Three Parts Dead

14

Abelard swung from the last rung of the ladder to an overhanging pipe and dropped into the red-flushed dark of the boiler room, landing lightly on his feet. Steam and coolant lines tangled about and above him like jungle vines, and beyond them squatted the boilers, huge and round and warm. Humid air condensed into a slick sheen on his skin, mingling with new sweat. The heat was familiar and oppressive as the memories of an unpleasant childhood.

But the part of his childhood Abelard spent in the shadow of these giant clanking machines had not been unpleasant. Complicated, rather, full of adventure, of hide-and-seek and narrow escapes. The tiny crannies grownup engineers resented as side effects of poor design gleamed to a child’s eyes like silver roads to freedom. Mastering this sweaty, benighted labyrinth, learning every path and obstacle, had been an ordeal of fascination and obsession. Abelard and his friends approached the garden of metal as if they were the first people in the world, consumed by its every facet, creating in the act of discovery.

The boiler room was not a safe place to play, and children were injured every season in their games. Abelard boasted a half-moon scar on his abdomen where, at thirteen, a falling girder tore through his leather work apron and robes to embed itself in his side. That afternoon he first felt the healing touch of his God, the holy fire that seared his skin, blackening and purifying.

He bore himself away from the boilers and up, sliding and swinging from pipe to girder to scaffold until the plummeting temperature made the steam that rose from his skin crackle and grow sharp. The Sanctum’s generators were a closed system, though imperfect. Water flowed into the massive boilers, where it became steam that drove the turbines that powered Alt Coulumb’s trains and lights and lifts and the endless smaller mechanisms by which four million people lived in close quarters without strangling on their own filth.

Superheated steam raced along a series of exhaust pipes to the fourteenth floor, where the coolant system wrapped its icy tendrils about Kos’s hot iron veins. The coolant system was more dangerous by far than the steam pipes. Those would scald and burn, but these would grip one’s flesh with the strength of ice, and not all the hot water in the world could thaw skin so frozen. When the principles behind the generators were explained to him, Abelard had envisioned the coolant system as a ravenous monster, devouring heat and life. His childhood nightmare was not far from the truth.

He ducked under a pair of dangling chains and approached the thick net of coolant coils, slick and shining with frost. Each coil curled thrice about an exhaust pipe before bearing the heat thus drained back to the coolant system’s core, which waited like a hungry maw in the darkness above. He climbed toward it.

Once, Sister Miriel liked to tell, there had been no coolant system. Once, Seril granted Her touch of moonlight and ice and cold stone to the pipes, calling Her element back to itself: rushing, cool-flowing water. When Seril died, the Church desperately sought another solution.

Seril. The dead Goddess had loomed large in Abelard’s life in the last two days. As he climbed through the monstrous tangle of the coolant system, he wondered how life in Alt Coulumb had differed while She lived. What were those nights like, lit by a watchful eye, guarded by creatures powerful, imperfect and passionate, fierce as they were relentless? Had the moon shone brighter on that city? Had its fullness caused the blood to leap for joy? Had Kos, too, been different?

Such thoughts verged on blasphemy, but climbing this scaffolding, smoldering cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, with no one near and with his God lying dead in starlight beyond the realm of man, Abelard allowed himself to wonder.

What had Kos been like, when Seril lived? God withheld the full force of his love these days, the old monks said, for fear He might burn the world to a cinder. Abelard had felt Lord Kos’s flame lap gently against his own mortal soul, but had He kept a part of Himself back even then? Could Seril’s presence have let Kos draw even closer to His people? If She still lived, would He have died?

The narrow cleft Abelard had been climbing opened; he stepped from the scaffold onto a vast plane of black rock, the ceiling of an entire clerical floor below, and found himself swaddled in darkness profound as the abyss. The air was chill as winter night, and there were no lamps. Light was heat, and this room was sacred to the deadly cold.

The chamber was three stories tall and nearly as broad as the Sanctum itself. Pylons thick and thin bridged the gap from floor to ceiling: staircases, people movers, large lifts for freight or groups of supplicants, all swaddled in layers of insulation to keep warm outside air from polluting the chill emptiness.

Abelard swept the narrow beam of his bull’s-eye lantern through the black.

Suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the rough stone walls by thick chains hung the immense, entwined double toroid of the central coolant tank. Black slick metal, it drank the beam of his lantern.

