“Where are we heading?” With Dad no longer in danger of falling off the horse, I guided the animal into the lead position and forced both our escape and my interrogation of Irina back on track.

I didn’t expect Irina to reply. I had killed and eaten her husband. Not just another person in Irina’s team of Inquisitors, but her husband. I remembered only vague impressions of the moment I had pulled Piers aside and forced her to go down first. That must have been where I had doomed the man, all because I had considered Irina a more valuable source of information.

Given that Piers had died, it had been the right choice. Yet regardless of whether it was a good trade or not, I might need to be a little less impulsive with such calls. Casual decisions like that, with little regard for how they affected lives, only highlighted how these people were only assets to me, and how I did not think like them.

Is that what Dad is to me?

Nothing but a tool?

He wasn’t. I knew he wasn’t. I could not accept that I had become that horribly inhumane. I had come so close to abandoning him though. A little more feral, and I might not have rescued him at all. Clearly, I wasn’t the appropriate person to judge my own compassion and capacity to care.

But if I’m not qualified to judge myself, and Dad is…

Irina’s unexpected answer to my question, loud, angry, tinged with fresh bite, cut through my silent brooding. “This path ends at an abandoned shack… mill… don’t care. That’s the rendezvous point.” Her bitter answer gained a relieved undertone. “We are to bring you there. The other team brings the woman from the village. From there on, you are on your own.”

Other team?

Woman?

I rolled my shoulders and tried to nestle deeper into Dad’s shivery embrace. It didn’t help. Irina’s piercing gaze burned straight through my dad and into my back. Hopefully the hint of relief I noticed from her was merely her looking forward to being rid of me, and not some fresh horror. This night already felt like it would never end, and the list of unknowns I desired answers for kept on growing.

“What woman?” I started with what was hopefully the least strategic follow-up question. Better to provide her with a false sense of security, slowly work my way up to the important questions.

“Some woman from Birnstead. Tracked the Inquisitor team that captured you all the way here. Came demanding your release.” Irina snorted in fake amusement. “Got picked up, interrogated over and over, then dumped in the nearest village. Instead of leaving well enough alone, she has stubbornly remained. Crazy bitch is just lucky she doesn’t know anything.”

Crazy bitch?

Can’t be…

Aunt Reya. The village’s medicine woman. It had to be. There was only one person in that entire town mad enough to chase after me, storm up to an Inquisitor fort, and demand the vampire they held be released. Gods, I still remembered that time when she’d rushed after me into the forest, at dusk. Fully aware that I was a vampire. A close to starving vampire. She had chased after me anyway, armed with only a knife.

Or the time she had stood up for me in front of Rafe, the man in charge of the town. Or that time she’d literally picked me up like a sack of grain and carted me off to Meg and Gery’s place. All the mornings she had snuck into the bunkhouse kitchen, intent on mooching breakfast off of Eryn. And succeeding at it.

“Tina?” my dad prompted. “You know this woman?”

“Vale,” I corrected him as I shook my head.

All the colorful sailor’s swears Aunt Reya had accidentally let slip in my presence. And the days in the forest, me on her lap, talking and guiding her through the essentials of magic weaving over and over again. Persisting in the boring minutiae of magic lessons, long after Shae and Nebby had given up.

Shae.

Nebby.

I sighed. No, I was being silly, letting myself be fooled by longing. It couldn’t be her. She had a girlfriend. She had granny Madge to look after. She couldn’t just up and leave all that behind. I squashed the impossible desire for an existence that was never really mine. And the anger that followed.

No one I knew was mad enough to challenge the Inquisition for me. It was probably some random crazy person. Someone who had picked up a rumor about the capture of a vampire, and was now pretending to know me in a mad grab for fame. Simple, utter lunacy. I would deal with the nutcase at the rendezvous point, and then it would be me and my dad running for our lives.

Hah. Running! As if I could ever come up with a proper plan for that. And then I wasn’t even considering the Creeping-vines’ threat of going after Uncle Hadrian, the potential risks to the people of Birnstead, or how my dad wouldn’t be able to handle a life on the run. All things I could worry about later. My innocent question had succeeded. Now that Irina was ever so slightly distracted from her anger, it was time to aim for the biggest, most shocking question I could imagine.

“Who is this Retivius?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to better judge her reaction.

