Bloodbound

  PATHFINDER

  TALES

  BLOODBOUND

  F. Wesley Schneider

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  I wrenched my eyes away and lunged. He was fast enough that his throat wasn’t pierced cleanly, but the wound looked like a woodcutter’s first chop—and was just as bloodless. He hissed, dashing into the wall and up, his claws not even marking the faded floral paper. I sliced the sheet covering some wall hanging. Suddenly the surface he clung to was sliding. He scrambled, then hit the ground solidly. I delivered the woodcutter’s next strike.

  The body burst into a cloud of pyre smoke. My sword screeched across the floor, momentum thrusting my face into that blast of dry death. I twisted away, grimacing as I regained my balance. I hated that smell. The young ones smelled wet, the old smelled dry, but both had that throat-clogging bitterness.

  Like a shadow given shape but not substance, the smoke fell but refused to disperse. It pooled across the floor, seeking cracks in the boards, trying to seep into the dark below. I hadn’t ended the stranger—his head hadn’t severed cleanly—just panicked him. Instincts were powerful things, even more so when immortality was at stake. He’d search out a dark place to recover, but he wouldn’t be bothering me again soon.

  I scanned the room for whatever he might have been looking for, but the woman caught my attention.

  The cloth I’d cut from the wall revealed a portrait of a noble family: two arch-looking young women in matching floral dresses, plus a mother and father. My slice had cut a mortal wound across the chest of one daughter, but it was her near-twin who caught my attention. Red strands strayed from beneath her broad sun hat. The traumatized canvas distorted her face, but it was clear she was a fragile thing, with her father’s calm expression.

  I raised my hand to the portrait. Something about that woman seemed …

  I pinched the limp canvas back into place.

  It was me.

  Dedicated to Marie E. Ritter,

  for whom there was never any doubt.

  Inner Sea Region

  Southern Ustalav

  1

  DESERVING VICTIMS

  LARSA

  Both were victims.

  She ground against him, forcing hips away from the soot-smeared stone of the alley wall, hands grasping, mouth gnawing.

  His breath came as a gasp but left as a growl. Hands struggled with her dress’s collar. Hairy fingers dug in her skin.

  Had I been a passerby, glimpsing them sidelong from the street, I might have been envious. Even knowing what they were, some voyeuristic urge stopped me on the slick shingle overlook. The appeal of hard and soft flesh aside, I wondered which of the pair was more the monster.

  Clothes fell away, hardly barriers at all, the straps of her provocatively innocent dress following his tailored coat. Peasant cloth dangled from her waist, skin milky in the alley’s slats of mist-webbed moonlight. He barely spared a hungry glance before diving back to her kisses, a coarse hand pinning her shoulder to the bare brick. Her own light touch played him like the moist rim of a wine glass, the results just as audible.

  I couldn’t hear their words, but the timbre of their murmurs gave away a predictable script. Gravelly whispers threatened pleasures. Feigned naivete filled her response with blushes. His hand slipped behind him, reaching for the grips of the tool jammed in the back of his belt, no longer hidden under his big coat. The steel of workman’s shears scored the gloom—shears that had, in preceding weeks, pruned at least four similar alley flowers. Her slitted eyes didn’t see, her head falling back under an assault of bruising kisses. The blades came up.

  Here it was.

  Like a whip crack, the motion was too fast even to blur. With a snip and splash the shears clattered to the boggy cobbles.

  There was no pleasure in his second gasp.

  Pale arms that had strained to enfold him a moment earlier now bit into his skin like viciously pulled reins. Her kiss on his neck was deeper now, sharper and hungrier. He struggled, but only now, with jaws at his neck, did he realize that he wasn’t the predator.

  A shame. I’d hoped she’d be the one surprised. Few humans could match her experience, though—she’d likely been hunting in the city for decades. She might have continued, too, if she played by the rules. Now she’d become a problem.

  My problem.

  I dropped from my vantage. Heavy with the night’s cold mist, my cloak slapped the stained cobbles. Her eyes were on me even as her mouth worked her lover’s neck. Greedy thing, she was more chewing than drinking—obviously not of the sort of stock anyone taught manners. I straightened and pulled my sword, its silvered length catching a glimmer of moonlight through the dull haze.

  Her eyes locked on mine, watching but obviously not considering me enough of a threat to risk losing her meal. The struggling in her grip was weakening, the man gradually accepting a warm, lethargic futility—the best part. I closed cautiously.

  She came up, as if for the air she didn’t need, gasping lewdly as she did. Sweat and blood trailed from her mouth in ribbons. She’d been sloppy, blood coursing down her jaw and chest. Daintily, she touched her hand to her lips, stained fangs glistening behind her fingers. A practiced pout poured over the shoulder of her current beau. “You can be next.”

  Very sloppy. My blade leapt up, obviously faster than she’d expected. A slender white digit arced into the air and plunked into the mud. It didn’t bleed.

