Valero Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Valero spent the next three days monitoring his eighth subject from a distance, confirming her patterns hadn't changed. She still left the boarding house before dawn, still took the same path toward the coaching station. No one followed her. No one watched him watching her. On the fourth morning, an owl landed on the post outside his stone house. Its feathers glowed with unnatural colors—orange, pink, yellow—bright enough to see in the pre-dawn dark. A leather tube hung from its leg. Valero approached slowly. The bird didn't startle. It turned its head and fixed him with round, dark eyes. He removed the tube and the owl lifted off without sound, disappearing into the trees. Inside the tube was a single sheet of paper, folded twice. The handwriting was familiar—angular, deliberate, the way he'd been taught to write forty years ago in a house he no longer visited. The message read: "The girl you're watching is already dead. I'm at the old pavilion past the plateau. Come see what you left behind. —J." Valero walked east for two hours until he reached the structure. It stood half-collapsed, dark wood carved with patterns he recognized from the family estate he'd abandoned when he turned. Purple curtains hung torn from the archways. Inside, blankets were piled in a rough circle on the ground, forming a makeshift nest. A woman sat on the edge of it, her hair gray now but her face still sharp. She looked up at him without surprise. "You don't write," she said. "You don't visit. But you're still turning people, aren't you?" She reached into the blankets and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth. When she unfolded it, he saw a silver comb, a child's wooden horse, and a portrait frame containing a faded painting of two young men standing side by side. One of them was him. The other was the first person he'd ever turned. "His mother gave me these before she died," she said. "She asked me to find you. To tell you he had a name. You remember that, don't you?" Valero stared at the portrait. The face beside his own looked nothing like the thing that had screamed and clawed at him in the cellar twenty-three years ago. He'd written the failure in his notebook as "Subject One" and moved on within the hour. He didn't remember a name. He didn't remember agreeing to turn anyone's son. The woman stood and placed the bundle in his hands. "You weren't always like this," she said. "You used to ask permission. You used to care if they lived." She turned and walked toward the edge of the pavilion. "I won't tell you to stop. But I needed you to remember what it cost. Not just them. You." She disappeared into the trees before he could respond. Valero looked down at the portrait again, then folded the cloth over it and carried it back to the stone house. He placed it in the cellar chest beside the blue necklace and his black notebook. When he opened the notebook to the first page, the entry read only: "Subject One. Male. Feral after six days. Terminated." No name. No mention of a mother. He closed the book and locked the chest. His eighth subject would have to wait. He couldn't proceed tonight—not with the portrait still sharp in his mind, not with the memory of a promise he couldn't recall making.