Where A Witch Goeth

Prologue

    April 1924

The vampire flicked a pebble toward the moonlit water, leaving his fate to the number of skips.

Evens, and he would do what he'd long avoided—travel east to Central Europe and repledge his fealty to Albescu, Liege Lord of the Blood-Cursed, as he was bound to do once each decade. Odds, he would go west to America to see his son. There was no lesser evil in the choice. Either act would bring him pain. But these last few years had been full of building pain, so... no matter.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

He sighed and strained his eyesight far out upon the loch. No—his vampire sight clearly discerned one more faint ring of ripples dancing in the moonlight.

Seven patterns of rippling rings meant seven skips.

West, then. To the land that had been his home much longer than his native Northern Ireland. He turned from the dark water and waded into the scrubby underbrush, ignoring the trail. He felt no great need to take a proper leave of the shores of Glen Gortin, where he'd played as a child. His human life here in the Sperrin Mountains was nearly a detached prelude.

But memory became an issue as a vampire aged. The old ones had holes. So he came here more from the necessity of memory reinforcement than nostalgia.

So far, the only thing he couldn't remember was his making as a vampire. But that was not uncommon. Few vampires actually remembered that traumatic time, though most were told the gruesome details of it by their maker as a right of monstrous passage. He was not so unfortunate in that way. Unlike most of his kind, he'd spent little time with his maker, because he had been able to quickly return to some semblance of the life he'd lived before he was turned.

That had only been possible because his time and place—the early eighteenth-century American frontier—was dark and wild and full of scary things long before he'd been changed into one.

Most people in this modern age no longer believed in monsters. Vampires. Werewolves. Black witches. Dark Fae. They were all real—and like humans, they had spread to all corners of the globe. When he settled in the backwoods of North Carolina two centuries ago, he knew nothing of monsters, but the land was so remote, so wild, he'd been worried about attack from the natives. He'd never seen the real threats coming, and he'd paid the price with his human life.

Now he was one of them—the Appalachian monsters—and he had been for one hundred eighty-nine years.

It didn't matter how far or wide he wandered, what wonders of the ancient or modern world he encountered, or how many times he returned to his native Ireland—the Appalachians always called him home eventually. He'd been remade in those blue ridges across the sea, and all that really mattered had happened to him there.

He was climbing above the lough now, and there was a purpose to his climbing. There was a boulder up this trail, similar to a great rock that sat atop a waterfall on his land back home in North Carolina. Dawn was coming on here, which meant it was just past midnight there. Though Evander hadn't been home in years, it didn't require much calculation to assess the moon rise over the ridge he'd called home for nearly two centuries. He pictured exactly how the moon shadows would be cast on the ground from the granite boulder atop his mountain in North Carolina.

Shadows were useful to him, especially when they were cast by formations of similar structure and substance. The night was his only realm, but he had mastered the magic of his own curse, and now the shadows were his chariot to ride where he willed.

As he walked into the dark shelter of the stone in Ireland, he willed himself to become night. No time passed at all as he passed from that shadow and into the shadow of the granite boulder atop the mountain in North Carolina.