Nightfall came, and Ellie and Jack were finally able to exit the barn they had taken temporary shelter in. “We best be getting back to the main road,” Jack said as he looked around the dark farmyard. “We can get to Skarvast before sunrise if we’re lucky.”

“Sounds good,” Ellie said, wincing slightly at the thought of travelling back to the motorcycle. “I take it that means we’re jumping again?”

Jack laughed. “You don’t like the way I jump?”

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re very good at it. I’m just not a massive fan of heights. I feel very exposed up there when you’re the only thing I’m clinging to. A fall like that is nothing for a vampire, but it would squish me easily. Not that I think you would drop me.”

“…I can see why it might scare you a little, but you’re correct. I wouldn’t drop you. No fears there. You can hold up here a second anyway. I’ll check the bike first, and make sure the road is empty. You okay waiting here while I go check?”

Ellie shrugged and looked around the yard. “Sure. I can dismantle the rest of the traps while you’re gone.”

Jack nodded, and a few seconds later he had jumped up into the air, disappearing into the night. She stood to watch in amazement for a minute as the vampire vanished overhead. Shaking her head, she turned back to look at the ground. The strength and speed of vampires like Jack always amazed and intimidated Ellie. What would it feel like if she had that sort of power?

Circling around the barn and the yard, she retraced her earlier footsteps and dismantled all of the traps. There were no more animals in them this time, but the traps were still active until Ellie took them down. She saw little sense in leaving the traps active if she were leaving. It would be cruel to capture an animal and leave it out here to die of starvation.

Once she was done, she came back around to the front of the barn just in time to see Jack touchdown again. He hit the ground with little effort, carrying his momentum out through a neatly timed forward roll. He stood back up to his feet and nodded his head up at her. “Sorry for the holdup.”

Ellie looked down at her wrist as if to say that she hadn’t noticed. “Hold up? You’ve barely been gone five minutes.”

“Well, I would have been quicker, but… well, there’s good news and bad news. Road is perfectly clear. Doesn’t seem to be another soul around us for a few miles.”

“What’s the bad news?” she asked.

“Bike is pretty much running empty. I didn’t realize it when we pulled over last night, but there’s not enough fuel left to get us to Skarvast.”

Ellie pushed her bottom lip out, pouting at the news. “Fuck. That puts a damper on our plans. What now?”

Jack flashed a smile. “That leads me to more good news. I spotted something from the air when I was jumping back here. There is a track leading from the main road to this farm. It’s so overgrown you can’t make it out from the ground, but I just about made it out from the air. There’s a small house halfway along the track between here and the road, and there’s a car in the garage. I think I can get it running. Wanna come take a look?”

Ellie nodded, but quickly made a face at the realization that there would be jumping again. “We have to go… up again. Don’t we?”

Jack surged forward in a flash and swept Ellie up into his arms, causing her to squeal.

“Give me some warning next time! Jerk!” Ellie hit him playfully, then tightened her arms around his neck in anticipation for the jump.

“Sorry,” he said with his handsome smile. “I just can’t wait to have you in my arms. Clearly.”

“Can we just get this over with already?” Ellie said, squinting at him through one open eye.

“Say no more my darling. Hold on tight!”

The ground disappeared below them as Jack exploded upward like a flying bullet. Fearing for her life, Ellie held on tight and buried her head against his chest with her eyes screwed shut. Fifteen seconds later the sound of rushing wind stopped and was replaced with a dull and earthy thud. She opened her eyes as Jack’s grip released her, letting her feet back to the floor.

“We’re here,” he said, and made his way into the open garage that was at the side of the old farmhouse. Ellie looked up at the abandoned structure and felt a strange sadness fill her. The old wooden building had probably been a beautiful home at one point. Now it lay abandoned under glistening moonlight, sleeping in the middle of an overgrown landscape, waiting under circling stars. Jack was standing in the garage under a solitary lightbulb which cast long shadows down the dirt drive. He stood hunched over the open hood of an old orange pickup.

