Day Patrol #2
I stayed down. Down had been the instruction. Down was also, as it turned out, where my body had developed a strong personal interest in remaining.
I found my glasses by feel, sweeping one hand through dirt and dry grass until my fingers brushed the familiar shape. They were in two pieces. The bridge had snapped clean, and one lens was webbed with cracks like a frozen puddle stepped on.
“Of course,” I whispered.
Then Flavia’s bowstring snapped.
The first arrow hit the sellsword high in the shoulder. He cursed and twisted, more angry than slowed. The second arrow struck lower, in the gap between two plates of stolen armor, and that one made him stagger.
Gaius reached him before he could recover.
The sellsword swung hard, a brutal sideways cut meant to open Gaius from ribs to spine. Gaius leaned back just enough for the blade to pass in front of him, then drove his horse in close and struck down with his sword.
Metal shrieked. The sound bounced off the old stones and vanished into the arch.
The red eyes in the dark did not blink.
The sellsword stumbled, but he was not done. He caught Gaius’s next blow on the edge of his own blade and shoved back with strength that did not need much skill to be dangerous. Gaius’s horse sidestepped. Dust kicked up around its hooves. The sellsword lunged after him.
Flavia’s third arrow took him in the thigh. His leg buckled.
Gaius was already moving. He swung down from the saddle rather than trying to fight from above. The sellsword roared and came at him again, sword raised.
Gaius stepped inside the swing.
I had watched Skip do that same impossible thing. He moved toward the danger instead of away from it, closing the distance so the weapon lost room to kill him.
Gaius slammed his shoulder into the man’s chest. The sellsword reeled back.
Gaius’s sword flashed once, low and efficient, and the man’s injured leg gave out beneath him. He dropped to one knee, armor scraping over stone.
For half a second, everything became very simple. Gaius above him. Flavia with another arrow drawn. The young woman on the ground, bound and shaking.
The red eyes watched from the mouth of the ruin as if this were entertainment.
“Yield,” Gaius said.
The sellsword spat blood onto the old stone and tried to bring his sword up again. Gaius knocked the blade aside with a hard, ringing strike.
The sellsword reached for the knife at his belt. Gaius caught his wrist, twisted, and drove his sword into the side of the man’s neck.
The sellsword’s eyes widened. His mouth opened, but only blood came out. Blood ran dark red over the edge of Gaius’s blade and down into the dust.
Gaius leaned closer, his face set and grim.
“Burn with Druven,” he said through gritted teeth.
Then he pulled the sword free. The sellsword collapsed. Flavia ran toward the young woman.
A voice came out of the ruin.
“Earth woman.”
My vision was blurry, but I could see the two red dots glowing in the darkness. It was speaking to me.
My stomach dropped hard, and every muscle in my back locked at once.
“She knows you have come,” it said. The voice was patient and dry and entirely calm, and that calm was the worst thing about it.
“Morvanna knows. She has known since the moment you crossed. You imagine you have hidden inside that little fort with your soldier and his ring. You have hidden nothing. She is patient. She is very patient. And she is looking for you.”
My body went cold before my brain caught up. For one terrible second, I could not move. My fingers tightened around the broken pieces of my glasses until the cracked lens bit into my palm.
This fear was different. Colder.
The sellsword had scared me because he was close, armed, and real. The vampire scared me because it was dead, patient, and speaking of me as if I were already being hunted.
Then I took a deep breath. It gave me one clear second to gather the scattered pieces of myself and stack them into something that could pass for courage.
“Then she can keep looking!” I yelled. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.
“You think the ring protects you,” it said.
I looked down at the glowing ring on my finger.
“Nothing can protect you from Morvanna.” The red points drifted a fraction closer to the edge of the light. “Join the dark bond. It is far more satisfying than the claiming bond. Mira knew this.”
It had come too far to say it.
Only a little. A hand’s breadth too far, reaching toward the place where the sun fell.
There was a sound like bacon dropped on a hot pan.
Thin gray smoke lifted off the edge of the shape.
The red eyes flinched back. In that flinch, in that one bad decision it had made by leaning into the light to frighten me, Flavia moved.
She threw her sword. The blade vanished into the dark, and the vampire recoiled from it. Then her bow was up, and she was firing, fast and flat, arrow after arrow into the dark after the retreating red, driving it back.
“Gaius!” she yelled.
