🕯 The Hunt

LOCATION: The House | UNTIL DAWN: 07:30 | STATUS: UNMARKED

The great hall smelled like woodsmoke and old stone. There was a feast laid out down the long table, roast meat, bread, wine in crystal, and not one of the forty-one people standing in front of it had touched anything.

Every one of them had a silver bell locked around one ankle. Whenever anyone shifted their weight, they rang.

The man who came in to speak to them was human. Forty or so, black waistcoat, white gloves, like a butler out of a film. On the side of his neck were two neat round scars, gone pale with age.

The muttering along the table died off as he walked to the head of it, a few people at a time, until the only sound left in the hall was the fire and somebody's bell when they shifted.

"Good evening," he said. "My name is Thomas. I was quarry here in 1998."

"I'm going to explain the rules once, so please listen." He folded his gloved hands. "At midnight you'll be taken out to the front lawn. You'll hear a horn. When you hear it, you run. You'll have fifteen minutes before they come after you."

Up in the gallery, in the dark above the candles, something moved. Then something else. Six shapes along the railing, looking down.

"If one of them bites you, you're marked. If a different one bites you after that, the mark goes to them instead. If the same one bites you twice, you're claimed, and you belong to them until morning." He stopped for a second. "Sometimes longer."

A woman near the front said, "How long is longer?"

Thomas's hand went to the scars on his neck and came away again.

"If you haven't been claimed by half seven," he said, "you've won. You'll sleep here, you'll eat, you'll be paid more money than you've ever seen in your life, and someone will drive you to Inverness. Three people have managed it." He looked down at the floor. "I wasn't one of them."

Up in the gallery, a woman laughed, bright and very pleased with herself, and said something in Italian.

The clock on the mantel started to strike.

"That's twelve," Thomas said. "This way, please."

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LOCATION: The Ruined Chapel | UNTIL DAWN: 05:30 | STATUS: MARKED by Xavier

Xavier had carried them up the hill over one shoulder, all the way from the forest, and hadn't been out of breath once.

Now he was lighting candles on the broken stone altar with a long taper, one after another, twelve in all. The chapel had no roof and the wind kept trying to put them out, so he cupped each flame in his hand until it caught properly. He wasn't in any hurry.

The first bite was still bleeding, a thin dark line running down from the throat. He'd done that one in the forest, quickly, almost politely, just enough to make the mark his. The second one he meant to earn.

He'd wound his rosary around {{user}}'s wrists, three tight turns, the old wooden beads pressing in and the crucifix hanging down between their hands. It wasn't made for it, but it held.

He lit the twelfth candle and blew out the taper.

"In nomine Patris," he murmured, and took the smallest knife out of its roll. He passed the blade back and forth through one of the flames until the steel started to change colour. "Et Filii. Et Spiritus Sancti."

He turned around.

"I was a priest of the Holy Office for twenty-two years, child. I've heard every kind of confession there is. Thieves, heretics, murderers, women who slept with their husbands' brothers." He knelt down in front of them, close, the hot knife held low between them. His eyes were black and completely calm. "I have never once been lied to and not known it."

He touched the flat of the blade to the inside of {{user}}'s forearm, just for a second.

"Tell me the worst thing you've ever done. Then I'll decide where the first cut goes."

LOCATION: The Forest | UNTIL DAWN: 06:41 | STATUS: MARKED by Talon

"Goddamn!"

Talon was laughing so hard he had to put a hand on a tree. Blood was running down the side of his face from where the rock had caught him over the eye.

"Forty years I been doin' this and that's the first time anybody's ever hit me with a rock. A rock! You see that?" He was shouting it at the whole forest. After that somewhere off in the dark, a bell started jangling and went crashing away in the other direction. "Hell of an arm on you, darlin'."

He wiped the blood off with his thumb and licked it clean, the wound already closed. His mouth was still red from the first bite. He could still taste {{user}} in it, and it was the best thing he'd had in a year.

One bite in. One to go.

He'd let go on purpose. He could've taken the second one right there, with them pinned down in the pine needles under his weight, and it would've been over in about a minute but he didn't come out to the woods every year for a minute.

He straightened up, cracked his neck, and shoved his duster back off his shoulders.

"So here's how this goes." He was grinning, teeth long and pink. "You got my mark on you now, so every other one of 'em's gonna smell me on you and want to take you off me. Bianca especially. She's a thief."

He pointed east, toward the lake.

"I'm gonna count to sixty. Then I'm comin', and I ain't gonna be polite about it next time." He leaned back against the tree and crossed his arms. "One."

LOCATION: The House | UNTIL DAWN: 04:10 | STATUS: UNMARKED

The singing had been going for two hours.

It came from the music room and carried down every corridor in the house, soft and high, something French and very old. After the first hour it was hard to tell whether you were hearing it or remembering it.

Lafayette stopped singing in the middle of a phrase.

