Blood War

A seismic blast shook the whole base of Blackwood Castle's tower. The steel-clad oak gate was blown into ten thousand splinters. The blizzard poured into the great hall along with the fierce crackle of gunfire.

Seraphine Dumont hadn't come alone. She had brought three Ancient vampires with a gift for slaughter and 20 mortal mercenary gunmen armed with modern weapons loaded with silver-banded rounds. The battle exploded, brutal, in short, rapid cuts.

Vanya went into the fight armed with what she did best instead of raw strength: cold, merciless assassin's calculation.

She moved like a ghost across the high vaulted roofs of the great hall. Using height to her advantage, Vanya fired precise shots into the tendons and joints of the attackers. When an Ancient vampire closed in, instead of risking her life blocking his blade, she yanked a rope that triggered a system of mirrors set up in advance on the roof. The early sunlight just breaking through the clouds shot straight through a magnifying lens and poured a blinding beam onto the enemy, burning away the upper half of his body in a horrible scream.

Glass. Smoke. A scream cut short.

She reloaded without looking. Fired. Moved. The roof tiles slid under her boots, and she rode them down to the next ledge and fired again.

She used silver, phosphorus traps, and every dark corner of the fortress she had memorized over the past months to take down the gunmen one by one.

But through the billowing smoke and gunfire, a figure appeared on the main stairs of the tower.

Rourke.

Her mentor, the supreme commander of Aegis — the man who had raised Vanya since she was nine — stepped out of the shadows, gripping a custom silver-plated hunting rifle. Rourke was here.

The last brutal truth came out: Seraphine Dumont had paid for the contract on Victor from the very start, and Aegis was only a commercial tool. Vanya had never been a rescued child; she was only the knife Dumont had borrowed Aegis's hand to plunge into Victor's heart.

Vanya dropped onto the stone floor. The shock of the landing jolted up through her ankle with a faint crack, but a killer's body, long used to wounds, wouldn't let her pause for even a tenth of a second. The muzzle of her pitch-black custom rifle was aimed straight between Rourke's eyes. Her hands were as steady as carved stone, without the slightest tremor.

The whistle of bullets, the screams and roars, and the sharp stench of vampire blood in the chaos around her were pushed completely out of Vanya's mind. Right now, the space between the two of them had thickened like a block of glass about to shatter.

Rourke looked at the best student he had ever shaped with his own hands over so many years. His hate-lined face, crisscrossed with blade scars and wrinkled with age, didn't show a single flicker of regret or fear. The Aegis commander's eyes were as cold as powdered lime. He looked straight into her eyes and spoke with a pitiless logic, twisted yet so right it was cruel:

"I made you, Vanya. If that modified compound hadn't been injected into your veins, you'd have died with the rest of the rotting meat in a mass grave at the border 18 years ago. I gave you the strength so no one could trample you, and I gave you a purpose so you could survive in this world. Aegis never owed you a thing."

The words sounded so true, so cruel, and they drove into Vanya's heart like a blade pulled straight out of a fire. Every word stripped bare the bitter truth: she had never been a rescued child, never been a real human being in the organization's eyes. She was only an expensive knife Dumont had borrowed Aegis's hand to forge, for the single purpose of plunging it into Victor Blackwood's chest.

Vanya stood still in the middle of the relentless gunfire and the thick gun smoke. Her finger rested on the trigger... cold silver metal pressed against her callused fingertip. One small squeeze, and the brain of the butcher in front of her would shatter.

But then her finger slowly relaxed.

She didn't shoot Rourke.

Vanya lowered her eyes to the long scar on Rourke's hand—the scar he got blocking a slash for her when she was 15. She lowered her rifle and spoke in a voice as flat as a blank sheet of paper, without the slightest anger and without a single drop of feeling left:

"Live with that, Rourke."

She turned and walked away without looking back even once. Behind her, the Aegis commander stood dazed in the ruins of the fortress. The cruelest punishment she could give him was abandonment instead of a silver bullet—leaving him behind with the weight of his sins, his betrayal, and the bottomless emptiness of a man who had spent his whole life as someone else's tool.

She heard him say her name once, behind her, very quietly. It didn't sound like an order. It sounded like a man calling after a train.

In the center of the great hall, the battle had turned into a slaughterhouse.

Victor was fighting Seraphine Dumont and two Ancient vampire House Lords all by himself. His hands had turned into sharp blades of Blood Armor, and his Pureblood power erupted so violently it shook the whole ancient system of stone towers. Every flick of Victor's hand tore through the air and left streaks of pitch-black, smoking blood on the stone floor. He fought like a wild animal backed into a corner, raging and savage, turning his attackers into piles of shredded meat.

But Seraphine had been preparing for this moment for centuries.

She knew the only weakness of a thousand-year-old Pureblood aristocrat lay in caring, never in strength or magic.

Just as Vanya turned her back to walk away from Rourke, a surviving mercenary gunman raised a silver-disc launcher and aimed it straight at her back. Victor's eyes flickered. In one fatal opening—when he whirled around with a start and threw all his Blood Armor to his left side to form an invisible shield across Vanya's path—Seraphine lunged at him like a murky gray blur of steel.

The short blade in her hand was cast from an ancient silver alloy and soaked in concentrated corrupted vampire blood gathered from a thousand corpses.

SHHK!

The blade pierced through the maroon brocade robe and drove straight into the left side of Victor's chest.

