The Butler Knocks Twice

Two soft knocks broke through the tension in the room. A middle-aged man stepped in. He wore the proper gray waistcoat of an old-fashioned butler, his hair combed so precisely not a strand was out of place, his ash-colored eyes cold but his smile so polite it was suspicious.

Vanya's eyes went to his feet first, then his hands, then the door behind him. He had crossed the threshold without a sound, on a floor that had creaked under her own weight an hour ago.

"Good morning, Miss Vanya," he said, bowing at exactly 45 degrees. "The name is Aldric. It is an honor to welcome a 'guest of the House.'"

Guest of the House. A cruel, sugar-coated phrase for a prisoner. Aldric never used the word "I," and he always spoke with absolute deference toward Victor.

Aldric came closer to clean up the broken crystal on the floor. For one brief moment, as he reached out, he pulled the black leather glove off his right hand to pick up the sharpest shard.

Vanya's pupils contracted.

Under the glove, instead of mortal skin or a vampire's pallor, was a patchwork surface of countless gray scales, hard as stone and crisscrossed with purple-black veins that crawled and twisted. He carried some kind of curse or a brutal biological mutation. Aldric put the glove back on at once, so fast that without eyesight sharpened by something demonic, she would have thought it was a hallucination.

"The guest will forgive the sight," Aldric said without looking up, sliding the glove back over his fingers as smoothly as a magician putting away a card. "Old wounds are not always polite."

"How long does this Blood Bond last?" Vanya ignored Aldric and fixed her eyes straight on Victor.

"Nine days," Victor said, leaning back against the edge of the oak desk. "Over the next nine days, the ancient blood in your body will fully dissolve and settle and transform your immune system. After nine days, the Blood Bond will loosen its limit on its own, and you can go anywhere you want."

"And you'll just let me walk out," Vanya said.

"I won't have to let you," Victor said. "That's rather the point."

Nine days. A countdown clock officially started ticking in Vanya's head.

She could feel it, she realized. Not the numbers, but the thread itself, a faint pull under her breastbone that grew stronger when he walked away and eased, very slightly, when he was near. It was like a second pulse that wasn't hers.

When Aldric quietly withdrew and pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind him, the two of them were alone in the room.

Vanya suddenly remembered the moment in the underground garage—when Victor said, "It wasn't me," and his throat didn't tighten at all.

A killer's quick mind let her string the facts together: the Blood Bond ran both ways. If pain could bounce back at 30 percent, then lies... would be punished by the blood itself.

She walked up to the desk, braced both hands on the wood, and leaned her face in close to Victor's.

"Tell me, Victor Blackwood," she said, dropping her voice low like a psychological interrogation. "The law of this blood... says you can't lie to someone who carries the Blood Bond, doesn't it?"

Victor's black eyes blinked slowly. He didn't deny it, and his throat was completely relaxed.

Vanya's lip curled. For the first time since she woke up, she felt like she had the upper hand.

"Good," she said through her teeth, firing off questions like bullets: "How old are you, monster?"

"Nine hundred and fourteen," Victor answered at once. There wasn't a trace of tightness in his throat.

She had expected a lie, or a joke, or a number that sounded like one. She tried to picture 914 years, and her mind simply slid off it, the way a boot slides on black ice.

"How many people have you killed in the past nine centuries?"

"More than the number of people you've met in your entire life," he said, his voice cruelly matter-of-fact. No pain tore at his larynx.

"Do you remember them?" she asked.

"Every one," Victor said. It came out quiet and flat, and his throat stayed perfectly still.

"Next question," Vanya said, leaning in closer, her eyes glittering with disgust mixed with an intense curiosity:

"Did you enjoy wearing that wrinkled old-lady mask, playing a poor little old woman to fool a human being? Did it give you a thrill?"

Victor paused for a brief beat. He looked straight into her burning gray eyes, and the words came out slowly:

"No. It was repulsive. But it was the only way to keep you from getting blown up along with that building on the very first day."

His throat was completely calm. He was telling the truth.

The feeling of being pushed into a winning position, and the craving to rip away every layer of disguise from the man in front of her, pushed Vanya over the safe line. She stared at his angular, pale face, so perfect it was unnatural. A question far too private, far too naked, slipped out of her mouth:

"Do you still remember... what your real face, your very first face, looked like?"

The library fell into absolute silence.

The ticking of the old grandfather clock in the corner seemed to hammer straight on her eardrums. The flames in the fireplace suddenly wavered.

Victor didn't answer right away. He sat as still as a boulder worn down by time. His black eyes looked straight through Vanya, out into the formless void of hundreds of years of the past—where his very first memories had been burned to ash by time and by countless transformations.

The fire in the hearth sank lower while he sat there, as if it were listening too. Every candle in the room leaned toward him and held still.

He was silent for a long time. His hands, clasped on his thigh, tightened slightly.

And then he spoke. A single word, deep, broken, and carrying a crushing loneliness:

"No."

His throat was completely calm. No tightening. No pain.

It was the truth. He had lived too long, worn too many faces, and changed into too many shapes, until he himself had forgotten the original form his parents had given him 900 years ago.

Vanya thought, suddenly and against her will, of her own mother. She had been very small when they took her, and whatever face had come before that was gone, burned away by 18 winters of snow and numbers.

She didn't remember her mother's face either. She had never said that out loud to anyone, and she was not going to start now, with him.

The two of them fell silent.

The clock ticked. The fire muttered to itself in the grate, and neither of them moved.

Vanya's upper hand vanished at once. She realized she had just stepped, without meaning to, on the deepest hidden wound inside this immortal creature. She took a step back, didn't say another word, and turned and walked quickly back to the bedroom.

That night, Vanya lay in the huge velvet bed, staring blankly up at the 13-foot ceiling. The pain of her cracked hand and the exhaustion pulled her down into a deep sleep.

As she lay down, the candles on the mantel dimmed one by one without anyone touching them, until only a single small flame was left burning by the door, the way someone might leave a light on in the hall for a child who is afraid of the dark.

And then the dream came.

But it held none of the bitter white snow of the Siberian Shadow training camp, and none of the gunfire or sulfur stink of the C4 blast.

In Vanya's subconscious, she found herself standing inside a damp, dark 14th-century stone house. The smell of rotting straw mixed with sickness and death flooded her nose. Outside the window, a funeral bell tolled in slow, mournful strokes over a town collapsing under the Black Death.

She looked down at her hands—hands without the scars of guns and bullets. In front of her was a thin woman in coarse black mourning clothes, sobbing her heart out beside the body of a child who had died of the plague.

Vanya felt it—so clearly she couldn't breathe: the feeling of the bones of her face shifting. The feeling of the skin and flesh on the outside warping and changing shape into the face of the dead child, just so the broken mother could see her child one last time before she closed her eyes.

A pain and a loneliness beyond anything flooded her chest.

She walked out of the stone house into the street. Snow lay deep and blue under a heavy sky, and the roofs of the village leaned together like tired shoulders, and at the edge of it all stood a church tower she had seen before, hanging on a wall at the end of a long, dark hallway.

Every window in the village was dark except one. She stood in the snow and looked at it, a single warm square of light, and felt a grief so old it had no name left, the grief of someone who has forgotten what the person inside that window looked like.

Vanya jolted awake.

Cold sweat drenched her back. She sat bolt upright, her chest heaving hard in the dark.

The ruthless Blood Bond bound more than her life and the distance between their bodies. It was opening a two-way door—pouring the memories, the pain, and the dark dreams of Victor Blackwood's 900 years straight into her mind.