Chapter 45

Gideon

Nora and Marcus went to try to convince our father to reconsider his order of execution. I went to find Clara and bring her back, hopefully not to be executed.

Marcus promised to send a signal so that I would know father’s decision before I brought Clara back. He would hang a flag over the east gate if our father still intended to kill her.

When I found her, would I bring her back if I saw that flag?

I didn’t know what other choice I had. I could hardly leave Clara to the tender mercies of the vampires and Rogues werewolves.

Well, first I had to find her.

It was a challenge to track the vampires. Whoever had covered their trail had done a good job. I couldn’t find any of the normal signs of a group on the move.

I was able to trace them from the dungeons to the wall. The ground was disturbed enough to show me that several people had climbed over it. I followed the trail to the woods. And then I lost the trail.

I searched for any sign of which way they might have gone. There was nothing. There was not so much as a broken twig or a scrap of cloth.

My wolf whined in the back of my mind. He was desperate to find Clara. I wondered if my wolf’s attachment to her had something to do with what Nora had revealed.

Clara, not Nora, was the gentle, silent woman who had saved me and tended to me while I was blind with poison. Clara had sat up all night caring for me. Clara had given me a portion of her own small servant’s allotment of food.

I owed her my life. Hopefully Marcus and Nora would explain that to our father. Then, I could bring her home and find some way to repay her for what she had done for me.

I stood at the edge of the vast forest that surrounded the royal compound. There had been three vampires imprisoned in the dungeon. They were all missing. Clara was missing. Logically, at least one person had gone into the dungeon to free them. So the group was at least five people.

I should be able to find some trace, yet I could not. And the more time I wasted looking for some clue that they had neglected to hide, the farther away Clara was taken.

I couldn’t find them, but maybe my wolf could. I shifted, and as the wolf I paced one side to another.

There was an odd smell at the edge of the woods. It was pungent and unpleasant. The vampires had spread something to obscure their scent.

And it almost worked. With that scent in the air my wolf would never have been able to parse out the dry, musky scent of the vampires.

But another scent caught my wolf’s attention and drew me into the woods. Clara’s unique scent left a distinct trail.

How had I never recognized Clara’s scent as my rescuer’s? Looking back it was so obvious. Nora hid her natural scent behind perfumes, as many noble women did. Clara never did. Yet I somehow did not realize.

I followed the trail through the woods. I caught traces of other scents. Those were probably the vampires. I smelled blood, too. They might be injured.

Worryingly, my wolf caught traces of wolf blood. That could only be Clara’s. Had they hurt her?

I ran as fast as I could follow the trail. The vampires took a nearly straight path. They were in a hurry to get wherever they were going.

I nearly tumbled into the river as I broke through the treeline on the shore. I shifted back to my human form, and paced the trail by the water.

Whoever was hiding their back trail had not gotten overconfident just because they were away from the royal compound. I couldn’t find so much as a footprint to tell me which way they had gone, or if they had tried to cross the rushing water.

Could Clara swim? I could not imagine when she would have learned the skill. Would the vampires help her, or leave her to drown if she couldn’t keep up?

To my relief, I found a trace of their passage that they hadn’t managed to erase. A rope had worn a line in a branch near the water. A boat of some kind had been secured there.

They hadn’t crossed the water, then. They had gone either up or down stream.

The smells of the river wiped out any trace of Clara’s scent. I could not find her that way.

I knew this territory. I had patrolled it for years. I had hunted Rogues and vampires through these woods. I should be able to figure out where the vampires were heading.

There was a castle up the river. It belonged to an old vampire lord. My father and that vampire had been bitter rivals for longer than I had been alive.

If those were his vassals, then they would take Clara straight to that castle.

But I had fought that vampire’s forces for years. He used thralls and mercenaries. He saw his troops as disposable playing pieces and the battles as a game board.

The vampire lord would never bother to send anyone to retrieve captured prisoners. No, these vampires belonged to another group entirely. This group operated by different rules.

They had risked a full scale assault on our castle for three prisoners. I had interrogated the vampires myself. They were ordinary, and not particularly highly ranked. They had no useful information. Why risk so much to get them back?

And why take Clara with them?

Whatever their reasons, I was confident I would not find them or Clara in the vampire lord’s castle. But where had they gone?

I looked at the mark on the branch. It was made by a single cord. The boat had been small. It would have barely held everyone that escaped the castle.

it would be a struggle to fight the current in a small boat filled to capacity. They must have gone down river.

I had no boat of my own, so I would have to follow the river on foot. I would lose time so I had to move quickly.

The river bank was heavily overgrown, and several times I had to duck into the woods to pass the underbrush. Once I had to risk swimming around an obstruction.

The current carried me past the fallen trees and massive rocks that had slowed my progress. I struggled to get back to shore.

I finally had a stroke of luck, though. The river dragged me around a bend to a small, shallow area. I staggered out of the water and nearly tripped over a pile of vines and branches.

Something about the pile didn’t look like the normal tangle of underbrush. I prodded it with my foot, and saw the cut edge of a branch.

I pried the underbrush off, and found a small raft. I had found the vampire’s water craft.

They had come out of the water there. But where had they gone after that? There was nothing in this area as far as I knew. There were no villages, no castles. There was just a mountain and more forest.

I shifted back to wolf form, and dove into the treeline. On land, I should be able to pick up Clara’s scent.

And then I would find her, and rescue her from the vampires, and take her home.

I only hoped that I would not find a flag hanging over the east gate when we got there.