The horse bucked, kicked, and jumped. When that didn’t dislodge me, it reared up, lurched forward, and slammed me sidelong into a tree.

I held on, my fangs sinking deeper into the animal’s neck the more it struggled. Even flung like a ragdoll, I would not let go of my food. I’d restrained my hunger for too long.

The prey fell to its knees. Frothing in a mad fright, it neighed, then struggled back up again to continue trashing.

With my one good arm, I pulled on its mane and clawed at its eyes.

My meal tripped and fell once more. It tried one final time to right itself, meeting the ground instead, the short-lived surge of energy its fear had given it no longer compensating for the loss of blood. An agitated swish of its tail, a weak kick of a leg, a shake of its mane, and a slow, forlorn nicker.

A final breath.

Nothing.

Death.

The hunt was over. I won. Still, I did not stop drinking. Without a beating heart to pump the blood into my mouth, I had to suck it out. I gladly did. I never thought I could consume so much. I must have been parched, starved beyond comprehension.

Eventually, I stopped. Even my thirst, my hunger, had its limits. I laid on my back, next to my vanquished prey, and took a moment to just...

Think.

It was a miraculous thing, having my thoughts be fully, entirely unclouded. Such clarity of thought! Something so easily taken for granted. Especially when my mind had been this... this haze, this jumble of scents and sounds and sensations stretching from the here and now all the way back to...

to Birnstead?

No, not to Birnstead. There had been more fleeting moments of clarity. In the most recent one I had also laid on my back — on cold stone instead of dirt — finally free from the crushing pressure of Tonaltus.

Free!

Free from the pit and the dark and little Arrin—

I shied away from the thought. I was free now, and that was all that mattered. Even if a lot of the intervening time was a confused blur, I was still free from that horrid place.

Where even am I?

I turned my head and let my gaze drift. Trees, dark and twisted, loomed high into the sky. Naked branches clawed at a cloud-covered night. A soft breeze fought for purchase but managed little more than an occasional creak of wood, and the quiet rustle of a dried-out leaf flitting slowly towards the ground.

A light coating of moss and rotting leaves, moist with decay and sharply speckled with rime, patterned the forest floor. The loamy taste tickled my nose just enough to ignore the hint of dead horse at the back of my throat.

The blanket of clouds high up in the sky hid the moon and the stars, coloring the night in an utter oblivion visible only in shades of dark and darker.

No birdsong broke through the silence. No scattering of midnight rodents. No chorus of insects. Only the wind was foolish enough to remain here where an apex predator had made such a brutal kill.

Only the wind… and the humans. Their wary, hushed murmurs drifted here from a distance away. They were silent until a moment ago. But now they spoke amongst themselves, desperate to fill the void of silence they so feared, convinced they could be quiet enough that I would not hear.

But I did hear. Utter silence meant their words carried far. Even when they did not speak, their breathing betrayed their presence. Them and their horses. Them and my D—

I shied away from that thought as well. I turned my head, still tasting the grass and leaves and dirt on my tongue. I swallowed, my mouth closed, yet the foul taste persevered. Those lone blades of grass kept tickling at the inside of my jaw.

I twisted my tongue in my mouth, pushing against the grass stuck there. I found teeth, my cheek itself, the taste of my own blood intermingled with that of the horse, then a gaping hole. My tongue went straight through the side of my face and found the ground.

A distant, muted sensation of pain tingled at the left side of my face as dirt and leaves were squished into a festering, open wound. And now that I was aware of it, the distant sting grew into a slight burn, harder and harder to ignore.

Urgently, I sat up. Pain surged down my left shoulder and arm, the limb exploding into so many new kinds of agony now that I foolishly put weight on it. I swallowed, once, twice, thrice to get the pain under control.

I looked.

Hissing in fright I screwed my eyes shut and turned away. That one glance showed enough and more. Most of the arm was gone, twisted and pulled apart into strips of bloody flesh marred with deep burns, held together only by the rope digging deep inside, coiling through meat and around the bone underneath.

