Tobias
The Forge Party in the Obsidian Caves is one of the worst possible places for someone carrying eight centuries of vampire memories.
Students cluster around a makeshift bar near the entrance, their laughter bouncing off the stone and multiplying until it sounds like a hundred voices instead of twenty.
A second-year boy tips his head back to drain his cup while the girl beside him sways to the music, her shoulder brushing his arm in a way that’s probably not accidental.
Salvatore loved gatherings like this one.
And just like that, warmth curls through my stomach, the laughter blurs, and the obsidian walls shimmer into marble and candlelight.
The string quartet in a Venetian ballroom shifts into a waltz, and a girl in green silk turns toward the music, her throat pale and perfect above her neckline.
Hunger coils in my stomach, burning through my veins, and then I’m closing the distance, leaning close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin as I tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the room.
When I guide her out to the terrace, she follows without hesitation.
She won’t scream. They never do. Not when I make it feel like seduction instead of slaughter.
No. Stop.
This isn’t real.
I twist the ring on my right hand and press the hidden spike into the pad of my thumb until blood wells up. It’s warm, and it’s mine, and in seconds, the ballroom dissolves back into volcanic glass and laughter bouncing off stone walls.
The memories belong to Salvatore. Salvatore is dead. I’m Tobias Cane. I’m twenty-five years old. I’m standing in an obsidian cave at Blaze Academy, here to help investigate the murder of one student and the disappearances of another student and a professor.
I take a few deep breaths, inhaling cheap alcohol and sulfuric rock, and count the stones in the nearest wall until the iron taste fades and my hands stop shaking.
It works. It always works.
With the memories appropriately compartmentalized, I look around the Forge Party to observe the students. That is, after all, why Helen wanted me here in the first place.
The girl near the entrance keeps touching her friend’s elbow, like she’s making sure the friend is still real.
The boy at the makeshift bar is laughing too loudly, trying to fill more space than his body allows.
A cluster of second-years near the back wall have their drinks raised and their mouths curved into smiles, but one girl keeps glancing at the tunnel entrances, and the boy beside her won’t stop tapping the outside of his glass.
Then, my eyes land on a flash of honey-blonde hair on the far side of the cave.
Avery Chambers is standing apart from the crowd with a drink in her hand, her body angled toward the wall like she’s trying to disappear into the stone. The floating flames cast shifting shadows across her face, and in the unsteady light, the hollows beneath her eyes look deep enough to drown in.
I know those hollows. I wore them for months after the attack, when the mirror showed me Salvatore’s hunger instead of my own face and sleep meant diving deeper into eight hundred years of nightmares I couldn’t wake up from.
I want to go to her. I want to comfort her, to help her, to know what it could feel like to connect with a person who might understand what it’s like to stand here and pretend to be normal when all you feel is the fracture that runs deep in your soul.
But I shouldn’t. There’s no way it will end well—it never does for me.
The last girl I tried to get close to asked me point-blank if I’d read her mind while she slept.
The one before that couldn’t touch me without flinching.
The one before that kissed me once and spent the rest of the evening with her arms crossed, as if keeping her body closed off would keep her thoughts safe, even though I hadn’t entered her mind once, not even for a second.
After enough of those conversations, you stop reaching, and you tell yourself that keeping people at a distance is a choice instead of a wound.
But I interviewed Avery a week ago, and her memories of the Halloween Ball were blurred and fragmented in all the ways too much alcohol makes them blurred and fragmented.
Technically, it made perfect sense. Except there’s a splinter in the back of my mind that won’t work itself loose, a quiet nagging that the picture was almost too tidy, and I can’t explain why.
That’s the reason I’ll speak to her. Not because the floating flames keep catching the gold flecks in her brown eyes, or because the loose strand of honey-blonde hair resting against her neck makes me want to brush it back.
No—figuring out what happened to her emberlinked partner is why I’m here.
It’s perfectly reasonable for me to want to follow up.
My feet are moving before I’ve fully decided to let them, and my heart beats faster with every step I take toward her.
On instinct, I twist the ring on my finger again. Not hard enough to draw blood, but enough that the spike against my skin reminds me to stay present.
She looks up when I’m about ten feet away, and I brace myself for her to flinch, or look away, or any of the telltale signs that she doesn’t want me near her.
Instead, relief floods her face, and I almost stop walking. Because girls don’t look at me like that. They don’t watch me cross a room like my presence is a comfort instead of a threat.
By the time I lean against the wall beside her, my hands are shaking, and when she gazes up at me with those gold-flecked eyes, every thought I had about professional follow-up questions dies a quiet death.
“You’re not celebrating,” I say, immediately wishing I’d come up with a better opening line.
Three years of Council interviews, and I approach the girl like I’m commenting on the weather.
She glances at the drink I’ve been holding like a prop for the past twenty minutes, and instead of the polite dismissal I’m bracing for, her mouth curves into a small smile.
“Aren’t Council members supposed to be above fraternizing with students at illegal parties?”
She’s teasing me.
My brain short-circuits for a half second, because girls don’t tease me. They excuse themselves, or they go quiet, or they ask the question I can always see forming behind their eyes—can you read my mind right now?—and the conversation dies before it starts.
“Probably,” I manage, the ease in my voice surprising me. “And aren’t worried emberlinked partners supposed to be resting in their rooms?”
Her smile vanishes, her gaze dropping to her drink like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.
The party noise fills the gap between us, and I run through a dozen ways to walk back what I said. None of them are any good, and the silence stretches until I’m convinced she’s about to excuse herself and leave me standing against this wall alone.
