Bloodbound Eternity

The blood on my hands was still warm when the church bells started ringing.

Not for us. They never rang for us. But the sound carried across the thatched rooftops of Wickham village like a summons, and I knew we had maybe an hour before someone found the miller's boy behind the tannery. I wiped my palms on the dead man's tunic, a linen thing his wife had probably bleached last spring, and stepped back to look at what we'd done.

Thomas was already dragging the body toward the river. He moved with the efficiency of a man who'd spent two hundred years learning how to make problems disappear.

"The current's strong enough," he said, not looking at me. "It'll take him downstream past the mill. They'll think he fell."

"He didn't fall."

"No." Thomas glanced up, and even in the grey pre-dawn light, his eyes caught something silver from the moon. They always did. It was the first thing I'd noticed about him, back when we were both still breathing. "But that's what they'll think."

I should have felt something. The boy couldn't have been more than nineteen. He'd had a thatch of yellow hair and a laugh that carried across the market square on feast days. I'd heard it just last week, when he'd been flirting with the blacksmith's daughter outside the church. Now his throat was open and his blood was soaking into the dirt beneath my boots, and all I could think about was whether we'd have to leave before I got to finish the bread I'd started rising that morning.

That's what two hundred years does to you. It sands down the edges of things like guilt and grief until they're just another set of tools you carry around. Useful sometimes. Mostly just weight.

Thomas heaved the body over the riverbank and we both watched it hit the water. The splash was small. The river swallowed him without ceremony, and the current took him east, toward the bigger towns where nobody knew his face.

"He was following us," I said.

"He was following you." Thomas turned away from the river and started walking back toward the village. I fell into step beside him because that's what we did. That's what we'd always done. "He saw you feed last week. In the woods."

"I know."

"And he was going to talk."

"I know."

We walked in silence past the tannery, where the smell of curing hides hung so thick in the air you could taste it. The village was waking up now. A woman stepped out of her door with a bucket, heading for the well, and she nodded at us as we passed. We nodded back. Just two travelers, up early, on our way to somewhere else. Nothing to see here.

That was the trick of it. Not hiding, exactly. Just being so unremarkable that nobody bothered to look twice. We'd learned that lesson in Prague, after the plague years, when we'd spent three months in a cellar while the city burned bodies in the streets above us. We'd learned it again in France, during the war, when Thomas had been mistaken for a English spy and I'd had to break three of a man's fingers to convince him otherwise.

Two hundred years of running. Two hundred years of never staying anywhere long enough for the neighbors to notice that we didn't age, didn't eat, didn't cast reflections in the polished silver they kept on their mantles.

Two hundred years of Thomas.

I looked at him now, in the grey light, and felt the familiar pull in my chest. It wasn't hunger. I'd fed two nights ago, a young widow who'd been walking home alone from her sister's house. She'd tasted like grief and rosemary, and I'd left her sleeping behind a hedge, none the wiser. No, this was something else. Something I'd never been able to name, even after all this time.

He caught me looking and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You're doing that thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you stare at me like you're trying to memorize my face."

I looked away. "Maybe I am."

"You've had two hundred years to memorize it."

"Maybe I'm a slow learner."

He laughed, a low sound that made something in my chest tighten. "You're many things, Eleanor. Slow isn't one of them."

We reached the edge of the village, where the road split. One path led north, toward the bigger towns and the promise of anonymity. The other led south, back toward the coast, where we'd come from three months ago. Thomas stopped at the fork and looked at me.

"North," I said.

"North," he agreed.

We started walking. The sun was rising now, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold that would have been beautiful if they weren't also a warning. We'd need to find shelter soon. The daylight wouldn't kill us, not exactly, but it made us weak. Slow. Vulnerable. And in a world that had spent two hundred years trying to kill us, vulnerable was the one thing we couldn't afford.

"There's a farmhouse about a mile ahead," Thomas said. "Abandoned. We passed it on the way in."

"I remember."

"I checked it. Cellar's dry. No windows."

"You checked it?"

He shrugged. "I check everything."

That was true. Thomas had always been the careful one, the planner, the one who thought three steps ahead while I was still trying to figure out where I'd put my feet. It was why we'd survived this long. I was the one who made the kills, who did the things that needed doing, and Thomas was the one who made sure we lived to do them another day.

We found the farmhouse just as the sun crested the treeline. It was a sad little structure, half its roof caved in, the door hanging crooked on its hinges. But the cellar was dry, just as Thomas had promised, and there were no windows, and the darkness wrapped around us like a blanket the moment we descended the stairs.

I sat down against the wall and closed my eyes. I could hear Thomas moving around above me, securing the door, covering the windows with whatever he could find. Always careful. Always thinking ahead.

"Eleanor."

I opened my eyes. He was standing at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the faint light from outside.

"We can't keep doing this," he said.