  Her scream was not that of a blushing maid. Shrill with shock, it cracked, reaching a pitch like a shrieking hawk. Her lover barreled into me, thrown backward as she extracted herself from his embrace. I spun out of the way, surprised to hear him grunt as the muddy cobbles met his face.

  My sword came back up for the milkmaid. The alley was empty. My eyes went higher, and so did a missile from my belt. The dart sounded like a wasp for the instant it flew, jabbing its silver stinger into a blood-drenched neck. She’d leapt up one of the alley’s crumbling tenement walls—an elementary trick.

  “Bitch!” Pain growled through the word. She sprang. I slid back. Even with a belly full of blood she was likely faster than I, but I was still quicker than she thought. Nails like claws sliced past my face, digging into filthy alley stone. It wasn’t a jarring miss, though—she landed like a bounding cougar and pounced again.

  My sword was between us, its hilt wrapped with the copper chain of an angelic ankh—the holy icon of Sarenrae, goddess of the sun. She skidded and reeled, expecting the symbol to flare with divine light.

  “You are forbidden to hunt in this part of the city.” I brandished the talisman as though I had faith in it. “Explain yourself.” />
  “I have refined tastes.” Even stained and exposed, she postured. “I hunt where I choose.”

  “You hunt where your master allows. You hunt where his truce isn’t threatened.”

  She tittered, again raising a coy hand to her mouth. It came back wet. “I have no master.”

  “Your arrogance threatens more than you understand.”

  “You mean we threaten you mortals.” She started to circle me. “Had that old coward not betrayed his kind with his truce, the only humans in this city would be mindless casks, waiting to be drained.”

  “Overestimation is a disease of the lowborn.”

  She sneered. “Your end could have been pleasant, had you the sense not to insult your betters.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “You had to trick a human into an alley. He wasn’t under your control—he was planning to kill you. Was his mind too difficult to overpower? Or perhaps your will was too weak?”

  Her eyes smoldered in the gloom. “How dare—”

  “Speaking of control, not even a rat has come to your aid. Where are your minions, mistress?” I produced a match and ran my nail across its head, the crisp white flame dramatically lighting her snarl. She was ready to pounce.

  “But most pitiful,” I dropped the match into the muck between us, “is that.”

  On the ground between us lay her dainty, mud-stained digit.

  “There’s no magic in this blade, Your Ladyship. So apparently you’re still mortal enough to be cut up by our weapons.” I leveled the sword at her face. “You’re not my better. You’re hardly even fit to call yourself vampire. You’re just some bored immortal’s stray spawn.”

  Baring her fangs and screeching, she rushed me, crushing the match underfoot.

  She wanted me dead. Good. There’d be no tricks now. She might not be a true vampire—at least, not as the full-bloods would consider it—but she was still deadly enough.

  She lashed out wildly, claws blurring. I kept ahead of her, scoring several nicks across her forearms. The bloodless wounds knitted shut with unnatural speed, but her reckless rush gave me plenty of opportunities to make more.

  Her chirping laugh echoed off the alley walls as I gave ground. A stroke across her stomach killed the noise, the gash deep enough to make her gush blood that wasn’t her own. With a sound more gurgle than growl, she grabbed the blade as it freed itself from her midsection. The silver bit deep into her grasp. I thrust to impale her, but the sword didn’t budge. Death lent her unnatural strength, and she yanked the blade from my hands. It clattered down the alleyway, toward her forgotten meal. My emptied hands snapped up, one covering my heart, the other reflexively trying to hold her off as she came. She slammed into me, pinning me against the wall just as her lover had trapped her moments before.

  She locked her nails around my neck. “Scream!”

  The chill of her hands caused my breath to catch. Death, palpable and endless, washed over me, an arctic wave seeking to erode my soul. While blood kept vampires fed, the chill of their lifeless essence leeched mortal life, freezing a living spirit to death.

  Fortunately, I liked the cold.

  “What?” She blinked, baffled as to why her touch wasn’t sapping my life. I flashed her a smile, and in that last moment she understood.

  I twisted, pulling a hawthorn stake from my bandolier, then lunged. The sharpened wood drove home, her weak, wet skin splitting like a reptile egg. A rigidity more appropriate to the deceased seized her body, freezing her face in a look of wide-eyed realization.

  I pushed, and black locks trailed her stiff fall. She struck the stone with hardly a thud. The stake quivered, but stayed firmly planted through her heart.

  She wasn’t dead—or, rather, she wasn’t destroyed. The stake would hold her paralyzed and unaware so long as it remained in place. A final destruction required a bit more effort.

  At the other end of the alley, I was surprised to find the big man weakly struggling to pull himself against a wall, blood oozing between thick fingers clasped to his neck. I paid his groans no mind and retrieved my blade.

