Chương 24

It was the woman from Hong Nguyen's. His breath locked in his throat. He wanted to speak, to demand to know who she was and why she'd followed him here, but those green eyes found his and the words wouldn't come. It was like looking into the eyes of a cobra. The woman smirked.

"The wine? Yes, no?" Lodin blinked.

"Uh... Yeah, there's more."

"May I have some?" Lodin recalled something Master Yan once told him about feminine wiles. With a grin on his face he'd said, Watch your back, boy. They'll be after you right out of the gate. He cleared his throat.

"First, you tell me who you are and why you're here," he said. She smiled down at him, and swept the cloak from her shoulders. Beneath it she wore a slim wrap of blood-red silk that crossed her chest and tied behind her neck, and a sarong of the same crimson fabric tied low on her hip, parted to leave one leg bare from thigh to ankle. The woman looked around for a place to hang her cloak, selected a nearby branch, and then passed by Kang Dae Han's snoring form and took his empty cup.

As she walked, Lodin noticed that her sandals made no sound on the dirt, nor did her golden bracelets and anklets clink or jingle. He also noticed the swaying of her hips. She sat down next to Lodin, close enough for him to smell the scent of jasmine on her skin.

"My name is Sarin Jeida. And you are in over your head." A laugh punched out of him. He looked her over, took a swig of wine.

"And you know this how?" Sarin met his eyes, smirked and held up her empty cup. He obliged her by taking up the jug and filling it to the brim. She put the cup to her lips, and leaned back as she tasted it, in a way that drew Lodin's eye down the length of her neck, to her collarbone and then further down, to where that band of red silk pulled tight across her chest, the fabric stretched smooth by the curves it barely restrained. Lodin's pulse kicked.

Heat crept up the back of his neck, and his mouth went a little dry. He shifted his gaze back to her eyes and found them staring thoughtfully into the guttering fire.

"Let's say I know what you're here to do, and the people you're here to do it to aren't my favorite either." She took a sip.

"Enemy of my enemy buys me wine. That's how the proverb goes, yeah?"

"But that's the practical reason." Her eyes slid his way.

"The selfish one is that I'm curious about you." Lodin's brows drew together.

"Curious about what?"

"How long you'll last." Something about the way she said it made his heart thump against his ribcage a little harder. And he had a feeling she could tell. There was a penetrating quality to those big green eyes. Like she wasn't just looking at him, she was looking through him. Assessing him. He fought the urge to keep staring back at her. Eventually he managed it, wrenched his gaze down to his cup.

"Longer than you'd think," Lodin said, as he took another sip.

"He has confidence..." She smirked again, and had another taste of wine.

"Of course. Someone's waiting for me." His answer gave her pause. He could feel her gaze against the side of his face.

"Tell me about him," she said. Lodin gulped a mouthful of wine, took a breath, and let it out slow.

"He's my twin. We were born different, both of us." He stared into the fire.

"He was always sick and in pain. Mom and I looked after him, and he hated it. He always wanted to do things on his own. He was always looking for ways to be more independent. I think what he hated most was feeling like a burden on us, even though it never felt that way to me, and I'm sure it never felt that way to mom." Sarin was quiet for a moment.

"What happened to him?"

"Someone took him." Lodin's jaw tightened.

"That's why I'm here." He glanced her way, and something about her steady stare told him he was not giving her new information. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! His pulse quickened again, but for a different reason.

"You're asking me questions you already know the answers to." A slow, guilty grin spread across her face.

"I'm getting to know you."

"If you wanna do that, ask me a real question."

"Alright," Sarin said, and she had another taste of the wine.

"What if you find your loved one, and they aren't the same person you remember. What if you fought and fought, and endured terrible ordeals, only to find someone who didn't want to be saved. What would you do then?" Something in Lodin's body went still. He met Sarin's eyes again, and this time she was the one subtly retreating from the intensity of his stare.

"It doesn't matter what they did to him, or what they made him believe," he said, and his voice was as rock steady as his gaze.

"It doesn't matter what he says. He's my brother, and I'm coming for him." Her gaze sharpened. She shifted closer to him, and in the process her knee rubbed against his thigh. Her warmth against him intensified. And she smelled nice.

"Good answer," she said. Lodin cleared his throat.

"Alright. You know why I'm here and what I'm after. Your turn." Her eyebrow arched.

"Do you really want to know?" He gave her a slow nod. Sarin Jeida tipped back the rest of the wine in her cup, set it aside and rose to her feet. She crossed to the branch where her cloak hung and swept it over her shoulders, and the crow feathers rustled as they settled against her back. She half-turned, grinned over her shoulder at him.