"Can't keep doing what?"

"This. The running. The killing. Eventually, someone's going to catch up with us."

"They haven't yet."

"We've been lucky."

I stood up, brushing dirt from my skirts. "Luck has nothing to do with it. We're careful. We're smart. We don't leave witnesses."

"We left a witness last night. The boy."

"The boy is dead."

"The boy is dead because he saw you. Because you got sloppy."

The words hit me like a slap. I felt the familiar heat of anger rising in my chest, the same anger that had kept me alive through two centuries of blood and fear.

"I got sloppy?" I stepped closer to him. "I got sloppy because I was hungry. Because we'd been in that village for three months and I hadn't fed in two weeks. Because you said we needed to lay low, and I listened, and this is what happens when I listen."

"You're blaming me?"

"I'm blaming both of us." I stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the cold that radiated from his skin. "We made a mistake. We fixed it. We move on."

"And then what? We find another village, and we settle down, and we pretend to be human until someone notices that we're not? Until someone comes after us with torches and pitchforks and a priest who thinks he can send us back to hell?"

I didn't have an answer for that. Because he was right. We'd done this dance a hundred times before, in a hundred different places, and it always ended the same way. Fire. Blood. Running.

"We could go north," I said. "Far north. Past the Scottish border. There are places there where nobody goes."

"People always go everywhere, eventually."

"Then we go somewhere else. We keep going. We keep running. It's what we do."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached out and touched my face, his fingers cool against my cheek.

"I'm tired, Eleanor."

"I know."

"I'm tired of running. I'm tired of hiding. I'm tired of pretending to be something I'm not."

I leaned into his touch, closing my eyes. "What else is there?"

He didn't answer. He just stood there, his hand on my face, and I felt something shift between us. Something that had been building for two hundred years, slowly, like water wearing away stone.

"We could stop," he said finally. "We could find a place. A real place. Somewhere we could stay."

"And do what? Live off the land? We can't farm. We can't keep animals. We can't do anything that requires being awake during the day."

"We could find a cave. A deep one. Somewhere no one would ever find us."

"And then what? We just... exist? Forever?"

"Maybe that's enough."

I opened my eyes and looked at him. Really looked. He was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, even after all this time. Even with the blood of a nineteen-year-old boy still drying on his sleeves.

"I don't know how to stop," I said. "I don't know how to be anything other than what I am."

"Neither do I."

We stood there in the darkness, two monsters pretending to be human, and I felt the weight of every life I'd taken pressing down on me. The miller's boy. The widow. The soldier in France. The merchant in Prague. The list went on and on, a river of blood that stretched back two hundred years.

But Thomas was in that river too. He'd been there from the beginning, when we were both still human, still breathing, still alive in the way that mattered. He'd been there when I'd woken up after the change, confused and terrified and so hungry I could have eaten the world. He'd held me while I screamed. He'd taught me how to hunt. He'd kept me alive when all I wanted to do was die.

I couldn't leave him. I'd never been able to leave him.

"North," I said again. "We go north. We find somewhere. We figure it out."

He nodded slowly. "Okay."

"Okay."

He leaned down and kissed me. It was soft, gentle, the kind of kiss that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with something else. Something I'd never been able to name.

When he pulled back, his eyes were dark. "We should sleep. We'll travel tonight."

"Together?"

"Always together."

I followed him up the stairs and into the main room of the farmhouse. It was dusty and abandoned, the furniture covered in sheets, the fireplace cold and empty. But there was a bed in the corner, a big one, with a mattress that looked like it might have been stuffed with straw. It would do.

We lay down together, still fully clothed, and I listened to the sound of his breathing. It was a habit, one I'd never been able to break. He didn't need to breathe. Neither did I. But we did it anyway, because it made us feel human, and sometimes that was enough.

"Thomas?"

"Hmm?"

"What do you think happens to us? When we die?"

He was quiet for a long moment. "I don't know. I don't think anyone does."

"Do you think we'll go to hell?"

"Probably."

I laughed, despite myself. "That's not very reassuring."

"I'm not a very reassuring person."

I turned on my side to face him. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and in the dim light he looked almost peaceful. Almost normal.

"I don't think I'd mind hell," I said. "As long as you were there."

He turned his head to look at me. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said."

"I'm not a very romantic person."

"I know." He reached out and took my hand. "But you're mine."

I squeezed his fingers. "Always."

We lay there in the darkness, two creatures of the night, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Something that might have been hope.

It didn't last.

We woke at sunset, hungry and restless. Thomas went out first, scouting the area, while I stayed in the farmhouse and tried to remember what it felt like to be human. It was getting harder. The memories were fading, replaced by centuries of blood and darkness. I could barely remember my mother's face. My father's voice. The name I'd had before I'd become this.

Eleanor. That was what Thomas called me. But it wasn't my real name. My real name was buried somewhere in the past, along with everything else I'd been.

