Forty Years

Victor's keen senses caught the change in Vanya; he clearly felt her heart suddenly skip a beat and her nose keep drawing in deep breaths as if she were trying to catch the scent of something. By then, he had pulled himself together after the storm of feeling and picked up the smell of another mortal's blood right here in this room, fresh, warm, and carrying no trace of the Blood Bond.

Victor didn't move a muscle. His broad shoulders went rigid against the velvet mattress. He kept his arm wrapped around her back, but his blazing red eyes narrowed, glassy, in the dark, reflecting an invisible panic.

He knew where the smell of that blood came from, but he chose not to explain, and he didn't pull his arm away. The silence pressed down between their two bare bodies lying close together, so heavy and suffocating that even the rush of blood in their veins became a naked accusation.

Vanya quietly slipped out of his arms. She didn't ask a single question, and Victor knew she was smart enough to know that the smell of that blood was coming from his own body. She turned her back to him and pulled the dark brocade blanket up over her flushed shoulders and the purple marks on her hips. He didn't reach for her. The two of them lay there on the same black velvet bed, back to back, but between them an invisible chasm had just opened all the way.

Only when Vanya's breathing had sunk into the heavy sleep brought on by the ancient blood and her physical exhaustion did Victor quietly sit up. He pulled on his tall leather boots, threw on his dark brocade robe, and walked out of the room without making the slightest sound.

He stood by the bed for a moment before he went. She slept curled on her side with one fist pressed under her chin, the way children sleep in cold rooms, and even in sleep her jaw was clenched. He did not touch her. He did not trust himself to.

He went down to the underground vault.

The stairs went down and down, turning on themselves in the dark. The air grew colder with every turn, and damper, and at the bottom it smelled of stone that had never once seen the sun.

The sealed iron door at the end of the pitch-dark hallway had never felt so heavy. When Victor pushed lightly on the rough metal with his marble-hard hand, a rush of cold air thick with the smell of medical preservatives, industrial alcohol, and the sharp tang of iron hit his vampire nose.

There were no gears or brass pressure valves in the vault, whatever lies Aldric had spun for Vanya. It was an underground medical storage room, cruel and horrifyingly modern, hidden beneath centuries of Gothic architecture.

Gleaming stainless steel racks ran the length of the room under flickering fluorescent lights that gave off a monotonous buzz. On the shelves, 500-milliliter blood bags were carefully labeled with code numbers and lined up in neat rows inside sub-zero glass storage cases. And at the far end of the stainless steel worktables, lying flat under a thin layer of dust, were 14 files bound in dark brown leather.

At the far end of the room, the air moved.

It was faint, a thread of cold slipping across the back of his hand, and it came from the wall behind the last row of racks. Victor followed it. The wall there was built of the same rough stone as the rest of the vault, except for one tall slab near the corner, where the floor in front of it was scored with long, pale scratches. Fresh ones.

He put his palm against the slab and pushed. It moved, grinding heavily on the stone, and a breath of air rolled out from behind it that smelled of snow and pine resin and something animal, warm and musky, like the inside of a barn in winter.

Behind the slab, a tunnel ran away into the dark, rough-cut and low, sloping down and north under the mountain. He had lived in this castle for three centuries. He had never known it was there.

So this was the sound she had heard at night. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel for a long moment, listening to the silence of it, and a cold, sick thought began to take shape in him: that 14 bodies would have been very easy to carry out this way.

Victor walked over. His footsteps echoed on the cold granite floor. He reached out a slightly trembling hand and touched the first file.

Each file had a black-and-white ID photo attached. The first face—a young woman with determined eyes. The second face... the third... all the way to the 14th face. They were the same 14 faces in the Aegis mission file Vanya had brought with her—the 14 laborers who had vanished without a trace.

He made himself look at every one of them, slowly, one after another. It seemed like the very least he owed them.

Under each photo were cold medical notes: blood type, volume harvested, compatibility with vampire blood cells, and date of death. In the bottom corner of every page was a dark blue wax seal in the shape of a white lily—the exclusive traditional emblem of Aldric's family.

Victor stood frozen. His long hand slid lightly over the cold wax.

He opened the file on top. Mateo Morales, 19. Blood type O negative. The photograph was the same one Vanya had carried in her notebook, a grinning boy with a guitar strap over his shoulder.

Victor had seen that notebook. He had seen it as Martha, lying open on a kitchen table at 3:00 a.m., and he had read that name upside down and thought nothing of it.

Forty years.

He had never asked Aldric—the old butler he still called Sebastian in front of Vanya—where the carafes of fresh blood brought up to his study every month came from. Stupidity had nothing to do with it, and contempt for human life even less. He never asked... only because he trusted Aldric unconditionally.

Three hundred years ago, during the brutal massacre in the Ashborne Valley, when the Vampire Hunters used silver cannon to lay siege to the whole castle, it was Aldric—then only a young warrior from a vassal family—who threw himself without hesitation in front of a lethal silver-sheathed birch stake meant for Victor. The blow had torn open Aldric's chest, leaving a long, permanent diagonal scar and stripping him of every ability to use spellcraft.

He remembered it in pieces, the way he remembered everything that old. Silver fire falling out of a white sky. The smell of burning pine and burning flesh. A young man with a face full of soot, standing in the snow between Victor and the stake, and the look on that face afterward, lying in the red slush with his chest open, when he realized he was going to live.

"Don't thank me, my lord," Aldric had said through bloody teeth. "It was only my job."

The blood oath of the White Lily family to Victor had been paid for with Aldric's own life and honor, never merely written in ink.

To a lonely vampire who had lived through nine centuries and watched hundreds of generations of mortals come and go like falling leaves, Aldric was far more than a butler. He was the only legacy left, the only living shield in whom Victor had placed absolute trust.

He believed Aldric collected the blood from ancient creatures of the deep forest*. He had never doubted it, because in Victor's mind, someone who had once been ready to die in his place could never deceive him.

But now the naked truth of that betrayal was slapping him in the face. Aldric had turned him into a monster feeding on the kind of the very woman he had begun to long to protect.

He had given a vassal family his trust, and his house, and 300 years of his back. He had never once thought to give them his questions.

A savage punch landed square on Victor's mind. He stood in front of the worktable, his blazing red eyes blurring as he did a grim bit of mental math:

His most recent stretch of Blood Armor as "Martha" had lasted 19 days—the stretch of time when he'd thought he had his thirst under control thanks to Vanya's presence. To keep her alive, so she could sit and eat dinner in the vaulted brick room, and so he could play the elegant aristocrat preparing every meal for her with his own hands... how many people had Aldric drained dry to fuel him?

And yet. The blood Aldric brought him had always tasted clean and wild, like snowmelt and deep forest. For weeks he had told himself that he could taste fear in it. Standing here, he could not honestly remember whether he ever had.

He pushed the doubt away. It felt too much like hope, and he did not believe he had earned any.