Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
Iwake up to him watching me.
The sheets are under me. The wards are humming through the walls. The room is dark and quiet. The bond carries his attention across the inches between us.
Maximus is awake. His eyes are already on mine.
I keep seeing his face in the sun. The way he looked at his own hands when the light fell across them, and nothing happened to his skin. That's what stays with me. That's what my sleeping brain couldn't have invented.
I place my hand on his chest. His hand finds mine. He doesn’t say anything for a long stretch. When he does, his voice is low.
“I haven’t felt morning light since I was forty years old.”
“I know.”
I press my palm flat over the crescent mark. It pulses. Constant.
“You weren’t dormant,” I say.
“No.”
His thumb moves across my knuckles. “I don’t know what to say about what happened.”
“Then don’t.” I find his face. Trace the line of his jaw with one finger. “We have time for it later.”
“We have time.” He says it back like he’s testing the shape of the words.
Neither of us moves for a while.
“I need to see my sister before we leave,” I say, sitting up.
“Okay.”
I bend down. Press my forehead to his for one breath. Then I get up to dress.
Simone has a legal pad. Yellow, college-ruled, the kind they sell in packs of three at the drugstore. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed with it balanced on one knee.
She looks up when I come in.
“Sit down,” she says. “I have questions.”
I sit on the edge of her bed. She flips to the third page, where a fresh list starts.
“The heartbeat thing.” She taps the pen against the pad. “I can hear them through walls now. For everyone that’s human in this wing. Dalton, the donors. Is that normal?”
“For us. Yeah.”
“How far does it go?”
“Depends. In the compound, I can pick up most of the building if I focus. Outside, it thins.” I lean back on my hands.
She writes something down.
“The feeding. How often. How much. Whether the hunger levels out or just gets easier to manage.”
“Levels out. Took me about a month before I stopped feeling like I could drain a room.”
I watch her write that down, the pen moving in quick efficient strokes. “You’re making a manual?”
“I’m making a record.” She doesn’t look up. “Nobody gave me one when I woke up. I’m writing the one I should have had.”
“There’s something else.” She sets the pen down. “The others are still there, Celeste. On those farms.” Her hand is still against the pad.
“I know.”
I don’t tell her we’re working on it. I don’t tell her about Erik’s wolves or Julian’s models or the three distribution hubs mapped in the conference room.
“When I’m ready,” she says, “I want in.”
“You’ll be in.”
“Not at the edges. Not getting updates on someone’s tablet.
I want to be in the room when you plan it.
I want to see the locations. I was inside that system, Celeste.
I know what it looks like from the floor.
” She picks up the pen again. “I’ve started writing down everything I remember.
Layout. Schedules. Guard rotations. The sounds the equipment made, because different machines have different sounds and I can match them to functions now that I know what I was hearing. ”
She flips the pad to show me the back section. The pages are dense. Tight handwriting, diagrams, arrows connecting boxes to boxes. A floor plan drawn from memory, with question marks in the rooms she couldn’t access.
“When you’re ready,” I say, “Julian’s going to want every page of that.”
“Julian can have a copy.” She flips the pad closed. “I’m keeping the original.”
I leave her room and take the corridor toward the east garden.
The compound is quiet. Everyone moving with purpose, and the guards at each junction nod me through.
Julian is at his console when I pass. He glances up from the screen.
"Found something in the historical records," he says. "Nothing urgent. I'll have it written up when you're back."
"Thanks."
"Safe travels."
Mira is sitting on the ground near the oaks in the east garden, her back against one of the trunks, hands in her lap.
I sit down across from her. The grass is damp beneath me, real and cool.
“You’re clenching your fists,” I say.
Her chin drops. She uncurls them. The nail marks on her palms are half-moons, deep enough to leave white indentations.
“He’s my grandfather.” She says it to her palms. “I didn’t even know I had a grandfather. And tomorrow I’m just supposed to walk in and meet him.”
“Then you walk in and meet him.”
