Beauty in Red | NaNoWriMo 2021

Chapter Two: Julien

"Who was that?"

I frowned, not wanting to answer questions from my persistent shadow. Not tonight, of all nights.

"Julien," he said.

I sighed, turning to face the male who had followed me and deliberately disobeyed orders. "What do you want, Tellin?"

Tellin scowled at me, as if I was the one in the wrong here. His grey eyes, the pupils ringed in a gold identical to my own, narrowed, glancing between where I stood, and the grisly scene below us. We stood on the edge of a roof of some ramshackle building, watching as the young woman I'd just spoken to tucked her daggers away, pulled her hood back into place, and took off running the same direction she'd been dragged from. She'd checked the eyes of the man on the ground, realizing he, at least, was human. If she would have been able to, she would have learned the man I strung up using a wire he'd been carrying--to use to tie her up, no doubt--was human, too.

"I don't know," I murmured, watching as her cloak disappeared around a corner. "But she was targeted tonight by Seamus."

Tellin let out a huff of annoyance. "Did you compel her, at least?"

I chuckled, turning once more to face my best friend. "She could not be compelled."

He blinked, his brows rising. "Could not be compelled...?"

I turned away from him, away from the edge of the balcony and the men whose deaths would surely be blamed on a vampire when their bodies were found, and towards the Second who hired them to kidnap that girl.

He was on his knees, several feet behind us, his hands bound behind his back and a cloth shoved in his mouth. Tellin must have done that, and I smirked a little as I noticed bloodied drool dripping from the corner of his lips. This one was starving--and it was no wonder. The humans who worked for the Order of the Light Bringer worked diligently in Emery to starve them out.

"Are we certain he works for Seamus?" Tellin asked, approaching the tied up Second with his short sword drawn. "He might just be some lowlife."

"A lowlife would be begging to be let go." The Second glanced up at me then, his dull blue eyes ringed in silver full of a seething hatred that made my lips tip up. "He's no lowlife. He has information--they were looking for that woman."

Even if I only discovered the reason Seamus was searching for her, that would be enough.

She hadn't screamed when the man grabbed her, and though I'd wanted to jump in then and there, the need to understand what was happening far outweighed the life of this stranger. But then her scent had hit me, and the mixture of roses and berries had made something come alive within me, something I never thought I would feel, and I knew the men who hurt her would not be surviving tonight.

The one who ran hardly made it a half mile away before I ripped his throat out, too.

My lack of restraint was not totally unusual when it came to protecting innocents--Tellin had witnessed slaughter at my hands countless times over the years since he began following me. But I'd never been filled with true rage like I'd been at the sight of a man's hands on her.

And once I'd spoken to her, seen the spark of anger in her strange golden brown eyes, seen her long black hair, dark as a crow's feather...I'd wanted to reach for her, to touch her and taste her and feel her come completely undone by my hands alone.

Dohara's mercy, I didn't even know her name, and I was utterly obsessed.

Which was why I had to let her go.

"Fair enough," Tellin conceded. "What shall we do with him?"

I turned my gaze on my second in command and personal guard, my smirk growing as I said, "What you do best."

The smile that spread across Tellin's face would make anyone's knees tremble.

"As you wish, your majesty."