I was mad, at my charge certainly, but also at the situation. We’d been clearing through swarms of Risen for about 15 minutes at this point, and no sign of this Stephanie, but what we were doing was important. Keeping the number of Risen low was important. The strega dei morti could revive some of them, but most would remain dead. It also served as a good opportunity to gauge the skill of the man.

  His fighting style with the longsword wasn’t terribly different from my own, though he seemed to prefer a guard that gave the illusion of openings so he could bait attacks. He flowed well from one guard to the next as he neutralized each Risen, but this wasn’t a particularly good measurement of fencing skill. These Risen were mindless drones repeatedly rushing us. Nothing like the more skilled versions that the strega dei morti was known for.

  The larger issue, I realized, is that we hadn’t seen any of her thralls or her fellow vampires. They could be surrounding us. I gritted my teeth. We needed to leave. The scouting mission was essentially accomplished, and assuming Stephanie’s body is even in one piece, she’ll have joined the ranks of the Risen anyway.

  “Signor Wright, we’re getting too deep. At this rate, we’ll be surrounded. We need to turn back.”

  Jack spun on me, “How many people are in your city?”

  His calm demeanor shocked me, but I could see where he was going with this. By his logic, an entire city’s worth of people was just dropped. That was an unsettlingly large number of bodies that could be resurrected, but even so, probably only a third would be usable as is, and another fifth of the bodies might be turned into fuel or reagents, but—

  “Whatever number you’re thinking, triple it.”

  That brought me up short. Triple it? Why? Is he suggesting his cities were larger? They were trapped on islands!

  “Today was the start of our fertility festival. A festival that draws so many visitors from other islands that we have to set up temporary housing on the smaller islands that are tethered to the main one, and even then there are always people sleeping on the passenger airships from lack of space. You’re telling me there’s a necromancer capable of raising the dead? So, triple your city’s population. Whatever internal calculus—”

  “I understand, Signore. But that’s all the more reason we need more people. The seven of us are not enough if we get surrounded. The strega dei morti is believed to be a cultivation level that’s one note higher than mine, and that’s not counting the other vampires that serve her, or her thralls. We’ll be overrun if we don’t leave now.”

  “I told you, I’m not leaving without Stephanie, or barring that, confirmation of a body! I’m not letting her become one of these abominations.”

  I sighed. “Fine, we stay for another 30 minutes. After that, I’m taking you back, forcefully if necessary.” He took off his helmet and looked at me. Maybe he was hoping to see through my helmet and attempt to stare me down. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it. He simply turned on his heel and marched into the next enemy, quickly decapitating it and moving on. Throw your tantrum, cattivello. I found myself biting my lip at that thought. I quickly shook my head and followed after him. We’re here for his fiancée, focus. You can think with your cunt later.

  Without warning, the mana of the area rumbled, and a thick sticky feeling coated the air. I quickly moved up to be a step ahead of Jack as we crested another pile of debris. The mana in the area was saturated with the resonance of undeath. The strega dei morti was close.

  “Stephanie?” Jack moved to step past me, but I grabbed his shoulder.

  “Wait, something’s not right. Let me spread my—”

  “Ah, Ippolita’s insetti, how nice of you to join us. I’m just doing the finishing touches on the ritual needed to raise everything in the city! What great luck I have that such a grand gift fell from the sky. It’s as if the gods are angry at their children and want me to teach them some manners.” A woman wearing a revealing black evening gown and an untasteful amount of gaudy jewelry stepped out from behind a large man in full plate armor that seemed to pulse an eerie light green. Her hair was glossy black that gleamed under the aforementioned light; her eyes were the same blood red of all her kind, and her skin was flush and lively as though she had recently fed.

  “Strega dei morti,” I growled.

  “Oh, I do love that little title you all gave me. Though soon it’ll be Regina dei morti.”

  I scoffed internally. The witch was a fool if she thought she was anywhere close to the power of the principesse. They were true monsters. The covenant certainly hamstrung their ability to use their power, but for the purpose of defending against an invading force, those chains were more loosened. Jack’s struggles broke me from my silent retorts.

  “Stephanie! Stephanie, I’m here!”

  . Please don’t let her be down there as a Risen. But there she was: honey blonde hair caked with dried blood, tattered blue dress with a dirty white underskirt. This was Jack’s fiancée, his undead fiancée. She was holding her hand up, seemingly participating in whatever ritual the strega dei morti was preparing.

