Blood Oath

I had been tracking the nest for three weeks when it found me first.

This was not supposed to happen. I was trained — from childhood, from before I had the language for what we did — in the specific discipline of the hunt: patient, invisible, precise.

You did not let the quarry know you were coming. You did not let them know you were there.

I had let them know I was there.

The tell had been the third night — a torch snuffed by a draft that moved against the wind, which did not happen naturally, which meant something had opened a door or a window between me and the house at the end of the lane. I had registered it and not acted immediately, and in the minute between registration and action, something had registered me.

I was halfway down the lane when the hand closed on my collar and lifted me off the ground.

Not roughly — that was the disturbing thing. With the deliberate ease of something that had decided the result before the gesture. I was hung in the air two feet off the cobblestone and brought around to face whoever was holding me, and I found myself looking at a man who was not, in any sense I could define clearly, a man.

He was tall and pale in the way of things that had not been in the sun for a very long time, and his eyes in the gaslight of the lane were the color that the old text called undeath-amber — the specific gold of a creature whose metabolism ran on something other than food. He was dressed for the century, which told me he had lived long enough to update himself and had bothered to do so, which suggested something I filed away for later.

“A Voss hunter,” he said. His voice had the quality of very old wood — deep, settled, the kind of resonance that took centuries to develop. “I haven’t seen your kind in twenty years.”

“Put me down,” I said.

“In a moment,” he said. Not threatening. Curious. “Your great-aunt came through here in 1987. She was considerably less controlled than you are.”

The fact that he was referencing my family history while holding me at arm’s length over cobblestones was the most disturbing thing about the situation, which was saying something.

“My great-aunt is dead,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “She died hunting a nest three counties west of here. It was wasteful. She had skill.”

He looked at me steadily. “You have more.”

“I could have killed three of your people before you caught me,” I said.

“You killed two,” he said. “Not three — Mira survived, which you didn’t know because you left without confirming.

A Voss error, which suggests you were working from an incomplete briefing.” He lowered me, slowly, until my feet were on the cobblestone. He did not let go. “Who sent you?”

“Hunters work alone,” I said.

“Voss hunters work alone,” he agreed. “Which is why the family has lost so many of them.”

His grip on my collar loosened but did not release.

“Come inside. I find I want to know who you are.”

“I’m going to say no.”

“You are,” he said, “very welcome to say no. And then I am going to carry you inside anyway, and we will both find the exchange considerably less dignified than if you walked.”

I looked at him. He looked back with the patient quality of something that had been waiting out human decisions for longer than I had been alive.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and he let go of my collar and walked to the door of the house at the end of the lane, and I followed — because following was safer than running, and because whatever he was, he had just told me more about my family’s hunting record than any briefing I’d received, and I wanted to know how.

The inside of the house was not what the outside suggested.

The outside was a Victorian terrace, indistinguishable from its neighbors, the specific camouflage of old money pretending to be ordinary money.

The inside was larger than it should have been — the back wall was gone, replaced by a passage into a building behind, and the combined space was a library the size of a small museum.

Books. Everywhere. Shelved, stacked, piled in the specific beautiful disorder of a collection built over centuries by someone who kept acquiring things faster than they could organize them.

He walked through it without looking at it, which meant it was ordinary to him.

I walked through it looking at everything.

A first edition Shakespeare. A bound folio of manuscript that might have been something I could name if I had more time to look.

An entire shelf of hunting texts — not my family’s, not the modern catalogues, but the older ones, the ones that predated the current guild systems by two hundred years.

“You have the Voss treatise,” I said.

He stopped. Turned. “Katerina Voss. 1734. Your third-great-grandmother, or thereabouts.” He looked at the shelf. “She was here.”

“She came here?”

“We had an arrangement,” he said. Something moved briefly through his expression — not grief, but its very distant relative, the quality of something that had been processed a long time ago and was now filed under history. “She is why I know your family’s faces.”

I stood in the library and thought: I am in a vampire’s library being told about my ancestors’ arrangements with him.

This was not a standard mission briefing.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Caius Darkmore,” he said. “I’ve been here since 1342, if you’re keeping track.”

He looked at me with the amber eyes. “And you are Nadia Voss. The last one.”

I went very still.

“The last what?” I said.

“The last Voss hunter,” he said. “Your cousins in Edinburgh were killed two months ago. Your uncle in Prague, three months before that. You are—” He paused, with the specific quality of someone choosing words that would land accurately but not brutally. “The lineage is down to you.”

The room was very quiet.

“How do you know this?” I said.

“Because I have been watching your family hunt for three hundred years,” he said, “and someone has been killing them systematically, and it is not me.”