Chapter 34
Nyxiana
My father takes me out of the private wing, across the palace grounds, past the stable yard, the walled garden, to a building I haven’t set foot in since I was a child.
The Cathedral of Fallen Angels stands apart from the palace on its own square of black stone.
It’s older than the wing my parents live in and looks it.
Two of the window panels have been cracked since before I was born, so what light comes through them falls broken across the floor.
My mother walks with us as far as the doors. “I’ll be out here,” she says.
My father nods at her. Then takes me in and he door swings shut behind us with a thud. Inside it’s colder than the palace, a cold that’s been in the stone a long time and comes up through my boots inside of a minute.
The roof goes up further than the light reaches.
There are angels carved into the pillars along both sides, wings folded down against their backs, faces worn off by however many centuries have gone by since anybody last cared for this place.
Nobody keeps it. It’s swept, that’s all that’s done for it.
He stops in front of the wall of carved panels beside the altar.
There are seven of them, each one about the height of a man.
“I’ve meant to do this a dozen times,” he says. “I’ve put it off every one of them.”
“Why tonight?”
“Because I watched you tell your mother the truth an hour ago.” He keeps looking at the panels while he says it.
“You had a softer version ready. I saw you decide against it. I’ve been giving myself a softer version for a very long time, and I’d rather not be the only one in this family still doing it. ”
I stay quiet and let him get there.
“When I started courting your mother,” he says, “there was something in me set hard against it. I’ve always called it prejudice.
Everyone in this court carried it then. Dragons on one side, us on the other, every one of us raised on what the other lot were supposed to be.
” He puts two fingers on the edge of the nearest panel.
“I’ve never questioned that explanation once in my life.
I’m questioning it tonight, because whatever you’ve been chasing across four realms might be a better explanation than any I’ve been using. ”
I go to the panels before I go to any of that.
The carvings are worn to almost nothing at the top, deeper toward the base where fewer people could reach.
Figures, divided, bodies with pieces missing, a limb here, a whole half there, laid alongside other figures carrying exactly the piece the first one lacks.
Whoever cut this knew what they were showing.
Fragments. That’s all the stone hands over on its own.
I’ve read worse and gotten more. This one has been touched too much.
Every hand that ever rested here took a little of it away.
The ones doing it were praying, which means they were gentle, and they kept at it for hundreds of years.
I turn back to my father. “Say what you actually felt,” I say. “Not the word you’ve been using.”
He takes a while with that.
“Prejudice was never accurate,” he says. “It’s what I’ve called it for centuries because it was the only word anyone around me had.”
“And?”
“It was closer to sickness.” He says it slowly. “Every time I reached for her hand there was a cold clench under my ribs. Not doubt or fear of a scandal just my body telling me to stop, in a voice that came from the same place hunger comes from.” He looks at me for the first time since we came in.
“I reached anyway. Every time. It never got easier.”
I put my hand on the panel he’s been touching.
The resonance comes up out of the stone straight into my palm and it’s a good deal stronger than I braced for.
My arm locks at the elbow, knees give an inch before I catch them.
I keep my hand where it is through all of it, because taking it off would mean starting over, and I have no interest in doing this twice.
My father says my name. I put a hand up to keep him where he is until it settles enough to read.
I know this pattern, I’ve had it under my hand once already, in a sealed room under a fae castle, off a page in a script that fought me the whole way through.
It’s the same construction, laid down by the same hands, aimed at the same result.
“This is the reduction,” I say. “It’s the same work. They divided one people into many, and then they wrote something into each division to keep the divisions from closing back up.”
“You’ve seen this before.”
“In Doria.” My hand is still on the stone. “An instinct, put into the blood itself, so that it comes up out of a person like nature and never like an instruction.”
My father is quiet. “What does that mean for me?” he asks. “Specifically. Are you telling me my own history has an explanation I never had access to?”
I open my mouth. There’s an easier version standing right there, already put together but not quite true.
It would let him keep the account of himself he’s carried for centuries.
It would take me one sentence. I close my mouth.
A man stood in my doorway a few nights ago with his hands split open and found out I’d made exactly that decision on his behalf, for months, without once asking whether he wanted it made. I take my hand off the panel.
