When he first met the cross-bearing killer, the Oriosi, Faust y'a Kori, he was not afraid, although the sky was full of fire. He had had too little to lose then, a boy with no family, no name; a daylighter who had escaped the fighting in the mountains but had been there long enough to see the few people who loved him die. He carried with him old herbs that could not cure what he was and a quiver of dull arrows. Before his eyes, the spire of the True church, Askelan, was burning.
Faust had found him there, staring up into the flames. The man’s arms were red to the elbow and his smile had no joy in it at all. He looked ruthless and empty. “What have we here?” he had said, once the vampire had panicked; fought; shot an arrow past the man’s ear and hit the ground hard under the weight of him. He smelled like charred hair and smoke and so much blood. “Something I missed? No. A daylighter?” Faust’s thumb slid up under his lips. Pressed against his fangs. He tasted the hands that had barricaded and burned hundreds of people alive.
“Things like you and me,” Faust had murmured, his body so heavy over the vampire’s own, “we are the ones.” He loosed the small bundle of herbs tied to the other’s belt and let them scatter like ashes over the snow.
“The Church is dead because we are alive.”
Nova—a nickname given to him by the woman who turned him and taken again because he needed something to be called—lets an arrow fly and watches it find purchase in the leg of a wild deer. The animal missteps, falls; in a breath he is out of the foliage and at its side. The deer heaves beneath him as he kneels and taps into the wide vein of its neck, his mouth flooding with the warmth. He does not have too long; it will struggle. Its legs kick; its nostrils flare wide. For a moment all he can think of is the frantic heart below him and then he centers himself, tugging the arrow free from the muscle of the leg and finding his feet again. As he backs away, the deer rolls, throwing snow. Blood runs very dark down its white shoulder. He sees himself reflected in the wet black eyes before it runs.
He is cleaning the arrowhead when Faust speaks.
“All you’re doing is making it easy for the wolves.”
He doesn’t answer. He wipes his hands, leaving pink streaks in the snow.
“What drives you, then? Propriety? Stupidity? Masochism?”
Nova turns. The sun is at their backs, lengthening Faust’s shadow and spilling it over Nova’s. They have been traveling together for almost five months. The towers have fallen and the temple collapsed and Cail is in the capital somewhere, shackles rusting to his wrists. Faust still walks and speaks like the man who burned all those Jodist churches for his dead god years ago and his eye still burns like something feral. But all of this has sown something between them. Since they left together, Faust has belittled Nova’s hunts. Killed what he refused to kill and let the bodies cool in the dirt. Bit the soft inside of his cheek and spit blood at the vampire’s feet. A gift, if you are so desperate.
Shouldering his quiver, Nova meets Faust’s eye. After a moment, he walks to him, past him, following the thin gray wisp of smoke from their camp. He doesn’t want to argue with him now; not again, not this same conversation. Nova feels the tingling in his fingers as his blood begins to run. His empty body finds its heartbeat again. Of course, it is not enough—it is never enough. He has lived on mouthfuls of blood from livestock and wild game and dying things for more years than he could count. Faust calls him gutless, calls him domesticated, and still Nova lines his arrows up and takes his careful shots.
He is thinking of hunger and the morning he cradled a broken bird in his hands and sunk his teeth into it, through it, feeling the bones crumple and the shuddery heart beat against his tongue. But it is just a memory now. He lets it go. He drops his arrows and pack by the fire, sitting against one of the rock outcroppings in their hiding place. His pulse fades to silence again after a few minutes. The fresh blood is used and gone, and he feels heavy.
When Faust returns, they say nothing. They sort out their supplies in the coming blue of evening. Faust sharpens his liara and changes the bandages on his arms. Those hands that closed on throats and pressed still bloody into Nova’s mouth are oddly precise when they work. There were times, watching him thread a needle for stitches or knotting the mouth of a bag, where it looked almost absurd. His massive shoulders and cruel stare lording over those thick effortless fingers, like watching a boar dance. Nova shakes his head, not quite smiling, and feeds the fire.
It is almost dark when he feels Faust looking at him. He knows the man is waiting for him to meet his stare, to ask him what it is. Instead Nova keeps his eyes on the fire. He finishes tightening his bow and begins relacing his boots when Faust finally speaks.
