CHAPTER ONE — THE ORDER

He had never taken it off. Not once. Not when the other hunters mocked him for it, not when the metal bit cold in winter, not even when a dying vampire grabbed his wrist mid-fight and stared at it like he recognised it. His mother had asked him to keep it on. He didn't know why. He was starting to think that was the point.

The summons came at midnight, the way the serious ones always did.

Aldric had been awake anyway. He usually was at that hour, lying still in the dark with his eyes open, doing the thing his trainer used to call resting and he privately called waiting for morning. Sleep came when it wanted to. He had stopped chasing it.

He dressed without lighting a candle. Pulled on his coat, checked the knife at his hip out of habit. Touched the bracelet the way he always did — quick, automatic. His mother's voice lived in that gesture somewhere. Keep it on. Promise me. He had promised. He still didn't know what he'd promised to do, exactly. But tonight, for a reason he couldn't name, he held his wrist a moment longer before letting go.

The hall outside his quarters was empty. The hunter order's stronghold was never truly quiet — there were always people training, always patrols, always someone sharpening something in the dark — but at this hour the sounds were distant enough to feel like silence. Aldric followed the route from memory. He'd walked it enough times.

Commander Vesran was waiting in the strategy room with two men Aldric didn't recognize. That was the first sign something was different. Vesran ran a tight operation — outside officials made him visibly uncomfortable, the way all careful men are uncomfortable around people they can't predict. The two men were dressed well. Too well for this hour, too well for a room that smelled like old maps and tallow candles. They had the look of people who were used to being waited on.

Nobody introduced them.

"Aldric," Vesran said. Just his name. The way you say something you've been practicing.

"Sir."

Vesran glanced at the two men. One of them stepped forward and set a sealed document on the table. He didn't say anything either. Aldric looked at the wax seal — a mark he recognized and had never expected to see on anything addressed to him — and kept his face still.

"You've been selected for a classified mission," Vesran said. "The details are in the brief. The short version is this: there is a vampire king. He has survived everything we've sent at him so far. You are going in alone, as a servant, and you are going to get close to him and kill him."

Aldric waited for the rest. There wasn't any.

"Alone," he said.

"Alone."

"How many teams have tried before me?"

A pause. Vesran's jaw tightened slightly. "That's not information you need."

Which meant enough that the number was embarrassing. Aldric looked at the document on the table, then back at his commander. Vesran had trained him personally for three years and had never once told him he was proud of him, which Aldric had come to understand was its own kind of respect. Right now Vesran looked like a man who wanted to say something and had decided not to.

"When do I leave?"

"Four days. Use them."

The two men left without speaking. Vesran waited until their footsteps faded, then picked up the document and held it out. When Aldric took it, Vesran didn't let go immediately.

“You are the best hunter in this order,” Vesran said quietly. “That’s why you’re going. Not because this mission is safe. Because we have run out of people we trust to come back with the job done.”

Aldric looked at him.

"I understand, sir."

Vesran released the document. "I know you do. That's what worries me."

He left. Aldric stood alone in the strategy room with a sealed brief in one hand and the particular silence of a decision that had already been made. He should have felt something — anticipation, maybe, or the clean bright focus that usually came before a mission. He waited for it.

It didn't come.

He broke the seal. Read through the brief once, then again more slowly. Dates, routes, the cover identity he'd be assuming, known details about the vampire court — thin on specifics, heavy on warnings. At the bottom, almost as an afterthought, a name.

Dravon.

He said it once, quietly, to nobody, in a room with no candles lit.

Then he folded the brief, put it inside his coat, and went to start preparing.

He touched the bracelet again on the way out. He didn't know why.