Be still,I tell them.Be dead. Be nothing.
“I’m going to increase the crystal intensity in stages,” Voss says.
Her voice is clinical, pleasant, the tone of someone explaining a routine procedure.
“You may feel a slight warmth as the light interacts with your shadow abilities. This is normal. Please try to remain relaxed.”
Relaxed. Right. I’ll get right on that.
The first stage feels like sunlight through a window — warm, diffuse, the light passing through my shadows the way it passes through any dark Nephilim’s darkness.
The monitoring equipment at Voss’s table shows readouts that I can’t see from this angle, but her expression stays neutral. Bored, almost.
The readings are showing her exactly what Bael’s blood designed them to show: a dark Nephilim student with unusual vampire-adjacent shadow properties. Interesting but not alarming.
Not what she’s looking for.
Stage two.
The warmth becomes heat.
The crystal light is more focused now — narrower beams that penetrate the outer layer of my shadows and probe the darkness beneath.
I feel it like fingers pushing through a heavy curtain, the light searching for something beyond the surface, something deeper than the vampire signature that Bael’s blood painted over my real shadows two days ago.
I grip the edges of the chair.
The metal bites into my fingers but the pain is grounding — something real and simple to focus on while the crystals look at my shadows with the invasive thoroughness of someone going through your private belongings while you sit and watch and can’t stop them.
The vampire layer holds.
Bael’s ancient darkness absorbs the crystal light with the heavy patience of shadow that has been enduring examination for millennia and doesn’t particularly care about one more.
I dare to breathe.
My heartbeat slows from its panicked gallop to something approaching normal. The vampire disguise is working. The crystals see Bael’s darkness and read it as the known quantity it is — old, unusual, worth a footnote but not worth an alarm.
Stage two passes. I’m still here. Still alive. Still unremarkable.
Stage three.
The crystals brighten to a level that makes the room go white at the edges of my vision.
The light drives into my shadows like a spike — not painful exactly, but intense, the kind of exposure that strips away surface and looks at what lives underneath with an intimacy that feels like violation.
The vampire layer stretches. Thins.
Bael’s signature spreading to cover the deeper examination the way ice spreads to cover a lake in winter — effective as long as the ice is thick enough, catastrophic if it cracks.
Something inside me moves.
Not my body. My shadows.
The living core beneath the vampire disguise — the part that thinks and chooses and responds to threat without asking my permission — reacts to the crystal probe with a flicker of independent behavior that I feel before I can suppress.
A shadow tendril reaching toward the nearest crystal, testing it, assessing it, responding to the light with the intelligent curiosity that marks the difference between dead darkness and the living kind.
One second. Maybe less.
