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They’re red. Gleaming, bloody red.

16

The miner was dead— is dead. I heard the last rattle of his breath in the back of the hand wagon. I saw the life leave his colourless cheeks. But now, impossibly, he is staring at me, his red eyes brimming with frenzied rage.

He scrambles to his feet, baring his teeth, and it is only then I notice the needle-sharp points.

What has Iestyn done to him?

Before I can speak, the miner lunges for me, spittle flying as he snarls. His fingers are a whisper away from the collar of my cloak when he stops, freezing in place.

I whip my head towards Iestyn. He rises from the floor, chin smeared with blood, his expression devoid of any kind of concern.

“You turned him,” I say, trying to ignore the pounding against my ribs. “You made him a vampire.”

The miner’s body is rigid, caught in some unnatural paralysis. Not an inch of him moves apart from his eyes, rabid with bloodlust. As I back away, his gaze follows me, and I cannot help but baulk at the thought of what he might do if Iestyn releases him.

“He is not a vampire,” Iestyn says evenly. “He is a revenant. This is what happens when we feed on the dead, Alderose. I did warn you it would be unpleasant.”

My head reels. “I…I don’t understand.”

“When a vampire feeds on a living soul, we can drink them dry with no consequence.” Iestyn presses a finger to his lips, wiping away a trickle of blood. “Siring only happens if we allow them to drink our blood in return. But feeding on a corpse, drinking the blood of the dead… It curses them. Their soul has already left their body, and what’s left is a mindless husk, a creature that knows only hunger.”

Horror spreads in my chest as I stare at the miner. I see it now—the emptiness behind his crimson irises, the slackness of his ashen face. Whatever this is, it’s not a man.

“You knew this would happen.” I slowly turn to Iestyn. “You knew what this would do to him, and you drank from him anyway.”

“I needed blood, Alderose. You knew that. It’s why you brought him to me.”

I recoil. “I didn’t—if I’d known, I’d never have…”

My words dry up. There’s nothing I can say to undo what I’ve done. Nothing that will loosen the knot inside me.

The miner’s eyes bulge. His face is so pale it looks like bone. A revenant, Iestyn called him.

“Is there…” I swallow thickly. “Is there anything that can be done for him?”

Too late, I see the look that crosses Iestyn’s face. I open my mouth to scream, to tell him no, but I don’t get the chance before the miner’s head jolts to one side.

A sickening crack. Bone snapping, tendons popping. The miner crumples to the floor, landing in the pool of blood he left behind. This time, he doesn’t move.

He was already dead, I tell myself, squeezing my hands into trembling fists. The creature on the floor was nothing more than a reanimated corpse, a shell with no soul. But seeing the truth in something isn’t the same as being able to stomach it. I let Iestyn desecrate this man. I fear what else I might allow him to do before this ends.

“His life was over before he arrived here, as you well know,” Iestyn says, sensing my troubled thoughts. “A revenant has no soul, no sense of self. Had I released him from my control, he would have drained you and made straight for the next human he could sniff out. You may think me a monster, but this was a mercy.”

“A mercy,” I echo. Isn’t that what I told myself when I took the hand wagon away? When I listened to the miner’s tortured moans and wheezing breaths until they fell silent?

Now, as I stare at his lifeless corpse, prone on the floor, neck bent at a wrong angle, I wonder how I could have ever believed my own lie.

“Come.” Iestyn smooths his shirt and turns towards the drawing room. “Let us review our progress in more pleasant surroundings.”

He doesn’t need to layer his voice with compulsion this time. No silent hand is required to force my legs into motion. I’m all too ready to walk away—a coward, desperate to spare myself from having to look upon what I’ve done.

Iestyn brings a pot of steaming tea into the drawing room. He’s cleaned himself up, washing the blood from his face and ridding himself of his stained shirt. But a change of clothes isn’t enough to change the way I look at him. I still see the monster hunched over the miner’s limp body, a stream of red dribbling from his lips.

But that’s not quite true, is it? There was more to it than that. The desperation in every gulp, the rapture in his expression. I can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop wondering if…

We both want the same thing, he told me the first time I came to Wreymoor Hall. We both want to end that hunger in us.