Vera Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

The red thread led into the black trees and then stopped. Vera stood over the miller's brother at dawn. His scar had scabbed. The blood no longer crawled. She pressed the arm hard, and nothing moved. The rune was dead. She wiped her fingers on the grass and pushed up her glasses. The compass only pointed while the demon fed. The feeding was over. Her lead had gone cold in her hands. Silas crouched beside her without a word. He turned the arm over, tested the scar, and let it drop. "Old blood," he said. "It won't point again." He said it like a man reading a broken clock. No anger. No worry. That calm was the thing she hated most about him. "Then we've lost it," Vera said. "No." Silas stood. "The rune bleeds only on a fresh mark. This one is spent. We need a new one." Vera understood at once, and her stomach dropped. "You want it to mark someone else. You want to wait for another victim." "I want a mark that still bleeds." He met her eyes. "There is a faster way. It has already seen your face. Let it mark you. Your scar would point straight home, fresh, every hour." She took a step back. "You'd hand me to it." "I'd give you a compass no one else can carry." He did not blink. "You knew this was coming when you let me walk with you." Vera thought of the miller's brother, twice-marked, and the double mark that had shown the demon her face. She would not be marked. But she would not sit and wait for a corpse either. She looked past Silas to the tree line where the creature had fled. There was another body out there that still bled. "There's a fresher mark than mine," she said. "The demon took someone last night to feed. That's why the old rune ran cold. Whoever it fed on is newly marked. Their scar is still wet." Silas went still. He had not thought of it. For the first time she saw him weigh her instead of using her. "We find last night's victim," Vera said. "Their rune is fresh. It points now." They searched the town through the morning. A washerwoman told them of a boy gone from his bed, black petals on the pillow. They found him behind his father's shed, alive, shaking. Vera turned his arm over. The rune was raw and cracked, blood standing in the deep lines. She pressed it. A thin red line welled and pulled sideways, holding its course toward the eastern woods. Vera stood. She had her compass, and it was not her own skin. "Now," she said, "we hunt." Silas watched her a moment longer than he needed to. He had wanted her as bait. She had found another way, and now he knew she would keep finding them.