The first thing Magnus learned about being free was that it was mostly logistics.
Nobody had ever told him that.
In the cellar, freedom had been a dream, a shape with no edges, something you thought about in the dark the way you thought about the sea.
He had imagined it, on the nights he still imagined things, as a door opening onto a road.
He had never imagined what you did on the road.
Where you slept.
What you ate.
How you got from one place to another when you were a dead man with two hearts and three companions, one of whom could not remember what century it was.
It turned out you bought a van.
Silas did it.
Silas could walk in daylight, and Silas spoke Romanian, and Silas had a face so old and so ordinary that nobody in the used-car lot outside Sibiu looked at him twice.
He came back at noon on their second day out of the mountains, driving a white Ford Transit with rust around the wheel arches and a crack across the windscreen and a hundred and ninety thousand kilometers on the clock, paid for with a fistful of Veyr’s euros.
He parked it behind the abandoned barn where the others were hiding, and climbed out, and stood looking at it with his hands on his hips and an expression of deep pride.
“I learned to drive in 1951,” he said.
“On a Soviet truck.
I think it’s mostly the same.” It wasn’t.
It took him four days to stop stalling at junctions.
But the van had no windows in the back, and Petra spent an afternoon lining the inside with black bin bags and duct tape until not a crack of light got through, and on the evening of the third day Magnus climbed into it at sunset and lay down on a mattress they’d bought from a supermarket in Alba Iulia, and Silas started the engine, and they drove west.
They moved at night, mostly.
Magnus could have stood more daylight than he let himself; he knew that now, from the chapel window.
But it still hurt, and it still burned, and there was something about the sun that made the voice in his blood go quiet and sullen, like a dog pressed under a bed during a thunderstorm.
He found he did not like it when the voice was quiet.
It meant he did not know what it was doing.
So he slept in the back of the van in the day, in the bin-bag dark, while Silas drove and Petra navigated with a paper map, because none of them had a phone and Silas did not trust them anyway.
And at sunset he woke, and they pulled off the road somewhere quiet, and he got out and stretched, and looked at the stars, and they ate.
That was the second thing he learned about being free.
Everybody needed to eat.
The ghouls needed his blood.
Not every night, but every three or four.
A mouthful each from the old silver cup, which Petra washed out carefully in streams and petrol-station sinks and kept wrapped in a scarf.
It kept the Grey away.
It did more than that: in a week, Silas’s arm healed completely, without even a scar, and his limp, which he had had since 1953, began to fade.
Petra’s cheeks got their color back.
And Irina, who had sat in the corner of the van for the first three nights without saying a word, began, very slowly, to come back from wherever she had been.
She remembered things in pieces.
A word here and there, a smell, a song.
She was from a village in Transylvania, near Cluj, she thought; she had been married; she had had a daughter called Ilona; there had been a war, a big one, with cannons.
When Petra told her that the war she was thinking of had probably been in 1848, Irina had stared at her for a long time and then begun, very quietly, to cry, and had not stopped for an hour.
Then she had wiped her face and asked Petra to teach her what a mobile telephone was.
She learned fast, after that.
Faster every day.
As if Magnus’s blood had found some locked door in her and was slowly prying it open.
So the ghouls ate from Magnus.
And Magnus had to eat from someone.
He had fed as a ghoul.
He had fed often.
Veyr’s cup had never been enough on its own; ghouls needed human food too, a little, and human blood, and Veyr had made sure there was always some of both, the blood usually from the same people the ghouls brought back from the valley roads.
Magnus had done it.
He knew he had.
He did not remember most of it, because of the fog, and he had been grateful for the fog.
There was no fog now.
That was the problem.
On the fifth night, in the Apuseni Mountains, the hunger got bad enough that he could not sleep.
He lay in the back of the van and listened to the three heartbeats around him, Silas snoring in the driver’s seat, Petra curled up in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard, Irina in the back beside him wrapped in a blanket, and he wanted them.
All three.
He wanted them so much that his hands shook.
He bit his own tongue until it bled and lay there with the taste of his own blood in his mouth and counted the seconds until he could get out of the van and walk away into the dark.
He told Silas he was going to hunt animals.
He even believed it, for the first mile.
There was a deer.
He found it easily: his new senses picked out its heartbeat from a quarter-mile away, among the pines.
He moved toward it through the shadows the way the Northerner’s blood had taught him, flowing from one patch of darkness to the next, and the deer never heard him, never saw him, until he was on it.
He drank.
It was warm and thin and tasted of grass, and it was like drinking water when you were starving: it filled him and it didn’t fill him at all.
