Chapter 14 Esme
ESME
My boots ring on the stone steps as I leave the dungeon’s cold embrace. I need air that hasn’t been tainted by death and torture.
My mother waits at the top of the stairs, her arms folded. When I reach her, she places a firm hand on my wrist and steers me away from the main thoroughfare, down a quiet, lesser-used corridor that leads to her office.
Considering she’s head apothecary of the coven’s infirmary, it’s rather small.
The circular room is lined with books, crowding the space further, and the air smells of old paper, dried herbs, and beeswax.
A single, large window looks out over the inner gardens, where winter-pale roses cling stubbornly to their thorns.
She closes the door, the latch clicking softly, and the sounds of the academy—the distant shouts and hum of magic as people rush into damage control—fade.
“You’ve been through a lot, Esme,” she says, her voice low. She gestures to a worn leather armchair by the window. “Sit.”
I remain standing. “I’m fine. There’s no time.”
“Don’t lie to me, Esme.” Her voice is sharp, but not cold. “You’re anything but fine.”
I swallow. “These aren’t normal times.”
I walk to the window, staring out at the garden. The roses look like frozen bursts of blood against the gray stone.
“The spirit grid was ravenous,” I say. “Desperate… just like the rest of us.”
My mother comes to stand beside me, her reflection a pale ghost in the glass. “Humor me. I’m not asking for time. I’m asking for thirty seconds in which you don’t pretend you’re made of iron. Now sit and let me check you.”
I know when not to argue with my mother. My shoulders slump and I slide into the armchair. The leather groans under my weight, cool and smooth.
She watches me, her expression unreadable, as I pull off my top layers, until I’m wearing just my bra. The air in the room is cool, raising goosebumps on my arms. I feel exposed, not just physically, but as if she can see the frayed edges of my soul.
Her hands are just as I remember them from childhood check-ups—cool, dry, and gentle.
They find the pulse point on my wrist first. Her thumb presses down, and her brow furrows almost instantly.
She holds the position for a long, silent moment, her eyes closed as if she’s listening to a story only my blood can tell.
“Your pulse is too fast,” she finally murmurs, her voice tight. “And your temperature… abnormally high.”
I say nothing. I knew she would feel it. The foreign heat that now lives in me, a low-burning power that is not my own. His.
She moves behind the chair, her fingers tracing the line of my spine, pressing at key points where spiritual energy pools. Her touch is clinical, precise, but I feel her recoil slightly, a minute flinch that I might have missed if I weren’t her daughter.
“There are… patterns,” she says, her voice strained. “Under your skin. Lines of energy that don’t belong to you… to our bloodline.” Her hands map them out, a delicate yet horrified exploration of the changes he’s wrought. I’m not sure I want to know them all. Sometimes knowledge only adds weight.
“What did he do to you?” she whispers, with a mixture of both concern and anger.
“Basically, what grandma wanted,” I can’t help but reply, bitterness coloring my tone. “He gave me his blood.”
“Gave you?” she repeats, and now an accusation is there, cold and sharp as a shard of glass. “Or forced it on you? Esme, this is more than a simple transfusion. This is like a binding. An alteration at the deepest level. He has marked you… Claimed you.”
I exhale slowly. “Yeah, he basically already told me that,” I say.
“But he might not have given me his blood if I hadn’t asked for it…
if grandma hadn’t told me to demand it. At Heathborne, she said I needed to drink it to survive his unbinding ritual.
” And I’m still not sure if that’s really true—if I could have survived it without drinking from him.
“She might have been right that it was for your protection,” Mom says. “But that doesn’t change… the situation.”
“Which is?” I murmur.
“That it’s permanent.”
Great. Confirmation right from my mother’s mouth.
“And we also don’t know how it could affect the Ide Trials: having foreign blood flowing through you.”
I frown. “Blythe and Corvin seem to think it will be an advantage. Added strength.”
Mom hesitates. “We hope so, but we can’t know for sure. This whole situation is… unprecedented. At least based on my knowledge.”
Her hand slides from my shoulder, down my arm, and takes mine.
I expect her to check my pulse again, but she just holds it, her focus on the golden band on my finger.
Her thumb traces the intricate pattern, and I feel a faint warmth-pulse from the metal, a subtle response to her touch.
She can sense the magic woven into it, the foreign, fiery signature that now clings to me like a second skin.
“What is this?” she breathes.
A detail I’d left out in the council meeting was the fact I actually married Dayn. It didn’t seem… completely relevant at that time.
“It’s a marriage band,” I say, the words feeling foreign and absurd on my tongue. I try to pull my hand back, but her grip is strong.
Her eyes widen. “Marriage?” The word is a choked whisper. “Es, what have you done?”
“What I had to do to survive,” I snap, the defensiveness sharp and automatic. “It was a political move to save my skin. It meant nothing.”
The lie tastes like ash in my mouth. It meant nothing. But my pulse is still hammering from just seeing him in the dungeon, and this ring feels like it’s fused to my very bone.
“Nothing?” She lets go of my hand as if it’s been burned, her face pale with horror.
“A dragon’s vow is not ‘nothing.’ It is an ancient, binding magic.
