Blackthorne

Blood of My Blood

NICO

The building had not changed.

It still had the rusted fire escape, the broken buzzer panel, and the yellow curtains on the second floor that had already looked old when I was twelve.

I stood on the sidewalk with Remy on one side and Mateo on the other, the wind cutting through my jacket, and wished I had come up with a better reason not to be there.

Remy kept his hands in his pockets. Mateo stayed a few steps back, close enough to be useful and far enough to pretend this was not exactly what it was.

I pressed the buzzer for 4B.

The intercom crackled before my mother’s voice came through, thin with static.

“Hello?”

“It’s Nico.”

There was a pause. Small, but I felt it.

Then the door buzzed open.

The stairwell smelled like Pine-Sol. I took the stairs two at a time, because if I slowed down, I would have too much room to think.

Marisol Venn opened the door before I knocked. She looked smaller than I remembered. Her hair was shorter, more grey than the last time, pulled back in a clip I recognised from the kitchen drawer of my childhood. She was wearing a cardigan I didn't know and holding the doorframe with both hands.

“Nico.”

“Mom.”

She looked past me to Remy, then up at Mateo. Way up. “And who is this?”

“Mateo,” I said. “He's with me.”

“Well, come in, all of you. Mateo, are you hungry? You look hungry. I have leftover arroz con pollo from last night, it won't take a minute to heat up.” She was already moving toward the kitchen, which was how my mother handled things she didn't know how to handle. She fed them.

“I'm okay, Mrs. Venn. Thank you.”

“Marisol. Please. Mrs. Venn makes me feel old.” She pulled open a cabinet. “Coffee at least. I won't take no.”

“Coffee would be great.” Mateo gave her the smile that worked on everyone, and Mom smiled back and it was the most normal thing that had happened to me in the recent days.

The apartment was different. New couch, still cheap but cleaner than anything they'd owned when I was growing up. New curtains. The kitchen had been painted a soft white that covered the nicotine stain my father's smoking had left above the stove for fifteen years.

Draco's money. I could smell it the way I could smell a fake antique.

Victor Venn sat at the kitchen table with his hands around a coffee mug. He had aged in a way that made him look tired. He looked up when I came in and neither of us spoke for a second.

“Dad.”

“Sit down, Nico.”

I didn't. Remy dropped into the chair across from him. Mateo took the mug Mom handed him and leaned against the counter, making himself as small as a man his size could manage.

“The apartment looks good,” I said.

“We're getting by.” Dad turned the mug in his hands.

“Getting by with Draco's money.”

The kitchen went quiet. Mom set a mug down in front of Remy and her hand shook on the handle.

“I need to know what it's going toward,” I said.

“Rent.” Dad looked at me. “Utilities. The kitchen. Remy's new phone. The rest is in a savings account at the credit union on Third. Your mother opened it.”

Mom nodded without looking up.

“Okay.”

Dad set the mug down. “You didn't come here for a financial audit, Nico.”

I looked at both of them. “I needed to see that you were alive.”

“We're alive,” he said.

“Good. Now tell me how much you know about Draco.” I pulled out the fourth chair and sat because my legs were starting to argue with my stubbornness.

Nobody answered. Mom busied herself with the sugar bowl. Remy studied the table. Dad looked at me and looked away.

“All of it,” Mom said.

The kettle on the stove ticked as it cooled. Mateo's eyes moved between my parents, reading them.

“The supernatural community, Nico. The vampires. The blood contracts. The territorial politics. The houses and the covens and the skinwalkers that walk around this city wearing human faces.” Dad set both hands flat on the table. “We've known your entire life.”

“How?”

He looked at Mom. Mom looked at her lap.

“Because we're part of it,” she said. “We come from mage families, Nico, families that have carried magic for generations. We grew up in it. We know what vampires are because we've lived alongside them since we were children.”

I stared at her.

“My mother was a mage,” she continued. “Your father's family carried the gift on his side too, different branch, weaker line, but it was there. We met through it. Our families knew each other through the community.”

“You're telling me you grew up in the supernatural world.”

