Blood Winter

by S. J. Coles

  “Sick fuck,” Ogdell was screeching. “Psycho freak.”

  “Shut your face,” I growled, grabbing the torch and raising the beam.

  A woman stood near the wall. She was very tall, taller than me, with limbs so slim that they appeared elongated. She had very black hair, cropped short over a long, bone-white face. Her eyes were burning yellow coals ringed in impossibly thick, dark lashes. They were fixed on Ogdell’s and didn’t flicker, even when I shone the light on her face. The glass-like smoothness of her skin made it impossible to guess her age. Her mouth was open and butcher-counter-red, the long teeth impossibly white and sharp.

  She was dressed smartly—dark trousers, a fashionable coat and flat but stylish shoes, nothing any normal person could survive wearing in this environment. That and the fact that her hands and clothes were soaked black with blood made her the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

  “And then there were two.” She didn’t speak loudly, but her cool, rich voice filled the narrow space and echoed off the walls, flooded my head and churned in my belly.

  “Stay back,” Ogdell growled. “Stay back, bitch. I’m warning you.”

  “You’re warning me?” Her gaze didn’t waver from where Ogdell crouched, trembling, in the shadows.

  “Freak,” Ogdell spat. “Twisted, blood-sucking freak of nature. We’ll hunt you all down, hear me? You’re history, all of you. We’ll drain you of every last drop of Blood and laugh while we do it.”

  I didn’t see her move. She was just gone from my light, then came the noise of Ogdell choking. I swung the torch around. The haemophile crushed him against the rock by his neck. His feet, dangling a foot of the floor, kicked wildly. He scrabbled at her hand, his round face flushing purple.

  “You dare talk about Blood?”

  “Wait,” I called. “Evgeniya, wait.” She froze like I’d stabbed her, her yellow gaze turning on and slicing through me. “Please,” I breathed. “Terje wouldn’t want this.”

  “How do you know those names?”

  I raised my free hand and took a step closer, the light shaking in my grip. “Please. There’s been too much death already.”

  “There you’re wrong,” she said. Ogdell rasped and spat as her hand tightened.

  “He needs to be brought to trial,” I continued, raising my voice. “Made a public example of.”

  Evgeniya dropped him. He landed with a sickening thud and lay groaning on the floor. She turned on me, breathing deep through her nose. Something in her eyes slowly caught fire. “You were there too,” she said in a low voice. Her eyes were the color of molten metal. Her nostrils quivered.

  I swallowed but resisted backing away. “I was.”

  “You drank,” she said, barely audibly.

  I took a breath to keep my voice level. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I want justice for what was done to Terje,” I said, not breaking eye contact, “just like you do.”

  She grabbed my coat and slammed me against the rock, hard enough to knock the breath from me, the pressure strong enough to bend my ribs. “Justice,” she hissed. “You humans and your pretty words, pretty concepts—all to disguise the filth underneath.”

  “If you do this,” I rasped, struggling to get my breath in, “everything will be ruined. You’ll be hated forever. Hunted. Exiled.”

  “We already are,” she said, her face so close that I could feel her hot breath against my jaw. She smelled of blood and snow. Her fingernails cut into my flesh through my coat. “We always have been and always will be. But we protect our own. We know how to survive.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  She smiled, the expression splitting her face like an open wound. “We don’t need you,” she purred. “You’re. Just. Food.” She leaned in, crushing my ribs, and sank her teeth into my neck. I didn’t even have time to yell. I pushed at her uselessly, but it was like trying to halt an avalanche with my bare hands. I felt blood being drawn out through the wound, the pain needling through my veins like lightning. Every muscle cried out in protest. I called to Ogdell but he didn’t reply. My vision began to swim.

  “Magister.” The voice filled the cavern and penetrated the roaring in my ears. The pressure on my neck and chest disappeared. I fell to the cold floor. I lay, gasping, blinking, feeling warmth soak my collar and stabbing agony with every breath.

  “Terje.” Evgeniya said his name like a curse. With all the strength I had left, I turned my head. Terje was standing at the entrance, snow melting in his fine, wind-swept hair. Fading marks on his face and neck marred his pale skin…scratch and bite marks. He leaned his weight against the rock like he was struggling to stay upright. But his eyes were flashing dark silver, his face blank and dangerous.

