Seraphine Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Seraphine Nightshade crouched behind a rotted stump and pressed her palm over her mouth to muffle the sound of her own breathing. A crossbow bolt had passed through the tree six inches from her ear a moment before. She was hunting the vampire lord who had cursed her, tracking his ghouls back through the hollow to the black-spired lair where he waited. Now something was hunting her. She knew his name from the villagers she had saved two nights ago. Marcus Ashwood. A vampire hunter with a reputation for finishing what he started. They had spoken of him with the same fear they used for her sire. She rose and ran. Her cloak snagged on thorns. Her crimson eyes swept the dark for a route out, but the hollow narrowed ahead into a stone throat where the lord's den squatted between the trees. If she ran forward, she reached her sire unprepared. If she turned back, she met the hunter's second bolt. "Stop running, leech." His voice came flat from her left, closer than it should have been. "You'll only die tired." He stepped from a stand of pines. Beard streaked with ash. A silver dagger in one hand, crossbow in the other, wooden stakes crossed at his chest like a second ribcage. His eyes fixed on her the way a butcher fixes on a hook. He had killed things that looked like her before and had not lost sleep. "I'm hunting the one who made me," Seraphine said. She kept her hands open, bow lowered. "His den is a hundred paces behind you. Let me pass and he dies tonight." Marcus laughed once, without humor. "They all have a story." He raised the crossbow. A shriek split the trees before he fired. The pale ghoul came down the slope on all fours, jaw unhinged, ribs showing through gray skin. It had smelled her blood and followed the same trail Marcus had. It struck him from the side and drove him into the dirt. Seraphine could have run. The path to her sire was open. Instead she drew, nocked, and put a rune-etched arrow through the ghoul's spine before it tore Marcus open. It collapsed twitching. Ash bloomed from the wound. Marcus rolled up, blood on his mouth, dagger still in his fist. He stared at her over the ghoul's body. She had been a clean shot for three full seconds and had not taken it. "Your master sent that," she said. "He knows I'm here. He'll know you are too." She turned toward the stone throat and the spires beyond. Behind her, Marcus did not fire. She heard him spit, then heard him follow. She had wanted to reach her sire alone. Now she walked toward his door with a hunter at her back, and no way to know which of them he would kill first.