Elijah Winters's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Elijah moved through the woods without sound. He kept off the road, cutting a slow arc toward the north bend where Aldric would drop the coin. He had walked into fights before. He had never walked into one against a vampire who had lived a thousand years. His hands were empty. His teeth would not be enough. He stopped at a stream and knelt. In the water he saw his own red eyes and understood what he was carrying north. Nothing. He had rage and speed and centuries of hiding. Corwin had all of that and a head start of nine hundred years. He needed a weapon. He knew only one place close enough to hold one. The old crypt sat half-swallowed by ivy at the edge of the woods. Weathered crosses leaned above its arch. Elijah had buried a friend there once, decades back, and left something with him. He pushed the stone door inward. The man in white was already inside, sitting on a sarcophagus lid as if he had been waiting since morning. Blanchard Bellerose. The vampire the others called Ghost. Elijah had met him twice in a hundred years, both times over the body of someone they had both wanted dead. A gold dagger rested across his knees. "You are late," Blanchard said. "I didn't send for you." "Aldric did." Blanchard did not look up. "He knows what you are walking toward. You do not." Elijah crossed the stone floor. A pale orb drifted near the ceiling, giving off a cold silver light. It moved when he moved, as if watching. He ignored it. "I came for the sword," Elijah said. "The iron in that wall will not cut Corwin. It will bend." Blanchard lifted the gold dagger and set it flat on the lid between them. "This will cut him. It cut the one who made me." Elijah looked at the blade. Then at Blanchard. "Why." "Because I want him dead and I cannot reach him alone." "And after." "After is after." Blanchard's mouth closed on the word. Elijah picked up the dagger. It was lighter than it looked. The grip fit his hand like it had been waiting. "There is a price," Blanchard said. "You bring me his head. Not his ash. His head." "Why." "That is mine." Elijah slid the dagger into his belt. He thought of Gretel on a stool in a warm room. He thought of a door in a house he could not reach in time. He thought of his wife's name, which he had not spoken aloud in a hundred years. "Agreed," he said. Blanchard stood. He was already moving toward the crypt door. "Then we go now," he said. "He is closer than Aldric told you." Elijah followed him out into the trees. The dagger was warm against his hip. For the first time since Vale, he was not walking to his death.