25. Bloom
BLOOM
NICO
The battlefield went on in every direction.
I walked through it because there was nowhere else to walk. The ground was churned mud and broken metal and things I didn't look at long enough to identify. Smoke hung in the air without moving and the silence had a weight to it that pressed against my ears like water.
Bodies lay in the mud. Dozens of them, then hundreds, stretching outward into the haze until the individual shapes blurred into a single dark stain across the field. Some wore armour. Some wore cloth. Most of them were face down, which was a mercy I understood without wanting to.
In the centre of it, a child.
He was small. Seven, maybe eight. Dark hair, bare feet, standing perfectly still in the mud between two fallen soldiers.
He was looking down at one body in particular, and his posture had the quality of someone who had been standing there for a very long time and intended to keep standing there for longer.
I moved closer. My feet made no sound in the mud.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
He didn't look up.
“Kid. Can you hear me?”
Nothing. He kept his eyes on the body at his feet. I came around to his side and crouched down and looked at what he was looking at.
The corpse was on its back. It wore leather and metal and cloth that had been expensive once and was ruined now, soaked through with mud and blood, and where its face should have been there was nothing. An absence, a smooth void where features should have existed.
My stomach dropped.
“Who is this?” I said.
The child turned his head and looked at me. His eyes were dark and they didn't belong in a face that young.
“You're waking up,” he said.
“What?”
“You're waking up. You need to go back now.” He looked down at the faceless body again. “Thank you for finding him. For saving him from himself.”
“I don't understand. Who is he? Who are you?”
The child didn't answer. The ground under my feet softened. I looked down and the mud was rising, climbing over my boots, my ankles, my shins, pulling with a slow deliberate hunger that had nothing frantic in it. It knew it had me. It was in no rush.
“Wait.” I reached for the child but my arms were heavy and the mud was at my waist and the field was dimming at the edges. “Wait, I need to—”
The ground swallowed me whole.
I came up gasping.
My body didn't know where it was. My lungs were pulling air like I'd been held underwater and my hands the fabric underneath them.
“Nico.”
I felt cold hands on my arms.
“Nico. You're in Blackthorne. You're in my room. It was a dream. You need to breathe.”
Draco. His face was the first thing that resolved out of the blur.
He was close enough that I could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that I'd never noticed before.
His hands held my arms firm enough to anchor me without trapping me.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed and his body was angled toward mine like a wall built to keep the panic from going any further.
I couldn't stop shaking. The sobs came without permission and I pressed my face into his chest because it was the coldest thing in the room and the cold cut through the heat of the panic like a blade through fog. His arms came around me and didn't say anything else.
I don't know how long it lasted. I pulled back and Draco's hand stayed at the base of my skull, grounding.
“Water,” he said.
He reached for the glass on the nightstand and held it while I drank because my hands were shaking too badly to manage it. The water was cold and tasted like nothing and I drank all of it.
“How long was I out?”
“Three days.”
“Fuck me…”
“Your body shut down after the threshold activation. The gift used more than you had available. Sleep was the repair mechanism.” His thumb moved against the back of my neck. “You're safe. Mateo and Rowan have been here the entire time.”
I looked around the room.
“You put me in your bed.”
“It was the most secure room in the house. The wards here are older and deeper than elsewhere in the manor.”
I pressed my palms against my eyes and breathed. The dream was still in my body and I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin.
“I want to shower,” I said.
“I'll draw the bath.”
“I can manage a—”
“Your body used more energy than it has ever produced in a single event. You're going to sit in hot water and let yourself recover. This is not a negotiation.”
I was too tired to fight him on it, which he knew, and which was the only reason it worked.
Draco ran the water and adjusted the temperature without asking.
He helped me undress with his careful hands. I stepped into the water and the heat went through me like a wave and I closed my eyes and let it hold me up because I didn't have the energy to hold myself.
Draco sat on the edge of the tub. He picked up a cloth and started washing my shoulders.
“My parents are mages,” I said.
His hand didn't pause. “Yes.”
“You knew?”
“I suspected before confirming.”