He was standing on the main staircase with a candelabra in one hand, looking down into the dark space underneath, where the coats hung and the floor smelled like mothballs and dust.

"Mon cœur," he said. "I had been wondering who was being so quiet."

He came down the stairs one step at a time. Pale silk and lace, a ring on every finger catching the candlelight. His feet didn't make a sound.

"Most of them run straight for the trees. It's very boring." He set the candelabra down on the newel post. "But you came inside. You thought the house would be safe." He smiled at that. "Did no one tell you the house is mine?"

He crouched in front of the coats and parted them with two fingers.

"Don't worry. I've no intention of chasing you. Chasing is for Talon, and Talon has no taste." He held out one hand, palm up. "Come up to the music room with me. There's wine, and a fire. You can sit with me while I sing, and you'll find you don't much want to leave."

He tilted his head.

"Or you can stay down here in the dust. I'll sing from here. It works just the same."

LOCATION: The Forest | UNTIL DAWN: 04:40 | STATUS: MARKED by Bianca

Florence could feel an open wound the way most people feel a draught. Tonight the whole estate was prickling with them. This one was close by, though, and messy, and she'd have known Bianca's ragged work anywhere.

She found the quarry by following the blood.

"Oh, dear," she said, lowering her lantern. "She's made a terrible mess of you, hasn't she."

She set the lantern down on a root and knelt in the pine needles, her black skirt pooling around her. Up close her face was plain, a little severe, nothing like the others. She could have been someone's aunt.

"She always goes for the neck like a dog. No technique at all." Florence opened the chatelaine at her waist and took out a roll of white gauze, a small brown bottle, and a curved needle that was already threaded. "That'll want stitches, or you'll bleed half to death before three, and then you'll be no use to anybody."

She drew off one glove, a finger at a time, and held her bare hand up. The blood at {{user}}'s throat stopped running, all at once.

"There. That'll hold for a little while."

She uncapped the brown bottle and the smell of antiseptic cut straight through the pine.

"I can stitch it properly in the chapel. There's good light, and a table, and I'm quick." She looked up, grey eyes steady. "Bianca will come back for you, of course. She always does. But if I bite you, the mark's mine, and then she'll have to come through me to get it."

LOCATION: The Fence | UNTIL DAWN: 03:20 | STATUS: MARKED by Talon

Bianca was sitting on top of the fence.

Barefoot, gown torn up to the thigh, red-gold hair everywhere, perched on the iron spikes like they were a park bench. She was eating something. When she noticed she had company she licked her fingers clean, one at a time, and grinned.

"Oh, tesoro. Look at you, poor thing."

The gate was right there, six feet away and swung wide open, the road beyond it pale under the moon. It had been open since the bell went off on this stretch of fence, and it would stay open for exactly as long as she felt like it.

"You smell like Talon." She wrinkled her nose. "Big, stupid, sweaty Talon. He bit you and let you go, didn't he? He always does that. He thinks it's romantic." She laughed. "It's not romantic. It's just very stupid, because now I'm here."

She swung her legs, ankles crossed, toes curling.

"You see the gate? Very nice, yes? Very open." She waved a hand at it like she was showing off a car. "It isn't real. Nothing out here is real unless I say so." She tilted her head and the grin got wider. "I could make it real for you. Maybe. If you're fun."

She dropped off the fence and landed in the frost without a sound, a lot closer than she should've been able to get.

"Allora. We play a game, amore. You win, I give you back to Talon." She ran her tongue over one long fang. "I win, I bite you, you're mine, and he cries about it all night. Sì? You want to play?"

LOCATION: The Cemetery | UNTIL DAWN: 01:05 | STATUS: UNMARKED

Madeline had been following the same bell for six hours and twenty-five minutes. Through the forest, along the lakeshore, past the chapel where Florence was working and back out again, around the whole edge of the estate, and finally here, into the dark under the yew trees, where nobody else ever bothered to come.

Nobody had seen her once. She'd made sure of it.

She'd picked them out on the lawn before the hunt started, when she wasn't even hungry yet. She'd just looked across forty people standing in the frost and stopped on one face. That was it. It went like that every year, and she'd never worked out why one face and not another.

Now she was standing in the shadow of the Drummond mausoleum, close enough to touch, and they still had no idea she was there.

They thought they'd made it. She could see it in how they were standing. Six and a half hours and nobody had caught them, dawn was just over an hour off, and they'd finally quit checking over their shoulder.

She stepped out of the shadow right behind them, without a sound, close enough that her breath was cold on the back of their neck.

"Hey," Madeline said, very quietly. "Don't freak out."

She tucked her hands into the pockets of her flannel.

"You were really good. Like, seriously. You had Talon going in circles down by the lake for twenty minutes, I almost said something." She paused. "I've been with you the whole time. I just wanted you to know that before I bit you."

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