I forced myself not to think about what Mina’s pyre would smell like. I told myself I wouldn’t have to find out.
Mina and I did not discuss her decline. What was there to say?
But the blood drained from my face the first time I came home to see Thomassen sitting at our kitchen table, his hand in Mina’s, their heads bowed.
An acolyte of Vitarus in my house—the same house in which I had an entire room dedicated to the blood and belongings of my vampire… friend. Dangerous.
But what frightened me more were the silent tears that rolled down my sister’s cheeks, because I sensed what this was the moment I walked into the room.
I had long ago come to terms with my own cruel mortality. But it isn’t easy to accept that kind of ugly truth. I went through my struggle when I grew old enough to understand what death meant. In the years since, I’d watched so many others go through it, as their eyes grew hollow, their skin dusty. I saw the desperation as they looked up at the sky, where maybe somewhere the god that cursed them lurked, and I knew they would do anything, anything for more time everyone knew they wouldn’t get.
When I came home and saw the priest holding my sister’s hands, I knew that, for the first time, Mina felt that desperation.
That terrified me.
My sister had looked up and given me a weak smile.
“Sit with us,” she said.
In the same tone of voice that she had asked, Stay.
Stay, I wanted to beg her.
But no, I wouldn’t pray to the god that had damned her. I wouldn’t help her come to terms with a death I refused to let her meet.
“I can’t,” I said, and went to my office without another word. I didn’t stop working until dawn, and even then, I fell asleep over my books.
But Thomassen came more and more often, and death crept closer and closer.
If I was less distracted by my work and the grief I tried so hard to stave off, perhaps I would have been more concerned by the acolyte’s constant presence in this house. Perhaps I would have given more thought to the way he watched me, the lingering stares at the doors I left ajar.
But I was used to being judged—too used to it to realize when judgment became dangerous.
I didn’t have time to worry about one old man’s thoughts about me. I had to work.
I was running out of time.
But then, one day, when nearly a month had passed since my last visit to Vale, something shifted. I slept in my study that day, as I so often did now, and I woke up to a pile of Vale’s letters, strewn across my desk. Four of them, in the sparse hours I’d been asleep.
My heart jumped with either anticipation or dread. So many in such a short span could only signal something wonderful or terrible.
It turned out it was the former.
Vale had made a discovery. I flipped through his letters—pages upon pages torn from one of his books. I’d gotten used to his scrawled handwriting, but the translations in the margins were even messier than usual, as if he’d been writing so fast he couldn’t even stop to form real letters. It took me hours to fully decode them.
When I did, I gasped.
He had found a crucial missing piece. The text was old, detailing experiments done on vampire blood in Obitraes. Yet, despite their age, the figures answered so many of the questions I had been grappling with about how to effectively distill vampire blood into something different. Vale and I hadn’t found much in the way of Obitraen science—vampire society, it seemed, was much more inclined to work with magic instead.
But this… it was exactly the sort of information I’d barely allowed myself to dream of.
“Vale,” I breathed under my breath. “Vale, you—you—”
I was grinning so widely my cheeks hurt. I probably looked like a lunatic, half-mad with exhaustion and hope. I hadn’t changed my clothes in days, and I figured another day wouldn’t do any harm, because I launched myself right back into work.
Hours blurred into days. New equations became new formulas became new vials of experimental potions. Vials of experimental potions became tests as I gave them to my ailing rats.
And tests became medicine as those rats grew less and less sick.
The next batch, too. And the next.
And then, one bleary morning, I found myself standing before an entire cage of healthy, active rodents, cradling those vials in my hands like a newborn infant—and medicine became a cure.
A cure.
It was only fitting, of course, that this was when everything fell apart.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I opened the door, and Farrow stood there, his sandy hair wild and eyes wide. Sheer terror.
He sagged against the frame when I opened the door, like he was so relieved to see me that all his muscles gave out.
Mine, on the other hand, tensed, as my fragile newfound hope smashed to the floor.
“You have to go.”
He said it so fast that the four words ran together in a single exhale.
“What—”
“They’re coming for you,” he blurted out. “They came to the city looking for help. They’re coming for him, and then for you. You have to go.”
He grabbed my arm, as if ready to haul me away by force. But I remained rooted, stuck, dread falling over me like a cold shadow.
I didn’t need to ask who “they” were.
Because I could picture Thomassen’s cold, suspicious stare. I could picture Vale’s ravens and magic. I could picture all the little marks of my friend I left around this house, now so blatantly, foolishly, stupidly obvious.
What was the obvious end to this story? Ignorant zealots who didn’t want to die were presented with a god that no longer loved them, and an illness that just kept spreading, and a vampire upon which they could blame it all.
Easy. A simple equation.
They’re coming for you.
They’re coming for him.
“You have some time, but you need to leave,” Farrow was saying in the background. “You can stay in my apartment in the city. I’ll have a carriage waiting and—”
“No.”
I wrenched my arm out of his grip, turning back to my office.
“No?” he echoed.
“Take Mina and leave without me.”
“But Lilith—”
Farrow kept talking, quickly, but I wasn’t listening to whatever he was saying. I let his voice run into the background.
We had no time for words. Only actions.
I grabbed my coat. My bag. My precious, precious bag.
Mina. I needed to—
“What do you mean, no?”
Funny, how Farrow’s voice disappeared into the din of my rushing blood, while Mina’s, weak as it was, made every other sound disappear.
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her sound like that. Enraged.
I turned slowly. She stood in the doorway. Or, maybe “stood” was too strong a term—she leaned heavily against the frame. I was struck all over again by how weak she looked—it seemed like she had even shrunk. How long had she been standing there? Only long enough to hear Farrow arrive, and yet dust already gathered in the ridges of the floorboards at her feet.
I realized, with a sinking feeling, that Mina couldn’t go anywhere, no matter what Farrow said.
We were running out of time. My sister’s was almost gone.
My eyes slipped away. I rummaged through my bag.