I held Arrin’s delicate corpse a while longer, drawing every last drop I could out of it. I remained wrapped around him for one final moment because nearness to his feverish warmth had been most of my existence in this nightmarish pit. I clung to him because his death was a welcome reminder.

So young. So weak. So pitiful. So frail, their pathetic prey lives. So insignificant compared to me.

And yet I’m still so useless!

I slipped off of Arrin’s corpse and allowed gravity to roll me onto my back. Glaring up at the repugnant Elderberry female, I let my urge to assert dominance take over. “Don’t ever do something like that again…” I declared, letting silence stretch out between us instead of finishing the sentence.

The blood from Arrin had been far too little, yet at the same time, it was enough for some small measure of clarity in my thinking. I had found a way out of my prison, days or maybe weeks ago. Then I used that knowledge to heal Arrin instead of freeing myself. Wielding Tonaltus magic to save the kid while I had been in such a pathetic state had unmade me back then.

Now, having fed on the boy’s corpse, I was probably strong enough to try to break free once more. Carefully, I reached for the energies around my prison. I felt for the places in the weave I would need to manipulate to disrupt the anti-magic field. It was good to know my idle threat wasn’t mere bluff. By killing the child, the Elderpoison female had made herself and her companions redundant.

Yet even with the threat and my unbreathing, lifeless gaze boring into the Irina woman, she remained defiant. “No, Sweets. If I had asked your opinion on the matter, you wouldn’t have agreed.” She stood up straight. “That kid was beyond saving. Keeping him alive like that, it was cruel of you, so don’t you dare protest, or you can find your own way out.”

Cruel?

It was her kind that had dumped me in this pit and left me to rot. It was her fellow Inquisitors who had dumped the boy in here, expecting him to be eaten by me. And she dared lecture me on cruelty?

Yes, I had kept the boy from dying. Yes, he had survived more on terror of me than anything else. Yes, I had only considered him as prey, as food, as a way out of this cell. But that was nothing compared to what they had done to me.

I closed my mouth, swallowing the rebuke that I had prepared. There was no point. Nothing would change. The prey was dead. No way back. Just a corpse. Meat. No more point in grieving. Or caring.

I spared one more look for the child-shaped pile of flesh, then nodded up at the female. I decided to withhold that I was no longer at her mercy a little longer. Humans who believed they had the upper hand always made such interesting mistakes.

After strapping me in, Irina climbed up with the same ease she had descended into the oubliette. A little later Irina and Piers were hauling me out, the rope biting a little deeper into my Tonaltus-softened flesh with each upwards tug.

For the first few pulls on the rope, I looked up, towards the rim. But when freedom came closer my gaze was lured downwards once more, towards Arrin’s baleful, dead eyes and blood-drained flesh.

The people back in Birnstead, what would they think of this?

Uncle Hadrian?

I doubted they would recognize this side of me. Despite how often I had tried to explain it to them, they had not believed me. They had trusted my kindness. Even Elderberry-poison Irina had mentioned it as her reason for freeing me. No thralls. No murders. So many people had been convinced they knew me better than I knew myself, and I had almost begun to believe them.

When they had first dumped me in this pit I had even spat out the human blood they had tried to feed me, disgusted at the atrocity. How foolish of me that had been. Now I had greedily drank Arrin dry. The truth of my nature lay revealed with his corpse. The only empathy I had was pretend. My cute little hunter-girl disguise, once good enough to fool even myself, it was slipping away from me.

With a final lurch on the rope, I reached the top. I crawled over the rim, rolled free of the edge, and then I floated. The crushing pressure of the Tonaltus field evaporated and suddenly the world was all fluffy clouds and painted rainbows. I was running, falling, flying, soaring, sailing. I was light and free and—

Please, don’t be a dream!

Please, please, please don’t let this be a dream...

