Stephanie Williams's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

Stephanie reached the willows at dusk. She read the ground for tracks. Elara left none. The gaunt woman moved through the trees like fog, unseen, always ahead. Every hour the child drew closer to the old ground. If the girl died there, the road emptied and Stephanie's forty-one drained to nothing. She could not follow what she could not find. She rode to the inn instead. The stablehand who had once been her sire's spy leaned against a stall, watching a mare refuse its feed. Stephanie and Vera had a wary truce now. Vera had reported her huts to Henry once. But Vera knew this ground better than anyone alive. "Elara moves through the willows," Stephanie said. "I can't see her. How does she pick her path?" Vera did not look up. "She follows what pulls her. She has to answer the call that tied her." She went quiet, the way she did near things she hated. "What call." "A cord. Someone braided it and smeared it and left it in her spot. That's what dragged her back." Vera named it flat. "Bind the cord, you bind her." Stephanie found the woman who had done it at the timber house near the road. She was ambitious and sharp, and she did not startle when a vampire stepped into her firelit hall. She sat in a green chair by the shelves, unbothered. "Deidra Arlan," Stephanie said. "You reopened the pact." "I reopened a debt someone else abandoned." Deidra smiled. "You freed her. That cost the village its arrangement. I only restored it." She turned a braided cord in her fingers, woven in many colors. "This calls her home. She cannot ignore it." "Call her here, then. Not to the old ground." Deidra tilted her head. "And what do I gain?" "The road stays walked. My travelers keep coming. You keep whatever you skim from them." Stephanie set both hands on the table. "A dead child ends the road. That helps no one who profits from it." Deidra weighed her. Greed won, as Stephanie had gambled. She pressed the cord to her palm, whispered over it, and knotted it three times. "She answers where the cord is," Deidra said. "It is here now." Elara came out of the dark within the hour. She carried the child on her hip, the girl asleep against her rotting green dress. Her black eyes fixed on the cord in Deidra's hand. She stopped at the threshold, held by the knot. Stephanie took the child from her arms. The girl stirred and did not wake. Elara stood still, unblinking, bound and empty-handed. The child would live. The road would hold. Stephanie carried the sleeping girl toward the village lights. But Deidra still held the cord, and the pact still lived. Stephanie had not ended the debt. She had only borrowed the woman who owned it.