Private Sink the Knife

One green eye, wide open. Steam trailing off the fresh kill. A cockatrice carved wide open. White hand digging in through the guts. Fingers, like claws turned to hungry gnashing jaws, ripping and tearing entrails. Blood splattered. Sprayed. Bits of viscera splat and dribbled. Fat shined. Sinew popped. Snap went some soft tissue.

Liver. He tore into it with his teeth. Tasted the power of the forest there in it. The sprawl of roots. Taking up all the earth gave to it. Bite. Bite. Chew. Gulp. What wounds he had stitched themselves together.

Birds flew away. Animals fled. The stench of brimstone. The tang of ozone. A human hand grabbed up a fat headed knife, stuck there about in the gore. Yanks it free. Drives the point in. Lifts it up. Snap. Grabs up that still hot heart and cranes his neck as he feels the last of its beating afterlife there in the palm of his bonewhite hand.

Well, a voice like steel across glass scraped inside his mind. What a fine prize we've caught, one last beat. Oh Bearer Mine. The massive heart was crushed there in the white hand's grasp. A gout of green flame there to eat up the splash.

Knife back in hand. Hacked. Cut. carved out. All the best parts.

The smell hit her first, brimstone painting a thick coat on the back of her throat. Infernal residue. Mixed with something sour and the air felt right before a lightning strike splits a tree in half. Daniyah's stomach turned before her eyes even found the source.

She came through the line of trees low, crossbow already off the shoulder. "Gobinh's teeth." It came out of her as barely a hiss. A cockatrice lay gutted wide. Steam still curling off it. And a shape crouched in the wreckage of it, white-handed, wrist-deep in gore. Her first read was clean: possessed host, active feeding... but then the scene didn't make sense for one long du-dunk in her chest. Her mind tried to hand her easy answers. A poacher. A ghoul. Something she could put a bolt through and walk away from. Then he lifted his head, and it was Garrod's jaw, Garrod's cheekbones, Garrod's stupid crooked nose.

"Garrod?" The heart crushed in his palm, crushed, weeping under the green fire between his fingers. Her finger found the trigger guard and stayed there, not pulling, not yet. An arrow's width from ready. Her pulse was a drumbeat in her ears now, loud enough to drown the wet noises from his gutting.

"What did you do? Put the knife down." A test, not a plea. She wanted to hear which of them answered to it.

The alley had gone quiet by the time the man—no, the creature now famously known as The Vagrant—had finished.

The poor soul lay crumpled against the damp stone, whatever pleas they had offered long since silenced, their blood still warm upon his hands as he casually licked the worst of it from his fingers. He lingered only long enough to savor the fading warmth before a different scent threaded through the darkness—blood, yes, but mingled with brimstone and ozone, something unnatural carried upon the night air from somewhere beyond the town. His head lifted slowly, red eyes narrowing beneath the brim of his battered cap as the strange aroma reached him. For the first time since he'd begun feeding, his attention left the corpse at his feet. “Well now…” he murmured, a faint smile curling beneath his fangs.

“Now dat smells interestin'."

Fresh blood was nothing unusual. After centuries of following its scent through battlefields, back alleys, slaughterhouses, and lonely roads, the vampire had long since learned that blood carried more stories than most living things ever could. But this was different. Brimstone clung to the air beneath the copper tang of the blood, mixed with the sharp sting of ozone and something sour and unnatural that set an old instinct stirring somewhere beneath the surface.

He stopped among the trees, listening to the forest around him. As he approached, he noticed the little oddities. Like how the birds had fled. Small creatures had vanished into their hiding places. Even the wind seemed reluctant to pass through the branches overhead. He could even feel the insects below ground burrow themselves deeper. Then, however, came the sound of flesh being torn apart, wet and methodical in the unnatural quiet.

A faint smile touched his blood greased mouth. A crimson trail dribbled down his chin.

The vampire stepped from between the trees without making any effort to conceal himself. He had no reason to. His glowing red eyes swept across the clearing, taking in the gutted cockatrice first, steam curling from its ruined body as blood soaked into the earth. Then he found a man crouched over the corpse, one white hand buried within its remains, green fire flickering through the gore. The sight held his attention for several seconds. Not because of the violence—never because of the violence—but because of what lingered beneath it. Something foreign. Something infernal. Something that did not quite belong inside the flesh it inhabited.

