The Excuse

The ninth day of the Blood Bond began with a sharp crack of breaking glass on the ground floor.

The crystal glass hit the granite floor and shattered into dozens of clear shards. Water splashed everywhere and soaked into the antique woven rug, leaving a cold, damp patch behind.

Vanya stood frozen beside the round table in the corner of the dining room. Her right arm was shaking in waves—far beyond the faint tremor of exhaustion or sleeplessness, it was a mechanical spasm rising from deep in her spinal cord. All 10 of her fingertips were stiff and had completely lost their sense of touch. When she tried to curl her fingers to hold the glass, the nerves in her forearm didn't respond at all.

Her vision blurred. The patches of light and shadow in the dining room began to sway, and the lines of the vaulted ceiling broke and smeared into dull gray streaks. A wave of dizziness shot straight up into her brain, carrying a primal craving, scalding and clawing, like thousands of needles stabbing into the back of her throat.

Her body was making demands.

To be more precise, Victor's demonic blood running through her circulatory system was starting to rebel. The Blood Bond was no longer an invisible thread pinning two lives together; it had turned into a greedy parasite that had started gnawing at every one of her mortal cells, demanding more energy.

SHHK.

A cold hand swept the shards of glass aside on the floor. Victor had appeared beside her without her noticing when. He hadn't used his phantom speed; he had simply walked over at an easy pace, holding an antique silver tray. On the tray sat a round crystal glass filled with a thick, dark red liquid that gave off a thin, cold mist.

"Drink," Victor said. His voice was deep and empty of emotion, but the faint shadows under his black eyes told the same story: the Blood Bond was weighing on his nervous system too.

Vanya looked at the glass. She clenched her teeth and tried to knock it away with her shaking arm, but the push was so weak her hand only brushed the sleeve of his suit.

"I... don't..." she whispered, her throat so dry it came out as a choked moan.

"Stop being as stubborn as a child," Victor said with a frown, his voice hardening. He reached out and grabbed the back of her neck, using just enough force to hold her head tilted back, and pressed the rim of the crystal glass to Vanya's cracked, dry lips.

The red liquid flooded her mouth. It was as cold as melting glacier ice, heavy with the taste of iron and the faintly bitter scent of ancient blood. Vanya swallowed out of a survival reflex. The first gulp. The second gulp. She gulped down mouthful after mouthful, hoping the icy flow would put out the fire burning through the nerves in her chest.

But five seconds went by. Then 10 seconds.

The fire didn't go out. The spasms in her forearm didn't stop. If anything, they flared even harder. Her stomach clenched violently, refusing to take in the liquid from the glass.

HURK!

Vanya shoved the glass away, doubled over the edge of the table, and threw up every drop of the dark red liquid onto the silver tray. The cold blood sat there in lifeless drops, completely unable to mix into her body.

"It failed," Victor said, looking at the tray, his eyes darkening.

That was the first method: Fresh blood poured into a glass. The Blood Bond rejected it. Once the demonic blood left his living body, even for a few seconds, it lost the "life force" it needed to soothe the bond. It turned into a dead liquid.

Victor didn't give up. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her hard toward the small dining room—where a fire was blazing in the hearth. He pressed her down into a leather armchair, then walked quickly to an antique glass cabinet and took out a silver medical needle kit and a glass vacuum tube.

The second method: Draw the blood directly with medical equipment and transfuse it straight into her vein.

Victor drove the large silver needle into the vein of his own wrist. The dark red blood immediately ran down the rubber tube and straight into the vein of Vanya's forearm. He calculated every milliliter precisely, pinning her arm to the armrest so the vein wouldn't burst.

The blood flowed into her. Vanya let out a small moan, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. But after only three seconds, the skin around the needle began to blister, and her veins swelled up like twisted dark purple ropes. Her mortal cells were rejecting blood that came through a middleman device. The blood couldn't recognize its "recipient" without the contact of heat and the biological field between two bodies.

Victor pulled the needle out at once. Blood sprayed a thin streak across the oak floor.

The third method: Use Blood Craft to force the blood to transform in the air.