He came back an hour later. "There's a village about three miles east. Small. Maybe fifty people. We can hunt there tonight and be gone by morning."

"Any problems?"

"Not that I could see. There's a church, but it's small. No priest. Just a deacon who comes once a month."

"Good."

We gathered our things and left the farmhouse behind. The night was clear and cold, the stars bright overhead, and I felt the familiar thrill of the hunt rising in my chest. It was the one thing I still enjoyed, the one thing that made this existence bearable. The chase. The kill. The taste of blood on my tongue.

Thomas walked beside me in silence, and I knew he was thinking the same thing. We were predators. We'd always been predators. The only difference was that now we didn't have a choice.

The village was exactly as he'd described. Small. Quiet. A cluster of houses around a central square, with a well and a church and a few shops that had closed for the night. We circled the perimeter, looking for easy prey.

"There," Thomas said, pointing.

I followed his gaze. A man was walking alone down a side street, carrying a lantern. He was middle-aged, well-fed, dressed in clothes that suggested he was someone important. The mayor, maybe. Or a merchant.

"Perfect," I said.

We followed him in silence, keeping to the shadows. He didn't notice us. They never did. We were too fast, too quiet, too good at what we did.

He turned down an alley and we struck. I took him from behind, my hand over his mouth, my teeth in his throat. Thomas watched, keeping guard, ready to intervene if anything went wrong. It never did.

The blood was hot and sweet, and I drank until I was full. Then I let the body drop and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

"Better?" Thomas asked.

"Better."

We dragged the body into a ditch and covered it with leaves. It would be days before anyone found him, and by then we'd be long gone.

"Where now?" I asked.

"North. Like we said."

We started walking, leaving the village behind. The road stretched ahead of us, dark and empty, and I felt the familiar ache in my chest. The one that never went away. The one that reminded me that no matter how far we ran, we could never escape what we were.

"Thomas?"

"Yes?"

"Do you ever think about it? The way we were before?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Sometimes."

"Do you miss it?"

"I miss not being hungry all the time. I miss the sun. I miss..." He trailed off.

"What?"

"I miss not knowing what I was capable of."

I understood. Before the change, I'd been a farmer's daughter, a nobody, a girl who'd never left her village. I'd never killed anything bigger than a chicken. I'd never seen death up close. I'd never known that I could be a monster.

Now I knew. Now I knew exactly what I was capable of, and it terrified me.

"We should find somewhere to camp," I said. "The sun will be up in a few hours."

"There's a forest ahead. We can find shelter there."

We walked in silence until we reached the trees. The forest was thick and dark, the kind of place where sunlight never reached the ground. It was perfect for us.

We found a hollow beneath a fallen oak and settled in for the day. Thomas wrapped his arms around me, and I pressed my face against his chest. It was a familiar position, one we'd assumed a thousand times before. It was the only time I ever felt safe.

"Eleanor?"

"Hmm?"

"What if we did stop? What if we found somewhere and just... stayed?"

I opened my eyes. "We've tried that."

"I know. But what if we tried harder? What if we found somewhere so remote that no one would ever find us? Somewhere we could be together without having to hide?"

"And do what? Spend eternity sitting in a cave?"

"Why not? We'd have each other."

I thought about it. Really thought about it. A cave in the mountains, far from civilization. No more running. No more killing. Just the two of us, alone forever.

It sounded like heaven. It sounded like hell.

"We'd go mad," I said. "Both of us. We need people. We need... something to do."

"We could read. We could talk. We could..." He paused. "We could love each other."

I felt my heart clench. It was a strange sensation, one I hadn't felt in centuries.

"We already love each other," I said.

"I know. But we've never said it."

"We don't need to say it."

"Maybe I want to."

I lifted my head and looked at him. His eyes were dark, unreadable, but there was something in them I'd never seen before. Something vulnerable.

"I love you," he said. "I've loved you for two hundred years. I loved you when we were human. I loved you when we died. I loved you when we woke up and realized what we'd become. I've loved you every single day since then, and I'll love you until the end of time."

I didn't know what to say. I'd known, of course. On some level, I'd always known. But hearing it out loud was different. It made it real in a way it hadn't been before.

"I love you too," I said. "I've always loved you. I think I loved you before I even knew what love was."

He kissed me then, and it was different from the kiss in the farmhouse. Deeper. More urgent. I felt his hands on my back, pulling me closer, and I responded in kind.

We made love in the hollow beneath the oak tree, two monsters pretending to be human, and for a few hours, I forgot what we were. I forgot about the miller's boy and the merchant in the village and all the others. I forgot about the blood and the hunger and the endless running. All that mattered was him. All that had ever mattered was him.

Afterward, we lay tangled together, our clothes scattered on the forest floor, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Peace.

"Thomas?"

"Yes?"

