Chapter 12 Rhianelle #2
“You muddy little menace.” He rights the bucket and returns to the anvil, where something glows orange-hot in the coals.
Coral watches him work, her head resting on her front claws, tail still wagging slowly. She looks... content. More content than I’ve seen her in weeks.
This isn’t the first time she’s been here. She knew exactly where to find him and walked here with purpose. The ease between them makes the truth impossible to deny. This is familiar to both of them, part of a routine I knew nothing about.
How many times has Coral slipped away to visit him? How long has Arescaine been welcoming her into his forge?
Arescaine pulls the glowing metal from the forge with tongs, sets it on the anvil, and begins to hammer. The rhythmic clanging fills the space, but Coral doesn’t flinch. If anything, she seems soothed by it, her eyes drifting closed.
I should leave or reveal myself. The last time I spied on Arescaine, it ended with him catching me. I should have learned from that humiliation. Yet here I am again, crouching behind a stack of crates like a thief and watching the vampire work.
I have watched him before, always telling myself that I needed to keep an eye on the dangerous stranger living among us. But I have never been this near. I am close enough to see the dark strands of hair that have fallen over his brow.
The hammer falls in a perfect rhythm. The muscles beneath his shirt flex with each strike, revealing the lean, powerful lines of his body. Every movement is controlled and utterly captivating.
Stop being a pervert, I tell myself. You have a mate. You have Landon.
But the golden string feels distant right now, a warm glow somewhere in the back of my mind. This pull toward the vampire is immediate and visceral. It makes my breath come faster.
He pauses in his hammering to examine the metal, tilting it toward the light. His dark eyes are fixed upon his work with such intensity that I find myself wondering what it would feel like to become the sole focus of that gaze.
I shake my head, trying to clear the thought. This is foolish and dangerous.
Arescaine sets down his hammer and wipes his brow with the back of his arm. Then he turns toward Coral, and my breath catches.
He’s moving toward her wings.
His hand reaches out, fingers extending toward the delicate membrane, and every protective instinct in my body screams.
No one should touch her wings where the cartilage is weak and wrong.
“Stop!” The word bursts from me as I leap from my hiding place.
Arescaine turns, his hand dropping to where a weapon would hang. His eyes find me in the darkness. For one moment, something flashes across his face.
Recognition and… longing.
Then it’s gone, replaced by surprise.
“Your Highness,” he says, and his voice is formal. Nothing like the warm tone he used with Coral moments ago. “I didn’t hear you approach.”
Of course he didn’t. Astefar built silence into my bones.
I step into the light of the forge, my heart pounding and my hands clenched to fists.
“Step away from my wyvern,” I say, trying to sound commanding. “Now.”
He doesn’t move. Arescaine looks at me with those dark eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” he says quietly.
I glance at his hand hovering near Coral’s vulnerable wing. “I don’t know that. I don’t know you.”
Something flickers in his expression.
“No,” he agrees. “You don’t.”
I hold out my hand toward Coral. “Give her back to me.”
Coral, oblivious to the tension, chirps happily and wags her tail harder, looking between us like we’re both here to play with her.
The silence stretches between us, broken only by the crackle of the forge fire and Coral’s happy chirping. Arescaine hasn’t moved, his hand still suspended near her wing, his eyes locked on mine.
“Coral.” I cannot keep the tension from my voice. “Come here.”
She looks at me, head tilting in that way that usually means she’s about to do the opposite of what I’ve asked.
“Coral. Now.” I point firmly toward the ground beside me.
My wyvern doesn’t move. She just makes a small questioning sound and looks back at Arescaine, as if asking him what she should do.
My chest tightens. “Coral, come to me right now.”
The stubborn wyvern shifts her weight but remains firmly planted next to the vampire. Her tail is still wagging, perfectly content to stay exactly where she is.
Panic prickles beneath my skin.
What am I supposed to do now? Walk over and drag her away? Coral may be small for a wyvern, but she is still heavier than I am and infinitely more stubborn. If I pull at her, I might hurt her weakened wings. If I leave without her, I am abandoning her with a vampire.
I take one uncertain step forward. Coral immediately presses herself closer to Arescaine’s leg.
