The Shape in the Dark

A dark shape shot out of the corner of the dark hallway.

She never saw where it came from. Later, she would try to remember, and there would be nothing there.

At an impossible speed—a speed far beyond every biological limit of a human being, ripping the air apart with a sharp WHOOSH—Martha slammed straight into Vanya.

Vanya didn't even have time to see who it was. She only felt a terrifying force hit her square in the chest and throw her six feet back.

And then a body came down full on top of her on the cold concrete floor.

BOOM!

The shock wave from the C4 erupted like a wild animal breaking out of its cage. A ball of blazing orange fire tore through the air and blew the pickup truck apart into a thousand scattering pieces of metal. The concrete ceiling cracked, and brick, stone, steel, and broken glass came pouring down like a meteor shower.

The sound was too big to hear. It went into her body instead, through her ribs and teeth, and her ears filled with a high, endless whine like a wet finger on the rim of a glass.

Vanya's whole world turned pitch-black, pressed down under a crushing weight.

Six seconds.

The world around her sank into a terrifying silence. A deafening ringing drowned out every other sound. Toxic smoke and the reek of burning sulfur filled the cramped space.

Water was falling from somewhere overhead, a ruptured pipe or a sprinkler head that had half given up, pattering down on the wreckage like rain in a cave. It hissed where it touched the burning truck.

But under the layer of brick and debris, Vanya was still alive.

She lay on her back on the cold concrete, wrapped completely by another body. A thin arm, hard as steel, was locked around the back of her neck, pressing her head into the other person's chest to shield her from the pieces of metal still raining down.

The heat of the fire was burning right on that person's back, giving off the bitter stench of scorched wool.

One second.

Vanya could feel the weight of the rubble pressing down on the back of the body on top of her. That body didn't move, didn't make a sound of complaint. It was a solid shield of granite, taking every piece of debris and the full force of the shock wave in her place. The pressure of a blast that massive was enough to rupture a mortal's organs, but that back held firm like a fortress.

Her hands were trapped between their bodies. Under her palms she could feel ribs, hard and close, and a chest that did not feel old or frail at all. It felt like the flank of a statue that had been left in the sun.

Two seconds.

A strange scent reached Vanya's nose through the smoke. Nothing like cheap perfume. It smelled of old cedarwood, of cold snow, and of thick, sweet blood—a ruthless, overwhelming scent that carried absolute power.

The smell was familiar. It took her a moment to understand why. She had been breathing it for 19 days, faint and hidden underneath the lavender soap and the warm bread, and she had never once let herself notice it.

Three seconds.

Vanya's forehead was pressed tight against that chest. Through the wool sweater the fire had torn to rags, she heard a sound.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A heartbeat. A heartbeat so slow, so majestic and so strong that it shook the whole rib cage. Nothing like the frantic, frightened heartbeat of a mortal staring death in the face. This was the heartbeat of an immortal—a rhythm that had carried the fate of centuries.

She had counted thousands of heartbeats in her life, her own and other people's, through a scope, through a wall, through the thin skin of a wrist. None of them had sounded like this. This one sounded like it had all the time in the world.

Four seconds.

Vanya's body—a body that had never let anyone touch it without answering with resistance or a physical recoil—suddenly went loose. Her rigid muscles softened. For the first time in her life, the reflex that rejected skin-to-skin contact was completely gone.

There were no needles. For the first time in her life, touch arrived without the bright, cold sting that always came with it, and her nerves, confused, simply went quiet and let it in.

Her body remembered this protection. It recognized the power wrapped around it before her mind could even take shape.

Five seconds.

A trickle of warm, thick liquid dripped from that person's neck onto Vanya's cheek. She lifted a trembling finger to touch it. Blood. But that blood wasn't cold; it was scorching as lava, and it carried a kind of magic that made the cut on Vanya's cheek stop hurting without her even noticing.

Six seconds.

Vanya lay still in the cramped, pitch-dark space under that body. Her mind was empty, except for one cold, true, bitter thought rising from somewhere deep inside her:

This is the first time... anyone has ever used their own body to shield me from death.

