Blood & Ruin (Crimson Crescent #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

He’s still fighting it.

Dawn is maybe ten minutes out and every other vampire has already dropped, the compound going silent, dormancy sweeping through all at once. Maximus hasn’t fallen yet.

He still goes dormant. That hasn’t changed. But dormancy’s hold on him is loosening, morning by morning. Something in the pull is different than it was.

He doesn’t know that I’m already past it. That dormancy can’t compel me anymore. It hasn’t been able to since before the last battle. I could go under if I was tired enough. But the compulsion is gone.

I’ll tell him tonight. Same thing I said to myself last night. Same thing I’ll probably say tomorrow.

His hand is at my throat, fingers resting on the chain, on the ring beneath. I put my hand over his and leave it there.

The bond is fully open between us. The heaviness settles into him, slower than it used to be. It used to take minutes. Now it takes longer every morning.

His breathing deepens. His fingers go slack against my throat.

I count to sixty after his hand goes still. Then I ease out from under his arm. Careful. Slow. His hand slides to the sheets. Nothing.

I dress in the dark. Boots. Hair back. I take one look back at him, marble-still, arm outstretched toward the empty space I left. I leave.

The service entrance off the south garden has a padlock I broke and hinges I oiled myself. The corridor beyond is unlit and smells like mildew and old stone, and I move through it fast, the route memorized. Utility passage, junction, two turns, back stairs.

I go up the stairs and out through the service door into the grounds.

The wards read something in my blood and part without resistance.

I’m through. The sun crests the tree line as I clear the service door.

It hits my face, and I let it, because I can.

I have until dusk, technically. But I need to be back in that bed before Maximus surfaces, so as far as he knows I never left.

The clearing is half a mile past the perimeter, past the gap where the creek bends south.

I’ve been coming here every morning for six days.

There’s a section of fallen oak where the creek bank collapsed, six feet of dead wood, bark peeling, center rotted through.

It’s my practice target by default. No training equipment.

No spotter. Just me and the wreckage and whatever I’m becoming.

I widen my stance and reach for it.

The power responds before I finish the thought. Pressure between my temples, then something pushing outward, and the oak section lifts off the ground, eye level, rotating slow. Six feet of dead wood hanging in the air like I asked it to.

Good. I reach further, past the surface, into the interior.

This is the part that still unsettles me.

The way it just goes, past bark into heartwood, past heartwood into the tight-packed rings underneath, pulling up information I didn’t ask for and can’t turn off.

Growth rings compacted where the droughts hit hard, looser where the rains came heavy.

A place near the left end where the wood knotted around old damage, the scar denser than everything surrounding it.

I already know where it will split.

Don’t. Not the point.

I set it down. Pick up a rock instead. Granite, fits in my palm. I reach in slowly, and the power does what it does now. Pushes past the surface and maps what’s inside. Quartz. Feldspar. A vein of mica running diagonally. The fault line at the narrow end. The exact angle that would take it apart.

I could split it right now. The power already knows how. I put it down instead.

Then a bird lands on the branch above me.

I don’t mean to reach for it. The power just goes, the same automatic reach it makes for anything nearby. Hollow bones. Heart beating fast. The weak point maps itself before I can think about it.

I yank hard. Pull back. The bird startles off the branch and is gone.

I sit down in the grass.

The bird is fine. You pulled back. It’s fine.

I don’t entirely believe that.

The list of things this power can find fault lines in keeps growing, and everyone I love is inside those walls, and I need to understand what it is before I put it in a room with them.

We made a promise. I’ve been breaking it since the battle ended and have been calling it something else. Research. Preparation.

That’s the clean version. The real version is that I don’t know what I’m becoming, and I’m afraid that when Maximus sees it clearly he’ll want to contain it.

Study it. Put a protocol around it. He protects what he loves by understanding it down to the bone, and I’ve watched him do it to every threat that’s crossed his territory, and I don’t want to become a threat he has to understand.

It sounds worse every dusk I come back inside and lie down beside him and fake it.

Six mornings, Celeste. Six.

I check the sky. The light has shifted.

Time to go.

I’m brushing the grass off my knees when I hear it.

Movement at the edge of the woods. Something prickles at the back of my neck, the same instinct that used to tell me when an opponent was about to move before they did.

I’m already turning when I hear the voice.

“Remarkable.”