  “Oh, what’s this? I didn’t notice at first, but what are you? Do you know one of my new pets? Did you come from the sky city, too? How did you survive, ?”

  “Jack, we have to leave, now.”

  “No, I’m not leaving. She’s right there, Fiametta. Stephanie!” he called after her, trying to jostle my hand loose from his shoulder.

  Stephanie didn’t move. She didn’t look at him. Rigid like a doll placed into its set position. I turned to look at Jack. Tears were flowing freely down his face now. There was pain, so much pain, and rage. We had to get him out of here before the strega dei morti took too much of an interest in him.

  “Jack, it’s too late. She’s undead. You cannot save her. There is nothing left to save.”

  “No,” he screamed at me. “No. No, no, I can’t. I can’t lose her. I won’t.” He continued struggling against me, so I grabbed both his cheeks, looked into his eyes, and channeled mana into the Dominate Mind tattoo.

  “Sleep.” My words, filled with power and control, washed over him. There was minor resistance, more than a D note cultivator should have any right to offer up, but it was ultimately futile. He went slack in my hands, and I threw him over my shoulder. I turned back to face the strega dei morti and her horde, but they hadn’t moved. Instead, she stood there, still smiling.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “You’re lucky I’m in such a good mood and that this ritual requires a great deal of my focus. Otherwise, I’d be taking that man off your hands. It’s been a while since I’ve had a new bed slave,” she said and licked her lips. “Run back to your principessa, insetti. Tell her that her reckoning is coming and her name is Vittoria della Morte.”

  *****

  I awoke in the same bed I felt like I had only just left. . . If we had gotten there sooner. If I didn’t waste so much time talking to these people. If I hadn’t passed out after arriving. If the horses were just a little faster. If—there was a knock on the door. I sat there unmoving and not making a sound. I didn’t want to see anyone. It wasn’t their fault. None of it was, but I was angry, and this was their world, and fuck them. Fuck this place. Fuck these vampires, and dhampir, and werewolves. Give me back my Stephanie.

  I failed to stifle a choked sob.

  “Jack,” questioned the muffled voice on the other side. “Jack, it’s me, Ippolita. Can I come in?”

  “It’s your fucking palace, isn’t it? Do what you want.”

  There was a sigh on the other side of the door. “I’m respecting your privacy, Jack. I won’t come if you don’t want me to.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She probably needs to hear details about who was in the city. “Fine, come in.” I don’t make the effort to sit up. It feels like that’ll take energy I don’t have. She walked in and strode over to the left side of the bed. She’s wearing the same dress, but her hair is no longer in a complicated braid or bedecked with gems. It draped across her shoulders in wavy curls. It looked really soft.

  “May I sit with you?”

  I slid away from the side to create more space and gestured for her to sit.

  She crawled into the bed and sat next to me, her back against the headboard. My head was weirdly close to her ass, so I rolled over, showing her my back. She started scratching my back. It felt good. I hated that it felt good. I really liked that it felt good. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to tightly seal everything I was feeling inside. It felt as if even one thing slipped out, I’d fall apart. And I couldn’t fall apart, not in a strange bed in a strange house in a strange city next to a strange woman.

  “I’m over 5,000 years old. Part of the blood covenant between the other principesse and me requires us to always have a husband. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but I can’t be unmarried for more than 500 years.”

  That must suck to be forced to marry.

  “I’ve never turned one of my husbands into a vampire, so they always remained a were or a dhampir. Well, actually, my first husband was an elf from Doranna. My point, though, is that I know what losing your heart feels like. Some were taken from me by old age, some from battle. One was even killed and then used against me by the very same woman who took your Stephanie.”

  I rolled over to look up at her, face wet. “Does it ever stop hurting?”

  “No,” she said, voice thick. “Not really. It hurts less, certainly, but I can call all of their faces to mind, and I still miss each of them.”

  “Ipp—,” I tried to get her name out, but choked on the words, and a sob came up instead. I felt her pull me to her, my head finding her lap.

  “Shh, teroso mio. Let it out. You are safe with me. It’s okay to cry.”

  As if there was magic in her words, I heaved a giant sob, and that was the signal flare to open the levees of my emotions. I wailed and ugly cried. I clenched and clawed at her dress, hit her legs with my fists, and left stains of snot and tears. And she held me tightly through it all. At some point, she began singing both with her voice and her mana. It was beautiful and comforting. I could feel my heart becoming a little lighter. I didn’t hurt less, but I no longer felt like the feelings were bigger than me. Between the singing and her rubbing my back, I drifted back to sleep again.

