Page 98 of Beds and Blades

My stomach dropped hard, and every muscle in my back locked at once.

“She knows you have come,” it said. The voice was patient and dry and entirely calm, and that calm was the worst thing about it. “Morvanna knows. She has known since the moment you crossed. You imagine you have hidden inside that little fort with your soldier and his ring. You have hidden nothing. She is patient. She is very patient. And she is looking for you.”

My body went cold before my brain caught up. For one terrible second, I could not move. My fingers tightened around the broken pieces of my glasses until the cracked lens bit into my palm.

This fear was different. Colder.

The sellsword had scared me because he was close, armed, and real. The vampire scared me because it was dead, patient, and speaking of me as if I were already being hunted.

Then I took a deep breath. It gave me one clear second to gather the scattered pieces of myself and stack them into something that could pass for courage.

“Then she can keep looking!” I yelled. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.

“You think the ring protects you,” it said.

I looked down at the glowing ring on my finger.

“Nothing can protect you from Morvanna.” The red points drifted a fraction closer to the edge of the light. “Join the dark bond. It is far more satisfying than the claiming bond. Mira knew this.”

It had come too far to say it.

Only a little. A hand’s breadth too far, reaching toward the place where the sun fell. There was a sound like bacon dropped on a hot pan. Thin gray smoke lifted off the edge of the shape. The red eyes flinched back. In that flinch, in that one bad decision it had made by leaning into the light to frighten me, Flavia moved.

She threw her sword. The blade vanished into the dark, and the vampire recoiled from it. Then her bow was up, and she was firing, fast and flat, arrow after arrow into the dark after the retreating red, driving it back.

“Gaius!” she yelled.

He was already moving. He went into the dark, low and hard with the hook in both hands. For a second, he disappeared.

Then something inside the ruin shrieked. The hook made a sound I felt more than heard. Iron biting through old flesh, catching bone, then wrenching through it with a wet, cracking scrape that turned my stomach inside out. Gaius roared and pulled.

There was one final snap.

The vampire’s head rolled out of the dark, torn free and tumbling across the threshold into the sunlight.

The faint sizzling I had heard before became violent. Smoke poured from its skin. The red eyes flared once, then collapsed into black. Fire raced across the cheek, the jaw, and the open mouth, consuming flesh and hair in seconds. When the flames guttered out, there was nothing but a blackened skull.

Gaius came back out into the sun, blood clinging to the curve of the hunter’s hook. He did not say anything. He looked at the place where the eyes had been, then at me, then wiped the hook clean with the same grim resolve he had brought to killing the thing.

***

The girl was still on the ground when Flavia reached her. She dropped to one knee, cut the bindings, and eased the gag from her mouth, talking low and steady.

“It is all right,” Flavia said. “You are all right. We have you. No one is taking you anywhere.”

The girl tried to answer, but the first sound that came out of her was not a word. It was small and broken and frightened, and it made Flavia’s face go very still.

“Do not force it,” Flavia said. “Breathe first.”

The girl breathed. Badly. In little broken pulls that caught halfway in her chest.

I crouched nearby, moving slowly enough that she could see every inch of it.

“Hi,” I said, which was possibly the stupidest opening available, but my brain had apparently decided this was not a moment for speeches. “You are safe now. I know that probably sounds inaccurate, given the extremely persuasive evidence of the last several minutes, but you are in fact safe.”

Her eyes flicked to me. Then to Flavia. Then back toward the ruin.

“No,” Flavia said gently. “Do not look there. Look at me.”