Somewhere to the right of me, grass rustled.

Prey!

I crashed through the underbrush. When the animal fled with a startled yip, I gave chase. The taste of its panic and the whisper of its hasty escape gave me direction. Smaller, more agile, the fox kept ahead of me with frequent changes in direction. It was a good hunt, freeing, invigorating. No slow tracking of a quarry. No armor to protect me. No weapons or magic to aid me. Only predator and prey. Me and the fox and the cold winter night.

The animal careened into a small clearing. A mistake. The open space gave me room to maneuver.

I dove at it.

It dodged my swipe with a leap.

I planted a hand on the ground, claws digging into the earth for grip, and twisted my body forward. Fangs closed around a hind leg as I landed. With a roll, I sprang back to my feet and whipped my head around in a violent arc. A liquid crunch of fox skull on hard winter ground ended the hunt. I fed, and then the animal’s drained carcass sailed through the air, landing in an open, dry patch of grass.

As I reveled in the blissful afterglow of hunting on pure instinct, I studied the spot where the dead body had landed, and the bushes I had burst through in my chase. Too noticeable. I crept near, careful to not leave any footprints, and gave the dead thing a little nudge to better conceal it.

My fleeing had to look a little panicked, but not too obvious. I intended to leave few traces in wide open areas with packed soil, and clear signs of trampled undergrowth where the vegetation was densest. An hour or so back, I had come across a convenient muddy stretch of forest too large to easily go around. There, my passing had left some fine clawed footprints that served as a reassurance to any pursuers that they were still tracking a vampire. This fox carcass would serve as another clear indication.

I couldn’t have the Inquisition thinking they’d gotten their trails mixed up. I needed them to follow this path, lead them toward me, and away from Dad and Aunt Reya. The more obviously hurried the traces I left were, the better. When the first rays of the sun crested the horizon and the Inquisitors started their manhunt, I wanted them to fear I might run so far and fast they would never catch me. It would force them to commit everything to my pursuit.

It had taken me far too long to convince Dad to let me go alone. He had insisted on joining me in trying to find Uncle Hadrian so strongly, had stupidly kept on suggesting I go with him and Aunt Reya instead. It showed his foolish sentimentality. Me splitting off gave him a chance to escape the Inquisition, and he refused to take it. It had been as if he could not see that he would slow me down. Or maybe he wanted me near him, so that he could prevent me from indulging in senseless slaughter.

I huffed, stuck my nose in the air, and sampled the night before I could get tempted to indulge that thought any further. I tucked my hair out of the way, positioned myself so that fewer trees obscured my view, and squinted up. The first of the two morning stars edged over the horizon. Its appearance in the sky meant we were already at the eleventh bell of night, with less than two bells to go before sunup.

Without further hesitation, I ran. East tasted right. It was vaguely the same direction I’d been heading before, and the terrain appeared to slope down a little that way. I changed directions several more times, choosing my course by alternating between whichever direction led vaguely downhill and where the landscape felt least wild.

Predictably, heading for the most tame-looking valley brought me to civilization. I passed by the first little hamlet I encountered. I would have preferred to ignore the second one as well, but I doubted I’d have time to reach the third one before dawn.

With no time for second-guessing, I crept nearer to a small cluster of buildings. Once, it had been one of my most steadfast rules — never feed on humans. Now I had fed on dead Inquisitors. I had drained little Arrin in his dying moment. I had fed on Piers’ corpse in front of his wife. The taboo was broken, and honestly, little changed. There wasn’t even anything unique about their flavor. Humans tasted neither wrong nor better, not all that dissimilar from some other animals I’d fed on. They were just another source of food. The only thing horrid about feeding on them was how disgusted people were by the idea.

If I wanted to give Dad and Aunt Reya the best chance of escape, then feeding from an unsuspecting human gave them that chance. If I preyed on a person, openly, in a way the Inquisition couldn’t hide, then they’d need to commit absolutely everyone to tracking me down.

Alas, Aunt Reya had expressly forbidden me from attacking people. She’d taken me aside and warned me off it away from Dad’s prying ears. How she had suspected my plan I could not tell, but she’s always possessed this uncanny ability to read me. And foolish at this sentiment of hers was, it was her in charge of getting my dad to safety. If she insisted on taking the additional risk, then I would grant her that.