Nova raises his head, not understanding. “What?”
Faust smiles. He has only ever smiled at the expense of someone else, as he stepped on the head of one of the shrieking Askelan priests or brought Nova the bodies of the animals he had tried to let live.
“You spend so much time shooting at rabbits. Why? You have me, right here. Fresh blood. Human.”
For a moment, Nova doesn’t speak. He has taken from Faust in the past, when they were trapped underground for three long weeks in the north and when the lack of food on the road and onset of starvation threatened to make Nova dangerous. But that was the thing: it was a gesture of necessity, of even Faust knowing the risk of traveling with a starving daylighter. Now Nova searches the man’s stare. He finds himself looking for the catch, the joke, the trap.
“I can survive like this,” Nova says slowly, thinking even as he says it of how taking from Faust would feel, how warm and awake he would be, how steady his heart would drum. “You know how it can be, taking from people. And you’ve never exactly offered, anyway.”
“You’ve never asked,” says Faust.
They hold each other’s gaze in the semi-darkness. Faust sits with no expression, attentive and watchful, his hand over the cross on his chest. There is firelight in his eye, but no cruelty.
“It’ll hurt,” Nova says, and Faust snorts.
There is a word for how Nova feels about Faust, he is sure, but it is not one he has ever heard or seen. That unpredictable animal anger, those ruthless hands. He does not trust him. No—he trusts Faust’s promises. I will burn this country to ashes, I will have my due. I will kill to the last man.
And, standing between Nova and the soldiers as the capital started to burn: Cover me, daylighter. No one will have you.
Carefully, Nova walks around the fire. He rarely gets this close to Faust—not unless they are fighting something or the man is spitting threats against his ear—and the feeling is eerie and cold, like placing a hand against a bear trap. That dark eye watches him. He sits on the bedroll at Faust’s side.
“You don’t have to do this,” Nova says. Faust rolls his eye.
He is. He is sure it is the only reason he has come this far; settled so close to what is possibly the most wanted killer in Glinn. He hasn’t had proper blood in months. The promise is too much, and Faust must know that. Even now, Nova wonders what he will want in exchange.
“Your wrist,” Nova starts, unsure. “Can I—”
“The throat,” Faust says, tapping the hard muscle of his neck with a finger. “It goes faster, doesn’t it?”
It seems almost too normal of a gesture, Faust gathering his raggedy hair and pulling it over his shoulder, out of Nova’s way. The vampire looks for a moment at his skin, at the heavy shadows cast by the firelight, the hard line of his jaw and the plume of white curling from his mouth and nose as the man sighs.
“Drink,” Faust says, like an order.
He is clumsy at first; awkward, wary. Nova brings his fingers to Faust’s warm skin and seeks his pulse. It is steady and strong, immediate. He shifts closer, leaning up, and the old instinct begins to take over. His lips replace his fingers over that even drumming, brushing it, seeking the strongest warmth. He bites. Faust smells like sweat and something animal, and beneath this, his fires, old and new. Under Nova’s teeth, he does not even twitch.
Time becomes loose, fuzzy. Nova has to remind himself when to stop. His chest is light and his fingers and face feel hot and he presses his tongue over the wound he has made until the bleeding slows. He is breathing, really breathing, little exhales against Faust’s skin, and his heart has whirred into overdrive, pushing all this life through his veins until they sing.
He sits back, dizzy, and wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. It leaves a bright red streak along his skin. Faust has not moved since he started to drink and now he turns his head, looking over the vampire beside him. He moves his hand; closes it around Nova’s arm. When he shifts his thumb, he smears the swatch of his own blood in a wide semi-circle.
Neither of them are speaking. Nova searches for something. “Thank you.”
The sound seems to refocus Faust somehow. His hand opens, letting the vampire go. He rolls his head, as if assessing the punctures in his neck, and makes a low noise. He stands.
“I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to kill you to pull you off of me,” Faust says, and walks to their tangle of gathered firewood, breaking branches in his hands. Nova watches, looking for signs that the blood loss has affected him, but all there is is a slight fumble in his hands. Those hands that have broken and barricaded and burned. Those snapping sounds. The beat of Nova’s heart.
Every fourth night after, Faust tips his head, all fire and shadow.
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