He wished he had Tara’s sensitivity to the Craft, for the central coolant tank was not a product of mortal engineering. Its inner workings were a mystery to even the most diligent and faithful of Kos’s priests. They knew the black box consumed heat and fed it to Justice by an unseen mechanism, powering Blacksuits throughout the city. That was all. It lay like an open wound in the center of Abelard’s mind, an affront to the laws of the universe.

He sat down on the stone, and closed his lantern.

Darkness rushed in, blacker than any night he had ever known, child of cities that he was. The tip of his cigarette burned against cold shadows.

He closed his eyes and traced in his memory the paths of the four hundred seventy-two threadlike coolant lines that wound over cold stone and through empty air to the central tank. They glowed in his mind’s eye, precise and exact.

He inhaled, and his breath froze in his chest.

They glowed not only in his mind’s eye, but in the black beyond his eyelids.

He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. Closed them, and the coolant pipes glimmered silver and cold in empty space. The silver lines seemed painted on the backs of his eyelids, or rather his eyelids seemed to have become filters that only this light could penetrate.

To his closed eyes, the coolant tank was a tangle of clockwork outlined in silver. Its innards spun and turned and wound, and in places silver light tangled about invisible, physical gears, pistons, camshafts. Power flowed down the chains that suspended the tank in midair, and proceeded through hidden paths across town to the Temple of Justice.

He inhaled smoke and exhaled it. The light gleamed more brightly. He opened his eyes, and the silver visions vanished.

“What is this?” he asked the empty space and the machines.

They didn’t answer, but something within him whispered, look further.

He closed his eyes again. Lines of spider silk filled the black, but not all of them were silver. In their midst, one ran a burgeoning red and gold along the floor to disappear into the rock. That line was darker than the others, barely shedding light. Dormant. It was not tied to the coolant system, he reasoned, and thus lacked the coolant system’s pale, hungry hue.

He opened his eyes and the cover of his lantern, shedding a narrow beam of light along the path of the anomalous pipe, fixed to the stone by iron bolts. It was less corroded than the surrounding coolant lines, but indistinguishable from them in gauge and make. Someone had intended this pipe to blend with the coolant system. Without his newfound vision, Abelard would never have seen the difference. No wonder the maintenance crews discovered nothing.

Returning to the scaffold, he traced the pipe back down into the boiler room’s sauna heat. His quarry wound about the primary steam exhaust pipe like ivy around the trunk of an ancient dying tree. It fed on the heat, draining it—slowly now, but he suspected it could drain faster, and indeed pull enough heat to steal power from Justice herself. This was no doubt the cause of the coolant fluctuations Sister Miriel had observed.

Back he climbed through the dark, guided sometimes by lantern light, sometimes by the vision that hung before his closed eyes.

Returning to the coolant system’s chamber, he traced the errant pipe until it plunged into the floor near a stairwell. By comparing the pattern of ventilation ducts and power conduits with the Sanctum’s floor plan, etched in his memory, Abelard identified the rooms below. Offices mostly, a scriptorium, a meeting hall. He knew the Sanctum better than his own body, but he did not know where this pipe led.

He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of his last. Breathing in, he closed his eyes.

Three steps to his left, beside the red ribbon of the fake coolant pipe, a red square burned in outline on the floor, a few feet on each side. At one edge of the square, the strange dull light illuminated a depression in the rock, invisible when Abelard examined the same space with his lantern.

A handle, concealed.

He placed his fingers into the depression and felt them wrap around a metal D-ring. When he pulled, the entire square of rock shifted up on an invisible hinge. Abelard expected the stone to be heavy, but it rose easily in his grip.

Below the hidden door, a tunnel dropped into darkness that Abelard’s new second sight could not pierce. A ladder was riveted to the tunnel’s round wall.

He glanced about, thinking that he should go for help. But access to the boiler room was limited to priests and monks and the occasional, heavily supervised consultant. Building such a complex project as this, with secret doors and tunnels and pipes, required time and power, or numbers, or both. An outsider could not have accomplished it without help from within the Church.

He thought back to Sister Miriel’s calm assurance, to her bafflement at the coolant problem. Sincere? Or secure, knowing he could not find what she and her comrades had hidden?

Perhaps Tara had made him paranoid, but Abelard did not feel like trusting anyone.

He set one foot on the ladder and descended alone.

