Bloodbound

by F. Wesley Schneider

  She sat gingerly on the end of the same log as Tashan, facing me—her back to Considine.

  “What happened to you?” I sounded like I was talking with my mouth full.

  “Jailbreak. It wasn’t pretty.” She didn’t elaborate, but wasn’t trying to sound nonchalant.

  “You came after me?”

  “You weren’t the only one they put in a cage.” She gestured at the vampire with her eyes.

  “I have a certain familiarity with cages, though I’m used to far prettier ones.” Considine strolled closer, scrutinizing leisurely. “Speaking of ‘prettier’ … you’re a mess.” He pointed a finger into my face.

  “Don’t.”

  He ignored me, prodding my upper lip.

  Jerking away sent spasms through my neck. Worse, the pain in my gums flared, a low burn I’d almost managed to ignore. A snarl made him retract the digit.

  “This one’s going to need your witchery next,” he said to Jadain without looking at her. He walked back to Tashan. “Don’t be long. The sun will be up soon. We’ve got a good lead on anyone who might be pursuing us, but it’ll be up to you to get us out of the county.”

  “Where are we?” I asked, covering my lip with my fingers.

  “About twenty or thirty miles northwest of Kavapesta. We’re nearly at the border to Ardeal, so I can’t imagine any local law following much farther.” His hand gave a careless flip. “Angry clergy, that might be another matter, but all the more reason not to dawdle. The horses are fresh … ish. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  Considine collected a wrinkled bundle and dropped it next to me. The thousand old tears tattooing my body bristled, bursting with silent mockery as I realized they’d been mostly bare this entire time. I pulled my cloak tighter around me, grabbed my leathers, and slammed the coach door.

  “Sorry about your ugly hat!” Considine’s voice reached through the door. “It wasn’t with the rest.”

  It didn’t matter. I dressed quickly, pulling on my long shirt and traveling pants, not bothering with the armored bits. It still took several minutes with all the checking for rips and exposed gaps. It took longer to fight down the embarrassment filling my belly and push the door back open.

  Predictably, Considine was the only one who commented. “Well, that’s slightly better.”

  That fast, his attention swung away. “Now.” He extended a hand to Tashan. “Someone said something about breakfast, and I just can’t put it out of my mind.”

  The Osirian’s eyes gave a tired roll. “You could have fed in Kavapesta. You left us there for two days, after all.”

  “One night! And can you really imagine me chatting up a goodwife taking in her laundry or some acolyte rushing home from evening prayers?” His look turned distant and lecherous. “Though … robes.”

  Tashan gave him a kick to the shin.

  “Those people bless their water! Gods only know what they do with their blood.” Considine’s lips curled in a devilish grin. “Anyway, I always know I’ll get a good fight with you.”

  “Please.” Tashan snorted, pulling himself up with vampire’s hand.

  “Back in a blink,” Considine said as he and Tashan walked toward the tree line.

  Jadain shook her head, watching them disappear into the dark. “What is it between those two?”

  I didn’t try to sweeten it. “Slavery.”

  A pensive look knotted her brow. “I don’t think so.”

  I shrugged, not interested in explaining all the ways Considine wasn’t a romantic—or the end I expected Tashan was all-too-willingly running toward. “So what happened to you?”

  She frowned. “It wasn’t happenstance that we were stopped outside the city. Inquisitor Mardhalas told them we were coming.”

  “She told them about me?”

  “She told them about us. She accused me of heresy.”

  She wasn’t wearing her little wooden holy symbol. Despite her robes being tattered beneath her cloak, its absence was what made her seem undressed.

  She went on when I didn’t reply. “An inquisitor questioned me. He asked me about you. I thought he was trying to raise evidence against you, suggesting that you’d somehow enchanted me.” She gave a hollow chuckle. “I apparently convinced him that my free will was intact, since he accused me of blasphemy and promised to excommunicate me.”

  “How’d you get away?”

  “Your friend showed up.” She nodded toward the shadowy trees.

