“Ouch.” She got to her feet. “We need to round up those horses, get these two in chains and…” She trailed off as Cian walked toward them, leading the horses.
He glanced at the vampires bleeding on the path. “Untidy,” he decided. “But effective. This one’s not in the best of shape.” He nodded toward the bleeding man slung over one of the horses. “But he’s alive.”
“Nice work.” She wondered, not for the first time, how hard it was for him to resist the smell of fresh human blood. But it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “We’d better get these two contained. This one wakes up, he’s trouble.” Blair circled her aching shoulder. “That one’s like a goddamn bull.”
While the men chained the prisoners, she examined the unconscious man. He was bloodied and battered, but unbitten. Going to take him back to the wagon, she thought. Share him with the female. Have a little party.
“We need to bury the dead,” Larkin said to her.
“We can’t take the time now.”
“We’re not just leaving them.”
“Listen, just listen.” She gripped his hands before he could turn away. “That man’s hurt, and hurt bad. He needs help as soon as we can get it for him, or he might not make it. Then we’d be digging another grave. Added to it, we need to get Cian back and inside before sunrise. We’re going to be cutting it close as it is.”
“I’ll stay behind, deal with it myself.”
“Larkin, we need you. If we don’t make good time, Cian’s going to have to go ahead, or go to ground, and that leaves me with two vampires and one wounded human. I could handle it alone if I had to, but I don’t. We’ll send someone back to bury them. I’ll come back with you, and we’ll do it ourselves if you’d rather. But we have to leave them for now. We have to go.”
He said nothing, only nodded then strode to his horse.
“He’s taking the female he ended to heart,” Cian murmured.
“Some are harder than others. You have that cloak thing, right? In case.”
“I do, but I’ll be frank and tell you I’d rather not risk my skin on it.”
“Can’t blame you. If and when you have to ride ahead, you ride.” She looked over where the two vampires were shackled, gagged and tied across one of their horses. “We can handle them.”
“You could handle them on your own, we both know that.”
“Larkin shouldn’t have to deal with what’s back there in that wagon by himself.” She swung onto her horse. “Let’s get this done.”
They rode in silence through the dark of the woods, across the fields dappled with pale moonlight. Once, just ahead, a white owl swooped over a gentle rise with only the whisper of wings. Blair thought, for an instant, she saw the glitter of its eyes, green as jewels. Then there was only the murmur of the wind through the high grass and the hushed silence of predawn.
S
he saw the vampire she fought lift its head. When its eyes met hers she saw the blood lust, and the fury. But over them both she saw the fear. He struggled against his chains, eyes wheeling toward the east. The one beside him lay weakly, and Blair thought the sounds he made behind his gag were sobs.
“They feel dawn coming,” Cian said from beside her. “The burn of it.”
“Go. Larkin and I can handle it.”
“Oh, there’s time yet, a bit of time yet.”
“We should only be a couple miles out.”
“Less,” Larkin told her. “A bit less. The wounded man’s coming around some. I wish he wouldn’t.”
The ride couldn’t be doing him any good, Blair thought, but they couldn’t afford to keep it slow and smooth any longer. The stars had faded out.
“Let’s pick up the pace.” She kicked her horse into a gallop, and hoped the man slumped over the horse she led would live another mile.
She saw the lights first, the flicker of them—candle and torch—through the rising mists. And there, the silhouette of the castle, high on the rise with its white flags waving against a sky that was no longer black, but a deep, dense blue.
“Go!”
The vampires bucked and jerked, making sounds far from human as the first streaks of red bled over the horizon behind the castle.