CHAPTER 4: What the Dark Tastes Like
1071 Words
CAELUM'S POV
I reach Calla's Reach at nightfall and find the chandler's shop with its front door open and old Pell on the floor behind the counter.
He's alive. Two punctures, right side of the neck, clean. Someone fed fast and didn't finish. The work isn't House Voss. We go for the left. And there's no coldness in the bite, no memory-drain. This is mer-folk. Specifically, a high court mer-folk who's learned to feed the way vampires do, which means someone has been training across species lines. That's new. That's deeply unsettling.
"Pell," I say, crouching down. "The girl who rents your upstairs room. When did you last see her?"
He blinks. Focuses. "Before sunrise," he says. "She went out the window. Then a woman broke my front door. Then..." He touches his neck. "Then I woke up on the floor."
"The woman," I say. "Describe her."
"Dark. Shimmer to her skin, like fish scales, but subtle. Jewellery on her wrist. Formal."
Abyss Court. One of their agents, then, not the Sunlit Court's scout I'd been expecting.
I leave Pell and check the room above. The window's open. Everything gone except one thing on the sill, a pressed flower, small and yellow, fresh. In November. Growing here.
I take it and go.
The hunter I sent ahead, Draven's agent, not mine, the one Draven placed without authorisation, I find him four miles up the north road. Not on the road. In the ditch beside it. He's breathing but hollow, the way people go when a memory-feed takes too much. His last six hours are gone. He'll never get them back.
Someone else is already playing this game on this road. Someone with the skill to take a Voss hunter down fast.
There's only one vampire bloodline whose memory-feeding is powerful enough to do it that quickly.
My brother's line.
Which means something has come off the Shore. Or someone.
The horse goes lame outside Merin. Picks up a stone, throws the shoe. I lose forty minutes to it, then leave the horse with the Merin stablemaster and go on foot, because on foot I'm faster than most things that have ever lived and there's no point pretending otherwise.
Six miles north of Merin, the road runs alongside dead scrubland, grey grass, bare hedges, the blight moving up the coast faster than any survey I've read has predicted. I pass through it and then I see what I've been looking for. Not the girl. The sign of her.
A strip of hedgerow, two branches, full and green, leafed out in the dead of autumn. Further on, a c***k in the road packed with fresh clover. Further still, three wild flowers growing in an old wheel rut, facing north.
She was here. She's not far ahead.
I'm moving fast when I hear it, hooves, four sets, coming back down the road. Fast. The same four horses I'd tracked passing me two miles south, but returning now, and returning hard, and there's something wrong with the rhythm of it.
One horse pulls up short ahead of me. No rider. The saddle dark with blood.
Three of the four riders come around the bend, and they're not chasing a road anymore. They're chasing something in the trees to the east, and one of them has a crossbow raised, and I can hear feet in the undergrowth, two sets, moving fast, moving well, and a third sound underneath, which is someone else already in those trees who was there before I was.
I go into the trees from the west at full speed.
I come through the undergrowth and find the hunter with his arm around Sera's throat from behind, the crossbow riders converging from the north, and a young man with a cartographer's pack swinging it at the nearest rider's head with genuine commitment.
I take the hunter off Sera in under a second.
We hit a tree hard enough to c***k it and I get my hand to his jaw before he recovers and I take. Six hours of memory floods into me in a hot, awful rush. I hate this. I've always hated this. But I need what he knows and there's no gentle way to take it. His meeting with Draven's steward, the order, the target, and then beneath it the second order, the one that wasn't spoken but was written on a card the steward burned immediately after.
Do not retrieve. Eliminate. Make it look like a Tidal Court hit.
I drop him.
Straighten up.
The crossbow riders have made a decision about the man swinging a cartographer's pack at them and that decision is retreat. They're pulling back north, fast, gone in thirty seconds, which tells me they were hired, not committed, and hired men recalculate when the odds shift.
I turn.
Sera is eight feet away. Knife out. Eyes, even in the dark, even at this distance, shifting from brown to deep violet. Her vampire blood, surfacing. She doesn't know it's happening.
She has her father's eyes. Her mother's jaw. She's pointing a blade at me like she was built for it.
"Who are you?" she says.
"My name is Caelum Voss," I say. "Your father was my brother."
She doesn't lower the knife.
"My father's dead," she says.
"No," I say. "He's not. And neither is your mother."
The knife stays up. But her hand, just for a half-second, shakes.
"You're going to want to keep moving while you say whatever you're about to say," the cartographer says from behind her, brushing bark off his jacket. "Because whoever just rode north is going to reach the Shore before we do, and I have a very bad feeling about what they're going to do when they get there."
"What do you know about the Shore?" I ask him.
He pulls a letter from his pack and holds it out.
I read it.
Do not let her reach the Shore alive.
I look at Sera. She's already reading it over my shoulder. Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are still violet.
"How many people want me dead tonight?" she says.
"That I know of?" I say. "Three separate parties. But the night's not over."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she looks at the cartographer. Then back at me.
"Start talking," she says. "You've got until I run out of patience, and I started with very little."
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