She Runs

Without warning, Vanya bolted.

She didn't go for Victor—that would be suicide. She shot straight for the side door to the bathroom. The first servant—a man in plain clothes with dull gray eyes—had barely poked his head in when Vanya drove her elbow straight into his throat. He dropped without a sound.

The second man, guarding the hallway, went for his gun at once. Vanya slid across the wood floor, caught his ankle, and swept his legs out from under him. She snatched a metal letter opener off a decorative table in the hallway and drove it straight into his kneecap, completely taking away any chance of him chasing her.

Nobody raised an alarm. Nobody shouted. The castle simply let her go, the way a held breath lets go, and somehow that was worse than being chased.

The whole thing took barely three seconds. Vanya raced down the long, cavernous hallway of the old castle toward the early light spilling through the wide iron archway.

The hallway went on and on. Portraits in heavy gold frames lined both walls, men and women in the clothes of a dozen centuries, and every one of them had the same pale, still face. She didn't let herself look at their eyes.

A staircase. She took it three steps at a time. It felt longer going down than it had any right to be, as if the house were quietly adding steps below her feet, and her lungs burned by the time her bare soles hit stone.

She burst out into a courtyard. There was a fountain at its center, and the water in it had frozen in the act of falling, a hundred glassy threads hanging in midair above the basin, catching the gray light. She didn't stop to wonder at it. She ran past it, and it made a faint, high chiming as she went by, like wind in glass.

She ran.

The strength of the vampire blood running in her veins let her legs fly like the wind. She smashed the lock on a side gate and sprinted out onto the freezing asphalt road that ran through the pine woods of suburban New York.

She was barefoot. She only realized it when she saw the blood on the snow behind her, small bright prints spaced out like a trail of dropped coins. Her feet should have been screaming. She couldn't feel them at all, only a humming warmth that rose up through her shins, and that frightened her more than the pain would have.

One mile. The early-winter cold stabbed into her lungs.

The pines closed in on both sides, black and silent, and the road ran on between them like a gray ribbon someone had dropped and never come back for.

Two miles. The thin shirt whipped in the wind, and the cold cut into her pale skin, but she didn't stop. Humiliation and hatred kept her legs moving. She had to get away from him. She had to get back to Aegis.

The three-mile mark.

CRACK!

A horrific pain, like thousands of red-hot needles stabbing through her heart and organs, exploded without the slightest warning.

It started under her breastbone and went everywhere at once, into her fingers, her teeth, the soles of her bleeding feet. It felt as if every drop of blood in her body had turned around at the same moment and tried to swim back the way it had come.

Vanya stopped short. Every muscle in her body seized violently. The blood in her veins seemed to boil, surging backward against every law of biology. She collapsed onto the gravel shoulder of the road, both arms wrapped around her chest, down on her knees.

She tried to stand. Her legs folded. She tried again, and got as far as one knee, and the road tilted up under her like the deck of a ship.

"Hkk... ugh..."

Vanya opened her mouth, and a mouthful of bitter fresh blood surged up from her throat and spattered across the dry leaves on the roadside. The old wound had nothing to do with this pain; it came from the backlash of the Blood Bond itself, now that the distance between her and Victor had gone past its limit.

She lay sprawled on the ground, her whole body shaking, her vision blurring from the pain. Victor hadn't needed to chase her down or lock her up by force—the cruel law of this world, the "ghostly blood thread" he had planted inside her, was chaining her in place.

Somewhere past the pain, a cold, calm part of her mind laid out the facts like cards on a table. She couldn't run. She couldn't call Aegis, because someone inside Aegis had sent four men and a truck full of C4 to kill her. She couldn't go home.

She had nowhere at all to go, and the only thing in the world tied to her now was him.

Unhurried footsteps sounded on the asphalt.

Victor appeared out of the thick fog. He walked toward her, but he was in no rush at all. He didn't pin her down by force, didn't pick her up, didn't even reach out to touch her shaking body.

The snow drifting down seemed to stop falling around him. She saw, with a strange, distant clarity, that not one flake had settled on his shoulders, or his hair, or his bare hands.

He kept his distance, the way Martha had once kept hers on the stairs, as if he had all the time in the world and none of it mattered unless she chose to use it.

Victor stopped and crouched on the side of the road, keeping exactly six feet between himself and Vanya's collapsed body. He laced his fingers together and watched her calmly, the way you might watch a child who had just fallen while trying to run away.

Vanya used the last of her strength to lift her head, drenched in sweat and blood. Her pale gray eyes blazed with the most primal fire of hatred as she bit down hard on her bloody lip:

Her voice cracked on the words. She hated that it cracked. She said them anyway, because they were the only thing she had left that was entirely hers.

"I'm going to kill you... Hck... Not today. But I... I am going to kill you..."

Victor looked deep into those defiant eyes. Without a trace of anger or mockery, he just nodded slightly, and his deep voice rang out:

"I know."

Before Vanya could react or spit out another curse, Victor stepped forward. He slid his arms under her back and knees and scooped her bloody, shaking body up off the ice-cold asphalt.

He carried her the way he had carried her out of the garage. She remembered that, and hated that she remembered it.

WHOOSH!

A sound like an engine tearing through the wind roared up out of nowhere, but there was no car.

There was only wind, and the terrible, weightless feeling of being carried by something that did not need the ground.

Vanya's heart gave a terrified lurch as gravity vanished completely from under her feet. For one brief moment, everything around her—the asphalt road, the pine woods, the dawn fog—blurred into gray streaks rushing backward at an inhuman speed. The early-winter wind cut straight into her face like sharp knives, forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut, her lungs choking from the sudden change in air pressure.

It was the first time in her life that a rigorously trained mortal killer like her had known what it was to truly "fly"—to move at the absolute speed of an Ancient vampire. There was no sound of feet hitting the ground, no shaking of machinery, only the wind screaming in her ears and Victor's chest, hard as solid rock, holding her close as they covered three miles in the space of a few thoughts.

The world came back in pieces. First the cold. Then the smell of woodsmoke. Then his arms, which had not tightened once the whole way, holding her as carefully as a man carries a bowl filled to the brim.

The dizziness made Vanya's vision swim. When the air stopped tearing at her and gravity came back, she found herself lying on a warm leather sofa inside the castle's great room. The backlash of the Blood Bond eased at once as the distance between them closed.

The great room was vast and dim, lined with books from floor to ceiling. As they came through the doors, the fire in the enormous stone hearth caught by itself with a soft, rushing breath, and the light jumped up the walls and found her face as if it had been waiting for her.

Victor stepped back two paces, as calm as ever, without a single quickened breath after that impossible burst of speed.

There was a single bright drop of her blood on the white cuff of his shirt. She watched him notice it. He looked at it for a moment, the way someone looks at a word in a language they used to speak, and then he tucked the cuff out of sight.

He unhurriedly lifted a plate from the silver tray on the table, the food still steaming, and set it gently on the oak table within reach of her shaking hand.

It was chicken soup, and a plate of baked sweet potatoes split open and steaming, with butter melting into them. Martha's food. Exactly the way Martha had made it.

"Eat first."