Forbidden Love (IronStrange)

1.3

Winter, The Year Of Our Lord 1617
Borders of Stark Lordship, Isle of Stone, a province of King Liam VII
Stephen

I prowl through charred tents and stone bodies. Vampires turn to stone if we are killed with crucifix silver, stone statues like you find in graveyards.

Oh, Lai, the horror I see!

So many, some that I knew, stone.

Some dust, killed by wooden darts and sticks.

Some still breathing, laying still, waiting for injuries to heal.

I kneel beside one such form, shaking his shoulder. "Loki, Loki, wake up. Loki, get up!"

The annoyed older boy sits up. "Stephen, I need to heal."

"We can do that when we find the other survivors. Come on." I pull the raven haired boy to his feet, watching him finger comb his hair in a princessy sort of way.

"Stephen, how do we know there are others? What if it's just us?"

"I saw the werewolf man a few tents back. He's alive. I was going to check on the Maximoffs, the Langs, the Wilsons, and then Wong. They were closer to the center of camp, so maybe they didn't get torched or shot at." Loki sighs dramatically and follows me as I go back to the body of a man curled on the ground.

"Clint. Clint. Wake up, Clint. The hunters are gone. Wake up. We're mostly safe." Clint sits up slowly.

"How the hell does one become 'mostly safe'? Either we're safe or we're not." He raises one eyebrow at me.

"Well. We're safe because they aren't currently hunting us, we're unsafe because Victor killed Lady Stark and the young lordship swore vengeance upon us. Are you hurt?" Clint swears under his breath worthy to make even a pirate blush.

"I wasn't in my wolf form when it happened, so a few splinters and some silver couldn't kill me. But Victor! Killed Lady Stark! We are in deep trouble. I'm guessing he's dead?"

"He ran into the woods after he killed her, when the young lordship tried to shoot him with those dart things. Father, Mother, and Donna are all dead." Clint looks Loki and I over.

"I'm sorry to hear that. You kids must be starving. Find a sheep or something and go to town. I'll check for other survivors." Loki immediately pounces on a small mouse dashing around the roots of a tree and bites down sharply.

I look around, finding a small wild dog a few tents away. I snap its neck cleanly first so it won't feel pain, then I latch onto the scruff of its neck and begin to draw the blood from it, sighing in contentment when I've drunk it dry. I throw the body into a campfire still smoking by the ruins of a wrecked tent. I hadn't fed in so long, and then smelling blood during the fight, and then healing, it's no wonder I was starving.

I go back to sit next to Loki, who has a steadily growing pile of animal carcasses next to him. He's older, and needs to feed a lot more frequently. I watch him bite into his sixth vole and sigh softly. He looks up and stops feeding for a minute, eyebrow raised.

"Something wrong, Stephen?"

"We lost so much last night and here we are, feeding like gluttons while the other's bodies lay around us. Shouldn't we set fire to the camps once all the survivors are out so the dead may rest in peace with Lai?"

"I suppose so, but it seems a waste of cloth and materials. We should collect some things before we go. I promise we'll send them off properly, Stephen. My question is where do we go from here?"

"Back to the mountains. Not the Stark territory mountains, the ones we just left. We'll hide out somewhere near Darkhall. Somewhere nobody would find us." Then I realize. "Like the cliffs! We could hide in the cliffs!" Loki doesn't match my enthusiasm.

"The cliffs are dangerous for pups like you and the Maximoffs and Lang. I don't, and I'm sure Clint doesn't, want to be a constant babysitter to four excited pups." Clint walks up to us, three or four people behind him.

"Correction. Three pups. Pietro Maximoff is dead. We have Wanda Maximoff, Scott Lang, Sam Wilson, and Wong. Victor appears to have found other survivors and led them away. He left a note saying to find them when they had reclaimed Darkhall, which probably will not happen. For now, Stephen is right. The cliffs are our best choice. We need to go, before they attack again. Take what you can find. Now!" There's a sense of urgency in Clint's voice, as if he knows someone is coming. Immediately, the six of us dash through camp, finding salvageable things as fast as we can.

I come back half an hour later with moss, cloth, and wooden boards—basics of a healer's trade. Wanda, who is younger than me, has a quiver of arrows and my family's old fletching table. Arrows and bows aren't very necessary to vampires, but we keep them in case our prey is faster than we are. Loki appears to have found every scrap of cloth that wasn't a tent and carries them in a shoulder bag. Scott, also younger than me, has a large pack on his back, one of the tent packs. How he found and packed up an entire, hopefully undamaged, tent on his own was a mystery. Sam has a satchel of mechanical parts and an unopened flask of aged blood that must be from an Elder's tent. Wong has a satchel of parchment and leather, the tools of a librarian. Clint is clearly unimpressed with our findings, but waves us towards the cliffs anyways.