Blood Winter

by S. J. Coles

  “She doesn’t. But it’s only a matter of time before someone makes the connection between you all. Then she won’t be the only one hunting you.”

  I took out my phone and stared at the screen. There were two missed calls from Meg already. Another from an unknown number. I swallowed, then switched it off.

  Terje drove fast. I watched warehouses and factories skid by, trying to wrestle my mind into order. My heart rate slowed as we left the city behind, but my chest didn’t loosen. I realized I was clutching the seat and made myself ease off.

  “You’re right to be scared,” Terje murmured, “but not of me.”

  The buildings thinned out, then we were on the motorway. The streetlights whizzed by overhead, arching blackness between, before they gave out entirely.

  “Where are we going?” I asked into the chill silence.

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “If she can track me by smell…”

  “She has to be in range for that. We have to get you far enough away that she can’t detect you.”

  Silence descended. I snuck glances of him out the corner of my eye. He didn’t use the mirrors. He barely blinked. I simultaneously longed for him to speak whilst praying he wouldn’t, afraid of what else I might learn.

  We barreled on into the night. Fatigue raked claws down the backs of my eyes but I clutched my knees and sat ramrod straight in the seat, unable to relax. My shoulders ached. My head pounded. David’s words rang in my ears. But under all that, more persistent and more unnerving, was the now-vivid remembered sensation of Terje’s hands and mouth on my skin. I shut my eyes against it, against the sight of him sitting so close with an infinite gulf of fear and danger between us.

  It started to snow. Pinhead-sized flakes whisked up the windscreen. The wind picked up and the flakes fattened, became the size of coins and swirled thickly in the headlights until the road was barely visible. Terje didn’t ease up on the speed.

  Despite everything, I was starting to nod, then the car turning off-road jerked me awake. He'd turned the headlights off. All I could make out was the star-studded arch of the sky over black nothingness ahead. We bumped over uneven ground for more than two hours. The sky grew lighter and I could finally make out the rough track we were following, barely more than a lip jutting from a scrubby hillside, nothingness yawning on the other. The snow was already a foot deep—or else we were so far into the mountains that we were where it had never melted. Terje had put on a pair of sunglasses, rendering him even more unreadable.

  When he finally stopped the car and turned off the engine, I was bone-weary and aching with tiredness. I blinked out at a small stone cottage that was built so tightly into the mountainside it was like it had just sprung from the ground. The sloping roof was covered in a thick blanket of white. The windows were dark, masked by blinds.

  “Where are we?” My voice was creaky with fatigue.

  Terje pulled up his hood and climbed out into the snow. He waded through the snow and put a key in the lock of the heavy wooden front door. I climbed out and stared around. It was deathly silent. The snow-covered mountainside rose sharply above the cottage. On my right, the sloping land ended in a straight line about five feet from the car. Beyond that was a yawning, unseen glen. More snowbound peaks towered on the other side.

  There was something vaguely familiar about the rocky outcrop sticking out of the snow like the rigid hand of a corpse on the mountaintop high above the cottage. At another time of year I might have recognized where we were, but the snow had stolen the land, turning it into an alien wilderness. There was no other living thing in sight, no traffic or background noise, no animal tracks, no trees. I clutched my phone in my pocket, realizing it would be useless out here anyway, then waded through the snow to the open cottage door.

  The interior of the building smelled of furniture polish and new upholstery. It was pitch black, all the windows made dark by blackout blinds. Terje switched on lamps, flooding the space with a warm orange light. There was a top-of-the-range wood-burning stove against one wall and a deep charcoal carpet underfoot. Simple, comfortable-looking chairs and sofas were arranged around the stove. There was a flatscreen TV on the wall over the mantlepiece. Against the far wall was a modern kitchen unit with surfaces of varnished wood, dominated by a massive, industrial-sized refrigeration unit. It took me a couple of glances to realize that there was no oven.

  The walls were plastered and whitewashed. There was no decoration apart from a large, framed map of the Cairngorms next to the door. It was all anonymous, blank, simple. It was shining new but…empty.

  “Close the door. Lock it.”

  Terje was passing through an inner door, closing it behind him. Numb, I closed the heavy front door, shutting away the sight of the snow, the naked cliffs, the white sky and the perfect silence that came from being miles away from anywhere. I heard the sound of electronic locks slamming home. There were also two large iron bolts. I heaved them over with a heavy feeling.

  I stood by the door, unsure what to do, until Terje returned. He’d shed his coat and sunglasses. There was a heaviness to his eyes. My watch told me it was a little after eight in the morning.

  “I have to sleep,” he said, voice thick. “There’s wood for the fire and food in the cupboards.”

  “There’s no oven,” I said stupidly.

  “Stay inside,” he continued. “Don’t turn your phone on.”

  “What is this place?”

  “I have to sleep,” he said, slurring. His eyelids were heavy. He straightened with visible effort and went back through the door, and I heard it lock. Then there was silence.

  I lit the wood-burner with the supply of logs and kindling neatly stacked alongside. The warmth began to permeate the air and I hung my coat on a hook by the door, dumped my bag and shed my boots. I double-checked my pockets, but all I found was my phone and my penknife.

