Bloodchild (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Hunting

Heading out of the castle and into
the night, Bradan stilled mid-step, his mind and body reeling from the sudden
influx of sensations.

Ever since he had awakened, he’d
been aware of the scents permeating the air, the quiet noises that broke the
silence of the castle, the minute texture of everything he touched. All of it
had felt familiar, though. Different because it was so much more intense than
he was used to, but familiar. The childhood bedroom in which he had awakened
held no secrets for him, and when he’d hugged Vivien, while her scent and the
feel of her in his arms had never seemed so entrancing, she’d also felt like
coming home.

When he stepped outside of the
castle, however, the familiarity disappeared. Everything felt new, from the
caress of a light breeze on his cheek to the scents it carried to how clear
everything was around him despite the darkness. Even Aedan’s hand, resting on
his shoulder, felt different. It reminded him of Passing Through to Earth the
very first time when he’d been a child. Everything had been foreign, strange,
and even scary. He’d had his mother at his side to guide him, then. Today, he
had Aedan.

Turning his gaze to his brother,
Bradan raised his eyebrows in a silent question. Aedan had mentioned finding
food, and Bradan could guess what that entailed, but somehow he needed to hear
it from Aedan.

“Do you need me to hold your
hand?” Aedan said with a slight teasing grin. “You know what to do. Follow your
nose. Your instincts will tell you the rest.”

Without thinking, Bradan looked
back at the castle behind him. That was where his instincts were telling him to
go: to Vivien. From the second he had awakened and heard her heartbeat,
something within him had been pulsing with his need for her. His need for her
body, but also her blood.

The last thing he wanted was to
hurt her, but he couldn’t deny, at least not to himself, how good she’d smelled
in his arms and how much he’d craved her warmth.

“No,” Aedan said, and the teasing
was gone from his voice. “When I said instincts, that wasn’t what I was talking
about.”

Bradan’s head jerked as though
he’d been slapped. He looked at his brother; in the twilight, Aedan’s eyes were
two pools of silver. Bradan wondered what his own eyes looked like. He didn’t
bother to protest. Aedan had been in his place before, and no doubt he knew
what was going on in Bradan’s mind. And even without that experience, the twin
bond they shared had to convey Bradan’s needs clearly enough.

“The woods?” he asked, subdued.

Aedan gave him a short nod, then
said, “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

A most unpleasant realization slid
over Bradan: Aedan wouldn’t be behind him because he was watching his back.
He’d be behind so that he could remain between Bradan and the castle. Between
Bradan and their dame. His own brother did not trust him anymore, or at least
not with Vivien’s safety.

And maybe Aedan was right. In
truth, Bradan wasn’t sure he trusted himself. He certainly didn’t trust his
instincts.

When he started to run, it was as
much to escape that disquieting thought as it was to go hunt and satisfy his
hunger.

He’d been a jogger for years,
having picked up running at the same time Vivien did so he could keep a close
watch on her. If it had been up to him, however, he’d have far preferred
running races and having to surpass adversaries than running solely for
exercise. Tonight, he ran as fast as his legs would allow, and had to laugh
when it only took him seconds to reach the woods. He’d known, abstractly, that
vampires were fast. He’d even seen Aedan run a few times. He’d never realized
the extent of that ability, however, until he experienced the exhilaration of
speed for himself.

He kept running past the edge of
the woods. The trees, overgrown bushes, and the lack of light did not even
begin to slow him down. He could see every low-hanging branch, could react with
more agility than ever when his footing became insecure, and he could have run
like that for the rest of the night, until the edge of Foh’Ran itself, maybe
all the way to the Elven territory, if Aedan had not called out his name, not
even bothering to raise his voice.

“Bradan. Wait.”

Bradan slowed down, then stopped.
When he looked back, Aedan was a few yards behind him.

“You never told me,” Bradan said
with a grin, and at Aedan’s puzzled expression, finished his thought. “You
never said how much fun this was.”

Shaking his head, Aedan smiled
ever so faintly.

