Blood and Briar

Chapter 6: Fangs and confessions

There was no time for explanations.

Not then.

Vesper moved before anyone else in the room had fully processed what Briar had said. She was across the room in the space between one heartbeat and the next, her hand closing around Briar's arm, steadying her, pulling her fully inside and away from the doorway. Briar's skin was cold. Not vampire cold. The cold of someone who had been running in the night air with fear sitting on their chest like a stone.

"How far behind you?" Vesper said.

"I do not know," Briar said. Her voice was steadier than her hands. "I ran. I did not stop to look."

"How many?"

"I saw three," Briar said. "But Seraphina never moves with only three."

Rue was already on her feet issuing quiet precise instructions to the others in the room. The young woman with the crossbow moved to the base of the stairs. The healer pushed the table against the far wall. Zed was doing something fast and complicated with the contents of his satchel that Vesper decided to trust without examining too closely.

"There is a back passage," Rue said to Vesper. "Behind the south wall. Takes you out two streets east."

"Take the others through it," Vesper said.

Rue looked at her. "And you?"

"I will deal with what is coming," Vesper said.

The way she said it made Rue look at her for one long assessing moment. Then she nodded and began moving the others toward the south wall.

Briar had not moved. She was still standing exactly where Vesper had placed her, her green eyes fixed on Vesper's face with an expression that was working very hard to be calm and not entirely succeeding.

"You should go with them," Vesper said.

"I am not going anywhere," Briar said.

"Briar,"

"I brought this here," Briar said quietly but with a firmness that left no room for argument. "I am not leaving you to face it alone."

Vesper looked at her for a moment. At the blood drying on her collarbone. At the torn shoulder of her dress. At the green eyes that were frightened and steady in equal measure.

She did not have time to argue.

"Stay behind me," she said. "Whatever happens. Whatever you see. Stay behind me."

Something in Briar's expression shifted at that. A question forming that she did not yet have words for.

She did not get the chance to ask it.

The door at the top of the stairs exploded inward.

There were four of them.

Not Seraphina's people. Vesper knew that the moment they came through the door. Seraphina's people were human, dangerous in the ordinary human ways, with knives and numbers and the particular cruelty of people who have been given permission to be cruel. These were not that.

These were Belphegor's.

They came down the stairs with the fluid wrongness of things that had learned to wear movement like a costume without quite getting it right. Their eyes caught the candlelight and held it in a way that eyes should not. The smell hit Vesper first, that same cold absence she had detected in the empty house, the scent of something that had hollowed itself out and filled the space with hunger.

Briar made a sound behind her. A small involuntary sound, quickly swallowed, the sound a person makes when their body recognises danger before their mind has finished processing it.

"Do not move," Vesper said quietly. "Do not run. Running triggers the instinct."

"What instinct," Briar whispered.

"The hunting one," Vesper said.

She stepped forward.

The creature at the front of the group tilted its head at her with that awful unnatural angle, too far, too smooth, like a hinge with one degree too many of movement. It looked at her the way its kind always looked at her kind, with the recognition of something related but inferior, a lesser branch of the same dark family tree.

It was wrong about that.

Vesper let her eyes change.

It was not something she did consciously usually. It happened when the predator in her rose fully to the surface, when the careful composed veneer of the woman in the burgundy gown peeled back and what was underneath stepped forward instead. Her eyes went from amber to something older and colder and without a great deal of patience.

The creature hesitated.

Good.

She moved.

What happened in the next forty seconds was not something Vesper would have wanted Briar to see under ordinary circumstances. It was efficient. It was fast. It was entirely without the elegance she usually maintained because elegance was a luxury and she was in a basement room in a broken city with a girl she was not willing to let get hurt standing six feet behind her.

When it was over three of the four creatures were gone in the way that Belphegor's minions went when their essence was properly disrupted, not dead exactly, dispersed, unmade, returned to whatever hollow dark place they had been assembled from. The fourth was pinned against the far wall by Vesper's forearm across its throat, her face inches from its wrongly hinged face, her voice very low and very quiet.

"Where is he sending them from," she said. "Which direction. How many more."

The creature made a sound that was not quite language. Vesper pressed harder.

It told her.

Then she let it disperse too.

She straightened. She turned around.

Briar was exactly where she had left her, six feet back, pressed against the wall. Her face was the colour of old parchment. Her eyes were enormous. She was staring at Vesper with an expression that Vesper had never seen on her face before and did not immediately know how to read.

Not fear. Or not only fear. Something more complicated than fear.

The silence stretched between them like a bridge over very deep water.

"You," Briar said. Her voice came out smaller than usual. "You are not," she stopped. Started again. "What are you?"

Vesper held her gaze steadily.

There was no version of this conversation that did not require the truth. She had known that from the moment Briar had walked through the door with blood on her collarbone. Perhaps she had known it before that, sitting on the doorstep in the early morning light, watching Briar walk away and thinking about what it might cost to be honest with someone for the first time in one hundred and fifty years.

"You already know," Vesper said quietly.

Briar stared at her. "Say it," she said. "I need to hear you say it."

Vesper looked at her for a long moment. At the green eyes wide and complicated and still, despite everything, not looking away.

"I am a vampire," she said.

The words landed in the room and stayed there.

Briar did not move. Did not speak. The expression on her face went through several things very quickly, shock, disbelief, a rapid internal recalculation of every interaction they had had since the market street, then something that Vesper could not name at all.

"The war," Briar said slowly. "The one everyone is talking about. Between the vampires and the humans."

"Yes," Vesper said.

"You are part of that."

"My father's kingdom is part of it," Vesper said carefully. "I am here because I chose to be. Those are not the same thing."

Briar looked at her. Really looked at her, the way she had on the very first day in the market street, that long unhurried assessment that saw more than most people managed.

"You could have hurt me," Briar said. "Any time. Since the beginning."

"Yes," Vesper said.

"But you did not."

"No," Vesper said. "I did not."

Another silence. Longer this time. The candles had mostly guttered in the chaos and the room was lit now by only two, their light small and warm and unsteady.

Briar uncrossed her arms slowly. She looked at the wall where the last creature had been. She looked at Vesper's eyes, still slightly wrong, still carrying the remnant of what had surfaced during the fight.

She took one step forward.

Then another.

She stopped when she was close enough that Vesper could hear her heartbeat, rapid and strong and alive, that same pulse she had felt on the very first day when she had held Briar's hand and not wanted to let go.

"The eyes," Briar said softly. She was looking directly into them. "They changed."

"Yes," Vesper said. Very quietly.

"Do they always do that?"

"When I am," Vesper paused, choosing the word carefully, "fully present."

Briar looked at her for another long moment. Something was resolving in her expression. Working itself through from shock into something more settled, not peace exactly but the beginning of a decision.

"Are you going to hurt me?" she asked. Direct and simple, the way Briar asked everything.

"No," Vesper said. With a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than words.

"Do you want to?"

Vesper held her gaze.

"Not in the way you mean," she said.

Something moved through Briar's eyes at that. Quick and complicated and warmer than the situation had any business producing.

Then the sound came from above them.

Not screaming this time. Worse than screaming. The specific silence that falls after screaming stops.

And then Zed's voice from somewhere in the passage behind the south wall, urgent and stripped of all its usual cheerfulness, reaching them through the stone.

"Vesper," he called. "You need to come and see this. Right now."

Vesper and Briar looked at each other in the dying candlelight.

Whatever had just shifted between them would have to wait.

Something told Vesper it was going to be a very long night.