25. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
I wake to the sound of two heartbeats, and one of them is mine.
I don’t move for a long while. I lie in the gray-gold light before dawn with Posy gathered against my chest, her breath slow on my skin, her new pulse keeping perfect time with the new pulse under my ribs, and I let myself simply have it.
The weight of her. The warmth, changed now, banked lower, a hearth instead of a bonfire, and still the warmest thing in any world I’ve known.
The silence of a house with nothing coiled beneath it.
In the dark, for all those years, I made lists of what I’d want if the box ever opened. Vengeance was on it, early. Then freedom. Then, in the later decades, when the dark had sanded me down to true things, smaller items: a window. Rain. One voice saying my name without fear.
Nowhere on any list did I have the audacity to write this.
Peace, it turns out, has a texture. I’d forgotten, or never knew.
It’s the absence of the hum I lived inside for a century, the binding’s constant subsonic grip, gone so completely that its silence woke me before her heartbeat did.
It’s a body with no cage around it and no silver in it and a heart in it, of all extravagances.
It’s a woman asleep on that heart as if it had always been there, as if it had always been hers, which, in every way the covenant’s ledgers would recognize, it had.
Her heartbeat stumbles, syncs again, quickens. Waking. I’ve listened to her wake every morning since she freed me, and it has never once stopped being my favorite music, and now there’s a second instrument, mine, learning the arrangement.
Her eyes open.
I watch it happen. I watch the whole world arrive in her all at once, the way it arrived in me three centuries ago and never fully left: her pupils flare, her breath stops, and she doesn’t move in my arms, listening to a morning she’s never heard before.
“Oh,” she whispers.
“Good morning, little bride.”
“The birds.” Her voice is hushed, astonished. “There are birds in the oak by the gate. I can hear their feathers, Valerian. I can hear the individual feathers. And rain. It’s going to rain, I can smell it coming, it’s…” She sniffs. “West? Is rain allowed to be west?”
“It’s coming from the coast. You’ll learn the compass of it.”
“And I can hear…” She stops. Her hand slides up my chest and flattens over my heart, over the place where the starburst scar has faded to a pale silver ghost, and her whole face opens. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
“It’s yours now,” I tell her. “It always was. It merely required a century of paperwork.”
She laughs, wet-eyed, and the laugh does what her laughs do, rearranges me, and then it turns into a wince and a small startled sound, and her hand flies to her mouth.
“Ow. What… oh. Oh.”
She’s discovered the fangs.
She sits up in the wreck of the sheets, magnificently bare and completely indifferent to it, prodding at her own mouth with scholarly concentration.
Her tongue finds a point. Presses. A bead of blood wells on the tip of her tongue, and her eyes go wide, and then, because she is who she is, she starts to laugh.
“I have fangs.”
“You have fangs.”
“I stabbed myself with my own face!”
“A rite of passage. I did the same, three centuries ago. My tutor called it ‘the first lesson in respecting one’s own architecture.’”
“They’re so small.” She’s twisted around, hunting the vanity mirror across the room, baring her teeth at her own reflection, delighted, and her reflection bares them back, small and needle-bright. “I thought they’d be bigger. Yours are bigger.”
“Mine have seniority.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
“Mine have tenure. Three centuries of distinguished service.”
“I’m going to bite you with these tiny ones and you’re going to pretend it hurt.”
“I will give a performance the ancestors will weep at.”
“Will they grow?”
“With use.” I sit up behind her and gather her back against my chest, and in the mirror we are two pale creatures in morning light, her throat wearing my faded marks, my chest wearing her handprint in old blood, both of us wearing the specific dishevelment of the newly eternal.
“Come here. You’re bleeding on your first morning, and that’s my jurisdiction. ”
She tips her chin up, and I kiss her, slow, and catch the tiny wound on her tongue with mine and seal it, and the kiss goes on a good while past medical necessity, because her mouth is new country now, cool where it was warm, and mapping it will take decades I suddenly, gloriously have.
When we surface, her eyes have gone heavy-lidded and her heartbeat has picked up a rhythm I know.
“Later,” I promise. “First, triage. How do you feel? Truthfully. All of it.”
She takes inventory with her eyes closed, thorough as always. “Strong. Strange. New. There’s a… humming? Everything’s louder and closer, and there’s a thread.” Her hand finds my chest again without looking. “Right here. Between your heart and mine. It pulls when you talk.”
“The bond, completed. You’ll feel me across any distance now.” I press my lips to her hair. “I’m afraid there is no longer any getting rid of me.”
“Damn. And I had plans.”
“Mm. The lease. The succulent.”
“The succulent died in June, actually. I’ve been living a lie.” She settles back into me, and quiet finds us again, the good kind, and through the tall windows the sky goes from gray to pearl to the first true gold. Sunrise arriving over the wild half of the garden.
She watches it come with an old flinch surfacing. “Should we… the sun…”
“Peasant superstition,” I murmur into her hair. “Twice confirmed. Thrice, now.”
The light crosses the floor and climbs the bed and pours over us both, warm and entirely harmless, and she turns her face into it and laughs again, and I file the image away in the permanent collection: my queen, fanged and gilded, laughing at the sun.
“Do you regret it?” I ask quietly.
I don’t plan to ask it. It leaves on its own, the last fear in the building, and she doesn’t flinch and she doesn’t rush. She turns in my arms and looks at me, steady, amber eyes flecked now with a ring of new silver.
“Ask me in four hundred years.”
“I’ll ask you every day until then.”
