Elijah Winters had come to Vale to ask about a killing, and he left with a child. He had not planned either. He stood at the edge of the village square with his hood up against the afternoon sun. He was a vampire, and had been for three centuries. The clan that made him had first murdered his wife and daughter in front of him, then turned him so he would never stop remembering. He had followed their trail here because the villagers of Vale said something in the woods had killed a farmhand the way only his kind killed. He needed names. He needed a direction. The villagers would not give him either. A woman closed her shutters when he passed. A man at the well spat and walked off. The baker looked at his pale hands, then at the door, then said he had nothing to sell. The girl solved it, in her way. She was maybe eight, barefoot, hair full of burrs. She had been following him since the mill. When the blacksmith turned his back on Elijah, the girl kicked over a bucket of nails and bit the blacksmith on the wrist. Elijah caught her by the collar before the man could swing. "She yours?" the blacksmith said. Elijah opened his mouth to say no. The girl looked up at him. She had a bruise under one eye that was not fresh. No one in the square stepped forward to claim her. "Yes," Elijah said. The square changed after that. The baker came out with half a loaf. A woman with flour on her apron told him the farmhand had been found in the north ditch with two clean holes in his throat, and that a man in a dark coat had been seen buying salt in the village three nights running. She said the man paid in old coins. She said the coins were stamped with a crest she did not know. It was not a name. It was a direction. He walked out of Vale before dusk with the girl trotting beside him. She had told him, around a mouthful of bread, that she was called Gretel and that the woman who used to feed her was in the ground now. At the treeline a witch stepped out from behind a trunk. Pale skin, freckles, ginger curls, a blue dress gone dark at the hem from walking. Elizabeth Frostwyn. He had asked her once, politely, to stop finding him. She kept finding him. Her eyes went to the child. Her mouth tightened. "Elijah," she said. "Whose is that." "Mine," he said. The word came easier the second time. Gretel bared her teeth at the witch and hissed. Elizabeth did not move. "We need to talk. There's another body. Closer than the last one." Elijah looked down at the girl clutching his coat, then north, toward the coat-wearing man and the crest he did not yet know.

Elijah told the witch to wait. She did not like it, but she sat on a stump at the treeline and watched the road while he took Gretel a few steps into the trees. He crouched to the girl's height and showed her the coin from Vale. The crest was worn but clear: a tower split by a branch, three small marks below. Gretel shook her head. She did not know it. Elijah had not expected her to. He had hoped anyway. He needed a name for the crest. Without one, north was just a direction. He could walk for weeks and pass the killer on the road and not know it. The woods answered before he did. A twig cracked. A boy stepped out from behind a dead, rune-carved tree that Elijah was certain had not been there an hour ago. The boy was small, maybe twelve, in a dark cloak too big for him. A gold brooch sat at his throat. The brooch was a coin. The coin bore the same crest as the one in Elijah's palm. Elijah moved. He had the boy against the trunk before the boy finished his next breath, one hand at the small throat, the other holding the coin up between them. "Whose mark," Elijah said. The boy did not struggle. He looked at the coin, then at Elijah's red eyes, and his mouth pulled into something that was almost a smile. "You're hunting the wrong end of it," the boy said. "But I'll trade." "Whose mark." "Not for a threat." The boy's voice stayed level. "For a favor owed. One. Called in when I say." Elijah's grip tightened. The boy did not flinch. Behind him, Gretel made a low sound in her throat. Elijah let the boy down. He kept the coin. "Name it," Elijah said. "Aldric Thornmoor." The boy touched the brooch at his throat like a man touching a scar. "I used to speak for them. I don't anymore. The crest is Vaelric. Old clan. The tower is their seat, the branch is the oath, the three marks are the founding blood." He paused. "The one you're chasing wears a dark coat and pays with these because he wants us to know. He's not hiding. He's calling us out." "A name," Elijah said. "His." "Corwin," Aldric said. "Corwin Vaelric. He killed your wife. He killed your daughter. He turned you. I was there. I held the door." Elijah did not move. The woods went very quiet. Gretel took hold of his coat. "The favor," Aldric said, "is that when I ask, you don't kill me first." Elijah put the coin in his pocket. He looked north, where the road bent into the dark under the trees. He had a name now. He had the man who held the door.

