Chapter 31-Chosen Distance

Sam’s POV

  I sent Zion a message before sunrise from Edric’s territory. The protected network could carry our status without exposing the site: we had arrived, would remain several days, and had reached no confirmed conclusion. I added that the northern cooks still feared pepper more than any reasonable person should.

  The last line was for Rain and Odett. Zion would pretend it did not belong in a report. Orian would read it aloud, and Jess might send seasoning with the next supply case. I could almost hear Odett laugh. Then I remembered how long it had been since I had heard her.

  Commander Halden stepped into the borrowed workroom carrying two sealed record boxes. Snow clung to his shoulders and melted onto the stone floor while he lowered them beside the evidence ledger. The witch investigator and vampire representative followed him inside without speaking.

  “The originals are still unavailable,” Halden reported.

  “King Edric’s archivist provided verified copies of the gate records and protection inspections.”

  “Verified by the archivist who made the copies or by the guards who created the original entries?” I asked cautiously after examining the seals.

  “The archivist,” Halden admitted.

  It was a useful copy, but its seal could not tell us what the guards had written. Edric had finally admitted the joint team after delaying us at his border. We could inspect the abandoned settlement and question his officers, provided every request went through someone loyal to him.

  “Substitute provided.”

  “Verification incomplete.”

  “Original formally requested again,” the vampire representative recorded as she opened the ledger we had started at the border.

  “Add that the copy was delivered with both boxes sealed.”

  “Nothing about the records proves someone changed them,” I instructed with deliberate caution.

  “And nothing proves the copy matches what was written at the gate,” the witch investigator warned while holding her thumb above the silver spell woven through the first seal.

  “Record both,” I replied without hesitation.

  I had given that answer in too many territories. Kings guarded patrol routes, covens guarded spells, vampire clans guarded feeding records, and frightened families guarded their children’s names. Each had a reason. None made our work easier.

  Fear did not make any of them guilty. It only made the truth harder to reach.

  We carried the boxes to the main table and broke the outer seals with two witnesses watching. The copied gate ledger listed every resident who entered or left during the month before the attack. Three inspection marks were missing from the final week, but the archivist had noted that the original ink was damaged.

  The protection records raised another question. They showed two weaknesses in the eastern barrier before the attack, while the patrol summary described damage in the north. Snow had erased enough of the ground that we could not disprove either account.

  “Another disagreement between the barrier and the tracks,” Halden observed.

  “Or between when the barrier failed and when the tracks were made,” I replied carefully while moving the two pages beside each other.

  “We do not know that they belong to the same event.”

  “The local officers already combined them in their summary,” the vampire representative warned as she leaned over the table.

  “Then our report separates them again,” I said.

  I had seen what happened when separate details were forced into one story. Preserved blood at one site carried a vampire scent longer than winter should have allowed. At another, punctures appeared beside cuts too deliberate to fit the surviving guard’s account. Neither detail could name an attacker.

  None of those details cleared vampires. None identified a particular vampire either.

  The attacks had crossed wolf territories, witch covens, independent villages, and mixed communities. Some places were burned until the stones split. Others were left standing around bodies arranged with a care that felt worse than destruction.

  The wounds did not point neatly toward one kind of attacker. Local records often did, especially when fear had made a community certain before our team arrived. The longer we stayed to ask questions, the less simple each site became.

  At the first settlement I inspected, blood marked the doors and boundary stones. Local officers took its scent as an answer before anyone counted the dead. Inside, furniture stood upright and food remained on tables. Several victims had narrow, careful cuts that did not fit the frenzy the officers described.

  The children’s rooms were orderly enough to make me stop. Blankets were folded and belongings remained, but several assigned beds were empty. The register could not tell us whether those children had been away, recorded under family names, or present when the attack came. We refused to call them abducted without a reliable count.

  Elsewhere, one dying witness remembered bright eyes but could not name their color. Another remembered cold hands. Both accounts seemed to support the vampire theory until the healers explained what shock, blood loss, and winter exposure could do to memory.

  I walked to the map fixed against the far wall. Black pins marked confirmed attacks, white pins marked communities that had stopped answering and later checked in safely, and blue pins marked reports still waiting for verification. The distance south had finally become shorter than the distance behind us.

  If Edric let us see the original ledgers, we might finish here within days. If he refused, we would record the limit and head toward the Southern Kingdom. I could finally think about the journey south as more than another route on the wall.

  Closer to Odett.

  Kyron stirred beneath my skin when I thought of Odett. The bond had made itself known years ago, when she was still a child who fell asleep during movies and expected me to carry her to bed. I had known what it meant. She had not, and that difference shaped every choice I made afterward.

  Knowing did not give me permission to change what I was to her.

  She trusted me as an adult in her family’s home. I found food she liked, helped her through crowded rooms, and carried her when she was tired. If I had treated that trust as a promise about her future, I would have broken it.

  Her vampire blood made people misjudge her age. She learned fast and healed differently, and her body changed sooner than a human or wolf child’s might have. She was still a child for the years she was a child.

  She could mature sooner than other children, and the bond could pull as hard as it liked. Neither gave me the right to decide she was ready. Her attention, her affection, her future—all of it belonged to her, and I had to leave her free to choose.

  “You stopped reading,” the witch investigator observed after closing the second box.