Then she speaks, so quietly I have to lean closer to hear her.
“The bond feels wrong.” She swallows, then keeps going. “It’s different than I expected it to feel if he was just far away.”
I should give her the official line.
Emberlink bonds behave unpredictably. We believe what you’re feeling right now is due to magical interference from the surrounding seas.
But my mouth won’t form the words, because she’s still here, and she’s not afraid of me, and the warmth of that is undoing me faster than any of Salvatore’s memories ever could.
“I know what it’s like to feel broken inside and have everyone tell you it’ll be fine,” I confess instead, and her eyes go soft in a way that makes my chest ache. “It doesn’t help. I know it doesn’t help.”
She looks at me then—really looks at me—and the impact of her attention is startling.
Most people’s gazes slide off me like water.
They see the Council’s haunted prodigy with centuries of trauma forced into his head, and they take a half step back without realizing they’re doing it.
But Avery Chambers is looking at me the way I look at fragmented memories—with the determination to see what’s actually there instead of what’s easiest to accept.
“The official explanation is that emberlink bonds can behave unpredictably in unique circumstances,” I continue, hating each word as I say it. “They’re blaming magical interference from the sea.”
“Do you think he’s coming back?” she asks without pausing to consider if what I’m saying could be correct.
The question is a blade, and she’s handing it to me, trusting me to hold it without cutting her.
I could lie.
Of course he’s coming back. The Council’s doing everything we can, and progress has already been made.
But she’s close enough that the warmth of her arm bleeds through my sleeve, and her eyes are searching mine with an openness that makes my ribs ache, and I can’t remember the last time someone stood this close to me without looking for the exit.
“I don’t know,” I admit, wishing I could give her a better answer. “I’m sorry. That’s not what you needed to hear.”
“No.” She stares down at her untouched drink, and I want to reach for her so badly it hurts. “But it’s more than anyone else has given me these past eight days.”
The firelight turns her hair to gold, and warmth pools at the base of my skull and spreads forward, slow and sweet, my vision softening at the edges.
A golden-haired girl in Naples is staring up at me with those same hopeful eyes, thanking me for listening when no one else would.
My hand settles on the small of her back as I tell her she deserves so much more than the loneliness she’s been carrying, and she’s melting into my chest because no one’s been this gentle with her in years, and I can taste her pulse before my mouth even reaches her throat.
“Tobias?” a voice cuts through the haze—Avery, soft and concerned—and I dig the spike of my ring into my thumb until blood wells up and Naples dissolves and Avery Chambers is reaching forward to touch my arm as if touching me is the most natural thing in the world.
The moment she makes contact, my brain stops working.
Because people don’t touch me. They keep their hands at their sides and a careful three feet of distance between us, as if one simple brush of skin is an invitation for me to enter their mind and dig out their deepest secrets.
But Avery’s hand is on my arm, warm through my sleeve, and she’s not flinching. She’s holding on, her brow creased with concern, her eyes searching my face like I’m the one who needs saving.
Salvatore goes quiet.
Not pressing, not prowling, not seeping through the cracks. He’s just quiet in a way he hasn’t been all night, as if Avery’s touch pushed him back behind his walls more effectively than the ring’s spike or the counting or three years of therapy ever have.
I stare at her fingers on my arm and try to breathe.
Then she pulls back so quickly I’m not sure she was ever there at all.
Of course she does. I don’t know why I expected anything else.
“People don’t usually thank me for disappointing them,” I say, attempting and probably failing to lighten the weight of whatever just passed between us.
“You didn’t disappoint me. You were honest.” Her eyes find mine again, steady and searching, and I have to remind myself to breathe. “Everyone else keeps telling me what they think I want to hear. You told me what you actually believe.”
The party noise swells around us, a drunken cheer erupting from near the bar, but it sounds muffled and distant, as if this pocket of the obsidian cave has decided to belong to the two of us and no one else.
“You said the bond feels wrong.” I choose each word carefully, aware that one wrong move could cause damage I can’t undo. “Have you told anyone else?”
“Who would I tell?” The bitterness in her voice catches me off guard, because nothing about Avery reads as bitter.
She reads as soft and steady—the kind of person who absorbs everyone else’s pain and forgets to mention her own.
“His sister’s barely holding it together.
His friends keep looking at me like I’m supposed to have answers.
And the Council...” She gestures vaguely at me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” My mouth quirks, because she’s right.
But the splinter in my mind is twisting deeper now, because she just confirmed what I suspected during her interview.
No one’s listening to her. No one’s taking her seriously.
She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that her bond feels wrong, and every single one of them has handed her the same useless answer and moved on.
They’re counting on her being dismissed as emotional, on the official explanation being tidy enough that no one looks twice.
They’re almost certainly right, because the Council is very good at not looking twice when looking twice would be inconvenient.
But I’m looking at her now, and her eyes are bright with unshed tears she’s too proud to let fall, and the next official line won’t come, because my mouth has apparently decided that honesty is more important than self-preservation tonight.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, and the words feel like stepping off a ledge, but I don’t care, because all I care about right now is continuing to be close to her. “I don’t think you’re imagining the wrongness you’re feeling.”
Her eyes go bright, and she leans closer, and the six inches between us feel like the only distance left in the world.
Because Salvatore hasn’t made a sound since she touched my arm.
And I don’t know what that means, but I do know this—standing beside Avery Chambers right now feels like the first safe place I’ve had in three years, and I never want this moment to end.