“On your first night, maybe.
You’ll get used to it soon enough. It won’t be long before you stop noticing.
Are you ready to hunt now?”

Part of Bradan wanted to keep
running, but the hunger inside him reawakened. Aedan had quelled it earlier by
offering Bradan blood from his wrist, but it was back already, a presence
within him that grew stronger with each passing moment and demanded that he
find blood.

“Is this anywhere close to where
you fought that welfgar?” he asked, looking around, searching for movement in
the underbrush. “We could hunt one of those and share it.”

Aedan’s bark of laughter startled
him, and Bradan’s eyes returned to him.

“Not even awake for a full hour,”
Aedan said, “and already you want to hunt a welfgar? How about you start with
something that won’t tear you to shreds? There are rabbits nearby. Can you
smell them?”

Protests rose to Bradan’s lips.
For one thing, he wasn’t a novice when it came to fighting. He’d never fought
an animal as big and dangerous as a welfgar with his bare hands, sure, but the
challenge of it would be as exhilarating as running had been. And then, there
was the fact that a rabbit, or any other small animal, hardly seemed like it
would satisfy his hunger. He’d need at least a dozen…

His train of thought ended when
his nose found a new scent. Can you smell them, Aedan had asked, and yes,
Bradan could. He could also hear them, tiny shuffling sounds along with several
fast, rhythmic beats. Heartbeats. His mind turned blank but for one idea: there
was blood nearby. He needed to find it.

Very slowly, he turned his head,
trying to orient himself toward the sounds, aware that Aedan’s entire attention
was focused on him. Bradan had questions for him, about what had happened with
Rhuinn and about what it meant that Bradan was now a vampire. They were all
important questions, and the answers might change a lot. At that moment,
however, blood seemed more important than anything.

More important even than Vivien,
and that was a rather uncomfortable thought. Bradan tried to push it back to a
corner of his mind where he wouldn’t have to examine it too closely.

At the moment he localized the
source of the tiny heartbeats, he heard something else. His head snapped to his
right, and he could see that Aedan had heard it too.

“What is it?” Bradan asked, as
quietly as he could.

“Ceash,” Aedan whispered back. He
unsheathed one of the knives he carried and held it out to Bradan, hilt first.
“Take left. I’ll take right.”

Aedan started to move as soon as
Bradan took the knife. His careful steps didn’t make a sound. Bradan tried his
best to emulate him, but to his own ears every small twig breaking under his
feet and every dried leaf crumbling to dust sounded as loud as thunder. The
ceash, however, did not seem to be alarmed. The sounds of mastication
continued; it was eating.

A minute or two of tracking
brought Bradan closer to the lake. He could feel it in the air, the humidity
higher now, and small plops of water that might have been fishes jumping to the
surface to catch insects. Finally, he could see the ceash.

It was a tall male, its antlers
long but with few branches as of yet; it was still young. It was tearing a long
strip of bark from a tree, but suddenly its ears twitched and it turned its
head, directly away from Bradan.

Bradan could hear what had
attracted the ceash’s attention: deliberately noisy steps. Aedan was trying to
scare it off so that it’d flee away from him and right toward Bradan.

It worked.

The ceash leaped and started
running, only a little to Bradan’s left. Without thinking, Bradan focused his
will and tried to mold it in a long hunting spear. The shock of finding the
Quickening out of his reach startled him so much that he allowed the ceash to
pass by him.

He’d channeled for more than half
his life; realizing he couldn’t channel anymore slammed into him the reality of
his situation even better than taking blood from Aedan’s wrist had.

Cursing under his breath, he
tightened his hold on the knife Aedan had given him and ran after the
frightened ceash. Something coursed through him, elemental and raw: the thrill
of the hunt, or the need for blood, or maybe both. It sharpened every one of
his senses, until he could have sworn he could smell the ceash’s fear. It
didn’t take him long to catch up with it. He lashed out at the animal’s back
leg with the knife, wounding it though not mortally. A few more strides and he
was level with the ceash.

