Laurel's strength and speed meant that she was put to use as a herder, just like the moon beasts. Their job was to drive the werewolves into the kill zone, and it was one she excelled at. Sometimes she would bait them, letting them chase her to their doom. Other times, she'd daze and disorient them, drawing them ever closer to their deaths through what looked like the regular dance of one-on-one combat. There was a degree of physical thrill but werewolves were fearless, so she derived no sustenance from the activity. After a full day of exertion, she was famished. She tried to eat some of the food they offered her but she couldn't keep it down.

  Laurel excused herself and left the campfire to find a discreet place to vomit. There was nothing obviously wrong with the food and no one else had had a problem. She intuited that she had let herself become too monstrous as she expelled a bloody gush from her stomach and fell to her knees. 'Hey,' Tamsin called from behind her. Laurel had heard her footsteps. 'Are you okay?'

  'I'm just hungry. It's fine, I'll be fine.' Hopefully, a few of the group's members would have nightmares.

  'Can't you eat normal food?' Something about Tamsin's tone indicated that she already knew the answer.

  'I don't know. Not anymore, I guess.'

  'We should've let you drink from one of the werewolves.'

  'No, I'm fine,' she groaned, not sounding fine at all.

  'You could drink from me.'

  Laurel whipped her head around, immediately. Tamsin seemed unsure of herself but her neck was so pretty and her blood smelled so good. 'I really don't need to,' she tried to convince herself, 'I'll be fine.'

  'Laurel, I want to help.' The girl began to crane her neck, making herself irresistible.

  She pushed her up against the nearest tree and bit down hard. Every last bit of the nightmare within was screaming at her to drain the girl but she tore herself away after only a few seconds. She shivered with relief and the sensation distracted her from an arrow that caught her square in the chest. Recoiling, she pulled it out and snapped it before searching for the culprit. 'Get the hell away from my sister!' Taylor was wielding a heavy crossbow and had already fired a second arrow, which she batted away.

  'It's okay,' Tamsin croaked, 'I let her do it.' The girl looked weak and Laurel cursed herself for taking too much.

  'What the hell is wrong with you?!' He asked his sister, and she had to admit that it was something she also wanted to know.

  'I just wanted to help,' she said, but it sounded like a lie.

  Laurel raised her hands in surrender. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken advantage of her.'

  The man's face blazed with hatred but he lowered his crossbow nevertheless and asked her for help carrying Tamsin back to camp, which she did with ease. Thankfully, Matthias had all sorts of tinctures and tonics and informed them that the girl would be perfectly fine. 'I want her gone,' Taylor complained, with most of the others murmuring their agreement.

  Gordon gave the only counter. 'Your sister put herself in this situation, it doesn't change anything. Laurel is very useful to us.'

  John agreed with him immediately, settling the matter, 'Gordon's right. Trading away a dhampir over a drop of spilled blood would be foolish. Laurel, from now on, if you need to feed, just go hunting. You don't need our permission.'

  That was easier said than done but she nodded. Presumably, getting herself caught in a werewolf ambush was a bonus, since she'd likely be able to hold her own long enough them to show up and collect more pelts. Either way, she did as he said and left the camp that night. A lingering attachment to her old life prevented her from hunting game, so she went looking for nightmares. The werewolves had driven a lot of them off and eaten many others but there were still a few powerful monsters lurking in the darkest depths. She saw a set of eyes fixed on her and headed right to them. What she found when she got there was a hobgoblin, something else she'd only ever seen in pictures.

  It had the long pointed ears of a goblin but stood as tall as any man, wore scavenged armour atop a muscular frame and its skin was ashen and hard. She'd read that, out beyond the wall, hobgoblins were semi-civilised mockeries of humanity, and she wondered if this one was a scout from those lands. It raised its sword and squawked at her before charging. It stood no real chance and, out of some strange concern for its dignity, she finished the fight quickly by knocking its sword from its hand, closing the gap and biting. She sucked hard and drained its putrid blood within a minute. The taste was foul, almost as foul as ghoul's blood, but it nourished her nonetheless and she returned to camp entirely sated.

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  She brought back the sword as a thin kind of proof, though most of the camp had fallen asleep. 'Tamsin will be fit and healthy come dawn,' Matthias said as he polished some of his tools. 'Still, you should be more restrained. The girl's obsessed with vampires and likely believes you can give her something you can't.'

  'She wants to be accursed?' The idea troubled her.

  'Indeed. Lots of people are attracted to the idea of eternal youth, not to mention the sheer power of a vampire. If they could have all of the upsides and none of the downsides, like you, I think pretty much every hunter I've ever known would want it too.'

  All of the upsides and none of the downsides. She knew that was logically true but it seemed strange to her nonetheless. 'After my mother was turned, she was so feral, almost mindless. She'd have attacked me, even whilst I was a babe fresh from her womb.'

