Chapter Three — The Rules

The first vampire Ward killed on camera took fifty-one seconds to die beneath an abandoned hydroelectric intake. It wasn’t Francesco. Lucy had sensed another presence off the service road, and Ward refused to leave an unknown vampire unaccounted for while we pursued Francesco.

Lucy raised one hand in the service tunnel. Water dripped onto cracked concrete; rust and a sickly sweetness filled the air.

“Something’s here,” she said.

Ward asked the question that mattered. “Francesco?”

“No.”

Rivas went left without waiting for another order. Bell unfolded the silver-net launcher and took the right wall. Ward drew a wooden-core spike from the sheath along his forearm. He pointed me behind Bell.

“Stay there.”

Water dripped below us. Rivas breathed through his nose while Bell locked the launcher open. Lucy winced.

“It’s moving.”

“Where?” Ward asked.

She turned toward a maintenance recess.

The thing came out of the dark on all fours.

It had once been a woman, perhaps twenty, perhaps two hundred. Blood-borne made age a visual joke. Tunnel dust had grayed her modern clothes. Her eyes found Lucy first. The vampire opened her mouth. The sound that came out might once have been a name.

Rivas fired silver at four meters.

The first round broke her shoulder; the second spun her into the wall. Smoke rose from both wounds, but she came forward again.

Bell launched the net. Silver filament opened across the narrow space and wrapped her torso and arms. Wherever the wire touched, her skin blackened. She screamed and pulled hard enough to drag Bell half a step.

Ward crossed the distance and drove the wooden core between her ribs, angling beneath the breastbone. She struck at his face. He caught her wrist and forced her down until the stake seated against the concrete.

“Hold her,” he said.

Rivas planted a boot against her shoulder. Bell tightened the net. Ward checked the time on his watch.

Her body bucked. Her fingers clawed at the floor. Ward checked the wound at thirty seconds and pressed the stake deeper at forty. At fifty-one, she stopped moving.

Ward kept his hand on the stake for another ten seconds.

“Document the wounds,” he told me. “Then the ammunition. Rivas, record the lot number. Bell, bag the net and don’t touch the blood.”

Rivas read the ammunition lot aloud; Bell photographed the burned net. Ward checked the corpse’s teeth, eyes, and wrists before anyone moved her.

For an ordinary Blood-borne, the procedure had worked.

Lucy folded her arms. “You knew she was here,” Ward said.

“I felt her.”

“Before you stopped?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Familiar. Like a song played with the wrong notes.”

“Your kind?” I asked.

Her head snapped toward me. “Don’t call her that.”

“You recognized her.”

“I recognized something.” She looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “That doesn’t make her my kind.”

Ward watched her for a moment. “Do you feel like her?”

“I feel hungry all the time, and I can hear a watch that doesn’t tick. Is that enough of an answer?”

Ward wrote it down without pressing her.

“If I complete the change, will you kill me like that?”

“If there’s a way to save you, I’ll keep looking. If I run out of options, I’ll tell you.”

She nodded once, still unsatisfied.

Ward administered the fifth injection in the back of the vehicle while the rain began to clear. It barely worked. Lucy’s temperature dropped by two-tenths of a degree, held there for less than a minute, and began climbing again. He checked the monitor twice, then checked her pulse manually.

“That’s all?” she asked.

“That’s all.”

She leaned back, hair stuck to her forehead. Without the glasses, the dashboard light made her squint unless she turned away.

“One left,” Ward said.

Lucy looked at the case. “I know.”

“Once the last one wears off, I can’t promise you’ll be able to follow instructions.”

“Then stop giving me instructions I can’t follow.”

Ward’s mouth tightened. I thought he might reprimand her. Instead he took the blanket from the floor and put it over her legs.

“If I pass out, film me being carried like a princess,” she said.

“Delete that sentence,” I said.

“Never.”

The engine and wipers filled the silence. Lucy fought sleep, then jerked awake with her fist clenched. Her body was deciding for her now: tracking movement, rejecting food, turning whenever someone said Francesco’s name.

I reviewed the footage that night. At the start of the hunt, Lucy had said, “I want to know why he left me.” Ward answered, “We find him first.” Lucy said, “Then you kill him.” After Ward qualified the promise, she added, “That’s the plan.”

Later, the recordings held only directions: “East.” “Not this turn. The next one.” “He’s north.” By the motel, there was just, “He’s closer.”

Ward and I treated the directions as a patient trying to reach the source of her infection.

Just after midnight, we found a folded map beneath a stone at a junction, three routes circled in red. Ward studied it for ten seconds.

“Decoy.”

Lucy never touched the paper. “He wants me to see it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked northeast, beyond the road and the wet trees. “But he isn’t on any of those routes.”

Ward slid the map into an evidence sleeve. “He knows you’re following.”

Lucy stared at him. “He knew I would.”

“You think he planned all this?”

“I think he bit me, disappeared, and made me crawl after him while my body fell apart.” She turned to Ward. “So yes. I think the asshole planned something.”

Ward tapped the final syringe case inside his jacket. “Find him first. Interrogate him after.”

At 5:06 a.m., Lucy sat upright in the passenger seat.

“Stop.”

Ward braked hard enough to swing my camera against its strap. Ahead, the broken tower of an abandoned monastery rose above the cloud forest. Fog moved between the trees, and mud blocked the road.

Lucy opened the door before the vehicle had settled.

Ward caught her sleeve. “There?”

She stared uphill. For the first time since Chachapoyas, the feverish tension in her face went quiet.

“There.”

We left the vehicles and climbed the last stretch on foot.