His gaze shifted toward the woman, crossbow raised and finger poised.

He watched her for a moment. He could hear her heartbeat from where he stood, quickened but controlled, and there was a certain tension in the way she held herself that told him she understood she was looking at something she didn't entirely recognize. Then her command cut through the clearing.


His eyes dropped briefly toward the blade in Garrod's hand before returning to the man himself. A quiet laugh escaped him, low enough that it was almost lost beneath the whisper of the trees. “Cher,” he murmured, his voice carrying that lazy, unmistakable rhythm of his Belmarun (Which my lovely readers would hear as Cajun.) upbringing, “I reckon dat knife ain't what you oughta be worryin' 'bout.”

He stepped farther into the clearing.

There was no weapon beneath his coat, no blade at his side, no steel waiting to be drawn. He carried nothing but himself. Tall as he was, The Vagrant rarely seemed to stand at his full height when he walked, his shoulders rolled slightly forward and his posture hunched in a way that made him look less like a man strolling through the woods and more like a predator prowling through its territory. Two blood-soaked but empty hands hung loosely at his sides, long fingers relaxed, dark claws catching the faint light filtering through the branches. There was no defensive posture and no overt threat in the way he moved; if anything, there was an almost casual looseness to it. That, perhaps, was what made him unsettling. A man expecting violence prepared himself for it. This one looked like a creature that had already survived whatever violence might come—and was simply stalking closer because he lacked the fear to warn him against it.

His attention settled upon the white haired man, Garrod, again, and his hunger stirred.

It was not the frantic hunger of an animal deprived of food. That sort of hunger belonged to younger creatures. This vampire's hunger was older than that. It had been refined by a millennia of restraint and indulgence, by countless nights spent learning exactly how much blood a body contained and precisely how long a heartbeat could continue after the heart had begun to fail. Hunger was no longer something that controlled him. It was simply another ancient companion, patient enough to wait.

And whatever was inside Garrod had caught its attention.

“Don't mind me none,” The Vagrant said softly, almost conversationally.

His eyes never left Garrod.

“I jus' nosy is all.”

There was no excitement in his voice. No anticipation. Only curiosity—the detached curiosity of something watching a storm gather on the horizon, wondering whether the lightning would strike nearby.

He took another step, boots sinking slightly into the blood-darkened earth. The squelch it made was music to his pointed ears. His head tilted as he studied Garrod's face, searching for something beneath it, something that might explain the wrongness he could smell. When he finally spoke again, his voice was quieter.

“You know…” He glanced briefly toward the woman before returning his attention to Garrod. “Dat smell ain't right. All teh sulfur be smotherin' dat otherwise lovely coppeh scent.”

His smile slowly returned.

“Now dat's enough to spoil even my insatiable appetite, mon ami.”

The words settled over the clearing like a cold mist.

The vampire stood there in the silence that followed, watching for the smallest change in Garrod's expression. His smile widened just enough for the tips of his fangs to become visible beneath his bloodied lips. There was something ancient in his eyes now, something that had been hidden beneath the easygoing charm and lazy drawl. The playful wanderer was still there, but only on the surface.

Beneath it waited the predator.

His gaze remained fixed upon Garrod as he spoke one final time, almost gently. “Question is…” His fingers flexed once at his sides, slick blood covered claws catching the dim light. “How you gon stop me from tearin' you open to see what's hidin' inside, eh?”

The Vagrant's grin widened.

That green eye went wide at the sound of her. "Shit," he hissed. Still low to the earth. Knife tilting to drop from his hand. "Funny meeting you-"

A second voice rolled through the air. Sweet as honey halfway to mead. Steps went on across the dirt. Big fucker.

Garrod's fingers curled back around the hilt of his blade. His own smile cut across his face. Wider and wider as his knife, a Den De Pulpo Espezial, hung at his side.

On and on. The honey voice soured in his ears. Big. Dramatic. Fucker.


Garrod flung the heavy headed blade right at the bastard's chest. No spin so its point would go thunk. See how he liked the Espezial's silver inlay for cutting all kinds of cursed shit.

The particular rot sweet musk serpentined it's way up her nostrils. A smell she would know blindfolded after growing up buried in that smell. Daniyah's whole spine went steel before her mind caught up to naming it. That smell had carved a reflex so deep it cut straight through the puffs and huffs of sulfur. She didn't even need to turn her head to know what had just stepped out of the treeline. Every rising hair on her neck and arms had already told her.

