Chapter 10
"Sage is sick."
That's all the note says. Three words, slipped under my dormitory door sometime before dawn, written in handwriting I don't recognize.
No signature. No explanation. No indication of what kind of sick or where she is or who left the note.
Just three words on a folded square of cream paper with the Vampire House seal pressed into the bottom corner in silver wax.
I'm already moving before I finish reading it.
The Vampire House is on the west side of the academy, past the main courtyard and through the covered arcade that smells like old stone and something darker underneath, something that has soaked into the walls over decades and doesn't fully leave.
I've been here twice. Once during the housing assignment chaos, and once when Caspian cornered me in the corridor outside the east wing and said something I pretended not to find interesting.
Both times I left quickly. This time I don't have that option.
The door to the main parlor is unlocked.
That's my first warning. The Vampire House doesn't leave its doors unlocked.
Everything about this place is controlled access, curated atmosphere, the kind of architectural arrogance that communicates exactly who belongs here and who is being tolerated.
An unlocked door means someone wanted me to walk in without having to knock and announce myself.
I push it open anyway.
The parlor is dim, lit by a row of low candelabras along the far wall, and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. When they do, I see Seraphina Vale first. She's reclining on one of the dark velvet settees with her head tipped back and her hair loose around her shoulders, and Caspian Thorne is beside her, his head bent to the curve of her neck.
Not biting. Already having bitten. His mouth is pressed against her skin with a slow, unhurried attention that makes the whole scene look private in a way I've clearly interrupted.
I stop walking.
Seraphina's eyes are closed, her lips parted, one hand resting loosely against the cushion as if she's forgotten it was ever tense. Whatever expression she has on is not one I've seen on her before, and I make a point of not cataloguing it further.
Caspian lifts his head.
His green eyes find me immediately, like he already knew exactly where I was standing. There's blood on his lower lip, a thin dark line, and he doesn't wipe it away. He watches me with the same cataloguing patience he used in the library, and says nothing.
"Where is Sage?" I ask.
Seraphina's eyes open. She sees me and something rearranges in her face, the drowsy quality dropping away, replaced by something sharper. She sits up slowly, pressing two fingers to the marks on her neck with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before and likes being watched doing it.
"She's in the east room," Seraphina says. "Second door on the right. If she's still breathing." She smiles at me. "I may have miscalculated the dose slightly."
I'm through the parlor before she finishes the sentence.
The east room is small and cold, lit by a single lamp on the table by the door, and Sage is on the low couch against the far wall with Malik crouched beside her, his hands pressed flat to her forearms, shadow magic running in thin dark lines beneath her skin.
He doesn't look up when I come in. His jaw is set and his eyes are fixed on his work and his entire posture is the posture of someone who will not be interrupted.
"How bad?" I ask.
"Nightshade compound," Malik says. "Laced with something I don't recognize. It's slowing her system down. Not stopping it. She's conscious enough to know where she is." His voice stays level. "She's been asking for you."
Sage's eyes open when I cross to her. They're glassy, her pupils uneven, but she finds my face and holds it.
"Hey," she says. Her voice comes out scraped thin.
"Hey yourself." I kneel beside Malik and take her hand. Her fingers are cold. "I got the note."
"Seraphina." Sage's mouth tightens. "She put it in my tea. I didn't even taste it."
"I know."
"Tell me you're going to do something about her."
"I'm going to do something about her." I squeeze her hand once. "But first I need to fix this."
I don't have what I need. I know that already.
My belt pouch has ghostcap and tiger's mane and three healing compounds I've assembled through trial and error over the past months, and none of them counter a nightshade compound with an unknown additive.
I know what Sage needs. I know what can neutralize a poison moving this slowly through a system that's already been weakened by the compound's second layer, whatever Seraphina laced it with.
I know it, and I don't have it, and the one person in this building who does is currently in the parlor with blood on his mouth.
I stand up. "Stay with her," I tell Malik. He doesn't answer, which means yes.