  I scoffed at her misread of our relationship, but let it pass. “He broke you out?”

  She nodded.

  “And you went with him?” I didn’t hide my incredulity.

  She didn’t nod.

  “It was terrible,” she finally said. “He wanted you but didn’t know where you were. He wanted us to come with him, but I knew what he was. I knew I didn’t have a chance against him, but the goddess says …”

  Her hand strayed to where her amulet wasn’t, then dropped back into her lap.

  “Then I was following him. He killed … many. Brothers and sisters of the faith. And I followed him, like he was the only thing I could see in a fog.”

  He’d dominated her—forced his will on her and made her his slave. I’d seen him do it countless times, usually to the drug addicts and waifs he entertained. Regardless of what Considine had claimed, I suspected Tashan was under his control, or had been for long enough that now he didn’t know his own thoughts from his master’s. That Considine had been able to control a priestess, and one sworn against his kind—that was surprising.

  She went on, her voice surprisingly even. “We found your cell at the top of the tower. The inquisitor I told you about, he caught us there. He shot Tashan and managed to drive Considine off. He was going to kill me, but I held him off with the goddess’s power. I prayed to the goddess to protect me, to hurt him, and she did.”

  She stopped to stare at the ground. It took her a moment to continue.

  “He was furious. He called me a heretic and a witch.” She forced open her swollen eye. “Then he did this.”

  At first I wondered how you could tear someone’s iris—rip the color away without just blinding the eye. It wasn’t a scar, though. Her iris hadn’t been torn, it had been reshaped. Instead of a soft brown ring, the colored part of Jadain’s eye twisted in a jagged spiral radiating out from a pupil turned misty. The shape was deliberate, Pharasma’s spiral branded upon tissue and tears—but reversed. It wasn’t the normal clockwise, outward-radiating swirl of the goddess’s cometlike symbol. Instead, the spiraling star’s head wound in on itself, spinning toward the pupil. It was an obvious corruption, an insult, like wearing another deity’s icon upside down.

  For a priestess, it must have been torture.

  She closed the eye, rubbing it as though there were something caught inside. “I can still see, but I see everything through the mark. It’s like holding a piece of glass over one eye: everything you see has the same flecks and flaws. But now the flaw is that blasphemy—the flaw is part of me.”

  She pulled her cloak tight around her. “I prayed to the goddess, begging her to heal it. She answered me—after all of this, somehow she still answered me. She closed my wounds and knitted my scars, but it felt like she didn’t want to. I could feel her disgust and,” she covered her eye, “she left this.”

  “Afterward, I was ill—so bad I nearly retched. The feeling didn’t pass until I put her symbol away.” She fished for something inside the remaining folds of her robe, but didn’t withdraw her hand. “I thought it might have been a coincidence, but just before you got up I prayed to the goddess to heal Tashan’s wounds. The Lady’s healing came and restored him as it should, but so did that terrible feeling. I actually did vomit that time.”

  “I heard.”

  “But what’s worst,” she confessed to the ground, “what’s worst is that through all of this, the blood, the killing, the accusations, the scarring, the goddess’s curse—through it all, I’ve wanted to cry. I’ve felt i
t so strongly that at times I almost choked. But I haven’t been able to. When I woke up in the carriage I tried—I must have spent an hour trying to squeeze out a tear. But I couldn’t. It’s like I’ve forgotten how.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Anything I imagined sounded like a platitude or a lie.

  We sat silently for some time.

  Eventually the whippoorwill picked back up its call, jostling Jadain from her brooding.

  “Sorry,” she said flatly, looking back up. “He said you were wounded too?”

  My lips tightened. “Yeah, but it’s going to take more than a bandage.”

  “I can try calling on the goddess again. Maybe the nausea’s a passing thing, or I’ll get used to it … or we’ll just have to do it fast.”

  I shrugged. It beat the alternative.

