And I’m still standing.
My hand lifts to my chest on instinct, fingers pressing into the place where a human pulse would live. For a suspended second, I feel something there anyway, not a heartbeat but the fading echo of another’s will, the last tremor of a presence that has occupied my bones since the night she remade me.
It flickers once, thin as breath against glass, and then dissolves. The pressure that has lived at the base of my skull, that constant, invasive sense of being watched from the inside, drains out of me in a slow, irreversible tide. Thought returns to its proper shape. The world feels quieter, as though a frequency I’ve endured for too long has finally been severed.
Whatever Valeria threaded into me when she turned me, that cold filament of ownership masquerading as instinct, hasbeen burned clean. Reduced to the same ash the wind is already beginning to take. The relief is so enormous it’s almost indistinguishable from grief.
The church looks like the war didn’t just happen in it, it happened to it, stone by stone, wall by wall, the building itself a casualty…
Which, to be fair, is accurate.
Scorch’s Dragonfire has eaten most of the east wall, the stonework blackened down to its bones, smoke still curling from the rafters in thin ribbons. The south gallery is gone, collapsed outward into the churchyard at some point in the last twenty minutes. The main hall is scattered with the evidence of what it cost us to be here—broken pews, broken stone, dark smears across the flagstones that my vampire senses translate without any input from the part of my brain that would prefer not to know.
Blood.
A lot of it.
Some of it is mine.
I size up the damage the way I do everything now, figuring out what’ll kill me first and what can wait till later. The gash along my forearm from a scion’s fingernails is deep but already knitting at the edges, and the ache in my ribs where someone got in a good hit somewhere in the second wave. The ringing in my left ear from the moment the gallery came down and the pressure wave passed through the main hall.
None of it is serious.
None of it will last.
The thing about being a vampire, about this body that was built from grief, violence, and two hundred and thirty-seven years of Valeria’s particular flavor of spite, is that it heals. Wounds close, breaks reset, and the body keeps insisting onsurviving even when the rest of you hasn’t quite caught up with the decision.
I’m still learning to be grateful for that instead of being unsettled by it.
Fifteen of them made it. I know the number without counting, the way I know the heartbeats in a room before I identify the faces. Fifteen scions, freed, alive, sitting or crouching or pressed against whatever surface they could find in the aftermath of the battle, wearing their confusion the way survivors wear it with a blankness that happens when the body has stopped running, and the mind hasn’t yet received the memo.
Five didn’t make it.
I know that number too.
In the hollow silence where those five missing heartbeats used to be, their names are unknown.
We didn’t get the chance to learn them, didn’t get the chance to do what Sloane, Rogue, and I did for the others—talk them back from the edge, let the Bloodfire burn the worst of Valeria’s control out of them. Five people who woke up one night in a life they didn’t ask for, were starved into weapons, and died in a ruined church without ever understanding what happened to them.
That one is going to sit with me for a while.
I know from experience that sitting with things is not the same as being destroyed by them.
I’m getting better at the difference.
The ones who survived are terrified.
That’s the first thing, before the confusion, before anything else. The terror is the loudest thing in the room, louder than the groaning of the damaged structure above us, louder than the distant sounds of the brothers moving through the churchyard outside, securing the perimeter. Fifteen pairs of eyes tracking every shift of movement with the skittish, hypervigilantattention of creatures who have spent weeks being kept at the precise edge of feral, never quite tipping over, never quite drawing back.
Valeria built them very well.
I walk toward them before I consciously decide to.
Rogue makes a low sound behind me, not stopping me, not warning me away, but present. That attentiveness of his I’ve come to recognize as the wolf version of being ready to catch someone if they fall.
I crouch down in front of the nearest scion, a woman, young, dark-haired, still shaking hard enough that the stone dust drifts off her shoulders in fine tremors. Her eyes, when they find mine, are red at the edges, hunger, terror, and something that might be the first fragile shoots of coherence all running through them at the same time.
“Hey.” I keep my voice the same way Rogue taught me to keep it when everything in me wants to be loud, low, and steady, and as if I have all the time in the world. “The fighting’s over. She’s gone. You’re safe.”