At least this way there was no new transgression I would never be able to explain away. My dad, vastly sentimental, cared even for people he would never know in a way that I never could. If he ever found out I had initially planned to feed on yet another person, if he learned how little I still cared for his pathetic fellow humans…

He’ll never know.

Aaaah, please let him never find out.

So… time to find a large animal — and not a human. I snuck from house to farmstead. There would probably not be any pigs. Almost everyone slaughtered theirs during fall so they’d have fat and meat to last the winter. I hoped for a horse or a cow, or really any animal big enough to survive and cause a fuss.

I had a bit of luck for once. There was a barn with a horse in it. The animal was asleep, calm, docile. I could simply walk up to it. My human mimicry was so good that even horses, cows, sheep, and any other domesticated animals accustomed to being prey simply accepted me as just another person. The horse remained perfectly at ease with my presence, even when I stroked her mane and rubbed her shoulder. When I wrapped my arms around her and laid my cheek on her neck, she stood meek and passive.

Right up until I sunk my fangs in.

Her panicked whinny broke the silent night. She trashed and bucked. I held on and drank. I wiggled my fangs as she writhed under me, making sure the puncture holes I left were nice and big. And when the first panicked farmer came rushing into the barn, I was long gone.

I did not stay to observe the aftermath, but whoever stumbled upon that panic-stricken horse, their nightmares were only beginning. Everyone knew the stories about vampires, about the war in Ostea, about how the horrid monsters had razed an entire continent. Everyone knew — hoped, prayed — there were no vampires here in Thysa.

A frothing horse with two very distinct puncture holes in the neck and a trickle of blood at the edges would shatter those illusions of safety. And all too soon, maybe in the morning, maybe a day after considering the distance involved, Inquisitors would show up, clearly in pursuit of someone.

Or something.

Those Inquisitors might try to hide the manhunt for the rogue vampire. Maybe they would only describe me as a weirdly feral young girl. Regardless, Inquisitors would follow my trail, and come to this village. A group of divine protectors, only seen when the vilest of monsters had to be slain, would show up right after a horse had been assaulted by a vampire. Rumors would spread, no matter how much the Inquisitors tried to deny.

They would put all their effort into hunting me instead of my dad, because of how frightfully close I had come to attacking a human.

For a fleeting moment, I felt sorrow. The horse I had assaulted was too much of a reminder of my own steed, Fern. I never drank from creatures so big I could not drink them dry. When I fed, my food always ended up dead, because the alternative was too horrid to consider.

The only exception had been Aunt Reya’s pig. The pig I had sipped from every other day while I stayed in Birnstead, so I did not need to go out hunting so often. The same pig the Inquisitors had slaughtered.

I knew why they had killed it. I knew why I hadn’t elaborated on it to Aunt Reya. It was for the same reason I had never fed from Fern. It was why, when cooking, I had steadfastly refused to sample the food I was preparing. It was why I always nursed the mug I drank from like a newborn babe until it was entirely empty.

To most living things, my saliva was an insidious poison. Consumed or infused into the bloodstream, it bred a strange dependence. The afflicted would suffer when they went too long without, would seek my kind out like a bad addiction. They would do anything for their fix. And when the craving got particularly bad, through abstinence after repeated feedings, it became lethal. Someone properly enthralled, four to five days without a vampire, and then they were dead.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Maybe Reya was right after all, not letting me feed on a person. If I did that, if I made human thralls, they would never stop hunting me, no matter how far I ran. At least feeding from the neck of the horse had been a mercy. With all the arteries there it was a bloody, messy spot. With some luck, the poor creature would be spared the suffering of vampire withdrawal, and simply bleed out.

I ran hard and fast, rushing far away from the settlement, the horse, and my thoughts of the horrendous suffering my kind could enact. This time I was careful not to leave a single trail. I only stopped running when the blazing Tonaltus of the rising sun forced me to seek refuge underneath an outcropping of rocks.

I could have gone on. My amulet could protect me from the very worst of the sun, but sunlight still crippled me. During the day, I would be weak and miserable, in constant pain. Without a horse, long treks in the sun would be a relentless, debilitating drain on my Metzus, forcing me to feed much more often.

