Chapter 11
Kage
I watch her walk out on his arm.
Not his arm. Next to his arm. She didn't take it—I saw her look at his offered elbow and leave it hanging, and that small defiance is the only thing keeping me from ripping the stone column I'm leaning against out of the floor and putting it through Leopold Vassard's chest.
She's walking across the north lawn with him.
The tribunal emptied ten minutes ago and the whole campus is watching—students in clusters, faculty at windows, everyone trying to figure out whether the witch just got saved or sold.
I know the answer. I've always known the answer, because I've been sold too.
Hex and me are alike in too many ways.
Her wrists are bleeding. The puncture marks from the irons, still open, dark spots soaking through the cuffs of her shirt. I can see them from here. I can smell them from here.
And that's the other problem.
Her blood has been a problem since the first time she bled near me—combat class, a split knuckle, nothing, a few drops on the mat, and my whole body went rigid like I'd been hit with a live wire.
Three hundred years of blood bags. Three hundred years of never feeding from a living person, never letting my fangs near skin, never once crossing the line the thing that turned me crossed when it sank its teeth in my neck and took my life away.
That line is the only thing I own. The one principle I've held through three centuries of having nothing.
And her blood smells like the end of everything.
It’s not like other blood. Not copper and salt and the flat nutritional fact of survival.
Hers is warm. Electric. It hums against my senses the way her magic hums against my chest when we're close, and every time I catch it, my fangs drop before I can think, and the hunger that hits me is so far past feeding it's something else entirely.
I watch Leopold lean toward her as they walk. His mouth moving. That easy, warm, poisonous smile. She's stiff beside him. Chin up, shoulders locked, hands in fists at her sides—holding herself together the way she always does, with sheer fucking stubbornness and not much else.
I should be down there. I should be between them. I should be the thing standing between her and whatever Leopold has planned in that white stone house, but I'm standing at a window in the admin building with my fist against the glass, because I can't do a goddamn thing.
I've been running the math since the tribunal ended.
The fail-safe is still in her neck. That hasn't changed—the adjudicator confirmed it stays with the council, stays with Aamon.
So even if I got her out of Leopold's house, even if I carried her off this campus tonight, the device travels.
Aamon wouldn't trigger it. I believe that now, after the cellar, after last night.
But Aamon isn't the only one with access to the override codes.
Balcour has them. The council has them. If she runs, they activate it from a desk somewhere and she drops.
I could cut it out.
The thought comes back every few hours like a dog I can't stop feeding.
I've seen the scar on her neck where they implanted it.
I've felt the outline of the device through her skin when my mouth was on her throat.
Small. Rectangular. Sits against the base of her skull near the brain stem.
I could do it—I've got steady hands and I heal fast enough to practice on myself if I needed to, and there have to be tools somewhere in the medical wing that would—
No. I'd kill her.
The thing is wired into her nervous system. Pull it wrong and I sever something that doesn't grow back, not even with vampire blood. I'm strong, not surgical. This isn't my kind of problem.
But I can't fucking leave her in there.
Not when I know the nasty fucker she’s dealing with.
Leopold carved a rune into her door with his own blood.
He got her sealed file—the one that lists every person her magic has killed, including her nine-year-old sister—and read it out loud at a party.
He engineered the chain of events that killed Emric Vane, and then he walked into the tribunal and offered to take responsibility for the mess he made.
Now the man who broke her has legal custody of her.
That doesn’t sit right with me.
I push off the window. Pace. My fist hits the wall before I decide to swing it—plaster cracks, knuckles split, heal, split again when I hit it a second time. Doesn't help. None of this bleeds when I punch it.
Not like Leopold would. Only the crunch of his bones under my hands would cool the fury coursing through my dead body.
Okay. Think.
Aamon got himself into the house. That section nine play—I didn't see it coming, and judging by Leopold's face, neither did he.
So she's not alone in there. Aamon is under the same roof, chained to her by the fail-safe protocol, and whatever else I think about the man, he meant what he said in that cellar last night.
