“Then what kind of test would it have been?” Quoneel asked.

7

nnis had never been a people person, unless ‘people person’ was defined as a person who ate people. She had spent most of her childhood miserable and alone while the other children in her village threw stones at her and called her names. Her teenage years had been typically awkward as a result, and then she ate everyone in her village so the opportunity for decent conversation became decidedly slimmer. When she was sixteen, the sun started to turn her to stone, so her entire adult life was spent in a variety of caves and ditches where her only source of friendship had been Scrannal, an idiot. So being in a room with other people was an unusual and unsettling development, and one which she hadn’t planned on... and then he walked in.

Annis felt her heart surge in her chest. Her belly squirmed like it was filled with a hundred undigested snakes. She felt blood rush to her face and hoped desperately that she wasn’t turning blue. Was this it? Was this what so many of her screaming victims referred to as ‘love’? Was this what they felt for the names they cried out as she devoured them?

He was tall, dark, and handsome. He had a quality about him, a mysterious, brooding quality that she found intoxicating. She could stare into his eyes and be lost forever. He didn’t bother sitting. She saw that he wasn’t wearing shoes. Another thing to love about this beautiful creature, this thing, this Springheeled Jack.

Black Annis was a weird one. Sabine didn’t know what to make of her. She’d heard the stories, of course. Knew what Annis was capable of. But the stories she’d heard were of a wild woman with jagged teeth and jagged nails and impenetrable blue skin. The person seated across from her wasn’t blue. She was squat in both frame and face, and her long, untamed hair was streaked with grey. She was somewhere over two hundred years old and Sabine reckoned she could see every one of those years etched into the lines around her mouth and eyes and on her forehead and... good God, this woman’s lines had lines. She looked her age and then some, unlike sorcerers and certain other creatures who had a pleasing habit of retaining their youth. Like vampires.

Sabine didn’t like vampires. They were too still, like statues. And the way they moved was unnatural. No living thing should be that graceful. But there he sat, the vampire, with his beautiful face marred by a single scar. He wasn’t even breathing. At least, she didn’t think he was. It was hard to tell.