Page 5 of Tin God

She cleaned her blade on a blanket near the fire, then put it back in its leather scabbard and walked out of the house.

The wind was gusting more wildly, her magic churning it though she remained calm on the surface. Her blood was jumping, and her fangs ached in her mouth, but she searched for satisfaction. For peace.

Temur’s blood was no more. Finally it was no more.

The hunter took to the air and barely noticed when the wooden house behind her burst into flames. She paused, glanced over her shoulder, and watched the flames engulf the house, the fence, and melt the snow where the bodies of stolen children had been hidden.

Fire vampires. So volatile.

She disappeared into the night and rid the last drop of Temur’s blood from her memory.

He was dead. Finally he was dead.

ChapterOne

Brigid Connor bumped over the snow, huddled in the fur-covered sled that a team of yapping sled dogs pulled through the dark, frozen woods of Alaska. The driver, a silent human who had introduced himself as Andre and then said nothing else, barked commands at them from time to time, but if he’d said another word to Brigid, the driving wind had blown it into the darkness.

Overhead, a glowing green-and-purple aurora borealis lit a clear night sky, dancing over the tips of evergreen trees. The northern lights were more vivid than she’d ever seen before, doubly vivid with vampire vision that turned them so bright she nearly remembered what it felt like to stand in daylight.

She pulled an old pocket watch from the folds of her winter coat. Her husband had bought it for her last birthday, the only timepiece that could withstand the pull of her amnis, the elemental energy that kept her vampire blood moving and connected her to her element.

Brigid’s element was fire, but she wasn’t very good at using it, and it didn’t seem very helpful in a land surrounded by sea and covered with snow, ice, frost, and fog.

It was six in the evening, and the sky was black pitch. Stars sparkled through the lights, and the moon was visible on the horizon, peeking through the dense forests of the Alaskan wilderness. She was traveling to a remote station run by Oleg, a Russian fire vampire whom Brigid now owed several favors.

Oleg wasn’t going to be at the station, which was a good thing. Under the archaic territorial rules that governed immortals, the Russian was trespassing. The area Andre’s dogs were drawing them toward was the territory of Katya Grigorieva, who was based in Seattle. She ruled the Pacific Northwest with canny intelligence, keen strategic thinking, and the convenient ability to look the other way when she didn’t really give a shit.

“So this used to be Oleg’s territory?” she tried to ask Andre, but she had no idea if the man heard her. Brigid turned back to face the wind, crouching down so the tearing cold wouldn’t lash her.

She was bundled from the tip of her nose to her carefully wrapped feet. Alaska in winter was no joke, and they weren’t even in the coldest part of it.

Oleg’s station was on the coast, a relatively reachable outpost on the Kenai Peninsula, only a few hours from Anchorage. The scope of the landscape was hard for Brigid to wrap her mind around.

This was “relatively close” to the city. This was “not far.” This place, where she hadn’t seen a sign of civilization other than a bright red stick coming out of the snow every now and then, was the “accessible” part of Alaska in the wintertime.

Brigid had been born in Ireland, a place where a person could drive across the entire island in the time it had taken them to drive from one city to the next in Alaska. She’d met Oleg’s people at the airport the night before, found shelter during the very short day, then taken four-wheel-drive vehicles over frosty roads as far as they could before switching to the dogsled to get to the station.

She glanced at her watch again, guessing they were only about forty minutes away from the destination where she would start her search for the vampire who had stalked her for years.

She gripped the cold metal in her hand and remembered Carwyn giving it to her.

Gold, darling girl. It’s the only thing that might keep this old thing running with your energy.

She’d protested that it was too extravagant to have a watch with a casing made entirely of gold, and he’d ignored her. He was old, much older than Brigid, and he’d had time to save money he rarely used.

“Aloha shirts and beer don’t cost much, Brigid.”

She thought of him constantly. His voice. His touch. The scent of his skin and his blood.

He was furious with her, and she deserved it.

There was a tapping on her shoulder, and she looked up to see Andre pointing at something in the distance.

A moose was tearing bark from a tree, shaking the branches with the force of his bite. She smiled up at Andre and gave him a thumbs-up to indicate she’d seen it.

Moose. Caribou. Birds of surprising variety.

No bears according to the locals. They would all be hibernating.

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