Ellie walked across the dirt to follow Jack into the garage. “Did you check to see if the house was empty before you stole this car?”

“I did,” Jack answered back without looking at her. “It’s thoroughly abandoned. Just like the barn. Whoever was here left in a hurry a long time ago. The pickup has a full tank of gas, I think I just need to clean the connectors on the spark plugs.”

Ellie hopped onto a dusty old worksurface and looked around the garage. There was a wall of tools on the back wall which looked as if they hadn’t been touched in years, old paint pots stacked under countertops, and mountains of junk that probably served some use at one point or another. She looked back to Jack and studied him as he dug around the engine.

“I didn’t figure you to be a gear head,” she laughed.

Jack looked up at her in amusement. A fresh streak of oil smeared down one side of his face, making him look like some sort of tribal mechanic warrior. The thought made her laugh. “I mean, vampires don’t really have a need for cars. Getting around is much easier for us. I still find them interesting though.”

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” she said. “Which is reassuring. Did you do a lot of this in your earlier days?”

Jack yanked a handful of cables from the car and walked over to the counter next to Ellie. He set them down and smoothed an old cloth over the connectors. He stared up into the air as he carried out the idle task, contemplating her question as he did so. “To be honest Elle, I think the old amnesia is blocking me from that answer.”

Ellie held her hand up a second and he stopped. “I’m sorry. Did you just call me Elle?”

He smiled. “Yeah. That not okay? I thought I’d try it out. See how it sounded.”

She considered it a second and came to the decision that it was okay. “I guess I don’t hate it.”

“Ah yes. Well. I don’t remember much. But I have another vague impression. I think my family were one of the first to get a car, back when they were still new. I have a picture in my mind of those ancient cars with giant wheels and square leather tops…”

Ellie had to stop him again. “I’m sorry. Hold on another second. Are you telling me you were a child when cars first came out?” She sat there for a second considering the revelation, feeling utterly gob smacked at the idea. Jack was a vampire, and it stood to reason that he was older than she was, but she hadn’t even considered for a second that he would be that old. “Just how old are you?”

“Wow.” Jack reared his head back in mock offense. “Talk about rude. You don’t just go around asking people how old they are. Didn’t your parents ever teach you some manners?”

She laughed again, rolling her eyes at his sarcasm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that—”

“It’s okay,” he said while chuckling to himself. “I have no idea how old I am darling. It’s another vague picture I’m afraid. I know I’m not a spring chicken, but I’m not ancient either. Vampires can live for thousands of years. I’d be surprised if I was over a hundred.”

Ellie stared at Jack in silence as he picked up the connectors and walked back to the car. She’d be very surprised if he were a year over thirty. He was tall, handsome, well-built and in great shape. His distant memory could put him close to a hundred, but it was Jack’s memory. It wasn’t the most reliable thing to go off. Jack clipped the connectors back into the engine, hopped around to the driver seat and turned the key in the ignition. The engine wheezed to life and broke the silence of the night with a shaking, but healthy sounding rumble.

He hopped out the car again and leaned over the top of the cab, flashing that brilliant smile at her. “So, what do you say? Should we finish this ride or what?”

Ellie hopped off the worksurface and brushed the dust off her trousers. “I call shotgun.”

* * *

The ride back to the main road was bumpy. The track leading between the barn and the house was overgrown, but not impossible to navigate. Jack carefully followed the track, weaving around trees and avoiding potholes, until the black tarmac was back under their tires once again.

“That’s better,” Jack said as he pulled onto the road, finally able to put his foot down. The old engine grumbled loudly as their speed picked up. The engine’s rattling was concerning, but the car showed no other signs of protest apart from that. The town would only be a few more hours away, the old pickup only had to last until then.