  The new carpet was deep and soft under my stockinged feet. I found a set of stairs behind a narrow door on the other side of the kitchen that led to a small, windowless bathroom. It didn’t look like it had ever been used. The fittings were plain and very white. I found a towel in one of the cupboards and washed in an attempt to normalize the situation. The water was only just above freezing, I guessed due to the newly-lit fire. One of the kitchen cupboards contained coffee, cereal, long-life milk, canned soup, tinned fish and jars of pickled vegetables. There was one bowl, a plastic spoon and a paper cup. The rest of the cupboards were empty. There were no plates and no other cutlery. I opened the fridge. Dozens of bottles of red liquid filled the shelves. I shut it hurriedly.

  I opened a tin of fish with my penknife, ate some cereal and sat in front of the fire. The TV didn’t receive any signal. It had a DVD-Blu-ray player built in, but there were no discs anywhere. The stove gradually warmed the room to a comfortable temperature. I dozed. The wind groaned around the cottage. The windows didn’t rattle and the door didn’t wheeze in its fittings. It was like I was walled away from the world, buried out of reach. I thought about Glenroe, how the weather had barely been held back by the crumbling stone, how there I’d felt like part of the storm but safe from it.

  I turned my face into the sofa cushions and let myself drift. I tried not to think of Meg…or of David. I tried to believe they were safe. I turned my phone over and over in my hands but didn’t turn it on.

  As night approached, I pulled a blind back from one of the windows and watched the sky darken. It seemed the sun had been set for hours by the time I heard the inner door being unlocked and Terje came through. He was in black jeans and a gray jumper, the muted tones making his skin and hair seem luminescent. His feet were bare.

  “Did you sleep?”

  I nodded stiffly, hovering near the window.

  “You’re still scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  His eyes slid to the bowl next to the sink. “Sorry. This place isn’t really set up for your kind.”

  “What is it?”

 
; “A hide,” he said quietly, moving to the fridge and taking out a bottle of blood. “A safe space.”

  “For haemophiles?”

  He nodded. “It’s not quite finished yet. But the location is isolated, the energy provided by solar power, heat and hot water from the fire. And there are caves in the cliffs farther up the mountain, a bolt hole from the sun should anything happen. Evgeniya was thinking of setting up a branch of our commune out here. At least, that’s what she told me.”

  “Evgeniya?”

  “My Magister. The hide is the reason I was in Scotland in the first place. I’d come to oversee the final stages.”

  “It’s a bit…spartan,” I mumbled, looking around at the plain walls, the new but functional furniture.

  His mouth twitched and I wondered if he was fighting a smile. “I’m afraid I don’t have much imagination when it comes to interior design. That’s what happens when you don’t need much in the way of physical comforts.”

  “This is why you were this far north?” He nodded. “And Karlsson found you?” I heard myself ask when the question had hung in the air too long unasked.

  “It was my own fault,” he said, moving toward the stove. “It’s dangerous to venture far on your own, especially away from your commune. But I wanted to see more of the National Park. This place…” His eyes went far away. “It’s so alive. So…it’s hard to say in English. Honest, I suppose. Real. Like your house with its ancient stones and secret caves. It’s all like it’s from another time…a harsher but more natural time.” His eyes were far away. “But I was spotted in the hills above Aviemore.”

  “You carried me for miles unconscious in a snowstorm. You moved that armoire with your bare hands. How did anyone manage to capture you?”

  “They were professionals—stun guns, real guns, nets.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “How long were you in that basement?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. His long fingers turned the bottle round and round. “I don’t know, exactly. Weeks, at least.”

  “Christ.”

  “I knew I’d been seen. I shouldn’t have risked walking that way again. Evgeniya warned me. They all did. But I really thought things were different now.”

  I shook my head, trying to make sense of it all. “And now your Magister is out for revenge?”

  His face changed. “That’s a very ‘Hollywood’ way of putting it.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “She’s dispensing justice.”

  Something uncomfortable worked its way up my spine. “She must care about you a lot.”

  He raised his eyes, slightly narrowed. “That’s not what it is, not in the way you mean it, anyway.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “A commune is… Well, there’s no word for it in English. It’s more than family. We depend on each other. We protect each other. And we obey our leaders. It’s how we survive. How we’ve always survived.”

  “So, when someone gets hurt…this family steps in?”

  He stared at the fire. “A member of the commune was abused. The wrong must be righted.”

  “If she really has killed all those people, it will set people’s attitudes back years.”

  “I know,” he said, seating himself on the sofa in a slow, lithe movement.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?”

  He frowned at me, a delicate line creasing between his fair eyebrows. “Stop her?”

  “Yes,” I insisted. “You could have reported Karlsson to the police—and the Ogdells. You could have let the authorities handle it…lawfully, without any killing.”

  He raised his eyebrows, open incredulity flattening his expression. “Evgeniya is my Magister,” he said calmly. “I report to her. She is the only authority over me.”

  “What about the police? The law?”

  He looked vaguely bewildered. “What about them?”

  “They are the authorities.”

  “Not over us.”