“They knew about about all of it, since before I was born. They're mages, Draco. They grew up in this world and they let me walk into it without telling me what I was.”
He moved the cloth down my arm, slow, methodical.
“My grandmother had a vision of me.” I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. “My father spent thirty years refusing to let anyone train me because he thought keeping me ignorant would keep me safe.”
“He was wrong about the method and correct about the instinct.”
“Don't do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make it reasonable. They lied to me for thirty years.”
“They failed you for thirty years. Those are different things, and the difference matters because one of them can be repaired.” Draco wrung the cloth and set it on the edge of the tub.
“Your parents are mages who chose to suppress their gifts and raise their children outside the community.
That choice was made from fear and it produced consequences they couldn't predict. But the fear itself was not irrational. Your blood is rare and your gift is dangerous and the people who hunt for both have been doing it for centuries. A mage who understood that and decided the safest option was invisibility was not acting from stupidity. They were acting from a limited set of choices and picking the one that they could live with.”
I sank lower into the water. “Remy's a mage too. But he never used it.”
“Using a gift requires believing you deserve to carry it. That belief was not available to him.”
I looked at Draco. His hand was resting on the edge of the tub, close to mine without touching it. He looked pale.
He was also sitting with his weight shifted to the left.
“What happened to you?” I asked
“I had business to attend to.”
“What happened?”
“It's handled.”
“Draco. You look like you lost a fight with a building and you're sitting crooked and you smell like silver. What happened?”
He looked at me for a moment. The composure held, then gave, just a fraction.
“I found Sabine. We had a conversation in the Crimson Room that ended with her driving a silver blade into my stomach before disappearing.”
“She stabbed you.”
“She did.”
“When?”
“Several hours after Mateo brought you back to Blackthorne.”
“You went after Sabine while I was out cold.”
“She sent the rogues to your parents' apartment. The response was not optional.”
I sat up in the bath. “Let me see.”
“Nico—”
“Let me see.”
He unbuttoned his shirt without hurry. The wound was on the left side of his abdomen. The edges were raw and discoloured, a dark bruising that spread outward from the entry point in veins of grey and black. His body was fighting it but the fight was slow and visible.
“You need to feed,” I said.
“I'm aware.”
“Feed from me.”
“No.”
“Draco—”
“Your blood pressure is still recovering. Feeding from you in this state would be reckless and I will not do it.”
“And walking around with a silver wound that isn't healing is what, responsible?”
“It is manageable.”
“It's killing you slowly and you're too stubborn to take what's right in front of you.”
“I am protecting you from a decision you're making because you feel guilty about what happened.”
“I don't feel guilty. I feel pissed off that a woman stabbed you because you went after her for attacking my family, and I'm looking at a wound that your body can't fix without blood, and I'm right here, and you're treating me like I'm made of glass.” I pulled myself up to the edge of the tub so my face was level with his.
“I really like you, Draco. Don't make me regret my feelings for you. You broody vampire. Come on and bite me, asshole.”
“You are infuriating,” he said.
“I know. Bite me.”
“You’re still healing.”
“And now I'm telling you to feed. My body, my blood, my choice. You don't get to decide what I can handle. Nobody gets to decide that for me ever again.”
I tilted my head and showed him my throat.
His eyes went dark. The pupil swallowed the iris and I watched him fight it for three more seconds before his hand came up and cradled the back of my neck and pulled me forward.
His mouth found my throat. The first pull of blood sent a warmth through my chest that expanded outward, and I felt it when his body started taking what it needed.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer and the water from the bath soaked through his open shirt and neither of us cared. His mouth worked against my throat and his hands gripped my waist and the feeding changed from need to want.
He lifted me out of the bath. Then he carried me to the bed with his mouth still at my throat and my legs wrapped around his waist.
The sheets were cold against my back and Draco was cold against my front and his mouth left my throat and found my mouth and I tasted copper and salt and the metallic edge of my own blood on his tongue.
I pulled his ruined shirt off his shoulders. The wound on his stomach was already half-closed, the silver retreating, fresh skin forming at the edges. My blood working through him, fixing what the silver had broken.
His hands mapped my body like he was checking inventory.