Free Duskfall by Christopher B. Husberg

girl snorted. She motioned, again, for him to come towards her. “Come
on
. We really should get out of here before dawn. Get over here and let me take care of that cut.”
    Knot frowned. He felt an odd desire to trust the girl, but there was a problem.
    He didn’t trust anyone.
    Slowly, he walked towards her. There was hardly anything she could do that would threaten him. Then he hesitated. The woman hadn’t torn
herself
apart. Knot was missing something.
    “It’s okay,” the girl said. “I won’t bite.”
    Then Knot knew. The thought lit up a corner of his mind.
    Ventus
.
    “You’re a vampire,” he said. He sat on the bed next to her.
If she is what I think she is
, he realized,
I don’t have a chance, whether I run or not
. Some part of him wondered if he wasn’t under-reacting. Vampires were thought extinct, if they ever truly existed at all. But, with all Knot had experienced in the past few days—in the past few minutes—he didn’t think he was in a position to question the girl’s existence. It explained how she’d torn from his grip so easily on the street, how she could see well enough to strike flint on steel in darkness.
    The girl—the vampire—gave him an annoyed look as she raised a wet cloth to his forehead.
    “Kind of you to notice. I’m flattered.”
    She didn’t sound flattered.
    Knot quelled his body’s desire to flinch as she dabbed the cloth at the swollen wound on his forehead.
    “You’re helping me,” he said, remembering the blur that had shot into his room when there’d been a sword at his throat.
    “Are you always this astute, or am I just special?” The girl raised her eyebrows. The bed creaked as she shifted to her knees, looking closely at his forehead.
    “Why?”
    “Direct, too,” the girl muttered to herself, dabbing again at his wound. “Everything I adore in a man. Canta must have
finally
heard my prayers.”
    Knot said nothing.
    “Okay,” she said, springing up. “Good as new. Now let’s get out of here. Dawn is in an hour or so, and—”
    “Why hasn’t anyone come in?” Knot asked. “You broke the bloody door down. Someone had to have heard it.”
    “Who says they didn’t? A vampire has got to eat, you know.”
    Knot swore. “Why them and not me?”
    The girl sighed, her shining green eyes rolling. “Canta’s bones, I didn’t
eat
anybody. That was me being funny. Nobody
gets
that anymore.” She shrugged. “I just… incapacitated some people, that’s all. They’re still alive, and they’re all still human.”
    Knot narrowed his eyes.
    “Don’t look at me like that. I may be a daemon, but there are daemons even daemons fear. Pray to your goddess you never encounter
them
.”
    Knot frowned. Nothing in the Sfaera said it was safe to trust her. And yet there was something about her, something Knot didn’t understand, but…
    “You don’t want to be here when people start realizing what happened. We need to leave. Now.”
    The girl extended her hand. Her left hand. “I’m Astrid, by the way.”
    A vampire
, Knot thought. He rubbed his shoulder, which still ached from the fight.
Canta’s bloody bones
.
    Then Knot gripped her hand with his own. No other options.
    “Knot,” he said.
    He didn’t ask her why he should trust her. She had saved him, and for now, that was enough.

6
Nazaniin outpost, Cineste
    “B OTH DEAD ? Y OU SURE ?” Nash asked.
    “My connection with their acumen is gone,” Kali said.
Why can’t anyone just obey orders? Why is that so hard?
    “She didn’t run out of frost?”
    Kali shook her head. “Not unless she has the shortest susceptibility of all time. She only took it five minutes ago.” They were in the Nazaniin’s Cinestean headquarters, but the local group of operatives—known as a
cotir
within the Nazaniin—was nowhere to be seen. As an acumen Kali could form a mental link with other acumens, and the link she had formed with the acumen in the Cinestean
cotir
had just been severed. Kali felt the