Bloodforged by Nathan Long Read Free Book Online Page B

clubs and gaffs in their hands.
    ‘No one stows away on my boat,’ growled their leader, a grizzled captain who held a cutlass and a lantern.
    ‘He’s a toff by the look of ’im,’ said the lookout. ‘Look at them boots.’
    ‘Hoy, it’s a lass!’ laughed another man.
    ‘Why so it is,’ said the captain, holding up his lantern as his crew surrounded her. ‘Hold still, girl. Let me have a look at you.’
    Ulrika backed towards the rail, shielding her face. So close, the smell of their blood overwhelmed her. She couldn’t bear it. She wanted to kill them all. She wanted to bathe in their blood. ‘Get away!’ she shouted. ‘Leave me be!’
    She tried to push through them, but two grabbed her arms. She snarled and lashed out, tearing at them. They fell back, shouting and clutching bloody wounds, and the rest backed away, staring and terrified.
    ‘Sigmar! She’s got fangs!’
    ‘She’s a fiend!’
    ‘Kill her!’
    Ulrika dropped into a crouch, howling, the beast urging her to attack – to slaughter and feast. But a tiny kernel of pride held her back. She would not be slave to her hunger! She would not let it choose the time or place or victim! Those were her decisions to make!
    The captain raised his cutlass. ‘All together, lads,’ he said. ‘In Sigmar’s name.’
    The men surged forwards, finding courage in their numbers, and Ulrika sprang, but not at them. Instead she leapt back on the rail and ran along it, weaving like a drunk in the throes of her weakness.
    ‘Keep back!’ she cried. ‘Put me ashore! Ashore!’
    A great, juddering jolt rocked the ship, slewing it sideways. The rocks! In the excitement, the steersman had forgotten them. Ulrika staggered and grabbed for a rope, but missed. She toppled from the rail and plunged into the swirling black water of the river.
    The pain as the waves closed over her head was worse than any she had felt since her rebirth – worse than the ache of blood hunger, worse than the blistering caress of the sun, worse than any wound she had ever taken, live or undead. A bubble of memory pushed through her panic as she fought to reach the surface again – Gabriella afraid of travelling in an open boat, saying that vampires feared water. She knew it from tales told around the fire in her youth as well, but in her frenzy to keep away from the boatmen she had forgotten it.
    It had been a fatal lapse. The water was killing her, and all her flailing wouldn’t save her. The current was flowing through her body as if she were a ghost, and dragging at her essence. Ulrika could feel it ripping, like a flag in a high wind being torn from a pole. Little translucent tatters of self frayed off and floated downstream, taking with them memories, emotions, joys and sorrows, and each one hurt like her arm being twisted off.
    She heard the men from the boat shouting as her head broke the waves again, but she couldn’t understand them. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. Then a rank, loamy scent came to her. Earth! The shore! She thrashed towards it, praising the gods that had abandoned her that she could still smell.
    The water made her clothes heavy and dragged her below the surface again. As a vampire, she had no need to breathe, but it wasn’t drowning that would kill her, it was the merciless current, trying to separate her essence from the undead body to which it unnaturally clung. It sucked at her like a leech, sucked the strength from her arms and the will from her heart. More pieces of self ripped away, taking faces and feelings with them. An insidious voice whispered that the pain would stop if she just gave up and died, but she knew it was a lie. Vampires clung to life so tenaciously because they knew the eternal torment that waited for them with the true death, and she was still too much of a coward to face that.
    She struggled on, though in her blindness she had no idea if she made any progress at all. Then her boots struck bottom. Had she sunk, or had the