“What you felt was never prejudice,” I say.
“There’s an instinct written into every vampire alive.
It was put there on purpose, by the founders, to stop our blood from ever combining with anything outside itself.
It runs under everything. Most of our kind go their whole lives believing it’s their own good sense. ”
He holds completely still.
“You didn’t defy a custom,” I say. “You overcame something built into your own blood. Every time you reached for her hand you were going against something installed in you before you were born. You went against it anyway. Centuries of going against it, every time, without once knowing what you were pushing through.”
The stillness in him has gone right down through his hands.
“You’re certain.”
“Yes.”
“Nyxiana.”
“The resonance matched exactly.” I hold his eyes. “Not approximately. The same signature I read off the founders’ own record in Doria, down to the construction. There’s no room left in it for me to be wrong.”
He stays where he is for a long moment. Then puts his own hand on the panel, over the place where mine was, and leaves it there.
My left wrist starts to itch, slight, a prickle under the sleeve.
I brush at it without thinking about it.
It goes warm, then hot. The star on my wrist comes up bright enough to show straight through the fabric, the hard white line of it where the birthmark sits, throwing my own shadow up onto the panel in front of me.
I push my sleeve back. The light on my skin holds steady.
There’s no flicker, none of the guttering of a thing on its way out.
It sits on my wrist like it’s been waiting my entire life for somebody to say the right sentence in front of it.
The star is exactly as it has always been.
Five points, small, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, sitting where the two tendons run into the heel of my hand.
My mother used to kiss it. Three healers in two realms have looked at it, called it a birthmark and sent me home.
I stand there and look at it. Three marks on three women I love.
Nova, born with hers. Harper, who carried hers through her own death and came back still wearing it.
Kari, with hers burned into her right palm off a substrate older than any of us.
I’ve had my hands on all three of those marks.
They cracked open into a map of four realms in a lodge at Ash Hollow with the whole pack standing around me.
I’ve taken every one of those realms in order since.
A fourth corner on the map has been dark from the first day I opened it.
Dark, I told myself, because of distance, or interference, or because somebody had hidden that piece better than the rest. But it was never hidden.
It’s on my arm. It has been on my arm since the hour I was born.
I’ve spent this entire hunt reading everyone in every realm we walked into and here are two signatures I have never been able to read.
One of them is Valen’s. The other one is mine.
That’s exactly why I needed my father standing in a cold room telling me what it did to him to hold my mother’s hand.
The founders built their fourth point to find a particular outcome.
Not a treaty. Not an alliance. A person who came through the instinct anyway.
My father overcame it. My mother, angel and dragon both, met him in the middle.
A daughter. Not a son. That’s the piece they were watching for, because a daughter out of that pairing is the worst of everything they were trying to prevent, and here I am, walking around wearing their mark on my wrist since I was born without ever once asking what it was for.
My father comes over. He takes my hand and turns my wrist. He touches the mark with two fingers, careful, the same way he’d touch something hot. “Who else knows?”
“Nobody. It lit up four minutes ago.”
“How long have you been working toward this on your own?”
“Since the marks opened at Ash Hollow.”
“You came all the way here and asked me about a shard.” He keeps hold of my wrist. “This was done to you before you were born, it was done to your mother and me to get you. That makes it ours as much as yours. You’re not going to handle it by yourself.”
“I’ve handled everything by myself.”
“I’m aware,” he says letting go of my hand.
“I need to find your mother,” he says and leaves.
The door takes a while to shut. When it does, the sound goes up to the roof and comes back down.
After that there’s nothing in here but me, the broken red light on the floor, and the mark on my arm still throwing its own.
That’s when it comes for me - not the founders, or the map.
Him. It arrives all at once. I’m standing in the biggest room in my father’s realm with the last piece of it lit up on my skin and there is exactly one person alive I would give any of it up to if I could have him here with me.
He’s three realms away because of what I did and there’s no one alive who could explain it to me.
I want his hands, the weight of him beside me, close enough to lean into, so that I’m not the only living thing standing in the middle of this.