“I know you will.” She kisses the corner of my mouth. “That’s rather the point of you.”
We stay there while the sun finishes arriving, and then, because grief and joy share a house, my mind goes down the stairs, to a basement where chalk circles are already just chalk, to a seam in the air that no longer exists, to my cousin, somewhere under a garnet sky, alone with the thrones he wanted and everything he traded to reach them.
“You’re thinking about him,” Posy says. Not the heartbeat trick. She simply knows me now, thread to thread.
“He got what he wanted. It’s the most complete punishment I know of.
” I trace the line of her shoulder. “The doorway is sealed. Your grandmother’s wards collapsed over it like a grave filling in; I heard them go.
There’s no reopening it from either side.
He’s home, and he’s alone, and knowing Mircea, he’ll be running the place inside a decade and miserable about it for a century. ”
“He told you to look after me. On his way out.”
“He did.”
“That’s the confusing part. All of it was real and all of it was the heist.” She sighs against my chest. “I’m going to be angry at him for a very long time. And I think, somewhere down the decades, I might also miss him, and I hate that.”
“Welcome,” I say, “to family.”
Her phone has been buzzing on the nightstand at intervals all morning, a persistent mortal heartbeat of its own. She finally reaches for it, reads, and huffs.
“Riley. She’s driving out Saturday. Direct quote: ‘bringing wine and mace, in that order.’” She types a reply, deletes it, types another. “I have to figure out what she gets to know.”
“What do you want her to know?”
“Everything,” she says, without hesitating, and then hears herself and laughs.
“God. Everything. She held my hair through the worst decade of my life; she can handle fangs. I’ll pace it out.
Wine first. Fangs somewhere around bottle two.
” She sets the phone down. “She’s going to take one look at you and say ‘concerning older.’ Prepare yourself. ”
“I’ll wear the exclamation points as armor.”
Below us, the manor is waking too. I can hear it settling into its new self, beams easing, the box in the hidden study sitting silent and empty, iron and nothing, a museum piece with no exhibit.
The whispering she heard from it that first day was me, she knows now, a century of my waiting carried up through the covenant to the one set of ears it was written for.
Her grandmother’s portrait of me hangs in the library now, where Posy nailed it up herself, crooked, refusing assistance.
FOR POSY, the back of it says. The whole house says it, if you know how to listen. She built it saying it.
“Thank you, Eleanora,” I say, to the ceiling, to the wards, to wherever keepers go.
Posy’s hand tightens over my heart.
“The roses will bloom in a month,” I tell her, because the future is suddenly a place we own and I want to start spending it. “The east beds first. I’d like to finish the garden properly. And the library wants a real catalog, if the household librarian is accepting commissions.”
“The household librarian is extremely expensive.”
“I have a treasury in another dimension.”
“Then she’ll consider it.” Her smile goes soft at the edges.
“Gran’s garden and Gran’s library. She’d like that, I think.
Someone loving it all back to life.” She’s quiet a moment, tracing the faded scar on my chest. “I’m going to call my mother.
Not today. Soon. She spent her whole adult life running from this house, and I finally know what from, and…
” She shrugs against me. “Gran died with a door shut between them. I’m not doing that.
I’ve recently developed strong opinions about doors. ”
“Someone did,” I say, and mean the house, me.
Then, from the depths of her, unmistakable in the new quiet, comes a long, articulate growl.
Her stomach.
She looks down at it, betrayed. “I’m starving. Is that… am I hungry or am I hungry hungry? How do I tell?”
“Both, most likely. New blood burns hot. You’ll want feeding and food both, and then, if my own first days are a guide, a great deal more of each.”
“Feeding.” She tests the word, and her eyes flick to my throat with a brand-new interest that does extraordinary things to my brand-new pulse. “That’s going to be a whole conversation.”
“It’s going to be a delightful conversation. I volunteer for all of it.”
“Of course you do.” She stretches against me, long and shameless, and makes a small pleased sound at the top of the stretch, and I catch myself cataloging it.
“I’ve memorized every sound you make, you know,” I tell her. “I keep a collection. The surprised one. The pleased one. The one that means you’re about to steal my food. I intend to expand the archive indefinitely, now that we have the time.”
“That’s either the most romantic thing you’ve ever said or grounds for a restraining order.”
“With us, little bride, there has never once been a difference.”
She laughs, bright and new-fanged, and then props her chin on my chest, and the morning light catches her fangs when she grins. “Okay. Practical question. What do vampire queens eat for breakfast?”
I look at her. Fanged, gilded, thoroughly mine, asking after breakfast in a bed where the curse of four realms came to die, and the answer arrives with the whole rest of eternity behind it.
“Whatever they want, little bride.” I pull her up and over me, and her laugh spills across my mouth, and outside the sun keeps rising on Thornwick Manor, which was a prison, and then a battlefield, and is now, at last, only what it was always waiting to be. “Whatever they want.”
She reaches over me to the nightstand, and picks up her phone.
“One thing first. Watch.”
She opens the settings. Finds the emergency contact entry, the one an ancient covenant filed the day her blood touched a seal. She deletes it while I watch, the covenant’s tidy handwriting swept away with a tap, and then, letter by letter, with her own thumb, she types it back.
V-A-L-E-R-I-A-N.
“The form is redundant now,” I point out, watching her save it. “I would know before the phone did. I’d know from another world.”
“It’s the principle.” She sets the phone down and settles over me, her heartbeat against my heartbeat, her forever against mine, and smiles the smile I crossed a century of darkness to find. “The binding wrote your name. This one’s mine.”
THE END