Victor cut a long line across his palm, then held his bloody hand two inches from the left side of Vanya's chest. He closed his eyes and summoned the ancient demonic energy to turn the blood into a fine mist that would soak straight through the skin of her chest. But the moment the red mist touched Vanya's pale skin, a high-voltage current shot back through the Blood Bond and threw them both apart at the same time. Victor staggered back two steps and slammed his back into the edge of the dining table, while Vanya collapsed onto the rug, her whole body shaking wildly.

Three indirect methods. Three rational attempts to keep a safe distance between two creatures. All three had failed miserably.

Victor stood still in the middle of the dining room, looking at the drops of extracted blood decaying on the silver tray. For the first time, a cold doubt rose in the mind of the 900-year-old vampire: The family's ancient books were wrong.

For centuries, the written records of the Blackwood line had always insisted that the Blood Bond was only a kind of liquid link that could be regulated or soothed by indirect extraction.

He had read those pages a hundred times over the centuries. He could see the ink now without opening the books, the confident Latin, the careful diagrams of veins and bowls and silver funnels, all written by men who had never once in their long lives let a mortal touch their skin.

But Victor saw the brutal truth behind those ancient texts: not one of the Purebloods of earlier generations had ever lowered himself to truly touch a mortal.

The arrogance of the demonic elite had always made them look down on humans, treating mortals as lower creatures not worth touching. All the laws for breaking the bond written in those books... turned out to be nothing but empty theory they had guessed at in their arrogance.

The truth in front of him was far harsher. The Blood Bond didn't work like an ordinary blood debt. It was a primal binding. And a sudden thought ate into Victor's mind, carrying a suffocating sense of threat: He and she might stay bound together like this for the rest of their lives.

But he had no time to think about it.

Vanya was convulsing on the floor. Her skin had gone ashen, every band of muscle was twitching nonstop, and through the bond, Victor could feel her life fading at a terrifying rate. Her heartbeat was cramping, weak as a candle in a storm.

She's dying.

The thought dealt a fatal blow to Victor's reason. Primal panic—something he'd thought he had lost eight centuries ago—flared up and burned away every bit of his calm. He couldn't let her die. He couldn't watch this unbreakable fire of life go out.

As for Vanya, in the middle of the blood fever burning through her brain, she could feel death touching the back of her neck too. Her body was collapsing, her internal organs felt as if they were being burned from the inside. In the utter despair of a creature standing on the edge of dissolving, she no longer thought about pride or hatred.

The air in the dining room thickened. The POP of a log in the fireplace sounded like a slap, tearing through the forced silence.

Vanya lay on the rug, her skin abnormally hot, her vision turned completely into a frenzied field of red.

Victor stood in the corner of the room, his back against the edge of a cedar cabinet. His right hand was still bleeding from the cut, each drop of dark red blood hitting the stone floor with a DRIP... DRIP...

The nerve link between them was tightening like a red-hot steel wire. Through it, Victor could feel more than her pain—he could feel the maddening hunger of his own blood inside her body. It was screaming. It was demanding that he take her, pin her down, devour her to quench its thirst.

For 914 years, he had resisted every animal instinct. He had lived like a cold block of limestone, playing the elegant aristocrat, the patient observer. But now the reaction of the Blood Bond, along with his most basic desires, was smashing that whole mask to pieces.

The muscles in Victor's face contracted violently. His black eyes turned blazing red—the primal red of a Pureblood vampire. The muscles under his suit strained so hard they tore the seams. He was shaking. An Ancient vampire was trembling just from trying to keep his own feet from walking toward a mortal assassin.

"Don't... come near me..." Vanya said through her teeth, her voice rough. She tried to push herself back toward the stone wall with both hands, but her legs had lost all their strength.

But she herself—the one who had just said no—was the first to lose control.

Her mind was swallowed by the blood fever. The toughness of a Siberian Shadow killer crumbled before a ruthless biological need. She no longer saw a 900-year-old enemy. All she could feel was that before she died, she had to do something to satisfy her heart.