  Fury tightened Evgeniya’s face and she growled something at him in another language.

  “No more, Magister,” he said, cutting her off.

  “You want to speak English? For them?” She spat. It hit Ogdell. He whined an obscene retort.

  “Their army is coming,” Terje continued. “They figured out what this one was planning and followed.” He nodded at Ogdell. “It’s all over.”

  “Let them come,” Evgeniya returned. “I’ll bleed them all dry.”

  Terje’s eyes darted to me then back to Evgeniya. “Novák’s with them. You can’t win, Magister.”

  Evgeniya’s lip curled, baring one long canine in an animal snarl. “I ordered you back to the commune once. Don’t make me do it again.”

  “This concerns me too.”

  “Not anymore,” she said, pushing him back toward the entrance. “You will answer for your interference. But I will end this tonight. Then I’ll deal with Novák.”

  “Not him,” Terje, said, gesturing at me.

  Evgeniya looked back over her shoulder, hot eyes drilling holes in my face. “And why not?”

  “He wasn’t part of this.”

  Ogdell scrambled for the gun. Evgeniya grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back. He thrashed about in her grip while she stared at me, darkness like winter storms building in her eyes. “He drank, Terje,” she murmured. “I know he drank.”

  Terje’s face didn’t change but something glinted in his eyes. “Not like the others.”

  Her fire-yellow gaze slid from me to him. “Then how, exactly?”

  “I gave it to him.”

  Her grip tightened and Ogdell gasped, face flushing red. “Why?”

  “He was dying.”

  “So?”

  Terje held her fiery gaze without a flicker. “I couldn’t let that happen. He saved my life.”

  Her face changed, like granite shifting in an earthquake. I got shakily to my feet. “I wasn’t lying,” I rasped through my bruised throat, gripping the bite wound in my neck, blood oozing between my fingers. My vision was gray at the edges. My head pounded. I fought to keep focus. “Any more killing will only make things worse.”

  Ogdell writhed, trying to twist himself out of her hold. He flailed his foot at the gun but only managed to kick it farther away. Evgeniya flung him into the corner in disgust. His head bounced off the rock and he collapsed with a low, burbling moan. Her gaze raked over me like claws. “Terje, have you been with this man?”

  “That’s not—” I began.

  “Silence!” The volume of her command made my ears ring. “Terje, answer.”

  His eyes flickered to me. “Yes.”

  “A human?”

  “He’s not like the others.”

  She flew at him and slammed him, hard, against the rock. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and bent his head back, exposing his neck.

  “Back off,” I yelled, scooping up the gun and aiming it, hands shaking, at her head.

  Terje held up a hand. “Don’t, Alec—”

  “Don’t look at him,” she growled, shoving him harder against the wall. “You answer to me.” His eyes as they held hers were steady, though his jaw had tightened and his long f
ingers were curled into fists at his sides. He was scared. “You betray me with a human?”

  “I’m not bound to you,” he said calmly. “Not that way.”

  “Stray for pleasure, fine,” she growled. “With our own. But after the last human, I explicitly forbade you—”

  “You can’t forbid me this—”

  Her hand closed on his throat. He didn’t flinch, but she pressed herself hard enough against him that the breath was crushed from his body.

  “You’re mine,” she gritted through clenched teeth. “You belong to me. You will obey me.”

  “Terje, fight,” I begged.

  “He won’t,” she growled, tightening her grip until he gasped, “because he knows if mutinies, he’ll be exiled. Clanless, cut off from donations, hunting in slums, feeding on rats. Chased to the ends of the night by Bloodthirsty humans with no one to protect him.”

  “Let. Him. Go.” The barrel of the gun trembled. I prayed the guard had managed to reload before he’d died.

  She turned her face to me. “It never works, you know,” she said with a wicked smile. “You’ll never be enough for him.”

  “Step. Back,” I ordered.

