29. The Vampire, The Witch, and The Door #2
“I am going to correct an architectural error that has existed for millennia. The sealed dimensions contain power that was locked away by creatures who were afraid of it. Fear is not governance. Fear is the absence of governance. What I am doing tonight is opening a conversation that should have happened centuries ago.”
“That's a great pitch. Really compelling. Have you thought about going to therapy?”
His smile widened. “I appreciate your humour. Cassiel had the same quality. The ability to be irreverent in the face of things that should have terrified him.”
“I'm not Cassiel.”
“No. You're better. Cassiel was a door that didn't know how to open. You are a door that has already opened twice and survived.” He stepped over the pentagram's edge and into the circle, and my blood screamed.
“The threshold gift in your bloodline is the strongest I have encountered in a thousand years of searching. Your grandmother carried a whisper of it. Your parents carry traces. You carry the full power. You are the key I have been waiting for since before your bloodline existed.”
“Flattering. Really. You should put that on a card.”
He stopped in front of me. “I had been Draco's mentor for two centuries before that night, and I made the decision that the mortal he had chosen to love was a liability to the order I was trying to build.” He tilted his head.
“I mention this because I want you to understand that I am not sentimental about the connections people form. Cassiel was brave and he was clever and he was in my way, so I removed him. You are brave and you are clever and you are standing in the centre of a ritual that will do what I need it to do. The difference between you and Cassiel is that I need you alive for this to work.”
“For now.”
“After the seals are open and the dimensions are accessible, your usefulness will be a separate conversation.”
“Can't wait.”
He reached forward and took the collar of my shirt in his hand.
I went still.
“The Clavis requires direct contact between the threshold blood and the pentagram's channels. The blood needs to flow. The channels need to be fed. The mechanism was designed for this.”
He tore the shirt down the centre.
The fabric gave without resistance and the cold air of the chamber hit my skin and I clenched my jaw hard enough to hear my teeth creak.
He pulled the remains off my shoulders and let them fall.
Then he reached for the waistband and tore again, and the sound of the fabric ripping echoed off the stone walls.
“The Clavis,” Vane said, and Sabine moved.
She crossed the chamber and placed the artifact on the raised platform beside me. Then, Vane took a dagger from his suit jacket.
“Hold still,” he said. “This will be quick.”
The first cut was across my chest. The blade moved from my left collarbone to the base of my right ribcage in a diagonal that opened the skin cleanly and without hesitation. My blood ran down my stomach and onto the stone platform and into the grooves of the Clavis pattern.
Then after a while, the pentagram lit up. A deep red glow that came from the channels in the floor, my blood filling them, running along the carved lines toward the five points of the star. The stone warmed under my knees.
“Magnificent,” Vane said, watching the blood move. “Look at the velocity. The channels were designed to be fed slowly. Your blood is feeding them at three times the expected rate. The threshold gift is eager.”
He made the second cut. Down the left side of my ribcage, deeper than the first, and the pain was a bright hot wire that went from the wound to my spine.
I gasped and my hands clenched around the chains and the enchantment flared and the burning in my wrists compounded the burning in my chest and my vision went grey at the edges.
“The old texts described the process as a partnership between the threshold and the mechanism.” Vane made a third cut, across my stomach, and the blood ran freely now, filling the grooves faster than the stone could absorb it.
“The door and the key working in concert. The reality is less poetic. The door bleeds. The key turns. The seals break. What comes through is a matter of preparation, and I have been preparing for a very long time.”
A fourth cut. My right arm, from the elbow to the wrist, running parallel to the chain. The blood hit the platform and ran in two directions, feeding channels I couldn't see.
I was shaking. The cold and the blood loss and the pain and the enchantment were working together to dismantle my body's ability to hold itself upright, and I was leaning against the chains because my knees were no longer capable of supporting me without help.
“Draco built his city on the principle of control,” Vane said.
He was walking the edge of the pentagram now, watching the channels fill, monitoring the glow.
“Every creature in this city operating under the terms of a man who believed that his fear of loss was sufficient justification for limiting the power of everyone around him.” He stopped at the northern point, near Elara.
“I am opening the cage. I am letting in what was locked out. And when the entities come through and the old order burns, I will be the only creature in this city with the knowledge and the relationships and the power to build what comes next.”
“A god,” I said. My voice was thin. “You want to be a god.”
“I want to be necessary. In the world that exists after tonight, necessity and divinity will be difficult to distinguish.”
He stepped back from the pentagram. The channels were glowing brighter now, the blood reaching the outer edges of the room, disappearing into the walls.
The stone under my knees was warm and humming with a frequency that my threshold blood was responding to against my will, the gift reaching for the mechanism the way a hand reaches for a doorknob.
“Tell Draco,” Vane said, adjusting his cuffs, “that I said hello. When we finally get rid of you pests, I'd like him to know it was personal after all.” He turned to the guards. “Bring the witch.”
They unlocked Elara from the post and brought her to the edge of the pentagram. She stood at the northern point, her chains hanging loose at her sides, her old eyes moving across the glowing channels and the blood-fed grooves and the artifact sitting on the platform beside my ruined body.
“Activate the spell,” Vane said.
Elara looked at him. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were the colour of a river under cloud.
She winked.
“Nothing personal, kid,” she said. “This may hurt a little.”
She opened her mouth and the words that came out were in a language I had never heard and that my blood had always known, and the pentagram blazed, and the Clavis opened, and the pain that followed was the last thing I felt before the world tore itself in half.