Ellie got comfortable on the cab’s wide leather seat, sitting back and putting her feet on the dashboard while she watched the passing landscape through the dusty old window. She thought back to their short time at the northern gate, and how chaotic things had been the night they escaped. She wondered where everyone else had got to. They hadn’t seen sight of another soul in the last two days. It stood to reason they would have seen other Valentine vampires by now, or at least have crossed paths with the Circle vampires. She rested her head against the window and wondered if Natalie and Rourke had made it out okay.

Monica had been a crazed bitch, obviously out to get Jack from the beginning, but her brother Rourke was definitely the more reasonable of the two. Monica seemed to only be interested in chaos and violence, whereas Rourke had actually helped them to escape. Ellie seriously doubted either her or Jack would have made it through the northern gate alive if it wasn’t for Rourke’s blood servant, Natalie. Most of all Ellie hoped that she was okay.

Lifting her head from the window, Ellie stared across the cab and looked at Jack. Both eyes on the road, he had one hand on the wheel, and the other in his lap, looking like he’d just walked out of a Calvin Klein ad. “Jack, don’t you it’s unusual we haven’t seen anyone else since we left the border?”

Jack looked over at her and nodded after a short moment. “I was thinking the same thing actually. It’s a little unusual. I anticipated we might see some of these Valentine vampires at least.”

“What about the Circle?” she offered. “I thought they might have given chase.”

He shrugged. “Who knows. They probably just wanted to take hold of the gate. It’s an advantageous spot to hold. If the Circle are looking to move men into the valley it would make sense for them to take it.”

Ellie nodded. “So, you don’t think that attack had anything to do with us?”

“It’s possible. Their main focus seemed to be on driving the other vampires out. There’s no way they could have known we were at the gate anyway. Just bad luck on our part. They’d probably be kicking themselves if they realized.”

She had to chuckle in agreement. As macabre as it had been, their lack of detection so far was lucky. “I’ve no idea why the Circle want to end the prophecy,” Ellie said. “When they first approached the Order and asked to work together I thought that none of it made sense.”

Jack glanced over. “You say they wanted to help in destroying the prophecy?”

She nodded back. “They wanted us to help track down the daughters and destroy them. Their goal was explicitly in making the prophecy fail.”

“That… is strange, I have to admit. It’s possible they’ve been infiltrated at the very top. I can’t understand why the Circle would want to stop the prophecy.”

“What do you think it all means?” she asked, referring to the prophecy. “If the prophecy comes to be then vampires are supposed to be ushered into a new dawn. If it fails, their time is supposed to be up. It’s all very vague, don’t you think?”

“A little, but prophecies usually are. There was that outbreak of that new disease recently, remember? Black Fang? Vampires were starving from the inside out, and it made it impossible to feed from humans. It’s possible that is a glimpse of things to come.”

“You can remember Black Fang, but you can’t remember your own name?”

“Hey, I’m not in the one in control of the mess up there.” Jack laughed and pointed to his temple. “I guess my mysterious mind deemed the killer vampire disease significant enough to remember.”

“Good point,” Ellie said. “I did find the whole Black Fang thing very interesting. A lot of the vampires we came across assumed that the Order was behind it, that we had manufactured it somehow.”

“Had you?” Jack said, looking across the cab at her.

“No,” Ellie said and shook her head. “Not as far as I’m aware. I’m not involved with every aspect of the Order, but I’m fairly clued in, I can’t anticipate they’d lie about something like that…” She trailed off, remembering Natalie’s tale from a few days ago, realizing that the Order already had lied to her once before.

“Everything okay?” Jack said. “You’re looking a little pale. Your heart beat is going crazy too.”

“It is?” Ellie placed a hand to her chest and found that it was in fact racing. She looked back at the vampire in disbelief. “I was just remembering something Natalie told me about the Order back at the northern border. It… it shook me up a little, that’s all.”

“Sounds juicy,” Jack said. “Fill me in?”

“It was actually the night of the train raid. The night Anderson’s group tried to attack you. The night you brought the storm down upon them. Remember?” Jack glanced back at her and she covered her mouth with her hands. “Sorry. Poor choice of words. Basically, you got away. A lot of our men were injured. Whenever we find human civilians we give them two choices: be recruited into the White Order or have your memory blanked and be returned to the nearest population center.”

