Lilith pinched the irregular black bone fragment and stepped closer to the bronze door. The sole of her boot crushed a piece of weathered gravel. The dark red veins on the surface of the bone fragment began to heat up. The heat passed through the deerskin glove and burned into her palm. Her left hand, still pressed against the door, felt a continuous pull. The size of the inverted cross recess in the center of the door matched the edges of the bone fragment perfectly.
She didn't press the fragment into place rashly. The first rule of the Nightshade family's ancestral teachings: never touch a complete seal. She raised the brass hurricane lamp and directed the light toward the gargoyle on the right side of the door frame. Beneath the green patina of the gargoyle's base, a line of tiny ancient vampire script was hidden.
"Chains forged with blood… the abyss sealed with bone and blood…" she murmured. Her voice echoed in the empty inner ring of the cemetery, then was immediately swallowed by the thick fog. When she reached the second half of the inscription, she stopped. She had never seen that root word in any parchment scroll or family book. She bit her lip and tasted a hint of dry, cracked blood. She opened her leather notebook and copied the phrase exactly as it was into a blank space with her charcoal pencil, planning to look it up in her tattered *Dictionary of the Dark Ages* back in the cabin after dawn.
A sharp crack of breaking branches came from the blackthorn hedge behind her to the right.
Lilith immediately closed the notebook and blew out the lamp. She pressed her back against the icy bronze door and reached her right hand to the crossbow at her waist. The thick fog was forcibly torn apart by something moving fast; the mist churned violently. In the air drifted a sweet, cloying smell of rust — dozens of times stronger than the sour stench of the fledgling from earlier.
A tall, thin man squeezed through the gap in the hedge. He wore an elegant black wool tailcoat, a crooked silk cravat, and his snow-white cuffs were stained with half-dried, blackened blood. The man took a deep breath, his chest expanding dramatically, and a look of near-ecstasy appeared on his pale face. His pupils were a pure, dark red.
Pure red pupils. This was a *kinsman* — a full vampire with intact reason, speed far beyond any human, and absolute dominion over lesser vampires.
The man tilted his head and fixed his gaze on the dark figure in front of the bronze door. "So you're the one who shot my little dog?" he said, speaking with a heavy Inner City noble accent, drawing out the last syllables as if toying with his prey.
Lilith didn't answer. She took a half-step back with her left foot, braced herself against the stone platform, and leveled the crossbow. She pulled the trigger.
*Thwip-thwip!*
Two silver short bolts flew in a triangular formation toward the man's chest.
The man pushed off with his feet, his hard-soled leather oxfords crushing a fragment of a tombstone. He turned into a blur, shifting nearly a meter to the left. The silver bolts grazed his tailcoat and buried themselves in the dirt behind him, their fletching humming.
"Feisty," the man said, his voice now coming from less than three meters to Lilith's left. He stuck out his tongue and licked his lips, revealing two sharp canine teeth. Saliva stretched into fine threads from the tips. "A graveyard keeper's blood — I've never tasted that before. I'm sure it's cleaner than those factory laborers."
Lilith retreated quickly, slamming her back hard against the bronze door. The cold of the metal seeped through her coat and into her bones. There was no room to retreat further. She yanked three spare bolts from the quiver at her waist with her right hand, and with her thumb pressed the bolt heads into the crossbow groove.
The man lunged. The nails on his ten fingers instantly elongated into black, bone-like blades, aimed straight for Lilith's throat. A gust of stench rushed at her face.
In desperation, Lilith clenched the burning hot black bone fragment in her left hand and slammed it into the inverted cross recess in the center of the bronze door.
*Click.*
The bone fragment fit perfectly into the recess.
A ring of dark red, tangible light waves exploded from the surface of the bronze door. The shockwave, like a roaring wall of air, slammed directly into the chest of the vampire mid-lunge.
*Bang!*
The man flew back more than ten meters, as if struck by a steam locomotive's cowcatcher. He crashed through the thorny blackthorn hedge and smashed three granite obelisks in a row before finally stopping. He knelt in the mud, vomiting a large mouthful of black blood mixed with chunks of viscera. The tailcoat on his chest was shredded into rags; large swaths of skin and flesh were turned inside out, exposing pale ribs. The edges of the wounds were charred black and would not heal.
"What in the hell is that…" the man gasped, clutching his chest as he stared at the great door in terror. He struggled to his feet, then turned and fled into the fog, crawling and scrambling.
Lilith didn't give chase. Because behind her, the bronze door was moving.
In the eye sockets of the gargoyles on either side of the frame, the cloudy obsidian suddenly blazed with piercing red light. The heavy, grating sound of mechanical friction rumbled up from beneath the earth, making the stone slabs under Lilith's feet tremble slightly. The bronze door cracked open in the middle.
A blast of frigid air blew out through the gap. Lilith shivered, and a fine layer of white frost instantly formed on her eyelashes. She tried to pull the bone fragment out, but it was stuck fast in the recess as if it had taken root.
The gap grew wider. The icy wind swept up dead leaves, stone chips, and the droplets of blood left by the fleeing vampire, sucking everything madly into the crack. Lilith's feet slipped; she lost her balance entirely and was dragged by the current of air into the interior of the door.
In the moment she tumbled through the gap, the black bone fragment popped out of the recess with a *ding* and struck her collarbone. She clenched it tightly in her fist.
*Boom!*
The bronze door slammed shut behind her with a dull, heavy thunderclap. The sound of the outside wind vanished completely.
Lilith fell onto a hard stone floor. Her elbows ached from the impact, her bones groaning in protest. She pushed herself up from the ground and brushed the dust off her coat. She fumbled out a match and relit the hurricane lamp.
