29. The Vampire, The Witch, and The Door
THE VAMPIRE, THE WITCH, AND THE DOOR
NICO
Iwoke up in the dark with iron on my wrists and a headache that felt like someone had tried to open my skull and forgotten to close it.
The cage was small. I knew that before my eyes adjusted because my knees were pressed against the bars on one side and my back was against them on the other, and my arms were above my head, and they were chained. The chains were radiating a low steady heat that pulsed against the skin of my wrists.
I tested the give. My wrists shifted half an inch to the left and the heat spiked into a white burn that shot from my wrists to my elbows and I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
“Stay still.” A woman's voice said from somewhere to my right. “Those chains you're tied to are enchanted, and one wrong move will put you in a serious amount of hurt.”
I held still and the burning eased back to a pulse.
“Where are we?” I asked
“Underground. Somewhere in the city, I think, though they had the decency to bag my head before they brought me down, so I couldn't tell you which borough. The air tastes like old subway, if that helps.”
“Did Vane take you too?”
She laughed. “That obvious, is it?”
“I'm getting good at recognising the hospitality.”
“Aren't we all.” A pause. “The enchantment on yours is stronger than mine. He wants you functional but contained. Mine are more of a courtesy.”
“Who are you?”
She was quiet for a moment. The dripping water counted the seconds between the question and the answer.
“My name is Elara. I am a witch, though that word has meant different things in different centuries and I've stopped correcting people on the nuances. You would know me, if you knew the full story, as the woman who stood on a battlefield a very long time ago and told a grieving vampire that the soul he was mourning had not finished walking.”
The bloodstone pulsed against my chest and I was surprised that hey hadn't taken it.
I shifted in the cage, carefully, keeping my wrists as still as the slack allowed. “Why did Vane bring you here?”
“Because I am the only living person who knows the full binding language for threshold magic at the dimensional level.
The Clavis Inferni requires an activation phrase in the old tongue.
Marcellus has the artifact and he has you, but without someone who can speak the words, the key doesn't turn.” She paused.
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. I'm old. Getting captured was going to happen eventually. The question was always whether it would happen before or after I'd made the right arrangements.”
“What arrangements?”
She didn't answer that.
The silence sat between us for a while. The water dripped. The enchanted chains pulsed. My headache was settling into a persistent throb behind my left eye that I was choosing to interpret as survivable.
“There's something your vampire doesn't know,” she said.
I waited and listened.
“The prophecy I gave him on the battlefield. The one about the soul returning through debt and blood and a door.” Her chains clinked softly against the post. “It wasn't a prophecy.”
“What do you mean it wasn't a prophecy?”
“Cassiel came to me the night before the battle,” she said. “He sat on the floor of my tent in the dark, which took courage because I had a reputation for cursing anyone who interrupted my sleep. He told me he was going to die.”
“He knew?”
“He was threshold-blooded. He couldn't see the details, but he could feel the door opening ahead of him, and he knew which side of it he was going to end up on.” The dry amusement was gone from her voice.
“He asked me to bind his soul to Drakhar's bloodline.
To make it so that when the soul came back around, and he was certain it would because threshold souls don't extinguish, they cycle, it would find its way back to Draco. Through debt. Through blood. Through a door.”
“You bound his soul.”
“Indeed.”
“Does Draco know any of this?”
“No. Cassiel made me swear. He said Draco would see it as a cage, as someone making choices about his future without his consent, and Cassiel didn't want the last thing between them to be an argument about control.” Her chains shifted.
“He was right. Draco would have tried to undo it, and the undoing would have destroyed the soul's path back to him, and Cassiel would have died for nothing.”
“How did Cassiel convince you to do it?”
“He told me that if I refused, he would find another witch who would do it badly, and the soul would come back wrong, and Draco would spend eternity loving a someone that wasn't quite him.” She laughed, softer this time.
“He was like family to me. The closest thing I had to a son, if witches are allowed to say that about soldiers who sit on their tent floors in the middle of the night and ask them to break the rules of death.
I didn't want to do it. I did it because he was right, and because he was dying, and because the alternative was worse.”
