Bleed for me (The Ashmoor Covenant #1)

PROLOGUE

Cassius

The girl's name was Hesper and she asked me to hold her hand.

That is the part I keep. Not the cellar, not the iron chair, not the seventeen of us standing in a ring like men at a christening.

Not Aurek's face when he knelt in front of her and pushed her sleeve back with two fingers, gentle as a physician.

Just her hand, cold in mine, small enough that my palm swallowed it, and the way she squeezed once before he opened her wrist, as if I were the one who needed comfort.

She was the last of them. Verity blood, anchor blood, the only living thing in the world that could make a dead man taste bread again. Aurek had spent thirty years hunting the line down to this — one seamstress in a Massachusetts port town with ink on her fingers and a bad cough.

He drank until the room went silent.

I remember what happened to us then. All of us. Colour came back into the cellar like someone had thrown a window open. The sound of the harbour. The smell of tar and wet rope and the tallow candle guttering by the stairs. Seventeen dead men weeping on a dirt floor because we could smell a candle.

And Hesper on the ground with her eyes open, and her hand still in mine, and nothing in it.

They call that night the Covenant. The old ones talk about it the way soldiers talk about a war they won. The night the last anchor died and the Long Hunger settled into our bones for good, and we all agreed, in the way that starving things agree, never to speak of it again.

I have been dead for four hundred years. I have not tasted anything since.

Two hundred years, and I still wake at dusk with my hand closed around nothing.