She almost smiles. Doesn’t make it.
“Have you ever walked into a fight you weren’t sure you’d win?”
“Every single one.”
“What did you do?”
“Walked in anyway. Made sure my hands were open.” I nod at her fists, which have clenched again. “Open hands can catch things. Closed fists can only swing.”
She looks down. Opens them. Lays them flat on the grass, fingers spread, pressing into the dirt. Her shoulders drop.
“Thank you,” she says.
“No thanks needed.”
The western edge is where the compound ends and the tree line takes over. The canopy here blocks most of the floodlights. The grass grows longer. Seraphina’s reinforcements run deep in the soil, and the ground hums with a low frequency that travels up through the soles of my boots.
Atlanta glows on the horizon. The sky out here has more stars than I’ve seen since Iron Claw territory.
Maximus is already at the tree line.
He turns when I reach him.
“Walk with me,” he says.
We walk past the tree line, where the canopy closes over and the compound disappears behind us. He stops in a small clearing. Faces me.
“Do you know what today is?”
I don’t. I stopped tracking dates a long time ago.
“March fourteenth,” he says. “The night you were turned.”
I didn’t know that. The fight. Valentina. Waking up in a warehouse with a note and no memory of what happened between. Nobody ever told me the date.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve known it since the night I brought you in.”
“One year,” I say.
“One year.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small leather box, dark brown, worn at the corners like something that’s been carried close.
He opens the box. Two rings. Gold. Signet rings similar to the one I lost. The faces engraved with two letters worked together so tightly they read as one mark. His initial and mine. Styled into a single crest.
“I had them made,” he says. “My father’s ring carried his house.
His name. Generations of history on a single band.
” He looks at the box in his hands. “I want that ring back. I’ll take it off Konstantin’s hand myself.
But it won’t mean what it used to. This is my house now.
Ours. And I wanted it to have a crest that belongs to both of us. ”
He takes the smaller ring from the box. He slides it onto my finger.
I’ve worn his ring before. That one was his. This one is ours.
I take the second band and reach for his hand. His fingers are cool against mine as I work the gold into place, and the metal catches light that shouldn’t be there under this canopy.
His hand closes over mine, the ring pressing between our palms.
I step into him. His arms close around me and his chin settles on the top of my head and I press my face against his chest where the mark lives under his shirt.
After a while he lifts my hand and turns it over, runs his thumb across the gold on my finger.
Seraphina arrives through the trees without sound, Mira beside her. They’re not carrying anything. Seraphina said to bring nothing from the mortal world, and she said it in a voice that doesn’t leave room for negotiation.
Maximus straightens beside me.
Seraphina stops at the edge of the clearing. Tips her face toward the sky as if she’s measuring.
“I spent thirty days in the realm,” she says.
“Nine passed in the mortal world.” She turns to face us.
“Your time will not be the same. The Veil decides. You may return to find nine days have passed. You may return to find three months have passed. The realm knows why you’re coming, so that may work in your favor. Or, it may not.”
Seraphina faces the trees. The air between the trunks is unchanged, but the shift in the soil is palpable, layers peeling back, the deep magic in the ground pulling toward her. She raises one hand. The air shimmers, then parts, and a gap forms.
The world splits along the tree line. On the other side, the sky is a blue I’ve never seen, and the light doesn’t match anything I can name. Stone, green things, and a charge that lifts the hair on my arms.
Thessivane. The Veil is open, and the Fae realm is on the other side.
Seraphina steps to the side. She doesn’t gesture us forward. She waits.
No going back from this one.
I walk through first. The Veil closes around me, and for one suspended second, I am between worlds, neither here nor there, the compound behind me and the realm ahead. Then color hits me. Warmth. The ground under my feet is solid and alive and humming with a frequency I feel in my bones.
I’m through.
Thessivane.
The frequency in my bones rolls upward through my chest, my throat, the back of my mouth. My stomach turns over once, hard.
I make it three steps off the path before I'm on my knees in the grass, retching.