2. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
The first breath is agony.
After a hundred years of nothing, the rush of existence tears through me. I’m smoke and hunger, pulling myself together from fragments scattered so long in the dark that I forgot what light looked like.
I remember now.
Because she’s here.
I feel her before I see her. The echo of her blood on my tongue, singing through the void, calling me home.
It tastes of summer storms and wild roses, and underneath that, purely and impossibly, of her.
The blood I was promised. I waited a century in a box for it, and centuries before that on a throne in another world, listening to prophets tell me she’d be worth it.
My bride.
The smoke coalesces. I force myself into form through will alone, bones remembering their shape, muscle knitting itself over a body I haven’t worn in a century. It hurts. The pain is distant, because I can see her now.
She stands frozen by the pedestal, one hand clutched to her chest where blood still wells from her finger, and she is…
Oh.
She’s nothing I imagined.
I pictured someone regal. A woman who would stride into this room with a queen’s bearing and know instantly what fate had written for us.
Instead I get a small human woman in strange blue trousers and a shirt that says I SURVIVED THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM across the chest, dark hair escaping from a knot atop her head, eyes the color of good whiskey gone wide with terror.
There’s a smudge of dust on her cheek. Her mouth is open in a shape that suggests screaming is imminent.
She’s the finest thing a century of darkness has ever opened onto.
The bond slams into me, a golden thread wrapping my chest and pulling tight until I can barely breathe. This is what the old texts described, and what I never truly believed until now. The bone-deep certainty that this terrified, magnificent woman is mine.
I drop to one knee before her. It’s not a choice. My body refuses to do anything else.
“You.” The word tears from my throat, rough with disuse and wonder. “Finally. You.”
She screams.
It’s a good scream. Full-bodied, committed, a scream that has clearly been in savings for years, cashed out all at once.
I wince, and I can’t stop staring at her.
At the flush spreading across her cheeks, fair skin gone pink, scattered with the tiny marks humans call freckles.
At the curl of dark hair trembling against her jaw.
She’s so alive. After a century of silence, her vitality is almost too much to bear.
“My queen,” I begin, reaching toward her, “you need not fear…”
She swings a fire poker at my head.
I don’t see where she acquired the fire poker. I wasn’t aware there was a fire poker in this room. But it connects with my temple with a crack that sends me sprawling, stars bursting across my vision.
“What the hell!” she shrieks, brandishing the poker in both hands. Her grip shakes and holds anyway, and the fierceness in those amber eyes puts a hook of admiration straight through my chest. “What, who, what are you?”
I push myself up onto one elbow and press a hand to my temple. It comes away bloody. My blood, dark and slow. I stare at it, fascinated. I’d forgotten what bleeding felt like.
“I am yours,” I tell her, because it’s the truest thing I know.
She hits me with the fire poker again.
“Stop.” I catch the third swing in my palm. It stings. Silver would have done real damage, but iron is merely unpleasant, and I’m too taken with the way she bares her teeth at me to care. “Please. If you would allow me to explain…”
“Explain?” Her voice has gone high and reedy. “Explain what? There was smoke, and then you were, you were inside the box, what is wrong with you, what is wrong with this house?”
“The box was my prison. Your blood set me free.” I rise slowly, keeping my movements careful.
She’s small. The top of her head would barely reach my shoulder, and she holds that poker as if fully prepared to beat me back into smoke with it.
I find this unreasonably charming. “I have waited a hundred years for you, my queen.”
“I’m not a queen! I’m a librarian!” She jabs the poker at me for emphasis. “I shelve books and argue with teenagers about late fees and I definitely, definitely do not have a smoke monster calling me royalty!”
“You are of the Thornwick line.” I take a step toward her. She takes a step back, and we continue this dance across the stone floor. “Your blood carries the covenant. I felt it the moment it touched the seal.”
“Stay back!”
I stop. She’s trembling now, the poker wavering, and I can smell the fear coming off her.
Underneath the fear and the tang of the blood still dripping from her finger, I can smell her.
Old books and lavender soap, and beneath it the warm, living scent of her skin, her pulse going rabbit-fast in her throat.
I want to bury my face in her neck and breathe her in until I forget the emptiness.
I want to taste her.
The hunger rises so fast it nearly drops me to my knees, hollow and clawing, ignored until this moment. I haven’t fed since before the box. I’m running on the fumes of her summoning blood and stubbornness, and she’s right here, bleeding, and I want.