Irina met my gaze. She stared at me for a long moment where she didn’t even blink. “I am under orders to keep you away from this topic,” she said at last. “But sard! That! Shit! You just killed my husband!”

Wait… she’s just going to tell me?

Why?

This made no sense. Anger directed towards me shouldn’t have her simply decide to share secrets with me. Right? Not unless…

Unless I wasn’t the only one she was angry with. There was a mysterious employer who requested my escape. She had superiors that had ordered her to do this. If the request for my escape came from or through some shadowy faction of the Inquisition, then Irina probably couldn’t refuse those orders. She didn’t just blame me for Piers’ death. She blamed her superiors. And divulging their precious secrets alleviated her anger.

Or maybe this was yet another of Irina’s many deceptions playing out.

“Irina, we shouldn’t,” the man riding behind Irina cautioned.

“Shut it, Canth!” Irina growled. “She’s in this mess, same as we are, and we all know that keeping a vampire in check with half-truths doesn’t work.” Irina’s horse snorted as she pulled on her reins in anger. “Lady Esmena Retivius is the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor.”

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Wait? What!

“You work for the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor?” I hissed in outrage, clutching Dad’s arm for support. The implications of this were… they were… more than I could imagine. So shockingly severe that I couldn’t think of any concrete consequences beyond how horrifically bad they would be. Bad, bad, terrible, impossibly bad.

“There’s a lot of ocean between here and Ostea,” Irina replied, clearly delighted at catching me so off-balance, “enough for opinion and policy to drift apart. Orders from Thysa and Aberny aren’t as well received in Ostea as they were four decades ago.”

Drift apart? That was very much… something. I had assumed factions of some kind. But this? This was agents from the Ostean Inquisition infiltrating the Thysan Inquisition and freeing their captured vampires. Never mind that the Inquisition was supposed to be mankind’s united front against the vampire threat. Never mind that vampires were meant to be killed instead of captured. Never mind that—

I didn’t even know if Irina was really working for the Ostean Inquisition. I was just assuming. My Creeping-vines captor, Inquisitor Sung, had insinuated Irina worked for a Retivius, and she hadn’t denied it back then. I asked just now, and she hadn’t explicitly answered either. Refusal to answer wasn’t an automatic admission, but it came close to one.

And then… Ostean Inquisition. The mere thought was utterly absurd. There was only one Inquisition. One united entity. The Inquisition stood above power struggles and succession politics. It was slow, and stuffy, and exploitative of us monster hunters. Dogmatic and a little haughty. But not this. Not the force sent to fight a war a continent away rebelling against their Thysan masters.

No matter how I looked at Irina’s ludicrous claims, I simply couldn’t wrap my head around them. Struggling for something concrete to anchor my reasoning in, I traced one of the wrinkles of the aged skin on Dad’s arm. “Dad? You know this Ostean Grand-Inquisitor?”

Just like me, my dad had stiffened when he’d heard Irina’s explanation. He was so distracted by her claims that I could prod his arm to get his attention now without there being a sharp spike of fear in response.

“I think,” Dad stammered, “wasn’t Retivius the Grand-Inquisitor before I was deployed there? He died during a…” He swallowed. “A vampire attack or something.”

“Lady Retivius is his daughter,” Irina explained.

Right. Fine. Not someone my dad knew then. No help there. Except that vampires had apparently managed to kill the previous Grand-Inquisitor. That was something. That was very something. And this was way back before I was even born, before it got truly bad in Ostea.

So much for getting my thoughts in order. Even the answers to the innocent questions upended everything. But it was fine. Shelve the confusion for later. Focus. I had suspicions I wanted confirmed or denied. Simple questions. Steer Irina towards answering my most important concerns.

“Back in my cell, you mentioned someone paid for my rescue, Irina.” I forced every ounce of skepticism I could muster into my voice, and let that suspicious tone be the question while my words themselves remained mere statements. “You said you accepted the job because I was a nice vampire.”

I had no idea what I was implying with my statements. I was still speculating wildly. By not suggesting anything specific, Irina was likely to fill in the vagaries in my question with whatever was foremost on her mind. Since she was most likely to be thinking about the truths she was trying to keep from me, she would assume I had figured out more than I actually had.

I hoped. This whole situation was a little beyond the usual mind games I played with people.