  I opened my mouth, letting her see inside. Cool air rushed in, touching parts of my mouth usually shielded from the cold, making the twin holes where my fangs used to be feel all the more empty.

  “Oh goddess.” She tilted her head, looking inside. “That explains …”

  I closed my mouth as she fished something out of her robes—a string of teeth, fashioned as a rosary. “Considine gave it to me—I think he thought it was funny. I think it was the inquisitor’s.”

  “I’ve seen it.” My voice cracked. I didn’t look to see if any of the teeth there looked particularly fresh.

  She stuffed it away and didn’t ask any more. From another fold, she produced her amulet and, shutting her good eye, lifted it between us. She swayed slightly, but nonetheless began muttering a prayer to the goddess. It took a moment—certainly longer than other times I’d seen her commune with her deity—but surely enough cold light surrounded her hands. Lips moving slowly, brow clenched in concentration, she reached toward me with her goddess’s blessing.

  “Jadain.” I backed away as best I could, still seated on the lip of the carriage cabin. “Jadain! Stop!”

  When she didn’t immediately halt, my boot came up between us. I hadn’t meant to actually kick her, but my heel caught her in the abdomen as she leaned in. Her prayer ended with a gasp, the aura fading from her hands.

  She rocked back. “The hells!”

  “Your magic!” I had recognized her spell. It was the same power the priests channeled outside the city, the touch of the goddess that tried to burn out my heart. “That kind of healing. You know I can’t …”

  I’d been healed by magic before, but never by one of Jadain’s order. Back in the Old City, beneath the cobbles of Caliphas, there were vampires who stilled prayed. Those who raised their voices to Asmodeus, the vampire god Ruithvein, or worse could weave the power of death to rejuvenate their vampiric kin. That same magic also worked on me. But for the living, death was death, and that which healed the people of the Old City would drain their life away—potentially even killing them. I’d assumed Jadain realized that. I’d also assumed that, as a follower of the goddess who stood at the border of life and death, she’d know which power to call.

  The mix of puzzlement and anger on Jadain’s face drained, her look turning distant. “Right. Her blessing burns you.”

  “Something like that, yeah. So reverse it. Make it not … burn.”

  She hid her amulet back inside her robes. “Call upon pain instead of healing? Pray for her to touch you with death instead of life?”

  “Yeah.”

  She stared into the dirt. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  It took a moment to realize what she was saying. When I did, it was my turn to stretch out the silence, only I was pausing to tamp down the heat rising in my chest.

  Some of it broke through—maybe through the cracks where my canines used to be. “You mean you can, but you’re not.”

  “I can’t call upon the goddess’s punishment and use it to heal you. It’s …”

  I finished her thought. “What? ‘Unnatural’? ‘Blasphemy’?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  I made a disgusted noise as I stood. “I’ve been waiting to see how far your open-mindedness about my kind goes. Don’t worry Jadain, you’re more like the rest of your order than you think.”

  I stormed into the dark, both out of annoyance and before I could say something nastier. The whippoorwill called and I let it be my destination, intent on silencing its obnoxious noise.

  A dozen paces from Jadain, some part of me regretted speaking to her so roughly. I kicked as hard as I could, launching a stone into the mist, sending the thought with it. Damn her. I’d actually let myself buy into her talk. I’d let her convince me that she saw me just like anyone else, that she and I were the same. When it came to it, though, when she had to actually act on her claims, to speak to her goddess on my behalf, suddenly I was different. Suddenly I couldn’t be healed, couldn’t be comforted, couldn’t be clean.

  My march brought me to the tree line. I was hardly ten paces into the damp woods when Considine’s voice drifted from just behind me. “You can’t really be surprised.”

  I swung for his face. The blow nearly connected, but his smile flowed effortlessly out of reach.

  “Did she call you ‘sister’? Did you think she would?” His snakelike fangs glistened, mocking. “Did you think she’d call you something else?