Worst of all, that gruesome sight made me wonder about the searing pain that was wracking my face, how it might be just as bad as my arm. Mentally counting to three for courage, and then to five because three wasn’t enough, I brought my one functioning hand up to my face and gave it the gentlest, most fragmentary of prod.

I flinched back because even with these delicate pokes of a claw, I could tell. The entire left side of my face was a blubbery mess, pockmarked with fleshy welts and cratered with burned-through holes. If I angled a finger or two just right, I could shove them straight through the hole in my cheek and touch my tongue.

I gathered my resolve. I am a vampire and I have suffered worse injuries than these. I have endured so many broken bones, so many rending, debilitating wounds. I had my skull caved in, had my brain leak out through my ears, and once was even foolish enough to stand in the sun unprotected. I could deal with these injuries too.

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It would work out as long as I did not think too hard about how, for the very worst of my previous injuries, I had healed most of them while I was so feral and incoherent that I did not remember much of it. Now, I’d have to do it while perfectly lucid.

I put a hand to my face, palm and fingers and all. Cold. Calculating. Cataloging. Left ear gone. Eyes, nose, and most of the forehead intact or already regrown. Hair mostly gone, and what few strands remained melded with the knitting, regrowing flesh.

It’s fine.

Done this before, not so long ago, right after I crawled out of that pit.

And let's not think about how my coherent thoughts shattered soon after.

Gods, that man’s arm… did I really… No, don’t think about it.

I hooked my claws into my skull, peeled at the worst of the regrown mess, and pried strands of black hair out from in between skin, occasionally pulling entire flaps of rotten flesh with it.

Moving on to the arm, I was reminded of the thick and sturdy rope, tangled around bones and woven together with partially regrown muscle. I could heal anything, broken spine, caved in skull, even a mushed brain, but not when there was so much foreign mass in the way.

I hissed in pain as I prodded my claws in between the strips of flesh and bone, trying to get at the rope.

Would probably be easier if...

Right. It would. I set my jaw and grabbed hold of the protruding bits of bone. My claws dug in deep, deep, deep! I exhaled, expelling all air from my lungs so that I could do the next bit silently. Without screaming my heart out.

Grip. Twist. Rotate as far as the joint will go. Then further. The other way. Again. Pull!

A bone-deep crack.

I screamed a silent snarl of pain. Then I held my own arm, torn off at the shoulder.

I could heal anything, but this was too much even for me. It was such a gruesome sight I almost wanted to puke. Yet I kept watching in morbid fascination as fresh bone protruded out of my elbow and flesh and sinew formed around it.

Never letting this happen again.

While I watched my arm and shoulder knit itself back together, I shifted through the jumble that was my memories. Things had happened after I had been freed. Secrets kept from me. A trap. Captured again. A threat to my Uncle. Clouds and clouds of dust and debris. A horrid fall. A scramble. Food I could not eat. And then—

Did I really just bring down a horse with only my fangs?

The dead animal was right there, so I must have. I crawled to my feet to stand next to it, to get a good measure for its size. It was big and sturdy, well proportioned too, a courser at the least. The insanely expensive warhorse dwarfed my lithe ten-year-old-little-girl frame. I had most likely brought down a horse that cost twice as much as I had earned in an entire year as a hunter.

Haaah, such a distant, futile life that was.

I tried to put a measure on the time of year, but even basic things like the concept of how long I was imprisoned seemed to elude me. Simply getting some of the experiences in order was a daunting impossibility. This could be weeks after my capture. Or months. There was a distinct chill in the midnight air, a biting, freezing coldness. That, the lack of leaves on the trees, and the rime told me it was likely more than a month. I had been captured in early fall and this felt like early winter.

Or an especially mild midwinter.

Or late winter, early spring.

I settled for just winter for now. Winter, and I was naked. Caked in blood and gore and — I sniffed — excretion?

Yuck!

Underneath all the grime I was naked. The wintery temperature did not bother me, I could feel it, but it did not hinder. Some amount of human sensibility, a weird sense of modesty roused itself from deep within me.

