Chapter 3: To the Crow Who Once Was a Canary (3) (1/3)

Under the moonlight Claire slowly opened her eyes.

Her heartbeat was still rapid.

She felt sweat sliding down her temples and soaking the pillow.

Carrying out a hunt aboard a moving train had been far more difficult than Claire had imagined.

The vampire injected with Demon Spinal Fluid had forced her to use her ability.

Vampires of the Vandro bloodline had always been renowned for their Swift Art, and Claire’s ability was particularly special.

When fully released, her movement speed could exceed a hundred times that of an ordinary person, to the point that her motion resembled instantaneous teleportation.

Yet using the ability placed an enormous burden on Claire’s body.

She could use it for a maximum of only thirteen seconds per day.

In the battle on the train she had released it for a full nine seconds, leaving her in a state of extreme weakness.

After draining every blood bag allocated by the Bureau in the safe house, she had slept straight through until midnight the following day.

Claire had just awakened from a long nightmare.

How many times had she had this dream?

She herself could no longer count.

The burning palace of twelve years ago and the black demons jetting steam remained nightmares she could not forget.

That hellish, searing memory had brought her countless moments of terror and despair.

Claire sat up and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to find a trace of warmth in the cold night.

She looked out the window.

Stars dotted the night sky, yet they could not illuminate the darkness within her heart.

Her thoughts, like a ship being towed, slowly crossed the river of time and returned to that distant yet familiar night twelve years earlier—when she had not yet lived under the name Claire.

***

Many years later, when Claire Vandro stood in the solemn hall of Cerberus Headquarters and swore her oath of allegiance, she would still remember that distant night when the great fire burned through her entire childhood.

The palace coup had been like a red-hot blade that stabbed without the slightest hesitation into the abdomen of her peaceful life.

As the blade turned, every beautiful thing rushed out one after another—her father’s smile, the side profile of her sister drawing a sword, the platinum spires dyed the color of honey by the setting sun, and the endless roses in the imperial gardens.

They rose lightly before her like ash scattered by the wind, then vanished.

She had once been the Second Princess of the Lucis Empire, Her Highness Flora.

The word “once” is the cruelest modifier in the world.

Herta Vandro had walked toward her out of the flames.

Many years later, when Claire recalled that scene, she always felt it had not been a rescue so much as the opening of a transaction: Fate, wearing a long black coat and military boots, had pinched out the flames on her body with cold fingers and then quietly named the price beside her ear.

The price of survival was that she would no longer be human.

The moment Herta’s fangs pierced the side of her neck, Flora felt something inside her shatter.

The doctrines and scriptures of the Holy Church whirled through her mind—vampires were beasts of the dark night, the glorious prey of knights; their very existence was a blasphemy against the gods.

And now she herself was that blasphemy.

The former imperial princess had become an object that the scriptures declared must be slain.

Herta brought her back to a castle in Cumberland on the Northern Continent.

It was an ancient building eroded year after year by moss and dark clouds; damp cold seeped between the bricks and stones, utterly different from the fireplaces that always burned and the flowers that always bloomed in the Lucis palace.

Flora was placed in a small room in the eastern wing of the castle, the windows sealed tightly by heavy velvet curtains.

She spent the first two years in that room.

Rather than spent, it would be more accurate to say she rotted there.

Every night when moonlight climbed onto the windowsill, Flora would involuntarily walk to the dressing mirror.

The girl in the mirror had skin so pale it was nearly transparent; her golden curls remained the same—the golden curls she had once been so proud of, like melted sunlight.

Yet those eyes had changed.

The pupils that had once been as clear as sapphires now emitted a faint red glow in the darkness, like two clusters of ghost fire that refused to die.

Those were not human eyes.

Those were the eyes of a beast.

She touched her own face on the glass with her fingers; the glass was ice-cold and biting.

She remembered the way her father had bent down and ruffled her hair with his large hand.

She remembered the smile her sister had turned to give her after splitting a wooden post with a single stroke on the training ground.

She remembered summer afternoons when the maids brought chilled juice and the fountain in the garden shattered into a thousand diamonds under the sun.

Those memories had temperature—warm, even scalding.

Yet at this moment her body was cold, and her heartbeat no longer as strong as before.

She could hear her own heart beating slowly and heavily in her chest, like an old clock barely maintaining its function.

Alive, yet not quite alive.

In those first two years Flora tried many times to die.

She tried cutting her wrists with a silver table knife and watched the black-red blood flow out like a snake.

She tried looking down from the highest tower of the castle, calculating whether the distance of the fall would be enough to destroy a vampire’s body.

But every time she was stopped by Herta.

Herta always appeared at the final moment, her speed so incredible that she was like a silent black lightning bolt, pulling Flora back from the windowsill or snatching the silver knife from her hand.

“Life is precious.”

“Even if you have become a vampire, you still have the right to live. I will teach you how to adapt to this world and how to find your place in it.”

Flora did not answer.

She simply leaned quietly against Herta’s chest like a young beast soaked through by rain.

She felt that the mere act of staying alive had already exhausted all her strength.

