Bound to the Vampire King

I didn't stop running until the frost bit through my boots. The border wasn't a wall. Nothing that honest. It was a line in the dirt where the village trees thinned and the pines got taller, darker. We grew up knowing the line the way we knew our own names. Don't cross into the Bloodlands, Eira. Nothing good lives there. My mother's voice. Even now, sick in bed, burning with a fever she couldn't shake, she'd say it again if she knew where I was. Which was why she didn't know. I'd left her with water by the bed and the windows locked, the way I did every night lately. The moon was high and fat and white. The old women called it a bleeding moon. The nights it hung full over the Bloodlands, the vampires came down to the villages. I told myself that was just a story. I'd been telling myself a lot of stories lately. I pulled my cloak tighter and kept walking. The satchel at my hip was heavy. Inside: a list of herbs from the village healer. Herbs that grew wild in the Bloodlands. Herbs that cost more than our whole house if you bought them through the trade road. The healer said the roots took hold where blood soaked the soil. She didn't say it twice. The healer had laughed when I asked for them. "You want to go into that place for a handful of weeds?" she said. "You'll come back with more than herbs, girl. Or you won't come back at all." I took the paper anyway. A mother is a mother. My father was dead. My brother had left for the capital four years ago and never sent word since. There was no one else to walk the border for her. So it was me, a satchel of weeds, and a moon the old women warned about. The trees swallowed me. The Bloodlands were quiet. The kind of quiet that made your ears ache. No birds. No wind. Just my boots crunching dead leaves, and the feeling of eyes I couldn't see. You're being watched. I shrugged, tightening my grip on the satchel. I'd been watched my whole life. The village boys. The healer's tongue. My mother's worry. One more set of eyes didn't scare me. Except this wasn't one set. A growl rolled out of the dark to my left. Low. Human and not-human at once. I froze mid-step. Warmth bloomed in my chest, spread down my arms like a second heartbeat, one I'd never felt before. Fear ran cold. This ran hot. Another growl. Behind me. Move, Eira. Move your stupid feet. I moved. Not toward the village, not that dumb, but deeper, boots slipping on frost and pine needles, while the growls multiplied around me like a sickness spreading. Six of them. Maybe seven. Shapes peeling off the trees, tall and lean and moving too fast to track. Vampires. Not the storybook kind, with velvet capes and charming smiles. The border kind. Leather and silver eyes and teeth that caught the moonlight. "Fresh blood," one of them said, and the way he said it, casual, hungry, like a man reading a menu, was worse than any threat. "The village sends us presents now?" "I'm not a present," I said. "I'm just passing through." He stepped closer. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Eyes the color of old blood. Handsome, the way a wolf is handsome right before it eats you. "Passing through. Where would a little mouse like you be passing to?" "None of your business." "Everything in the Bloodlands is my business, little mouse." He reached for me. The frost on the leaves shivered. And then every one of them went still at once. I heard it before I saw it. A wet, heavy crack, like ice breaking under a horse. The vampires turned, their easy hunger snapping into something sharp and wary. The man at the edge of the clearing was tall. That was the first thing I noticed, because everything else about him seemed designed to make you forget he was a person at all. Black coat. Black boots. Skin pale as old marble. And his eyes. His eyes stopped me mid-thought. Frozen silver. Flat as ice. Fixed on me like I was the only warm thing in the world. The lead vampire backed up two steps. "My King. We didn't know you were hunting tonight." "I wasn't." The man's voice was low, even. The kind that didn't need to raise itself. "I was following a scent." My blood went cold. I didn't know why. It just did. He walked toward me, slow, each step measured. The pack parted around him. When he stopped, he was close enough that I could smell him: frost and old stone and something dark and sweet underneath. Something that made my chest ache. "Human." He tilted his head. "You crossed the border alone. On a bleeding moon. For what?" "Herbs." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "My mother's sick. They only grow here." "Herbs." He said it like he was tasting the word. His mouth moved, almost a smile, but his eyes stayed cold. "You risked your life for herbs." "They're the only thing that'll save her." I held his gaze even though everything in me wanted to look away. "So yes. I risked my life for them." His eyes moved over my face, and I couldn't read what was in them. That was strange. I'd always been good at reading people. It was how I'd survived Ashford, knowing who to smile at and who to run from. This man, I couldn't read at all. "Whose business is that?" "Everything in the Bloodlands is my business." He used the border vampire's words, but they sounded different in his mouth. Final. Like a door closing. "Including you." My hands curled into fists. "I belong to nobody." He looked at me a long moment. Then he reached out, slow, and took a strand of my hair between his fingers. Dark red against his pale skin. He held it like it was worth something. "You came here for herbs," he said, "and instead, you found me." "I didn't find you. You found me." "So I did." He let the strand fall and straightened, and when he spoke next, his voice sat lower in his chest, heavy in a way that made the vampires behind him go still. "Do you know what a fated mate is?" "Like—soulmates? The old stories—" "The old stories are true." He said it flatly, like he was stating the weather. "Every vampire has a mate written in their blood. Most never find them. I'm five hundred years old." He paused. "I stopped looking a long time ago. Then you crossed my border, and my blood knew you." The frost at my feet turned to ice. I could feel it, crackling up the hem of my cloak. "I don't—" I shook my head, backing up a step. "You're wrong. I'm nobody. A village girl with a sick mother and a satchel of herbs." "You are not nobody." He said it like a law. "You are mine." The word hit me in the chest. Mine. I'd never been anyone's. My father died when I was young. I'd made sure no boy got close. I belonged to myself, to my mother's illness, to the cold little cottage at the edge of Ashford. And now this stranger, this king, was standing in the moonlight telling me I belonged to him. "You're insane," I said, and my voice cracked. "You don't know me. You saw me two minutes ago." "I know your blood. That's more than most couples get." The lead vampire swallowed. "My King—she's human. The Court will never—" "Then the Court will learn," the king said, "to bow to a human." The vampires went very quiet. My mother's voice again: Don't cross into the Bloodlands, Eira. Nothing good lives there. I'd thought I was saving her. I didn't know yet that I'd just walked into a cage with a king's name on the lock. "Take her to the Court," he said. "A room in the eastern wing. She's not to be harmed. Not to be touched." The lead vampire bowed. "And if she runs?" "She won't." I opened my mouth to argue. I always argued, it was my nature. Then he looked at me, and the words died in my throat. "They said you'd be carrying a secret into the Blood Court," he murmured. Low enough that only I could hear. "They were right." I went cold. They? Who was they? What could anyone know about a village girl from Ashford? He didn't explain. He just looked at me like he already knew the answer. Like he could see something in my blood I'd never seen in myself. He was already walking away, coat swallowed by the dark. The pack closed in around me. Hands on my arms, none of them rough. Just there, like they'd been given orders. I didn't run. I wanted to. Every part of me wanted to. But my feet wouldn't move, my heart hammered against my ribs, and all I could hear, over and over, was his voice in the dark: You are mine. Turns out my mother wasn't the only one carrying a secret that night. I just didn't know it yet.