The Vampire's Bond [Book 2]

by Samantha Snow

  It was easy enough to find one, though, and with a pat on the head, Barton slunk off into the underbrush, intent on cutting around the front to get rid of its path of escape. As he did, Jack and Siobhan split up, veering off in separate directions to come at it from opposite sides.

  It was Siobhan who reached the buck first, lunging out from behind a tree and hurling herself at it, throwing her arms around its neck and wrapping her legs as far around its chest as she could.

  Predictably, the deer did not react well, launching itself into a frenzy of stamping, jumping, and bucking, and for a few moments, Siobhan was positive she knew what a rodeo rider on a bucking bronco’s back felt like. Her teeth clacked together each time the deer left the ground and landed again, and she had to duck her head down into the buck’s fur to avoid getting the point of an antler in the eye as it tossed its head.

  It screamed and made such a ruckus, she was pretty sure the vampires back at the manor may very well have been able to hear it, and Siobhan was going to consider herself lucky if she wasn’t deaf by the end of the night. It certainly seemed like a possibility.

  Not making any of it better was just how unsettling it sounded.

  When a deer bellowed from a distance, there was actually something pretty hilarious about the noise. It sounded like a trumpet with a head cold and an anger management problem.

  When a deer bellowed from right up close, its face only inches from Siobhan’s, the noise was terrifying. Even so, she wrapped her legs more firmly around its middle, grabbed onto its antlers with both hands, and heaved her weight to the side. The buck bellowed one more time as its legs went out from under it and it crashed to the ground, and then again as Siobhan heard the noise of bones cracking.

  She ignored the sound, grabbed the antlers harder still, and yanked the buck’s head hard to the side. There was a sliding crack, and with a last kick and a few lingering twitches and spasms, the buck went limp. Slowly, she disentangled herself from the deer as Jack and Barton joined her again.

  “You couldn’t have helped with that?” she demanded from her seat on the ground, a hand on the buck’s neck where a pulse still weakly fluttered, though it had no way of going anywhere with its spinal cord severed.

  Jack shrugged cheerfully. “I wanted to watch,” he answered candidly, dropping down to his knees to join her on the ground. “Besides, someone had to hold Barton back,” he added, feigning innocence unconvincingly.

  Siobhan scowled at him and rolled her eyes before she leaned down. She parted the buck’s fur with her fingers, getting as close to the skin as she could before she sank her fangs into its neck.

  A deer, at least, was a lot more filling than a rabbit, even if it was being shared between two people.

  They left the deer’s remains by the side of the road, in the hopes that someone might spot it, realize it was in decent condition still, and make some use of it. They had been hungry and they had needed it, but that didn’t mean either of them wanted to see it go to waste.

  *

  Siobhan had a shovel perched over her shoulder, and she turned in a slow circle, squinting into the woods.

  “It’s…this way!” She pointed triumphantly into the distance and set off at an easy lope, Barton bounding at her heels as Jack watched her with fond amusement.

  “What’s this way?” he asked curiously as he caught up with her. “Is there a secret cave? Does it have treasure in it?”

  “Well, there is a cave somewhere in the woods,” she confirmed, shrugging one shoulder. “I don’t know how secret it is. And I don’t know if it counts as treasure, but there is a time capsule, and it’s this way.”

  “A time capsule,” Jack repeated, slightly dubiously. “From when?”

  “When I first moved into the cabin when I was, like, eighteen. So, almost nine years old.” She snorted. “Not exactly old for a time capsule, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to get the chance to actually dig it up in the future. So why not? Besides, I barely even remember what I put in it.”

  “Compelling reasoning,” Jack agreed, making a superfluous ‘lead the way’ gesture, sweeping one arm forward.

  Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Remembering the general location of where something the size of a small duffel bag was buried was one thing. Remembering its exact location was quite a different matter, Siobhan realized as she stared in consternation at a stretch of ground blanketed in ferns.

  “It’s around here,” she insisted, her hands planted on her hips and her shovel planted into the dirt by her feet. “I remember, I buried it in the Fern Depot.”

  “Fern Depot,” Jack repeated slowly before he patted his hands together in delicate, almost silent applause. “Very creative. Golf clap.”

  Siobhan seized a stone from the ground and whipped it at him, only mildly disappointed when he caught it and shoved it into his pocket.

  “You didn’t think to put a marker or something on top of it?” Jack carried on, his amusement mounting.

  Siobhan stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry at him. “It was a spur of the moment thing,” she explained primly, turning her head away so that her nose was in the air. “I was celebrating my new house.”

  “With a time capsule,” he repeated, just in case he was still mishearing things.

  Siobhan punched his shoulder hard enough that he staggered two steps to the side, laughing as he did.

  Throughout the entire argument, if that was even what it could be called, Barton prowled in circles through the ferns, leaves rustling with each step. He had bits of greenery stuck in his fur and looked a bit like a craft department had been dumped on top of him by the time he came to a halt in the eastern quarter of the ferns, just off of the center. He sniffed curiously at the ground beneath his paws before he began digging.