He let the deer go, still alive, staggering, and stood in the dark with its blood on his chin and the hunger worse than before.
And then, on the wind, he smelled the campfire.
The hiker was alone.
That was the first thing Magnus noticed, standing at the edge of the trees, looking down into the little clearing where the man had pitched his tent.
Alone, and young, twenty-five perhaps, with a beard and a beanie hat and a big expensive rucksack propped against a log.
He was sitting by his fire with a tin mug in his hands and earbuds in his ears, nodding his head to music Magnus could hear, faintly, from forty yards away.
Something with guitars.
Something happy.
His heart was beating at seventy-two beats a minute.
Magnus could hear every one.
He did not decide to walk into the clearing.
That was what frightened him, later.
He did not remember deciding.
He simply found that he was doing it: stepping out of the trees, walking across the frosty grass, his shadow long in front of him in the firelight.
The hiker looked up, startled, and pulled out one earbud.
“Oh,” he said, in English with a German accent.
“Hello.
You scared me.” Then, uncertain: “Are you lost?” Magnus looked at him.
At his throat.
At the pulse jumping in the side of it, just under the jaw, quick and bright.
“No,” he said.
His voice sounded strange.
Low and soft and warm.
Like Veyr’s voice.
“No, I’m not lost.” The hiker’s eyes went wide, and then, slowly, soft and unfocused.
His mouth went slack.
The tin mug slipped from his fingers and fell into the frost and rolled.
Magnus felt it happen: something going out from him, through his voice, through his eyes, and settling over the young man like a blanket.
Not the threads.
Not the domination.
Something gentler, and worse.
A suggestion.
A pressure.
A soft voice in the back of the mind saying, It’s all right.
Don’t be afraid.
Don’t move.
He had seen Veyr do it a hundred times, on the valley roads.
He had never known how.
Now he knew.
He knelt by the fire, beside the hiker, who did not move, who looked at him with wide, soft, empty eyes.
He took the young man’s head in his hands, gently, and turned it to one side, and bent his own head to the throat.
It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
He had thought Veyr’s blood was the best thing, and then the Northerner’s.
They had been power.
This was something else.
This was life.
Hot and sweet and rich and thick with everything the hiker was: his music, his long walk that day, his tiredness, the coffee he’d been drinking, the girl he’d been thinking about.
It went down into Magnus like sunlight, the sunlight he could not stand anymore, and filled every hollow corner of him with warmth, and he understood in that moment why vampires killed.
Why they couldn’t stop.
Why they didn’t want to.
More, said the voice in his blood.
More.
All of it.
He drank more.
The hiker’s heart, under his lips, began to slow.
Seventy-two.
Sixty.
Fifty.
Forty.
All of it.
Thirty-five.
And then it stuttered.
A little skip, a missed beat, like a foot catching on a stair.
And Magnus heard it, and something in him that was not the voice, that was older than the voice in a different way, that was a nine-year-old boy in a foster home in Wythenshawe listening to the woman downstairs cry through the wall, went no.
He tore himself away.
It was like tearing off his own arm.
He threw himself backward away from the hiker so hard that he went sprawling across the frosted grass, and he lay there on his back, gasping, with the young man’s blood all over his face and the hunger screaming at him to go back, go back, go back, and he dug his fingers into the frozen earth and held on to it as if he were falling.
The hiker had slumped over sideways by the fire.
His face was very white.
But his chest was moving.
Up and down.
Up and down.
Slow, but steady.
Magnus stared at him and shook.
He stayed until he was sure.
Hours, maybe.
He sat at the edge of the clearing with his back to a pine tree and his arms around his knees and watched the young man breathe, and the fire burn down, and the stars wheel overhead.
He did not trust himself to go any closer.
He did not trust himself to leave.
Around two in the morning, the hiker stirred, and groaned, and sat up, and put a hand to his neck.
He looked at his fingers.
There was a little blood on them.
Not much; Magnus’s saliva had closed the wounds, the way Veyr’s always had, so that they would heal in a day and look like nothing more than an insect bite.
The hiker looked around the clearing with a dazed, puzzled frown.
He did not see Magnus in the shadows of the trees.
Magnus made sure he did not.
Then he crawled into his tent, very slowly, like an old man, and zipped it shut, and was asleep in a minute.
He would wake up tomorrow with a headache and a strange weakness, and blame it on the altitude, or a cold coming on.
He would not remember a stranger walking out of the trees.
He would not remember anything.
Magnus would remember all of it.
