7. Erik

1000 YEARS AGO

We swam for miles until the sea stretched in every direction toward a dark, boundless horizon. We never grew tired, never faltered, never stopped.

“Andvari spoke of another land,” Miles called above the lapping waves, his golden head bobbing close by.

“Do you think he’ll guide us?” Clarice asked, but none of us answered.

I didn’t like the idea of fulfilling Andvari’s plans for us. I suspected there was more to his promises than he let on. But the others drank in the idea of us taking power somewhere else in the world as if we were no longer cursed, but blessed.

Leaving my homeland behind pained me, but the gods had strengthened the slayers beyond our wildest imaginings. They matched us now, and they had come close to killing more than one of us. My fear had been stoked and protectiveness had taken over. I would not see my family murdered, so running from them was our only choice. And every mile we put between us and them brought a calmness to my soul that I hoped meant we had made the right choice.

Would they follow us now? Even if they did, they would surely never find us. We had decided to swim as far as we could, making our way into an ocean that led to the unknown.

As days merged to weeks, time became as eternal as the maddening years I’d spent in solitude. When the sun blazed, we were forced to shelter beneath the waves, to swim deep in the infinite blue. It was a cold, barren place where little life stirred around us, the creatures of the deep keeping away as if they sensed a plague passing through their waters. Within the quiet, suffocating silence of the ocean, my mind almost cracked time and again.

Sometimes, I saw Andvari watching us beneath the waves. Other times, he whispered his encouragement or pointed out the way by creating a glowing path through the sea, urging us on when we were at our most desperate.

One day, impossibly, land grew visible in the distance, and hope found me once more, just when I’d thought all was lost. We must have been at sea for months and despite my immortal body never failing me, I still grew anxious to have my feet on dry land. My hunger was keen, but I had endured two hundred years without blood and nothing compared to the pain of that. The rest of my family would be on the verge of losing themselves to the thirst.

We doubled our efforts as a shore came into view and Clarice cried out her joy as we finally made it to a sandy beach. Dragging our drenched bodies from the sea, we strode onto our new land. I drank in the sight of the trees stretching away into the distance, and the twitter of birds sounded as dawn painted the cloudy sky in pastel pinks and copper tones. The sun crept above the horizon at our backs, promising to weaken us further as its rays slipped into the sky.

Fabian rubbed his throat, looking haggard, his hair a mess of clumping strands and his clothes half torn from his body by the harshest of waves we’d met out in the ocean. “What if there’re no humans here? How are we going to eat?”

I perched on a piece of driftwood in nothing but a sodden pair of trousers, wondering if he was right and we’d just isolated ourselves from blood for the foreseeable future. It would be ironic for me to end up starving again after I’d decided to try and make this hellish life work.

“There will be humans,” Miles sighed, running a hand into his wet hair.

We’d had this argument before, out in the water when our hope had been waning, and we had decided to keep going anyway. Andvari hadn’t answered our questions, only urging us onward. If he wanted us here, I was sure it was for a reason more than starvation.

A gull hopped closer to us on the shore, tilting its head as it observed us.

“Just what we need,” Fabian growled, stalking toward it and slashing his nails across his wrist. In a flash of movement, he caught the bird by the neck, prising its beak open and allowing the blood to flow inside.

The gull squawked as Fabian snapped its neck, but as he released it, the animal stretched its wings and rose into its undead life.

Fabian pointed to the sky. “Find humans. Summon me when you’ve located them.”

The bird took flight and I angled my head toward the brightening sky, my body beginning to weaken as the sunlight licked my skin. Andvari had sometimes given us a reprieve from the sun during our journey, drawing the clouds thick and low for us, so we hadn’t always had to swim under the waves during the daytime. But I wondered how far his kindness would extend now that we’d arrived.

We moved between a line of palm trees, sitting in the shade on the beach side by side, waiting in silence for the gull to bring news to Fabian of the humans. After I’d killed so many slayers in that monstrous battle, I knew there was little point in trying to avoid blood from now on. But I had come to a new decision along our journey here. I wouldn’t kill again unless I had to. If there was any chance my soul could still be saved, I had to try and live a better life. One with as little death in it as I could manage.

Fabian stood abruptly, his laughter filling the air as he saw something through the eyes of his newly-made Familiar. “A village is close! Come, let us go to them and sate our thirst.”

“Fabian,” I growled, rising too. “I will not attend another slaughter.”

“We don’t have to,” Clarice said keenly, pushing her damp locks from her neck and smiling at me. “We can pretend we are gods, have them worship us. They will give us blood willingly.”

“It always worked for me,” Miles said in agreement.

I didn’t like the idea of giving in to the ways of my brothers and sister, but I didn’t have much of a choice now. And anything was better than mercilessly killing the innocent. So all-powerful gods, we would be.