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, aspower, astake 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 sameinstinct 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 saysstay.
"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.
