The fire had no right to smell this warm.
Cain pressed his back against scorched stone, tasting smoke and old prayer in the air. Eighty years in this ruin. Eighty years of careful silence. Gone in an hour.
Flames licked the vaulted ceiling of what had once been a cathedral. Outside, snow fell through the collapsed roof. Inside, eight Church Knights moved through the smoke with mechanical patience. Holy silver swords. Blessed fire.
His youngest descendant, a girl he'd turned barely two decades ago, lay crumpled against the altar. Mira. Seventeen forever, unless she died right now. Blessed steel through her stomach. She was trying to hold herself together with fingers that kept slipping on her own blood. Her eyes found his.
*"Father. Go."*
Not an option. He did the math in a heartbeat: four knights closing from the left, four from the right, the commander holding the rear exit. Eight against one. But they were nervous—holy fire made vampires twitchy.
His left arm hung useless at his side. A silvered blade had taken it at the shoulder an hour ago. It would regrow—in three days, maybe four, if he had blood. He didn't. His supply was in the eastern cellar.
The eastern cellar was currently on fire.
The knights were twenty paces out. The front rank raised their swords—blessed fire crawling along the blades.
*Two options. Die here, regenerate into a corpse, and face whatever mercy the Church decides to show me. Or activate the disc and find out if three hundred years of theory were worth betting my unlife on.*
The front rank charged.
Cain moved.
Not toward the knights—toward Mira. He dropped beside her, and did the thing he had sworn never to do.
He drank.
Her blood hit his tongue like iron and old wine. The first taste was copper—sharp, bright. Then it deepened: the ghost of the wine she'd loved in life, a Hungarian red they'd shared at her turning. And beneath the taste, he felt *her*. Not her thoughts—she'd slipped past consciousness—but her *emotion*. A fierce, burning thing with no name: the love a parent bears a child, compressed and reversed, because she had been his creation first. She was telling him she understood. That she did not blame him. That her final gift was freely given.
He swallowed.
*Thank you. I'll make it count.*
Power flooded his dead nerves. His severed arm exploded with new flesh—muscle, bone, tendon, skin, all knitting in the space of three ragged breaths. The front-rank knights stumbled, swords raised against a target that was suddenly whole again.
And burning.
His eyes blazed crimson. His blood control, dormant for lack of fuel, roared awake.
"Boys," he said, for the first time in decades. "I have somewhere to be."
He released a wave of blood mist—not thick enough to blind, just enough to disrupt. Four knights flinched. Four knights oriented on the wrong vector for half a second.
Half a second was all he needed.
Cain hit the front rank like a battering ram. His right hand, transformed into a blade of condensed blood, took the first knight through the throat. The second swung wide—Cain was already past him. The third blade caught his shoulder, carving a line of screaming fire across his collarbone.
*Worth it.* The knight who cut him was now armless.
More knights behind. He didn't stop. Couldn't. He ran through them the way a river runs through a gate, blood blade singing.
Behind him, Van Helsing's voice cut through the chaos—calm, measured, giving orders. The commander wasn't chasing. He was repositioning. Cain didn't need to look back to know why: the portal chamber had one exit, and Van Helsing was going to seal it with Cain inside.
*Good. That was the plan.*
Cain hit the crypt stairs at full speed, vaulted the last twelve steps, and landed in the chamber he'd spent sixty years memorizing. Black jade disc on the altar. Characters glowing faintly.
He slammed his palm onto the disc.
The crypt wall cracked. A seam of absolute darkness split the stone, widening like a wound. Cold poured through—not winter-cold but void-cold, the temperature of places where nothing lived.
He looked back. One knight had followed him down—young, terrified, sword shaking. Cain met the man's eyes.
"Tell your commander I'll send a postcard."
He stepped backward into the dark.
---
On the other side of the rift, Van Helsing raised his hand.
The holy relic he carried was not a sword, not a chalice. It was a crystal shard, said to be a splinter from the Crown of Thorns, mounted in silver and gold. A dying Pope had pressed it into his palm decades ago, whispering that it could track any soul passing between worlds.
Van Helsing had never believed it worked. Until now.
The crystal blazed white. The old hunter's eyes widened—not with fear, but with sharp recognition.
"Commander?"
"It's crossing," Van Helsing said quietly. "Not dying. *Crossing*. Another realm."
The rift narrowed, compressing to a scar of darker darkness.
"Should we pursue?"
"Not tonight." The crystal's light faded. But the trace remained—burned into the crystal's lattice, a scent trail in a medium no mortal had names for. "The rift is closed. The trail will hold. Years. Perhaps decades."
He closed his fingers around the relic. His emerald eyes fixed on the sealed rift.
"We inform Rome. And when we understand what lies beyond this threshold—" A pause. "—we follow."
---
Cain fell.
Not down—*through*. Through colors that had no names, through sounds that existed in frequencies his dead ears couldn't process. His blood sang. His bones liquefied and reformed. Something ancient and vast brushed against his consciousness—a presence so old and cold that it made three centuries feel like an afternoon nap.
Then: impact. Not hard—wet. Warm and organic and *alive*.
Cain opened his eyes.
He was lying face-down in something viscous and red. Blood, but not human—thicker, sweeter, thrumming with an energy that made his blood origin *sing*. He was in some kind of spirit beast garden—cultivated plants in geometric patterns, broken formation arrays scattered across the ground.
*Not Europe. Not the 16th century. I have no idea where I am.*
His body was whole. Starving. The fall had burned every calorie Mira's blood had given him and then some.
Fifty meters northeast. A white fox. Young, low-grade. But its blood was rich with something he'd never tasted in three hundred years.
*Qi.*
The white fox's blood called to him with a Siren's pull. His vision narrowed. His thoughts turned to iron and hunger.
He was going to kill something.
---
*But as Cain crawled toward the fox, he didn't see the shadow detach itself from the bamboo behind him. A figure in grey daoist robes, watching. The figure's lips moved, forming words that made no sound:*
*"Blood Ancestor's heir. Finally."*
*Then the figure was gone, and the bamboo swayed as if no one had ever been there.*