Male. Calm. Unhurried.

My hands come up, and my power flares in every direction at once, a hard shove toward the voice.

Twenty feet away at the edge of the clearing, Konstantin stands with his weight on his back foot and his hands clasped behind him.

My telekinesis hits him. I feel it connect, everything I’ve built in six mornings in one hard push.

His coat shifts slightly as if it’s been ruffled by a light breeze. That’s all.

He’s in the sun. Full morning light on his face.

He isn’t burning.

Oh, shit. This is not good.

I’m already running the numbers.

Every vampire in the compound is dormant. Maximus is dormant. There is no one within range to hear me. They are all sealed behind blackout shutters and dead to the world until dusk.

The only person who knows I’m out here is standing twenty feet away with the sun on his face like it’s nothing.

Great odds, Celeste.

“You’ve been out here.” I keep my hands up. “How long?”

“Six mornings.” He tilts his head. “I wanted to understand what you were becoming.”

Six mornings. He’s been at the edge of the woods for every one of them.

I go for him.

Full force, everything I’ve built concentrated into the space between us. Wood splinters somewhere to my left. Rocks scatter. The air compresses.

He steps to the side. One clean movement.

My telekinesis hits the empty woods behind him, and a branch drops.

I’m already moving, but he’s faster. By enough that when I catch the motion, he’s already past my guard, and his hand catches the chain at my throat in one pull. The clasp gives. I grab for it, but he’s already two steps back, the necklace swinging from his fingers.

I stop.

No.

He’s two steps away with the ring in his hand.

He holds the ring up in the morning light. Turns it. The heavy gold. The stylized M. He works it off the chain and tosses the chain at my feet without looking at me. Then he slides the ring onto his finger.

I go for it.

I’m across the clearing before I finish the thought, hand out, power surging. He turns his wrist just enough. The ring catches the light and my fingers close on air.

His gaze settles on me.

“Sunwalker.” A pause. “I wasn’t certain the modification would fully express itself.

” He turns the ring against the light, then back to me.

“Any of those six mornings, I could have taken you. I want you to understand that. As a fact, not a threat.” He tilts his head.

“I chose to watch instead. I find I learn more that way.”

I think about Maximus waking. The ring gone. Me the reason.

My stomach turns.

“Give it back.”

“No.” He says it pleasantly, like I’ve asked him to return a pen. He turns toward the woods. “Six mornings. I wonder how many more it would have taken before you told him what you were doing.”

“The next time I see you,” I say, “I’ll kill you.”

He walks into the woods. “You’ll try,” he calls, without looking back. “And I’ll look forward to it.” He waves the hand with the ring before disappearing at vampire speed.

I stand in the clearing.

I crouch down and pick up the necklace from the grass.

I have a broken chain and a clearing full of proof that I couldn’t stop Konstantin from taking Maximus’s ring.

Okay.

My stomach drops. Deeper than anything I felt when I was human. Like something inside my chest just fell through the floor and kept going.

I have to go back in there and tell him his father’s ring is gone. On Konstantin’s finger. And I know exactly how it got there. Every decision that put it there, starting with the first time I slipped out of bed.

My hands are shaking.

I look at them like they belong to someone else.

The ring. On Konstantin’s finger.

He’s going to look at me like… He’s going to…

I don’t know what he’s going to do. I know his control. I know the stillness that settles over him when everything behind his eyes goes flat. I know his silence.

I don’t know what it looks like when I’m the one who did it.

Holy. Shit. What am I supposed to do now?

I close my fingers around the broken chain. Go. My knees unlock. I run.

Service entrance. Panel gap. Back stairs, storage corridor, our room.

He’s dormant. Still. Arm outstretched toward the empty space.

I lie down beside him with the chain in my pocket and Konstantin’s last words still turning in my head and I wait.

His hand closes around mine in the dark. His grip tightens. Just holds on.

“I rose earlier again,” he says.

“I noticed.”

A pause. His thumb traces my knuckles.

“I meant to ask you before, has Mira said anything to you?”

“Not since the night Seraphina left.” I shift closer. “She sits in the east garden. Doesn’t eat unless Dr. Dalton brings it to her.”

“She watched her mother get taken through a hole in the world and disappear.”

“I know.”

“I should talk to her.”

“She doesn’t want to talk. She wants her mother back.”

His thumb stops. Starts again.