Vampire.

"Cher," he said, all lazy drawl and slow menace, like this was a parlor and not a butchered magical creature in the dirt. She didn't turn. Didn't give him her eyes. Rule one, learned the hard way, before she was old enough to understand why, a vampire's eyes are a hook. Her heartbeat kept its steady mortal rhythm. That never changed, not after everything, not after the Dead had drained the color out of her, hair and skin, until she looked more like something that belonged in a mausoleum than out of one. Silver hair. Skin pale. Eyes the milky dead blue of a body pulled from a lake.

"Can you not see," she said, without an ounce of warmth, cold as frost "that you're interrupting something, leech?" She kept her sightline on Garrod, on the knife, on the fire wet heart in his hand. She heard the vampire take another step. Heard the wet suck of blood soaked earth under his boot.

The knife left Garrod's hand before Daniyah's mouth had even closed around her next words. Her body simply moved. Weight already shifting off her back foot, crossbow swinging away from Garrod and onto the vampire instead. Her thumb found the crank. The bolt left her string aimed true at center mass, where a mortal heart would sit, where all these years of hunting had taught her. Runework on the stock flared, stripping away the one advantage centuries bought a creature like this. Speed. Reflexes honed across lifetimes of watching mortal blades coming from a mile off, lazy and slow as falling leaves by comparison. Not against this. The bolt crossed the clearing in a blur of celerity. It would not allow him to read the trajectory. It passed Garrod's knife in a wish of a heartbeat.

The bolt was aspen. Pale, straight grained, cut on a night with no moon from a tree that had never known a graveyard's shade. It was old wisdom, older than the Red Mouth itself, that aspen trembled because it had betrayed the humans once and regretted it still, so now dead thing could bear its touch. The arrow head bound with rowan pins and a hair's width of silver wire, and blessed it in running water the way her mentor had taught her.

She was already moving into the next motion before the string had finished singing, cranking the crossbow back into ready.

THWIP! SHUNK!

The bolt punched into his flesh just before the knife sank in beside it.

Mid-step, The Vagrant looked down at his chest as though mildly surprised to find the weapons there. His next step faltered, his boot dragging awkwardly through the damp earth before he stumbled backward. A dark stain began spreading across his ragged shirt, ichor seeping from the twin wounds as he stared down at them. His usual grin slowly collapsed into a grimace, one hand twitching at his side.

“Hnn…” A strained breath escaped him, followed by a crooked little smile. “G-good answer, dat…”

Then, like some great oak finally giving way beneath the axe, the towering vampire tipped backward and crashed into the earth. Leaves, dirt, and loose debris scattered around his fallen body as the impact shook the ground beneath him. The dark stain continued to spread from the two wounds, soaking outward across his shirt while the bolt and knife remained jutting from his chest like crude flagpoles planted atop a conquered hill.

And then he was still.

His face remained frozen in those final moments, the expression of pain lingering across his features as though death had caught him by surprise. Yet perhaps unnoticed—or perhaps not—something strange had begun to happen along his left forearm. Crude sigils and scattered runes covered the pale skin there, inked without any discernible pattern or alignment. Among them was one peculiar marking: a simple line ending in what looked almost ironically like an arrowhead.

That particular symbol began to burn.

The skin around it darkened as the ink cracked and flaked away. Tiny fragments drifted upward from his arm, breaking apart into fine black dust before vanishing into the night air.

Still, the body did not move.

The clearing remained eerily quiet.

Then, somewhere in the distance, a wolf—something—howled.

The sound rolled through the darkness, long and mournful, answered almost immediately by the distant flutter of leathery wings. The air seemed to change. Somehow the clearing grew darker, as though the surrounding light itself had begun to retreat. Growls and snarls emerged from the woods, accompanied by scattered yips and barks. Dozens of crimson eyes appeared between the trees, watching from the darkness.

Above them, hundreds of black shapes swept across the face of the moon.

Bats.

Their wings beat in a great churning mass overhead, casting the clearing into momentary shadow as they wheeled through the night. For several long seconds, the forest seemed alive with them.

And then—

Nothing.