  Matthias nodded. 'That's the fate of most of the accursed. Trueborn vampires have a lot more self-possession but their evil nature is also usually inescapable.'

  'Usually?'

  'Dream creatures are strange. There's so much about them we still don't know. Some can be tamed, like brownies and even gremlins. Others can grow docile, either from lethargy or timidity. Then there are the civilised ones like elves. It's rumoured that elf cities will treat notable humans and dreamlings as honoured guests. They've also been known to trade with dreamling tribes and even make treaties. Given all of that, I tend to trust the rumours of those rare vampires that switch sides.'

  'What about moon beasts?'

  Matthias smiled at that. 'Ah, now that is the question. If we can pull benevolent creatures such as them from the nightmare world, then why not others?' It was a rhetorical question. 'You've probably the heard the stories of angels. I once met a man who claimed to have met one but he was half-mad. From time to time, I dare to imagine that we can win the Nightmare War that way. Humans have so many more good dreams than bad ones, the only trouble is that only the bad ones come to life.'

  'I hope that too,' Laurel said.

  'There are some that say you are that dream, you know? The dreamling tribes have legends of being founded by dhampirs. Dream hunters consider meeting one, even in passing, to be a sign of good fortune. This lot are not so superstitious but only because most of them have never been beyond the wall. Out there, people are forced to believe that the War can still be won.'

  'I wish I could meet one of my own kind,' she confessed, somewhat timidly.

  'Go beyond the wall,' he said, with real enthusiasm in his voice, 'you'll meet a dhampir eventually and so many more things besides. It's endless carnage and war and, for a creature like you, it may as well be heaven.' The promise of finding another dhampir seemed impossible to resist. 'Anyway, I need my sleep as much as any of my colleagues. If you're feeling up to it, I've got a few empty bottles.'

  'Of course,' she said and, within an hour, she filled them all up with fairy dust. During the following day's journey, she caught up to Tamsin. She was pleased to see the girl looking well but what Matthias had said was still weighing on her mind. 'Why did you really offer me your neck?'

  The girl didn't bother lying. 'I was hoping you'd infect me.'

  'Why?'

  'I suck at hunting and I'm afraid of getting old.'

  'But you wouldn't even be you. You'd die and a nightmare would take your place.'

  Tamsin shook her head, 'only at first. The longer an accursed vampire lives, the more of their old memories and personality returns. The human is still there, just under the surface. The rest of the group would just have to keep me in restraints and within a few years I'd be back to my old self.'

  'You've thought about this a lot.'

  'When my brother and I were little, we were obsessed with nightmares. He wanted to be a werewolf and I wanted to be a vampire. We would play pretend all the time and come up with ways to make it work. Our father encouraged us. He was a dreamling, so he believed that embracing the nightmare world was the real key to survival. Since he died, Taylor has turned his back on the idea but I still believe it would work.'

  'You'd be happy living the rest of your life in the dark?'

  Tamsin rolled her eyes at that, 'the rest of my immortal life? Yeah. I don't expect you to understand. You're a dhampir, you got to be, like, the coolest person alive from day one.'

  Laurel's brow furrowed. 'On day one, I watched my mother burn to ash.'

  'I'm sorry to hear that.' The girl looked abashed. 'All I'm saying is that you don't have to deal with the same fears as the rest of us.'

  That was true. 'Look, it's all irrelevant anyway. Dhampirs can't transmit the infection.'

  'Bummer.'

  Things were better between them once that was all out in the open but Laurel noticed that girl was generally less interested in following her around or getting close to her. That hurt a little because she'd dared to think that she'd found a replacement that could fill the hole Sarah had left in her heart.

  The culling continued in a predictable pattern over the next few days and nights and, eventually, without any other neck-biting incidents, she stopped receiving suspicious glances. The fifth morning was spent preparing her for a confrontation with the alpha, a werewolf almost twice as tall as any other. They had their own plans to deal with him but they predicted that he would still kill a few of them in the process. Now that they had a dhampir, however, they could outsource the work. They dressed her in leather armour with sharpened silver studs, gave her a silver sword alongside her dagger and lathered her skin in an elixir that would supposedly mask her scent.

  Finally, they planned a diversionary attack that would draw most of the alpha's pack away, leaving him with just his mate and a handful of werewolves too old to hunt. When she saw him, she realised that they had undersold his size. He was as tall as they'd said but also wide and muscled almost beyond belief. His teeth were almost too long to sit comfortably in his mouth, causing him to sit with his mouth open and drooling. His eyes were a brighter red than her master's had been and the predatory aura behind them took her as close to fear as she'd felt when her father's guards had dragged her into the sun.

  She knew better than to whisper to herself but, internally, she had to constantly ply herself with reassurances as she made her approach. It felt as though she was walking right into hell.