The relief I felt upon escaping the containment field was almost palpable. For a moment, I just allowed the complete lack of pressure to wash over me. I let out a breath of delight and simply savored the feel of air on my skin. Not being torn apart by Tonaltus, it was indescribable. I thought I had forgotten how to feel the pain of it. The reality was both worse and so much better, I had forgotten how not to feel pain.

I could have lain there forever, but the wet slap of fresh meat on stone pulled me out of ecstasy. Irina had dumped a whole cut of meat right next to my head. Not a tiny, already portioned piece you put on a grill, but the big hunk of muscle kind you keep in a larder, pounds and pounds and pounds of it.

Irina’s intention was clear, and she was right. Contentment would have to wait. I needed to escape first, and food to heal my battered vessel would aid with that. I tore into the meat, not caring how ugly or gruesome it looked as I ripped hunks of it off with my bare fangs. I barely chewed, and after a first couple of swallows, I pushed Metzus through every inch of my body.

The familiar not-quite painful but not-quite comfortable sensation of my unnatural regeneration crawled over my flesh. Bones inside my chest straightened and hardened, organs knit together, new flesh and muscle strung itself over bone. Where my arms had been torn off, fresh bone grew, pushing past the rotten, festering, necrotic stumps of flesh. The bones became arms, wrists, hands. Soon after, tendons, blood vessels, nerves, and finally flesh and fat and skin snaked themselves over the new bone.

I watched it happen with curious detachment, more focused on devouring the food in front of me than anything else. Soon the entire hunk of meat was gone. By then I had control of my new arms. I clawed away at the layer of old, decomposing, half-liquified flesh still covering me, stripped my vessel bare of the contaminated flesh, and stuffed it in my mouth, preferring to scarf it down and grow it all anew instead of healing the rotten mess.

Even then there wasn’t enough food. My limbs grew back as spindly things, barely more than skin over bone. My spine became a hard ridge on my back and my ribs jutted out starkly as what little fat and muscle I had elsewhere was repurposed. But at least I had arms and legs once more.

And all the time I was knitting myself back together those two tasty morsels, Irina and Piers, were arguing about the sanity of saving me. Staring at them in wonder, I combed a hand over my skull. When I pulled my hand back, gelatinous clods of goop trailed over my fingers.

The giant male gesticulated from me to the pit, and when he did he followed the gesture with his eyes. It made the Remorseful-morsel look at me, properly look at me.

I flicked my hand, but the ropy threads of rotten flesh I’d scraped off my scalp, radiating in hues of red and yellow in the light of torches, stuck to my fingers and refused to come off.

His breath caught and I could physically hear his stomach heaving. With two heavy gulps of air, he fought to keep his food inside.

The Honey-blood female followed her male’s gaze, the tilt of her head perfectly accentuating her exposed neck.

My eyes roved over these two terrified meals, taking in every inch of their delicious bodies, the male’s anxious fear, the female’s heartbeat thrilling that same erratic fast-paced drum that had made me pounce on her down in the pit.

Healed too much too fast.

Control yourself, Vale. Don’t eat the food yet.

With those two snacks in front of me, licking the goop off my fingers suddenly wasn’t as appetizing as it had been. The sound of their heartbeat, the taste of their terror, those were so much more important than anything else. I forced my gaze away and chewed on my lip in a desperate bid to distract myself from the prey-like behavior of my saviors.

Even preoccupied with the temptation of two fresh meals, a small part of me recognized that I was the problem. The sight of my gruesome regeneration amplified their fear, which roused and rattled the feral part of me that was still so close to the surface, only for that to further fuel their primal terror.

They seemed to understand this as well. That entire argument they were having, it was fabricated. It was merely the female’s attempt at keeping both herself and her companion focused on something other than me regrowing close to my entire body. It had failed. All it had taken for them to become impossibly aware of what they had been trying to ignore, was me glancing their way.

“How long?” I asked, trying to get myself to focus. I had already wasted too much time simply recovering. What mattered now was getting out, and understanding the secret plans these two had with me.

