The Vampire’s Feeder

Jump

[Victor]

The first thing I noticed was the silence inside my own skull. For five hundred years, every waking hour had been less of a process and more of a simulation. There had never been the slow, reluctant climb toward consciousness that humans described, the warmth of it, and the temporary confusion of not knowing immediately where one was.

I knew where I was. I simply did not recognise the state I was in.

Everything was quiet. Not the world, the world was the same indifferent dark it always was at whatever hour this was. The quiet was internal. Some restlessness I had carried so long I had stopped registering it as what it was had simply vacated, and its absence was so foreign that I lay still for a full minute trying to identify what was wrong before understanding arrived:

‘Nothing was wrong.’ That was what was wrong.

I sat up slowly. The lamp on the far table had burned down to the wick, which meant it had been going for hours before it gave out, which meant I had been unconscious for considerably longer than one song should have produced. I turned this over with the interest of a man examining a rare feat.

The cold in the room had the deep, settled air of a space that had not been tended in some time. The fire was dead and I felt… rested.

The experience was so unfamiliar that I sat on the edge of the bed for another moment simply taking inventory of it. No sharpness behind the eyes. No low, grinding awareness of every sound in the castle at once. No desire to find the nearest person and make them suffer simply to have something to do with the excess of alertness that had been my permanent condition for centuries.

I almost laughed. I had actually found one. After hundreds of years of documented extinction, a siren had crawled to my doorstep and collapsed at my boot, and she had done in one sitting what nothing else in decades had managed.

The laugh was forming into something genuinely pleased for the first time in recent memory, right when I became aware that Reynolds was not where I expected him to be.

He was sitting across the room. On the floor, back against the wall, having apparently been asleep himself and now stirring at the sound of movement from the bed. He got to his feet with the slightly disoriented look of someone waking from an unplanned sleep in an uncomfortable position, and when his eyes found me his face did the thing it did when he had information he knew would displease me.

My lips pressed together then parted to ask: “How long?”

Reynolds straightened. He looked at the dead lamp, then at the window. His mouth pressed together briefly in the manner of a man confirming his own count before speaking it aloud. “Two days, my lord.”

The number landed differently than I expected. Two days?

Impossible!

I had been unconscious for two days and had not stirred, had not surfaced, had simply been gone in a way I had not been gone since my exile. “Reynolds, I forgive your impulsive act of keeping the girl alive. Haha!”

He nodded, keeping his head down.

My delight didn’t last too long though. “Where is she?”

Reynolds dropped to both knees. His head went down, the full bow, the one he reserved for situations where he had calculated that no other posture would adequately communicate the gravity of his failure. “She poisoned me, my lord. With a hairpin.” He kept his head down. “I woke some hours after she fled. The gate was open, one horse missing from the stable.” A pause, then, with the quality of a man offering the one thing he had in mitigation: “A crow I assigned to watch her came up this morning. It had seen her being taken into Aldenmoor under restraint.” He looked up briefly. “I know the town, my lord.”

I looked at him on the floor for a moment.

“Aldenmoor…”

A rare siren, loose in Aldenmoor? The thought did something unpleasant to my mood.

“We’re going after her,” I said plainly. “That girl is too rare to lose to a slave town.”

Reynolds was already on his feet. “It will take three days to descend the mountain by road, my lord. Perhaps two and a half if the weather—”

“Who said anything about descending by road?”

He stopped. “Pardon?”

I stood, rolling my sleeves down, and looked at the window with the consideration of a man doing mathematics against a timeline.

“I intend to jump,” I told him.