CHAPTER SIX The Thing the Pact Never Named
266 Words
They came at dawn.
Not soldiers—farmers, bakers, men I’d known since childhood, armed with iron tools and torches wrapped in pitch. The bells didn’t warn the village of monsters.
They warned them of me.
I stood on the castle steps as Astridr held the gates behind me, unmoving, unreadable. My skin burned where his blood had touched my lips the night before—not changing, not healing—listening. Every heartbeat around me rang inside my skull like a drum.
“She’s marked!” someone shouted. “Look at her eyes!”
A stone struck my shoulder. Another split my lip.
Blood spilled, and the air changed.
The vampires hissed from the walls, restless.
“Do not move,” Astridr said quietly behind me. “If you run, they will hunt you. If you fight—”
Another stone flew.
I caught it.
I didn’t mean to.
The stone shattered in my palm like chalk. The crowd fell silent. I stared at my hand, unbroken, veins glowing faintly beneath the skin in a pattern that wasn’t human.
“What did you do to her?” my mother screamed.
Astridr stepped forward then, voice carrying like steel on stone. “Nothing,” he said. “Your ancestors did.”
The crowd surged.
A man rushed me with a pitchfork.
I felt the moment before it struck—time slowing, narrowing—and when I moved, I moved wrong.
Too fast. Too precise.
The pitchfork went through his throat.
I stood there, drenched in blood that wasn’t mine, realising with horror—
I hadn’t felt fear.
- Writer