“You just spent a quarter bell growing limbs just so we wouldn’t have to carry you, Sweets. Not much longer at all until someone notices we’re breaking you out,” the Elderberry-blood answered.

Meanwhile, the Sorrow-blood had become aware of the goop on my fingers and was staring at it in such morbid fascination that I delighted in stringing it out as far as it could go, then rolling it into a ball again.

“So, breaking out. What’s the next step of your plan there?” I flicked my hand, shooting the goop off of my fingers, and straight at the male’s boots.

The remorseful morsel jumped back, too late to dodge the mushy gobbet. “Oh gods, what is that!” He stomped his foot on the ground and flailed his leg, desperate to get the goop off, but too terrified to touch it.

I blinked at the sight, then snorted. Suddenly I couldn’t help myself. It was such an absurd reaction. Here was this massive slab of meat, nearly seven feet of overprotective male, dancing around in fright, not of me, but of a little clot of flesh stuck to his boots.

I giggled uncontrollably and pushed myself up onto my frail, wobbly legs. “It’s me!” My laugh stretched my words into a titter.

The Sorrow-blood’s head snapped my way. His eyes twitched towards the crossbow he had so foolishly discarded, now out of his reach. Just my standing up, it made the terror of this man who was nearly twice my height spike in such interesting ways. I was only a little over four feet tall, skin and bones and absolutely nothing else. He had to look so, so far down and yet he had the look of a man facing down a threat the size of a mountain.

It wasn’t funny. I was howling with laughter, but it wasn’t funny. Narrowing my eyes I rounded on my Sorrow-blooded meal as he limped away from me. I stalked him through the room with a slow, determined stride, and steadily forced him towards a corner.

“It’s mud and shit and piss and my own flesh and blood melted off my very bones!” I ranted at him.

With trembling fingers, the giant male reached for the dagger sheathed in a bandolier around his chest, but with the raw terror coursing through him he just couldn’t get it out. His armor clanked against the wall. He let go of the dagger, hands trailing the stones, searching for a way out. His back arched, his knees bent, he sought to make himself smaller. “Irina?” he whimpered and cast a pleading look at the female.

Backlit by the torches, my shadow loomed over him, making me appear so much taller than my tiny four-foot height. I placed a hand on each side of him, trapping him between me, my twig-like arms, and the wall, and smiled up at him. “That’s what happens when you dump a vampire in a Tonaltus field, Sorrow-blood.” Then I grinned even wider and shoved that mad grin of mine so close to his chest that I could lick the fear right of his sweaty neck. “That gunk is what you! Did! To me!”

This was amazing, intoxicating validation. This absolute terror of his, it was bliss. It was…

This isn’t me.

This shouldn’t be me.

Hissing, I darted away from Piers. Terrorizing the prey was fun, but now was not the time. Doing it to the people breaking me out was not the way. It was not helpful. It was not beneficial. This fury was... irrational. Deranged. Far too human.

My eyes darted away from the prey, seeking something to focus on that wasn’t the lure of the morsel’s blood. Or Elderberry-poison’s pulsing heartbeat. Or the Inquisitor those two had slaughtered and dragged into my cell. Or the streaks of my own bloody gore I had painted the floor with. Or the—

“That help?” The female startled me out of my daze.

“No,” I snapped at her, only barely suppressing another hiss. Trying not to look at all of the food in the room was not working because I could still smell it.

“Not feeling better?” Irina tilted her head and lifted an elbow to scratch at her chin.

“Hungry.” I leaned in towards her neatly presented neck.

Her eyes flicked towards the corpse of the dead guard. She did not say anything but the offer was there. Then, as if that offhand suggestion was insignificant, she turned her back to me and started rummaging around in her pack.

I didn’t care what she was looking for. After all my efforts not to linger on it, she had irrevocably drawn my attention to the corpse. I could not look away anymore. It was there. I needed it. The Honey-blood had offered it to me. She had offered me another human being as food, without thinking twice about it, simply because I had asked.

