The Vampire’s Feeder

My Lord

[Yara]

"Yes, my lord."

The boot moved, shaking off the fingers that had no strength left in them worth speaking of. The grip on the leather gave easily and fell open against the ground.

I heard the crunch of his footsteps move away, stopping somewhere to the left and I could feel, even without looking, the presence of him. Yet, the weakness in my bones didn't permit me the strength to lift my neck.

I had expected refuge on getting to the top of the mountain, not contempt.

'I can't die... not yet.' The thought kept replaying on a loop.

"The entrance," he began, his tone cool and exacting, as though addressing a flaw in craftsmanship rather than a breach of his home. "If something so inconsequential could crawl its way to my doorstep, then it is not secure. See that corrected."

"Yes, my lord."

"The rear gate as well, remove it entirely. A fortress requires a single point of passage. Let those who come choose between courage and death."

"Yes."

A brief silence followed, then he spoke again and there was the faintest shift in his voice. Not to softness, far from it as his irritation sharpened into something colder.

"And before I return... cleanse the interior. I will not have my halls mistaken for a charnel house."

The second man said nothing for a moment. Then: "The—ah—bodies, my lord?"

A quiet, humorless breath. "Reynolds," he drawled. "If you must ask about the obvious, you have already disappointed me. Yes, the bodies. The stench is intolerable."

"It will be done."

The footsteps began to move away, growing fainter with a steadiness that suggested he had never in his life moved at any pace other than the one he chose. I listened to them until I could not hear them anymore and the night settled back into its freezing silence around me.

Then the second man—Reynolds, sighed. It was the sigh of someone who has just been handed a very long list and no help, and it was directed at no one in particular, which told me he thought he was alone.

He was not alone. I moved my hand across the ground until my fingers found the hem of his coat.

He went still immediately. Then, slowly, he looked down. Or at least, I could feel him looking.

I had no idea what came over me, but the sudden urge to see his face forced my neck to twist. Still, I couldn't see it properly, my vision had been behaving strangely for the past hour, but I had the impression of someone young.

Younger than the other one, certainly. Younger than this situation called for. He muttered something under his breath. It had the cadence of a curse, or possibly a prayer, or possibly both, which I understood. He crouched down briefly, which I think was to look at me more closely, and whatever he saw confirmed what he'd muttered, because he straightened up again and exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Unfortunate," he muttered, to himself rather than to me. Then he reached down, closed his hand around my arm just below the shoulder, and began to pull.

He was not rough about it, which almost made it worse; there was no spite or anger in it, no particular feeling at all. He was simply moving something from one place to another as instructed. His grip was firm enough that I could feel it bruising against bone that had very little left to cushion it, and the ground scraped against my legs, and I could hear the wind picking up again somewhere ahead of us, the open, directionless sound of wind that had nothing to run into.

We were standing over the edge, and I knew it without seeing it.

I couldn't fight him. That was the plain truth of it and I had lived long enough inside plain truths to recognize one. My limbs had nothing left to give, and the hunger had seeped into my bones. The blood loss from my injuries had taken everything that the mountain had not already claimed, and what remained of me was operating on some stubborn will to live.

I'd promised to find my way back to my mother and had hurt Elias in ways I would never forgive myself for. I had so many regrets and was absolutely sure I wouldn't rest peacefully if I died now.

My throat was too dry for pleas, too dry for anything, really. I couldn't call out, argue, or do any of the things a person does when they're trying to convince someone not to throw them off a mountain.

What I could do... what I had always been able to do, in the worst moments of every bad night I had ever survived, was hum.

It came out broken and threadbare, barely sounding at all, more breath than note. My throat protested every second of it. But it was the one song that came, Elias's song, and the one I had sung to him the morning before he left for the battlefield and many nights before then.

It was the one song that didn't require much effort.

The dragging abruptly stopped. The hand on my arm did not release me, but it went very still, and for a moment there was nothing but the wind and the thin, wrecked thread of sound I was producing and the silence of a man who had been moving with purpose and had suddenly run out of it.

"How..." His voice came out strangely. He tried again, lower, almost to himself. "How do you know that song?"