The wolves fell silent, and the bats vanished beyond the trees, their frantic wingbeats fading into the distance until the darkness settled back over the clearing. For several long moments, nothing moved. Then, slowly, the absence became apparent. The place where The Vagrant had fallen was empty. No body. No movement. Nothing but the bolt and knife lying crossed upon one another in the damp grass, as though the earth itself had swallowed what should have been there. For a moment, there was no explanation—only the quiet certainty that something was terribly wrong.

Then came the laugh.

Low and throaty.

Menacing.

Sinister.

It seemed to rise from everywhere at once, echoing through the trees until it became impossible to tell where it had begun. Shadows stretched and twisted at the edges of vision. Something moved between the trunks—or perhaps it hadn't. A shape flickered in the corner of an eye, gone whenever someone turned to look.

Then his voice came from the darkness.

Close.

Far too close.

A whisper against the ear, carrying that same lazy Belmarun drawl as though he had never left at all.

“You gon' find me a mite harder ta kill den dat.”

The shadows shifted.

And suddenly, he was there.

Standing exactly where he had been before.

As though nothing had happened.

His posture remained loose, slightly hunched, shoulders rolled forward in that habitual prowling stance of his. His shirt, however, told a different story. Two ragged slits remained where the weapons had struck him, the fabric stained dark around them.

The Vagrant slowly cocked his head to one side.

Then he grinned.

His lips pulled back until far too many sharp teeth were visible, the smile stretching across his face with something almost unnatural in its breadth. His crimson eyes glimmered beneath the shadow of his battered cap as he stared at them, amusement slowly returning to his expression.

"Go'n now... run if you tink it'd help."

Bats swarming the moon. Wolves answering a corpse. Theater, older than the vampire playing it . A distraction dressed up as a death rattle. Meant to buy the bloodsucker the seconds he needed to vanish into shadow and reappear somewhere less full of wounds. She'd seen this exact act performed at Old Hunger's court as a child, back when she'd been made to kneel in awe and fear for it.

Somewhere behind her sternum, an old prayer surfaced unbidden. Words from a dead dialect her mentor used to mutter over salt circles.

So while the clearing went dark with churning wings, her hand pulled a vial free of its cord, thumb finding the seal, wrist snapping it once, twice, shaking the bottled solstice light back to furious life. K'pala fire, caught and bottled, a gift from the old babas of the eastern villages in Zelevir. Light stolen from the shortest night of the year, when the sun refused to fully set and the creatures of the night were forced to remember what they were. The glass went white-gold in her palm, before she let the flask fall from her fingers, its light spilling wide.

"Go'n now... run if you tink it'd help." He had no idea who he was talking to. She'd bled out a whole nest of monsters crueler than whatever this ragged leech thought itself to be. She'd put an end to a creature that had worn crowns back when mortal kingdoms were still just names whispered, a creature that had raised her from the cradle for the sole purpose of making her his night bride.

"You first." The crossbow was already up, already loaded, and the bolt loosened.

Daniyah moved first. The flask struck the ground before The Vagrant had quite finished speaking, bouncing once against the earth before erupting in a violent burst of white. For an instant, the entire clearing vanished behind a wall of brilliance. The flare cracked through the night and rattled the surrounding trees, the sudden burst overwhelming his senses as his vision dissolved into a searing wash of light. He recoiled a fraction, one hand coming instinctively toward his face as a high, unpleasant ringing filled his ears. For anyone mortal, the combination would have been enough to leave them helpless. For The Vangrant, it was little more than an abrupt inconvenience—but an inconvenience that accomplished exactly what Daniyah had intended. His vision was gone, if only for a moment, and the ancient vampire found himself momentarily blind within the white glare.

He could feel the heat radiating through the air, its white-gold brilliance washing across his skin with something of the character of true sunlight. Had the flask's flash been capable of doing more than blinding him, perhaps it might have bought Daniyah a more meaningful opening. Instead, the light merely irritated him, and the vampire was already beginning to recover. His vision was returning through the afterimage, his heightened senses reasserting themselves as the ringing in his ears slowly diminished. He lowered his hand, blinking against the fading illumination, his crimson eyes just beginning to make out the shapes around him again.

He never saw Garrod move.

The distraction had been enough.

By the time his vision cleared, Garrod was already inside his reach, his sword sweeping upward from the left in a vicious diagonal. There was still time to move if he chose to. But he remained still, wanting to give the white haired man the opening he earned. The blade found him swiftly, tearing through coat, leather and cotton as it bit deeply into his midsection. The strike continued upward, following its brutal arc across his torso toward the shoulder, and The Vagrant's eyes widened as he finally understood where the blow was going.

