Drew would know what to do, my mind laments.Drew is— Don’t even think it.
“I’m rather fond of breathing and if helping you is the only way to continue doing that then consider me your new assistant.” It’s partly true. Partly a brave face. I knew I was dead from the moment he took me.
“Do you think I will take you at your word?” He dips his chin slightly to look me better in the eyes. His gaze is shadowed, two gleaming orbs set on a night sky. Relaxed and outside of battle, he looks at me with the eyes of a much younger man; they’re striking, even. But painfully juxtaposed on his ancient visage. They’re the eyes of a man in his prime, brimming with masculine prowess trapped in the body of a walking corpse. I find myself unable to look away.
“You must want to, or you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.” I speak around the lump in my throat.
“I want many things I do not have,” he says solemnly. The words are as heavy as stones sinking to the bottom of a well, echoing with a dull note of yearning. “But I cannot let wants cloud my judgment when the fate of my people hangs in the balance.”
“Then what will you do with me? If you cannot trust me, what’s the point of any of this?”
“That is something I have been debating while you slumbered and healed. And I think I have come up with a solution—solving one problem with another, as it were. I do not know if I can trust you. Rather, I know Ican’ttrust you.”
The feeling is mutual.
“And we return to the problem that you are dying as well.” He pauses and briefly considers his next words. “How much do you know of the Fade?”
Very little, in truth. The Fade exists in the myths and legends of Hunter’s Hamlet. It’s as old as the fortress and even more mysterious. Drew told me stories of it, but every one seemed more impossible than the last.
“I know it stems from the first hunter—a protection to keep your kind from overrunning my world.” Perhapsthat’sthe “curse” of which he speaks? If it is, there’s no reasonable way he could imagine I would help him undo it.
He snorts and folds his hands behind his back. The vampire lord turns, stalking to the window. “Clearly, you know nothing.”
“I know enough.”
“The Fade has nothing to do with our squabbles,” he says.
“Then what is it?”
He glares at me. I seem to be rather good at frustrating the vampire lord. A wonderful talent, that. Which makes me all the more surprised when he answers.
“Just over three thousand years ago, there was a great war of magic. Humans were caught in the fray, unable to contend with those like the vampir. The Elf King made a treaty with the Human King. He took a bride and severed the world in two with the Fade. On one side lived the humans in what we call the Natural World. On the other side, in Midscape, lived the rest of us.”
Elves.Rest of us?No…there’s only ever been the humans and the vampires. There’s not…more. My head aches, and not just from my wounds.
“It was not long after the world was split that the curse was laid.” His voice becomes as sharp as a sickle. “And we have been weakened by it ever since.” Ruvan’s—the vampire lord’s hands tighten at the small of his back. It’s hard to imagine that the vampires we face areweakened. “But what you need to understand, from all of this, is that humans are not made for Midscape. Only the Human Queen can live in this world. All other humans from the Natural World wither and die. That is the death chasing you now. That is why our healing is dulled at best. We can slow its progress, minimally, but we cannot stop you from withering.”
He could be lying to make me desperate. I stare back at my hands.
I curl my fingers into a fist. I can still feel the unnatural ache that was there from the moment I first woke. The exhaustion in my body is deeper than muscular, deeper than skeletal. I know what those injuries and pains feel like. I might not be a hunter, but I’ve had my share of hardship and toil. I’ve lived in the smithy—through all the burns, scrapes, bruises, and breaks. I know how I should be healing and this isn’t it.
I’m still aware that he could be lying to make me desperate. But I can’t shake how my body feels…different. Wracked with pain and an unabating exhaustion.
“How long do I have?” I finally ask. I’m still not sure if I fully believe him, but this would all be a rather long, drawn-out ruse to be entirely a lie. If all he wanted was my blood, he could’ve already had it. And then there’s the aches in my body.
There’s more to all this, there has to be.
“A week, two at most.” He faces me once more. His eyes drift from my head, down to the blanket, and over my covered legs. “But in a few days you won’t be able to even lift your head. A few days after that you will lose the strength to chew and swallow. You might still breathe, but you will already be dead long before your eyes shut for the final time.”
“Then let’s go open your door now.” I’ve been gone from the hamlet for too long. I must get home, even if I’m returning in shame. The thought of Mother searching for me makes my chest ache with yet another pain. Does she think she lost both her children to the Blood Moon hunt?
He laughs again, deep and rumbling. The sound reminds me of the taste of lemons. Bitter and sharp…yet not entirely unpleasant, if you have an inclination for it. “If only it were that simple. We will need to move fast, yes. But there is no way we will be able to accomplish in one week what vampire lords before me have been trying to accomplish for centuries. The door is deep within the old castle and difficult at best, deadly at worst, to get to. Impossible for you to make the journey with your condition deteriorating the entire time.”
“Couldn’t you transport us there with your mist?” I ask.
He inhales slowly and pinches the bridge of his nose as though he’s holding together every scrap of his patience. “No, the castle is warded. If there was an easy way to get to this door you would already be there.”
“Well, if I cannot be transported there and it will take great effort to get to—more time and energy than I have remaining—what is your plan to get to it?”
