My excessive violence served as a potent warning to the Inquisitors aiding my escape. When the corridor’s runelight surged back on, four shocked humans joined me, a very, very healthy distance away. They had thought they knew how to fear me. They had thought themselves cautious of any potential betrayals on my end. They had just realized how very, very lacking their understanding of vampires really was.

The fifth person, however, was not cowed. Irina marched towards me with fury plain to see on her face. Without hesitation, she leveled her blade at my neck. “This is your idea of inconspicuous?” she growled.

“They didn’t get to sound the alarm,” I pointed out, not even acknowledging the sword she’d turned against me. With the enchantments on it inactive, it was an empty threat she did not intend to follow through on.

I turned my back to her and tasted the air. Beyond that sturdy wood and steel door that barred the entrance to the cells, I could only taste my dad. Only one prisoner. No one else held here. Not Aunt Reya. Not Meg or Gery or Shae or anyone else from Birnstead. Not even Uncle Hadrian, who brought me gifts every year, who coddled me and let me ride piggyback every time I was in a mood.

Who had let a feral baby vampire explore his tasty little neck without fear of being bitten.

Only Dad, and that flooded me with blessed relief and horrid apprehension at the same time. He was the only one they had found and captured. Everyone else was safe. Safe. I had to keep believing that because the alternative was unthinkable.

“Sarding hell, this was a bad idea!” One of Irina’s gaggle vented his annoyance at me once more. “We should leave the monster to digg its own grave. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

While Irina stewed in annoyance, I ran a finger over my sword, simultaneously collecting the blood on its blade, and deactivating the enchantments. Already I could barely feel anything with the hand holding the hilt, and my fingers were turning sticky in that distinct flesh-boiling-of-the-bone way that so defined the blade’s Tonaltus field.

Behind me, the Honey-blood sheathed her sword, and whipped her head towards her companions. “Piers, keys. Get that door open. Canth, manacles. Get her father out and prepare to run.” She strode around me so she was facing me once more, stepped right up to me, and glared down at my face. “Hurry,” she spat out, “our idiot vampire shut down the lights on the entire dungeon floor. There’s no way no one noticed that.”

“Ah....” I voiced my own mounting horror as the colossal magnitude of the mistake I had made sank in.

I licked the blood off of my fingers because it was better than admitting that I had made an amateur mistake that could bring the entire fort of Inquisitors down on us. Better than considering that perhaps I wasn’t merely pretending to be irrational. I might actually be so much of a feral mess that I didn’t even realize how reckless I was being. That I couldn’t even be trusted to reason through the basic consequences of my actions certainly pointed that way.

I continued licking, trying to get my hands clean, because my dad seeing me lap up human blood would break him.

While Irina’s people worked to free my dad, I kicked the corpses at my feet and then knelt down next to them. It was pointless human behavior, nervous fidgeting that was preferable to thinking, to fretting over how I had no quick way to hide these two bodies from my dad, or to get rid of the half-eaten arm, or even to make myself presentable. Better than worrying about what he would think. I had done enough of that in my cell and couldn’t stand another second wondering about—

“Tina?”

My dad’s voice was tinged with apprehension.

When I turned towards him he flinched.

When I rose to my feet he took a step back.

I told myself I was used to it. He loved me so, so much, and even more if there was a safe three feet between us. He taught me with such tender, careful care. He soothed and comforted me like I was a ferocious wildcat kitten. He insisted on alternating sleep schedules because he felt safer that way. Not that that last thing even made sense!

He was the Inquisitor raising a vampire daughter, and no matter how much he loved me, I was still the thing that haunted his nightmares, the same creature that had taken his wife from him.

I hated it, despised it with such firm human resentment. He had taught me what love was, and yet I still couldn’t tell if he loved me for who I was, or out of deep-rooted fear of what would happen if he ever stopped loving me.

This reaction from him, right now, it was worse than anything from before. Utter horror bled off him. Aghast, he looked away from me. His eyes found the two bodies. A quick, fearful glance back at me. A whimper as he spotted the gnawed-upon arm. Then his defeated, mourning eyes were on me again.

At least I held back on pumping these two guards full of Metzus.

He should be happy about that!

I rounded on him, pounced when he jumped back, wrapped my arms around him, and dug my claws in his back when he wanted to struggle free. I buried my head in his chest right where his heart was about to hammer out of it. I snuggled in his arms and smeared the gunk I was covered with all over his prison slacks while he choked on his own fear.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Don’t!” I sobbed over the frantic rush of his runaway heart.

Don’t you dare let go. Don’t flinch away from me. Don’t be afraid of me. Don’t turn away from me now that I need you.

With one of my arms, I kept holding him close, kept using my inhuman strength to prevent him from squirming away. With the other, I quested over his battered body, searched out every cut and scrape and welt, and traced every beating he had received and every bruise he had suffered. And I made sure to burn every atrocity the Inquisitors had inflicted on him in my memory.

When I found one particularly nasty infected gash on his side, I recklessly weaved Tonaltus and pushed the healing magic into the wound. I coughed half a lung out as the incompatible weave tore half my chest cavity apart, but that was fine. Just a bit of damage. I healed. All I needed was a little snack later and I would be better.