It was something I had tolerated before, when I was pretending to be human, when I had been hiding right under the Inquisition’s nose. Not anymore. I no longer needed to pretend to live on a daytime rhythm, but could roam the night at will. I no longer needed to fake sleeping, but could torpor when it suited me. I did not need to stuff myself with horrid, indigestible fruits and vegetables or overcooked meat. I did not have to hide my strength or my claws or my fangs. I no longer needed to care.

The world knew what I was. I was on the run, fleeing both for my own life and that of those dear to me. And for the first time in forever, I was me. Fully and truly me. And it would be glorious.

----------------------------------------

Every night, I ran. During the day, I rested, hidden in burrows, the crowns of firs or other dense evergreen trees, and sometimes even caves and crevasses if I managed to find any.

Some days, I couldn’t find cover soon enough or foolishly pushed a little further than was wise. On those miserable mornings, as I often did when suffering too much sunlight, I worried. Seeing Dad again… it had confused me. More than a year apart, and I had been homesick. In quiet moments, with nowhere to go, I had longed for home. In that longing, dead-end thoughts had brought back memories of him. While stuck in the deepest darkest pit of that damned oubliette, I had prayed for his safety.

And then he was there, and all of those suffocating years cooped up at home, with his constant overbearing watchfulness came rushing back. He looked my way and it reminded me of how he’d always looked at me. Aunt Reya had embraced me, making it all the more startling how he never did. Suddenly there was this rift between the dad I had longed to return to, and the father I had always had.

The worst part was that I knew. I had always known this was what he was like. I’d just… conveniently forgotten. Somehow, that made it even worse. I had lost a precious part of my dad — a part that might only have ever been there in rosy memories. I’d probably never get it back. Nothing but a dumb, childish fantasy.

This, in turn, made me question other childhood certainties as well. The first time I spent the day crumpled up in a badger’s den recharging the runic circuits of my amulet, I wondered about that too. The craftsmanship was exceptional — a tangle of runic lines etched into it so dense it was nearly invisible to the naked eye. Such a concentrated weave must be interspersed with at least a dozen different durability enchantments as well. Otherwise, the delicate carvings would have broken long ago.

I tried studying it, but the intricacy of it was far beyond my comprehension. It was not the kind of thing my dad could manage either. I didn’t know anyone who could deliver this kind of expert work. I couldn’t even think of any other use it had beyond protecting a vampire from the sun. This amulet, my most precious possession; it must have been made specifically for me.

Why?

Who?

Uncle Hadrian again, or do I have even more mysterious benefactors?

It was something I had wondered before, but the question had never lingered. It had never really seemed to matter. I had freedom with my amulet, and that was vital. It was irreplaceable, my dad had told me, and so I would lose that freedom if the amulet ever got damaged. That potential loss had worried me, and not much else. Now, never having worried about where it came from, or any other aspect of my childhood, seemed like such an oversight.

Of course, there were the obvious measures we took to keep me safe. The middle-of-nowhere villages we stayed at. The out-of-the-way houses at the very furthest edge of town. My feigned sickness and frailty, the way we pretended that I was almost always bedridden so no one ever worried why I was rarely seen outside. How we moved every handful of years, so that no one would begin to wonder why I did not seem to age as everyone else did.

None of that explained how we had arrived. How my dad had been smuggled back in despite no one ever returning from Ostea. How I had been smuggled back in. The absolute mad risk of bringing a baby vampire into Thysa, when no one knew how much of a threat I would be. Why my dad risked everything and kept risking it, despite how much he clearly feared me.

There were a lot of unanswered questions. Uncle Hadrian would have a lot of explaining to do. Dad as well. The more I worried, the more sleepless days I mulled this over, and the more I began to suspect that he too hadn’t told me everything.

Three weeks and more I traveled. I cut a confusing, incomprehensible trail across the country, and kept that up long after I knew I was safe from pursuit. I could have been at my destination so much faster, but this was what we had agreed, together, and I was going to stick to the promise. Me and mine. Safe. It was better to go slow and make certain that the three of us remained safe than to rush headlong into danger to save a fourth person but sacrifice everything else.

Even with so much time spent obfuscating my trail, little of it was truly wasted. Weeks and weeks of imprisonment had left me completely out of touch with the world. I could not afford that kind of ignorance, so after my initial bout of worrying I spent a lot of my idle time gathering information.