He'll watch her. He'll keep Leopold's hands off her. He'll buy time.
Time for what though?
For me to find something I can actually use.
Leopold's weak point. The thing that explains why he's been hunting her since September, why a Vassard heir is wasting his political capital on a twenty-five-year-old witch who can barely hold a channel.
There's a reason. There's always a reason when someone with that much power focuses it to a fault. I just haven't found it yet.
I'm halfway through hedging a plan—Leopold's quarters, his correspondence, the sealed wing where he met the Vane advocate—when my blood catches fire.
It starts in my wrists. It always starts in my wrists—the place where my sire's teeth went in three hundred years ago, the entry points, the original wounds that healed on the outside and never healed underneath.
A heat that isn't heat. A pull that isn't physical.
My blood, moving against the current, pulling toward something my body recognizes and my mind rejects.
Midus.
The name arrives with the pull like a signature on an invoice. I know who's calling before my legs start moving because the bond carries the caller's signature in the compulsion, and Midus's signature tastes like old iron and cruelty.
I’m being summoned.
I lock my knees. Brace my hands on the railing. Fight it.
The sire bond doesn't care. It doesn't argue, doesn't persuade, doesn't negotiate.
It just pulls harder. My blood reverses direction in my veins—I can feel it, every drop of it answering a voice that isn't mine, and the muscles in my legs tighten and release without my permission.
My right foot slides forward on the stone. Then my left.
I grip the railing until my knuckles go white. The iron bends under my hands.
“Fuck,” I grumble as the last of my strength against the call gives out.
Three seconds. That's how long I can resist. I've counted. Three hundred years and the longest I've ever held back from answering a summons is three seconds before the bond overrides everything—autonomy, dignity, the basic human right to stay where you fucking are.
I used to fight longer. When it was new, when I still remembered what it felt like to own my own legs, I'd fight until the pain made me black out. My summoner would find me on the floor, muscles locked, blood running from my nose, still trying to hold. It never worked. It just hurt more.
One.
The heat spreads up my arms, across my chest. My heart rate spikes—not from fear, from chemistry.
The sire bond runs through my circulatory system like a second nervous system, and when it activates, my body goes to war with itself.
The part of me that's still a person tries to hold.
The part of me that was rewritten three hundred years ago by a vampire who wanted to punish me answers the call.
Two.
I was human once. I don't remember his face—the one who turned me.
I don't remember why. The memories are gone, dissolved over centuries like photographs left in water.
I remember the feeling of sunlight on my arms without a spell to protect me.
I remember a woman's laugh with no face attached to it.
I remember the exact moment the teeth went in and the world changed, and then three hundred years of this.
Of being called. Of being sent. Of being forced to become a monster. One horrendous deed at a time.
Three.
My fingers release the railing. My body straightens. My legs carry me toward the stairs, smooth, unhurried, compliant—the well-trained animal responding to a whistle only it can hear.
The walk to Midus's office in the training complex takes four minutes. Basement level. No windows. The hallway is lit by fluorescents that buzz at a frequency that makes my teeth itch, and the door is open. Midus is sitting behind his desk eating an apple.
He doesn't look up when I walk in. He never looks up. I'm not a person entering a room—I'm a tool being retrieved from a rack.
"Took you four and a half minutes," he says. Chewing. "You were fighting it."
I don't answer. The compulsion has released—it always does once I'm in proximity, the sire bond going slack like a leash that's been walked to its full length. My body is mine again.
For now.
"There's a collection run tonight." He takes another bite. Looks at a clipboard. "Three addresses in Kenner. The donors are behind on their agreements."
Donors. The word he uses. The word the academy uses for the humans who supply the blood stores—the bags that fill the dispensary, the clinic, the faculty lounge.
Some of them are voluntary. Paid contracts, regular draws, compensation that makes it worth the needle.
Those donors don't end up on Midus's clipboard.
The ones on the clipboard are the ones who stopped showing up. Like faulting on a gambling debt.
"Behind how long?" I ask.
"Two months. Three months. One of them changed her phone number." He flips a page. "Remind them of the terms."