The blade reached his arm with impressive speed and precision.

There was a wet, meaty crack as it severed the limb cleanly at the bicep, and the force of the rising swing carried it with the blade, launching the severed arm upward and away from the body. It went tumbling through the clearing, spinning end over end as the fingers remained curled into their familiar claw, dark fabric twisting around pale flesh with every rotation. For a moment it caught the moonlight before continuing into the darkness beyond the trees, disappearing somewhere among the shadows.

The vampire stared after it.

For perhaps the first time since he had entered the clearing, his grin faltered.

Not from pain.

Surprise.

His crimson eyes slowly dropped toward the stump of his arm. Dark ichor poured freely from the wound, running down his side and staining the already battered remnants of his coat. The vampire rolled his remaining shoulder once, and beneath the ragged edge of the wound, something moved. Muscle tightened. Tendons drew together. Pale flesh began creeping across the severed surface as his ancient body immediately set about repairing what had been taken from him. It was grotesque, but there was no panic in the vampire's expression, no instinctive attempt to staunch the bleeding or protect the wound.

He even made sure to slow the rate of his regeneration. Clever theatrics, but often helpful in a pinch.

The vampire lifted his gaze back toward Garrod and grinned that toothy grin. The playful amusement remained, but beneath it came a sharper interest, recognizing the hunter's attention to detail. Those tattoos weren't decoration. They were wards. Protections deliberately carved into The Vagrant's flesh, and judging by the trajectory of the strike, the vampire suspected the arm had never been an incidental target.

No matter, the spell had already been activated. The woman had been right about the theatrics of it all, just not in the way she thought. He wouldn't have much time though and the toll would be high, but these two didn't need to know any of th-

THWIP!

The aspen bolt punched squarely into his chest and buried itself deep, the impact forcing him backward half a step. He looked down at the shaft protruding from his body, the silver wire and rowan pins catching the moonlight as dark ichor spread across his chest. For a moment he simply regarded it with detached curiosity. Then his remaining hand closed around the shaft and he pulled. The blessed wood tore free with a wet sound, leaving ichor welling around the wound even as the flesh immediately began closing behind it.

The vampire turned the bolt between his fingers, examining it as though someone had handed him an interesting little artifact. The sound of burning flesh tickled the ears. The tips of his fingers sizzled as smoke rose up from the charred flesh there. The prolonged exposure was worth it to gauge the expert craftsmanship. His gaze traced the aspen, the rowan pins, the silver wire, and whatever blessing had been worked into the weapon. A quiet appreciation entered his expression. Daniyah hadn't simply fired a crossbow at a vampire. She had built the perfect weapon for the job.

“Aspen...” he murmured, turning the bolt once. “Rowan. Silver.” His eyes lifted toward Daniyah. “An' blessed in runnin' water?”

A low laugh escaped him. “Now dat's a proper hunting tool, cher.”

With a casual twist of his fingers, he snapped the bolt in two and dropped the pieces into the grass. His gaze fell briefly to the hole in his chest as the last traces of the injury sealed themselves shut, leaving little more than a black stain on the fabric and the skin below. When his eyes rose again, the amusement in them had returned in full.

“But I reckon you already see...” his tongue briefly traced one of his fangs. “...it ain't gon' be enough.”

They had surprised him though.

Garrod had managed to take an entire arm, and the precision of the strike had revealed that there was more to the man's tactics than he initially understood. Daniyah had attempted to blind him with a weapon meant to mimic the killing touch of sunlight, and neither attack had done more than inconvenience him. More importantly, neither of them had run. They had been told to fear the dark, and instead they had brought their own light into it.

He found that admirable.

The Vagrant flexed his regrown hand, dark claws extending slowly from his fingertips as the muscles of his shoulder tensed and stretched. Somewhere out in the darkness, a dark outline of ichor stained the ground where his severed arm used to be.

Then, he opened his stance deliberately, exposing himself once more, offering them the very target they had already proven capable of hitting. He tore the remnants of his shirt off and tossed the scraps of his coat to the ground. Finally, he pulled his cap off and stuff it into his back pocket. He liked this one, hoped to keep it a while longer.

“Y'all do be mighty impressive tho,” he said, his crimson eyes moving between them.