“Yes.”

“And you said nothing.”

“Nico, we didn't know about Remy's debt until it was too late, we didn't know you'd gone to Blackthorne until after you'd already signed the—”

“You could have told me any one of the years I spent in this apartment wondering why Grandma made me salt the doorframes, and you chose to let me think she was a superstitious old woman losing her mind.”

Mom flinched. Dad's hands curled into fists on the table.

“Don't talk about your grandmother like that,” he said.

“Then tell me why she let me walk around blind when she had the same blood I do.”

“Because she had a vision.” Mom stood up from the table. “She saw what was coming for you and it terrified her so badly she came to this apartment shaking, Nico.”

“What did she see?”

“You.” Mom's voice cracked and she pressed her knuckles against her mouth and breathed through it.

Mateo set his coffee down.

“She wanted to train you. She wanted to start when you were eight. She had a whole plan for it, how she was going to teach you the threshold work, how she was going to introduce you to the community, which families would sponsor your education. She had it mapped out.” Dad said.

“And you said no.”

He looked at me and his eyes were wet. “Every year she asked and every year I said no because every year you were alive and you were normal and you didn't have a target on your back, and I told myself that was enough.”

“It wasn't enough.” I stood up. The chair scraped back hard enough to hit the wall behind me. “You are mages. You had magic your whole lives. You understood this world and what it could do to someone who didn't understand it, and you sent me out there with nothing.”

“We were trying to protect you—”

“You were trying to protect yourselves.” My voice was louder than I wanted it to be and I didn't bring it down.

“You were trying to pretend you were normal.

That's what this apartment was, wasn't it?

That's what the whole fucking performance was.

Two mages playing human in a walkup in Brooklyn, suppressing their gifts, hiding their bloodline, letting their mother's magic die with her because it was easier to pretend it didn't exist than to deal with what it meant.”

Mom was crying. She stood at the counter with both hands pressed against her mouth and her shoulders heaving, and I wanted to stop but the anger was a living thing in my chest and it had been building since the first night I'd slept in Blackthorne without knowing why the house could feel me breathing.

“That's not fair,” Dad said. His voice was raw.

“Fair? You want to talk about fair? I walked into a sentient house owned by a vampire lord who can smell what I am in my blood, and I didn't know what I was. I let him feed from my neck without understanding why the blood tasted different to him.”

Dad stood up. His chair went backward.

“You think I wasn't scared for you?” His voice filled the kitchen the way it used to fill it when I was a kid, and my body registered the sound before my brain did. He saw me flinch and the anger went out of him and he sat back down.

“I'm sorry,” he said. The words came out rough and broken.

My eyes were burning. I blinked and my face was wet and I hadn't given it permission to be.

“Every day.” Dad's voice was thick. “Every single day since Remy told us what happened, I have sat in this apartment and hated myself for what I did to this family.

For what I took from you. Your grandmother begged and I refused because I was a coward who couldn't handle his own power and decided his son shouldn't have to either. That is what happened. That is the truth and I am telling it to you now because you deserve to hear it from me and not from anyone else.”

Remy stood up. His chair scraped the linoleum.

“I knew too,” he said.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and looked at my brother.

“I'm a mage too, Nico. I've had the gift since I was a kid and I never used it because I watched what it did to this family. I thought if I ignored it long enough it would stop being true.”

“Did it?”

“No. It's still in my hands. Every time I get scared I can feel the pressure in my palms, like it wants to come out.” He looked at his open palms. “I never let it. I was too afraid of what I'd become if I did.”

I pressed my hand over my eyes. None of them thought I could handle the truth about what I was.

Mom put her face in her hands. Remy sat back down. Dad stared at the mug he hadn't touched in ten minutes.

“You should have told me.”

“I know.” Dad.

Nobody spoke for a while. The radiator ticked.

Mom got up and made more coffee because that was what she did when the world was falling apart, and Mateo accepted a second cup because he understood that letting her do this was a kindness, and I watched my mother pour coffee for a wolf shifter in the kitchen where my father used to slam cupboards.