This isn’t politics. This is… another claim.
” Her voice drops, trembling with a fury I haven’t seen in years.
“He has bound you to him, body and soul.”
“Not exactly,” I say sharply. “I still have free will.”
Yet even as I say the words, a cool doubt creeps in.
Because this isn’t a political contract.
It’s something I don’t understand. Something that has its own hunger, its own appetite.
And something that tells me I could refuse it every day for the next century and still feel his heat in my veins when he’s half a continent away.
Because I still don’t know where it leads.
I stand abruptly. “I need to go. We can talk… later.”
The path to the coven’s graveyard is slick with a thin layer of moss that grows between the flagstones. This old, quiet part of the grounds, tucked away behind the main infirmary, where the ancient yew trees cast the world in an almost perpetual twilight.
It’s about time I connect with the source of all this, the architect of my entire current mess—or at least try to.
And I don’t have long. We don’t know when the next attack might come.
The air grows colder as I hurry beneath the wrought-iron archway, the familiar scent of damp earth and decaying leaves filling my lungs.
Headstones, some so old the names have been worn away by centuries of rain, stand in silent, orderly rows.
Though this isn’t a place of grief, of course.
It’s a battery. Or supposed to be. A barracks for a currently-damaged army of spirits.
I find my grandmother’s stone and kneel before it, the dampness of the ground seeping through the knees of my jeans.
“You did this,” I whisper, the words barely a breath in the stillness. “You sent me to him… you bound me to him. And now… I’m supposed to channel an Ide with foreign magic burning in my veins.”
I pull a small silver blade from my boot and slice the tip of my thumb, a familiar sting. I watch as a single, perfect bead of blood wells up, then press my thumb to the cold stone, smearing the blood over her name.
“Talk to me,” I plead, my voice raw. “Why did you tell me to drink from him? What do you know about this bond?”
I close my eyes, reaching out with my senses, searching for that familiar, formidable presence in the spiritual ether. Esther Esme Salem. I push past the low hum of any lesser spirits, seeking that one, sharp, commanding voice.
But there’s nothing.
The connection is dead. A void where her powerful presence should be.
It’s like screaming into an empty room. The grid may be feeding, but for some reason my link to its most powerful spirit is still down.
A cold knot tightens in my stomach. I’m alone in this.
Not that I’m sure I can even fully trust what she tells me now…
“I told you it was a bad idea.”
I open my eyes. Brynn stands a few feet away, her arms wrapped around herself, her expression clouded with worry.
“Spying on me now?” I ask, wiping my bloody thumb on my jeans.
“You’re not exactly subtle when you’re brooding,” she says, stepping closer. “I figured you’d end up here.” She looks at Esther’s headstone, then at me. “Anything?”
I shake my head, the frustration bitter in my mouth. “She’s silent.”
“Maybe she’s finally realized the mess she’s made,” Brynn mutters. She sits on the edge of a nearby stone sarcophagus.
“Told me what was a bad idea?” I ask.
“About the trials, Esme… I can’t believe you’re seriously doing them.”
I exhale. “It’s a weapon. The only sure one we have that might be big enough.”
“A weapon we can’t aim,” she adds. “An Ide isn’t a spirit you can just command, like you’re used to. We don’t know if it will even be Dominic Merlin as we know him… I can’t help thinking that there has to be another—”
The air between us shimmers, and the next thing I know, Helena is before us.
But she’s not the calm, clear spirit we saw in Draethys. Her spectral form is a staticky, unstable projection, twitching and convulsing—her long hair scattered—almost looking like she’s being electrocuted.
“Helena!” Brynn gasps, scrambling to her feet.
“Listen…” Helena’s voice is a distorted shriek.
“What’s happening to you?” I ask, taking a step forward.
“No time!” she rasps, her form flickering violently. “The bond… is incomplete… a half-formed weapon…” She looks directly at me, her deep-pool eyes wide with a desperate, frantic urgency. “It needs… a catalyst… a merging…”
She suddenly jerks backward, as if yanked by some powerful force, and she screams, a sound that is both silent and deafening in my mind. She seems to fight against it, her entire form vibrating.
“The ritual—” she forces the words out as if each one is a monumental effort, “—must be consummated! Flesh to flesh… soul to soul. Light and darkness… must bond… fully. The dragon and the darkblood... become one. No hesitation. No doubt. There is no other path, Esme!”
Then she is sucked backward into a swirling vortex of nothingness, her silent, screaming face the last thing we see before she vanishes.
The air snaps back to stillness, the silence absolute.
Before I can piece together a coherent thought, Brynn makes a choked, strangled sound and collapses. She hits the damp earth with a thud, her body curling into a tight ball. She clutches at her chest, her face a mask of agony.
“Brynn!” I’m at her side in an instant, dropping to my knees. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It… snapped,” she gasps, her knuckles white where she grips her own clothing. Tears stream from her eyes. “My connection… to her… it’s gone. It’s like something… something tore it out of me!”
I stare from my sister, writhing in a pain I can’t see, to the empty space where our ancestor was just violently… unmade? My mind spins, echoing with Helena’s final, insane words.
What in the seven hells just happened?