Blood Into Blood

In barely two seconds, three options appeared and flashed through Victor's mind:

He did the arithmetic anyway, because he had always been a creature of arithmetic. The numbers did not care in the least what he wanted.

But the third option was madness and absolutely forbidden.

It was a serious violation of the Supreme Law of the Council of Five Houses: Never grant the Bloodline to a mortal without consent. On top of that, in all of history, no Ancient vampire had ever used his own pure blood to save the life of a killer who had been born to hunt his kind.

The last Ancient who had given his blood to an unwilling mortal had been brought before the Council in 1703. They had chained him to the roof of a church in Lyon and let the sunrise have him, slowly, over the course of a summer morning. Victor had been in the crowd. He remembered the smell for a century.

Victor chose the third option without stopping to wonder why.

For 900 years, he had survived on cold calculation, always putting his own survival above everything, but in these two seconds, every rule and every scrap of reason he had collapsed completely. He chose to save her.

Victor lunged forward and dropped to one knee on the bloody concrete.

He lifted his left forearm to his mouth and bit down hard on his wrist with his own razor-sharp fangs. The pale skin split open, and ancient blood poured out, thick and a strange dark red, rising in scalding steam.

"Open," he said through his teeth, one hand gripping Vanya's chin, forcing her mouth open.

Her teeth closed on nothing. Her jaw was weak as a child's under his hand, and still she fought it, and he had never admired anyone more than he did in that second, holding her down and forcing his blood between her lips.

Vanya tried to fight him with the last bit of strength she had. She turned her face away, her glassy eyes blazing with total disgust at the supernatural creature in front of her, because she had seen death coming and was ready to face it. But Victor didn't give her a choice. He held her jaw tight, tilted his wrist, and let the scalding blood spill over her lips.

The ancient blood ran straight down Vanya's throat. It was bitter, heavy with the taste of metal, and hot as churning lava, burning every inch of the lining of her throat. At the same time, on the cold concrete floor, Vanya's own bright red blood was still pumping out of the wound in her belly and mixing with the drops of Victor's blood falling beside it.

He could feel her swallowing. Weakly, against her will, the way a drowning body takes in water. Each swallow pulled at something deep in his wrist, as if she were drawing on a thread that ran all the way up his arm and into his chest.

The moment the two bloods met—mortal blood flowing out and vampire blood flowing in—a strange and violent biological, spiritual phenomenon erupted.

CRACK!

A jolt like thousands of volts of electricity hit both of them straight in the nerve centers and the chest.

Victor's heart, frozen for nine centuries, gave one violent lurch, as painful as an iron spike driven through it. An invisible thread, transparent but strong as a steel chain, pierced out of nowhere straight through his chest and bound his soul directly to the mind of the woman lying beneath him.

The Blood Bond had officially formed. A cruel, fated tie he had never seen coming.

It did not feel like magic. It felt like a hook set under his breastbone, fine and cold and absolutely certain, with a line running out from it into the dark. At the other end of the line, very faintly, something tugged back.

Every ancient text he had ever read described the Blood Bond as a chain. None of them had mentioned that it would hurt like this, or that the hurt would feel so much like being found.

Vanya came to for exactly two seconds.

Her pupils contracted, and her pale gray eyes briefly got their sharpness back. She opened her eyes wide and looked straight into the pale, angular, cruelly perfect face of Victor Blackwood—the man who had just stepped out of Martha's shell.

In those two brief seconds, Victor waited for fear. He waited for the horror of a mortal realizing that a demonic monster was forcing life on her.

But what rose in Vanya's gray eyes had nothing to do with fear.

It was betrayal.

A deep, sour pain and disappointment blazed in her eyes before her eyelids fell and she passed out completely in his arms.

"Hate me later," Victor said to her quietly, though she could no longer hear him. "Live first."

That look brought Victor down harder than any silver weapon or any magic Aegis had.

He had been shot 209 times. He had been stabbed, burned, hanged once for an afternoon in Prague, and staked twice by men who did not know where the heart was. None of it had landed like that look.

Pain, he understood. Pain passed. This felt like something that would stay.

He stood frozen in the wreckage, his chest throbbing again and again. He understood the bitter meaning of that look: a person could only feel betrayed if they had once given their trust. Vanya hadn't trusted anyone in all the years since Volkov took her away to be trained, but she had set aside one small corner of her broken heart to trust Martha. And he had smashed that one piece of trust with his own hands.

The black smoke from the blast began to thin.

Victor quietly bent down, slid his arms under Vanya's back and knees, and gathered her weightless body up. The wound in her lower belly was closing on its own at an astonishing speed under the vampire blood, leaving a faint, flat scar.

Sirens were rising in the distance, three or four of them, their wails braiding together over the rooftops of Queens. Doors were opening upstairs. Someone was shouting a name, and a baby had started to cry.

He carried her out through the service exit at the back of the garage and up the alley, keeping to the shadows under the fire escapes. A man in a bathrobe standing on his stoop with a phone to his ear looked right at them. Victor met his eyes for half a second, and the man turned away and went back inside, and would never be able to say afterward what he had seen.

He walked out of the underground garage and set her in the passenger seat of the Blackwood car that was already waiting on a hidden corner.

He buckled her in. His hands were shaking so badly that it took him three tries to fit the metal tongue into the clasp, and he, who had once disarmed a man with a saber in the dark, had to stop and breathe before the fourth.

Victor hit the gas and sent the car tearing into the thick fog of New York City at first light.

The city was waking up around them. Bodega shutters rattled up. A bakery truck idled at a curb with its back doors open, spilling warm yellow light and the smell of bread onto the frozen street. On the Hudson, the first gray light of morning lay on the water like a sheet of tin.

She slept against the passenger door with her head tipped toward the window, her face ashen, her breath fogging a small circle on the glass. Every few seconds, Victor looked away from the road to make sure the circle was still there.

He drove north out of the city and into the hills, where the trees were black and the snow on the shoulders of the road had not yet been touched by anyone. He did not turn on the radio. He had the feeling that any sound at all would be too much.

On the steering wheel, Victor's fingers suddenly trembled. He rolled down the window and took a long, deep breath of freezing air, but the roar of the engine was not what he heard.

Inside his chest, right beside the slow beat of his own heart, a second heartbeat was pounding fast.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

It was weak, but clear and utterly real. It was Vanya's heartbeat—the woman lying unconscious beside him. Through the Blood Bond, he could feel every beat, every breath, and every wave of pain and hatred churning in her unconscious mind.

It was the loneliest sound he had ever heard, and somehow the least lonely. Somewhere behind him in the dark, the old laws of his kind were already waking up, and they would not care at all what it had felt like.

Victor gripped the wheel, eyes fixed on the endless road ahead, his heart full of a cold bitterness.

He had just done something that could never be undone: he had bound his own immortality to a killer full of hatred and signed his own death warrant.