Nema #3
One of them trapped my legs between its own.
I tried to turn my head toward Skip. A hand closed around my jaw and forced me to face forward.
Every part of me was contained. Not merely restrained.
Positioned.
Varia stepped closer.
“One would be sufficient,” she said. “But I want no accidents.”
Behind her, Skip strained against the ropes. I could feel his panic.
Varia’s gaze never left mine.
“Morvanna told me through the dark bond that you would come,” Varia said.
Her voice was hers on the surface, but something beneath it was not, as if the dark bond had learned to imitate her.
“Morvanna said that the claiming bond would bring you out. That you would not be able to feel him afraid and stay behind the wall. That you would come.”
I looked at her. At the face I had woken up to four months ago when she brought breakfast and smiled at the ring. At the face that had been on the wall with me in the snow.
Whatever was in front of me was not her. She had come back through the gate and reported a victory. She had sat in the infirmary and let Caen close her wounds. Every word, every movement, every hour she spent among us had been part of the plan.
All of it calculated. All of it intentional. All of it set in motion the moment they turned her. Every step leading to the moment she walked back through the gate, opened her mouth, and said: three vampires down, village clear, I am the only one who survived.
Morvanna had not turned a random soldier. She had turned the person who knew this garrison best, who knew Skip best, who knew me best—and had sent her to finish the job.
The smile again.
“Morvanna was right.”
“Varia,” I said, the name breaking out of me.
“Varia is not here,” she said, almost gently. “I exist within the dark bond now.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
She held my gaze with those red eyes and that borrowed smile.
“Kill you?” she said, with a trace of amusement. “Of course not.”
She tilted her head, considering me.
“Morvanna doesn’t want you dead. She wants you inside the dark bond. We’re not going to kill you. We’re going to bind you to it.”
Her expression didn’t change.
“We want what you carry. Your knowledge. Morvanna understands now that women from your world are useful. We intend to add your knowledge to our own.”
She pointed at Skip.
“And you won’t lose him,” she added.
“Scipio will be there as well. Through him, we will know everything—every plan, every weakness, every detail of the outpost line’s defenses.”
She raised her wrist.
She drew the nail on her right index finger across her wrist with ease, as though performing a familiar task. Dark blood welled immediately from the line.
They were going to force me to drink.
Skip made a sound behind the gag.
His terror surged at a level I had never felt from him before. It was overwhelming. The helpless panic of watching the worst possible thing unfold while unable to stop it.
The two vampires holding me adjusted their grip. They forced my head back. Varia’s wrist moved toward my mouth.
“Varia,” I said.
Her movement stopped.
“I know you are in there,” I said. “I know the bond does not take everything. I know there is still something that is you—the part that has been there since the beginning. The part that handed me a flask on a wall in the snow.”
The smile had not changed. The red eyes had not changed.
“The tenant sleeps,” she said.
“You told me,” I said, “that you had never been claimed again because you watched what happened when the bond broke. That you did not want to feel that again. That you had been managing it for years.”
The words came fast, driven by urgency.
“You told me I was the first person in years you’d wanted to tell anything to. Not just here. In any garrison. In your entire life.”
Something happened in the red eyes. Something very small and very fast.
“You told me about your claimed man,” I said.
“You told me what it felt like through the bond when the warmth shifted.”
I stopped. Grief rose so fast it took my breath with it. My eyes burned, and then I was crying before I could stop myself. The tears ran hot over my face. I could not wipe them away. I could not make myself care.
“Please, Varia! You were my ride or die,” I said.
The room was very quiet. The wrist had stopped moving.
I held her red gaze with everything I had, like someone who had identified the only thing that mattered and refused to look away.
The red changed.
Blue.
And from that blue: a tear.
One tear, moving down the face that was Varia’s face, from an eye that was briefly, incompletely, partially hers.
Her hand moved to her sword.
She drew it in the arc I had watched for four months. The motion she had spent sixteen years refining and four months teaching me. It was hers alone. No one else in the garrison moved through it in quite that way.
Neither vampire reacted.
They still believed she belonged to the bond.
Varia took the head of the vampire on my left.
Then the one on my right.
Two motions. Clean.
Their bodies fell almost together, their hands releasing me as they dropped.
I caught myself against the council table. My legs held. That was enough.
Varia stood before me with her sword in her hand and her eyes blue. Her face flickered between the woman I knew and the thing the dark bond had made of her.
“Meghan.”
Her voice. Her actual voice.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
“I can feel it closing again,” she said with an urgency that sharpened every word. “The dark bond. I can’t hold it off forever. Meghan, you have to free me. My soul is still here, but as long as this body lives, the dark bond holds me. Morvanna holds me.”
Her voice broke. Only once. Then she steadied it.
“Free me. You know how.”
The blue in her eyes began to fade. Red bled back into them. The window was closing.
“Ride or die,” she whispered.
She offered me the sword.
I took it.
The arc was hers. The technique was hers, given to me across four months of mornings in the cold and practiced until it lived in my body rather than my mind.
I used it exactly as she had taught me.
My feet found their position. My weight moved through the turn. For one final instant, her eyes were blue. The blade passed cleanly through her neck.
Varia’s body fell.
But in the instant the blade passed through her, I felt something release. Warm. Clean. Distinct from the claiming bond’s empathic current.
I had felt it with Mira in the corridor. I had recognized it without logic or reason, the way you recognize something true.
This time, it was Varia.
The warmth lasted only a moment. Within it was something I had never been taught to recognize, but would spend the rest of my life knowing was real.
I heard her voice.
Thank you, Meghan.
Then silence.