  Siobhan and Jack didn’t actually notice until dirt began to pelt the bottoms of Jack’s pants and his shoes. For a moment, they stared blankly at Barton as he dug, his claws ripping up the grass and tossing dirt every which way.

  “…You think he found it?” Jack wondered, leaning to the side to peer around the mutt.

  “Maybe?” Siobhan hazarded, shrugging slowly.

  And then a chipmunk went scampering out of the hole, and Barton bounded after it jubilantly as both Siobhan and Jack wilted in disappointment.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Siobhan sighed, before she picked her shovel up again. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I think,” she began slowly, casting her mind back to that time nearly nine years ago, “I buried it in this half of the Depot, and probably around the base of a tree?”

  She cracked an eye open, turning to look at the assortment of trees. It did at least narrow things down a bit; a few of the trees were clearly young, so they wouldn’t have been there nine years ago for her to bury anything beneath any of them.

  It took four attempts from there before, at last, as the blade of the shovel made a quiet, metallic, clunking noise, she proclaimed, “Aha!” She began to dig with renewed vigor until finally she could toss the shovel aside, drop to her knees beside the hole, and pull the metal box out.

  Once upon a time, it had been a bright, cheerful red, though it was understandably filthy and much of the paint had flaked off. It was rusted and dirty, and as Siobhan flipped the latches open, one of them snapped off entirely. Shrugging, she shoved it into her pocket. Its hinges protested loudly as she lifted the lid, and Jack dropped to a crouch beside her as the lid thumped against the ground.

  A bit of dirt had worked its way into the box, but on the whole, the contents were in remarkably good condition. There was a black satin headband with a sequined red rose attached to it. A necklace made entirely of enormous, faceted beads in various shades of blue and purple, with a bright red jewel hanging from the middle. A folder, and when Siobhan handed it to Jack, he flipped it open and found ticket stubs from a rock concert, a long expired debit card, a high school diploma, a photograph of Siobhan ecstatically hugging the ‘Sold!’ sign outside the cabi
n, and another photo of her standing between a man a few years older than her and a girl a few years younger. Considering the resemblance between them, he could only assume they were her siblings. They looked fond enough of each other. Notably, there was nothing that had anything to do with her parents in the folder.

  There was a photocopied, laminated copy of the deed to the house, as well as a few bank statements. A photograph of a beat up green sedan, the same car that was still sitting in the cabin’s excruciatingly long driveway; though if Jack had to hazard a guess, it probably wouldn’t start up again without some extensive bargaining. A photograph of Baltimore, taken from the upper window of a skyscraper. A bundle of receipts. A photograph of Siobhan with another young man, and when she saw it, she wrinkled her nose and declared, “Ugh. I broke up with him, like, a week and a half later. He said I was becoming too rustic, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.”

  There was a small statue of a howling wolf and a crudely made clay sculpture of what Jack could only assume was a voodoo doll, pins and all.

  Nothing in the time capsule was particularly exciting, but buried underneath it all was a yearbook. Siobhan paged through it slowly for a moment before she admitted, “I don’t even know why I bought it,” and handed it to Jack. “I didn’t really do anything in school—at no time—so I’m pretty sure the only picture of me in there is my senior photo.”

  Curiosity compelling him, Jack began to page through the book as Siobhan got to her feet. “Wait here. I need to run back to the cabin real quick.” She waited for him to nod distractedly before she turned and burst into a sprint toward the cabin.

  Eventually, Jack came to all of the senior photos, and he paged through them slowly until, at last, there was Siobhan. She looked a little less care worn and a little more high strung, even in a still photo. She was wearing a red baby doll top, black shorts that were definitely not included in the school dress code, and black boots up to her knees. In her hair was the same headband that had been in the time capsule. She was perched in a tree, seated on a broad branch, her hands on the branch and one knee crossed primly over the other.

  For a moment, seeing the way the dappled light through the leaves fell across her hair, he couldn’t help but miss the sun.

  He closed the yearbook and set it back in the metal box, and as Barton trotted over to him (sans chipmunk, thankfully), Jack scratched the mutt’s ears and settled back until he was seated to wait for Siobhan to get back.

  When she returned, she was holding a handful of pages in both hands, clutching them to her chest almost protectively.

  “I needed to print a few things,” she explained, handing the pages down to Jack for him to flip through.

  There was a photo of just him, lounging on a beanbag chair in the manor’s library. One of Barton, stretched out in a run and slightly motion-blurred. One of Barton on Jack’s lap, again on a beanbag, though the dog was not supposed to be in the library. Osamu and Harendra, deep in conversation and taken at a small distance. Regina and Allambee, standing side-by-side and looking at the camera, both of them looking far too stern and serious to have truly taken the moment seriously. Regina, Osamu, and Dask’iya, having tea that both Dask’iya and Osamu looked slightly dubious of; only Regina seemed to have actually noticed the camera, smiling at it slyly. Siobhan and Barton, her arm wrapped around the dog’s neck as he barked in her ear, her phone held out at arm’s length as she took the picture. And finally, one of Siobhan and Jack looking grimy with leaves in their hair, her face ducked against his neck and his arm around her waist as he took the picture.

