The rain washed the blood away, but not the scent.
Nyra had been walking for hours. Time had melted into a gray haze of pain and exhaustion. Her bare feet were cut open, leaving red footprints that the rain erased instantly.
The bundle in her arms was quiet.
The baby, perhaps sensing the death that stalked them, had stopped crying.
Nyra looked up at the sky. The clouds were not natural. They were vortices of darkness spinning above her, giant eyes scanning the earth. Dracula wasn't merely sending hounds; he was moving the storm itself.
"He won't stop," Nyra whispered, her voice cracked and raw.
"As long as I'm with you, death will chase us."
She stopped atop a muddy hill.
Below, nestled among ancient trees and shielded from the full fury of the tempest, stood a large, old Western-style building with a faded blue roof. A wooden sign creaked in the wind at the gate:
Sky Blue House Orphanage.
A place of peace.
A human place.
Nyra held her child to her chest one last time. Her heart faltered. Leaving the baby behind felt like tearing her own heart from her body with bare hands. But keeping her would damn her.
She descended the hill, moving through shadows like a ghost.
At the heavy oak door, sheltered by the porch, Nyra knelt. She had nothing to leave, no money, no letter. Only a legacy of blood and the love of a dead father.
She pulled Eijiro's blue leather coat from her own shoulders, feeling his warmth one final time. Then she wrapped the baby in a simple gray blanket.
"You have no name yet," she whispered, looking into the child's dark eyes, Eijiro's eyes. "But they will give you one. Forget mine. Forget the blood. Live as a human. Be happy."
She kissed the baby's forehead.
One tear slid down Nyra's cheek, mixing with the rain on the child's skin.
Nyra stood.
She knocked on the door.
Three firm knocks.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
Footsteps sounded inside.
A light flickered on.
Nyra didn't wait. She slipped back into the forest, one hand over her mouth to smother the sob tearing up her throat.
The door opened. A kind-faced woman looked down, gasped, and scooped up the gray bundle. She peered into the storm, searching.
"Is someone out there?" she called.
No answer.
She stepped inside and shut the door, taking Sayuri to warmth.
Nyra, hidden behind a centuries-old oak, closed her eyes.
"Goodbye, my little lily."
Then she felt it.
The air pressure shifted.
The wind soured.
She turned away from the orphanage, running out into the open field, far enough that the coming battle would not wake the child.
In a muddy clearing, she stopped and waited.
Four shadows descended around her.
Not mindless beasts, no, these were tall figures clad in baroque black-and-red armor.
Vampiric Generals.
The elite of Dracula's Crimson Guard.
"End of the line, traitor," hissed the leader, unsheathing a long sword etched with necromantic runes. "You will return to your exile."
Nyra smiled.
Filthy, wounded, wrapped in rags, yet in that moment, she looked like a queen.
"Then come," she rasped, raising her bare fists as her claws extended one final time. "Because here, all you'll find is death."
They attacked.
Nyra fought like a cornered demon.
She dodged the first thrust, shattered the second general's arm with a spinning kick, tore out the third one's throat with her teeth.
But she was exhausted.
She had just given birth.
She had not eaten, not slept.
A cold iron chain cracked through the air and wrapped around her ankle. Another seized her wrist. Another, her neck.
Nyra was yanked down, dragged through the mud.
The leader stepped on her chest, shattering ribs already cracked. He leaned down, inhaling the air around her.
"Milk… and ashes," he growled. "Someone here has given birth."
Nyra spat blood in his pale face.
"You'll never find her."
The vampire wiped the blood with disgust.
"The Master will rip the truth from your mind piece by piece, even if it takes a thousand years. Take her."
They dragged her away.
As a dimensional rift opened, swallowing the clearing in crimson light, Nyra looked one last time toward the orphanage.
The lights were dark.
Everything was quiet.
She smiled as the void consumed her.
She had won.
The Underworld. Time Unknown.
There was no sun, only an eternal sky of pulsing veins and clouds of sulfur.
At the center of a valley of bones stood a tree.
Not a tree of wood, but of gray flesh and twisted muscle.
A Symbiotic Tree, built to drain and contain high-level prisoners.
Nyra was fused to it.
Her body was swallowed by thick, slimy roots up to her neck. Only her head and hands remained free, though her hands were pinned in thorned gauntlets that pierced her palms, holding her in a warped crucifixion.
Had she been there months? Years?
Time did not exist in torment.
Dracula had come many times.
He tried to invade her mind, crack her defenses, find the child's location, but he was still weakened from his battle with Lucy.
Nyra's mind had become a labyrinth of steel and hate.
She had locked Sayuri's memory in a vault so deep the Devil himself couldn't reach it.
Nyra lifted her head. Her silver hair was long and filthy, falling over a pale, gaunt face.
But her eyes…
Her blue eyes glowed with a nuclear intensity.
There was no madness in them.
Only focus.
"Mother…" she whispered, her voice dry as sandpaper. "Eijiro…"
She clenched her fists, ignoring the thorns ripping her flesh. The roots around her pulse, reacting to the surge of latent power radiating from her.
She wasn't merely imprisoned.
She was absorbing.
Learning the pain of the Underworld, drinking from the very darkness trying to kill her.
"They think this is a prison…" she said to the dead silence of hell. "But it's a cocoon."
A slow, terrible smile curved her cracked lips.
A smile worthy of someone seeking absolute power.
"I will get out of here…" she vowed, as the ground trembled faintly. "And when I do… I won't just kill you, Dracula. I'll take everything. I'll claim power. Power to protect. Power to destroy."
She looked at her pinned hands, imagining a katana in one and the Vampire King's head in the other.
"I need… more… power."
The darkness of the Underworld quivered.
The Wolf was not tamed.
She was merely waiting.
END OF "THE LOST YEARS"