  *****

  My eyelids fluttered as I entered the world of consciousness again for the third or fourth time in 24 hours. I didn’t even know what day it was anymore. I was still lying on Ippolita’s lap. I turned my head to look at her. She was smiling down at me, her hair framing her face. I could feel heat rushing to my cheeks, and I got a flashback of Stephanie. My emotions were all over the place. This closeness with her, especially after losing Stephanie, felt wrong, but I also didn’t want to pull away. She was a raft, and I’d been drowning. Besides, this was my life now, with these people. I’d have time to sort my feelings out.

  “Jack mio, if you’re up for it, I need to ask you some questions.”

  “About the population of the city, right?” She hummed in affirmation. I clutched at her leg and let out a sigh before continuing. “Yeah, alright. I can do that. I won’t know everything, of course, but for the important bits I can give informed guesses.”

  “That will be good enough. What was the population of your city?”

  “I believe the last census said we had something around 250,000. With it being the first day of the festival, you can probably expect close to one million people have fallen to their deaths outside your walls.”

  “That is an unsettling number. Such a great loss of life,” she said, trailing off. We were both silent for a few heartbeats before she asked another question. “What of their cultivation levels?”

  “The duke would have probably been the highest. He was either blue or indigo. Er, sorry, he was either G or A. Behind him would have been the two guildmasters of the two Adventurer’s Guild branches, and their seconds in command. All four would have been G. Our city had two large dungeons that went pretty deep, so we had a decent population of F-level cultivators. I couldn’t give you an exact number—”

  “Anything less than G is insignificant. Frankly, it’s all insignificant. If Vittoria steps foot past my walls, I can pulp her with a thought. It’s been such a long time since I’ve had to demonstrate why the principesse are in charge and why we established the covenant. I don’t think any of the current nobles were alive for it. Vittoria certainly wasn’t, otherwise she wouldn’t be calling herself Regina of anything, let alone the dead.”

  I started to get angry. She could have killed this woman this entire time?

  “Easy, carissimo, I just said she needed to step past the walls. The covenant prevents me and the other principesse from acting beyond them. It’s best this way, trust me, but it does cause tragedies like this one to happen from time to time.”

  “That… that kind of sucks.” She laughed then. It was musical, but not in the same way as Stephanie’s. It was still nice to hear, but different. What is wrong with me?

  “Yes, it does suck, as you say. But this is the price the other principesse and I willingly pay to guarantee no conflict is caused between us. We entirely remove the temptation to protect our ‘interests’ outside of the walls.”

  “Then why did you say that anything lower than G was insignificant?”

  “What do you think Fiametta’s cultivation level is?”

  “Really?”

  “Indeed.”

  “I knew she had to at least be F, but I’d never seen a G in combat before. That’s impressive to be honest.”

  “I’ll let her know you think so. She’d like that.”

  I felt myself blushing again.

  “I’m just teasing you, carissimo, relax.” She gently patted my head before petting me and running her fingers through my hair. It was soothing, and I needed that. “Most of the nobles are G with some of the older ones being A. Most officers in the city guard are G, and almost all rank and file in the guard are F. They’d all be farther along if they had reason to be, but my city is peaceful. Additionally, there’s the expeditionary forces that go outside the walls. Those range from F to B. It really depends.”

  “That’s shocking. Has anyone completed the octave down here?”

  “Aside from the principesse, you mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Plenty. It’s been a while, certainly, and there isn’t one in my city as of right now, but I have two that are close. One is actually my castellan. The other is the leader of one of the expedition teams.”

  We sat together in comfortable silence as she continued running her fingers through my hair for a few minutes.

  “Fillipa is about to knock on the door with breakfast. You need to eat, even if you have to force yourself.”

  I turned my head to look at her. “Principessa Ippolita,” I started, and noticed her flashing a quick frown. So quick, I almost missed it, “Do you mind… I mean, I don’t want to be alone right now. Would you join me for breakfast?”

  “I’m sorry, carissimo, but I can’t. My generals will want to know the details you gave me. Even if Vittoria doesn’t represent a threat, they’ll still want to create a plan to attack her before she gets within sight of our walls, I’m sure. I’ll send Fiametta in to keep you company,” she said before muttering, “Gods know the girl needs it herself.”