Abruptly, the ceash stopped
running and turned toward Bradan, lowering its head to present him with its
antlers. The second it started charging, a flash of silver flew through the
night, catching the ceash in the neck. It fell with a braying cry, its
thrashing slowly abating.

As Aedan approached, Bradan’s head
snapped toward him. He glared.

“Why did you do that? I thought
this was my hunt.”

“Your hunt?” Aedan snorted. “An
antler through the chest won’t kill you, but it won’t be pleasant, either. And
you know Dame Vivien would blame me for it.”

The fact that Aedan was right
changed nothing. Bradan still felt irritated, and he was about to say so when
the scent of blood filled his mind, erasing everything else. He turned to the
ceash. Before he knew what he was doing, he was stepping toward it and falling
to his knees right beside its neck, where blood was flowing past Aedan’s knife,
staining the light brown coat of the animal dark red.

“Don’t drink from the cut,” Aedan
said in a low voice. “Extend your fangs and bite.”

Bradan had already been leaning
down to that blood, his head lighter with the thick, entrancing scent
permeating the air. He barely understood Aedan’s words, let alone the reason
behind them.

“Why?” he asked, and was surprised
when the word came out as a growl.

“Because the sooner you learn to
control your fangs, the better. For this, you can’t follow your instincts, or
you’ll find that they extend at the smallest provocation whether you want them
to or not. Now. Make a conscious effort to extend them.”

Frowning at Aedan, Bradan shook
his head. With blood so close, so enticing, it was hard to think—hard to
understand Aedan’s directions.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

“Yes, you do.” Aedan knelt next to
him. “Your body does. You only need to teach it to do what you want, not what
it thinks is best. Close your eyes. Try to clear your head. Then focus on your
fangs extending. It’s not all that different from focusing your emotions to channel.”

The hunger tearing at Bradan’s
insides caused his entire body to shake. It also urged him to disregard
everything Aedan was saying and drink to take his fill of blood.

Something else, however, kept him
still and silenced the growl that tried to push up his throat. Aedan’s voice
sounded oddly compelling. It reverberated inside Bradan, the words gaining
strength until Bradan found himself closing his eyes and doing what Aedan had
said.

One second, he was sure he
wouldn’t know how to extend his fangs but tried anyway; the next, his mouth
felt different, and he pricked his own lips before he knew what had happened.
When he opened his eyes, Aedan was giving him a faint smile.

“It’ll get easier,” he said.
“You’ll practice in a while. But first… You can feed.”

Permission was all Bradan had been
waiting for. He plunged for the ceash’s jugular, his mouth open wide, already
salivating. His fangs sank in with the smallest amount of pressure, and at last
blood erupted into his mouth, filling it, his mind, and his entire body with
warmth, comfort, and strength.

“Don’t drain it dry,” Aedan
murmured, his hand resting on Bradan’s shoulder again. “The hunger will urge
you to do it, but resist it. This time you have to make the conscious effort to
stop. That’s the only way you’ll learn to control the hunger rather than let it
control you.”

The words made sense. Bradan
realized that much. More than that, some raw part of him wanted nothing more
than to obey, make Aedan proud, show him how good Bradan could be. Neither
thing, however, made it any easier to listen and do what Aedan said. Nor was it
near enough to control the all-consuming hunger that blazed through Bradan like
a fire.

“Try,” Aedan said urgently as
Bradan continued to pull deep, messy mouthfuls of blood from the ceash. “I know
it’s hard, but you’ve got to try, brother.”

But Bradan
was
trying. His
hands were clenched on the flesh of the ceash, and he tried with every ounce of
strength of will he possessed to push himself away.

He couldn’t, not until he’d drunk
every last drop of blood the animal had to offer. Even then, even when he
raised his mouth from that still warm neck, he only wanted more. He was a
hunter. He was hungry. Surely it was normal for him to hunt again, tear into
tender skin until blood and life bubbled forward to his lips, warming him from
the inside out.

The realization that it was a
human neck he was thinking of sinking his fangs into—Vivien’s neck—was like a
bucket of icy water drenching him to his very soul. His fangs retracted of
their own accord. He turned wide eyes to Aedan.