Going Gray

Toxic smoke curled like gray ghosts, drifting around the blackened steel frame of the pickup truck that had just been blown apart. The stench of sulfur, burning plastic, and spent gasoline rose thick and choking, strangling what little air there was in the cramped underground garage.

Victor stood motionless in the middle of the wreckage. Strips of Martha's charred skin fell to the concrete like shaved candle wax, revealing the pale, flawless, cold skin of an Ancient vampire. The monstrous force of the shock wave he had taken while shielding Vanya with his body, on top of dropping his Blood Armor so suddenly, left every cell in his body screaming.

But he didn't care about his own pain at all. His eyes took in nothing but the woman standing in front of him.

A jagged piece of the truck's frame was still lodged under his left collarbone. He reached up, closed his fingers around it, and pulled it free without looking away from her. It came out with a wet sound, and the wound behind it began, slowly, to close.

Dropping the Blood Armor all at once had been like tearing off a suit of wet plaster that had grown into his skin. Everything underneath it was raw. The air itself hurt.

Vanya took a long step back. Her thin back slammed into the cold concrete support pillar with a dull thud. The pistol in her hand was aimed straight at the center of Victor's chest.

Her hand had always been a perfectly precise instrument for killing and had never wavered in front of any target, but now it was shaking hard. Her lips had gone white, and her pale gray eyes stared, glassy, in the middle of the wreckage, opened so wide they looked ready to shatter.

"What the hell is this...?"

Vanya's voice came out in broken pieces, hoarse and choked by the toxic smoke. She tried to tighten her grip on the gun, her breath coming fast and ragged, tearing at her raw throat.

"Where's Martha?! What... what did you do to her?!"

The mind of a seasoned killer ground to a complete halt in the face of this impossible reality.

She had been trained for ambushes, for torture, for betrayal. She had never been trained for grief, and she had no idea until this moment how much it could look like rage.

All the cruelty of Siberian Shadow had never taught her what to do when a 60-year-old mortal woman—someone who had just given her life to shield her—melted into a strange man right before her eyes.

Victor looked straight down the silver-loaded barrel pointed at him. His chest sank into a cold emptiness. His voice rang out—no longer Martha's soft, frail huskiness, but the deep, uncanny voice, heavy with supreme authority, of a man who had ruled for nine centuries:

It felt strange in his own throat after so long, like a coat that had been hanging in a closet for weeks. Too big, too cold, and entirely his.

"There is no Martha, Vanya."

"Don't you lie to me!" Vanya choked out, a sob of pure fury rising to block her throat. Her finger on the trigger jerked, her knuckles white from the pressure.

"She was just here! She held me... she saved me! What... what the hell are you?!"

"A vampire. An immortal. Or whatever name your Aegis likes to use in its classified files," Victor said, every word blunt and brutal, without the slightest attempt to hide anything.

The answer went through Vanya's mind like a blade of ice.

Every impossible piece of the past 19 days snapped together at a ruthless speed: the skin melting like candle wax, the crack of shifting bones, the uncanny heartbeat thudding deep through the wool sweater, the overwhelming smell of cold snow and cedarwood... and the face of the ultimate target Aegis had given her: Victor Blackwood.

The confusion and panic in her pale gray eyes vanished at once, burned away completely to make room for a dark, smoldering fire of hatred and pitiless disgust. The emotion and the tear of regret she had shed a moment ago were chopped into a thousand sour little pieces.

He watched it happen. He watched every warm thing in her face close, one after another, like shutters being pulled down along a street at night, until there was nothing left facing him but a wall.

"So... the past 19 days..."

A bitter, twisted smile tugged at Vanya's lips. She clenched her teeth, her voice shaking like a storm:

"The hot chicken soup... the baked sweet potato in the middle of a winter night... 'Thank God you're all right, sweetheart'... All of that was just a script some monster was running? You played a sweet little grandmother and stood there watching me stupidly open up, watching me believe I finally had a family... just so you could laugh at me, is that it, Victor Blackwood?!"

Victor stood as still as a carved statue in the curling smoke. For the first time in 900 years of existence, a master manipulator who had steered the fates of countless dynasties and ancient nobles found his tongue frozen solid. He couldn't spit out one more lie, and he couldn't offer any more logical cover stories. He stood in silence and took the heart-ripping fury she threw at him.

There were true things he could have said. That he had come to Queens because she was the first interesting thing to happen to him in a century. That he had stayed because of a kitchen at 3:00 a.m. and a girl named Katya. That every one of those 19 days had cost him in blood and bone, and he would have paid it again.

Every one of them would have sounded like a lie. Worse, every one of them would have sounded like an excuse. So he said nothing, which was the one thing he had never been good at.

"Answer me!" Vanya rasped, her chest heaving violently, her finger on the trigger already at the break point. "What... do you... want from me..."

"You're losing blood," Victor cut in.

His voice was still low and cold, but his eyes didn't go anywhere near the barrel aimed at his heart; they were locked on Vanya's left side.

Vanya's lip curled, a glassy haze filming over her eyes: "Don't... pull that trick..."

"Look down at your stomach," he repeated, taking one short step toward her.

The cold certainty in his eyes triggered what was left of Vanya's military instincts. She slowly lowered her head.

The black body armor along her side was soaked through, drenched in thick dark red. The fury and the pounding stress of the last few minutes had pushed her blood pressure to its peak and torn wider the wound from a sharp shard of C4 casing buried deep in her iliac artery.

It was a small wound to look at, no bigger than a coin. That was the terrible thing about arteries. They never looked like what they were.

Once the surge of fury settled for a moment, the organ-ripping pain finally exploded in earnest. It knocked out her entire exhausted nervous system.

Clatter.

The pistol slipped from Vanya's limp hand and dropped to the concrete. Her gray eyes went wide, and the hatred in them was quickly replaced by emptiness as the oxygen drained out of her brain. She slid down the concrete pillar and collapsed into the fresh blood spreading across the floor.

Victor looked at the dark red blood spreading across the floor. His black eyes gathered every bit of data at once and ran the cold math: Ninety seconds.

Bleeding at that rate from the iliac artery would drain a mortal's life in under two minutes. She would die of blood loss and shock before dawn had a chance to break.

He had watched men bleed out on battlefields across half of Europe. He knew the gray that came into the lips first, and the way the eyes lost their focus before the rest of the body understood. Her lips were already going gray.