5. Posy
— ? —
Posy
The vampire is malfunctioning.
I notice it when I come back downstairs for my phone charger.
Valerian is still in the kitchen, but he’s migrated to the counter and braced himself against it, both arms locked, head bowed, a book hanging forgotten from one hand.
His knuckles are white around the spine.
His skin, already pale, has taken on a grayish cast, and concern lands in my chest before I can refuse delivery.
Concern. For the vampire. Who lived in a box.
God, my life has gotten weird.
“You okay?” I ask from the doorway, and he startles. Actually startles, as if he didn’t hear me coming, which seems wrong for a creature with supernatural senses.
“I am well.” He releases the table and straightens, but the motion is too careful. Too controlled, a man budgeting every movement. “Did you require assistance?”
“I require my phone charger.” I cross to my bag, keeping one eye on him. “What I don’t require is you collapsing in my grandmother’s kitchen.”
“I am not going to collapse.”
“You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
I find my charger and turn to face him fully. In the morning light he looks worse than I thought. There are bruised shadows under his eyes that weren’t there yesterday, deep purple against his pallor, and his hands, clasped behind his back in that formal pose he favors, aren’t quite steady.
“Valerian. When did you last eat?”
“Vampires do not eat. We feed.”
“Fine. When did you last feed?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Valerian. Answer me.”
“I do not recall the precise date.” His voice is carefully neutral. “Time moved strangely in the box.”
“So it’s been the whole hundred years, plus whatever came before.” The realization drops through my stomach. “The curse sustained you while you slept. But you’re not sleeping now.”
“No, I am not.”
“So you need to feed now.”
He meets my eyes, and his expression scrapes raw for an instant, hunger showing through before he shutters it.
“Yes, Posy.”
“Then why haven’t you…” I stop. The answer is obvious, isn’t it? There’s exactly one heartbeat in this house. “Oh my god.”
“I told you.” His voice is soft, strained. “Nothing leaves your veins unless you offer it. That rule outlives me.”
“Even if you’re starving?”
“Even then.”
“Even if you…” I can’t finish the sentence. Can’t say the word hovering between us. “You’re dying, aren’t you?”
Pain crosses his face, or resignation, there and gone too fast to sort.
“I am already dead, little bride.” He tries to smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I am merely… fading.”
My throat closes around an answer I didn’t plan to have.
This is the creature who crawled out of a box and called me his queen.
Who sat outside my door all night, who speaks in full historical-novel sentences, who touched my nose once and rearranged my entire nervous system.
He’s annoying and persistent, and he’s been quietly starving rather than take from me without permission.
I don’t know what to do with that.
“Okay. That settles it.” I shove the charger in my pocket and grab his wrist before I can think better of it. His skin steals the heat from my fingers, marble-smooth, and every line of him stops at the contact, a full-system halt. “We’re going to the library.”
“The library?”
“You said my grandmother kept the binding intact. That means notes. Research.” I’m already pulling him toward the door, and he follows without resistance, apparently too surprised to argue. “If there’s a way to break this curse that doesn’t involve me becoming a juice box, I want to find it.”
“A juice box?”
“It’s a… never mind. Just come on.”
I drag him through the dusty hallways, past the shrouded furniture and the judgmental portraits, and he moves shadow-silent beside me while my footsteps echo.
His wrist is delicate bones under cool skin, a pulse point with no pulse in it, and I’m very aware that I’m still holding it, and that he’s letting me, and that a creature who could crush that blender in one fist is being towed through his prison by a librarian with a phone charger in her pocket.
He could stop me with a finger, and what he does is orbit. I should let go, and I don’t.
The library is just as I remember, floor-to-ceiling shelves and leather armchairs and a fireplace that could roast a whole pig. Dust motes drift through the light from the tall windows, and the smell of old paper and wood polish settles over me, familiar as any place I’ve ever loved.
“Your grandmother spent much time here,” Valerian says quietly. “I could sense her, even in the box. Her footsteps above me. Her heartbeat through the stone. She was constant.”
“Sense her how?”
“The seal allowed fragments. Impressions.” He touches the spine of a book as we pass, fingers trailing the leather with reverence. “I knew when she arrived each morning to check the binding. I knew when she left each night. I knew when she grew old, her steps slowing.”