*

Ms. Kevarian did not find Cardinal Gustave in his office, nor in the library. An aide said he had gone to the rooftop to meditate. She sought him there.

Cresting the stairs she found the Cardinal leaning on his staff near the edge of the roof. Ordinarily from this vantage point Alt Coulumb stretched from horizon to horizon, but today clouds wadded about the Sanctum like thick wool. The world ended in a blank expanse beyond the tower, as if some god had forgotten to draw the rest of the image on the page, or having drawn it, frowned, and reached for the eraser. The noise of the crowd below was barely audible, an undifferentiated mash of sound in the misty depths.

“Your people are angry,” she said without preamble.

“Their faith is weak.”

“They want someone to explain the situation. Assuage their fears.”

He did not respond. Wind whipped his robes about him, but did not touch her.

“I wanted to talk to you about Kos’s resurrection.”

“Talk.”

“We need a strategy for rebuilding Kos, and the first step is for me to understand what the Church wants. What you want.”

“I want.” He did not say those words often, she thought. “I want my Lord back. The way He was.”

“Kos as you knew him is gone, Cardinal. We can resurrect him, but we can’t save everything. I need to know your priorities.”

“Our priority,” the old man said, “is to defeat Alexander Denovo.”

Ms. Kevarian joined him at the tower’s edge. She remembered that tension in his voice from his brief talk with Denovo at court. “This isn’t an adversarial process. We win to the extent we get what we want. Denovo loses to the extent he does not get what his clients want.” Wind filled the silence. Through the mist she heard the mechanical rush of a passing train. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

“I remember when you were not much older than your apprentice is now,” the Cardinal said. “And I was younger.”

“You were.”

“It doesn’t seem fair, that all the things of this world pass—that Gods pass—and not you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I don’t mean you in particular. Your people. Craftsmen. Craftswomen. Lingering on, untouchable.”

His words died somewhere in the depths of the cloud.

“Hardly untouchable,” she said.

“Denovo looks even less aged than you.”

“He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also,” she said after a pause, “he moisturizes.”

She intended that as a joke, but the Cardinal did not laugh.

“Cardinal, I need you to tell me if you’re hiding anything about your relationship with Denovo.”

No response. Far below, she heard raised voices.

“When you met him at court, you behaved as if he’d wounded you personally. That by itself means little, but this afternoon I visited several of your creditors, his clients. They told me he angled for this position. He’s working virtually for free, and that’s not his style. He wouldn’t be here unless he thought he had something to gain, but your situation seems strong. Unless he knows something I don’t.”

Gustave turned away from the abyss, away from her. “You know the Technical Cardinal is responsible for maintaining Justice.”

“Yes.”

“For the last several months, Justice has felt a drain on her power in the early morning. The Blacksuits weaken on patrol, and Justice’s thoughts grow sluggish. Our people determined this trouble was Craft-related, but they could not trace its source. We sent word to Denovo, who was the chief architect of Justice. He came, advised me about our problem, and left.”

“He didn’t mention any of this when you met in the courtroom because…”

“We both felt it best his consultation remain secret. The Church did not want Justice to appear weak, and Denovo did not want anyone to know his greatest construct required maintenance.”

A gust of wind billowed Ms. Kevarian’s long coat behind her like a cape. She stuck her hands in her pockets. She heard, and he heard, the distant repeated cry: “God is dead! God is dead!”

“I think Denovo discovered something when he consulted for you,” Ms. Kevarian said. “Something that made him think Kos was weaker than he seemed. Knowing that, he positioned himself to represent the creditors when Kos died.”

Cardinal Gustave turned to face her. His expression was carefully blank. “Why? What could he gain from his position as counsel?”

“My question exactly.”

Gustave considered this, and Ms. Kevarian, and the clouds around him, with a firm, fixed expression. Saying nothing, he walked to the stair that led back down into the Sanctum’s depths.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Where else? I am going to speak with my people.” His staff tapped out a slow, inevitable rhythm. “I will show them that Kos’s truth endures, despite their weakness.”

“Applied Theology won’t work,” she said, though he knew this already. “Kos’s body may endure, but his soul is gone. He won’t be able to help you direct his power.”

“He appointed a little might for his priests’ daily use. That will remain through the dark of the moon, like the generators and trains and all the rest.”

“Without Kos, you can’t shape and refine his power. If you tried to light a fire you’d end up destroying the fireplace.”

