Blane Bloodworth's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Blane had a mark now, a bunny on a hunter's coat. But a painted rabbit was not a face. He could not walk the city striking strangers. He needed someone who knew where the hunters drank. So he went to the cabin at the edge of the orchards, the one strung with guitars and bone charms, where the rock and roll witch kept her rituals. Starr Gaze opened the door before he knocked. She wore a torn black dress and silver bells in her ears. She looked at his fangs the way most people looked at a weapon, not a costume. "You want the bunny man," she said. Not a question. "Everyone who comes here wet-eyed wants the bunny man." Blane's chest tightened. "You know him." "I know where his den sits." She leaned on the doorframe. "Deep in the briars, past the sick apple trees. A stone house shaped like a rabbit, eyes that glow. Folks call it the hollow." She studied him. "You're not the first vampire to go looking. The others don't come back." "Take me." Starr laughed, short and hard. "I'll point. I won't walk you into that mouth." She stepped aside and poured him a glass from a dark bottle. The drink was blood-red, a thorn sprig on the rim. "Drink. The briars read fear. This keeps it off you." He drank. It tasted of iron and rot. Then he followed her finger into the twisted orchard, past apple trees with faces carved in their trunks, down a path choked with thorns. The hollow waited at the end. Stone ears. Two burning eyes. A green glow bled from its open door. Blane stepped inside. The thorns pulled at his coat like fingers. A man sat in the glow. Except he was not a man. Black fur. Long ears. Orange eyes like the stone ones outside. He wore a buttoned coat and a red tie. On his lapel, painted small and neat, sat a white rabbit. Blane stopped breathing. Here was the mark. The thing he had hunted for three years. "The teeth," the bunny man said. His smile showed small sharp teeth of his own. "I know those teeth. I put down a woman with teeth like that. Long coat. Fed careful." He tilted his head. "You're the one she made. She used to watch you sleep, you know. Sentimental. It got her killed." Blane did not freeze this time. He lunged. But Corvin Blackhare was fast. He twisted aside, and a chain snapped up from the floor, catching Blane's ankle. He crashed into cold stone. The thorns outside began to close over the door. "Wrong house to bare fangs in, vampire," Corvin said. He stood over Blane, calm, counting him like coin. "I keep what I catch." Blane had found his hunter at last. Now the hunter had found him, chained on the floor of the hollow, with the briars sealing shut behind.