I smothered it. I needed clothes, yes. I needed them like I needed a river or a body of water to wash in. Not because of modesty but because anyone sensible would have a hard time tolerating my presence in my current state.

Later.

Yes, later. Distractions like that could wait until I had a better handle on my situation. I had been captured and I had escaped. Part escaped, part had help escaping. Five Inquisitors had helped me get out. Their reasons for that were a mystery. They needed interrogating. I should do that. Soon. Now. Before the one of them that was in charge reclaimed her wits and decided remaining this close to a feral vampire was unwise.

Combing a blood-caked tangle of hair out of my eyes, I tasted the air, figured out the proper direction, and set out. The humans were further away than I expected, and upwind. At least that was one good, rational decision I had made in my feral state. They had their own horses with them. Had I taken down my own horse closer to theirs, where their animals could hear or smell the struggle, they would almost certainly have panicked, warhorses or not.

Reaching for my amulet, I slowed my step, thinking. Even half feral, I had made certain not to lose it again. Yet despite the sun protection it offered, I would still have to hurry. It was well past midnight, probably. And while the amulet meant I wouldn’t burn in the sun, it would still be a miserable time. The Inquisition would never pursue me at night, but they would make up for that as soon as dawn came.

Yet despite the need for haste, my steps slowed further. I would have to face them. Irina, who had seen Piers die right in front of her. Irina, who had seen me try to eat the man. Irina’s companions, who had seen our mad dash from the fortress, who had rushed towards our position, and who had witnessed everything. And worst of all…

I swallowed. Thoughts for later. No matter how soon that later would be.

None of these people should matter. What they thought of me should not matter. Sentimentality should not matter. They were merely tools I used in the pursuit of my freedom. Human concepts, relationships, friendship, family, they were only the things that had gotten me captured in the first place. They should not matter.

And yet…

When the murmur of hushed whispers grew into distinct voices I slowed my pace even more, stalking closer as soundless as I was able. It might be educational if I could catch some of their conversation on my approach.

“I truly don’t think it’s coming back, Irina,” a low, whining male voice complained, young enough to be barely past the cusp of adulthood. This was the annoyingly tender, baby-faced male. Canth?

“She’ll be back. I don’t think she’s just going to let us go like this.” The female. Irina. Even burning with hatred she sounded resolute and in control.

“But what if it kills us? Isn’t it better to just leave it behind?” One of the other two Inquisitors.

“You want to run?” Irina scoffed, defiant even in the face of bleakness. “From a vampire? You haven’t seen her fight, have you? You’d have better luck outrunning the dawn.”

Having heard enough I made the appropriate approaching sounds so as not to unduly startle them, and then stepped out from between the trees.

Four Inquisitors peered in my general direction, only barely able to make out my form in the dark. They feared. They had all seen too much of me. They had hoped to free a kind vampire. But there at the end, when it had been me and Irina and Piers’ corpse, when the others had come running, they had seen the undeniable truth.

I… fed on Piers.

Until then I hadn’t known, I hadn’t been certain. Feral recollection too vague. I’d still had doubts. Maybe I had been able to hold back at the very last second. Maybe they had given me the horse before I had lost all control. But the way they held themselves, perfectly prey-like, teetering on the edge between panic and despair, told me all I needed to know.

And worst of all, was the fifth person that hid behind the four Inquisitors, the one most horrified of all of them. I tried to catch his eyes, this man whose comfort I needed most, but he shied away.

He shied away, as I had shied away from simply thinking about him time and time again. And I knew then, from how he feared me now, so much more raw than ever before. I knew, from the cold dread clawing at me from deep inside.

What I had done, right in front of his very eyes, was not something I could ever explain away. Not to him. My days of pretending to be a harmless little thing were over. Maybe I could still fool other people. But I would never again fool him. Never again fool myself.

Here. Tonight. I had freed my dad.

And then I had lost him.

He’d been right about me all along.