My dad’s panic finally diminished when he felt the healing magic ease his injuries. Or maybe it was because I began spewing chunks of my lungs all over him. It was hard to tell. It didn’t matter. His hands stopped pushing me away from him, and one of them found the back of my head.

I leaned into his touch, glanced up, and sobbed dry, nonexistent tears. When my dad looked past me, at the carnage I had inflicted, I tugged on his arms and forced his eyes back on me. “You’re alright?” I pleaded. “Please Dad, tell me you’re alright?”

“Oh Tina…” he said with that annoying warning tone of his.

I was too tired, too spent, and so starved for affection that I let it be and merely snuggled deeper into his embrace. I was pulled close again and I gladly let myself get buried in his arms. I inhaled deeply, and the familiar taste of his apprehension, the tender care of his love, and the nervous buzz of his pulse set my heart aching, and my teeth even more. I breathed all of him in, over and over again.

“Anyone else, Dad?” I asked after a while. “Anyone else they came for? Uncle Hadrian?”

Anyone from Birnstead?

“No baby, no,” he said, and simply kept hugging me. “Just me. Only me.”

We were still holding each other when a horn sounded. It cut through everything. It was unfair. He was embracing me. This should never end. I nestled myself even deeper into my father's arms, pretending not to hear the alarm that indicated my escape had been noticed.

“They’re onto us,” Irina pulled on my shoulder. “Less hugging, more running, my Sweethearts.”

I broke from my father’s embrace and pointed two claws at her to shut her up. I did not need her reminder that, instead of using the little time since freeing my dad wisely, I had been too busy reveling in my father’s scent. I could do that just fine on my own.

I’d postponed what was needed and had instead indulged in a moment of contentment. Again. Stupid me never learned. It was infuriating, maddening, I wanted to scream but that wasn’t helpful either so I pushed all the pointless human emotion deep down until all that remained was predatory calm and focus.

Tilting my head and opening my mouth I paced the corridor. Sampling the air and straining my hearing I tried to catch a whiff of the movements of the Inquisitors in the fort above us. Yet even with my superior senses, it was pointless. There was too much rock between me and the rest of the fort to make out anything specific. The sleepy, quiet of night had evaporated though, that much was clear. The alarm had woken up the entire fort. The window we had to escape might be gone, and if it wasn’t, it was fast closing.

Maybe I could still salvage this. If I acted decisively I might still be able to save my life. I was not going back to that cell. Not ever. I would tear down this fort before I allowed that to happen.

The best way to buy myself time was a distraction. Except, I didn’t trust Irina’s flock for that. They had betrayed the Inquisition by breaking me out. They could just as easily change sides again. I didn’t trust them to protect Dad while I was busy creating a distraction either. Yet keeping Dad with me while a whole army of Inquisitors threw everything they had at me wouldn’t keep him safe either. If only I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping him safe. If only I didn’t care so much.

Stupid, stubborn human weakness!

A warm and loving hand massaged the back of my neck. “Tina? What is going on? Who are these people?” My father took me in with those lovely eyes of his.

His presence, frail and weak and exhausted yet so near me, held a promise of impossible trust. Somehow, he had chosen now of all times to believe that I wasn’t a danger to him.

I couldn’t stand it, his mistaken belief, so I wrenched my eyes away from his gaze and fixed Irina with a stare. “They’re probably coming from over there.” I pointed towards one end of the corridor. “I’ll delay them. Get my father out of here.”

As I spoke, I knew that my vague guessing as to the direction the assault would come from was right. Perhaps some predatory instinct I did not understand. I welcomed it. Carving my way out it would be. As a concept, it was both terrifying and exhilarating. The cage the Inquisitors had put me in was improvised, indicating that they had not expected to hold a vampire here. How far we had gotten up to now confirmed this. There had been no endless layers of gates and magical protections, no regiments of guards keeping security at every possible hour. I was held in what was not so long ago a normal dungeon, in a normal fort.

This could work. The Inquisition killed vampires instead of capturing them, in part because it was near impossible to hold one for long. It turned out that here in Thysa, they had been especially ill-prepared for capture. It was night. I was still hungry. It would be a good hunt.

Hah! Still hungry!

I would be bone-deep in a blood-high by now if they hadn’t starved me so badly.

“Gods, you’d actually slaughter your way out, wouldn’t you?” The Honey-blood female did not wait for me to answer that statement. She simply shoved my father towards her accomplices. “Get him out, we’ll follow.”

“Tina?” my father begged me, stumbling forward on legs no longer accustomed to standing after so long shackled in a cell.

“Dad, they’re here to get us out.” I helped him keep upright and pushed him onwards. “Go with them. I’ll be right behind you.”

I hope.

The female waved her arm in the direction of safety, urging them to hurry along. Three of her companions dragged my father with them. She and Piers remained.

I didn’t spare the receding figures any more glances. It would only keep me wondering about all the ways Irina’s men could betray me now that they had my dad. I simply picked up the blade I had discarded and began studying the corridor for advantages I could use.