He leaned forward slightly, deliberately exposing his throat as the predatory grin stretched wider across his face. There was no attempt to defend himself, no effort to retreat or put distance between them. Instead, he tilted his head to the side, baring his neck as though offering it up on a silver platter, almost daring either of them to take the opportunity. The ragged-looking vampire simply stood there, utterly unconcerned, practically inviting them to try and chop his head clean off.

“So I gon' give ya one more try.”

The vampire's grin widened until the full length of his fangs showed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped into something quieter, older, and infinitely more dangerous.

“But den it's my turn."

She let Garrod keep the vampire's attention, sword shrieking through air, tendon and bone in that relentless butchery he did so well.

Old blood was still blood. Even eternity kept a ledger somewhere, and every limb he regrew, bolt he shrugged off, every rune flaking to ash along his arm was a withdrawal from some vault they couldn't see. No heart in that chest, either... her bolt would burrow into his chest and do nothing. Whatever kept that thing standing lay somewhere else. Somewhere she couldn't reach with aspen and silver. But this glade might reach it. This glade had been fed on tonight, not only by the Fiend Bearer.

“Now dat's a proper hunting tool, cher.”
“But I reckon you already see...it ain't gon' be enough.”

"I will have you ash, even if it takes all night." Her voice had gone low, down to something closer to a growl than speech.

Daniyah dropped back to where the cockatrice's blood had run deep enough to soak past the leaf litter into old earth. She'd learned long ago that places remembered what happened on them. Fed on it. Every glade, every crossroads, every small corner of the land had something watching from underneath and behind. Old watchers, spirits that had seen a hundred deaths just like this one and taken their cut of each. Daniyah crouched.

She drew her belt knife and opened her own palm without hesitating over it. The cut welled dark in the moonlight, and she pressed her palm flat to the cold ground, forcing the offering down into dirt already thick with cockatrice gore. Mixing her blood into the feast. Cold climbed up through her wrist into her arm.

"Spirit of this hollow, hear the blood I give you. Spirits who watch this dying place, who feasted tonight on cockatrice blood! I bring you more! Take it and hear me! I ask one rite in trade, unmake every ward here tonight."

It was a mad thing to ask for. She knew that even as the words left her, offering up her own protections alongside his, gambling on that raw hatred. She didn't dare stop talking. A hollow like this didn't have to say yes. It could weigh her offering and find it thin. But blood of the living carried something dead blood did not and never could. Dead things, old things, hollow things... they had long since spent their share of that. That was why the vampire drank from throats and never bothered with corpses. That was why spirits of this hollow might lean in closer at the smell of her drops than it ever would at the reek of the vampire and a dead creature.

"Strip us bare. Let claw and steel and tooth decide it, the way it was always meant to be decided, before men and beast thought to hide behind marks and their little magics. No kindness carved to spare either of us what's coming."

Every bird that hadn't already fled the glade went now, all at once.

With his neck exposed, head tilted to one side and his fangs shimmering in the moonlight, The Vagrant watched as Garrod closed in on him. That impressive speed carried the Cazadore across the short distance in less than half a blink. He had expected the sword to cut into his neck in the next half-second, so he was genuinely surprised when Garrod went for his limbs instead. In that briefest moment before metal rendered flesh, the vampire felt the same kind of admiration a hunter had felt for a bear. That knowing reminder that, if he wasn't careful, the bear would tear him limb from limb and feel nothing about it.

If it hadn't already been clear, it was now. This Cazadore had known strife and been that strife. He had hunted and been hunted. He learned from every encounter, every survival, honing his craft with each one. There was no doubt in the vampire's mind that this man would probably be the end of him one day. Not that Daniyah wasn't capable herself. She had all the right weapons, along with the knowledge, training, and experience to use them. She was just as clever, if not more so. The difference between the two of them was as simple as a line.

Would she cross that line if it meant ending the bloodshed? Ending the monster? Stopping him from killing countless more? Would she sacrifice others to make sure he died? Perhaps she would, but The Vagrant couldn't be certain. What he did believe was that Garrod wouldn't hesitate. To destroy a monster, you had to become a bit of a monster yourself.

The bear didn't care about the line. It didn't even see it. He didn't think Garrod did either.

His gaze slipped past Garrod's attack, toward Daniyah crouched beside the cockatrice.

But he'd been wrong before.