Silas found him at dawn, still sitting under the tree.
The old ghoul did not ask what had happened.
He looked at the clearing, and the tent, and the blood dried on Magnus’s chin, and he understood.
He sat down beside Magnus with a grunt, on the frozen ground, and held out a bottle of water, and waited until Magnus took it and washed his face.
“I almost killed him,” Magnus said, after a long time.
“But you didn’t.” “I almost did.
I wanted to.
I wanted to, Silas.
It was the best thing I’ve ever—” He stopped.
He couldn’t say it.
“There’s something in me that wanted it.
That still wants it.
It’s not just the voice.
It’s me.
It’s what I am now.” Silas was quiet for a while.
The sky was going gray behind the pines.
Soon they would have to get back to the van.
“Do you know what Veyr said to me,” Silas said, “the night he made me?
In ’53?
He’d bought me off Sokolov’s people, a prisoner, half dead.
He gave me his blood, and I woke up, and I was so hungry, kid, I was so hungry I’d have eaten my own mother.
And he laughed, and he said: Don’t fight it, Silas.
Hunger is the only honest thing about us.
Everything else is just manners.” Silas shook his head slowly.
“I believed him.
For seventy years, I believed him.
I thought that’s all we were.
Hunger, with manners on.” He looked at Magnus.
“And then a skinny English boy who’d been in the cellar five years stood up in front of the master and told him no.” “That’s not the same.” “It’s exactly the same.” Silas put a hand on his shoulder, heavily.
“You want it.
Course you want it.
Every vampire there’s ever been has wanted it.
That’s not what makes a monster, kid.
What makes a monster is when you stop wanting to stop.” He nodded at the tent across the clearing.
“You stopped.
That boy’s going to wake up and go home to his mother.
Hold on to that.” Magnus held on to it.
He didn’t know if it was enough.
But he held on.
He made a rule, after that.
He told the others about it in the van the next night, so that it would be real, the way he had made his promise real in Veyr’s study by saying it out loud.
He would not feed on anyone who didn’t deserve it.
“Who decides who deserves it?” Petra asked.
She was sitting cross-legged on the mattress across from him, frowning.
She had a way of asking hard questions in a soft voice that he was beginning to find both annoying and invaluable.
“I do,” Magnus said.
“I guess.” “That’s what Veyr would say.” He looked at her, startled.
She looked back at him, steadily.
She was right, he realized.
She was completely right.
That was exactly what Veyr would say.
“Then help me,” he said.
“All of you.
If you think I’m getting it wrong, tell me.
Stop me, if you have to.” Petra looked at him for a long moment.
Then she nodded, slowly.
It turned out not to be hard to find people who deserved it.
That was the worst lesson of the road, maybe.
Worse than the hiker.
The world was full of predators.
He had just never had the senses to notice them before.
In a truck stop outside Oradea, on the Hungarian border, there was a man who drove a lorry with a false wall in the back, and behind the false wall, Magnus’s new ears told him, were eleven heartbeats, very frightened, very quiet, breathing through holes drilled in the metal.
The man was very surprised when Magnus found him behind the toilet block.
He was much more surprised when Magnus put him to sleep with a word, and fed, and then opened the false wall, and stood back while Silas, who spoke four languages badly, explained to eleven terrified Afghan and Syrian men and women in the back of the lorry that they were free to go, and gave them a fistful of Veyr’s euros, and pointed them toward the nearest town.
The lorry driver would wake up tomorrow with a headache and a weakness he could not explain, in the cab of an empty truck, with no memory of the night at all.
In Budapest, there was a man in an expensive coat who followed a drunk girl out of a bar on the Pest embankment at three in the morning, and had his hand on her arm in a dark side street when Magnus stepped out of a shadow in front of him.
In a village in Slovakia, there was a farmhouse where a dog was screaming, and kept screaming, and Magnus went in and found out why.
He fed on all of them.
He did not kill any of them.
He took enough to weaken them, and enough to make them forget, and once, in Slovakia, enough to make sure the man would be in hospital for a week, and he made very sure they all woke up in places where they would be found.
And each time, afterward, he sat in the dark for a while and waited for the hunger to settle, and it did, a little more easily each time.
And each time, he felt himself grow.
Not much.
Not the great surges he’d had from Veyr and the Northerner.
Human blood didn’t do that; it only fed him, kept him strong.
But he grew all the same, in ways he was only beginning to understand.
The shadows got easier.
The first time he tried to step through one, the night after the hiker, in a pine forest in the dark, he’d simply walked into a tree.
