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Jacqueline was tired. Every breath came labored and mingled with the stench of peppermint. There was blood on her mask, and through its glass eyes, she could just barely spot her mark, slumped up against the wall of the landing. It was tired, too. All of that absurd supernatural prowess, slowed to a crawl by the rising sun.
It had been a wise decision to launch their attack just before dawn.
But even so, they had lost Alfrid.
Jacqueline was going to kill it. She didn't have her knives, but she was going to kill it. It wasn’t a declaration of anger or a promise—it was a simple premonition. An inevitability that each heavy step brought her closer to. The certainty brought her a feeling of resigned calm that she had taken to calling the Golden Moment, when nothing else mattered in the world but herself, her mark, and the hunt.
She took another step forward.
The vampire glared at her from behind its frayed golden locks. It spat out something in French and dashed up the stairs, disappearing around a bend.
Jacqueline didn’t quicken her slow march. Nothing was up there except for a string of spare bedrooms with no windows. She had the vampire cornered. Cornered beasts were dangerous, and a wounded one was even more so. To be both and a vampire in their own home made a solo pursuit a mad thing to do. Jacqueline recognized this. She had seen young hunters who still rode the high of their first kill rush in with confidence, only for her to discover their limp bodies later in various states of disfigurement. She recognized this, but she did not care. She was in the Golden Moment, and so long as it endured, she couldn’t die. Not truly.
Up the rest of the staircase, she limped.
She found her mark in a hallway, banging on one of the doors and pleading with something inside. There shouldn’t be a something. There were only two vampires. One had been driven into the basement by Master Molly, and the other was here. None of their servants typically checked in at this hour, either. Some corner of her exhausted, air-deprived brain screamed at her to take caution, but she couldn’t hear it over the hammering of her heart, the blood roaring in her ears, and the hoarse wheeze of her breath escaping her mask. Her focus lay solely on the chimes of the Golden Moment and the nearby marble bust on a pedestal that decorated the hall.
It was a good thing, that bust. It gave her something she could use as leverage.
Jacqueline took hold of the pedestal and wrenched it off the floor, tearing out the nails that had held it in place. Her mark did not react. It had fallen onto its knees, its hands clawing at the door. It kept repeating something. Jacqueline didn’t catch what it was until she swung the pedestal like a battleaxe down onto the vampire’s head.
Eliana.
A name.
Jacqueline blinked. The vampire lay strewn in splinters before her, a marble bust where its... his head should be. For a moment, she lingered, not comprehending. Was he dead? No, of course not. He would not die until they burned him. But had his skull been destroyed? Her body moved to answer, stepping through the doorway and around the pillar before crouching down for a closer examination.
Yes, it had been. Completely and utterly, if the vivid red spray was anything to go by. The vampire would not rise again.
Jacqueline inhaled, calm.
The stench of blood and peppermint.
She turned away from the body and ripped her mask off, scattering the dried herbs stored in its snout. She sucked in a draught of untainted air before exploding into a coughing fit that knocked her onto her hands and knees. The Golden Moment had evaporated like morning mist, revealing all that it had obscured. The nausea, the ache behind her eyes, the warmth trickling down her numb leg and pooling in her boot. God, she could barely even think. Being alive for this single moment made the idea of living unbearable. She wanted to puke. She wanted to lay down and sleep and have nightmares. There was nothing her unconscious mind could conjure that was worse than what she was feeling now.
Let me escape, she pleaded silently. Let me escape with Alfrid and the others. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t. Please.
Shh, said the corner of her brain. Keep still--RUN!--be alert--RUN NOW! You are not alone. Eliana! Eliana! ELIANA!
The choking half-sobs that Jacqueline had been struggling to hold back were silenced at once. She titled her head in small increments, as if her joints were mechanical, and for the first time, she saw where she was.
The orange light that spilled into the bedroom hadn’t been the Golden Moment’s ethereal guidance, but from the fireplace crackling at the end of the hallway. It highlighted the dark silhouettes of the numerous porcelain dolls watching her. They were crowded across every available inch of furniture, and the ones that couldn’t fit sat on the floor.
Where was the danger? Jacqueline’s eyes darted from blank white face to blank white face. Then she spotted it. The only doll in the room that had its head bowed, hiding its face behind its bonnet.
The doll shifted, as if sensing her recognition. It lifted its head.
Jacqueline gasped without meaning to. The doll had been no doll at all, but a child. A girl no older than six with curly red hair and shockingly blue eyes. Jacqueline’s mind reeled. She fought to move, to react, to clarify who she was and tell the girl that she meant her no harm and comfort her. But she could only muster one word, spoken with painfully transparent weakness.
“Eliana?”
Eliana grinned, and to Jacqueline’s pure horror, there were fangs.
“Well done, chasseur,” the vampire said, her voice sweet and sardonic. “Bashing Philippe’s head in with a bust of his own face was a delightfully poetic choice. I don’t think I could have done it better myself.”
“No,” Jacqueline whispered. She drew herself up shakily and rose above the sea of dolls. Eliana remained seated among them, her small smile tainted by adult cynicism.
“There was nothing about you in the reports,” Jacqueline continued. “There was nothing about a child vampire. You… By God, you shouldn’t exist.”
“Oh, I am in full agreement. I should’ve died eighty years ago the moment before they found me, a sick girl clinging fervently to her mother’s corpse. That way, I could have spared you the unpleasantry of cutting my head off.” She pouted her baby lips. “How selfish of me! I should run down the hall and throw myself into the fireplace as an apology. Would that make your job easier, Mademoiselle Chasseuse?”
