Eskel found the corpses in the road, but no sign of Maya except her mare pawing absently at a trampled patch of greenery exposed in the battle. The saddlebags lay where he dropped them, though one had been opened and rummaged through, ingredients strewn out. A glass jar filled with white myrtle petals lay on its side in the mud.
He remembered her rolling the jar between her hands as she packed, debating.
"These are fairly common," Maya said. "But they are special. People say they are sacred to Melitele. The flower of love."
He told her to make room for them. He was an idiot.
He found her tracks easily enough, small female footprints leading off into the trees. They rambled almost aimlessly, stopping occasionally where more red tinged spit would litter the ground. She was bound and determined not to swallow the blood, wasn't she?
He didn't know what it meant, not really, but it didn't matter. Nothing did except finding her.
The trees thinned out, the trunks getting thicker as their quantity decreased. Here, the snow was still icy and crisp. The air was cold and he could see his breath, billowing out like a mist from between his lips. Eskel knew how to move silently, so he stepped carefully, trying to avoid the crunch of snow under his boots. He didn't want to spook her.
If someone had told him he'd be sneaking up on a vampire because he wanted to see her, not kill her, he would have told them they were insane. A lot of things were different now. That didn't mean everything was a horror, did it?
He spotted her hair first, a bright swatch of sunset orange against the white snow, the grey trees. Her pale dress was blood stained and dark, her winter cloak discarded on the ground. Maya sat on a fallen log, her elbows on her knees and her head in her hand. There was a puddle of blood on the ground between her feet, an ingredient jar propped up against her foot. One hand was clutched into a white knuckled fist.
Eskel put his hand against a nearby tree trunk, trying to get enough air. She heard him shift and her head whipped up. She'd scrubbed her face clean with snow, her cheeks raw and pink. But there was new, red blood on her lips. There was no one else here. The blood had to be hers.
Her eyes were wild when she looked at him, half panicked and half sad. She trembled; her instincts must have been telling her to run or to fight but she didn't move.
"You change your mind?" she asked. Her voice hurt him, soft and choked. "Going to give me a mercy killing before the Hunters catch up with me?"
Eskel pulled his silver sword and walked towards her, the metal ringing as it pulled free of the scabbard. Maya's lip trembled.
"The one consolation I have, is that its you," she said as he stalked closer. "I'm not afraid to die and I'm glad that you'll be the last thing I see, even if you don't believe me."
He was only a few steps from her now. She didn't flinch, just looked up at him with wide eyes. He still said nothing.
"I didn't lie to you Eskel," she said. She made almost no sound. It was just loud enough for him to hear. "I love you."
His silver sword clattered to the ground. Eskel fell to his knees in front of her, his legs sinking into the bloody snow. He didn't care. He grabbed her face, tucked his forehead against hers. He still couldn't talk.
What could he say? He didn't know where to begin, or what to feel. He just knew he didn't want to kill her, he didn't want anything except to be with her, to make sure she was safe from hunters and fuck all whatever that might come after her.
If that meant he was a shitty Witcher, so be it.
He felt her hand, cold as ice, come up and touch the side of his face, tentative little fingers along the scars. She traced them, following the lines along the plane of his face and spoke when he couldn't.
"A long time ago, a Witcher hunted my family," she began. Eskel started to pull away but her fingers, now just the same soft fingers they'd always been instead of the claws he saw her wield against his attacker, flexed against his jaw and he stilled, his forehead still against hers. He could smell her breath, coppery and cold. "We evaded him for a while, but eventually he caught up to us. He...killed them. I ran, but he pursued. He was relentless."
She brushed his hair back, tucked it behind his ear. Eskel swallowed hard.
"He cornered me in some ruins and there was nowhere left to run. He attacked me." He felt her shake her head. "And I killed him." Her breath shook. "I might be a vampire, but I'd never killed anyone before. We drank only from the willing, and rarely at that."
She lifted her head, lifted his face to look at her. Eskel met her eyes, those familiar eyes that seemed suddenly so strange, so foreign.
"As we struggled, his silver sword snapped. It hit the bone in my arm, shattered into pieces. And the wound wouldn't heal, not until I pulled out the shards, curled up in the corner, staring at what I'd done, at his body just laying there motionless." She tilted her head. "That's when I pulled out my teeth. I couldn't dare do it again. I never wanted to kill anyone. So I broke the shattered pieces of the blade and slid them into my mouth where the fangs had been." She lifted her lip, showing him the bloody socket, packed with powdered silver from the jar at her feet.
"I told you the truth. I don't know anything about being an elf; my father apparently was one, but I never knew him. And with the rest of my family dead, I wandered for a while until I stumbled into the Temple of Melitele. They took me in, no questions asked, and trained me to be a healer. I thought it was my chance, that maybe in time that I could make up for what I'd done. But it never felt like enough, even after all these years, moving from one place to the next, helping and moving on before other Witchers or Witch Hunters could find me."
She smiled, so sadly, as if her heart was breaking. She touched his face again. Eskel leaned against her fingers. Words, one hundred, a thousand different things to say fluttered through his head. He couldn't think of anything, nothing that made any sense as a reply.
"Then," she continued when he could not, "Then you fell in my door, half dead and I thought I was finally going to get my redemption. Finally, I would save a Witcher, save one of the hunters that I was forced to kill. And then, maybe I'd be free from my guilt. Maybe I could finally grieve for my family in peace."
She hummed in the back of her throat. "I thought you were brought to my door by fate. I didn't think...I didn't think it would be more than that. But there you were, not just some heartless killer. You weren't like him; you weren't at all like the stories said. You were just a man, with a heart just like mine. We were both monsters, and yet neither of us really were."
She brushed the knuckles of her other hand, still tightly held in a fist, over his cheekbone delicately.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Eskel crushed her against him. Words failed, but actions didn't. She fit into his embrace so perfectly. He didn't know what to do, what to say, but he knew how he felt. Maybe it was fate that brought him to her door. He understood what she said; he knew it was the truth by her broken, heartfelt voice. But how did they do this? How did a Witcher love a Vampire? How did a monster hunter love a monster?
"We can't help what we are," he managed, his mouth against her temple, her soft hair fluttering over his face. "I wish I knew what to do."
Maya lifted her head, leaned back to look at him. She slid her clenched hand up between them and opened her fist. In her palm were her teeth, four long sharp fangs that she'd pulled out of her own mouth, teeth that had cut her hand as she clutched them, pain she caused herself as penance for a crime she wasn't even guilty of.
"Just forgive me," she said.
He put his hand over hers, the fangs digging into his palm, wicked sharp and slicing into his skin even as he wrapped his fingers around hers. He felt his blood and hers, sticky and damp between their palms.
He nodded mutely and then he kissed her, offering her the only forgiveness he could offer, hoping, begging for hers in return.