Mom sat back down and she put her hand on mine and I let her. “Your grandmother loved you more than she loved being right. The vision ate her alive. She spent the rest of her life trying to find a way to change it. When she couldn't, she gave you the old rules instead.” She squeezed my hand.

“I'm still angry,” I said.

“Good.” Mom wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “You should be.”

Mateo's head came up.

He set the mug down and moved toward the front door with a smoothness that had nothing casual in it. His shoulders were changing, broadening, his spine resettling.

“Nico.” The warmth was gone from his voice. “We need to move.”

“What is it.”

“Rogues. Four of them. Coming up the stairwell.”

“Rogues?” Remy said.

“Unaligned vampires.” Mateo looked at me. “They shouldn't be in this neighbourhood. Someone sent them.”

A moment later, the front door came off its hinges.

They came through in a rush, four bodies moving with the jerky overcranked speed of vampires running on bad blood.

The first one through had its mouth open before it cleared the frame, fangs out, a snarl from deep in a chest that wasn't breathing because it didn't need to.

Mateo met it head-on.

The shift finished mid-impact, and the rogue's forward momentum became a problem for the living room wall instead. Plaster cracked. The new curtains came down.

The second rogue went left, toward the kitchen.

Mom raised her hands. The air between her palms went bright. It hit the rogue in the chest and staggered it back two steps. Its skin smoked where the magic touched it.

It didn't go down. Mom's hands were shaking. The brightness flickered.

Dad was beside her. He threw his own hands forward and the same brightness came off him, thinner, weaker.

Their combined magic held the rogue at the kitchen threshold but it was costing them.

The rogue was pushing through it step by step, feeding on whatever bad blood was driving it past the point where pain mattered.

Remy grabbed a chair and broke it across the rogue's back. It stumbled sideways into the refrigerator. Remy went in with his fists, knuckles connecting with the thing's jaw, and the rogue caught his arm on the backswing and threw him into the far wall.

I hit the rogue from the side. My fist connected with its temple and I felt bone give. It turned on me with those flat red eyes and I hit it again, same place, driving the fracture deeper.

It caught me by the throat and my feet left the floor.

In the living room, Mateo had two of them on the ground. The fourth had its teeth in his shoulder and he twisted and threw it off but the other two were getting up, the bad blood rebuilding what he'd broken.

Remy was on the floor. The rogue that had been at the kitchen was dragging him by the ankle toward the shattered doorframe. He was clawing at the linoleum. Mom was screaming. Dad tried to get between them and the rogue sent him into the counter without breaking stride.

Mateo went down. Two of them pinned his arms. The third went for his throat. His sound was a wolf's sound, deep and desperate. Blood pooled under him.

Remy stopped fighting. The rogue had him by the collar, lifting, and his eyes met mine across the room.

The one at my throat pulled me closer. I smelled the rot on its breath, the corrupted blood under its skin.

I screamed.

The wall behind the rogue holding Remy split open.

The plaster and brick and insulation parted along a seam that had never existed, and behind it was darkness that was deeper and older than the space between walls. It reached.

The rogue dropped Remy. It turned toward the opening and the darkness took it. One moment it was there and the next it was pulled through the gap the way water went through a drain.

The three on Mateo lifted their heads.

They fought it. I watched them try to hold their ground and I watched the wall open wider and I felt it in my blood, the old gift finding a door I needed badly enough to blow open.

The rogue at my throat lost its grip. It turned and the darkness closed around it and it was gone.

The last three went together. Torn off Mateo and drawn through the gap in the wall, and whatever was on the other side of it had been waiting a long time to be fed.

The wall closed. The seam sealed. The plaster smoothed. The bricks reformed. Three seconds and it was a wall again, solid and ordinary.

My knees went.

I heard Remy calling my name. I heard Mom screaming. I heard Mateo's breathing, ragged and wet but there.

The floor came up and I let it.

The last thing I heard was my father saying my name the way he used to say it when I was small. Before the cupboards. Before the shouting. Before everything that came between us and made it impossible to hear.

Then the dark came, and I went with it.