Page 38 of The Truths We Hold

And because — beneath every strategic calculation, beneath every defense and every layer — the wanting is still there. My shadows reaching for his light. The devastating, unwanted, undeniable truth that the darkness in my body recognized something in Raziel’s illumination that it has been searching for since before I was born.

“Wednesday,” I say.

He nods. The silver eyes holding mine for two seconds — the same duration as the group scan’s eye contact, the same weight, the same pull — before he looks down at the file on his desk and the professional composure reassembles itself over whatever the personal interest was showing.

“Thank you, Ashley. You may go.”

I stand. Walk to the door. Open it and step into the corridor and close it behind me and make it four steps before my legs buckle and I’m leaning against the stone wall with my hand pressed over my mouth and my shadows erupting beneath the false normal in a silent scream of relief and terror and the devastating exhaustion of a woman who just survived fifteen minutes with the most dangerous being alive and who has agreed to do it again on Wednesday.

The stone wall is cold against my shoulder blades — the wing harness a ridge of heat between the cold stone and my burning back. The corridor is empty. The institutional quiet pressing against my ears after fifteen minutes of light that hummed at a frequency I could feel in my teeth.

Constantine’s door opens. His arms around me. Fire flooding through the bond. His mouth at my ear — “You’re out. You did it. You’re out.”

His shirt is damp with sweat. His fire so dim it barely registers as warmth. The man burned himself empty for fifteen minutes to give me whatever fraction of protection the interference provided. His hands on my back shaking with the depletion that comes from sustained maximum output.

“He wants to see me again,” I whisper.

Constantine’s arms tighten. The fire flaring with the heat his body produces when the emotions behind it are too complex for language — the love and the fear and the jealousy and the relief and the knowledge that the woman in his arms just walked out of a room with a being who felt a pull toward her and who asked to see her again.

“Wednesday,” I say. The word carrying the weight of everything the assessment revealed and everything it hid and the thin, trembling line between the two.

“Wednesday,” Constantine says. And holds me tighter.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

raziel

I have made an error.

The error is not in the reading. The reading was thorough — fifteen minutes of directed light, every layer of the shadow examined with the full attention nine centuries of practice have refined into the most penetrating assessment that exists. The reading found what the shadow contained: a vampire bond of unusual depth with a being of significant age. Fire residue consistent with academic research. The developmental signature of a powerful second-year whose shadow strength exceeds her training. Documentable. Explicable. The kind of unusual that fits within the expanded vocabulary nine centuries of assessment have built.

The error is in what I requested.

A conversation. Not a follow-up assessment. Not an institutional examination. A conversation. The word left my mouth before the professional discipline could intercept it — the way a door swings open before the hand reaches the lock. I heard myself say it and recognized the sound. The voice of a being speaking from personal interest rather than institutional purpose. The voice I have not used in nine centuries because it belongs to the room I sealed after the Fall and have not entered since.

I am sitting in my chambers. The institutional bed. The institutional desk. The curtains drawn against the evening light, the room dim and close with the residual warmth of a day I spent reading the shadows of students and the residual weight of the one shadow I cannot stop reading even now. The window glass behind the curtains carries the last amber glow of sunset — the same light that painted the gates when I arrived. The same color, I note with the involuntary precision of a being who notices everything, that lives at the edges of Ashley Dawn’s shadow. The room smells like lemon polish and old stone and the faint, metallic residue of my own light at sustained output — the scent my body produces after a full day of assessment work, sharp and clean the way ozone is clean. The scent of a tool that has been used hard and put away without being cleaned.

My light is restless.

This is not normal. My light, like my voice, is disciplined. Controlled. The product of nine centuries of daily practice in directing the power toward its institutional purpose and restraining it from every other use. My light opens when I direct it to open. My light reads what I direct it to read. My light does not fidget. My light does not pace. My light does not press against the inside of my skin like something trying to get out. My light does not behave like an animal that has caught a scent and cannot stop turning toward the source.

My light is turning toward Ashley Dawn.

Not physically — she is in the dormitory, hundreds of feet away, beyond stone walls and institutional wards and the distance that should render her shadow invisible to my resting perception. But my light knows where she is. The way a compass knows where north is — the direction of her shadow pulling at my awareness with the gentle, constant insistence of a gravitational body that has entered orbit and that my senses have involuntarily begun to track.

This has never happened. In nine hundred years of reading shadows, my light has never tracked a shadow after the reading ended. The reading begins. The reading ends. The shadow returns to the general population of darkness that exists in the world and my light releases it the way a hand releases a book that has been read. Finished. Catalogued. Filed.

Ashley Dawn’s shadow has not been released.

I review the reading. The professional discipline asserting itself — the analytical mind directing its full attention to the qualities that make this shadow resistant to release.

The vampire bond. Genuine. Deep. The blood exchange that produced the current level of merging is beyond anything I have encountered in a student — the kind of bond that typically exists between ancient beings who have shared blood for centuries rather than between an old vampire and a young woman bonded for less than a year. The depth suggests either extraordinary compatibility or an extraordinary amount of exchanged blood. Perhaps both. The ancient whose name is in her file — Bael — would be capable of this level of bond depth. Bael was always capable of depth that exceeded his years.

Bael. The name opens the sealed room by a wider margin than I can control.

I have not thought about Bael with intention in four centuries. I have thought about him the way one thinks about weather — peripherally, automatically, the awareness existing without conscious engagement. But now his blood is inside a woman whose shadow reached for my light and the name is no longer weather. The name is a storm.

Before the Fall, Bael was everything. The word is too large and too small. He was the shadow to my light — the brother whose darkness taught my illumination what it was for. We developed techniques together. His shadow-walking. My light-reading. The shared methods that existed in the space between our abilities where light and shadow were not opposites but partners. I taught him to read the currents in darkness. He taught me to see the beauty in what my light revealed. We trained in forests that no longer exist, in clearings where the air carried the combined scent of shadow and light intermingling — a smell like rain on warm stone, the specific fragrance of two elements occupying the same space without conflict. We were young. We were brilliant. We were the proof that the division didn’t have to exist.