Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

The Other Side of the Border

The vampire territory forest swallowed him within fifty steps.

He was trained for wilderness survival. He knew how to move through terrain that wanted to keep you still, how to read the ground and the light and the sound of things to find water and avoid danger. He had done survival training in worse conditions than this, in more hostile terrain, in worse physical states.

The difference was that on those occasions he had been well-rested, well-fed, and armed.

He was none of those things now.

The silver had done something to him, not the permanent damage it would have done to a wolf kept in the chains for weeks, but the kind of systemic disruption that the metal caused to a shifted form had leaked into his human form too, and his body felt faintly wrong. Off-key. Like an instrument that was technically in tune but vibrating at a slightly incorrect frequency.

He kept moving.

He found water by sound, a small tributary running northwest. He drank, filled the small vessel he had in his pocket out of habit. He assessed his resources: the clothes on his back, the small knife in his boot that had been missed in the search because he had spent fifteen years making sure no one knew he kept it there, approximately four days of water if he was careful, no food.

Adequate. For now.

The forest was quiet in the way that vampire territory was always quiet, not the comfortable quiet of a healthy ecosystem but the slightly wrong quiet of a place where the usual rules of the food chain did not apply and everything small knew it. Birds existed but called less. 

Insects moved but the larger rustling sounds of deer and foxes and the normal business of forest life were absent.

He walked east because there was nowhere else to go.

He walked and he thought and he let himself be angry for exactly one hour, measured by the movement of light through the canopy above him. He had learned long ago that anger was useful in specific quantities and destructive in larger ones, and an hour was the amount he allowed himself before requiring himself to convert it into something more productive.

What he converted it into, at the end of the hour, was a question.

Why?

Not why had they done it, the how was clear enough. What he needed to understand was the why. The Elder had been kind to him. He had been a resource, not a threat. Vanitas had never given any indication, in fifteen years of proximity, of fearing him or wanting him gone.

Fifteen years.

He thought about the way his brother's face had looked in the council chambers. The stillness of it. The quality of the grief, performed, precise, exactly the right amount. He had seen Vanitas perform grief before, in the political contexts where it was required, and it had always looked like that.

It had never looked like that when it was real.

He had not wanted to see it because he had not wanted it to be true.

He stopped walking and leaned against a tree and pressed his hands flat against the bark and breathed.

Then he pushed off and kept moving.

………………..

The wound found him on the third night.

He had built a shelter, crude, functional, adequate for a night's sleep and was moving through the dark to check the snare he had set near the water, when something crossed his path that was not a deer and was not a boar and was not any of the normal forest animals whose scent he knew.

He had time to register wolf before the impact hit him.

Pack wolves. Silverstone. Three of them, shifted, moving with the coordinated precision of trained hunters who knew their target had no weapon worth mentioning.

They had followed him.

Or they had been sent.

The difference did not matter much in practice.

He fought. He was a Beta of the Silverstone Pack,was, had been, would always have been in the ways that matter, even if they had stripped the title and the name and the bloodline recognition. He was fifteen years of combat training and a particular quality of will that did not particularly care how badly the odds were stacked.

He held them off for six minutes.

On the seventh minute, the one on his right flank got through.

The strike caught him across the left side, below the ribs. Not a killing blow,wolves killed with the throat or the spine, and this had been aimed at neither, but deep and long and immediately consuming, the kind of wound that changed everything about what the next hours were going to look like.

He got the knife into the wolf who had hit him.

The other two stopped.

He did not know why they stopped. He did not question it. He ran.

He ran with his hand pressed over the wound and blood running through his fingers and the specific, extremely clear thinking that extreme pain sometimes produces, which is not heroic but is functional: he needed to get further into vampire territory, because the pursuing wolves would not follow him deeper in, because even trained Silverstone hunters did not go deep into vampire land without specific orders to do so.

He ran until his legs stopped working.

Then he walked.

Then he stumbled.

The forest around him was very dark and very quiet, and the wound in his side was becoming the most important fact in the world, expanding to fill his awareness the way serious injuries did, insisting on attention he could not spare.

He found a tree and used it to lower himself to the ground.

He pressed his back to the bark.

He held pressure on the wound with both hands.

He looked up at the canopy. The stars were visible in gaps between the leaves,cold and remote and absolutely indifferent, which he had always found strangely comforting. The universe did not know or care about any of this. He was a very small thing in a very large dark, and that had always seemed true before he ended up like this, so he might as well let it be true now.

He breathed.

Something shifted inside him.

He did not have a name for it. He had no frame of reference. It was like feeling a muscle move that he had not known was there,something deep and structural, something that had been dormant for so long that it had no language in his body's existing vocabulary. It moved, and it was warm, and it pushed back very slightly against the cold that was starting at the edges.

He noticed it.

Filed it away.

And then the world went sideways, and the darkness took him, and he stopped noticing anything at all.