My throat tightens. “You felt her die.”
“I felt her silence.” He doesn’t look at me. “One morning she simply did not come. The absence was…” He swallows. “It was difficult.”
I don’t know what to say to that. My grandmother, who I barely knew, spent decades tending a vampire in a box, and the vampire grieved her, and I didn’t even go to the funeral. I didn’t come at all until the lawyer called about the will.
“Help me search,” I say instead, releasing his wrist. I miss the contact immediately, which is annoying. “She must have kept records. Notes, journals, anything that explains this.”
We search. Valerian takes the upper shelves, which he can reach without a ladder, which is deeply unfair. He handles each book as if it might be load-bearing, reads every title aloud in a tone of mild judgment, and holds up a water-stained paperback with a shirtless pirate on the cover.
“This was your grandmother’s?”
“Put that down.”
“The pirate appears to have misplaced his shirt and most of the buttons on the lady’s…”
“Put it down.”
He puts it down. He’s smiling while he does it, faint and infuriating, filing the information away for later use, and I turn back to the desk before he can see that I’m flushed to the ears.
I take the lower shelves and the desk against the far wall.
The desk is covered in the mundane sediment of a life, electricity bills, grocery lists, a half-finished crossword, but buried in a drawer beneath old receipts, I find them.
Journals.
Leather-bound, hand-stitched, pages yellowed with age. Six of them, spanning decades by the dates on the spines. I pull them out with unsteady hands and carry them to the nearest armchair, curling up with my legs tucked beneath me.
We reach for the drawer’s contents at the same moment, and his hand closes over mine on the topmost journal.
Neither of us moves. His fingers are cool over my knuckles, curved to the exact shape of my hand, and the contact runs up my arm and takes the stairs two at a time.
One second. Two. He withdraws first, unhurried, as if touching me were a place he was reluctant to leave, and I stare into the drawer until my pulse agrees to behave.
“Found them,” I say, steadier than I am. “Stop doing that!”
“Doing what?”
“The silent creepy vampire appearing thing.”
“I walked.”
“You did not walk. You manifested.”
“I will endeavor to walk more loudly in the future.” He settles into the armchair across from me, at what I notice is exactly five feet of distance. Smug compliance. “What have you found?”
I open the first journal and start reading.
My grandmother’s handwriting is precise and elegant, penmanship from a world that graded it. The early entries are simple, weather observations, garden notes. But gradually they shift.
Checked the seal today. No degradation. He sleeps still.
The prophecy texts are frustratingly vague. “The last daughter of the line will summon the king from darkness.” But how? When? I have questions and no one left living to answer them.
I dreamed of her last night. My granddaughter. She stood in the study with blood on her hands, and when she looked at me she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I woke up crying.
“She dreamed about me,” I whisper.
Valerian says nothing. He’s watching me read, silver eyes steady on my face.
I keep going. The entries span decades, my grandmother documenting her research in clinical terms, seals and blood-wards, but she writes about Valerian with an affection she probably never said out loud.
He is conscious in there. I can feel it sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet. A presence. He must be so lonely.
I wish I could speak to him. Tell him help is coming. But only the summoner’s blood can break the seal, and I am not the one who was chosen. I am only the keeper.
Martha called today. Posy is doing well in school, smart as a whip, stubborn as a mule. I wanted to tell them both. But Martha has made her feelings about the family legacy very clear. Perhaps ignorance is a kindness I can give them.
The roses have gone wild again. I haven’t the knees for the garden anymore, and it grieves me. This house deserves better than my old bones can give it. Perhaps someday someone will love it back to life.
“Martha’s my mother,” I say, and my voice comes out strange. “She never talked about Gran. Never explained the estrangement. Half my family just… didn’t exist.”
“Your grandmother protected them both,” Valerian says softly. “The weight of this knowledge…”
“Is heavy. Yeah. I’m getting that.”
I turn to a later entry, and my heart stutters.
The box is not merely a prison. It seals the road between worlds.
I read the line again. The words don’t change.
“The road between worlds,” I say aloud. “What does that mean?”
Somewhere behind me, Valerian stops turning pages.
“It means your grandmother understood more than most.” His voice has dropped into a register I haven’t heard from him before, careful and closed, and when I open my mouth to push, he rises and crosses to me, forgetting the five-foot rule entirely, or ignoring it. “May I?”
