Hanako Tepes's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

Hanako walked home from the arena with a name and no proof. Carmilla had killed her own witch to keep the trail clean. Every operative Hanako caught died before speaking. She needed a way past the dead mouths. So she went to the one person in Walachia who could read the blood itself. She found Maria in the castle's lower hall, cleaning a red-stained blade. Dracula's daughter did not look up. "You want something. You never visit me otherwise." "You said only a few can pull a heart across a room," Hanako said. "You called it fine work. If you can feel who cast it, you can name my traitor." Maria set the blade down. "Blood carries a signature. Like a hand carries a grip. I can read the one who bent that witch's heart." She looked at Hanako at last. "But the corpse is frozen and days gone. I need fresh work. A living sample of her craft." That was the trap inside the answer. Hanako could not get close to Carmilla. So she baited a smaller one. She let it be known she had found a scroll naming Carmilla's operatives. Within a night, a courier came to steal it. The Midnight Pair caught him on the market row for coin, a stylish vampire man and his sharp-nailed partner, and dragged him to the castle. Hanako pressed the courier for a name. His eyes rolled white. His heart burst in his chest, exactly as the witch's had. Blood misted the air. Carmilla had reached across the city and killed him mid-word. "Now," Maria said. She spread her hands over the fresh corpse. The blood in the air stopped falling. It hung, then spun, pulled by her will. "There. A river by its throat." Her eyes narrowed. She held the dead man's blood and traced the force that had killed him back along its own path. "I have her," Maria said. "The signature is a woman's. Cold. Practiced. She stood behind the killing, not inside it." She turned to Hanako. "The blood remembers her hand. Carmilla de Styria. I would name it before the whole court." Hanako's frost cracked across the stone floor. At last she had a witness the court could not wave away. Not a dead pawn. Dracula's own daughter, the blood bender, ready to testify. But the killing had told Carmilla something too. She now knew Hanako had learned to read her work. The shadows were spent. There would be no more small hands sent to mislead. Maria wiped her palms clean. "She knows you can see her now. A cornered thing does not hide. It strikes." Hanako looked at the frozen blood on the floor. She finally had proof. And she had just made Carmilla stop playing games.