  Indulging my frustration, I kicked high. The blow came around hard and connected with his chest. He was surprisingly light, the blow knocking him from his feet. He never hit the ground, though. In the time it took to tumble he burst into mist. It drifted atop a fallen log, then rose back into a familiar shape.

  “Sensitive,” he said, brows high.

  I walked away.

  “They might bend the rules, but they never really break them. There’s always an excuse.” He hopped down, following. “They’re ultimately very obedient things. Just look how eagerly she followed me.”

  “You controlled her.”

  I could hear the shrug in his voice. “I gave her an excuse to do what she wanted to.”

  “You made her kill her own people.”

  “Please, that little thing? I bade her follow along and she did. That she beat an old man to death, well—the young ones are such temperamental things.”

  She hadn’t said anything about killing anyone. “The one who marked her?”

  He confirmed with a hum.

  Jadain wasn’t a killer. As upset as she’d been over the death of the innkeeper’s boy, I couldn’t imagine the weight she’d feel over a death she’d actually caused—the death of one of her order, at that. Even to me, that sounded like betrayal. For her, it must have sounded like heresy.

  “If my rescue educated your choirgirl on the harsher truths of survival, I don’t require thanks for the lesson.” He drifted next to me. “And if it broke her faith in the goddess of wasted lives, well …” He made a throwing-away gesture. “That’s not really anything to begin with.”

  “It is when that was her whole life—if now she’s too conflicted to do anything more than sulk.” I wheeled on him. “I’d planned on having the support of a Pharasmin priestess while I hunted Rivascis. Now what?”

  “Now you’ve got me.” He brought his hands up in display. “We’ll track down Father together and …” he swirled his hand, “justice, or whatever. We’ll do whatever you want. It’s exciting!”

  “It’s not exciting,” I nearly shouted. “This isn’t some holiday for me. My life is on the line for this! I disobeyed Grandfather in leaving the city—or, at least, he’ll see it as disobedience. Even if I find Rivascis, even if I put him down, Grandfather might still decide to rip me apart just to make an example. He already sent you to watch.”

  A thought dawned on me. My eyes narrowed on Considine. “What are your exact orders anyway?”

  “Hm?”

  “Say we get to Ardis and Rivascis isn’t there, or for some reason I can’t kill him.”

  “Oh, darling. Always so—”

  I tried to stay calm. “He sent you to see that I do what I said, but if I fail�
��if this was all a waste of Grandfather’s time—you’re supposed to what?”

  I wanted him to say it. To tell me what was suddenly so obvious.

  His bored expression only frustrated me more. “Well, whatever I’m supposed to, I’m not doing it unrested.” He looked up into a sky empty of stars.

  Fine, I’d say it. “You’re here to kill me.”

  He gave me a look like I should know better, then a fake little laugh. “No, no of course not.”

  I glared, my doubt plain.

  He shrugged deep. “Nothing in this world would pain me more, Sister-Dear, but don’t start thinking you’re anything special. We’ve all got Grandfather’s nooses around our necks.”

  I shook my head. A reluctant executioner was no less an executioner. Maybe Considine wasn’t due the entirety of my ire, but he was still Grandfather’s agent, and who knew the larger game Grandfather was planning?

  “Tabby will drive you on today—you should reach Ardis in just a few hours.”

  Surprise drained some of my annoyance. “We’re that close?”

  “I made good time last night. I move pretty fast when I don’t have to waste time listening to nonsense.” He glanced up. A familiar pale bat chirped in the branches above, alerting its master that the sky had lightened another shade.

  “You brought that disgusting thing all this way?” I spared a scowl for the sickly creature. It hissed in response.

  “Worry more about yourself and,” Considine waved his hand generally, “this whole sad condition.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  In the time that took he’d reappeared in front of me, intrusively close.

  “What?” I tried to sound more annoyed than startled.

  He’d acted fast in whatever dalliance he and Tashan had shared. I smelled blood on him.

  “Consider it thanks, for so graciously letting me tag along.” He leaned in, leading with his mouth. Crimson limned the corners of his lips.