Chapter
One
He’s still fighting it.
Dawn is maybe ten minutes out and every other vampire has already dropped, the compound going silent, dormancy sweeping through all at once. Maximus hasn’t fallen yet.
He still goes dormant. That hasn’t changed. But dormancy’s hold on him is loosening, morning by morning. Something in the pull is different than it was.
He doesn’t know that I’m already past it. That dormancy can’t compel me anymore. It hasn’t been able to since before the last battle. I could go under if I was tired enough. But the compulsion is gone.
I’ll tell him tonight.Same thing I said to myself last night. Same thing I’ll probably say tomorrow.
His hand is at my throat, fingers resting on the chain, on the ring beneath. I put my hand over his and leave it there.
The bond is fully open between us. The heaviness settles into him, slower than it used to be. It used to take minutes. Now it takes longer every morning.
His breathing deepens. His fingers go slack against my throat.
I count to sixty after his hand goes still. Then I ease out from under his arm. Careful. Slow. His hand slides to the sheets. Nothing.
I dress in the dark. Boots. Hair back. I take one look back at him, marble-still, arm outstretched toward the empty space I left. I leave.
The service entrance off the south garden has a padlock I broke and hinges I oiled myself. The corridor beyond is unlit and smells like mildew and old stone, and I move through it fast, the route memorized. Utility passage, junction, two turns, back stairs.
I go up the stairs and out through the service door into the grounds. The wards read something in my blood and part without resistance. I’m through. The sun crests the tree line as I clear the service door. It hits my face, and I let it, because I can. I have until dusk, technically. But I need to be back in that bed before Maximus surfaces, so as far as he knows I never left.
The clearing is half a mile past the perimeter, past the gap where the creek bends south. I’ve been coming here every morning for six days. There’s a section of fallen oak where the creek bank collapsed, six feet of dead wood, bark peeling, center rotted through. It’s my practice target by default. No training equipment. No spotter. Just me and the wreckage and whatever I’m becoming.
I widen my stance and reach for it.
The power responds before I finish the thought. Pressure between my temples, then something pushing outward, and theoak section lifts off the ground, eye level, rotating slow. Six feet of dead wood hanging in the air like I asked it to.
Good. I reach further, past the surface, into the interior. This is the part that still unsettles me. The way it just goes, past bark into heartwood, past heartwood into the tight-packed rings underneath, pulling up information I didn’t ask for and can’t turn off. Growth rings compacted where the droughts hit hard, looser where the rains came heavy. A place near the left end where the wood knotted around old damage, the scar denser than everything surrounding it.
I already know where it will split.
Don’t. Not the point.
I set it down. Pick up a rock instead. Granite, fits in my palm. I reach in slowly, and the power does what it does now. Pushes past the surface and maps what’s inside. Quartz. Feldspar. A vein of mica running diagonally. The fault line at the narrow end. The exact angle that would take it apart.
I could split it right now. The power already knows how. I put it down instead.
Then a bird lands on the branch above me.
I don’t mean to reach for it. The power just goes, the same automatic reach it makes for anything nearby. Hollow bones. Heart beating fast. The weak point maps itself before I can think about it.
I yank hard. Pull back. The bird startles off the branch and is gone.
I sit down in the grass.
The bird is fine. You pulled back. It’s fine.
I don’t entirely believe that.
The list of things this power can find fault lines in keeps growing, and everyone I love is inside those walls, and I need to understand what it is before I put it in a room with them. Wemade a promise. I’ve been breaking it since the battle ended and have been calling it something else. Research. Preparation.
That’s the clean version. The real version is that I don’t know what I’m becoming, and I’m afraid that when Maximus sees it clearly he’ll want to contain it. Study it. Put a protocol around it. He protects what he loves by understanding it down to the bone, and I’ve watched him do it to every threat that’s crossed his territory, and I don’t want to become a threat he has to understand.