  While the one of him and Barton could have happened at any one of three dozen times, he did remember taking the one of him and Siobhan. It had been taken shortly after the angelic confrontation at the manor a few weeks back because they had killed their second archangel, the Lords had managed to dispatch two seraphim, and even if there had been some loss of life on the vampires’ side, it had seemed like a moment that deserved celebration.

  “More memories for the time capsule?” he guessed, though the answer seemed pretty obvious as he handed the photos back to her.

  She nodded once and dropped to a crouch. She picked the folder up again and slid the new pictures into it before she began to return everything to the box. The yearbook went on the bottom again, with the folder on top of it and everything else piled on top of the folder.

  She closed the box and latched it again as best as she could with one latch broken and the other on its last legs, and then she plopped it back down in its hole. Shoveling dirt back over it was a simple matter, and once again, the time capsule was hidden away, waiting for the next time it would be unearthed.

  Before they left, Siobhan piled a few rocks on top of the mound of dirt.

  *

  There was a hill just beyond the trees. Hiking to it had always been a bit of a trek for Siobhan before, but as a vampire? All she had to do was pick up Barton, and she and Jack could run to the hill in no time.

  They sat in the grass, both of them leaning back to use Barton as a pillow as he grumbled and squirmed good-naturedly. For a while, nothing particularly exciting happened.

  And then Jack’s hand flew up, one finger extended and pointing, and he exclaimed, “I see one!” as a streak of light flew by overhead, as somewhere far above them, a piece of space debris burnt up with all the brilliance of a star.

  They fell silent for a time, until it was Siobhan’s turn, pointing skyward with one hand and proclaiming excitedly, “There’s another one!”

  On the ground between them, their free hands linked together, their fingers intertwined. Save the owls in the branches and a fox lurking at the edge of the tree line, everything else was quiet, as if the rest of the world had stopped existing for just a little while.

  Siobhan hadn’t realized until then just how little she had relaxed since coming to live at the manor. She considered, for just a moment, moving back into her cabin after everything with the angels was said and done. She wasn’t sure what the logistics of it would be or if Jack would agree, but she supposed it was an idea worth considering, at the very least.

  *

  As it was wont to do each morning, eventually the sun began to rise, a line of gold breaching the eastern horizon like molten treasure. Jack and Siobhan shared a look, still standing safely in the shade of the trees, yet untouched by the early sunlight.

  “Should we head back?” Jack asked, though he didn’t sound particularly enamored by the idea.

  “I don’t know,” Siobhan mused quietly. “Do we really need to? We haven’t been gone that long.”

  Jack shrugged and offered pleasantly, “It’s a fair point.” That seemed to be all the conversation he required on the topic, and he led the way back to the cabin.

  They spent the morning and most of the day in the cabin, lazing around and doing nothing in particular. True enough, they could have driven back to the manor without risk of danger beyond sprinting to and from the car, but it had been too long since either of them had been able to just do nothing. They both missed it. Siobhan appreciated that Jack’s job—both as Regina’s de facto assistant and as the resident angel expert before Gabriel had showed up—was important, and she knew he cherished it, but the ability to just sprawl out on the rug in front of the couch and trace the shapes on the ceiling was also a necessary part of life now and then, as far as she was concerned.

  They spent some time sprawled together on the couch in a tangle of limbs, their hands lazily stroking each other. It was all reasonably tame, for the most part, but it was nice to simply be close to each other. At some point, they both dozed off, and they woke up two and a half hours later to find Barton curled up on top of both of them, a broken piece of the deer’s antler dangling from his mouth.

  The sun was setting by then, and after making sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, they piled the bag and the dog back into the truck and climbed in. The window treatments for the truck meant that they were perfectly safe to drive
in sunlight, so Siobhan appreciated the sight of a golden and red sunset while she could, and she pretended it wasn’t a bit disappointing when she and Jack had to block up the mental link to silence it.

  The drive back to the manor was relaxed, all things considered, and the moon was high in the sky by the time they got back. Regina gave them a thin, knowing smile when she spotted them, but they offered her no hints as to what had been going on. If she was going to assume it was less wholesome than it had been, then that was her prerogative. She asked no questions of them, and Siobhan didn’t get the impression that Regina disapproved of it.

  She was glad, she supposed. Regina didn’t seem like the type to try to break apart a relationship because she personally disapproved (even if she was, Siobhan wouldn’t exactly be able to do much to stop it if that were the case), but Siobhan knew that Regina was important to Jack. She knew how important it was to him that Regina approve.