Of course I had brought my equipment. I had my needles and vials ready. Vale pulled up his shirt sleeve and extended his arm to me, and I drew his blood.
Up close, he smelled like jasmine—both old and young at once, foreign and familiar. His skin was smooth and tan. When I touched his wrist to adjust the position of his arm, I jumped at the lack of warmth, but it also wasn’t as cold as I’d imagined it would be. People spoke of vampires like they were walking corpses, but I’d seen many, many corpses, and Vale didn’t look like any of them.
Still, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting when I pierced the smooth skin of his inner arm with my needle. I had to push much harder than I did with a human, and when the needle went through, it did so with a faint pop and abrupt force. The blood that flowed into my vial appeared to be the same consistency as human blood, but much, much darker—nearly black.
I watched it, fascinated. Then, by the second vial, my eyes had drifted up to the rest of the room, taking in the tapestries on the walls, the books on the shelves. Gods, some of those tomes looked to be many centuries old, carelessly shoved into dusty corners.
How old was Vale, I wondered? Legend said he had been here, beyond the outskirts of Adcova, for nearly two hundred years. How many decades—centuries—of life had he lived before then?
How much had he experienced?
“Are you enjoying looking?”
Vale’s voice startled me. My eyes flicked back to him. He was now looking at me as he had looked at that rose—pulling me apart, petal by petal.
Are you? I wanted to say.
Instead I said, “What will become of all of this when you die?”
“I’m immortal.”
I scoffed. “You’re not immortal. You’re just very long-lived. That’s an important distinction.”
“By the time it matters, I’m sure I won’t care.”
It already looked a bit like Vale didn’t care, judging by the condition of his living space, but I didn’t say that, either.
A knot of jealousy formed in my stomach. He spoke with such blasé carelessness about all of this. About his life. The gluttony of it revolted me. He’d hoard all of this knowledge here, and he’d think nothing of it. Selfish.
“I imagine it must become the only valuable thing, after all that time,” I said. The last vial was almost full. I watched the blood bubble up in the glass, ready to pinch off the needle. “Knowledge.”
“Knowledge is cheap and dull,” Vale said, too casually, and I almost gasped at him in horror.
“I can’t imagine that ever being true. There’s so much to learn about the world.”
He laughed a little, condescendingly, the way one laughs at a stumbling kitten. I corked the last vial and withdrew the needle from his arm. I found, with some surprise, that his skin had already healed around the needle tip. I had to rip it from his vein, which he didn’t react to.
“After so long, you realize that knowing things doesn’t especially matter very much. Knowledge with no context is meaningless. That’s not the real treasure.”
“Oh?” I tucked away my tools and stood. “What is, then?”
Vale stood, too. He was quite tall, and he looked down at me with a wolfish kind of delight. He smiled, revealing those deadly fangs. The moonlight from the window glinted in his amber eyes.
I felt, all at once, like an idiot for thinking before that he didn’t look monstrous. Because in this moment, with that smirk on his lips, I glimpsed the man of the legends. The monster of the whispers.
“Curiosity,” he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vale’s blood was beautiful. There was no other way to describe it—it was as undeniably aesthetically pleasing as a field of flowers.
It was almost dawn by the time I returned home that night. I wasn’t tired, though—no, far from it. I was literally shaking with excitement, my mind running over every moment of that visit over and over and over again, burning it to memory. I hugged my pack to my chest for most of the walk, as if to shield it from the world. It was contraband, after all.
When I got home, I went straight to my office and bolted the door behind me. I didn’t need Mina knowing what I was up to, both for her sake and mine. The less I involved her in my blasphemous little scheme, the better.
But there were no footsteps in the house yet. Mina was still fast asleep. I pulled out my instruments, messing up everything I had been so careful to neaten before my departure. I dragged a side table to the center of the floor, setting my seeing lens atop it—a device comprised of many brass rings stacked on top of each other, the top one on hinges and covered in glass so that it could be positioned upright. Runes and sigils had been carved into each ring of metal, and when I touched it, I could feel the magic pulsing from it. I grabbed my ink and stuck my finger into it, drawing a series of marks around the outermost circle of the device.
I didn’t have a shred of magic myself, of course, nor did I especially want any—I’d seen many times how it could lead to ruin. But the tools magic could produce were undeniably useful. This one had been created by a priestess of Srana, the Goddess of Seeing and Knowing. I did like to see things, so at least I could be grateful to Srana for that.
I finished the runes, placed my vial at the center of the device, and blew out the candles. The uppermost ring of copper glowed with steady warmth, and when I adjusted the hinge, a ring of light was cast upon the wall.
Within that ring was Vale’s blood—his blood at its most base level, the tiniest particles of life within him. They looked like a field of red-black flower petals across the plaster, moving in slow constellations like the stars across the sky.
Sometimes people talked of vampires as if they were living death, nothing more than animated corpses. One look at Vale told me that wasn’t true. Still, I knew that vampires had a closer relationship to death than humans did, so perhaps I might have expected to see some of it in the makeup of Vale’s body.
No. None of this was death. It was beauty and life and an astounding miracle. He was hundreds of years old and yet his blood was healthy and thriving. It was graceful, elegant. It looked so different from human blood, and I was certain that it would react differently to every test. And yet, there was something so familiar in it too, as if we had been the originals and he had been the improvement.
Maybe the vampires’ heretic goddess had been onto something, after all.
I stared for far too long, transfixed.
My instrument had been created with the magic of Srana, a goddess of the White Pantheon—the White Pantheon that despised Nyaxia, the mother of vampires, which meant I had to be very careful with the instruments I used around this blood.
Even the fact that I had it at all… here, in a town that worshipped Vitarus…
I blinked and saw my father kneeling in that field of death, knuckles trembling around a fistful of doom, ready to spite a god that would happily spite him back.
I pushed the thought away and quickly broke down the instrument, tucking Vale’s blood into a drawer.
Still, I couldn’t help but take it out every few hours to peer at it, even if only for seconds at a time. I told myself it was for work—and it mostly was, because I didn’t stop working for more than ten minutes at a time those next few days—but really, I was… well, a little transfixed by it. Every time those splotches of black lit up my wall, I released an exhale of awe.