"I want you to come with me." Lodin's eyes narrowed. She was with the enemy, surely. Helpers didn't just appear out of the night and offer themselves to him. He chewed on that possibility for a moment, and then a grin spread across his face. So what if she was. Let them try to trap him. Let them try to stop him. He rose to his feet and went after her. Sarin Jeida flew through the trees like a shadow with wings. Lodin broke into a sprint to give chase. Branches whipped past his face. Roots tried to catch his feet.

The canopy swallowed what little moonlight reached this far, turned the world into a maze of black shapes and blacker spaces between them. She was fast, faster than he had expected. Her cloak billowed behind her as she wove between trunks and ducked under limbs. The crow feathers blurred into dark streaks that he tracked through the murk. Her feet found purchase on stone and root and bare earth, and each step launched her forward with blinding speed and unnerving silence. Lodin matched her pace.

His legs drove him forward, launched him over fallen logs and through gaps in the undergrowth. Cold air burned in his lungs. His heart hammered against his ribs. He could see the flash of her leg through the slit in her sarong, the gold at her ankle, and he followed that beacon through the dark. His sense of the passage of time blurred. They could have been running for minutes, or hours. The forest stretched on and on, an endless maze of trunks and branches.

Lodin kept his eyes on the billow of her cloak and let everything else fall away. Then the treeline stopped. Sarin halted at the edge of the woods. Lodin pulled up beside her, his breath heavy, and followed her gaze. A hill rose before them, squat and round, its gray slopes bare of trees. What appeared to be a ring of rubble crowned its summit, boulders that caught the moonlight like jagged teeth. Above the rubble, as if it had risen up from within the mountain itself, a circular stone keep jutted toward the sky.

A single trail cut switchbacks up the steep grade and ended at a gate set into the keep's outer wall.

"What have we here," said Lodin.

"The Shattered Summit Sect," said Sarin. The ramparts of the keep's outer wall were lit with torches at regular intervals, and he could see armed sentries standing watch and on patrol. Lodin felt a burning sensation in his chest. Something about the presence of that fort, those men, made the edges of his vision turn red. He thought about what he'd seen just yesterday. That empty village, the abandoned homes, the child's sandal in the middle of the road. The mass grave. They did that.

He glanced at Sarin, caught her staring at him. She had a strange look in her eyes.

"You want to kill them," she said. He frowned, nodded. She grinned and grabbed his wrist. Cold spread from her fingers into his skin. The sensation was alarmingly familiar. He had felt it too recently, in the dark beneath Tianmu Cemetery, when Gutou's withered hand pressed against his chest. The same chill that sank past the flesh and into the blood beneath. His eyes snapped to hers. Sarin's face had changed. Her lips were parted, her eyes half-lidded, and a flush crept up her neck. She drew a shuddering breath.

Her grip on his wrist tightened.

"You…" she whispered.

"W-what are you…" He could stop her. Wrench his arm free. Put her down before she took any more. But he didn't move. She was like Gutou. Gutou must have told her about him. Sent her, perhaps. But Gutou had not stayed to fight that night beneath the cemetery. He had fed on Lodin, grown strong from it, and then fled. Why? Cowardice seemed unlikely in a man who commanded a horde of demons. Which meant there was something else. Some internal conflict among the demonic cultivators he had now stumbled into.

And this woman was on the other side of it. The enemy of his enemy. The cold spread up his forearm. He watched her drink, watched the color bloom in her cheeks, watched her shoulders straighten and her spine grow taut. Whatever she took from him, it was changing her the same way it had changed Gutou. She released him with a gasp. Her back arched. Her head tipped toward the sky and her mouth fell open, and for a moment she just stood there, trembling, her fingers curled into claws at her sides.

A flush spread down her neck and across her chest. Her breathing came fast and shallow. At the same time, points of red light bloomed on her palms. The light spread and lengthened, took shape, hardened into a pair of long, kris-bladed swords, their zigzagging edges razor sharp. They gleamed bright red, the color of fresh arterial blood, and when they were fully formed she grasped their handles as a crow screamed from the treeline behind them. Another crow answered, then another.

The calls spread through the forest, dozens of harsh voices that rose into a chorus. Black shapes burst from the branches and wheeled overhead, a storm of wings and beaks and glittering eyes. On the ramparts above, the sentries turned. Torchlight flickered across their faces. One of them shouted something and pointed toward the treeline. When Sarin Jeida looked at Lodin again, her pupils had dilated all the way out. The vibrant green of her eyes was a thin, luminous ring around pools of black.

A grin split her face, feral and bright.

"Let's butcher them all." The sound of her voice was startlingly different. Guttural. Like a beast trying to speak as a human. Something stirred in Lodin's chest. Fear, maybe. But the thrilling kind, the kind that sharpened the senses and quickened the blood. And something else beneath it, hotter and harder to name. She streaked up the hillside and he joined her.