She didn't know how long she lay there. She knew only that she did not want to move, and that she had never in her life not wanted to move.

The black smoke began to thin, revealing flickers of light from the fire still burning on the pickup's frame. The crash of falling brick and stone settled.

Vanya shoved the broken bricks off with every ounce of strength she had, gritted her teeth, and rolled out from underneath.

Her hands were slick with dust and something warmer. She didn't look at them.

Her voice was shaking—a rare tremor even she couldn't control. Panic, fear, and a sudden pain surged up in Vanya's chest and choked her throat with bitterness.

"Martha! Martha!"

She reached out frantically, and her sinewy hands, which had only ever known how to hold a knife and squeeze a trigger, shook uncontrollably as she tried to lift the thin body slumped on the ground.

In that brief moment, Vanya's mind slowed down like an old black-and-white film.

Her memories came up out of nowhere, one after another, like photographs spilling out of a box someone had dropped on the floor.

She remembered the past 19 days—the only 19 days in her life when she had lived like a normal human being. She remembered the old woman's warm, rough hand pressing a hot baked sweet potato into hers in the middle of a winter night.

She remembered the time she'd burned with fever from an old wound gone bad, and Martha had stayed up all night, gently wiping her forehead with a warm cloth and whispering: "Thank God you're all right, sweetheart."

In a whole life spent as a cold-blooded weapon for Siberian Shadow, Vanya had never known what it was like to have a mother or a grandmother. For the first time, she had tasted what it was like to be taken care of, to be worried about.

She remembered Martha teaching her to cut an onion without crying, laughing when Vanya did it faster than she did. She remembered the radio through the floor at night. She remembered falling asleep to it.

And then regret came surging up like a storm and tore her mind apart.

It was her fault. All of it was her fault. If she hadn't come back here, if she hadn't brought these killers and this disaster with her, that kind, poor old woman could have lived out the rest of her life in peace.

She had thrown herself in front of the blast for her and used the fragile body of a 60-year-old mortal to take the full force of the C4. Vanya had dragged an innocent person into this cruel death.

She had built her whole life so that nobody would ever stand close enough to be hurt by it. Six years of locks and sealed bottles and rooms with nothing in them. And in the end it had taken one old woman with a container of stew to walk straight through all of it.

"Don't... please... don't die..." Vanya's voice broke, and one hot tear, one of the rare few in her life, fell onto the streak of blood.

But Vanya's fingers stopped in midair.

Every blood vessel in her body froze.

In the flickering firelight, the shredded, charred skin on Martha's face wasn't bleeding the way it should. It was melting like candle wax held to a flame.

Crack. Crack.

The sound of bones shifting echoed, gruesome, in the dead quiet, and chopped every warm memory that had just risen in her head into a thousand pieces.

It was the sound of her own training coming apart. She had seen bodies broken in every way a body could break, and none of them had ever sounded like this, like wet wood being bent into a new shape.

The emotion, the pity, and the crushing regret in Vanya were instantly replaced by a stunned shock so total that her jaw hung open.

The person she had been holding in her arms was changing, like some strange creature reaching the season when it sheds its skin and crawls out of its old body.

The face of the 60-year-old woman was rebuilding itself. The cheekbones rose higher, the straight, razor-sharp bridge of the nose lengthened, and the body grew taller, inch by inch, under the half-burned sweater. Strips of charred skin fell away onto the concrete, revealing skin underneath as pale as ice and snow.

The snow-white hair turned jet-black and grew down to the collar.

Vanya staggered to her feet in shock and took a step back, eyes wide, her grip on the pistol so tight her knuckles went white. The trembling was gone, replaced by a cold, flesh-ripping look of murder.

Her back hit a concrete pillar. She stopped there. She raised the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel at the thing on the floor, and her hands, for the first time that night, were perfectly steady.

Hatred made them steady. It was a clean, cold, familiar feeling, and she held on to it like a railing in the dark.

The one slowly lifting his head from the ashes, with a sharp shard of metal driven through the left side of his chest and black eyes slowly turning a pitiless dark red—was none other than the target she had tried to kill 10 days ago.

Victor Blackwood.