30. The Name I Kept
THE NAME I KEPT
DRACO
Iput my fist through the study wall. The plaster gave but the stone behind it didn't. My knuckles split across the surface and the blood that ran down the wall.
The desk went next. I swept the surface clean and the ledgers and the inkwells and the stack of territorial correspondence that Elias had arranged by priority went to the floor in a cascade of paper and glass.
The inkwell shattered. Black ink spread across the hardwood in a stain that Blackthorne would hold for decades.
The house groaned. A portrait on the far wall tilted itself two degrees to the left, which was Blackthorne's version of a disapproving look.
“I don't care,” I said.
The portrait tilted another degree.
“I don't care about the wall. I don't care about the desk. I don't care about the portrait or the ink or the stone or any of it. They took him from me because I was not fast enough.”
The portrait levelled itself eventually.
Helena sat in the chair by the fire. She had arrived forty minutes after Mateo's call. “Draco, breaking things is not going to find him.”
“Breaking things is the only action currently available to me, and I would prefer you not remove it from the list.”
Evie was on the couch with her legs crossed. She was angry and choosing not to show it. Remy sat beside her with his hands in his lap and his leg bouncing and he was trying to hold himself together by the margins.
In the corner of the study, Marisol knelt beside the couch where Mateo lay on his back with his shirt off and the silver damage visible across his ribs and shoulder.
Marisol's hands hovered above the wounds, palms down, and the light that came off them was soft and golden.
Healing magic. She had told me that healing was her specialisation within the mage discipline.
Mateo's colour was returning. The grey was receding from his skin and the silver veins were fading. Rowan was beside him on the floor, shirtless, the gash on his temple was closed but the silver in his blood was still working. He had refused treatment until Mateo was stable.
Victor stood at the window with his arms crossed and his jaw set.
“Evie. The soul-search can you try it again?” I turned and asked Evie.
“I've tried three times since you called me. The soul-search works within a range that depends on proximity and ward density. Either Nico is outside my range or the location is warded against phoenix sight, and given that Vane has had years to study my capabilities, I'm going to assume the latter.”
I looked at Helena. “Contract tracking?”
“The blood contract between you and Nico is technically inactive. The certified copy in my office provides a legal shield but not a sympathetic link. I cannot trace him through a document that has no active binding.”
I pressed my bleeding knuckles against the wall and breathed.
Nico was somewhere in this city, in a warded room, with Vane, and every mechanism I had built across a thousand years of accumulated power and infrastructure and paranoia was failing to find him.
I was diminished. The city was compromised. My territory was fractured. And Nico was gone.
“There may be another way,” Victor said.
The room turned to him.
“My mother knew old tracking methods, the kind that predate modern scrying and phoenix sight. Most of it I dismissed because I was dismissing everything she told me. But she taught us that when two people share blood, a connection forms between them. Not a bond in the supernatural sense. A path. The blood remembers the body it came from and the body it went to, and that memory persists in both directions.”
“Nico's blood is in my system and my blood is in his.” I said.
“Then the path exists. The problem is distance and wards. To follow a blood-path across a city and through heavy warding, you need power. More power than a standard tracking spell can produce.” He looked at me.
“My mother said the old method required the searcher to burn through something permanent.”
I understood what he was describing before he finished.
“The search needs fuel,” Victor continued. “My mother called it the furnace method. You pour what you've built into the search, and the search eats through it until it finds the target.”
“What kind of accumulated power are we talking about?” Helena said.
Victor looked at me. “That depends on what the vampire has spent centuries building.”
The room was quiet.
“My sun tolerance,” I said.
Victor's face shifted. He understood.
“If I use the furnace method and feed my sunlight resistance into the search, the accumulated tolerance burns away permanently. I cannot rebuild it. The process took a thousand years the first time. It would take another thousand to replicate, and I would be starting from nothing. After tonight I will be unable to tolerate direct sunlight for more than minutes. Daylight operations, daytime travel, exposure of any kind will become what it was when I was newly turned.” I looked at the room. “I will be bound to the dark again.”
“There has to be another way,” Amara said.
“There isn't. The sun tolerance is the largest reservoir of accumulated power I carry outside of the territorial wards. The wards are tied to Blackthorne and cannot be moved. The tolerance is portable, storable, and mine to spend.”
Mateo lifted his head from the couch and looked at me. “Do it.”
Rowan nodded once.
The connection between me and the stone was not physical. It was architectural. My blood lived in that chamber the way my blood lived in Blackthorne's foundation. I could feel it the same way I felt the house. A distant warmth. A second pulse.
I pressed my palms flat against the remains of the desk and closed my eyes.
I reached for the reservoir.