I sat in the dark with that and let it settle.
“Cassiel sounds like he was a real piece of work.”
“He was magnificent. He was also insufferable. The two qualities were inseparable.” A warmth came into her voice that hadn't been there before.
“He used to argue with Draco about everything. Military strategy, the morality of feeding, whether the stars were fixed or moving. He once spent three hours convincing Draco that a particular breed of horse was smarter than most vampires, and the worst part was that he made a compelling case.”
“I argued with Draco about lamp placement last week.”
“Of course you did. The soul has a type.”
“The soul has terrible taste, is what the soul has. I could have reincarnated into someone with a nice, normal boyfriend. A librarian. An accountant. Instead, the soul looked at a thousand-year-old vampire who owns a sentient house and communicates exclusively through legal documents and thought, yes, that one, again.”
She was laughing now. It filled the dark space of the cell and bounced off the stone walls and for a few seconds the dripping water and the burning chains and the smell of old stone were just background noise.
“You are very much like him,” she said, when the laughter settled.
“I know. Everyone keeps telling me that. I'm starting a tally.”
“You are also very much not like him, which is the part that matters.” Her voice softened.
“Cassiel loved Draco with the conviction of a man who believed love could survive death.
You love Draco with the stubbornness of a man who doesn't care whether it can or not. He would have liked you. He would have been jealous of you, too, which he would have hated admitting.”
“Jealous of what?”
“You get to keep him. Cassiel always knew he wouldn't.”
“I'm going to keep him,” I said. “But I have to get out of this cage first.”
“Yes. You do.”
“Can you break the chains?”
“No. The enchantment is keyed to Marcellus's blood. Only he can release them, or someone carrying blood old enough to override the key.”
“So we're stuck.”
Elara was quiet. Then she made a sound that might have been a smile.
“Be patient,” she said.
I didn't know what that meant. But before I could ask, the door at the far end of the room opened and torchlight flooded in and two guards came through it.
One of them unlocked the cage. The other grabbed my chains at the base and yanked, and the enchantment flared and I clenched my teeth against the burn and let them drag me out.
They brought Elara too.
The corridor was long, stone, lit by torches at intervals that threw shadows too large for the flames that cast them. The air was colder here and the symbols on the walls were thicker, carved deeper, and my body was reacting to every one of them.
It opened into a chamber and a pentagram was cut into the floor.
It was large, twenty feet across and carved into the stone.
The lines were deep and dark and stained with what I am guessing was not paint, and the five points of the star extended outward into channels that ran to the edges of the room and disappeared into the walls.
At the centre of the pentagram, a raised platform of black stone, barely a foot high, with grooves cut into its surface in a pattern that I recognised from the book Blackthorne had shown me. The Clavis pattern. The key's cradle.
The guards dragged me to the center and locked my chains to iron rings set into the platform.
The enchantment connected to the pentagram's lines and the heat in my wrists doubled and spread, running down my arms and into my chest and my blood sang with it, the threshold gift recognising the architecture of the room and understanding, before I did, what it had been built to do.
They positioned Elara at the edge of the pentagram. Her chains were shorter and they locked her to a post that stood at the northern point of the star, outside the lines but close enough that I could see her face in the torchlight.
She looked at me. Her eyes were calm.
Then Vane walked into the chamber, and Sabine walked in behind him.
Vane was dressed in pale grey that had been chosen to look unthreatening. His eyes found me on the platform and he smiled.
Sabine stayed by the door.
Vane stopped at the edge of the pentagram. “I apologise for the accommodations. I would have preferred a more civilised introduction, but your boyfriend has made civilised introductions difficult.”
“My boyfriend is going to tear your spine out through your mouth.”
“Possibly. He has the temperament for it. But he would have to find us first, and this location was chosen for its inaccessibility.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
“I want you to understand that none of this is personal. What happens in this room tonight is not about you. It is not about Draco. It is about a door, and what lies behind it, and the failure of every governing body in the supernatural world to address the imbalance that has existed since the seals were placed.”
“You're going to open the nine hells because you think the system is unfair?”