The Vampire’s Feeder

Pit Stop

[Yara]

My heart was slamming against my ribs so loudly I was certain, for one dizzying moment, that they would hear it. I did not move. I did not change the rhythm of my breathing. I kept my eyes closed and my body loose and my mind very, very awake.

I had been wrong about so many things since this morning. I had been wrong about the cough going with the winter. I had been wrong about the Priestess passing me by. I had been wrong about what waited at the end of this road.

I was not going to be wrong about what I did next.

I simply had not figured out what that was yet.

The carriage rolled on through the darkening countryside, and I lay still against the wall, and I thought, with a cold and focused clarity that surprised even me, about how to survive the next few hours or days.

I waited until my need was genuine before I asked.

That was important. Men like these read desperation the way animals read fear, like they could smell the performance in it or the too-convenient timing. So I sat with the discomfort until it was real, until I was shifting slightly against the hard bench, and only then did I lift my head from where it had been resting against the carriage wall and say, quietly, that I needed to stop.

The broad one looked at me the way men like him always looked at girls like me. Like something that had just reminded him it existed.

"Hold it," he said.

"I have been." I kept my voice small and apologetic, which cost me nothing. "Please. I won't be long."

They exchanged a look over my head. I watched it pass between them without appearing to watch the glance, the slight nod, the corners of their mouths pulling in a way that had nothing to do with generosity. I had seen that look coming for the past two hours.

‘Fools.’ I thought, with a coldness that was becoming easier to locate. Come where I need you.

The mountain path was narrow and pale with loose stone. We had been climbing for the better part of the afternoon, the horses slowing on the gradient, and the drop on the outer edge of the path was considerably all grey rock face and the kind of windy silence that heights produce. The top was closer than the bottom now. I had noted that without appearing to.

The broad one climbed down from the driver's box to escort me himself. Of course he did.

"Around the rock," I pointed, nodding toward the large outcropping where the path curved out of sight of the carriage. "For privacy."

"Naturally," he smiled.

I walked ahead of him, picking my way over the loose stones carefully, one hand lifting the hem of my dress away from the ground. The hairpin was at my collar where I had moved it two hours ago and very slowly, while the carriage rocked.

The venom was my mother's, originally. She kept it for animal attacks, a thin preparation she'd learned from her own mother, drawn from the yellow-bellied adder common to the lowland marshes. Enough to paralyse. Enough to drop something larger than a small animal, if the dose reached the blood cleanly.

I had carried it for two years without ever expecting to use it.

We rounded the rock and the carriage disappeared from view.

I slowed, reached down to gather the hem of my dress with both hands, then glanced back at him over my shoulder with an expression I hated wearing. Helpless. Slightly flustered. In need of assistance.

"Would you—" I hesitated, as though embarrassed. "The hem keeps catching. If you could just hold it up at the back while I…”

He was already moving. Already glad to. That gleeful, self-congratulatory eagerness of a man who believed he had engineered an opportunity and was now simply collecting what he's owed.

He leaned down.

I turned and drove the hairpin into the side of his neck.

It was not graceful. My hand shook slightly and I registered that distantly, the shaking. He made a sound that was more surprise than pain, his hand flying up to grip the spot. He looked at me with an expression that moved through several stages very quickly: confusion, anger, the beginning of something uglier.

Then his legs went.

He dropped to the ground in sections, knees first, then sideways, one hand still pressed against his neck, his mouth working without producing anything useful. His eyes stayed open, which was the part I had not anticipated, and I looked away from them, pulling the hairpin free and pressing it back to the fabric of my collar with fingers that were steadier than they had any right to be.

The cough came immediately after, of course it did, and I muffled it against my sleeve, shoulders shaking with the effort of keeping it quiet, then crouched against the rock face until it passed.

Then I looked up.

The path continued around the outcropping and switchbacked further up the mountain face, a different route from the one the carriage would take. Steeper. Harder. Entirely exposed.

I looked down at him once more. His chest was moving. He was alive, and would stay that way until someone found him, and by the time the venom released its hold on him I intended to be somewhere it could not matter.

I gathered my skirts, found the first handhold in the rock, and began to climb.

I heard them from the corner.

Their voices carried strangely up the mountain face after waiting a few minutes. The irritation in them was clear enough even before I could make out the words.

"—taking long enough.”

"—said she'd be quick.”

A pause. Then footsteps on the gravel path. Then nothing, for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.

Then: "Bernard! Bernard!"

A sharp silence. And then a voice, low and vicious and carrying perfectly up the open rock face:

"Find her."

I pressed myself flat against the mountain and did not look down and kept climbing.