Keeper's Justice
Copyright© 2025 by Charly Young
Chapter 29
Violetta
Violetta the Romani knew they were all going to die as soon as she saw the assemblage of beings in the slaver’s office. She had been involved in countless situations fraught with danger. Working with her sisters to manage their mother’s far-flung enterprises was not without daily risk.
This day, she had taken one chance too many.
She closed her eyes and muttered, “Mother Mary, pray for me now at the hour of my death. Amen.” The familiar words from her mother’s prayers from the old country steadied her racing heart. She prepared to sell her life as dearly as she was able. She was Romani. She would die well and do her best to take the bitch L’eena with her. Her hands slid toward her throwing knives.
Two Dökkálfar Sidhe lordlings leaned against the wall to one side. Both were relaxed, but she could see the predatory eagerness in their too-perfect forms. Each of their faces held a mocking smile, the kind of expression cats wore when preparing to play with a wounded mouse. Their eyes were pools of green, cold and cruel. One absently picked at his nails with a curved dagger, while the other traced lazy patterns in the air as he flipped his black dagger and caught it. The dagger, obviously imbued with some sort of magic, left faint trails of green sparkle as it twirled point to hilt.
She turned to see that Helen the vampire sat at the other end of the room like a queen holding court, her porcelain beauty masking the monster beneath. Two human slaves knelt at her side, their necks bearing the telltale puncture wounds of repeated feeding. Their eyes were vacant, lost in ecstasy. The vampire’s red lips were morphing into a frown ... Violetta could see the sharp points of her fangs pressing against her lower lip.
The bloodsucker was bad enough, but no one could stand against the Sidhe. Everyone knew that. The Fair Folk were death incarnate when roused to violence, their speed and skill beyond mortal comprehension.
She glanced at the assassin for some guidance, hoping against hope that Wraith had some plan, some trick that might see them through this. Wraith was holding the little odd-eyed asrai’s hand, her knuckles white with tension. The little female’s mismatched eyes—one blue as the summer sky, one gray as storm clouds—were wide with terror.
L’eena herself sat behind an ornate ebony desk. After the initial shock caused by thier entrance, the slaver’s face was calm, her fingers steepled as she watched the intruders realize their doom.
A beat of silence stretched between them as the room’s inhabitants stared at them. The only sound was the labored breathing of the vampire’s slaves.
Then came an ear-piercing shriek that seemed to split the very air. Helen’s beautiful façade melted away like ice on a stove as the vampire instantly morphed into a seven-foot nightmare, her delicate features elongating into something from the deepest hells. Her feeder teeth erupted from her gums in rows like a shark’s, and claws burst from her fingertips with wet tearing sounds. Muscles bulged beneath her skin as she launched herself forward in a blur of supernatural speed.
The thing blurred into motion, crossing the room in the space between heartbeats, only to suddenly stop mid-leap as a blinding ribbon of light erupted from the shadow walker. Where the ribbon of light touched the vampire, flesh simply ceased to exist. Helen’s head separated from her shoulders with surgical precision, her body crashing to the floor and morphing into a pile of ash and dust.
A gagging stench of decay filled the room—centuries of corruption released all at once. Violetta gagged, pressing her sleeve to her nose as the smell hit her like a physical blow.
But her eyes were on the Shadow Walker now. She was as afraid as she had ever been. Tales of this being were common in Oldtown—tales she had scoffed at when she heard them, dismissing them as campfire stories meant to frighten children. But seeing him now, watching the way shadows seemed to bend around him like living things, her mind flashed back to his meeting with her mother and sister. This man was a death god, wrapped in human form but containing something far more terrible beneath.
The two sidhe lordlings were no longer smiling. Instead, their hands now held gleaming falcatas, the curved blades seeming to drink in the light. They moved with fluid grace, spreading out to flank him, their movements perfectly coordinated like dancers who had performed this deadly ballet for centuries.
“You broke Opari’s Laws, Dökkálfar,” the Shadow Walker said, his voice singing doom. “For that, there is only death.”
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