A horrific roar of hatred and pain tore through the vault of the great hall. Victor's blazing red eyes exploded with a fire of absolute rage. Instead of pulling back, he surged forward, letting the blade sink deeper into his chest, and clamped both of his large hands around Seraphine's neck. He roared and twisted hard with all his primal strength.

CRACK!

Seraphine's head was crushed, and her body was flung across the shattered granite floor. The two remaining Ancient vampires were knocked down by the shock wave of Victor's killing rage, either destroyed completely or fleeing in disarray out into the blizzard.

The battle was over. The great hall fell into a deathly silence, with only the storm wind whistling through the shattered arched windows.

But Victor sank to his knees on the stone floor.

The wound in the left side of his chest wasn't closing at all. The corrupted poison blood from Seraphine's blade began to bubble, mercilessly rotting his flesh and bone. Pitch-black veins crawled out from the wound like small venomous snakes, spreading in blotches up his neck, onto his cheekbones, and across Victor's pale face. The poisoned blood was destroying and wiping out his Pureblood magical circulatory system.

He had an hour to live at most before his chest crumbled to ash.

Vanya raced over and dropped to her knees on the cold stone floor beside him. She held up the tall, violently shaking body of the 900-year-old vampire.

Up close, the black veins moved. She could see them crawling under his skin, slow and patient, the way roots crack a sidewalk over a hundred years, only this was happening in minutes.

"Victor... Victor!" she cried, both hands gripping his broad shoulders, which were growing colder.

Victor looked up at her. His eyes, usually blazing like dark blood, were starting to cloud over with a deathly gray film. He knew he had reached the end.

But even more than he feared crumbling to dust, he feared that the magical thread of the Blood Bond—the thing binding the rhythms of their two bodies together—would dissolve along with his body and set off a magical poisoning that would take Vanya's life too.

It was time to SEVER THE BLOOD BOND.

The thousand-year-old law of the Blood Bond was utterly unforgiving: to cut the magical pact without killing the mortal, one of the two had to willingly use their will to draw every bit of the other's magical blood out of their own circulatory system. And whoever carried out that drawing had to bear the full, flesh-ripping pain of both of them combined, twice over.

Victor raised a trembling hand covered in black blood. He meant to cut his own vein to draw out the bond himself; he wanted to take that savage pain on in her place. But he was too weak. His 900-year-old hands shook too hard to hold the silver blade, and the ancient poison had completely paralyzed his nerve endings.

He couldn't do it. He was dying.

"Let me," Vanya said firmly, without the slightest fear.

She had never been more sure of anything. The certainty sat in her like a round in a chamber, cold and heavy and ready.

She didn't hesitate for even a single breath. Vanya pulled the short silver blade from her belt, drove it straight into the vein of her left wrist, then pressed that bleeding wound directly onto the smoking wound in Victor's chest. She activated every biological antibody in her circulatory system and, with the fiercest willpower she had, actively pulled all of Victor's magical bonding blood out of his body.

And even more merciless... she didn't stop at drawing out his bonding blood. She used her body, which carried the Frost Antibodies, to pull the rotting poison blood from his wound into herself as well.

The pain exploded, brutal.

Nothing about this pain was romantic or bearable through ordinary willpower. It was the truest, most brutal nightmare a body could know.

The veins under Vanya's pale skin jerked nonstop, turning purple and bulging like black worms burrowing to the bone. The magical poison blood entered her body like molten metal heated to a thousand degrees, burning away every one of her already callused peripheral nerve endings. Vanya threw her head back, her eyes rolling up, her whole body convulsing violently on the cold stone. The scream strangled in her throat sounded as gruesome as flesh and bone being ground apart, and sweat mixed with fresh blood seeped out of every pore of her face.

Victor stared at her in horror. With the last of his strength, he tried to push her away, cloudy tears welling from his blazing red eyes:

"Vanya... stop... please stop... I'm begging you..."

But Vanya didn't let go. Her hand stayed clamped to his chest. She let out a gut-wrenching scream and, with every last bit of strength she had, pulled the final mouthful of magical blood out of his body.

CRACK!

A dry, magical snap sounded in the spiritual space both of them shared.

The magical thread of the Blood Bond etched deep into Vanya's wrist broke completely, shattered into dim gray streaks of light, and then vanished completely into nothingness.

Vanya let go of the silver blade. She collapsed onto the cold granite floor of the great hall. Her skin was as pale as a corpse's, her breathing broken, her eyes shut tight.

Around them, the great hall had gone silent except for the wind and the soft crackle of small fires dying in the wreckage. Snow drifted in through the broken doors and settled on the dead, and on her, and did not melt.

The thread had snapped.

The whole thousand-year magical bond of master and slave had dissolved forever.

Victor lay slumped beside her. The poison in his chest began to ease now that she had drawn out most of the poisoned blood, and his Pureblood cells began slowly healing themselves. But when he dragged himself over to her, swaying, and laid a trembling hand on Vanya's chest... a vast, terrifying emptiness slammed straight into his mind.

For the first time in weeks... he could no longer feel her heartbeat inside his own chest. The magical thread that bound the rhythms of their bodies together was no longer there.

That absolute silence hit his soul like a death sentence. He no longer knew whether she was alive or dead. He had completely lost control, lost the only link that bound him to this world.

Victor knelt on the broken stone floor, threw his head back toward the ruined ceiling of the tower, and let out a tragic scream of the utmost pain:

"VANYA!!!"

The sound ripped through the blizzard outside the window. No magical authority rode on it, and no command of a vampire king. It was the first true sound, the cry of a creature that knew pain, that Victor had ever let out in 900 years of existence.