Chapter 37 Magda and the Rubies
MAGDA AND THE RUBIES
“Why have you come?” In total darkness the cave dweller scuttered closer, just a faint rattle and clatter echoing off the walls, his voice no more than a faint hiss.
“The young girl who believed herself destined for greatness, now one of the undead…did your grandmother not warn you?” He let out a brittle laugh.
“Shh.” I cut him off, weary of riddles. Had I still been human, I might have felt fear.
But now? I had nothing left to lose. I could not be more dead than I was—unless he chose to obliterate me.
Perhaps that would be mercy. “I came because you called to me. I have the rubies you gave Serban—what I need to know is how their magic works.”
“Who will you bring back, Magda? Dani? The one too good for you, who gave everything to protect you and your daughter—never to have the only thing he ever wanted: your love. The love you squandered on Caius instead. Or will it be your daughter? Stolen from you too soon, denied her life barely after it began. And if you succeed—what then? What if she makes the same mistakes you made? Will you damn her to the same fate?”
“Stop. This is none of your concern. Give me only what I ask.” The command left my mouth, rough and caustic, steadied by a confidence I did not entirely possess.
“As you wish, blood drinker. Under the blood moon's gaze, let your lifeblood fall upon hair, or tooth, or bone of the one you crave.
Set it to flame. When the fire leaps bright, cast the two rubies into the heart of the blaze.
When the embers die and the stones grow cold, take one for yourself, and spend the other.
The ruby given is loosed into the world, beyond your will, beyond your hand.
His words swirled around me, cryptic, strange.
“At the next Crimson Convergence, more than six hundred years hence, the soul you seek shall draw breath again. They will not know you. Their road is their own. Yet the wandering ruby will return in time—first to the hands of a maker and seer, the daughter of flame. She will bring you together with the one you seek, and the ruby shall awaken their memory. Then shall the lost life burn anew, and the chance denied shall be lived once more.”
I stared at Ossivian, the words refusing to settle into meaning.
Six hundred years. I bowed my head because my neck would no longer hold it upright.
The number tolled inside my skull—slow, merciless, an inescapable funeral bell.
Six centuries of waiting. Six centuries of watching the world turn and rot and renew itself while I remained unchanged.
Six hundred years to carry a love that had already broken me once.
My breath hitched, then shattered entirely. My shoulders shook with it. How could I endure so long? How could any promise survive that span? What if memory faded? What if I did?
And beneath the grief, another thought coiled, colder still. What if this was not mercy? What if the gods, in their vast and distant wisdom, had not granted me another chance—but merely stretched my punishment across the centuries?
Ossivian read every frantic turn of my thoughts and answered them with a dry rattle of bone that might have been laughter. “You have nothing but time, blood drinker,” it said. “Nothing but time. Make yourself useful.”
I knocked twice on Buna’s door. Footsteps shuffled closer, then stopped—as if she'd frozen just short of the threshold, wondering who would come knocking at this hour.
“Open the door, Buna. It's me.” My voice was barely more than a whisper against the draft seeping through the lock.
The bolt clicked. The door creaked open.
A single candle trembled in Buna’s hand, its light throwing long shadows across her face.
She didn't look surprised to see me. Her face was carved into stone; only her eyes moved—cold, filled with a quiet, bitter contempt.
She stepped aside to let me in, her eyes never leaving mine as I ducked under the low doorframe.
I had to bend farther than I remembered—another reminder of what I'd become.
In all the years I'd lived here, I'd never had to stoop.
A few inches in height, a few degrees less human.
My turning had changed more than I'd realized.
She did not recoil when she saw me. No gasp. No sign of the cross. No whispered prayer against evil. If anything, her gaze sharpened—as if she had expected this reckoning.
“You should not have come back,” she said at last, her voice steady. “What you are now…there is no place for it here. Not among the living.”
The lack of fear unsettled me more than hysteria would have. She had always been devout. Superstitious. Quick to warn of strigoi and wandering spirits. Yet she looked at me not as a monster—but as something inevitable.
“I came to know if it was true,” I said. My voice did not tremble, though something inside me did. “That Dani and Anca died that night.”
