The Vampire & Her Witch

Inside the modest carriage, three women waited patiently for the Inquisitor’s return.

Lady Ashlynn Blackwell sat on the forward-facing seat, her emerald green eyes studying him as he settled into his place. She’d pushed back the hood of her traveling cloak, revealing the pale blonde hair that fell in artful waves around her shoulders. Despite the modest cut of her dress, a deep forest green wool that was comfortable and appropriate for travel, there was no mistaking the regal bearing in the way she held herself.

Next to her sat Samira, the ashen-blonde woman whose resemblance to Ashlynn had once made her the perfect body double to help Owain Lothian perpetuate the lie that his wife had simply withdrawn from social life to rest in the Summer Villa until her child was born.

Owain had intended for the ’pregnancy’ to be nothing more than a charade, but Samira’s pregnancy was very real, and it was clearly visible now, her belly swelling beneath the layers of her winter dress.

Her hands rested protectively over the child within, and her dull green eyes watched Diarmuid with a mixture of gratitude and apprehension that commoners always held toward members of the Inquisition. A few months of pretending to be Lady Ashlynn was far from enough to strip her of the sensibilities she’d grown up with as a simple servant in Lothian Manor.

Across from them sat Master Isabell, her silver hair gleaming in the dim light that filtered through the carriage’s curtained windows. Her silvery eyes studied him over the rims of her spectacles with that analytical gaze she turned on everything, as if she were examining a particularly interesting mechanism and trying to determine how it worked.

When she saw the pained expression forming on Diarmuid’s face as the carriage door closed, however, Isabell’s expression softened, taking on a look of maternal concern as she recognized the look of strain on the other man’s face after he’d finished playing the role that circumstances demanded of him.

”Thank you, Diarmuid,” Ashlynn said softly. ”That could have become complicated, and we can’t afford to stumble here at the very beginning.”

”You’re welcome, my lady,” Diarmuid replied as he slumped into his seat next to Master Isabell while the carriage started rolling again. He resisted the urge to tug at his robes or to loosen the collar that seemed to be growing tighter with each passing moment. ”I understand the necessity, but it feels... uncomfortable to use the name of the Inquisition like this,” he said.

Uncomfortable wasn’t the right word. ’Wrong’ might have been a better fit, but he didn’t know whether it was objectively ’wrong’ or not. Ever since the Battle of Hanrahan, things he thought that he could see in simple black and white had become much more gray and he had yet to find his footing now that he’d made the decision to follow High Inquisitor Ignatious and Lady Ashlynn.

”We all play our parts,” Isabell said in a tone that was meant to be reassuring, though there was a ghost of something unpleasant lurking in the corner of her silvery eyes as she spoke. ”Sometimes, the best we can do is to remember the goal we’re working toward and that things will be better afterwards in order to get through the difficult moments on the road to reach our goal.”

”I know,” Diarmuid said with a heavy sigh. He’d learned enough about Master Isabell to understand that the once-famed ’Engineer of Destruction’ had been forced to confront her own choices in a war that claimed countless lives in order to ensure that the ’right person’ sat on the Emerald Throne. When he put his own discomfort at this small act of deception next to the guilt she’d wrestled with, he felt almost childish for allowing it to bother him.

”I’m still coming to terms with everything,” he said as he gave up and unbuttoned the stiff collar at his neck. He wanted to let his hair down in order to relax the way he’d done in the Vale of Mists, but for the next few days, he still had his part to play, no matter how much he disliked stepping back into a role that no longer felt like it belonged to him.

”I thought it’d be easier to put the robes back on,” he admitted, running his fingers over the gold and crimson brocade. ”But they’re more than just clothes. They used to stand for something. The search for truth and the promise to protect people from the wickedness of the world. They felt like armor that kept me safe. Now... it just isn’t the same...”