"Let's do it."

"Do what?"

"Find somewhere. A real place. Somewhere we can stay."

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. "You mean it?"

"I mean it. I'm tired of running. I'm tired of being afraid. I want to be with you. Really be with you. Not just for a few months at a time, but forever."

He smiled, and it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. We'll find somewhere. We'll make it work."

I reached up and touched his face. "I love you."

"I love you too."

We fell asleep like that, wrapped in each other's arms, and for the first time in two hundred years, I dreamed of something other than blood.

The dreams didn't last.

We woke at sunset to the sound of barking dogs.

Thomas was on his feet in an instant, his eyes scanning the forest. "They found the body."

"How do you know?"

"The dogs. They're tracking us."

I scrambled up, grabbing my clothes. "How many?"

"Can't tell. More than one. We need to move."

We dressed in silence, our movements quick and efficient. We'd done this before. We knew what to do.

Thomas led the way, moving through the forest with the grace of a predator. I followed close behind, my senses on high alert. I could hear the dogs now, their baying growing louder with every passing moment. They were close. Too close.

"We need to split up," Thomas said.

"No."

"It's the only way. They can't track both of us."

"I'm not leaving you."

"Eleanor, listen to me." He stopped and turned to face me, his hands on my shoulders. "We've survived this long because we're smart. We don't take unnecessary risks. Splitting up is the smart thing to do."

"What if something happens? What if I never see you again?"

"Nothing's going to happen. We'll meet at the coast. Three days from now. The cave where we hid last winter."

"The one with the tide pools?"

"Yes. You remember it?"

"Of course I remember it."

"Good. Three days. I'll be there."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that we could fight them off together, that we were stronger than they were, that we didn't need to run. But I knew he was right. We'd survived this long because we were careful. Because we didn't take unnecessary risks.

"Three days," I said.

"Three days."

He kissed me, quick and hard, and then he was gone, disappearing into the trees. I stood there for a moment, listening to the dogs getting closer, and then I ran.

I ran faster than I'd ever run before, my feet barely touching the ground. The forest blurred around me, a wash of green and brown and black. I could hear the dogs behind me, their barking growing fainter with every step. I was faster than them. I was faster than anything.

But I wasn't faster than the sun.

It caught me just as I reached the edge of the forest. The first rays of dawn broke over the horizon, and I felt my strength draining away, my limbs growing heavy, my vision blurring. I stumbled, fell, crawled toward a thicket of bushes. I needed shelter. I needed darkness. I needed...

I don't remember what happened next. I only remember waking up in a cave, the sound of waves crashing against rocks somewhere below me. I was weak, weaker than I'd been in centuries, and my body ached like I'd been beaten.

"Thomas?" My voice was barely a whisper.

No answer.

I tried to sit up, but the pain was too much. I fell back, gasping, and stared at the ceiling of the cave. It was the cave. The one with the tide pools. The one where we'd agreed to meet.

But Thomas wasn't there.

I waited. One day. Two. Three. I waited until I couldn't wait anymore, until the hunger became too much, until I had to leave the cave or die.

I found a village a few miles down the coast. I fed. I recovered. I went back to the cave.

Thomas still wasn't there.

I waited a week. Then a month. Then a year. I searched for him everywhere. I asked questions. I followed leads. I killed people who might have information. I did things I'm not proud of.

But I never found him.

Two hundred years. That's how long we'd been together. Two hundred years of running, of hiding, of loving each other in the darkness. And now he was gone.

I should have known it couldn't last. I should have known that happiness was something we weren't allowed. We were monsters. We didn't deserve to be happy.

But I couldn't stop looking. I couldn't stop hoping. Because somewhere out there, in a world that had spent centuries trying to kill us, Thomas was still alive. He had to be. I would have felt it if he wasn't. I would have known.

So I kept searching. I kept running. I kept killing.

And every night, before I closed my eyes, I whispered the same words into the darkness.

"I'll find you. I promise. I'll find you."

The years passed. The world changed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Plagues came and went. I moved from country to country, always searching, always hoping. I learned new languages. I learned new ways to hunt. I learned how to survive in a world that was constantly trying to kill me.

But I never learned how to live without him.

I'm in London now. It's 1888, and the city is a cesspool of smoke and fog and human misery. I hate it here. I hate the noise and the stench and the endless crowds of people who don't know what I am. But I stay because there's a rumor. A whisper. A name that keeps coming up in certain circles.

A man who doesn't age. A man who doesn't eat. A man who's been seen in the East End, late at night, when the fog is thick and the streets are empty.

I don't know if it's him. I don't know if it's anyone. But I have to find out.

Because after all this time, after all these years of searching, I'm still hoping. I'm still believing. I'm still the same foolish girl who fell in love with a monster two hundred years ago.

And I won't stop until I find him.

I won't stop until I'm whole again.