The room went chill with the arctic cold of female temper strained to its limits. “You should've thought about which one had the most people willing to kill for them,” Anastasia said, dense flames coiling relentlessly along her arms in sinuous tongues of destruction.

“You said he was alive,” Miss Raven asked, eyes coming back to the Mistress.

“Your man child's alive, what condition he’s in, is impossible to know,” The Mistress said, black eyes plucking and pulling at the strings of Alexandra’s soul as she met them for a nightmarish second.

Viktor shared a long look with Jerold, it was on the tip of everyone’s thoughts, but no one was willing to ask how the Mistress knew Cesare was alive. Any number of reasons came to Alexandra, none of them good.

Given the looks on the others faces, they were having the same uneasy thoughts. “Andras Twin Souled doesn’t take prisoners,” Viktor said, facing the furious women. “He’s a wet worker, not a kidnapper. If he took the kid, then there’s something going on here we don’t know.”

“The options have not changed, we wait. As long as the man child's alive, your vengeance will wait. Should he die, the Void will pull its protection for the Silvestre.” There was no missing the cold dismissal in her words.

The women pulled back along with the men. They’d gotten everything they were going to get from the thing that ruled the school. They couldn’t move against Victor until they were sure Cesare was dead. It wasn’t what Alexandra wanted, but she was wise enough to know she needed the others backing if she wanted to take the old soldier.

Alexandra traded lost looks with the three woman stopped at the top of the landing. Give her an enemy and she was good. She'd trained her life to fight, she liked killing and was good at it. But this wasn't something she could filet with a sword, break with her hands, or terrify into submission. Cesare was the one that always knew what to do.

“Elizabeth.” The word came from the one man none of them wanted to hear from. The three turned, facing the wild thing. Gods how she hated the heathen filth with its arrogance and wandering eyes. As if she'd ever let the profane touch her flesh, he was a diseased animal that should have been strangled with its umbilical cord.

Viktor only had eyes for Elizabeth. One on one Alexandra wasn't a match for the man, they'd proven that. If Alexandra couldn’t land a decisive blow, than Anastasia didn’t have a chance in hell. Only Elizabeth was a threat, and Viktor knew it.

It infuriated Alexandra, rage seething under her skin, Cesare's blood singing an ancient hymn to vengeance, pushing her to throw herself at the betrayer of her Lord. Only one thing held her back, knowing she'd fail. She’d held her own against the man, but she wouldn't be able to catch him by surprise again.

“I know the kid means a lot to you,” Viktor said as he caught Miss Raven’s eyes. “I didn’t have a choice. It was saving the Doku No Hane or get in a drag out fight with the Hounds and maybe lose both. I had to make a choice, and I won’t apologize for it.”

The ravens gathered in the room, perching on Miss Raven's shoulders, finding nooks and crannies in the stonework and along the banister, glaring down with pitiless eyes of the black hearted. “There was a time when you were a man of honor. There are tales of you standing over a downed man and fighting for him until blood ran like sweat. When did you lose that fire in your gut? When did you pawn your honor for a nice place to sleep? When did you lose your balls?”

Frigid disdain dripped from her words, each a pearl of venomous scorn. “You were once a man among men. They didn’t idolize you because you were strong, they loved you for standing for what’s right. You stopped teaching kids to fight because you tired of training children to kill in other men’s wars. There was a time when you would've killed a man for leaving a student behind to be savaged by Hounds. A time when you were more than a thug for hire. I can’t help pity what you’ve become, this mockery of all Viktor Blood stood for.”

Watching the slow vivisection of the man, a viciously cruel smile stretched across Alexandra’s face. Viktor’s eyes blazed with fury, a creeping yellow spreading through them, muscles locking up tight. His fists clenched into sledgehammers of bone, feet shifting, lowering his center of gravity.

Eagerly, Alexandra shifted with him, vampiric nature shredding the mask of humanity in a rush of blood born hate. Elizabeth wasn't a fighter, she didn't crave the terror that bled from a man's eyes when you tore his belly open, couldn't feel the sexual thrill born from agonized screams. No, Miss Raven was artillery, with the same weakness that marked Anastasia. A fear of intimacy, of being close, sharing the same air, breathing each other's fear stained sweat. Artillery breathed the rarefied air of cold calculation, deliberate marshaling of unholy powers, perverting the pureness of killing.

“Do it,” Alexandra hissed eagerly, straining against the fading threads of sanity. “Make a move, we’ll tear you apart.” The promise was echoed by a blast of heat that washed over the landing as Anastasia embraced the Ebon Flame.

Miss Raven faced the rage with a queer, dangerous calm, the easy casualness of a boy burning ants. It was delicious, for all his vaunted looks, a career as a killer without peer, here he was confronted by a trio of women that could take his life at will. It was a violation of his hunter’s soul, Viktor hunted woman, they didn't hunt them.

The three watched until he disappeared around a bend. “Come along, we can talk as we tackle the hydra,” Miss Raven said as she eyed the stairs with weary resignation.

Passing the first landing, Alexandra looked at the woman. “What does it mean that you claimed Cesare as a Child of the Earth?” She didn’t like her Lord beholden to some pagan god, the thought of him worshipping profane mockeries of the true God was a horror she forbade herself from contemplating. Cesare was meant for Christ, and she was meant to lead him there.

