Page 35 of Beds and Blades

There was no blood.

That was the first wrong thing. After everything I had seen the night before, I expected blood. A wound. A mess. Some visible evidence of violence the body could explain.

Instead, he looked emptied.

His skin had gone pale and waxen, stretched thin over sharpened cheekbones. His mouth hung slightly open. His eyes had sunk back into their sockets. At his throat were two punctures, small and dark and horribly neat.

The rest of him looked collapsed around the absence of blood. Drained.

There was no chaos. No torn cloth. No broken fingernails from a desperate struggle. Not a drop wasted.

Something had held him still. Something had bent over him in this courtyard, close enough for him to understand exactly what was happening, and then it had fed with patient restraint.

When it finished, it left no mess or evidence of haste.

Only the body and the open crypt.

Caen stepped toward the stairs.

Skip caught her arm before she had taken the third step.

“Do not.”

“I need to know what is below.”

“You need to stay on your feet,” he said.

The words were quiet. That made them more forceful.

Caen looked at him. Then she closed her eyes. Her breathing had gone shallow.

Then the pendant at her throat flickered once and failed to brighten. Her face tightened, and one hand found the stone beside the stairwell.

“I can feel something,” she said.

Every soldier close enough to hear went still.

“What?” Skip asked.

She looked down into the blackness beneath the courtyard.

“Darkness,” she said. “Something that should not be inside consecrated stone.”

“How did one of the vampires get in here?” I asked.

Skip looked at me, and his eyes sharpened with recognition.

“It didn’t get in,” he said. “It was already here.”

The courtyard seemed to narrow around that sentence.

“One of them came over the wall during the attack,” he continued. “To hide for another purpose.”

“In the courtyard?”

“In the fortress,” he said. “Somewhere no one thought to look while every eye was on the breach.”

I looked at the body. The open crypt. The black mouth of the stairwell.