Caspian is leaning in the doorway when I turn around. Not the parlor doorway. This one. He's been standing there long enough to hear the whole exchange, and he's looking at me with his arms crossed and his expression giving nothing away except that he's waiting for something specific.
"Seraphina's gone," he says. "I sent her back to her room."
"How thoughtful." I hold his gaze. "Vampire blood neutralizes nightshade compounds and most paralytic additives. You know that."
"I do."
"So you're going to give me some."
He doesn't move from the doorway. "Am I."
"Unless you want to explain to me why you sent that note and got me here only to let my friend die from a poison that you could fix in thirty seconds." I take one step toward him. "Which I don't think you will, because if that were the plan you'd have let the door stay locked."
Something shifts in his face. Gone before I can describe it.
"You're fast," he says.
"You keep saying that like it surprises you."
"It doesn't surprise me." He pushes off the doorframe and straightens.
"It confirms something. That's different.
" He uncrosses his arms and rolls his left sleeve back to the elbow in two clean folds, and then he extends his wrist toward me, palm up, and the gesture is so direct that I stand there for a full second before I understand what he's doing. "Come here, Angelic."
He doesn't say it like a command. He says it like the outcome is already settled and we're just getting to it.
I cross the room. I stop in front of him with his extended wrist between us, and I look at the inner surface of it, the pale skin there, the faint lines of veins beneath.
"I've never done this," I say.
"I know." His voice is even. "I'll tell you how."
"I don't need instructions."
"You don't need to be embarrassed either," he says, and there's something in his tone that isn't quite amusement and isn't quite warmth but sits somewhere between them.
"It's not complicated. Your teeth won't extend like mine, so you'll use your mouth where I've already opened the skin.
Press down. The blood will do what it needs to do. "
I take his wrist with both hands. His skin is cooler than mine, the temperature differential I've noticed before, that specific quality of cold that runs a few degrees below a living body's warmth. His pulse is there under my fingers, slower than a human's, steady and even.
He presses his thumbnail to his wrist and draws a thin line across the skin.
Blood rises along it immediately, dark and immediate, and the smell hits me before I've decided anything, copper and something underneath it that isn't copper at all, something older and stranger, something that registers in my absorption instinct the same way absorbed magic does, as power, as take this.
I press my mouth to his wrist.
The first pull is careful, instinctive. The blood is warm despite his skin temperature, and the taste is nothing like I expected, nothing like iron or meat or any of the things I'd constructed in my head.
It tastes like the moment before lightning strikes.
It tastes like the second after you've made a decision you can't unmake.
My absorption pulls at it automatically, the same instinct that pulls at every source of power I get close to, and I feel it move through me with a heat that starts in my throat and spreads outward through my chest and my arms and my fingertips.
Caspian exhales. Slow and controlled, but not entirely controlled.
"There," he says. His voice is lower than it was. "Keep going. Enough to carry to her."
I take another pull. The heat spreads further and I grip his wrist tighter without meaning to, and his other hand comes up and presses flat against the back of my head, not pushing, not directing, just there, a weight that says stay.
"You taste like salvation," he says quietly. "Do you know that? Every time your absorption pulls, it feels like—" He stops himself. Whatever he was going to say, he keeps it.
I lift my head. His blood is on my lips and my absorption is running hot, the magic in it moving through me in slow waves, and I'm looking up at him with his wrist still in my hands and his palm still against my hair, and his green eyes are darker than I've ever seen them, focused on my mouth with an attention that is absolutely not clinical.
"That's enough," I say.
His hand drops from my hair. I step back and he lets me, and I turn to Sage without looking at him again because I can't afford to stand there processing what just happened when she needs what I'm carrying.
I kneel beside her and press both hands to her forearms the way Malik was doing.
My absorption reverses, the way it always can when I'm pushed far enough, and I push the blood's power back out through my palms, directing it into her system the way I've learned to direct absorbed magic, carefully, in controlled amounts.
Sage gasps. Her pupils contract and then equalize.
The color starts coming back to her face in slow degrees.