Her eyes softened then, just slightly.
“You are the only one I have left,” I added. “The only one I still trust to speak plainly to me.” Whatever I had become, whatever name the village might give it—she was still my grandmother. And I was still her blood.
Her shoulders sagged, the strength draining from them as if she had been holding the weight of it alone.
“Ach…yes,” she said at last, and the words came laced with something darker than grief. “Ivar and his men burned the house.” Her mouth tightened. “We found Dani near Anca.” A breath hitched in her chest, but she did not let it break her voice. “But we never found you.”
Her eyes lifted fully to mine then—not in fear, but in searching. As if she were peeling back the pallor, the stillness, the unnatural quiet of me…looking for the girl she had once held as a child.
For a moment, something like pity flickered there. “I knew you had been taken,” she said softly. “No body in the ash. I knew.” Her gaze sharpened, not accusing—demanding truth. “But this…” Her hand gestured faintly, encompassing what I had become. “How did this happen to you, Magda?”
Not what are you. How. And beneath the question, another: Who did this to you?
I knew she meant my turning. All the village knew Ivar was a monster, but only the mortal kind—the kind that killed, not one that had the power to create the undead. “Ivar and his men beat me. Raped me. Stabbed me. Then they threw my body over the cliff…into the river like trash.”
The candle trembled in her hand.
“The man I saw in the glade that day—the one I said was a maleficius—he found me. Only he isn't a maleficius. He is strigoi.”
Buna huffed, her face twisting. “And now you are like him.” She spat on the packed dirt floor—her disgust, her grief, her final blessing and curse in one gesture.
“Where are they buried?” I asked, my voice breaking finally as tears stung my eyes. Tears for them, and tears for myself, alone now. Disowned.
“In the cemetery,” Buna said. “Caius buried them.”
“What?” I demanded, the word catching somewhere between anger and disbelief. “Why?” The thought of him grieving—of him claiming any right to sorrow—ignited anger inside me. “He did not care about them,” I snapped. “Not enough.”
My hands trembled, though whether from rage or old hurt, I could not tell.
“He let his father decide who he could and could not love. He let that man choose his future—choose for him.” The bitterness in my voice surprised even me, raw as an open wound.
“When it mattered, he left. He let them send him away. He let them turn me out.”
The memory rose vivid and merciless—the day the door closed behind me, the day I understood exactly how small my place in his life had been.
“He is weak, Buna,” I said, the word falling heavy between us.
“Weak.” It was not a revelation. It was a truth I had swallowed the day his father severed us—when I learned that love meant nothing beside obedience.
“He is weak,” Buna agreed softly, though the sharpness had left her tone.
“That much is true.” Her eyes held mine—not chastising, not dismissing.
“You know it now because you have known the love of a man who was strong. Strong not only in body, but in heart. A man who chose you openly.” There was meaning in the distinction.
She drew a slow breath. “But weakness does not erase love, Magda. It only corrupts it.” The words were worn with age, not accusation.
“Caius may have lacked the courage to defy his father. He may have failed you—and Anca.” Her voice thinned, tired as old linen.
“But it does not follow that he felt nothing. A man can love…and still choose wrongly. Both can be true.”
That struck deeper than I expected.
Her hand lifted and settled briefly on my shoulder—light, uncertain, as though she were no longer entirely sure what I was made of. She searched my face one last time, then withdrew her touch.
Without another word, she turned toward the cupboard, leaving me alone with a truth I had no desire to carry.
“Why aren't you afraid of me?” I asked, irritation fraying the edges of my voice.
She still addressed me as though I were an impulsive girl who had come home in disgrace—not something the village would whisper about after dark.
She knew what I was. I could taste the revulsion in her. But there was no fear.
“I know how I die,” Buna replied, her tone brisk as she rummaged through the cupboard. “And it is not by the hand of a strigoaica?.” She said it plainly, without bravado.
Buna’s gift for reading smoke was no secret. Villagers had come to her for years with bundles of dried sage and questions about harvests, marriages, illnesses. I would not have been surprised if she knew the season—perhaps even the hour—her own breath would leave her.