  Back with my quarry, I performed the necessary field dressing—removing her head. It was a practiced grotesquery, and I hacked through the cold meat with a butcher’s half attention. A trickle of gore—none of it her own—reminded me why I hated doing this right after the creature had fed. Finishing the work, I dragged the decapitated corpse to the alley’s eastern mouth, propping it against a wall sure to be hit by the morning sun. The dawn would reduce the vampire’s body to ashes, assuring no second resurrection.

  A whimper drew my attention back to the bleeding man. Dropping the vampire’s head into the stained sack I used for exactly that purpose, I turned back to the would-be murderer.

  Past him, a carriage soundlessly pulled up at the far end of the alley.

  I didn’t hold back any of the curses that leapt to mind.

  Stiff black clothes held a stiff-backed driver, a human in his late fifties who regarded the bodies and incriminating stains with disinterest.

  “He’s expecting you,” he said in his perpetually bored voice. Despite the formality, I knew it was an order.

  Damn. This was sure to further ruin an already perfectly unpleasant night. “I’m almost done.”

  The driver’s expression didn’t so much as twitch, yet I could tell he disapproved.

  To hell with him.

  I retrieved the bleeding man’s heavy shears and knelt at his side. He couldn’t resist me pulling his hand away, uncovering his torn neck. The spawn had been brutal, but he’d survive.

  He let me scrutinize the wound closer, obviously mistaking my intentions. He hardly whimpered when my mouth clapped over the deepest wounds, fangs tearing the tortured flesh back open. I pressed his arm against the wall and drank fast, draining him like I was throwing down a shot. I didn’t like sharing from the same flask as my quarry, but if the evening was taking the turn I feared, I wouldn’t have another chance.

  Anyway, he deserved it.

  2

  TRANSGRESSIONS

  JADAIN

  The goddess teaches us to recognize suffering, to minister to victims of all sorts—of fate, of tragedy, of violence. But the worst are victims of hope.

  He was one of them.

  He was kneeling upon the sanctuary’s black-and-white marble while I attended midday prayers. He kept his place through the afternoon chorales. Even as I finished reading the evening inevitabilities, he knelt there still. If he’d been an old man, a bandaged leper, an expectant mother, I would have let him be—for those at the brink of life the goddess isn’t always as silent as she appears. But he wasn’t one of the common lot who came to Maiden’s Choir seeking answers.

  Perhaps the goddess had left him waiting there for me.

  The last beams of dusk slipped through the cathedral’s stained-glass depictions of watchful psychopomps and ascendant souls, bruising pale stone violet and blue. The colors shrouded one of the smaller statues of Pharasma—our goddess of birth, death, and the unknown—secluded within one of the vast sanctuary’s peripheral shrines. Here, the goddess worked the wheel of fortune like a spinning wheel. Hundreds of purple prayer candles surrounded the statue, but only one nearly exhausted flame lit her toil.

  Uncut, sun-singed hair and grass-stained clothes suggested the youth worked on the city’s fringes, maybe still someone’s apprentice. He rocked slightly upon his knees, hypnotically repeating a familiar mantra. “Mother of mystery, guard my path, and grace my death as you did my birth.”

  A dozen more repetitions passed. I settled my fingers upon his shoulder. “You know she’s heard you.”

  His voice caught mid-word. He looked up dazedly, blinking as he came back to the world. “I’m—I’m sorry, Mother. I—uh. I didn’t realize it was late.”

  “It’s fine. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. You’ve been here for some time, though. Is there anything you need? A drink of water, perhaps?”

  “No—no, thank you,
Mother.”

  Among the servants of the goddess of birth, “mother” is a revered term, whether literal or honorary. I hadn’t earned either yet.

  “Please, just sister—or Jadain, even. I’m not old enough to be anyone’s mother.” I grinned, repeating a rote quip every Pharasmin acolyte learned.

  His eyes went wide, obviously not understanding. It wasn’t just awkward humor that unsettled him. With our black nails and the spiritlike spirals covering our robes, my order wasn’t known for comfort.

  I smiled as warmly as I could muster. “You’ve sacrificed nearly a whole day to the goddess. Are you always this devout?”

  “Umm …” He searched me for accusation. “No, Sister?”

  I seated myself on the alcove’s cherrywood bench, its seat worn smooth by countless past penitents. “Well, if you’ve already told her everything on your mind, perhaps you’d like someone else to listen?”

  He twisted to look out over the rest of the sanctuary. No more than ten others were wandering the temple’s columned nave—mostly supplicants busy with their own prayers or acolytes polishing flagstone grave markers. He looked back to me, unsure.

  I didn’t push him. “If you think it might help.”

  “Well.” He swallowed hard. “Her name’s Marisia.”

  Of course. I pinched back a smile.

  “Her family’s been neighbors with mine for—for forever, and …”

  I nodded.

  “And during the Prince’s name day last week she …” He blushed.

  “She …” I prompted.

  Out it tumbled. “She took my hand.” His shy eyes fell. “Just on the walk home. But she’d never done that before.”

  “Did she?” Adorable. “What do you think that means?”

  He pondered the memorial blocks etched into the floor.