I spent a day tailing a shepherd that liked to mumble all his worries to his herd. I perused the notice boards present in larger towns when no one was there to witness me staring at my own wanted posters. Hiding in the darkest shadows, in trees, and on top of high roofs, I listened in on conversations when people thought no one was looking. I discovered that the bottom of a town’s central well was, while very cold and wet, nearly as good a hiding place as a cave, and that such a central gathering place was great for eavesdropping on town gossip.

Once I got closer to the capital, I spent several nights sneaking into town after town, stealing basic clothes, gloves, boots, various trinkets, and a respectable amount of money. I cut my wild tangle of hair to a short and domestic bristle, even though it was more of a nightmare to keep it short than to have it long. I traded Aunt Reya’s oversized hand-me-down shirt for a modest skirt and presentable cloak. I got myself a staff to hide my unsteady daytime gait, a coif to cover my hair and blend in with all the modest farmers’ daughters, and a burden basket to have a reason to be out in winter. And only when I looked nothing like the feral child Valentina the wanted posters spoke of, did I show myself in public.

The sun’s baleful Tonaltus glare, the oppressively confining burden of my outfit, I tolerated it all. I hobbled into the last big town before the capital with a slight limp, leaning on my cane for support. It was a risk, that cane, but one I would need to live with. My coordination under the light of the sun was far from perfect. If I conserved my Metzus, then the only walk I could manage during the day was one where I tried not to look like a stumbling drunk. It was an obvious tell of my nature that anyone searching for me might be looking out for. I could not hide my unsteady gait for long, but maybe, just maybe, I could pass it off as a limp.

There was a certain irony in hiding behind a human disguise mere weeks after my elation at being rid of it, but I would not let apprehension of the method distract me from my goal. I pushed my way through the uncharacteristic throng of people at the market, the densely nervous press of the crowd being an unusually good source of rumors.

Very disturbing rumors, that for days now had been so consistent that I had to take them as fact. I went about my business with haste. Clamping down on my heightened senses and chewing my lip to rein in the overwhelming taste of so much clueless prey milling around me, I bought what I needed with my stolen money, and hurried back out of town.

Nearly an hour later, after sundown and when the road I traveled was free of people, I veered into the bushes. Pushing through the thicket I first cursed the idiocy of long, constricting skirts, then the horrid not at all coincidental events that seemed to chase after me, and finally my own ill-thought-out plans.

I knew my Uncle lived somewhere near here, but not where exactly. I merely knew it had not been the place I had just come from. I did not know the details of what he traded in. I did not know his last name. I did not know where he lived. I had known him all my life, and only now was it becoming clear how little I knew, how much he had deliberately hidden.

Still, he was family, and I would do all I could to protect him. I sincerely hoped that him living near the capital had not been another lie, because then no amount of asking other merchants if they knew him would help me.

I found myself a tree both far enough away from the road to be safe for me and close enough that I could keep track of the groups of people that would pass by. Tomorrow, when traffic towards the capital picked up again, I would join up with the first group of gullible idiots that happened to pass by. My disguise might not be all that good, but since everyone was looking for a lone vampire girl, a group would be the perfect way to get past the city gates.

I pulled myself up, branch by branch, and nestled myself uncomfortably in the old, knotted wood crown. The sky darkened, and the first stars sparkled. Without the flimsy warmth of the sun, the temperature dropped. It became cold. Freezing cold. Dark clouds loomed overhead, promising either rain or snow. No sane person slept outdoors in weather like this. Except me. Vampire me.

And even if I did not feel the cold like anyone else did, I still longed for warmth. Dad and Reya, even though they were heading here as well, would not have been able to travel as fast as I had. Days, maybe weeks remained before I would see them again. I longed for the comfort of their presence. Despite not needing it, pure yearning soon had me curl into a little ball and drift off into the closest approximation to sleep I could manage.

Don’t need to sleep.

Really, really don’t need to sleep.

‘s still so nice sometimes.

Yes, it was nice. That was all. And it was so much better than mulling over all that I had managed to overhear. About the total uproar that dominated every little hamlet and town around the capital. Irina had been right. Aunt Reya had been even more right. It wasn’t just the Ostean Grand-Inquisitor that was heading for the port capital of Tormund.

Everyone was in a frenzy because the vampires sent a delegation of representatives as well, supposedly to negotiate an end to the war.