I stare at the house—what once was a house—for a long moment.
I smell no life. I hear no heartbeat. Once, I could sense her from across the room—across the castle—like her body itself called to me, making its presence constantly known.
Her absence now is even more overpowering. A great hole that has opened up in my soul.
Regret, fierce and unrelenting, tears me up.
Three of my soldiers surround the remains of the house, but they haven’t yet seen me. I consider flying away. Every part of me wants to turn away from this wreckage and lock it somewhere I don’t have to think about it.
But the absence of the heartbeat I was looking for made me miss the one that remained. The three Hiaj below were circling something, their interest piqued with hunger.
I can, at least, finish what I came here for.
I land. One of the soldiers is cursing and rubbing his bloody hand.
“A lamb?” he mutters. “More like a viper.”
Then the warriors notice me and hurry to bow. I don’t pay attention to them.
Because by then, I have seen you.
You are a lone flicker of light in an expanse of death. The only living thing in this pile of rubble.
In my dreams, my child is a mirror of myself. It is my own face I see when I think of dying by my Heir’s hand.
But you, little serpent, look so much like your mother.
I kneel before you. You are so very small. Surely small for your age, though I’m not sure exactly how old that is. Time can be strange for vampires. Your mother has lingered with me for so long that sometimes, I can’t remember how long it has been since she left.
You have long, slick black hair that covers your face, and freckles over your nose that blend with the smears of blood and soot, wrinkling as you sneer at me. They make me think of another time, long ago.
But those eyes.
You have my eyes. Silver as the moon, round and full of steel rage. The rage is mine, too. The fearlessness.
I reach for you, and though I can hear in your heartbeat that you’re afraid, you don’t hesitate to snap at me, sinking your little teeth deep into my finger.
I will not lie to you, little serpent.
I was expecting to kill you that night.
But what I was not expecting was to love you so devastatingly much.
It hits me so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, that I don’t even have time to brace myself against it.
You glare at me, like you’re ready to go down fighting even against one of the most powerful men in the world, and I smile a little, despite myself.
It takes me a minute to recognize the sensation in my chest. Pride.
I think of my own father and the way he spent my entire life crippling me out of fear of what I would become. Think of the night he casually threw my newborn baby brother out the window to the demons.
It is incomprehensible to me that my father ever felt for me the way I feel in this moment.
Surely no one ever has.
I cannot describe the depth of that emotion, nor the intensity of the terror that comes with it, bound together so inextricably. I came here to excise my greatest weaknesses, and instead, I now offer up my heart to it.
From that moment, little serpent, I could not entertain the possibility of killing you.
I’ll do the next best thing, I tell myself. I will raise you. I will protect myself from you by protecting you from a world that would teach you how to kill me.
It can be different, I tell myself, than how it was with my father and me.
It can be different than how it was with her.
I pick you up. You’re so tiny and fragile in my arms. Even though you’re terrified of me, you cling to my neck, like some part of you knows exactly who I am.
I’m already more afraid than I ever have been.
Afraid of you and what you could do to me. Afraid of the world that could kill you so easily. Afraid of myself, gifted with another fragile heart that I know I cannot keep.
But, my little serpent, it is the most wonderful fear.
Every minute with you is, even if I already regret all the mistakes I know I will make.
I drew in a gasp. My chest hurt. The air burned.
I was on my knees now.
I forced my eyes open through the noxious smoke. No—not smoke. Magic of some kind, thick and red, shimmering in a million colors at once.
Maybe that was why tears streaked down my cheeks.
Maybe not.
Vincent was kneeling beside me. His hand was on my shoulder, but I couldn’t feel his touch, and for a moment that devastated me.
No matter how real he felt, no matter how real he looked, he was gone.
He smiled sadly at me.
“I tried, Oraya,” he murmured. “I tried.”
I understood the depth of what he was admitting in those two words. Centuries worth of brutality ingrained into him, revered above all else. Millennia worth of generations of bloody ends and bloody beginnings.
I had never seen Vincent admit weakness before. And those words were a concession of so many failures.
And yet, I was still so angry at him.
“It wasn’t enough,” I choked out, fractured with an almost-sob.
His throat bobbed. “I know, little serpent,” he murmured. “I know.”
He tried to stroke my hair, but I felt nothing.
Because Vincent was dead.
All of it was true at once. That he had saved me. That he had crippled me. His selfishness and his selflessness.
That he had tried.
That he had failed.
And that he had loved me, anyway.
And I would carry all of that forever, for the rest of my life.
And he would still be dead.
I forced myself to my feet. I turned to Vincent. His image, once so sharp, was starting to fade.
He looked to the obelisk.
“I think,” he said, “this is what you came here for.”
I followed his gaze. The pillar had opened, revealing a cavity full of rippling crimson light.
And there, at its center, was a little vial, floating, self-contained, in the air. The liquid within contained impossible multitudes of color, shifting and changing with every passing second. Purple and blue and red and gold and green, all at once, like the range of shades in a galaxy.
“The blood of Alarus,” I whispered.
“Your mother and I gave up so much to distill this.” His gaze found mine again. “But we gained so much, too.”
“What do I do with it? Do I drink it or—or wield it—”
“You can drink it. Only a little bit. Or you can put it in your blades. It will find a way to give you its power, however you wield it. Your blood is the catalyst.”
“What will it do to me?”
I thought of Simon, and his bloodshot, empty eyes. Those teeth that had taken more from him than they had given.
“It will make you powerful,” Vincent said.
“What else?”
“I cannot say.”
There was a reason, I knew, why he had never used the blood. It was a power so great it could only be an absolute last resort.
I reached into the compartment and closed my hand around the vial.
It took a moment to realize the scream that sliced the air was mine. Everything disappeared but the pain for several long seconds. I was dripping with sweat when, inch by inch, I withdrew it from the obelisk.