After the banquet where High Inquisitor Ignatious had revealed the truth of the ’bargain’ that the faithful struck with fate in order to gain their powers, Diarmuid had decided that he could never again serve the order that had shaped him into the man he was today. The things that once felt pure and sacred, like the robes of his office, now felt tarnished and dirty, covered in centuries of lies and deceit.

Some men might have been able to put the robes back on easily after what he’d learned. Diarmuid had met enough people in his years as an Inquisitor to understand that some men would feel righteous about donning the vestments of an order of oppressive charlatans in order to deceive those very same people. But that wasn’t who Diarmuid was... or who he wanted to become, and the necessity of the moment felt like cold comfort for presenting a lie to the world.

”They can still mean those things,” Ashlynn said gently. ”You only just learned the truth a few days ago. Even I don’t know how things will end with the Church when Lothian March falls, but I imagine there are going to be a lot of people looking for comfort from old symbols and for the people who understand what they were supposed to mean instead of what they’ve become,” she said, glancing out the window in the direction of the Abbey of the Inquisition.

A part of her, a larger part than she liked to admit, wanted nothing more than to order the carriage to bring her to the abbey. Percivus, the man who had tortured her sister and murdered her cousin, Eleanor, had been an Inquisitor from that very abbey, and Ashlynn didn’t believe for a moment that his superiors and brothers within the order hadn’t known exactly what kind of monster he was.

And yet, they’d done nothing to prevent him from torturing and murdering innocent people in the name of the Inquisition. For that, the entire abbey deserved to be torn down, stone by stone, until there was nothing left but rubble, burying the ’men of faith’ who had failed so horribly in their charge.

It was hard, so very hard, for her to resist that dark, destructive impulse. But Percivus himself was already dead at her sister’s hands, and the Abbot who had supported him had gone to Lothian City, likely bringing his most loyal followers with him. There would be no justice in pulling down the abbey on top of the heads of the remaining acolytes and servants, no matter how satisfying it would have felt.

But more than that, sitting across from her, Diarmuid was living proof that there were still good men within the halls of the Inquisition. Men who could confront the truth and grow from it. Some might already question what they had been taught, and others had never steeped themselves in the wickedness and hatred that permeated their order.

To slaughter them all, just to ease the pain in her heart over what had happened to Jocey, wouldn’t be justice at all, but that didn’t mean that the temptation didn’t claw at her every time she saw that golden spire.

Sitting across from her, Diarmuid was quiet for a moment, his gaze distant. Then he nodded slowly.

”You’re right,” he said. ”A few more days of this. A few more days of deception in the service of a greater good. Only this time, at least I’m not the one being deceived.”

The irony of it wasn’t lost on him. For most of his career as an Inquisitor, he’d been the one uncovering deceptions, rooting out lies, exposing those who tried to hide their sins beneath false piety. But it had all been built on a foundation of the Church’s lies. Falsehoods that were told in the service of a ’greater good.’

Now, he was the one who was seeking a greater good and deceiving others in order to achieve it. How quickly the shoe had moved to the other foot. Perhaps it had been the same for the founders of the Church as well, or the ones who developed so many of the practices that he came to recognize as manipulative. Maybe they’d sat in an uncomfortable position, just like he did now, choosing to accept an expedient falsehood over an unpalatable truth.

But then, there was a vast difference between what the Church had done and what he was doing now. This was war, he reminded himself, and only a fool would be honest with their enemies. It was just that, until recently, those guardsmen would have been his allies, and they still believed they were.

And that, Diarmuid realized, was the true source of his discomfort. He’d resolved to leave the Church and his place as an Inquisitor behind, but he had yet to make peace with everything else he was betraying along with his decision to join Lady Ashlynn in her quest to build something greater than the world he was leaving behind. That was why the robes he wore felt so uncomfortable.

Diarmuid drew a deep breath, intending to ask Lady Ashlynn how she’d resolved the turmoil in her own heart when she first ordered her armies to march against the human kingdom that had raised her, but when he looked in her emerald eyes, he saw an even greater storm raging there as she stared out the carriage window...