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Every single warning bell in my head went off, and I locked my instincts down to keep my shadows from surging forward to defend me. How in the hells was I supposed to respond to that? Marisse would have known how to handle this situation, I was certain, but she had disappeared, probably to go feed some vampire. “That’s flattering, but—”
“Kitten.” Maximillian appeared out of nowhere, looking devastatingly handsome in his evening attire. His stormcloud hair and alabaster skin glowed faintly in the soft light of the aetheric crystals, the dim glow highlighting the angular planes of his face. He extended his arm to me as he nodded a greeting to the inventor. “Excuse us.”
“Of course, Lord Starclaw,” the inventor rasped as I curled my arm around Maximillian’s. The moment I made contact with him, his scent surrounded me like a cloak swirled around my shoulders, and my nerves began to settle. “Enjoy your little morsel.”
Maximillian led me away, tucking me protectively against his side. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, his voice a low murmur in my ear. “But it looked to me as though you required assistance.”
I hid a smile as he echoed the exact words he’d spoken to me after rescuing me from that vampire grunt on my first night in Lumina. “You have a thing for rescuing damsels in distress, don’t you?” I asked.
“Only when they are as exquisite as you are,” Maximillian responded with a low purr. The teasing note in his voice sent a current of warmth through me, and I blinked as I realized I was flirting with a vampire, in the middle of a vampire soiree, and actually enjoying it. It was a situation the old me couldn’t fathom, and that the new me was still wrapping my head around.
Who was I becoming, exactly?
“Don’t allow yourself to be alone with Icarus Stormwelder if you can help it,” Maximillian continued as he led me through the garden, his expression growing serious. “He may be mad, but he is also highly intelligent and has a penchant for experimenting on live subjects. It is the worst of combinations, which is precisely why the emperor keeps him around.”
A shudder went through me, and I resisted the urge to look back at the aetherion inventor, whose eyes I could still feel on my back. “No wonder Eliza hates him,” I muttered.
“Indeed.” Maximillian squeezed my arm, then straightened as we arrived at a high-top table, where the Stellaris twins were holding court along with a gaggle of other vampire nobles. The female twin, Viviana, lit up at our approach, the silver flecks in her midnight eyes lighting up as they landed on me.
“Oooh, you’ve found her!” she squealed, clapping her hands like a child that had been given an unexpected gift. Her long nails were painted silver, with black tips, and they seemed to mirror her hair, which had been swept off her neck in an updo, leaving only the long white streak to hang down by her face. “I have been dying to get a taste of you since Maximillian presented you at court this morning.”
Her words caused my insides to coil with dread, and I glanced up at Maximillian, uncertain. “But I thought—”
“Ignore my sister,” Caelum said with a drawl, picking up his cocktail glass so he could take a sip. I tried not to focus on the way he licked the blood off his teeth before he spoke. “She’s simply trying to get a rise out of you. No one but Maximillian is allowed to drink from you—the emperor proclaimed it, and so it shall be.”
“I’ve always found that to be a silly rule,” Viviana said with a pout. Her lips were painted a vivid shade of red that contrasted beautifully with her ivory skin. “After all, it’s not as if one bite alone is enough to complete the Descendancy. If that was the case, we would have run out of humans a long time ago.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point,” Caelum said, his words edged with annoyance. “The rule is in effect so that no Nightforged can claim that they merely got ‘carried away in the heat of the moment’, or some other nonsense.”
“Have people really used that defense in the past?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Oh yes.” Caelum gave me a sharp smile. “Feuding house members will often steal a descendant out from under the nose of another, simply to assert dominance, or as revenge for some petty slight. It can happen within houses, too. But the emperor wants us all to act as if we are one big, happy family, so he does as much as he can to ensure minimal scrapping between the houses.”
“Are we not one big, happy family?” Soren Ironheart interrupted as he stepped out from the shadows. Like Caelum, he wore a military dress uniform, this one in dark red to indicate his statusas army commander as opposed to Caelum’s dark blue navy attire.
“Sure we are,” Caelum said, his voice rife with sarcasm. “The Psychoros gunners on my ship get along wonderfully with my Sanguis Noctis deck officers.”
“Perhaps you should restructure your crew assignments if you are having issues with inter-house conflict,” Soren suggested coolly. His grey eyes found Maximillian, barely acknowledging my presence by his side. “Lord Starclaw, may I have a word? It concerns the cannon prototype.”
“Of course. Please excuse me,” he said to the others, then stepped past me, his hand brushing the small of my back before he disappeared into the foliage with the army commander, leaving me alone with the Stellaris twins. Caelum’s words hung in the air in their wake, reminding me he was on the forefront of the battle between Noxalis and Trivaea. It was his ships relentlessly attacking our coastline, and the Crescent Cove—my clan's home—was right in the middle of it.
“Is the new cannon really going to make such a difference?” I asked Caelum, trying to sound like I was only casually interested, as if the lives of my people didn’t depend on the answer. “I thought your ships already had guns.”
Caelum snorted. “The guns that we have are little more than sparklers. The crystals take forever to charge, the blasts are not very powerful, and they can only hit at around three hundred yards on a good day. This new prototype is supposed to be able to hit targets from up to fifteen hundred yards, and from what I heard, a single blast from one was enough to reduce an entire airship to kindling.”
“Ahh, that’s right.” Viviana leaned in, a conspiratorial smile on her face. “You were there for the demonstration, weren’t you? Was the cannon as impressive as Caelum describes?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Good,” Caelum said with a grunt. “We’ll be able to actually launch strikes on the coastline. And maybe even rip those sea monsters apart.”
“Sea monsters?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “Didn’t those all die off after the Eternal Night?” From what I’d read, the lack of sunlight had severely disrupted the ocean’s ecosystem. I didn’t see how creatures who required large amounts of food, such as sea monsters, could have survived.
“They did,” Caelum said darkly. “But the Necrospire Clan used their dark magic to resurrect them, and that crafty bastard, Sebastian Nocturne, has bribed the Blackwater Pirates to lend Trivaea a portion of their fleet. Now every one of their accursed ships has a necromancer witch on it, and they send all manner of horrific creatures to attack our ships—Shadow Krakens that rip our masts off with their tentacles, Wraith Whales that blow holes into our hulls with sonic blasts, and even Necrotic Sirens who use their dark forces to sing my sailors into madness until they turn on each other.”
Caelum’s grip tightened on his glass as he spoke and it shattered in his hand on the last word. The naval commander swore as one shard cut deeply into his palm, and Viviana tsked, reaching for a cloth napkin folded on the table.
“You really need to learn how to leave your work at home, brother,” she scolded, scooping up his hand so she could mop up the blood. I figured it was more about the mess than anythingelse—the wound was already healing before my eyes. “This is a party. You’re supposed to be relaxing.”
