Something was wrong.
Rian shifted in her new bed. The room was stuffy, but she didn’t think the summer heat had woken her. Had it perhaps been the absence of noise? The muted rush and roar of wind no longer rattled winged shutters. Or could it be—? Rian fumbled for the switch of the bedside lamp, and looked quickly at the dresser. But the automaton hadn’t moved.
A distant thump and crash brought her to her feet. While she expected some noise at night in a vampire’s house, that had had the distinct air of large things breaking. Reaching for a light robe to cover her nightgown, Rian surveyed the room for a suitable weapon. Not even a fire iron.
More noise followed, an enormous scrabbling as if a rat the size of an auroch had found its way into the roof cavity. It approached so rapidly Rian had no chance to do more than jump backward as the ceiling collapsed, depositing a veritable monster into the room.
It had a distinctly human face mounted on a catlike body apparently fashioned from pale marble. A dozen whip like limbs tipped with blades of blue enamel were attached to its back, arranged to form tentacular wings. Perhaps most disconcerting of all were a pair of fine breasts, bare and gleaming with a high polish that had not been lavished upon the rest of the creature’s body.
It shook itself, made a low, rumbling sound, then noticed Rian trapped in the corner between the bed and the shuttered windows. The wings stirred, and the floor groaned as the thing shifted its weight, but Rian was already scrambling across the bed to the dressing table. This simply trapped her in a different corner, but it gave her a larger selection of inadequate weapons, ranging from a spindly chair to a collection of toiletries and cosmetics.
Cursing her decision to put her pistols into storage, Rian opted for a bottle of scent, hoping to at least confuse and distract long enough for a dash for the door. The locked door.
A turn of a key represented only seconds of delay, but nothing in the way the creature prowled forward made delay sound like a good idea. Whatever the thing wanted, she had its attention, and the head-lowering, ready-to-pounce stance didn’t suggest a midnight conversation.
With few other options Rian tossed the scent. As the bottle left her hand, a figure dropped from the gaping hole in the ceiling, landing by the creature’s chest in time to receive a shower of crystal shards.
The newcomer swore, a hand going to his eyes, and, as Rian recognised the young man from the library, two of the whip like limbs slashed down at him. One of the enamelled tips ploughed deep into his shoulder and chest, while the other severed his raised hand at the wrist, sending it arcing through the air to land, palm up, in the centre of the bed.
It was not quite true to say vampires were blood. Vampires were a conjunction of a god-touched creature too small for the eye to see, and a larger, living vessel. The symbiont permeated all the flesh and tissues, even the bones of its vessel, but it was doubtless true that blood was the focus and central factor of vampiric existence. Rian recognised the library photographer as a vampire when the spurt of blood trailing the severed hand stopped mid-air, and then returned to its source. The wrist of the severed hand lay without even oozing, keeping its blood safely contained.
He’d been knocked to the floor by the force of the creature’s blow, and his other arm hung useless from the wreckage of his shoulder, flopping like a newly-landed trout as he tried to shift it. Distant shouting intruded on the scene, but Rian had no hope of outside help, and hurled her heavy silver hairbrush before snatching for another missile, hoping to buy the wounded vampire a few seconds for recovery.
The winged creature ignored the object bouncing off its face, and again the dagger tips arced down. In response, the vampire raised his head, the whole of his damaged body straining as if lifting some enormous weight. And the monster halted.
The freeze wasn’t total. Bladed wings still crept down, at a glacial pace that the vampire had no difficulty avoiding as he staggered to his feet. Rian let her breath out, then headed for the door. Time to retreat, before the thing broke loose.
The vampire turned, the movement sharp, barely restrained, and she hadn’t even enough time to recognise her danger before he slammed her into the wall and opened her throat.
A great gash, torn rather than neatly punctured, blood spurting extravagantly into his mouth. Rian barely felt the pain of it, drowned as it was by a sudden sense of being torn in two. Vampires fed on the blood of others to maintain their bodies, but they sustained their beyond-human existence with ka, life-force, and this vampire was draining hers.
Carefully-researched expectations were rent, shredded, with nothing of a measured business transaction in the experience, but instead an agony beyond anything she’d ever encountered.
Flailing for any weapon within reach, Rian found nothing, so boxed his ears, but even with one arm useless and the other truncated, the vampire still effortlessly kept her pinned, ignoring her attempts to beat him off. Already it was too hard to move, her legs sagging and her vision fading. She became overwhelmingly aware of cinnamon. Citrus. Sandalwood. The bottle of scent she had thrown. He had been thoroughly doused, and if Rian had had the strength she would have laughed, because the wretched stuff was called Egypt.
Into the rising grey blur came a sensation as sharp as lemon on a cut. Collapsing onto the floor, her own hand clasped weakly over a wound grown fire-hot, Rian could feel the flesh knitting together beneath her fingers. Vampires sealed their bites with a lick of saliva or a few drops of blood. He must have used more than that, but the heat of healing only made the rest of her colder, all but a fraction of her life, the essence of her taken away. He wouldn’t even pay for killing her. The Exsanguincy Act, forever controversial, would excuse her death. An unlucky circumstance, practically an accident. Like Aedric’s.
Rian could not accept that, not with a shadow still on Eiliff and Aedric’s names. It meant too much to their children. And, damn it all, her own pride should not allow her to die so uselessly.
An enormous crash brought a brisk, reviving breeze in its wake. The windows and shielding shutter wings were gone, and bright moonlight outlined the vampire, looking down. His shoulder showed no trace of injury as he turned from the gaping hole to cross to the bed, collecting his severed hand and tucking it by the fingers into his belt.
“…right…about revolting…”
He considered her dispassionately. “I haven’t bound you. A binding from me would probably kill you, though that looks to be rapidly becoming a moot point. Before you go over the edge, care to explain why that sphinx was after you?”
It didn’t seem wise to admit she had no idea. “What…makes…you think…was?”
“It came in a set of two, apparently trying to reach Leodhild, but this one abruptly diverted directly here.”
Rian felt too tired to be surprised. Too weary to answer, and not at all inclined to explain brothers and envelopes and investigations ended before they were begun. Every breath had become a production, an achievement with a distinct beginning and end. Pride never was enough to live on.
“Did its work for it,” she observed, as detached as the vampire watching her die.
Her eyes must have closed, because now he was crouched before her, prying one lid open. She realised someone was banging away at the door, but her attention was focused by a renewed wave of scent.
“…reek.”
“And whose fault is that?” the vampire said. “Consider it an achievement. Few have ever come so close to getting me killed. Attend me.”
Two words become cliché thanks to their appearance in countless plays and stories: the classic words of a vampire imposing his will. Rian could feel it—a sudden muffling, as if a blanket had settled over her mind and contracted—but she slipped beneath, not by any exercise of strength, but thanks to a sucking weariness that stole all her attention. Inhalation. A slow release, and then a pause. The breath after that a distinct and separate thing, a new mountain to consider climbing.