“She’s fine where she is,” Arescaine says quietly.
“Coral’s my wyvern.” The edge in my voice surprises even me. “She usually comes when I call.”
Arescaine and I stare at one another across the forge. He does not threaten me or move to block my path, but Coral has planted herself beside him as firmly as if she has chosen a fortress.
I realize I have no way to retrieve her without his cooperation. Coral trusts strangers too easily, and I have followed her into a vampire’s forge at dusk without telling anyone where I was going. If I have misjudged him, there is no one here to help us.
“She’s safe with me.” Arescaine’s voice softens. “I would never harm her.”
“Why? What are you to her?” I glance between him and Coral.
He looks at me for a long moment. I see him weighing his words, deciding what he can and cannot say.
“A friend,” he finally settles on.
Coral makes a soft sound and nuzzles against his leg. He absently scratches behind her jaw ridge again, and she practically melts.
“Coral,” I try one more time, my voice breaking. “Please. Come here.”
She looks at me with those soulful eyes that have watched me from the platform edge during every training session. The little wyvern turns away and rests her head back on her claws.
The rejection shouldn’t hurt this much. Coral has ignored me plenty of times before like a smug stray cat. But this feels different. This feels like she chose him over me.
“Your Highness—” Arescaine starts, and there’s something in his voice that sounds like sympathy.
“Don’t you dare pity me,” I snap. Tears gather behind my eyes, hot and humiliating. I blink them back and look at Coral’s bowed head, at the loose scales along her back and the wings dragging against the forge floor.
Perhaps she came here because I failed her. I taught her to watch other wyverns fly without ever finding a way for her to follow them. I kept promising she was perfect while she grew sadder beneath my care.
“I’m not pitying you.” He takes a step toward me, and I notice for the first time that he’s being careful. “Rhianelle—”
“Don’t call me that.” I have never cared much for titles. I am forever telling people to abandon the honorifics and simply call me Rhianelle. But hearing my name from Arescaine feels different and far too intimate. It slips beneath every defense I have raised against him.
“What should I call you then? Your Highness?” There’s the slightest edge to his voice now. “My queen?”
Something warm curls low in my stomach at the words. I hate that I like the sound of them in his voice.
My queen.
I hide the reaction behind a glare and pray he cannot see it.
Arescaine turns back to Coral. His hand moves toward her wing again, slower this time. He supports the weakened edge of the membrane with one palm and gently examines the cartilage with the other.
This time, I remain silent.
“I’ve been trying to help her,” he says quietly, still focused on her wing. “She started coming here a few weeks ago, after... after training got hard.”
His jaw tightens. “Coral realized she couldn’t do what the others could do.”
“Oh Coral.” My voice cracks.
Arescaine finally looks up at me, and the expression on his face makes my chest ache. “I made her something. Something that might help.”
“What?” Hope and suspicion collide inside me.
Instead of answering, the vampire turns back to his workbench. The metal he was shaping earlier sits there. It no longer glows, but it still radiates heat. He picks it up with his bare hand. Strigon, I remember. They still feel pain but they heal fast and easily.
Arescaine holds it toward the light.
I see what it is.
It resembles a harness, but unlike any harness I have ever seen. The delicate frame has moving joints and extending struts. It’s made specifically for small wings.
My breath catches.
“What is that?” I whisper again, stepping closer despite myself.
I can see it properly now, the delicate metal framework that curves and mirrors natural wing structure, leather straps reinforced with thin steel.
“A chance,” he says simply, looking down at Coral. “If she’s willing to try. This wing brace could be her chance to fly.”
For a moment, I forget how to breathe.
A wing brace?
I stare at the thing in his hands, trying to make sense of what he is telling me.
Coral might fly. The thought is so impossible, so enormous, that I am afraid to let myself believe it.
“It’s based on old dwarven designs for injured miners.
I modified it for a wyvern’s body.” He sets it down on the workbench and picks up a piece of parchment covered in sketches and calculations.
“The theory is that if her wing cartilage is too soft to maintain rigidity, external support might compensate. These braces lock her wings into the proper position for gliding. The pulleys distribute tension evenly, preventing strain on any single point.”
I move closer, drawn by fascination and possibility. “Will it work?”