And then looked down.
The world was no longer rushing closer. Instead, it all spread out beneath me, ruins and sand nothing but abstract shapes in the moonlight.
“Mother,” I whispered. My voice was shaking.
Maybe I was already dead, and I was hallucinating. I didn’t want to move, in case it all shattered.
Raihn swooped down beside me, and I chanced a glance at him. He was grinning with pure, childlike joy. That smile—it made my stomach clench.
“Fucking amazing, right?” he said.
And it was his reaction that made it actually sink in.
I couldn’t do anything but grin and nod. Yes. Yes, it was fucking amazing.
I was fucking flying.
The reality of this hit me all at once, immovable and confusing, and suddenly I was thinking too hard about the wings that I swore I must have been hallucinating, and the air beneath them, and these new unfamiliar muscles that I had no idea how to control— Raihn’s eyes went wide. He lurched toward me, hand outstretched.
“Oraya, watch—！”
Everything went black.
Vincent smelled like incense, a scent that was clean and old at once, elegant as preserved rose petals. It reminded me of very expensive things one shouldn’t touch, but it also reminded me of safety. My father, in his strange way, was both of those things—distant and comfortable.
Vincent rarely touched me. But now, he grabbed my shoulders and hoisted me up, holding me firmly as I shook away the fuzziness from my senses.
“What in the name of the Mother were you thinking?”
My head hurt. I rubbed my eyes, and opened them again to see Vincent’s staring directly into mine, silver ice-cold.
He shook me once, firmly. “Never do that. Never. How many times have I told you that?”
He was always calm and reserved, but I knew how to read my father. These rare moments when his fear for me slipped through his constant stoicism shook me down to my bones. I was only eleven years old. Vincent was the beginning and end of what I knew. When he was afraid, I was terrified.
I looked up at the balcony above.
“I was just trying to climb—”
“Never do that.” He grabbed my wrist and lifted it, as if for emphasis. His fingers were long, wrapping easily around my arm. “Do you know how breakable your bones are? How quickly your skin tears? It would be so easy for this world to take you away forever. Don’t give it reason to.”
My jaw was tight, my eyes burning. The truth of my father’s words sat heavy in my stomach, leaden with my embarrassment.
Of course, he was right.
I had seen Vincent leap from that very balcony and fly off into the night. I’d seen him fall farther and land on his feet without a scratch.
But Vincent was a vampire, and I was human. He was strong, and I was weak.
“I understand,” I said.
I’d always been bad at hiding my emotions. Vincent’s face softened. He dropped my arm and touched my face.
“You are too precious to be taken away by such a mundane danger, my little serpent,” he said gently. “I wish it were different.”
I nodded. Even young, I knew a wounded pride was better than a wounded body. Better to be ashamed and alive than overconfident and dead.
“Now get ready for bed,” he said, releasing me and rising, turning to his armchair just within the double doors. “You’re on chapter fifty-two of the histories, if I remember correctly. We’ll do two more tonight before you sleep.”
“Yes, Vincent,” I said, grateful that he was giving me an opportunity to impress him in my studies after my embarrassing little misstep. I rose and took a few steps into the library.
Then…
Something prickled at the back of my neck. A strange awareness of realities that didn’t line up.
The realization that this library wasn’t on this floor.
That I read the histories when I was fourteen, not ten.
That Vincent was…
My chest constricted. Breath withered in my lungs.
“We don’t have to look at it, little serpent,” Vincent’s voice said behind me.
So gentle.
So sad.
But the truth was the truth. I did have to look at it.
I turned around slowly. Vincent was in his armchair, a book on his lap, the firelight playing over the familiar planes of his face, a mournful smile at his lips.
I knew that face so well.
Now I grabbed onto the sight of every angle of it, desperately, as if to keep it from slipping away.
“You’re dead,” I said.
My voice now belonged to my adult self, not the version of myself from thirteen years in the past.