant to hurt me. But there was still my lingering distrust of her, my instinct that part of her — a part as dark as any battle instinct in me — did want to hurt me, and I shouldn’t let my guard down. She’d already tried once.
Catrin slammed against the opposite wall of the hallway. She recovered instantly, glaring up at me — her face had turned corpse-pale, her eyes into milky white spheres — and hissed like an animal, revealing needle-sharp teeth.
She lunged at me, or tried to. With a furnace growl I summoned my aura again, filling the passageway with dim amber flame. Catrin recoiled from it just as the chimera had, letting out a noise of frustration.
I kept it up until she got her breathing under control. With it came her senses. She knelt against the wall, her corpse eyes unfocused, but I saw a hint of the mischievous spy I’d come to know over the past several days peek through the bloodlust. Her eyes, still empty, widened as she met mine.
“Alken…” She shuddered. “I’m so sorry. Bleeding Gates, I’m sorry, I didn’t… I can’t…”
“Are you in control?” I asked. I still burned my aura, not quite trusting she was in control of herself. This might be a trick, a vampire’s ploy to make me let my guard down. I had no way to know how much influence that part of her had over her words as well as her actions.