“If you think I’m foolish enough to lie about that to a vampire, then you are sorely mistaken, Sweets.” Irina laughed bitterly. “Yes, I was paid to rescue you. Yes, the person who made the request used your kindness as an argument. No, it is not an absurd reason. Humans do not have a monopoly on kindness. And vampires are not the only ones capable of cruelty, as you are by now hopefully well aware.”

Right. As far as non-answers went, that was definitely an all-encompassing one. Lies by omission were still lies, and that meant Irina was very much callous enough to lie to a vampire, regardless of her claims to the contrary. She was a conniving bitch. I should be ripping the secrets out of her and then killing her and her men after I was done with them. The only thing that was keeping me from doing that, was how my dad was likely to consider me even more of a monster if I did.

Something she might be abusing. Time for a less subtle approach. “That’s not the entire truth, is it? You’re also here for politics. Your job rescuing me merely happens to align with your Ostean Inquisition agenda.”

There had to be more to the rescue attempt; some kind of political maneuvering that supported Irina’s motivations for it. Implying that the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor might be involved was beyond absurd, absolutely one of my more outlandish theories. I was merely latching on to the one important name I had managed to remember from my captivity. That made it stand out and loom more exaggeratedly important than it actually was. But I needed something non-subtle to prod Irina, and this qualified.

“Hah! Of course there’s politics, Sweets. There’s always politics.” Irina laughed another bitter laugh. “The other team, the one waiting for us at the rendezvous point, has a letter from the employer. I don’t want to know who it’s from, and I certainly don’t want to know about its contents. Everything from assignment to payment, perfectly anonymous. Better that way. If they catch me or my men alive, they’ll never stop asking questions.

“I know this though: the disagreement between Ostea and Thysa is about to get a lot uglier. Grand-Inquisitor Esmena Retivius will be coming here for negotiations. Whatever is in that letter, you run and you hide and you keep your head down. A vampire running loose here for the first time in more than thirty years has everyone assuming plots and plans. I did not save your ass and lose my gods-damned husband just for you to get yourself captured again right after!”

“She’s… coming?” my dad mumbled. “But… there’s a blockade?”

Of course. The blockade. The Inquisition upheld a strict blockade on Ostea. It had been there since before I was even born. No passengers or goods were allowed to travel to or from Ostea. Inquisition detachments were sent to Ostea to fight the war, but the posting was permanent. No one ever came back. Not even news from Ostea traveled the ocean. All of it to make absolutely certain that no Ostean vampires would ever make it to Thysa. That the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor was coming here was the biggest change in policy regarding the blockade ever.

Irina snorted at my dad’s remark. “That blockade didn’t stop you from smuggling a vampire baby into Thysa.”

Irina was right. There was smuggling. A way past the blockade. But that was for letters. Little notes from Inquisitors posted in Ostea to the family they had left behind here in Thysa, like the ones Onar must have gotten. Maybe a keepsake or two. But not whole crates of goods. Not people. Definitely not vampires. Except, apparently, baby vampire me.

How have I never questioned that?

Worse, how have I never even noticed this?

Dad pulled his arm out of my grip, and suddenly his icy fingers were digging into my shoulder, turning me to face him. “Tina, what is all this? What did you get involved in? Last I heard from you was that letter in the summer and now all this.”

“I don’t know.” I whimpered, shook my head, and focussed on the path ahead.

I didn’t understand any of this. I had never heard of Inquisitors returning from Ostea, and now the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor was traveling here. There was an impenetrable blockade against vampires, yet my dad had smuggled me into the country anyway. There was only one unified Inquisition, and now two factions were standing at odds. Vampires were always killed on sight, yet I had first been captured and then freed. None of this made sense.

Maybe this is all one big lie by Irina?

Or maybe I’m just ignorant?

Regardless of any of this, Irina’s warning to stay hidden made sense. As far as I knew Thysa was vampire-free. What would happen if word got out that the vampires were here anyway, hiding away in cozy little villages like Birnstead? That they were pretending to be innocent little hunter girls like me? I could hardly imagine the consequences. The panic.

What if news spread that an Inquisitor had helped free a vampire? Would people even believe that kind of rumor? I was a vampire and vampires were horrid monsters and Inquisitors protected people from the vampires.

I could reason through what Creeping-vines Sung would think of this though. The timing of all this conveniently matched the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor coming here. He would wonder who I was that I required this kind of special rescue. Spy? Planted agent? Precursor to a vampire invasion?

Seen in that light, having been captured instead of killed made a lot more sense...