I force the hunger down. Cage it. Lock it in the same place I kept my sanity through the dark.
She is my bride. I won’t take from her the way a beast takes.
“I will not harm you,” I say, rougher than I intend. “I swear it on my blood and my name.”
She bolts.
I didn’t anticipate this.
She drops the poker and runs, sprinting past me with a speed that surprises me, that absurd knot of hair bouncing with each stride. She’s out of the study before I can react, footsteps hammering away through the manor.
Fleeing. From me.
The hope goes out of me the way the candles went out in my cell, all at once. Through the long dark I nursed one foolish dream, that she would look at me and simply know, the way I knew her.
She ran.
I follow. Not quickly. I don’t chase her, don’t want to terrify her further, but I can’t stay in this room without her. The bond pulls, demanding I close the distance, and my legs carry me into the hallway before I’ve decided to move.
The manor has changed. Different wallpaper, shrouded furniture, dust on every surface. In my world I had palaces and a throne carved from nightstone. In this one I have a hallway that smells of a dead keeper’s lavender. I follow the sound of her heartbeat through the house.
She’s barricaded herself in the kitchen.
I can hear her on the other side of the door, furniture scraping across the floor, panting breaths, a string of profanity inventive enough to earn my respect. I press my palm flat against the wood and close my eyes, letting the sound of her wash over me.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Her heart. Racing with fear, yes. But strong. Alive. Here.
“Little bride.” I keep my voice gentle, though gentleness sits strangely after so long. “I mean you no harm. Please. Let me explain.”
“Go away!”
“I cannot.” True in more ways than she knows. “Your blood called me from the darkness, and now I am yours. Wherever you go, I must follow.”
A pause. Then, muffled by the door: “That’s incredibly creepy.”
“I understand how it might seem so.”
“It doesn’t seem creepy, it is creepy! You’re a, a…” A sound of pure frustration. “What are you? Actually? Because I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that ‘smoke monster who crawls out of a box’ is never good news!”
I lean my forehead against the door. The wood is cool, and she’s on the other side of it, closer than any living soul has been to me in a century.
“I am a vampire.” The human word sits oddly on my tongue. “A king, in the world I was taken from. Here, merely a prisoner. Bound to this manor by a curse I cannot break alone.”
Silence. Then: “A vampire.”
“Yes.”
“Like… fangs? Blood drinking? Turns into a bat?”
“I have fangs. I require blood to survive. I have never turned into a bat and I find the suggestion vaguely insulting.”
A hysterical little laugh filters through the wood. “Oh my god. My grandmother kept a vampire in a box. My grandmother had a vampire in her creepy secret room. That’s so much worse than the taxidermy collection I was expecting.”
“Your grandmother was my keeper. She maintained the binding. Kept me safe while I slept.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“I do not know what that is, but I suspect they cannot help you.”
“It’s people with guns who arrest criminals!”
“I am not a criminal. I am your betrothed.”
The silence that follows is so complete I briefly wonder if she’s expired from shock.
“My what?”
“Your betrothed. Your fated mate. The covenant was sealed before you were born. Your blood knows mine. We are bound, little bride, by prophecy and a very long wait.”
“We are not, I am not…” She splutters at full royal volume. “I don’t even know your name!”
“Valerian.” I press my palm more firmly against the door, willing her to feel me there. “My name is Valerian, and I have waited a hundred years for you, my queen.”
Another beat of silence.
“Yeah, well, I’ve waited on a pizza. They bring it to your door, and you complain if it takes long, so.”
I blink at the door. “I do not know what a pizza is.”
“That’s not the point! The point is you can’t just appear out of a box and tell someone they’re your fated whatever! That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!”
“How does it work, then?” I’m genuinely curious. A century in a box and a lifetime in another world have left me with gaps. “Tell me the proper protocol and I will follow it.”
“The proper protocol is you don’t materialize from smoke and call strangers your bride!”
“But you are not a stranger.” I flatten both palms against the wood. “I knew you before you were born. The shape of you, written into my blood. And now you are here, and you are more than I imagined, and I…”
I stop. The hunger claws again, deeper this time, and I have to breathe through it.
“You what?” Her voice is smaller now. Less angry. Almost curious.
“I am weak,” I admit, because she deserves honesty.
“I have not fed since before my imprisonment. The curse sustained me in sleep, but awake…” I press my forehead to the door.