  “But you’re part of this world now. That was the whole point. All the campaigning—”

  “Those institutions want us to turn to them. And in an ideal world, one I had hoped we’d reached, we would. But all the human establishment has done so far is make matters worse.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  He regarded me levelly. “The last member of my commune that reported human-perpetrated abuse to the authorities vanished. We’ve not seen or heard from her in months. Even the Magister hasn’t been able to track her down. She thinks she’s dead.”

  I shook my head, bewildered. “No…no, that can’t be right. There are laws—”

  “There are,” he said calmly. “And I still hope—within my lifetime, though probably not yours—that those laws might one day mean something. But right now?” He shook his head without looking at me.

  “It can’t be true,” I repeated.

  “Alec, think about the way your kind treats different strains of its own species, even after generations of attempts at change. How long do you think it will take them to accept a new species they don’t even understand yet?”

  “But, what’s his name, Ivor Novák?”

  “Novák’s doing what he can. But you are aware of the sort of people who can afford a donor, Alec.” His voice tightened and I wondered if I was seeing pain flickering in the back of his eyes. “They’re not the sort of people your authorities go after if they can avoid it. So, until the world Novák wants to create becomes a reality, we’ll protect our own, as we always have done.”

  I felt slightly unwell.

  “Do I wish things were different?” he said softly after another long moment. “Of course I do. I was foolish enough to hope they already were. And look what happened.”

  “So you gave her names, the names I’d given you, knowing what she’d do?”

  “What she does is her business.”

  “Did you even try to stop her?”

  A bitter smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “This is not something you can understand, Alec. She’s my mother, my leader, my master…all those things, none of those things. I don’t have any say in what she does or in what she tells me to do. And I can’t hide things from her. I wouldn’t, even if I could.”

  My palms prickled. “So what would she think of you hiding me like this? Of us being together here, now?”

  His eyes slid away. “She won’t find out.”

  “This isn’t the first place she’ll look when she doesn’t find me at Glenroe?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  His jaw tightened. “Because the only way you’d be here is if I brought you. And it would never occur to her that I’d defy her like this.”

  I put more wood on the fire simply to fill the silence. I was very aware of his eyes following me and wondered what it meant.

  “If you want to drink that, don’t let me stop you,” I said, sitting in an armchair. I heard him open the bottle, then the sound of him drinking. I tried not to watch. I failed. His eyes were closed. He drank in long, smooth swallows. He tilted his head. His hair moved against his neck. The bottle emptied. When he lowered it, his face was slack with such an intense expression of pleasure that it made my blood start to thump, even whilst chills ran up the skin on my back. I looked away.

  “How long do you think I’ll have to stay here?”

  He put the empty bottle out of sight beside the sofa. His cheeks and lips had warmed to the color of new cream and a light danced in his eyes. “Until she’s done,” he said, voice slightly drowsy.

  I shifted in the chair. “Done killing everyone?” He didn’t answer. I was ashamed that I didn’t have the courage to ask again. “How long will that take?” I asked instead, in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “But you’re safe here, Alec. I promise.” He spoke slowly, staring into the fire, then his eyes slid to mine. My heart danced sideways, a familiar throb starting deep in my gut, a hot awareness of every bloo
d vessel in my body sparking to life. His eyes flicked between mine, like he was reading my thoughts. “Do you still think about it?” he whispered.

  “About…what?”

  “The Blood,” he said after a pause.

  I wrestled with that for a long moment. When I spoke, my voice was harsh with equal parts pleasure and pain. “Yes.”

  His drew his fine brows together. “I’m sorry I gave it to you, but there was no other way.”

  “It saved me.”

  “You’ll never forget it,” he murmured. “You’ll think about it for the rest of your life.”

  “I think about you more.” I heard the words come out of my mouth in a heavy, loaded voice. The tips of my fingers and toes tingled. My belly churned. The smell of red wine and dry leaves came to me, threading through the fresh, cool smell of his hair.

  He absently ran his hand over fabric of the sofa, eyes far away, ice-white eyebrows slightly arched. “It’s just the Blood, Alec. It’s not real.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  The corner of a sardonic smile played across his lips. “You don’t think I maybe have a little more experience in this area than you?”

  “Then why am I here? If there’s really nothing between us, what difference does it make to you if this woman kills me or not?”

  “I’m not a monster, Alec. And neither’s Evgeniya. You might not understand her actions, but she is punishing those she believes deserve it. Your society does exactly the same thing.” His gaze slid to the fire. “But I know you didn’t drink at that house. I know you helped me. And you gave me shelter in your home, even after…after you’d seen me at my worst. Evgeniya won’t believe that you had nothing to do with the Blood Party. But I know you didn’t.”

  A long silence fell in which I fought with a hundred things to say. In the end there was only one question that mattered to me. “Is that all this is?”

  He blinked, slowly. “What do you mean?”

  I shifted to the edge of my seat. “I want you to admit there’s something here…between us. I don’t understand it…but I know it’s there.”

  “You’re mistaken.”

  I knew a flinty moment of doubt. My hands went cold. I kept my voice level with an effort. “I don’t think I am.”