My jaw clenches and my body locks up.
What he means is: go to their homes at night, knock on their doors, and use whatever combination of intimidation and compulsion it takes to get them back into a chair with a needle in their arm.
And if they won't come willingly—if they've decided that the money isn't worth the bruises, or the dizziness, or the look in their children's eyes when a vampire shows up at the door—then remind them that the contract they signed has enforcement clauses, and the enforcement clause is me.
I am the enforcement clause.
Three hundred years of this. Blood collections are the easy nights.
The siring bond doesn't care what the job is—whoever holds it can invoke me for anything, and the academy has held it for three centuries.
I've collected blood. I've broken bones.
I've stood in rooms while people begged and done what I was told to do anyway.
I've killed for them. Twice that I remember clearly, more that I've buried deep enough that the details are gone but the weight isn't. Every one of those nights lives in my hands like a stain I can feel but can't see, and three hundred years of being made to do it has never once made the next time easier.
I don't feed from humans. That's my line. The one thing I chose. And then they send me to drag humans into rooms where other vampires feed from them, and the distinction I draw between those two things is the thinnest, most pathetic wall I've ever built.
"Three addresses," Midus repeats. "Start with the woman in Kenner. She's the flight risk."
He pulls a folded paper from the clipboard and holds it out. Doesn't extend his arm—makes me cross the room to take it. A small thing that proves his dominance and superiority over me.
I take it.
"And Kage?" He bites the apple again. Chews.
Swallows. "I heard about the tribunal. Your little witch got herself a new owner.
" His eyes come to mine for the first time—flat, amused, the way you'd look at a dog that keeps trying to jump a fence.
"Shame. I know you liked that one. But Leopold's got deep pockets and you've got—" He gestures at me with the apple core.
All of me. The scars, the clothes, the three centuries of nothing. "Well."
My hands stay at my sides. My jaw stays closed.
"Go," he says. "Fetch."
I leave.
The hallway is long and lit and empty. I stop three doors down and put my back against the wall and close my eyes.
Fetch.
Three hundred years. Three hundred years of fetch and heel and back on the rack and every other leash-snap a man like Midus has in his vocabulary.
Three hundred years of swallowing it because the alternative is dying—the bond doesn't bluff.
Fight it hard enough, long enough, and it kills you.
Not metaphorically. The blood stops. The heart quits.
I watched it happen once, to another turned vampire, decades before I ended up here.
She fought a compulsion for eleven seconds.
Eleven. Her body shut down like someone pulled a plug, and she was dead before she hit the floor.
So I swallow it. Every fucking time. I let a man who couldn't beat me in a fair fight on the best day of his life talk to me like an animal, and I walk away, and the anger sits in my chest like a coal that never goes out.
It's about the only thing I feel anymore—the anger.
A low, constant burn that I've carried so long it's less an emotion and more an organ.
Anger and numbness, numbness and anger, the two modes I toggle between like channels on a dead TV.
Until her.
Calypso broke the dial. She walked onto this campus and something in me that I thought was scar tissue turned out to be a nerve, and now I feel things I don't have names for and can't afford.
The smell of her blood still in my head.
Her wrists in the tribunal, the puncture wounds weeping through her sleeves.
It reached me across a room of two hundred people and my fangs dropped before I could stop them and nobody saw but I felt it—the want, bone-deep, the kind of hunger that has nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with her.
I open my eyes. Unfold the paper in my fist. Three names. Three addresses. One has a note in Midus's handwriting: kids in the house—be clean.
“Jesus,” I mumble.
I refold it. Put it in my pocket.
I go do my job.
Calypso's in Leopold's house right now. First night of her new jail cell with a brand new tormenter.
If I were free.
I said that to her once. In the shed. Meant it then. Mean it now. But the sentence starts with if, and I still haven’t found the way to break my sire bond.
I get in the car. Start the engine.
Somewhere behind the campus lights, past the north lawn and the oaks and the iron gate of a white stone house, Calypso is learning the shape of her new cage.
I'm driving toward mine.