Elijah Winters's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Elijah Winters had come to Vale to ask about a killing, and he left with a child. He had not planned either. He stood at the edge of the village square with his hood up against the afternoon sun. He was a vampire, and had been for three centuries. The clan that made him had first murdered his wife and daughter in front of him, then turned him so he would never stop remembering. He had followed their trail here because the villagers of Vale said something in the woods had killed a farmhand the way only his kind killed. He needed names. He needed a direction. The villagers would not give him either. A woman closed her shutters when he passed. A man at the well spat and walked off. The baker looked at his pale hands, then at the door, then said he had nothing to sell. The girl solved it, in her way. She was maybe eight, barefoot, hair full of burrs. She had been following him since the mill. When the blacksmith turned his back on Elijah, the girl kicked over a bucket of nails and bit the blacksmith on the wrist. Elijah caught her by the collar before the man could swing. "She yours?" the blacksmith said. Elijah opened his mouth to say no. The girl looked up at him. She had a bruise under one eye that was not fresh. No one in the square stepped forward to claim her. "Yes," Elijah said. The square changed after that. The baker came out with half a loaf. A woman with flour on her apron told him the farmhand had been found in the north ditch with two clean holes in his throat, and that a man in a dark coat had been seen buying salt in the village three nights running. She said the man paid in old coins. She said the coins were stamped with a crest she did not know. It was not a name. It was a direction. He walked out of Vale before dusk with the girl trotting beside him. She had told him, around a mouthful of bread, that she was called Gretel and that the woman who used to feed her was in the ground now. At the treeline a witch stepped out from behind a trunk. Pale skin, freckles, ginger curls, a blue dress gone dark at the hem from walking. Elizabeth Frostwyn. He had asked her once, politely, to stop finding him. She kept finding him. Her eyes went to the child. Her mouth tightened. "Elijah," she said. "Whose is that." "Mine," he said. The word came easier the second time. Gretel bared her teeth at the witch and hissed. Elizabeth did not move. "We need to talk. There's another body. Closer than the last one." Elijah looked down at the girl clutching his coat, then north, toward the coat-wearing man and the crest he did not yet know.