“I am starving, little bride. Starving, and bound to the seal that held me, wherever the seal sits. Your grandmother carried my whole cage here in a box, and now this house is its walls. You are my only hope of freedom.”
The silence stretches. Her breathing slows on the other side, deliberate, effortful, thinking pushing panic off the wheel.
“Why me?” she asks finally. “I’m nobody. I’m a librarian who can’t even keep a succulent alive. Why would there be a prophecy about me?”
“Your bloodline made a pact with my world long ago. When your blood touched the seal…”
“I didn’t mean to bleed on it! The clasp cut me!”
“The covenant does not weigh intent. It weighs blood.” I allow myself a smile she can’t see. “Yours is powerful. A single drop was enough to reach me in the dark and call me home.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Calling you what?”
“Little bride. It’s weird.”
“What shall I call you, then?”
A pause. “Posy. My name is Posy.”
Posy. The name settles into place as if a lock has been waiting for it. “Posy. It suits you.”
“It’s a flower name. My mom was going through a phase.
” She sounds almost embarrassed. “It’s short for, actually, never mind.
Not important. What’s important is that you’re apparently a vampire who’s been living in a box in my dead grandmother’s creepy secret room, and you think I’m your prophesied bride, and this is insane. This is completely insane.”
“I understand your distress.”
“Do you? Really? Because I came here to clean out an old house and sell it, not to acquire a vampire husband!”
“I am not yet your husband.” Warmth blooms behind my ribs where the word lands. “Merely your betrothed. The ceremony would need to be…”
“There’s not going to be a ceremony!”
“As you wish.” I won’t push. She needs time, and I know how to wait. “But I cannot leave you, Posy. The bond will not allow it. Wherever you are, I must be.”
“That’s…” Fabric rustles, and her weight settles low against the door, as if she’s slid down to sit on the floor. “That’s really a lot to process.”
“I know.”
“You’re just going to follow me everywhere?”
“Yes.”
“Forever?”
“If you will have me.”
She laughs again, that same hysterical edge. “I don’t have a choice, apparently!”
“You always have a choice.” This she must understand. “I will not force you, Posy. Not into the bond, not into anything. I will follow you, because I cannot do otherwise. But what you give me is yours to decide. I ask only that you let me stay near you. Let me earn your trust.”
“By stalking me through my dead grandmother’s house?”
“I prefer to think of it as devoted attendance.”
Another laugh, softer this time. “You’re insane.”
“Quite possibly.” I press my palm to the door once more, then let it fall. “I will wait here. When you are ready, I will answer any question you have. I will not touch you without permission. I will not feed from you without consent. You have my word.”
Silence. Her heartbeat settles further, approaching normal. I hold onto the sound of it.
“Valerian?” Quiet now. Almost soft.
“Yes?”
“I have a question.”
“Ask it.”
A pause. Then: “If your cage travels with the box, and you haven’t fed since before my grandmother was born, how are you even conscious right now? Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, a pile of bones or something?”
“Your blood woke me, and it sustains me, for now. But it will not last.” I close my eyes. “I am fading, even now. Without proper sustenance I will return to the darkness.”
“You’ll die?”
“I am already dead, little bride.” The endearment slips out before I can stop it. “But yes. I will cease. The curse requires a living vessel, and without blood, I cannot remain one.”
She exhales slowly through the door.
“That’s really sad, actually.”
“Do not pity me.” It comes out harder than I intend, and I gentle my voice. “I waited a hundred years in the dark, and every moment of it was worth this one.”
She doesn’t answer that.
Then she says: “You can hear my heartbeat, can’t you? Through the door?”
I go still.
“Yes.”
“What does it sound like?”
The question catches me off guard. I press closer to the wood and let the rhythm wash over me. Steady now. Curious rather than afraid.
“It sounds like coming home,” I tell her quietly. “A century of silence, finally breaking.”
I stop there. The rest of the words are too big, too raw. She’s inches away and I can’t touch her. I can only press my hand to this door between us and ache.
“It is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.”
Silence. Her heartbeat carries on, steady and strong, on the other side of the door.
Then, very quietly: “I’m still not opening this door.”
“I know.”
“And this conversation is over.”
I settle back against the wood, and in the dark of my bride’s barricaded hallway, I smile for the first time since the box closed.
“Little bride,” I say, “it has not yet begun.”