Elijah pocketed the coin and looked north again. The road bent into shadow. Somewhere down it, Corwin Vaelric was buying salt with a dead clan's money and waiting for Elijah to come running. That was the trap. Move openly, and Gretel walked into the same night his wife had. He would not do that twice. He turned to Aldric, still leaning against the rune-carved tree. "You said you spoke for them. Where does Corwin sleep." "He doesn't sleep in one place," Aldric said. "He moves. The coins are breadcrumbs. He wants you on the road, alone, with the girl beside you." Gretel's small hand tightened in Elijah's coat. He looked down at her bare feet on the cold dirt. He thought of a door closing on a house he could not reach in time. "Then I don't take the road," Elijah said. He crouched to Gretel. "There's a place I know. Warm. Loud. A woman there feeds strays and asks no questions. You'll stay until I come back." Gretel shook her head hard. "You'll stay," Elijah said. "Or I go nowhere." Her jaw set. She nodded once. He took her through the trees on foot, off the road, until the woods opened on a low building with broad windows and warm light spilling out. The sign above the door showed a swirling dark and a pale figure. Auntie's Margaritas. He had used it before, decades back, when he needed a place that did not remember faces. Inside, the air smelled of salt and something burnt-sweet. Behind the bar, a shapeless dark thing coiled over the taps, its body a piece of night sky, two star-shaped eyes fixed on him. The void chef tilted toward him without a mouth to speak. "The girl needs a bed for three nights," Elijah said. He set four silver coins on the wood. The chef's stars dimmed. It nudged the coins back with the tip of its tail. "Not coins," Elijah said. He understood. He pulled the Vaelric coin from his pocket, then the witch's warning from his memory, and set neither down. Instead he unclasped the small iron ring from his own finger, centuries old, and laid it on the bar. The stars flared. The chef curled the ring away. Gretel climbed onto a stool. She did not cry. She watched him. "Three nights," Elijah said to her. "If I'm not back, the witch in the blue dress will come. Elizabeth. She'll know where to take you." He walked out before the girl's face could change his mind. At the treeline, Aldric waited. Elijah handed him the Vaelric coin. "Take this back to the road at Vale. Drop it where he'll find it. Let him think I came and turned around." Aldric's mouth pulled. "You're baiting the baiter." "I'm going in quiet," Elijah said. "Alone." He stepped off the road into the dark trees and was gone.

Elijah moved through the woods without sound. He kept off the road, cutting a slow arc toward the north bend where Aldric would drop the coin. He had walked into fights before. He had never walked into one against a vampire who had lived a thousand years. His hands were empty. His teeth would not be enough. He stopped at a stream and knelt. In the water he saw his own red eyes and understood what he was carrying north. Nothing. He had rage and speed and centuries of hiding. Corwin had all of that and a head start of nine hundred years. He needed a weapon. He knew only one place close enough to hold one. The old crypt sat half-swallowed by ivy at the edge of the woods. Weathered crosses leaned above its arch. Elijah had buried a friend there once, decades back, and left something with him. He pushed the stone door inward. The man in white was already inside, sitting on a sarcophagus lid as if he had been waiting since morning. Blanchard Bellerose. The vampire the others called Ghost. Elijah had met him twice in a hundred years, both times over the body of someone they had both wanted dead. A gold dagger rested across his knees. "You are late," Blanchard said. "I didn't send for you." "Aldric did." Blanchard did not look up. "He knows what you are walking toward. You do not." Elijah crossed the stone floor. A pale orb drifted near the ceiling, giving off a cold silver light. It moved when he moved, as if watching. He ignored it. "I came for the sword," Elijah said. "The iron in that wall will not cut Corwin. It will bend." Blanchard lifted the gold dagger and set it flat on the lid between them. "This will cut him. It cut the one who made me." Elijah looked at the blade. Then at Blanchard. "Why." "Because I want him dead and I cannot reach him alone." "And after." "After is after." Blanchard's mouth closed on the word. Elijah picked up the dagger. It was lighter than it looked. The grip fit his hand like it had been waiting. "There is a price," Blanchard said. "You bring me his head. Not his ash. His head." "Why." "That is mine." Elijah slid the dagger into his belt. He thought of Gretel on a stool in a warm room. He thought of a door in a house he could not reach in time. He thought of his wife's name, which he had not spoken aloud in a hundred years. "Agreed," he said. Blanchard stood. He was already moving toward the crypt door. "Then we go now," he said. "He is closer than Aldric told you." Elijah followed him out into the trees. The dagger was warm against his hip. For the first time since Vale, he was not walking to his death.