The sun tolerance lived in my blood the way colour lived in glass, infused so deeply into the structure that removing it meant changing the structure itself.
I found it the way I found all things in my own body, through the old awareness that a thousand years of inhabiting the same blood had given me, and I opened the channel between the reservoir and the blood inside the pendant.
The connection held. Across the city, through wards and stone and distance, the blood in the bloodstone's chamber answered the blood in my veins and the path between them opened.
The tolerance began to burn.
The bloodstone took what I gave it and converted it into reach. I felt the stone respond against Nico's chest, felt the pendant heat as my spent tolerance poured into it, felt the search expand outward from wherever Nico was.
My vision blurred. My knees softened. Centuries of daylight draining out of me in a sustained pour that had nothing gentle in it.
“Draco.” Amara's hand on my arm. “Your colour.”
“Not yet.”
“You're losing—”
“Not yet.”
The stone searched. It pushed through the layered defences that Vane had placed around his location.
It found him.
The connection snapped into place with a force that buckled my knees. I went down and Amara caught me.
“I have him,” I said. My voice was wrong. Thin. The voice of a man who had given away too much of himself and was operating on the remainder. “South. Underground. Beneath the old Dutch foundations south of Wall Street.”
Helena was already on her phone. Evie was on her feet. Victor was pulling Marisol up from where she knelt beside Mateo, and Marisol was protesting because the healing wasn't finished and Victor was telling her that it was finished enough.
We moved.
The car was in the drive. Rowan was behind the wheel before anyone told him to be, moving stiffly but moving, the silver metabolised enough for function if not for comfort. Mateo climbed in beside him. Amara took the front. Evie, Remy, Victor, and Marisol took the second vehicle.
We were three blocks from the financial district when the sky changed.
The crack appeared above lower Manhattan like a wound in the air.
The Clavis was active. Nico's blood was in the channels and the seal on the first dimension was breaking.
“The portal,” Amara said.
A second crack appeared beside the first. Then a third, further south, above the water.
The sky above the financial district was fracturing in a pattern that corresponded to the nine points of the dimensional seals, and through the cracks I could see movement.
Shapes pressing against the openings the way hands pressed against glass from the other side.
The first one came through.
It dropped from the crack in the sky and hit the street three blocks ahead of us with an impact that cratered the asphalt and sent two parked cars sliding sideways.
A second one came through. A third. The cracks were widening.
“Amara,” I said. “Mateo. Rowan.”
They looked at me.
“The civilians. Call the council. Call Greer. Call every pack and coven and house that answers. Get them off the streets and put everything that can fight between those things and the people who can't.”
“Draco, you can't go in alone.” Mateo's voice was strained.
“I'm not alone.” I looked at the second car behind us. “I have enough.”
“You don't.”
“The portals are opening and every second we spend discussing the composition of the team is a second his blood feeds the channels. Go.”
Mateo held my eyes for a long moment. Then he reached forward and gripped my shoulder hard.
“Bring him back,” he said.
“I intend to.”
They went. Amara coordinated with the second car, split the group, and the two wolves and the vampire peeled off toward the falling shapes and the screaming streets and the cracks in the sky that were still multiplying.
I transferred to the second car and Evie drove.
“The entrance will be warded,” Helena said from the back seat, her phone pressed to her ear, relaying information to someone I couldn't hear. “Vane's protections will include anti-vampire measures. The silver in your blood will interact with the ward threshold.”
“I'm aware.”
“You are at significantly reduced capacity.”
“I'm aware of that too.”
The car turned south. Above us, the cracks in the sky were spreading north.
A demon flew between two buildings and the buildings shook.
In the distance, sirens. Closer, the sound of Greer's wolves answering Amara's call, the howls rising from the eastern boroughs in a cascade that was not beautiful and was not meant to be.
Remy leaned forward from the back seat. “What do we do when we get there?”
“You stay behind me until I tell you otherwise.”
“And if you go down?”
“Then you use the gift you've been afraid of your entire life, and you find out what it can do.”
He sat back. His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs and held them there and the shaking didn't stop.
Victor put his hand on his son's shoulder.
Marisol reached forward and took Remy's wrist. The three of them sat in the back of the car, connected, fragile, mortal, and willing, and I looked at them and thought about Cassiel walking onto a battlefield because there were people behind him who couldn't fight for themselves.
The car stopped.
The entrance was a maintenance door in the foundation of a building that had been condemned. The wards on it were visible to me even in my diminished state, layers of anti-intrusion magic woven into the metal frame with the craftsmanship of someone who had been building wards for centuries.
I put my hand on the door but the wards pushed back.
I pushed through it.
The ward shattered and the door opened. The stairwell behind it descended into the dark and the smell that came up from it was old stone and stale air and blood.
Nico's blood.