By Budapest he could step from one side of a street to the other in an eye-blink.
The voice in his blood got easier to hear, and easier, sometimes, to ignore.
And the hunger, the great howling hunger of the first night in the crypt, got slowly, slowly smaller, until it was something he could carry.
Like the other things.
Like the surgeries, and the forest, and Florin, and Bogdan.
Heavy, but his.
He did not stop hating it.
He didn’t think he ever would.
But by the time they crossed into the Czech Republic, he found that he hated himself, maybe, a little bit less.
Only a little.
They went to Plzeň because of Petra.
She had not asked.
She would never have asked.
But Magnus had seen her look at the road signs, once they crossed the border, and he had seen the way her lips moved when she read the name.
And he had heard her, in the back of the van, at night, when she thought he was asleep, whispering: Thursday.
Thursday was pizza night.
So they drove to Plzeň.
It was a Thursday when they got there.
Magnus had made sure.
Petra’s mother lived in a fourth-floor flat in a long gray block on the edge of town, with a view of the brewery chimneys and a balcony full of plants.
Petra stood on the pavement across the road, in the dark, in the cold, with her hands in the pockets of a coat that had belonged to Cassian Veyr, and looked up at the lit window for a long time.
Magnus stood beside her.
Silas and Irina stayed in the van.
Through the window, with his new eyes, Magnus could see them.
A woman of fifty, gray-blonde, thin, in a cardigan, setting a table in a small bright kitchen.
A boy of fifteen or so, gangly, with headphones around his neck, sitting at the table and looking at his phone.
A pizza on a baking tray between them, a little burned at the edges.
Even from here, Magnus could see that the crust was terrible.
The boy reached for a bottle of ketchup.
The woman said something, sharply, and slapped at his hand, and the boy laughed and squirted it all over his slice anyway, and the woman threw up her hands, and then, after a moment, laughed too.
There was a third chair at the table.
No one sat in it.
There was no plate in front of it.
But it was there.
Petra made a sound.
It was very small.
Magnus put his arm around her, and she turned and pressed her face into his shoulder, and he held her while she shook.
“I can’t go up,” she said into his coat.
“Can I?” He wanted to tell her she could.
He wanted it more than he had wanted anything since the night he killed Veyr.
He could imagine it so clearly: her running up the stairs, knocking on the door, her mother’s face.
The scream.
The hugging.
The crying.
And then, the next week, or the week after, the hunger.
Petra going Grey, if she stayed.
Or coming back to Magnus for his blood, every few days, and having to explain where she went, and why, and why she never ate pizza anymore, and why she had to stay out of the sun at noon, and why her eyes caught the light like a cat’s.
The questions.
The lies.
And one day, perhaps, the Foundation knocking on that door, or Sokolov’s men, or something worse, because Petra had led them there.
She knew it too.
She had known it the moment she got out of the van.
“No,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
You can’t.” She nodded against his shoulder.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she pulled away, and wiped her face with the back of her hand, and took something out of her coat pocket.
A rusty nail.
The one she had used to scratch the days into the cellar wall, two years of them, every one.
She crossed the road, quickly, before he could stop her, and knelt at the base of the building, beside the front door, where there was a little patch of earth with some dead geraniums in it.
She dug a hole in the cold dirt with her fingers.
She put the nail in it.
She covered it up again.
Then she stood, and looked up at the window one last time, at her mother and her little brother eating terrible pizza in a bright kitchen on a Thursday night, and touched two fingers to her lips, and held them up toward the glass.
Then she came back across the road and took Magnus’s hand.
“Where now?” she said.
Her voice was steady.
“Prague,” said Silas, from the open window of the van.
He had been listening.
Of course he had.
“There’s a place in Prague.
I heard about it, years ago, from one of Veyr’s guests.
A place where our kind go.
Ghouls without masters.
Vampires without courts.
They say nobody owns Prague.
They say there are people there who can help.” Magnus looked at him.
Then at Petra.
Then at Irina, in the back of the van, watching them all with her strange, coming-back eyes.
Then he looked west one more time, toward the dark, toward the lights of the motorway, toward a city he had never seen.
He did not hear it, then.
He would think about that, afterward, more than he could bear to.
How sharp his ears had gotten, how he could hear a heartbeat at a quarter-mile and the sigh of a deer in a forest and eleven frightened people breathing behind a steel wall.
And he did not hear the car that had been following them, at a distance, since the Slovak border.
A long black car with tinted windows and Italian plates, that pulled out from a side street as the white van drove away, and followed it, at a distance, with its headlights off, all the way to Prague.