“Hell of a choice to make,” Jack said sarcastically.

“Yeah...” she said unsure. “I never agreed with it myself, but that’s how it went down. There was a designated team of men that handled civilian side of things. Normally we’d end up getting a few recruits out of it, but that night on the train I noticed we had no new recruits after. Every human on that train was there because they wanted to be. They were all blood servants after all.”

“They all wanted to be vampires,” Jack said. “Not much chance in recruiting a bunch of aspiring vampires.”

“Exactly,” Ellie said back. “As it turns out however, Natalie was one of the blood servants on the train that night. She recognized me when we arrived at the border. We talked after your fight. She told me she was from the train and I told her that simply wasn’t possible. If she decided against joining the Order, then they would have blanked her mind. Plain and simple.”

“Makes sense,” Jack said. “So, what happened? Why could she remember?”

“Because they don’t blank minds at all. They never have. Natalie said the guards lined the servants up against a ditch in the forest. They were all given one last chance to join the Order at gun point, but none of them did. The Order… they… they executed them.”

The pickup swerved across the empty road temporarily as Jack looked over at her in surprise. “Sorry. Continue.”

“Well, Natalie was shot, but the bullet didn’t kill her instantly. She fell back into the mass grave, waiting to die, when a group of vampires showed up and attacked the Order troupe. As it turns out, they were Valentine vampires. Rourke was among them. They ended up killing the executioners and Rourke helped to save Natalie. She’s been a servant at the border ever since.”

Silence beat between them, the only sound the hiss of the road under the pickup’s tires. Jack let out a long low whistle after a minute and finally spoke back. “That’s quite the story. Vampire hunters are killing humans now.”

“And the Red Circle are trying to destroy all vampires,” Ellie said back. “Seems like the world has gone fully crazy.”

Jack looked over at her, his red eyes searching into hers. Ellie felt her skin prickling slightly at the examination. She laughed nervously, brushing a hand through her hair, hoping that she could look better. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

She nodded.

“What made you join these vampire hunting folk in the first place? What kind of person do you have to be to wake up one day and decide that you want to kill things for a living? Most humans don’t know about vampires, so I assume you had to have a pretty select upbringing to be in on the ‘secret’.”

Tarmac hissed underneath as Ellie considered the question. It was true that her upbringing was more on the unusual side. As she sat there her mind traced back over the years that had brought her to right now. Try as she might it seemed as if she couldn’t avoid vampires, no matter how hard she tried.

“What’s the matter?” Jack asked after a moment of silence. “That heartbeat of yours is getting all crazy again.”

She checked and found he was right again. Damn. It wasn’t easy skirting the truth when you were stuck in a cab with a human lie detector. “It’s just a sensitive topic for me, that’s all. I know you’re bored, but I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Why not?” he asked. “We’ve got a few hours until we get to this village at least, and I’m interested in getting to know you better.” He said the words so plainly, so matter of fact, that she could have sworn he was telling the truth.

Her brow knotted in confusion. “You actually sound like you want to know.”

Jack looked at her in confusion. “That’s because I do, ya idiot. Why would I lie about something like that?”

“I don’t know…” She trailed off. Maybe because no one had ever shown any interest in her before like that? She’d spent her whole life living in the shadows. Forgotten. Unwanted. A burden. She could count on one hand the times people had asked her how her day was. Jack’s interest seemed sincere, which felt wholly unusual. “You really want to know? Where should I begin?”

“I’m all ears darling, honest. Start at the beginning. Seems like the best place to me. What are your parents like?”

She smiled at the faint memory pressing against the back of her mind. There was something there, but not enough to go off. “I couldn’t really tell you, but I do know that my brief memory of them was good.”

Jack looked over, concern filling his face. “They’re dead? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She shook her head. “And yes. I assume they’re dead. It was a long time ago. It was the night the vampires raided our home. The night my life changed forever.”