“That,” he said grimly as he descended into the shadows of the Sanctum tower, “will be enough.”

Unseen within the gray erasure of the universe below, the crowd screamed on.

*

Tara stood in the hospital room, and caught her breath. Snaring Cat’s mind had taken more strength than she expected. This cloud-covered city had so much light but so few stars. She needed to be more efficient to accomplish all she had planned for tonight. An interrogation lay before her, combat and pursuit, but at the end she would gain another piece to the many puzzles surrounding Kos’s demise, and, if she was lucky, a weapon to use against Alexander Denovo.

In the process, she might even prove herself to Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, but that prospect seemed distant and barren to her now. It lacked the pleasant warmth that came when she thought of Denovo falling.

Shale lay in the bed, or at least his body did. The nurses had stripped him naked and plugged an intravenous drip into his arm. Risky at this low level of medicine, but there was no other way to feed him with his face gone. The folded bedsheets revealed the corded muscles of his chest, unsettling in their perfection, as if he had been built rather than grown. He was thinner, she thought, than yesterday. His freakishly swift metabolism was already cannibalizing fat and muscle. If Shale’s incapacitation lasted much longer, his body would devour itself from the inside.

She set her shoulder bag on a table across from the bed, beside a vase of flowers. From within she produced her slender black book. Its silver trim glimmered in the dying sunlight. She took other items from the bag as well: a tiny gas burner the size of her clenched fist, a folded piece of black silk, a pen, a vial of ink the color of mercury, her small hammer, a pouch of silver nails, and a tiny silver knife.

Last chance to turn back, she told herself. Even now you could probably apologize to Cat. Go farther, and you can rely on no one but yourself.

She undid the latch on the black book. Sandwiched between the tenth and eleventh pages lay Shale’s face. The cool skin twitched as her fingers feathered over its cheek.

Tara unfolded the face, set it features-down on the black silk, uncapped the ink, sterilized the silver knife with the gas flame, and began to work.

*

Cat arrived at the vampire’s door, uncertain how she had come there. Her mind felt mulled, heated and seasoned. Need quickened in her breast.

She was tired. It had been a long and sober night, and a long day in plainclothes, relieved only by the brief ecstasy of the suit. The world felt empty, its colors garish and sharp without the flood of joy to cushion them.

In a moment’s inattention she opened the door and stepped into the vampire’s sickroom. She looked down at him, sleeping: lean and wiry, with black hair. His skin was marble-smooth, burned brown as old leather by exposure to sunlight. Slick, weak vampires like the one who had hustled her last night burst into flame in the sun, feared it like humans feared acid or spiders. This one had built up a tolerance, which took power, grit, and practice at enduring pain. He could sleep comfortably in a room with a window during the day, only blackout curtains separating him from death.

He could take her further down than she had ever been before.

His mouth had lolled open during his profound sleep, and she saw the tip of an ivory fang in the narrow gap between his lips.

The cuffs of her cotton shirt were too tight. She undid the buttons, rolled them up. Tiny blue veins pulsed beneath the pale skin of her forearm.

Outside, the sun kissed the edge of the horizon.

She walked toward the bed.

*

The darkness soon yielded to a dim blue glow. Abelard stepped off the ladder’s last rung onto an unfinished rock floor, and turned to face the source of the light: three shining concentric circles set into the floor, graven round with runes. In their center stood a rough wooden altar, upon which lay a writhing pool of shadows impaled by a crystal dagger. A sharp stench of blood and ozone hung on the air. The fake coolant pipe descended from the low ceiling to merge with the altar. From the pipe’s terminus spread eight cardinal lines of blue flame, which intersected the circles.

Someone had built this Craft at the heart of the Church, to drain Kos’s heat from His own generators. Many questions burned in Abelard’s mind, but three burned brightest: who, and why, and how could he stop them?

Abelard approached the altar. His skin tingled as he stepped over the first circle, careful not to touch the glowing lines. With another stride he crossed the second. A breath of hot air kissed his face and ruffled his robes. One left.

This, too, he crossed, but as his second foot touched down the world vanished. He was familiar with the sensation by now, and welcomed the nothingness and warmth, and the red edges to his vision as if a great light burned behind him. For the first time, he had the presence of mind to turn around and see what waited there.

Fire filled the void.

