oh, worm?

Owen has caved in the castle crypt entrance – there's no holy books to be pilfered, no reason for the humans to venture, save to sate their own curiosity. Even the other vampires keep their distance, their rooms carved out from the catacomb tunnels. It's just him.

Almost.

By the third day's sunrise, he has settled with his back against the raised stone coffin, and the cold has seeped into and through him. Above, in the fresh air and the moonlight, there's only chaos and hatred to be found. But here?

Here, it is silent.

(But sometimes, when he's on the verge of something that is almost sleep, he still hears the thud.)

(Owen had not realised its importance – what it was – until he flew down to the base of the lake crypt. He hadn't seen the fall; he had only heard as he passed the smack of something slamming into stone and then hitting the shallow water below.)

(The sound of a body landing on stone floor is a strangely impersonal one. It's dull. Heavy. Felled trees fall with more spectacle, with more gravitas, while the weight of a human life holds little more resonance than a dropped sack of flour.)

Here, hidden away in the castle crypt, far from the humans and the vampires and their feud, it is silent.

It is silent, and he only has the passing hours and his memories for company.

(And there had been blood.)

(God, there had been so much blood, and it had seeped from the doctor in such a way that Owen hadn't known if it was the work of a frenzied, failing heart, or simply gravity working through a cooling corpse.)

(And maybe had he been a doctor – had their roles been reversed and it had been him bleeding out, broken, on a stone floor deep in the earth – then maybe he would have known the difference. Maybe he could have stopped the bleeding. Maybe he could have offered another solution, another cure.)

(But Owen is only a vampire, and so he had sunk his fangs into that neck once-bitten already, and drank.)

(He has never turned anyone before. All he had to go by was the grief-muffled memory of his last moments with Louis, and Goldsmith's violent turnings of the townsfolk.)

(And the instincts of a vampire are not to turn, they are to feed.)

It is a quirk of his bloodline, passed from sire to fledgling; the vampiric turning takes three days, while the Goldsmith lineage is nigh instant. A mercy, perhaps, that the doctor didn't wake in the remnants of his own death. A mercy, perhaps, that Owen had time to drag the corpse-cold body out of the lake crypt, a mercy that the forest was quiet and no soul saw him bring the doctor to the castle. A mercy, perhaps, that Owen has – had – three days to figure out what the hell he's going to do when Legundo wakes.

A mercy.

Perhaps.

It is silent.

Owen has never turned anyone before.