I had asked.

That single thought was enough to keep me from pouncing the sack of dead meat. I had asked. I was once again failing to rein in that primal urge. Quickly, before I could utter any more idiocy, I bit down on my lip.

In an attempt to get away from my overpowering instincts, I leaned my head against the wall of the dungeon. The stones were cold and possessed a gentle slickness that was just enough to dull their natural roughness, but not remove the texture entirely. I ran my fingers over the stones, tracing their outlines, finding the cracks with my claws. I began working at those seams, picking at them, scratching at the dirt.

Underneath me, the same kinds of stones cooled the soles of my feet. I twisted a leg and curled my toes. I scraped the talons of my feet over the stones, clawed my toes around one of them, and pulled to test how well it was set.

The wintry air clung to me in tiny droplets of condensation on my skin. The chill leaked into my hair through the wet stones, turning it slick and clammy against my head. It was a nice and nippy kind of chill, deeply cold and reminding me of mossy caves, fields full of rime-covered flowers, ice-cold waterfalls under the light of the morning sun, or the misty air after a sudden springtime rainstorm.

It was the kind of cold dampness that would set a person to violent shivering if they stayed out in it too long unprotected. It was the kind of coldness that reminded me of my dad berating me after I had stayed out in the snow for far too long. Little kid me, completely unbothered by the kind of frigid cold that would kill a person, Little me, completely oblivious and still learning how something as insignificant as a change in temperature could kill a person.

Dad.

I took a breath. A single deep breath. Completely unnecessary. Unneeded but calming. I exhaled, long and deep, the air escaping my lips with the gentlest hint of a whistle.

I had healed too fast and lost control. Letting instinct and hunger guide my actions… not anymore. That wasn’t me, could not be me. I was better than that, subtler than that. Definitely no longer human, or anything that could pass for human; draining Arrin had proven that.

Gods, hadn’t even wanted to do that.

There was no way back for me after this. My old life was over, but I wasn’t dead yet. I hadn’t been killed, and that offered me a chance. I would get me and mine out of this, on my terms. But for that, I had to keep control of my hunger. Terrorizing the humans into compliance when they were still being voluntarily helpful was foolish.

Hope I haven’t ruined my chance at subtler manipulation.

Piers still stood in the exact same place. With his eyes downcast, his fists clenched, and his shoulders bunched up he inhaled and exhaled rapidly and deliberately. One harsh gulp of air at a time he managed to get both his heartbeat and his breathing under control.

I patiently observed this wary reclamation of his courage until he was calm enough to look up and acknowledge me.

Apologies would hopefully fix some of my mistakes. I had been good at pretending to be nice once. I could do friendly. I knew I could. “Piers, right?” I spoke softly, pushing the illusion of fragility and remorse into my voice. “I’m... I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

His eyes narrowed. “You just tried to kill me! Don’t play your vampire mind games with me!” he snarled. He inhaled, pushed down his anger, and took his first step out of his corner. Warily he circled me, inching towards the safety of his female companion. “Gods damn it, Iri, you’re seeing this, right? Why don’t you do anything!”

“Piers, Piers, Piers Honeybee.” Irina tutted, turned towards me, and dangled the thing she had fished out of her pack over my head. “You want to know the plan, Sweets? This is where it starts.”

Hanging from a plain cord, Irina presented me with a simple stone disc, but carved with infinitely intricate runes. It was old and worn, and intimately familiar to me. My amulet. Charged up with Atlus it would protect me from the sun’s merciless rays. The Inquisitors had taken it from me, and she was... giving it back?

I reached for it, almost fearful that this was some kind of trick or illusion. I had hoped to get out, at best. Actually reclaiming this one item, it would make my escape so much easier. I would not be restricted to the night.

I touched it, fully expecting her to deny it from me.

Instead, she simply deposited it into my outstretched palm.

“Thank you.” I sighed, and a sudden rush of relief twisted the corners of my mouth into a genuine smile.