When he opened his eyes, he stood within the innermost circle. Before him lay the dilapidated altar, and the crystal dagger buried in its surface. Shadows writhed beneath the blade’s tip.

No, not shadows. These were too coherent for shadows. An animated tangle of liquid black, like a catch of seaweed flowing with the tide.

When he closed his eyes, he saw the room mirrored in his newfound second sight. Innumerable silver threads drew heat from the pipe to the circle, then wove back up the altar to knot through the crystal blade. Whatever had been done here, that dagger was the keystone. Remove it, and the system might fall apart.

Or perhaps accelerate. Tara would know, or Lady Kevarian, but Abelard didn’t want to risk leaving this chamber to find them. The conspirators wouldn’t have made this intricate siphon of power so that disturbing it would damage the generators they hoped to use. Removing the dagger might break the Craft at work here, but there should be enough evidence left to find the people who had desecrated the holy places of Lord Kos.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled the dagger free. It came loose easily, as if drawn from a sheath, and left a low ringing sound in the air.

The black tangle fell limp, but nothing else changed. The circles glowed with cold light. With eyes closed, Abelard saw the silver threads still knotted through the dagger. He opened his eyes again, and examined the weapon. Trapped within its crystal blade was a red fleck, the color of fresh blood.

When he lowered the dagger, he saw that the wooden altar was bare. There was no sign of the writhing shadow.

He heard a harsh rasp, like a chisel scraping over stone.

Was it his imagination, or had the chamber grown darker? Perhaps the light was fading.

No. The light had not changed, but the surrounding gloom was closer and more viscous, especially eight feet up the wall where a black pustule swelled, extending small tendrils to drink in the lesser shadows around it.

He backed out of the circle, gaze locked on that wriggling, growing darkness. Its limbs stretched out, some thick and others narrow, some soft, some hard, glittering like nightmares. As those tendrils moved over the stone, he heard the faint rasp again, and saw bits of rock dust fall.

Another step back. His breath was loud in his ears. Or was that only his breath?

His eyes burned. Without thinking, he blinked.

When he opened his eyes a fraction of a second later, the shadow on the wall was gone.

Above, he heard a thousand tiny chisels rake over bare stone.

He reached blindly behind himself and found the rungs of the ladder. His fingers shook; it took him two tries to jam his cigarette between his teeth. He turned around and began to climb.

He felt, rather than heard, a heavy diffuse collapse behind him, like a hundred pounds of dead insects falling from the ceiling. He surged up the ladder, granted strength and speed by fear. Scrabbling on stone below: the shadow creature, climbing. A few more feet and he would reach the main coolant chamber and its pitch darkness. With luck the shadow could not be behind and ahead of him at the same time.

The shadow skittered up the wall after Abelard, a herd of centipedes crossing a floor of night-black stone. Pain sliced through him—his leg caught by what felt like a circle of thorned rope. Abelard kicked, pulled. His robe tore, and his skin, too, but he was free, up, out, panting spread-eagled on the rock beneath the curved cold immensity of the coolant system. Darkness surrounded him, crisscrossed by pipes and tubes and vents and chains.

Below, behind, the shadow wound its first tendrils over the ladder’s top rung.

Abelard forced his unwilling body to run.

*

Reattachment of a face was a simple process. Once Tara inscribed the geometric sigils and the ancient runes, only a few final cuts remained. Seven, for the seven apertures of the senses, on the reverse side of the face and on the blank flesh of Shale’s head. Two cuts for the two eyes, two for the ears, one for each nostril, one for the mouth.

She found a spare bedsheet in a dresser drawer, ripped it to long thin shreds, and used the shreds to knot Shale to the bed frame. Then she matched the fresh wounds on face and head to one another and said the words that untied her bonds of Craft.

She kneaded the cheeks, pressed in at the temples, smoothed the eyes back into their sockets. Flesh knit to flesh, and the body welcomed its spirit’s return. His features swelled and grew pink as blood rushed to them once more. Breath rattled in a throat that had not tasted air in more than a day. A pair of emerald eyes opened to regard the world. The lingering fog of Shale’s exhaustion parted in a rush when Tara leaned close and whispered into his ear, “Time to wake up.”

His sharp teeth snapped for her throat, but she had expected that and pulled back in advance.

“Not a good idea, Shale.”

