Dhampirica

XII

THE FOLLOWING DAYS WERE the hardest in all of Yvanna's twenty-five years of life. The snowstorm had picked up its second wind, and even with the added layers of clothing, it was still miserably cold. Yvanna felt pathetically weak and constantly hungry. She took care to ration the cans of food, though Lord Dante insisted that she eat till she was full. If she acted so myopically, she would die from starvation. But at this rate, she felt as if she would die from hypothermia. She could not regulate her body heat as efficiently as usual, not while all her energy was dedicated to healing the injuries upon injuries she had sustained in the last couple of days.

After they had killed those humans and fled, the pair trekked miles through harsh snowy terrain until they found a cave to camp in for the night. Using a pair of matches he had procured from the cabin, Lord Dante lit a small fire upon a bundle of sticks. He made an effort to go hunting for meat, but when he returned empty handed, Yvanna could not bring herself to fault him. Even if he miraculously found a deer or a boar in this forsaken weather, he had no means of catching it.

She instead ravenously devoured half a can of spam and half a can of lentils, feeling guilty afterwards for having eaten more than she had planned to. She combined the food into one can and discarded the empty one. Afterwards, she flattened her jacket on the ground in front of the fire and went to lie down. She watched the flickering amber flames, trying to imagine she was warm in spite of it all. She wanted to sleep, but it was too cold and her ankle was throbbing. Across the fire, she could feel Lord Dante's eyes on her. A thought suddenly occurred to her.

"Why Luca Burdette?" she asked him. It was the name he had given to their kidnappers in lieu of his real one, but Yvanna was not sure it was entirely fake.

"Luciano Azarro — Luca — he's my best friend and cousin. And the Burdettes, well... they're friends of the family."

"I see." Yvanna remembered the first time she went to the Azarros' home, and how angry Lord Dante was after their visit. She decided to ask him why.

"I'm afraid it's not my place to tell," he replied, tossing a small stick into the fire. "Let me ask you something — when was the first time you killed someone?"

She paused. It was a strange question, mostly because she thought the answer seemed obvious. "The night we were kidnapped. When they attacked us."

His eyes were on the flames, his expression unreadable. "You're good at killing. I ask because you don't really seem affected by it."

Yvanna's mind lingered on his words for a moment. Though she had been trained for most of her life on how to defend and how to attack and how to kill, it was only very recently that she had first taken a life. She had not spared much thought to it since then, but only because they had been faced with urgent danger after danger. Thinking on it now, she did not feel that much different or like she had changed in any significant way. She did what she did in order to protect Lord Dante.

With that in mind, she said, "I suppose I haven't had much time to think about it."

"Makes sense."

A gust of wind blew into the cave, and Yvanna shivered. She wriggled closer to the fire to get warm, but any closer and she would singe her hair.

"Your lips are turning blue," he commented.

Yvanna wanted to deny it, but it would have been a weak attempt at a lie. "Nothing we can do about it," she managed to grit out between her chattering teeth.

He stood up, coming around the fire to sit beside her. "Here," he said, shrugging off his jacket and laying it over her.

"I don't need it," she said, shaking it off. In any case, she was already wearing thermal clothing, whilst he only had on a dress shirt and pants. It was just that a single turtleneck and slacks did next to nothing in these temperatures, and she needed to use the jacket as a barrier against the cold ground.