A flower grew out of the kitchen sink, its purple stem supporting a giant blossom four feet across. Waves of petals, shimmering with delicate pink and gold, wrapped its core, which was only the size of a basketball. Parachute-like protrusions, like dandelion fuzz, thrust from the core, their feathery ends glowing gently with beautiful crimson. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Londar Len Teles,” Arland whispered next to me.

My sister raised her eyebrows. “World killer?”

“Don’t move,” Arland warned, his voice an urgent whisper. “If you move, it will launch spores, sting you, and grow from your bodies.”

I held perfectly still.

“Hold still, flower,” Maud said without turning her head. “If you move, we all die.”

“Don’t raise your voice,” Arland said, his lips barely moving. “It reacts to any sign of life, movement, sound, heat, change in air composition. It’s a hunter. Are there any more?”

“No. This is the only one.”

The soft feathers of the parachutes trembled slightly, turning toward us.

“Can you contain it?” Maud asked.

“It passed through solid plastic,” I whispered.

“You can’t stop it,” Arland whispered. “It’s impervious to fire, acid, energy weapons, and a vacuum. It will pass through whatever barrier you can summon, because it becomes flesh only when it meets its prey. If you send it to another world, you’ll doom that world to extinction. It will kill and grow and kill again, until it’s the only thing alive on that planet.”

I couldn’t be responsible for the death of an entire planet. And I couldn’t contain it, burn it, or drown it.

“How do we kill it?” I asked.

“You can’t,” Arland said. “But I can.”

“How?” Sean asked behind him.

“My blood is toxic to it,” Arland said. “I’ll explain if I live. The seeds should fail to implant.”

“Should?” Maud whispered.

“Don’t move and don’t scream,” Arland said. “I have to be the only target. If it keys in on anyone else, the seed will bloom inside your bodies, and the contamination will spread. I might survive one plant. I won’t survive two.”

“What about the void field?” I asked.

“No,” Arland said. “I need to pull it out. If the void field works and you sever the stem, the flower will just grow again, in a new direction.”

“This is daft,” Maud said, her voice strained. “There has to be another way.”

Arland’s voice was eerily calm, his gaze fixed on the flower. “Lady Maud, should I die, say the Liturgy of the Fallen for me.”

Maud opened her mouth. Her face turned into a bloodless mask, her eyes turned hard, and without moving a muscle, she transformed from my sister into a vampire. Her voice came out calm and even. Vampire words rolled off her tongue. “Go with the Goddess, my Lord. You won’t be forgotten.”

Arland charged into the kitchen.

The flower exploded. Every parachute sprung into the air, the bright pink seeds at the end glowing, and clamped onto the vampire. Arland snarled like a wounded animal. The parachutes engulfed him, wrapping around him like a strait jacket, the seeds pulsing with red, sinking through his armor, then falling off, black and lifeless. They battered his face, drawing blood. He gritted his teeth and locked his hands on the core of the flower. The petals flared bright red. Arland howled, his voice pure pain, and pulled the flower to him. The petals turned black. His whole body shook. The immovable mountain that was Arland barely stayed upright. The stem of the flower wrapped around his arm like a constrictor trying to choke its victim. Arland gripped it and pulled, hand over hand, his teeth bared, his eyes bulging out. The vine spilled out, coiling around him. It whipped him, penetrating the armor like it wasn’t even there. Blood drenched his face, slipping out of the dozens of tiny wounds. Arland went down to his knees, still screaming, raw and desperate, tears streaming from his eyes. I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and curl into a ball so I wouldn’t have to hear or see him. Maud stood rigid beside me, her hands locked into fists, breath hissing through her clenched teeth.

The last few feet of the stem spilled out of the drain, carrying a glowing blue bulb the size of a walnut at the end of it.

The Marshal of House Krahr gripped it. It pulsed with blinding light. He dug his fangs into it, ripping a hole in the bulb, bit his hand, and spat his own blood into its center.

The bulb turned black.

The plant convulsed, squeezing him in a last attempt to strangle its victim, turned black, and became still.

Arland raised his hand and growled a single word. “Clear.”

Maud sprinted to him.

“Well,” Caldenia said. “Nobody can say that this siege is boring.”

* * *

Arland couldn’t get off the floor. Welts formed on his face, swelling into blood-filled blisters in seconds. He was breathing like he’d run a sprint.

“You need to take off the armor,” Maud told him. “You’re bleeding under it.”

“What I need… is a… moment… to catch my breath.”

“Arland,” I said. “You need to get out of the armor.”

He didn’t answer. Prying him out of the armor would be next to impossible without his cooperation. For the knights of the Holy Anocracy, armor was everything. They spent more of their lives in it than out of it, and, in times of life-threatening injuries, the urge to keep it on often overwhelmed them.