Steel-cord muscles strained against her improvised cloth ropes, but the knots held, and the strips of blanket were tight enough to deny him the leverage to tear free. He convulsed on his bed like a netted fish.

“I’d like you to answer my questions,” she said.

“I’ll kill you!” This time, Shale’s voice was fierce, and passionate. Tara saw the gargoyle’s eyes widen at the force of his reclaimed rage.

Which was all well and good, but if he didn’t quiet down, he’d call the Blacksuits to them. “I gave you back your body as a show of good faith. I need your help.”

“You imprisoned me.”

“We’ve been over this,” she said. “I got you off that roof without the Blacksuits seeing. Would you rather be in prison? Or dead? Everyone in Alt Coulumb seems to think Seril’s Guardians are monsters. Would they give you a fair trial? You’re an animal to them.”

“Blasphemy.” He spat the word at her.

“You know that’s how they see you. You said as much yourself, yesterday. Let me help you prove them wrong.”

“I don’t know anything. I won’t tell you anything.”

“Those are two very different statements.”

“My people will come for me.”

“I’ve blocked their sense for you.” Not true—how else had the gargoyles found her last night on the Xiltanda’s roof?—and perhaps not even possible, but Shale was no Craftsman, and didn’t know what she could and could not do. “I want to help them as much as I want to help you. Your leader, Aev, sent you to Judge Cabot’s penthouse to receive a message. You pretended not to know more when last we spoke, but she wouldn’t have sent you in blind.”

“Aev said, talk to no one.”

“A dark night is falling over this city, Shale. You can be with your people by moonrise if you tell me what I need to know.”

Green eyes flicked from the window to the strips of cloth that held him. A bright instant of calculation flashed across his face. “I…” His voice dropped. He was weaker than he looked. “I was to receive something from Judge Cabot.”

“Yes.” She approached the bed, reeled in by his sinking voice. “What was it? And remember, I can tell if you lie.” Also untrue, but he didn’t know that.

“Don’t know.” He shook his head. “Just a courier.”

“Why did you come into the city? Forty years with no Guardians in Alt Coulumb, then this, putting your whole Flight at risk. What did Judge Cabot have for you?”

“He was going to help us. He’d been dream-talking with Aev for months. Everyone was excited.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“No.” He was desperate, shaking his head.

“Yes. But we’ll come back to that. Tell me what you saw when you reached Cabot’s penthouse.”

The setting sun’s first shadow fell across Shale’s face, and his body twitched. The knotted sheets held.

“Tell me.”

“Blood,” he said.

“And in the blood?”

His nostrils flared. “A face. Surrounded by bones.”

“Cabot’s face?”

“Cabot. His body broken. Flayed, but he could speak.”

“What did he tell you?”

Shale looked away. She grabbed his chin, and forced him to face her. “Tell me. What did he say to you?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his fingers flex. Silver-blue light crackled between them.

“What did he say, Shale?”

He opened his mouth. Something like a word came out. She leaned in to catch it.

But his mouth was not a human mouth anymore.

Cloth ripped and talons flashed. Beneath her was a creature ceasing to be human: skin now gray stone, muscles writhing and nerves rewiring themselves, whole being condensed in agony as wings unfurled from his back. His hooked beak spread to devour.

Tara fell back, screaming, and white light flashed between them.

*

Cat swam through a sea of need. She sat on the bed next to the vampire, who lay corpse-still beneath the sheets. Blood pounded through her veins, so much of it. She didn’t need it all.

Captain Pelham—no, call him the vampire, that made it easier—lay lost in the predatory dreams of his kind, dreams of chase and capture, not the tremulous scavenger hallucinations of mortal man. Like all beings, his kind had sleeping reflexes. Bring blood to their lips, and they would suck.

There are more important matters at stake than your satisfaction, a tiny part of her protested, small and alone in a cave at the back of her mind. The vampire is in fine condition. No harm befell him during the day. Your mission is fulfilled. Go back to Tara. Do your duty.

Duty was a dry well, and the world a cold promontory. Light, life, and glory waited within his teeth.

She lowered her bare wrist, and slid it between his lips. The inside of his mouth was cold as peppermint, and his fangs pressed against her skin.

Small, and sharp.

She placed her free hand behind his head for support. His hair scratched her palm like a nest of wires.

Don’t do it, that tiny part of her screamed. You’re better than this.

She jammed her wrist onto the tips of his fangs.