“I didn’t become a hunter to kill children,” Jacqueline said thickly.
“Of course not. You became a hunter to kill.”
“I became a hunter to survive.”
“And how has that been treating you so far?” Eliana sneered.
Jacqueline wondered if Eliana was real and not a figment of her tortured imagination. Before this, she hadn’t even known vampire children were possible. The implication had always been there, lurking on the fringes of her conscious mind, but she never believed for a moment anyone would go through with creating one, because who would stand to benefit? What creature could be sadistic and cruel enough to damn something as tiny and fragile as a child so thoroughly? If they wanted a slave, better a capable adult body. If they wanted to grow their coven, the same still. Never a child. Never a child.
Jacqueline remembered how the vampire Philippe had clawed at the door, begging and pleading with the wood. She remembered how the reports had said that there were two, both male, living in resplendent luxury atop a snow-covered hill, alone together forever. She remembered how all vampires were human once.
The blood in her veins froze. Her wounded leg gave out, and Jacqueline collapsed onto her knees, wide-eyed, staring at nothing.
May death take her now before she draws a single other conclusion.
Eliana giggled, a pure and innocent sound that tore Jacqueline’s heart to pieces. “That’s as good of an answer as any,” the vampire said, and then she stood beside Jacqueline, the fluttering hem of her frilly green dress the only indication of preternatural movement. Jacqueline dully noted that the sun didn’t seem to hamper Eliana like it did the others. What a worthless discovery that was to have now.
A cold and slender finger traced the outline of Jacqueline’s gray hair where she had cut it short. The hunter shuddered, but couldn’t muster the will to pull away.
“You’re younger than I thought,” Eliana mused. “Tell me, good hunter, what is your name?”
“Jacqueline… Grey,” she croaked.
Eliana pulled her hand back as if stung. “The Hound?”
Jacqueline nodded her head, numb. Eliana made a sound that could’ve been a scoff.
“I can’t believe it. That explains how you managed to best Philippe.” She let out a horrible, strained little laugh. “And if the Hound is here, the Crow can’t be far behind, which means my dear Nicholas is most certainly dead as well. How tragic! I had staked everything on that bleeding heart of his. If I could get him to love me more than he loved Philippe, we could have killed him together, and I would have been free to travel eastward. I… I could have found the old vampires. I could have learned their secrets, the ones that Philippe had always withheld from us. I could have found the answer to why!”
Porcelain shattered. Eliana had spun away from Jacqueline to obliterate the head of a doll with the back of her fist, sprawling its body across the floor in a scattering of its own blonde strands.
There was a pause, and Eliana let her arm fall.
“But none of that matters now,” she whispered. “Does it, Jack?”
Jacqueline gritted her teeth. “I never wanted this,” she hissed.
“Neither did I.” Her voice held no accusation, no anger. “But my guardians are dead, and if you don’t kill me, some other hunter or vampire or beast will. It’s only a matter of short, fleeting time.”
Clunk.
Both vampire and hunter stiffened. They looked towards the doorway.
Thunk. Clunk.
Footsteps. Heavy ones that approached from down the hall. Eliana’s sardonic smiled returned. “Like I hadsaid—short and fleeting.”
Jacqueline hung her head. A hunter must hunt, so what did that make her? A hunter who was too stricken with emotion to finish the job and avenge her comrade was a hunter who had failed in such a way that not even death could excuse. Shame whipped her soul. Master Molly cannot see her like this. She needed to stand. She needed to bury her shame and misery and face her failings with some semblance of dignity. It was the barest courtesy she could offer them both, to her mark and her master.
Thunk.
Too late.
Master Molly’s frame had filled the doorway. Her black feathered cloak enshrouded her body in darkness, making her a hunched and brooding specter. The fireplace’s trembling glow caught the glass lenses of her beaked mask, and they shone out from underneath the wide brim of her hat as she surveyed the room. Blood dripped off the wicked curves of the knives she held at her sides. This Eliana stared at, her face twisted in an honest display of distress.
“That’s Nicholas’s blood,” the child vampire said quietly.
The Crow said nothing.
Eliana’s lip quivered as she struggled with something internally. “How… how did he die?”
“It was a normal death,” Master Molly rasped. Her voice had a familiar rich depth to it that soothed Jacqueline for a moment, despite everything. “Like any other man.”
“I see. Well, it serves him right enough.”
When Eliana didn’t say anything else, Master Molly turned her attention to Jacqueline. The younger hunter kept her head down. She didn’t want Molly to see the tears forming at the corners of her eyes.
“Are you hurt?” the Crow asked.
“No,” replied the Hound. Her grief began to stream down her face, wet and hot. “Just a gash on my leg. I’ll be fine.”
A silent pause. Jacqueline tightened her grip on her knees to the point of numbness. Eliana was looking at her with a cold, distant expression. What was it exactly? Pity? Annoyance? Jacqueline couldn’t bring herself to meet her gaze. Even that decency was beyond her now. All that remained was a hollow husk. She wished she could be gone.
Master Molly stepped forward, her boots heavy on the creaking floorboards. She brought her knives to Eliana’s neck. The vampire’s eyes never left Jacqueline.
“Do you want to leave the room?” Molly asked.
“No,” Jacqueline said. She couldn’t keep the break out of her voice.
“Then I’ll make it quick.”
“How very considerate of you,” Eliana said dully. “Go on. I would hate to inconvenience you any f—”
The blades of mercy sang. Eliana’s head flew off her shoulders before hitting the floor and rolling onto the lap of a doll. The vampire gaped at nothing, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly. Then a long, rattling sigh escaped her.
“Enfin, c'est fini,” she mumbled.