I hand him the journal. He reads the page in silence, and whatever moves behind his eyes, he doesn’t share it. When he hands it back, his jaw is set.
“Your grandmother was thorough,” is all he says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is not,” he agrees quietly, and offers nothing else.
I file that away, right next to the unease crawling up the back of my neck, and keep reading, flipping pages with increasing urgency. The notes grow more detailed as the years pass. More determined. My grandmother chasing every scrap of the prophecy she could find.
And then a loose page slips free and drifts to the floor.
Valerian bends and retrieves it before I can move.
He goes still. Completely, utterly still, no breath, no movement, the statue stillness of a creature that has stopped pretending to be alive.
“What is it?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
I uncurl from the chair and stand beside him, and look at what he’s holding.
It’s a portrait. Painted, not photographed, oils on heavy paper, the colors faded but alive.
A man with dark hair and silver eyes, dressed for another century, standing in what is unmistakably the hidden study upstairs.
He’s less weary in the painting, his expression proud and certain, a king who hasn’t yet learned what a box feels like from the inside.
It’s Valerian.
And on the back, in my grandmother’s precise hand:
FOR POSY
“She painted this,” I whisper. “She painted you.”
“She must have seen me somehow. In dreams, perhaps.” His voice is rough. “The seal let echoes through, for those with the sensitivity to receive them.”
“She painted you for me.”
I take the portrait from his hands, careful with the delicate paper. The brushstrokes are amateur and devoted, love standing in for training. My grandmother caught the intensity of his gaze, the barely-there smile that could be amusement or arrogance or both.
She wasn’t just a keeper. She spent her whole life preparing this house, this box, this impossible inheritance, for a granddaughter she was never allowed to know. She kept him safe and the road sealed, and she left me everything I’d need to understand why.
“I wish I’d known her,” I say, and my voice cracks on the last word.
Valerian’s hand comes up, hesitant, and settles on my shoulder. The touch is light, asking permission even as it offers comfort.
I don’t pull away.
“She knew you,” he says softly. “From the day you were born until the day she died. You were never a stranger to her, Posy. You were her hope and her legacy.”
A tear slides down my cheek. I wipe it away roughly, embarrassed, but he doesn’t comment. He just stands there, solid and present, his hand on my shoulder, an anchor.
“We should keep reading,” I say finally. “There might be more. Instructions. What breaking the curse actually takes.”
“Are you certain? We could rest and return to this.”
“I’m certain.” I clutch the portrait to my chest, this gift from a grandmother who believed in me sight unseen. “She left this for me. I’m not going to let her down.”
His hand squeezes my shoulder once, gently, and doesn’t fall away.
I look up.
We’re standing too close. I don’t remember either of us moving, and here we are anyway, inches apart in the fading light, the portrait pressed between my chest and his, and his hand is rising toward my face in slow motion.
“Posy.” My name, half whisper, half warning.
“I know.” I don’t step back. “I know we shouldn’t.”
“Tell me to step away.”
I open my mouth. The word is right there. Stop. One syllable, and the entire sensible remainder of my life waiting on the other side of it.
His thumb touches my lower lip.
The sound I make is embarrassing and honest, and his eyes go dark, and his hand curves along my jaw, cool against my burning skin, and we’re close enough now that his breath moves my hair, and…
The journal slides off the arm of the chair and hits the floor with a crack of leather on wood.
We spring apart with the guilt of teenagers. He’s across the rug in a blink, expression shuttered, the mask reassembled. I’m clutching the portrait to my sternum with my heart attempting to exit through my throat.
“Gravity,” he says. His voice is rough gravel.
“Old houses.” Mine is no better.
We very carefully don’t look at each other while I retrieve the journal.
“Then we continue together,” he says.
I settle back into the armchair. He takes the one across from me, five feet away, precisely lawful, watching me over the top of a journal, a man guarding a door I haven’t found yet.
“You’ve stopped pretending to read, little bride.”
“And you’re deflecting. What aren’t you telling me, Valerian?”
He turns a page without reading it. “Ask me again when you trust me more.”
“Maybe I’ll just keep reading until I find it myself.”
“That,” he says quietly, “is what I’m afraid of.”