Family day fell on the last afternoon of camp, the whole hillside above the lake given over to sausage sizzles and half-collapsed tents and a bonfire already being built taller than any responsible adult should have allowed.
Noah ran at me across the grass looking sunburnt and gloriously feral, full of a week’s worth of stories about knots and a boy named Ollie who’d cried on the flying fox, and I hugged him hard enough that he complained about it, which was its own kind of relief.
Damian had come with me, at Noah’s insistence, and stood a little apart from the other parents the way he always did at these things, watching the crowd with an alertness I understood now had nothing to do with basketball scholarships and everything to do with keeping us both breathing.
I noticed him go still around dusk, the same stillness from the forest, head tilting slightly toward the treeline.
“Where’s Noah,” he said, very quietly, already moving.
He wasn’t at the bonfire. Neither were two of his cabin mates, small, sturdy boys named Tane and Josh who’d apparently been inseparable from Noah since day one. A young camp leader with ash-pale, close-cropped hair, new that week according to the roster pinned to the mess tent, had offered to take a few boys to see “something cool” up past the caves before the fire started, and nobody had thought twice about it, because nobody there had any reason to.
Damian was running before I’d even finished reading the sign-out sheet, and I ran after him, my chest tearing with a terror I couldn’t outpace.
We found them at the mouth of the cave, deep enough that the last of the daylight barely reached. All three boys were down on the stone, Noah and Tane and Josh, laid out in a neat, deliberate row like something arranged rather than dropped, and the man standing over them, unhurried, almost bored, was not, in any way that mattered, a scout leader.
“Silas,” Damian said, and the name came out of him like a curse older than either of us, older than the country we were standing in.
“Damian Ashworth.” Silas said the whole name slowly, savouring it, ash-pale hair catching what little light reached that deep into the stone. “Five hundred years and you still can’t resist playing house with something breakable. I heard you’d gone soft. I didn’t believe it until I saw the woman.”
“They’re children, Silas. Let them go and this doesn’t have to happen.”
“It’s already happening.” Silas nudged Noah’s still body with one boot, almost fondly. “Do you have any idea what a happy child tastes like? Real happiness, the kind that hasn’t been ground down by grief or fear or five hundred years of nobly starving yourself on other people’s misery. It’s the sweetest thing there is. You’d know that if you’d ever once let yourself take it properly instead of scavenging off broken, sad little women who barely fill a thimble.” He crouched, almost gentle, and brushed the hair back from Noah’s forehead. “Three of them. Nobody questions three boys wandering into a restricted cave and not coming out. Kids do foolish things. Kids die doing foolish things, every year, in every country, and nobody ever thinks to ask a vampire about it.”
“You will not touch him.” Damian’s voice had gone somewhere I’d never heard it go, low and absolutely flat.
“I already have.” Silas smiled. “I just haven’t started yet.”
He came at Damian without any further warning, and the fight that followed was nothing like the pool block, nothing like anything I had words for. Silas was faster. I understood that within seconds, some old and terrible fact between them that Damian had clearly known and hoped, right up until this exact moment, he wouldn’t have to prove wrong. Silas drove him back into the cave wall hard enough to crack the stone, and when Damian came up swinging, Silas caught his arm and simply broke it, the sound of it obscene in that small space, and Damian screamed, a raw, human sound I had never once heard him make, not in the pool block, not anywhere.
“There it is.” Silas sounded delighted. “That’s what weak blood gets you, Damian. Centuries of feeding off other people’s sorrow and you break like a mortal the first time something actually pushes back. You should have listened when the others said you’d starve yourself into nothing, feeding on scraps out of some misplaced sense of mercy.” He drove a fist into Damian’s ribs, and I heard something else give way, and Damian went down onto one knee, blood running freely now from his temple, his broken arm hanging wrong at his side. “Look at you. Five hundred years and you’re going to die on your knees in a cave protecting a boy who isn’t even yours.”
“He is mine.” Damian’s voice came out in pieces, but there was nothing broken in the certainty of it. “In every way that matters, he is mine, and you are not touching him.”
He tried to rise. Silas kicked him back down, almost lazily, and turned from him entirely, dismissing him, and I understood, with a horror that stopped my heart in my chest, that Damian was no longer fighting because he no longer could.
Silas crouched over Noah again, unhurried, savouring it, and put his mouth to my son’s throat.
The scream that came out of me didn’t sound like anything I’d ever made before. It came from somewhere below language, and the force of it seemed to leave my body entirely, a visible ripple in the air that threw Silas backward off Noah and into the cave wall, and left him crumpled and unmoving on the stone.
I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember kneeling over him, my hand pressed flat to his skull, words coming out of my mouth in a language I have never learned and cannot now recall, and I remember watching him turn, slowly, from skin to something grey and cold and utterly still, stone from the inside out, right there under my palm.
Then I was at Noah’s side, the same words pouring out of me without my permission, my hand over his heart this time, and I felt it, actually felt it, stutter and then catch, beating again under my palm, weak but there, alive, and Tane and Josh both slumped nearby, breathing evenly, deeply, asleep in a way that had nothing natural about it at all.
Only then did I look for Damian.
He was on his knees a few feet away, one arm hanging useless, blood dark down the side of his face, staring at me like he had never once, in five hundred years, seen anything like what he’d just watched me do.
“Sarah.” His voice was barely a whisper. “What did you just—”
“I don’t know.” My hands were shaking. Everything was shaking. “I don’t know what that was. I don’t know how I did it.”
“You need to feed on me.” I was already crossing the space between us, kneeling in front of him, tilting my own head back, baring my throat to a man too shocked and too broken to move. “Whatever’s left of the fight in you, you’re going to need it, because there are two boys asleep on that ground and a stranger’s memory to fix before anyone else finds them like this, and I can’t do that part. You can.”
“Sarah, I can’t, not like this, not after everything I told you about what it means—”
“I’m not asking,” I said, and pulled his mouth to my throat myself.
He bit down.
And everything changed.