SHUNK-SHLICK-SHANK!

The vampire was dragged back into the onslaught. It wasn't often he found himself on this side of the ripping and tearing. Bits of oily black ichor sprayed outward with every gash, every new cut. Digits and limbs were lopped off and sent scattering across the clearing. He was starting to look like one of those fancy statues missing half their arms.

Then the blade sang through the air, whistling beautifully before slicing through his ankle and severing the tendon with ease. Then the other.

The big vampire toppled to the ground, surrounded by pieces of his own limbs and the clothing he had discarded only moments before. A puddle of black ichor spread outward from his butchered form, growing wider as more of it poured from the wounds.

The stuff oozed toward his face. It reached his lips and tongue, and he winced before spitting it away. He hated the taste. It was like licking along a rotten piece of moldy meat soaked in the stagnant water that collected at the bottom of trash bins after a hard rain.

But there was a reason that enchanted ichor flowed through his veins.

Not one he particularly liked, but one he was forced to tolerate.

Not that he could do anything about it in the moment. Ever since that first attack, when Meinrad's ward had activated, he could feel his power being sapped from him. His speed. His enhanced senses. His regeneration. Every little thing that made being a vampire so much fun was being dampened exponentially with every passing second.

He wouldn't have much time, and the toll would be high. That was his first thought when he felt the ward burn itself out of his skin.

He should have just killed them and been done with it. But like a fool, he had wanted to play with his food. You'd think he would have learned better in his old age, but some habits were impossible to break, baked into the bones like memories and emotions.

The Vagrant blew out a long sigh, sending bubbles churning through the black ichor.

At least his hat wasn't getting stained.

Anyway, he'd need to end this quickly before the rune's magic shut him down completely.

He was already preparing to move, to regenerate his limbs—lightning quick this time—and take Garrod's head. Then he caught sight of the woman again.

Daniyah was doing something.

The scent hit him like a brick.

Copper flooded his nostrils.

He narrowed his eyes, looking past Garrod's legs—nice as they were—to where Daniyah had begun to chant. One brow lifted as he listened.


Her voice carried through the clearing as she continued.


The frown he had been carrying quickly curled into a grin.

Well now.

He'd have all the time in the world.

"Thank you, ma chérie."

The wards along his arms began to literally melt away, as though they were nothing more than ordinary ink. Black ichor flowed down the curves of his arms, dripping into the dark puddle surrounding him.

The magic went with it.

Suddenly, a shadow stretched across the ground beneath him, forming a sprawling oval that nearly touched both ends of the clearing. Then it opened.

A giant, glowing red eye stared up from within it, with The Vagrant all chopped up at its center.

The shadow slithered up his body, covering him entirely, swallowing him whole. It pulled him downward as the enormous eye slowly closed.

Then thousands of tiny red eyes blinked into existence across the darkness.

They pooled together and rose from the ground, forming the silhouette of The Vagrant. The shadow began to harden, taking on substance, becoming something physical. One arm reached upward and flexed its oversized claws.

A slow, drawn-out cackle filled the air.

His two glowing eyes opened, joining the countless others scattered across his shadowed visage.

Then the shadow retreated.

The countless eyes blinked shut. The enormous eye collapsed back into his smaller shadow, and suddenly The Vagrant was standing there once more.

His pale body was untouched.

Clean.

Fresh.

He could hear their hearts beating.

He could smell the blood pumping through their veins.

He could almost taste the crimson ambrosia flowing beneath their skin.

All of his essence came flooding back into him at once, nearly overwhelming in its intensity. He hadn't felt this good in three hundred years.

He lifted a clawed hand and dragged one dark nail down his chest, slicing neatly through his flesh. Instead of oily black ichor, fresh, warm blood welled from the wound. He brought his finger to his mouth and sucked it clean.

A shiver ran down his spine.

His grin widened.

There was nothing holding him back now.

For the first time in a very long time, he was free.

Then he reached into his back pocket.

His cap was still there.

Good.

In the breadth of the next half-second, he was inches from Garrod. Glowing red eyes and snarling fangs. One clawed hand lashed toward the Cazadore's throat, the dark nails already poised to tear across it, while somehow, another him was in front of Daniyah, his leg already drawn back, cocked and ready to punt her across the clearing like a rag doll.

And then he struck out at both, at the same time. The claws slashed and the boot kicked.