The Cold Returns

Vanya stopped short on the 13th step. The heavy sound of metal being dragged across the basement floor was still rising up through the rough stone

scrrr... drag... scrrr…

Every sound seemed to shake her spinal cord directly. Her hand clamped down on the cedar railing, and her killer's instinct threw off every trace of exhaustion and focused all her lethal intent on the sealed iron door at the end of the pitch-dark hallway.

She laid her palm flat against the wall beside her. The stone was trembling, very faintly, the way a table trembles when a heavy truck goes by outside.

She pulled the cloak tight around her and put her weight on her bare feet to go down. But she hadn't gone two steps—

"Miss Vanya."

A tall, thin figure, silent as a ghost, stepped out of the dark corner of the hallway. Sebastian the butler stood there holding a brass storm lantern that gave off a murky yellow light. His aged face was lost in shadow, smooth and still without a ripple.

He had the same unhurried stillness as the servants she had seen crossing the far ends of galleries, the stillness of someone who had long ago stopped expecting to be surprised by anything.

"It is not yet light. The master asked that you stay in your room and rest," Sebastian said, tilting his head, his voice deep and so proper it was chilling.

Vanya narrowed her eyes, her stare cold and sharp as a blade pinned straight on him: "What's down there?"

"Only the castle's underground water pipes and its ancient mechanical gears," Sebastian answered without a beat of delay, without blinking.

"When cold fog rolls in from the valley, the change in air pressure knocks the brass pressure valves out of line. The castle has run this way for many centuries. There is nothing for you to be concerned about."

"The castle is very old, miss," Sebastian added. "Old houses make old noises. It is best not to listen to them too closely at night."

Vanya stared into the old butler's eyes. She knew perfectly well he was lying with a flawless script that had been prepared hundreds of years ago. But a sudden stab of pain in her temple and a vague exhaustion creeping through her muscles kept her from pressing further. She cursed her own carelessness under her breath, then turned and climbed back up the stairs.

The next three days passed in a strange, careful truce.

On the first evening, just after sunset, she went down to the courtyard with a length of ash wood she had pried off a broken chair and began to work through the forms she had learned in the snow. Strike, turn, drop, rise. The fog swallowed the walls around her, and the frozen fountain chimed softly every time she moved past it.

She knew he was watching before she saw him. The thread under her breastbone always told her. He stood in the arched gallery above the courtyard with his hands in his pockets, a darker shape in the dark.

"Your left side," he said eventually. "You keep it back, as if you're protecting something."

"I am," Vanya said, without stopping. "My liver."

"You fight like someone who expects to lose the first blow and win the second." He came down the stone steps, unhurried. "Against my kind, there is no second."

She swung at his head without warning. He wasn't there. She felt the air move behind her, turned, swung again, and he stepped inside the arc of it as easily as stepping through a doorway, so close she could see the frost forming on his lashes.

On the 11th try, the end of the stick caught his cheekbone and split the skin. They both stopped.

A thin line of dark blood welled up and then, as she watched, sealed itself shut. On her own cheek, in exactly the same place, she felt a small, sharp sting.

"Thirty percent," Victor said, almost gently. He looked at her for a long moment. "Again?"

"Again," Vanya said.

Later, when her shoulders were burning and the fog had turned to a fine, freezing mist, he reached out and touched her wrist to correct the angle of it. The needles came at once, cold and bright under her skin, and she flinched hard.

He took his hand away immediately. He didn't ask. He stepped back two paces and waited.

She stood there breathing, the stick hanging from her fingers. Then she held her wrist out to him, very slowly, the way you might offer your hand to a dog that has bitten someone before. "Show me."

He did. He touched her only with the tips of two fingers, as lightly as if she were made of paper, and he moved her wrist into place and let go. It hurt. She let him do it anyway.

On the third night, she found him in the underground library, a long, low room beneath the great hall where the air was dry and smelled of dust and old glue. Books were stacked on every surface around him in unsteady towers, and he was reading three of them at once.

She took one off the nearest pile without asking. It was in Russian, a 19th-century treatise on the anatomy of the blood, and she sat down on the floor with her back against a shelf and read it by candlelight while he read beside her. Neither of them spoke for two hours.

"The painting," she said finally, without looking up. "Where is that village?"

He was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn't answer. "I don't know," he said. "I've been looking for it for 400 years. I think I was born there, but I'm not sure."

His throat didn't tighten. She had known it wouldn't. She turned a page she hadn't read and kept her eyes on it, and for some reason she couldn't name, her own throat felt tight instead.

But on the fourth day—only four short days after the frenzied night in the dining room—a cruel reality dealt a fatal blow.

The Blood Bond's nine-day cycle had been cut abnormally short. Vanya had no idea that the "Frost Antibody" cells inside her body were burning the demonic blood like mad to flush it out, making her energy drain twice as fast.

That afternoon, as she was walking down the sloping hallway toward the library, Vanya's vision suddenly went black. There wasn't a single warning sign. Her legs stopped short, all the strength drained out of her skeleton at once, and she collapsed onto the cold granite floor.

It felt like a hand reaching inside her and switching something off. The floor tilted. She put out an arm to catch herself and the arm wasn't there, and the cold granite came up and met her cheek with a flat, final sound.