16. Chapter 16 #3
“Stronger. Faster. Bigger. Healing too fast. Hungry in ways I didn’t understand.
My wolf was still there, but there was vampire blood in me, too.
Lucia’s blood.” His hand slid from the back of her chair to her shoulder, thumb resting near the lace.
“I knew I would’ve died without her. Hell, I did die for a few minutes.
I also knew my choice had been taken from me. ”
My throat tightened.
I understood that sentence so violently it almost hurt.
Maksym did not move beside me.
Doc’s eyes met mine. Blue, steady, tired in a way humor could not entirely hide.
“That made me angry,” he said. “Not because I didn’t want to live. I did. God help me, I wanted to live. But wanting to live doesn’t mean you wake up grateful for every piece of what survival costs.”
No one spoke. Not even Lucia.
“I took that anger out where I shouldn’t have,” Doc continued.
“Not cruelly. I don’t think. But stubbornness can do damage without raising its voice.
I fought the bond. Fought the title. Fought being pulled into vampire politics.
Fought the part where everybody looked at us like we were either a miracle, an abomination, or a precedent they wanted killed before it complicated their paperwork. ”
“That sounds familiar,” I said quietly.
His smile was brief and humorless. “Yeah. Supernatural bureaucracy has teeth.”
Lucia’s gaze sharpened at some memory beyond my reach.
“The Council scrutinized them,” Maksym said, voice low. “Many objected to what Lucia had created.”
“Not created,” Lucia said.
Maksym inclined his head. “Saved.”
Her hand found Doc’s and held it.
He continued, easier now and worse for it.
“There was prejudice. From vampires who thought wolf blood diluted something sacred. From wolves who thought vampire blood contaminated the bond. From demons who were happy to exploit anything that weakened both sides. It fed a war already waiting for reasons.”
“The war that put my brother on the throne,” Lucia stated.
“Yes, by my father's appointment.”
He offered no further explanation, but it carried a field of bodies behind it.
Doc leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Before that ended, the previous vampire king and the demon king abducted me.”
The cheese in my mouth lost all flavor.
I set the plate down carefully.
Doc’s face stayed open, but something shuttered behind his eyes.
“They tortured me,” he said. “Partly for information. Partly because men like that enjoy finding out what new things can survive.”
Lucia went utterly still. Not calm. Still. The difference mattered.
Doc’s fingers closed around hers. “Kazimir, Lucia, and Archon came for me.”
“The Angel King,” I said, because apparently my life now required phrases like that to be clarified aloud.
Doc’s mouth twitched. “That’d be him. Tall. Golden. Makes you feel like you ought to stand up straighter even if you’re strapped to a table.”
A terrible laugh pressed at my throat. Not because it was funny. Because sometimes the mind rejected horror and reached for any available exit.
I did not let the laugh out. Not yet.
My hands had curled into fists on my knees. I looked at them and made myself open my fingers.
Femoral artery. No choice. Waking changed. Council scrutiny. Prejudice. War. Abduction. Torture. Rescue.
Not my story. Too close to mine.
Different cage. Different monsters. Same lesson repeated by the world with poor imagination: power loved to call its appetite law.
“I thought,” I said slowly, “that I was trying to sort creatures into categories.”
All eyes turned toward me. I hated that. I continued anyway.
“Human,” I said. “Vampire. Wolf. Demon. Witch. Angel. Monster. Victim. Perpetrator.” My gaze moved from Lucia to Doc to Maksym. “But that doesn’t work, does it?”
“No,” Lucia said.
I looked at Doc. “You suffered at the hands of supernaturals too.”
“Sure did.”
“And you are supernatural.”
“Unfortunately for everyone who liked me more predictable.”
I looked at Maksym, then back at the table. Blood wine in crystal. Cheese and figs. A room full of lethal beings discussing trauma like it were weather they had all survived from different directions.
“There are many evil players among you,” I said.
“Yes,” Maksym answered.
Honest. Always honest when it hurt most.
“I keep wondering if there are more of them that are bad than good.”
The question entered the room and changed the air.
Not dramatically. No thunder. No candle guttering. But it hung there, heavy as a verdict no one wanted to hear read aloud.
Lucia did not answer immediately. Doc looked down at his joined hands with hers.
Maksym’s silence beside me felt old enough to have buried several empires and still not found a satisfying response.
Were there enough good ones to matter?
The answer came from the doorway.
“Well, I sure as hell hope not.”
Devon walked in as if summoned by despair and offended by its manners.
She wore soft black leggings, an oversized pale sweater slipping off one shoulder, and thick socks that looked wildly inappropriate for a fallen angel living in a vampire king’s mansion.
His queen, by all accounts. Her white-blonde hair fell loose and unruly around her face, still slightly damp at the ends.
There was nothing arranged about her. Nothing courtly.
She crossed straight to the nearest open cushion, dropped onto it with a sigh that belonged to exhausted saints, and women who had had enough of everyone’s existential gloom, then leaned forward and tore a hunk of cheese off the charcuterie board with her fingers.
No plate. No knife.
Lucia’s eyebrows rose.
Devon stuffed the cheese into her mouth, chewed, and pointed at me like we were already in the middle of an argument.
“I mean, mathematically, I have no idea,” she said around the last of it, then swallowed. “But if evil outnumbered good by too much, I think creation would smell worse.”
I stared at her. Doc laughed first.
Lucia closed her eyes briefly as if praying for patience from a source seated in the room eating cheese incorrectly.
Maksym exhaled beside me, and the terrible weight in the room cracked cleanly down the center.
Devon reached for a grape. “Also, good people are often quieter because they are busy cleaning up messes evil people make, while evil people are giving speeches about destiny.”
“That,” I said, “is disturbingly consistent with my professional experience.”
“See?” She popped the grape into her mouth. “I am wise.”
“You are eating from a board prepared by Tilden with your fingers,” Lucia said.
Devon looked at the board.
Then toward the ceiling, as if Tilden might be concealed above us in judgment.
“I love you, Tilden,” she called.
From somewhere beyond the room, a voice answered with perfect composure, “And I you, my queen.”
I nearly choked.
Devon beamed. “He forgives me.”
“He enables you,” Lucia said.
“Same thing with better lighting.”
I laughed. Not fully yet. But enough that my chest remembered how.
Then another presence entered behind Devon.
Taras.