Before her was a wide, sloping corridor leading downward. The walls were polished from solid pieces of obsidian, their surfaces mirror-smooth. The walls were covered with dense, intricate blood-runes. These runes were far older than those on the tombstones outside, and some of the grooves still glowed with a faint dark red light. The air was unusually dry, lacking the smell of rotting earth, and instead carried a cool, fragrant scent like a mix of myrrh and cedar.
There were no steps underfoot, only a rough, non-slip ramp. Lilith raised the lamp and began walking down the slope. She held the bone fragment tightly in her left hand, her palm sweating through the leather glove. Her heartbeat still maintained a rhythm of one beat every three seconds, perfectly synchronized with some pulse in this space. The resonance made her feel slightly dizzy.
After walking about five hundred paces, the corridor ended.
Before her was a vast, circular underground hall. The dome of the hall was so high that the darkness swallowed the light. Hanging from the center of the dome were hundreds of chains, each as thick as a wrist. At the ends of the chains, bound together, was a massive black coffin.
The coffin hung in midair, about two meters above the ground. Its material looked like some kind of rare jade, and its surface flowed with living, blood-like textures.
In the very center of the hall's floor was drawn a huge, ten-meter-wide hexagram. The lines of the array were cast in brass, and the wide grooves were filled with a dry, blackened substance.
Lilith walked to the edge of the hexagram. She squatted down, pulled off her right leather glove, and scraped a bit of the black substance from the groove with her index fingernail. She brought it to her nose and sniffed.
It was blood. Extremely concentrated blood, coagulated for hundreds or thousands of years.
*Ummm——*
The bone fragment in her left hand suddenly vibrated violently. Its temperature spiked instantly, burning like a red-hot coal freshly pulled from a furnace. She cried out in pain and instinctively opened her hand. The palm of her glove was scorched with a black hole.
The bone fragment did not fall to the ground. Instead, it hovered in midair. It radiated a blinding red light and flew like a shooting star straight toward the blood-jade coffin hanging in the air.
The bone fragment embedded itself precisely into a recess on the side of the coffin.
*Clank, clank, clank…*
All hundreds of chains suspending the coffin tightened at once, scraping against each other and emitting a piercing screech. Rings of golden sealing script emerged on the surface of the chains. The script glowed with intense heat and gave off a sharp, metallic, burnt smell.
Then the outermost chain snapped. The heavy iron link crashed onto the stone floor, gouging a shallow pit half a meter deep. Stone chips flew everywhere, and a sharp piece of rock cut Lilith's left cheek. She wiped it with the back of her hand; her knuckles came away smeared with bright red blood.
*Snap! Snap! Snap!*
One by one, the chains broke. The thunderous roar of metal echoed through the hall, jarring Lilith's eardrums and stabbing deep into her brain like needles. She dropped the hurricane lamp, clamped both hands over her ears, and stumbled back behind a thick stone pillar at the edge of the hall.
The last main chain snapped. The blood-jade coffin, completely unsupported, crashed down with tremendous force onto the very center of the hexagram.
*Boom!*
A tangible shockwave of air exploded outward, carrying with it a thousand years of dust. The hem of Lilith's coat flapped wildly in the gale, and her back pressed hard against the stone pillar.
The dust slowly settled.
The coffin lay intact in the stone crater it had made in the floor.
Silence. The hall fell into dead silence. The heavy, three-second thumping heartbeat had vanished.
Lilith gripped her crossbow and leaned half her body out from behind the stone pillar. She held her breath, her eyes fixed on that dark red coffin.
*Creeeak——*
A teeth-grinding sound broke the dead silence. The heavy jade lid of the coffin was slowly being pushed aside by some force from within.
A hand gripped the edge of the coffin.
It was a man's hand. The skin was pale as paper, almost translucent, revealing faint bluish veins on the back of the hand. The fingers were long, the knuckles well-defined. The fingernails were trimmed neat and flat, not elongated into bestial claws like an ordinary vampire.
The palm pressed down on the edge, exerting force. A figure sat up from the coffin.
Lilith's temples throbbed.
The man wore an old-fashioned, elaborately styled black shirt, its collar open, revealing a clear line of collarbone. His long, silver-gray hair fell loosely over his shoulders. His eyes were closed. He tilted his head back slightly and took a slow, deep breath, as if tasting the air around him.
Lilith stared at the man's face. His features were deeply chiseled, his nose high and straight. A thick shadow fell beneath his brow ridge. There was nothing monstrous or savage about him; instead, he carried an almost divine, austere beauty.
But the pressure radiating from him made Lilith feel suffocated. The air around her became thick and viscous; the temperature plummeted, and every breath turned to white mist. This aura far surpassed that of the viscount who sat high above in the governor's mansion. Such a seal as this was reserved only for the high-ranking vampires of myth and legend.
The man slowly opened his eyes.
His pupils were not the murky dark red of an ordinary vampire, but an extraordinarily pure crimson — like two perfectly cut rubies. There was no reflection of any emotion in the depths of those eyes; they were cold, as if looking at lifeless objects.
His gaze swept across the hall, through the lingering dust, and landed precisely on Lilith, hiding behind the stone pillar. More precisely, it landed on the still-bleeding wound on her cheek.
"Come here."
Two words. The voice was low, hoarse, dry from long disuse. The pronunciation used the oldest form of the vampire tongue — complex and guttural.
Lilith understood. Every cell in her body screamed at her to run. But her legs were frozen to the spot, heavy as lead. That latent power in her blood, under the gaze of those eyes, was completely suppressed, unable to be summoned in the slightest.
The man stood up from the coffin. Barefoot, he stepped out of the coffin onto the cold stone floor. His crimson eyes remained fixed on the blood on Lilith's cheek.
He took a step forward with his right foot, walking toward Lilith. A trail of very faint frost marks followed his bare footprints on the stone slabs.