He was already moving. He went into the dark, low and hard with the hook in both hands. For a second, he disappeared.
Then something inside the ruin shrieked. The hook made a sound I felt more than heard. Iron biting through old flesh, catching bone, then wrenching through it with a wet, cracking scrape that turned my stomach inside out. Gaius roared and pulled.
There was one final snap.
The vampire’s head rolled out of the dark, torn free and tumbling across the threshold into the sunlight.
The faint sizzling I had heard before became violent.
Smoke poured from its skin. The red eyes flared once, then collapsed into black.
Fire raced across the cheek, the jaw, and the open mouth, consuming flesh and hair in seconds.
When the flames guttered out, there was nothing but a blackened skull.
Gaius came back out into the sun, blood clinging to the curve of the hunter’s hook. He did not say anything. He looked at the place where the eyes had been, then at me, then wiped the hook clean with the same grim resolve he had brought to killing the thing.
***
The girl was still on the ground when Flavia reached her. She dropped to one knee, cut the bindings, and eased the gag from her mouth, talking low and steady.
“It is all right,” Flavia said. “You are all right. We have you. No one is taking you anywhere.”
The girl tried to answer, but the first sound that came out of her was not a word. It was small and broken and frightened, and it made Flavia’s face go very still.
“Do not force it,” Flavia said. “Breathe first.”
The girl breathed. Badly. In little broken pulls that caught halfway in her chest.
I crouched nearby, moving slowly enough that she could see every inch of it.
“Hi,” I said, which was possibly the stupidest opening available, but my brain had apparently decided this was not a moment for speeches. “You are safe now. I know that probably sounds inaccurate, given the extremely persuasive evidence of the last several minutes, but you are in fact safe.”
Her eyes flicked to me. Then to Flavia. Then back toward the ruin.
“No,” Flavia said gently. “Do not look there. Look at me.”
The girl’s mouth trembled.
“Name?” Flavia asked. “Can you tell me your name?”
It took three tries.
“Tatiana,” she whispered.
“All right, Tatiana,” Flavia said. “Good. That is good. You are coming back with us to Ely.”
Tatiana’s eyes filled with tears. Flavia opened her arms carefully, giving Tatiana the choice.
Tatiana stared at her for half a second, then folded forward into her.
Flavia caught her and held on. Not tightly enough to trap her.
Just firmly enough that Tatiana could fall apart without hitting the ground.
Flavia blinked once, hard. When she spoke again, her voice was still steady, but her eyes had gone bright.
“You are safe,” she said against Tatiana’s hair. “We have you.”
“I thought...” Her voice cracked and vanished.
“I know,” Flavia said.
Tatiana shook her head once, hard, as if Flavia could not possibly know the shape of it.
“I thought no one was coming.”
The words were barely there. Something in my chest hurt.
“We came,” I said.
Tatiana looked at me again.
“We came,” I repeated, because it was the only useful thing I had. “And now we are going to take you home.”
Flavia wrapped her cloak around Tatiana’s shoulders and fastened it at her throat. Tatiana clutched the edges with both hands as if cloth could hold her together if she gripped it hard enough.
“She rides with me,” Flavia said.
Gaius nodded once and helped Tatiana to her feet. Her legs nearly failed under her. Flavia caught her without making a production of it, one arm around her waist, steady and practical.
“Easy,” Flavia said. “I have you.”
Tatiana nodded like she wanted to believe it and did not know how. They got her onto Flavia’s horse. Flavia mounted behind her and kept one arm securely around her middle, cloak and all.
I got back onto Velox with less dignity than anyone deserved to witness. Then we rode for Ely.
Tatiana did not say much after that. She sat rigid in front of Flavia, watching the path ahead and flinching at every sound from the scrub. Flavia murmured to her now and then, low enough that I could not catch all of it.
Tatiana kept looking toward the walls as they rose out of the valley, as if she did not trust them to be real.
I rode in the middle, as instructed, holding the two halves of my glasses in my pocket and squinting at a world that had lost its edges.
At the gate, Flavia took Tatiana straight toward the infirmary, still wrapped around her like a shield.
I headed toward Caen’s tower, because being thrown from a horse, losing my glasses, and getting personally threatened by a vampire seemed to require a magical professional.
***
Caen’s tower was warm and smelled of drying herbs. Bunches of them hung from the rafters, tied with cord and labeled.
Caen took one look at me, pointed to the chair, and waited until I sat.