  She laughed, that low, eerie sound that came from the bottom of her lungs and filled the air like the rumble of an approaching storm. “I see he’s snared you well and truly. Not that I can blame you,” she said, gently brushing the hair back from Terje’s face, tender as a lover. “He is one of my finer creations. But you should know”—she stepped away from him in one fluid movement but he stayed against the rock, pinned in place with her look—“that he only beds humans to exasperate me.”

  Stones dropped in my belly. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Oh, sweet, pliable child,” she cooed, stepping close so the gun pressed into her chest. “It’s nothing but my business. I’ve never managed to stamp out the revolutionary spirit he gets from his peasant ancestors. It was a mistake, turning him, but, like you, I couldn’t resist.” She smiled, her needle-sharp teeth whiter than snow against the red of her lips. “But whatever he is, he’s mine—his body, his Blood, his mind. He can never be yours.”

  “He chose me,” I forced out between clenched teeth.

  She examined me for a long, spine-tingling moment. Terje’s eyes were on Evgeniya. I willed him to say something, to deny her. But he stood frozen where she’d put him.

  “Did he tell you why he was up here on his own?” she murmured softly. “That it was a punishment? No, of course not. He wouldn’t have wanted you to know the truth about himself.” I poured all my remaining strength into not looking away from her burning gaze. Her smile widened. “He’s ashamed of his nature, you see. Imagine that…being ashamed of the very things that make you what you are. Not that I even particularly care about a kill ending up in the papers, but it had recriminations I would rather have avoided.”

  “I didn’t kill that child,” Terje finally spoke.

  “So one of her own kind pulled her apart and exsanguinated her?” she asked dryly. “Then left her in Hyde Park for the first human of the morning to find?”

  “Shelly Morris was your victim,” Terje stated flatly. “I was trying to help her. Whoever you sent to follow me that night snatched her from her garden. They killed her.”

  She heaved a sigh, looking between us with a disinterested crease to her brow. I lowered the gun, my strength leaving me in floods. I couldn’t even feel the wound in my neck or the freezing hardness of the cave wall at my back. Cold had sunk into my bones.

  I stared at Terje with Evgeniya’s words swirling in my head. I knew at that moment that I should never have touched him, never had let myself be drawn in. Knew it just as certainly as I knew that if I had the chance, I would do it all again.

  I breathed his name. I don’t know what I was asking for or even if he could give me an answer. He didn’t speak and I couldn’t read the wild storm of his eyes.

  “What a sorry mess this all is,” Evgeniya went on in a bored voice. “Another weight for that guilty conscience you treasure so dearly, Terje elskede. But my patience is at its end.”

  She wrenched the gun out of my weakened grip and reached out for me. A monstrous noise, somewhere between a hiss and a roar, filled the air and Terje pounced. He moved too fast for my dazed senses to follow. I was only aware of the noise of tearing clothing and flesh, yelps of pain, animal snarling. I dropped to the floor, curling myself tight, but was still caught by flying feet. Ogdell grunted as they crashed into him where he lay curled in the corner, bleeding heavily from a cut on his head.

  I was trying to reach the gun again when the cave was flooded with blinding light. It stabbed into my skull, making my cry out. Screams, almost too high-pitched to hear, split the air. Squinting, I made out Evgeniya and Terje, both bloodied and torn, staggering back, flinging their arms up to shield their faces.

  “Stay back,” ordered a voice amplified and de-humanized through a megaphone. “Stand against the wall. The daylight flood will be switched off when you have your hands against the rock.”

  Moving stiffly, Evgeniya and Terje turned, their eyes clenched shut, faces twisted, teeth bared, and placed their shaking hands on the rock. The light dimmed. Both haemophiles sagged with relief. Voices shouted orders over the click of dozens of weapons and the tramp of boots as the cave filled with people in helmets, goggles and body armor. I was hauled onto my feet and bundled out.

  “Take it easy with the human casualties,” the megaphone said, loud enough to split my head in two. I blinked around, trying to make sense of the crowd of armed people moving briskly and efficiently over the snow-swamped mountainside. They wore crampons, climbing gear, snow boots. I strained my eyes and made out Terje, held firmly by three armored men with three more keeping careful aim at his head, being marched along behind me. Behind him came Evgeniya, similarly accompanied but with a much darker and more deadly expression on her cut-glass features.

