The Sniper He Couldn't Control

Victor's POV

The silver-jacketed bullet lay in the palm of Victor Blackwood's hand, still giving off a faint leftover heat from its friction with the air, streaked with thick black blood that had already begun to dry and harden.

The pure .999 silver jacket caught the dull light of the antique glass chandelier hanging from the soaring ceiling and gave off its sharp, unmistakable metallic smell.

It was a poisonous scent, one that made the nerve endings under his skin tighten in the natural revulsion of pure blood.

Cold air poured in through the broken window and moved the pages of the fallen book on the rug. Across the valley, the skeleton of the half-built tower stood black against the city glow. He looked at its roof for a long moment, and it was empty now. He could feel the emptiness from here, the way you can feel that a room has been left.

In 900 years on this earth, he had been shot a total of 209 times.

Victor remembered every number exactly, every date, every savage sensation of metal tearing through muscle.

In 1349, a copper-tipped arrow from a witch hunter in Cologne;

In 1812, a lead ball from a French soldier's flintlock in the flesh-cutting cold outside Moscow;

And in 1920, bursts of Tommy gun fire from gangsters at the Brooklyn shipyards.

But in nine centuries of hundreds of wars and the rise and fall of countless dynasties, no one had ever jacketed a bullet in silver when they aimed it at him.

Not the witch hunters, not the Inquisition, not the Vampire Hunters who came later with their holy water and their very bad poetry. Silver was expensive, and it was hard to cast, and most people who wanted him dead had not wanted it quite that badly.

Silver was the cruelest, most loathsome metal there was to the race of Ancient vampires.

The physical wound was the least of it. Silver burned like poison. When the bullet pierced the skull, the silver killed the blood cells on contact, blocked the magic of self-healing, and left slow, smoldering burns that kept tearing through the nerve tissue.

That was why it had taken him 40 grueling seconds—40 endless seconds of flesh-ripping pain—to push the metal out and fully heal the shattered wall of his skull.

Healing always felt the same, no matter how many centuries he lived. It was like ice closing over dark water, slow at the edges and then all at once, and the cold of it went deeper than any wound.

That put two possibilities on the hidden chessboard of New York: either the woman lying on that rooftop 1,200 meters away knew exactly what kind of pure blood ran in his veins, or she had a survival instinct so sharp and so dark it was frightening.

Victor rolled the bullet gently between two thin fingertips and felt the rough grooves the rifling had cut into the metal.

He crossed the study to a tall walnut cabinet that stood between two bookshelves and opened its narrow top drawer. Inside, on faded green velvet, lay a row of small, ugly things.

A flint arrowhead. A crossbow bolt snapped at the shaft. Musket balls gone white with age, a rusted iron nail, a flattened slug from a Colt revolver, a dozen others, each resting in its own shallow hollow in the cloth. Two hundred and eight of them, spread across 11 drawers.

He had never been able to explain to himself why he kept them. Perhaps because they were the only proof he had that the centuries had actually happened to him, and had not simply passed him by.

He opened a new drawer and laid the silver bullet inside. It looked small there. Almost clean.

The moment he dug that bloody lump of metal out of his forehead, he had sent the force of his mind across 1,200 meters of night. Compulsion—the art of mastering a soul with waves of thought—was the birthright of the Ancient vampire Houses.

In 900 years, no mortal human had ever resisted that power when he focused the full weight of his gaze. He had fully expected to see her drop her weapon in a daze, her eyes emptied and sunk into perfect obedience, waiting for his orders from afar.

But what happened tonight had thrown a bucket of cold water over nine centuries of Victor Blackwood's arrogance.

He had once turned a whole regiment of Swedish cavalry around at the edge of a frozen lake with nothing but a thought, and let them ride home believing they had won. He had talked a cardinal out of a burning. He had never once needed to raise his voice.

His mind had shot across the distance, ripping through the New York night to find the sniper's neural pathways.

Yet instead of slipping into the soft emptiness of a human mind, he had slammed into a wall of steel, thick and cold and absolutely solid. That wall hadn't been raised with magic or any kind of active defense.

It was sealed shut by her very nature—like a secret room poured out of reinforced concrete, with no windows, no skylight, and not a single crack to slide a finger into. His power had been thrown back out and slid across the surface of her consciousness like a drop of plain water on frozen granite.

For the first time in 900 years, mind control had failed completely against a mortal creature. No door. No way in. She stood like a lone fortress, completely immune to the magic that had once brought countless kings and empires to their knees.

The rebound had cost him. He hadn't noticed at first, but now a dull ache sat behind his left eye like a thumb pressed against the socket, and when he touched his ear, his fingertips came away wet and dark.

Compulsion over that distance always took something. Tonight it had taken something and given nothing back, and that had never happened to him before either.

A soft knock, exactly three even raps, broke off his wandering thoughts.

"Lord Victor."

Aldric Vane stepped into the room. The butler of Blackwood Castle—who had faithfully served nine heads of the house over the past 190 years—still kept his small, slight frame, his slightly stooped back, and his crisp black tailcoat. His hands were always sheathed in spotless white cotton gloves that he never took off, not even to sleep.

He moved without sound across the old floorboards, as he always had, and the silver tray in his hands did not so much as tremble. Victor had never once heard him coming. He suspected that Aldric took a quiet pride in that.

In nearly two centuries, Aldric had never interrupted anyone, and he had never once used the word "I" in front of a member of the Blackwood family. His presence was the definition of absolute obedience, an inseparable part of the ancient architecture around him.

"The Council of Five Houses has just sent an urgent sealed letter," Aldric said as he came closer, holding up an antique silver tray engraved with the family crest.

Aldric's eyes moved, very briefly, to the shattered window and the dark stain spreading on the wall behind the chair. He said nothing about either.

"Leave the glass," Victor said. "I'll want to look at it in the morning."

"As you wish, my lord. The draft will be considerable."

"I have been cold before, Aldric."