Lover’s Requiem: The Hunter’s Mark

II

[KAEL — POV]

He had two rules about humans.

The first: never underestimate them. They were fragile and mortal and prone to error, but they had been killing his kind since before the first stone walls of cities rose from the earth, and complacency about that particular fact was a grave error that had unmade greater vampires than him.

The second: never tell them more than they need to know.

He was currently breaking the second rule, which irritated him, but the woman with the blade had a look in her eyes that he'd learned—painfully, over centuries—to respect. She was calculating every word he said against the geometry of the room and the position of the exits, and if he gave her anything that felt like evasion, she would stop listening and start acting, and his head was moderately important to his continued operations.

"Corvath," he said. "Do you know the name?"

"Splinter faction," she said immediately. Not a guess. Knowledge, organized and ready. "Extremist. Broke from the Warden's Flame two years ago over doctrine. We classify them as rogue but not active threat." A pause. "We classified them."

"Corvath has been escalating operations in the neutral zones for the past six months. Systematically. Killing hunters, killing vampires, framing each side for the other's casualties." He watched her absorb this. She was good at keeping her face still—better than most—but her eyes moved in a specific pattern when she was processing something that disrupted her existing framework. "Your men tonight were not killed by vampires. They were killed by Corvath operatives using vampire-style methodology. Fast, efficient, theatrical. Designed to look like a Noctis strike."

"Why." It wasn't a question. It was a demand for completeness.

"To prevent this conversation," he said.

She stared at him. "You called a meeting—with our informant—to warn us about Corvath?"

"I called a meeting to confirm that Corvath has been doing the same thing to us. Killing our people. Framing the Warden's Flame." He kept his voice level, which required something that was not quite effort but was adjacent to it—there was something disconcerting about being near this woman, some quality she projected that made the air feel differently pressured. "Four of my couriers, assassinated in the style of Warden hunters. One of my intelligence contacts, dead with a hunter's mark carved into his chest. My court believes these are Flame attacks. I have spent three months attempting to verify otherwise, because starting a full-scale war over manipulated evidence seemed inadvisable."

"That's—" She stopped. Started again. "That's almost reasonable."

"Almost."

"Vampires don't call meetings to prevent wars."

"This one does." He held her gaze and did not look away, because she was the kind of person who tested everything, and looking away would register as a tell. "I have commanded armies, Sera Voss. I am aware of what wars cost. I am not interested in fighting one that someone else engineered."

She was quiet for a moment. The chandelier crystals turned slowly overhead, casting moving light across the planes of her face—she had a remarkable face, he'd noted that immediately, angular and fierce and currently arranged in an expression of profound suspicion that he found, to his mild annoyance, rather compelling.

"You said three minutes," she said. "That was two ago."

He tilted his head, extending his other senses outward, feeling for vibrations in the building's frame, the subtle wrongness of distributed weight on the external walls. "Thirty seconds," he corrected. "They're faster than anticipated."

She moved without hesitation. The blade disappeared into a sheath he hadn't located at her hip—she was good at concealment too—and she was already at the window, already assessing the drop to the street, already—

"The roof hatch," he said. "It's the only viable exit that isn't covered."

She looked at him. "How do you know it isn't covered?"

"Because whoever planned this wanted witnesses. A dead vampire general and dead hunters, all in one place—that's a story. It needs to be found." He moved past her toward the bar, toward the storage room he'd already mapped on his way in. "The hatch in the ceiling connects to a maintenance corridor. If we go now—"

"We." The word landed with the weight of an objection.

He paused and looked back at her. She was standing in the center of the room, arms at her sides, with the expression of someone who had just been asked to recalibrate a deeply held principle.

"You don't have to trust me," he said. "You have to survive long enough to verify what I've told you. Those are not the same thing." A pause. "Three bodies tells me they have at least eight operatives. Possibly twelve. You're good, but—"

"Don't finish that sentence."

"—but you're not twelve good." He held the storage room door open. "Come."

The sound came first—the specific crack of the roof access being breached, footsteps spreading across the floor above in a pattern that confirmed twelve at minimum.

She was beside him in two steps.

He chose not to comment on it.