  They bundled me in extra layers, but the wind bit into my raw skin and made my bones pulse. It was an agonizing age before the ground leveled and I summoned the strength to raise my head to see the cottage, bleached white in the headlights of a number of off-road vehicles crowding the track.

  “I’m sorry, Alec.” I blinked. Terje was behind me, his guards scanning the milling crowd and chatting into communicators. He looked pale and drawn. Older. There were fresh bite marks in his neck and bloody rips in his clothing. His lip was split, part of his ear torn. Fingernail scratches raked over one eye and onto his cheek. His blue-white hair was matted and stained red-black with Blood.

  “Where… Where were you?” I managed.

  “I was…detained.” His eyes flickered toward Evgeniya, standing just beyond him, her only visible injury a scratch on the forehead. She glared with steady, yellow eyes and Terje seemed to shrink in on himself. He opened his mouth to say something else but a guard poked him with his gun.

  “Let’s move.”

  “Wait,” I croaked, but the guards marched both the haemophiles toward one of the armored trucks and out of earshot. An impossibly tall man with long, black hair and a sweeping navy-blue coat separated himself from the knot of milling soldiers and strode toward them. He rumbled in a low voice that I felt rather than heard, his wide, statuesque features stern. His skin was an unearthly shade of bronze under the harsh light, dark but with the underlying pale haemophile glow.

  Evgeniya scowled at him, her canines bared. Terje stood at her side, meeting his eyes without speaking.

  “Over here, mate.” One of the soldiers was pulling at my elbow. “Medic’s over here.”

  I reluctantly allowed myself to be steered to a brightly lit truck where a woman in a high-viz snow jacket was opening boxes of medical supplies. She gave me a perfunctory visual assessment before wrapping me in a silver survival blanket and pressing an oxygen mask over my face.

  “Breathe normally,” she ordered, opening sterile packets. My belly jolted when I saw Ogdell being brought to the med truck
by two more soldiers. He was bucking and pulling in their grip.

  “Take me back,” he yelled. “Let me at the fuckers. I’ll kill ‘em. I’ll—”

  He stumbled, unbalancing one of the soldiers. The other attempted to right them, but in the confusion, Ogdell grabbed his weapon, broke from their hold and ran back toward the cottage. The soldiers lurched after him, but it was too late. Ogdell raised the gun and let a volley fly.

  The weapon thundered. People screamed. Bullets pinged off vehicles and imbedded in windscreens. I watched, spellbound, as Blood, black in the artificial light, sprayed into the air. Terje, Evgeniya and two of their guards crumpled to the floor. The third haemophile dropped to his knees as the soldiers reached Ogdell, tackled him to the ground and forced the gun from his grip.

  I ran toward them. Evgeniya, her face more petrifying than a living nightmare, was shrieking and straining against the tall haemophile’s hold on her. Flesh hung from gouges in her arms and abdomen. Her face was spattered in red and black. She screamed and struggled, her eyes burning like furnaces, lips drawn back from her tooth-filled maw, the noise both deafening and terrifying.

  The tall haemophile’s eyes were hot and filled with darkness. His trousers were torn and his legs were injured and bleeding. His lips were drawn back from a set of teeth large and sharp as a lion’s, but I could see in the deep, tight lines of his face that he was fighting—fighting to hold on to Evgeniya and himself.

  I was suddenly back in that basement, staring at Terje’s twisted face as the Blood took over. Brody screaming. Bones snapping. Blood pooling on the concrete.

  The soldiers had fallen back, aiming guns and shouting useless orders. Evgeniya screamed and screamed, her feet digging gouges in the earth and snow as she fought.

  “Hold her, Novák,” someone shouted into the megaphone. “For God’s sake, hold her.”

  The tall haemophile could only grunt in reply. The muscles in his huge arms bulged under his coat as he tried to overpower the flailing Magister. I scanned the scene desperately and finally spotted Terje sprawled on the floor at their feet. His face was turned away. The muddied snow around him was soaked black with Blood. I shouted his name and ran forward.