As for place or adaptation, those words passed through her ears as if through an empty room—touching nothing and leaving no echo.

A living dead.

Those two words described that period of time most accurately.

The turning point came on a certain night in the third year.

Herta pushed open the door of her room without knocking or speaking.

She simply walked to Flora’s desk, placed a newspaper on it, then stepped back two paces and stood quietly in the shadows.

It was a newspaper from a month earlier, from the imperial capital of the Lucis Empire.

The paper had yellowed slightly from the long journey; the scent of ink mixed with the salt of the sea—it had crossed the entire ocean to reach this Northern Continent castle.

The front-page headline was printed in solemn Gothic type—

Princess Phine and Princess Flora hold grand state funeral and memorial ceremony for the late emperor at the Platinum Tower.

Flora’s fingers stopped on the newspaper as if nailed in place.

Princess Flora.

She read the words three times, and each time she felt those characters burning on the page.

A face rose in her mind—not her own, but that of another girl.

The commoner girl who shared her exact face, the somewhat clumsy girl with whom she had switched identities on the night of the coup.

Claire.

Claire had actually survived.

Not only had she survived—she had lived in the palace under the identity of “Flora” for a full two years without anyone discovering the truth.

That Claire who always lagged half a beat behind, whose cheeks were always puffed because Flora had secretly stuffed her with too many pastries, had somehow accomplished something so incredible.

Flora’s eyes suddenly grew wet.

She could not clearly describe what she felt at that moment.

Shock, disbelief, fear, relief, heartache, pride… these emotions boiled like a pot of water inside her chest, colliding and surging, scalding hot the heart that had grown dull after she became a vampire.

Claire was the last attachment she still had in this world.

Under the afternoon sunlight of the summer palace, Flora had once taken Claire’s hand and said, “We look so much alike—it must be fate arranged by heaven.” 

Claire’s face had flushed and she had refused to speak, only to have Flora stuff a cream puff into her mouth.

That was the last warmth in her memory.

Like a small candle flame cupped in the palm, it had never been extinguished by the wind through two years of darkness.

Flora pressed the newspaper against her chest and raised her head.

Herta still stood in the shadows; moonlight illuminated only half of her face.

She said nothing, yet her eyes seemed to say: I have waited a long time for this moment.

“I want to return to the Southern Continent.”

Flora finally walked out of the room that had imprisoned her for two years, and also out of the stronger cage she had built for herself.

She stood before Herta, and for the first time a living expression appeared on her pale face.

Herta neither refused nor immediately agreed.

She gestured for Flora to sit before the fireplace, then told her of a world Flora had never understood before—the true situation of the vampires in the United Kingdom.

The First Supreme King had indeed generously promised citizenship to the vampire race, but a promise from a politician had a shorter shelf life than mackerel in a fish market.

In the decades that followed, law after law targeting alien races had been piled on layer upon layer, like endlessly adding locks to an already narrow door.

In the end, only vampires who obtained official posts in the Cerberus Bureau were eligible to receive the blood rations distributed by the state—the sole legal means by which they could continue living.

And for vampires without official status?

Only two roads lay before them.

The first: driven by hunger to attack humans, then be tracked, hunted, and beheaded by the hunters of the Fourth Agency of Cerberus, their heads placed in specimen jars and left to gather dust in the archives.

The second: voluntarily enter a sanatorium for “containment.” It sounded like recuperation, but in reality it meant being confined in a basement without sunlight, without freedom, without dignity—catalogued and numbered like cans on a shelf until eternal life became a punishment longer than death.

Herta’s tone remained calm throughout, as if she were merely reporting the weather while recounting these cruel facts.

“So,” Herta said at last, “you have only one path. Become an agent of the Cerberus Bureau, accumulate seniority, obtain the qualification to handle cases abroad, and then… it will become possible to return to the Southern Continent.”

The flames in the fireplace crackled, illuminating Flora’s face.

She remained silent for a long time—so long that Herta thought she would retreat once more into that dark room.

But Flora did not.

She raised her head; the leaping firelight was reflected in those red beast eyes.

“I know this path will be very difficult,” Flora said softly.

“But I still want to see her one more time.”

That single reason was already enough for her to walk any road.

From that day onward, a girl named Flora died, and another person rose from her ashes.

That night the moon was beautiful; its cold light fell into the castle washroom like a layer of silver silk spread across the floor.

Flora stood before the mirror, scissors in one hand, her long golden curls clutched in the other.

Those were her final mark.

Her mother had once said her golden hair was like the sunlight of March; her sister had always loved braiding it for her in the afternoons.

But now she had to cut them off with her own hands, as if severing the last thread connecting her to the past.

When the scissors closed they made a clear snip.

Golden strands fluttered down to the floor.

Then came the dye; deep black gradually swallowed the gold, like night swallowing dusk.

The girl in the mirror looked like a completely different person.

Short black hair, red beast eyes, a pale face—nothing remained of the little princess of the Lucis Empire who had once been cherished by the sun.

From this day forward she became Claire Vandro.

She chose that name.

Among all the names she could have chosen, she selected the one most familiar to her.