Miss Raven thought on the question for a full flight of stairs before stopping and wiping sweat from her forehead with distaste. “It’s not something many know, and I’d prefer to keep it that way,” she said with a meaningful look at the girls. “It was hundreds of years before my people were strong enough to produce an Imperatrix Terra. Not only the raw power, but the level of skill required of an Elementa Dominantium. When they produced one, she wasn't only the first, but many think the most powerful.”

Staring down the stairs, her words came soft with old thoughts touched over and over until they were soft from time. “Back then, most Chthonic’s were enslaved to either the Umbrae Lunae or the Illuminati. We were valuable slaves but a dangerous free people. The Imperatrix Terra went and found the Mistress, she was mythic even back then, a horror that walked the land untouched by even the gods. The two made the Pact of the Void.”

Miss Raven measured the girls for a moment. “It’s simple on its surface. In return for the Mistress sparing the Children of the Earth, the Imperatrix Terra refrains from attacking her.” She stared down the flights of stairs with utter contempt. “Goddess, I hate this tower. Anyway, it was simple and yet profound for the time. The Mistress was the first person to acknowledge the Chthonic’s as a free people. The pact set the stage for others, a paradigm change that would see my people free.”

“She can’t attack any of your people?” Anastasia asked, eyes narrowing in thought.

“No, theoretically I could claim all Chthonic’s, but it would be nothing but a perversion of spirit if not the word. It’s a personal commitment, voluntarily binding our reach, acknowledging the apocalypse of we should clash. My ravens, the trees, this land, all of it falls under the pact. While the school and students belong to the Mistress, the land belongs to me,” Miss Raven said as she pushed off the wall and started walking again. “It’s why she accepts me. Few Immortals would be eager to have a Chthonic with my power close to them, but the treaty binds me as much as it does her.”

Not much was known about the power of the Elementa Dominantium. The rulers of their race, the limits of their powers were unknown, limited to vague tales of blasted lands, ruined cities, and genocide done grand, from the Unbound Wars. One fact rang through the ages, no army had ever survived a battle with them. They stayed in the shadows, lesser Chthonic’s selling themselves as mercenaries. Some thought they were little more than figure heads, no different than the ones peddling services for money. Her father believed different, he thought the truth was they almost a different race, atavistic creatures beyond the touch of all but a few immortals, atomic bombs waiting quietly for someone stupid enough to trip them.

Alexandra was interested in seeing what Miss Raven could really do, and her father would be ecstatic to have a firsthand account. It was the reason the scions of powerful clans were here, to judge the strength of the other races that prowled the shadows. They slaughtered each other more than they fought the Illuminati. They cannibalized each other like hyena kits pushed into a hole to starve, bite by bite, devouring each other until only the strongest was left. Alexandra's mission was to find out all she could in preparation for the day when the Order of the Dragon converted the races to Christ or exterminated them.

It was a question that preyed on her when night claimed the land. She'd never looked for another loyalty, her soul dedicated to God and her body to the Order. There wasn't room for anything else. Yet, Cesare had slunk into the chambers of her heart, his dark howl resounding through the dead meat, claiming the tortured, arctic wasteland of shattered dreams and psychotic fantasies. She knew as well as any knight who she owed her loyalty to. God, The Order of the Dragon, and finally her Lord. It was as simple and stark as that. If she was ordered to kill Cesare, she'd do it. No matter the breaking of her heart, her honor and oaths would demand his death.

Choosing a Lord was a decision every knight agonized over. The Lord would hold your honor in their hands, their ascension or ruin would chart the path of the knight. She'd been told her Lord should be a man of unquestioned honor, discipline, faith, and breeding, a refined blade of a man with battles behind him and a following of noble knights. Alexandra's father might despise the mad thing his wife had birthed, but Alexandra still carried the Dracul name. Anything less than the finest knight would be a slight to the Knight Commander. Unsaid was that it would be a vampire, no one had sworn to a Lord outside the Order, ever.

Cesare was a damnati, a street walker with nothing to his name, from a gutter mongrel family that hadn't wanted him. The weakest squire had more breeding and honor in his pinky than Cesare did in his whole body. For all the reasons she should never have considered him, when the moment had enfolded her, kneeling to Cesare had been as easy and true as peeling flesh from bone. When they found out she'd sworn to a damnati, fury would pour down upon her in a flood.

That wasn't what kept her up at night. No, what prowled the midnight hours, hulking at the edge of sight, was a simple question. The Order would never let something like Cesare remain unmolested. They'd work to bind his malignant charm, to halt the cancerous growth of his following before it became a threat. Through domination and threats, they'd loop chains around her wolf's neck, hobble his feet, and muzzle his jaws. You couldn't tame the wild, Cesare couldn't be bound, wouldn't bend knee to any God or man. His feral soul would forever be free. She'd be ordered to pull the weed before its roots grew too deep, to rip his life from him, coat her hands in his blood and shred his flesh. Cesare was the only light in her life, the only person willing to offer comfort to the mad, diseased thing Alexandra knew herself to be. She'd be killing the only person who cared about her. How did she live after that?