Crimson Vows: The Vampire Lord of the Shadow Realm of Veth.

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which felt wrong. Bad news should come on Mondays, Lena thought, when the week was already ruined and there was nothing left to protect. Tuesday had potential. Tuesday was salvageable. Or it had been, until the envelope slid through her mail slot and landed on the kitchen tiles with a sound like a sentence being handed down.

She almost didn't open it. The wax seal alone was enough to give her pause — deep red, pressed with a serpent swallowing its own tail. Not a symbol any modern legal firm would use. Not a symbol she'd ever seen, and yet something in her blood recognized it with the dull, cold certainty of an old wound reopening.

She opened it anyway. She had never been good at leaving things alone.

The letter was written in black ink so dense it seemed to absorb the light from the kitchen overhead. The handwriting was precise, old-fashioned, each letter formed with deliberate pressure, as though whoever had written it wanted every word to last.

Miss Lena Vale,

Your father, Aldric Vale, died in default of a binding blood contract entered into on the fourteenth day of September, nineteen years prior. By the terms of that contract, all obligations unpaid at the time of his death transfer, in full, to his firstborn child.

That is you.

You are required to present yourself at the gates of Ashveil Manor, in the shadow realm of Veth, no later than seven days from the date of this letter. Failure to appear will constitute a second default, and the consequences will be pursued accordingly.

The contract requires one year of service to Lord Dorian Ashveil. The terms of that service will be explained upon your arrival.

We look forward to receiving you.

There was no signature. There didn't need to be.

Lena read it three times. Then she set it on the kitchen table, put the kettle on, and stood with her back to the letter while the water heated, as if ignoring it might cause it to think better of itself and leave.

It did not leave.

She'd known her father was a liar. She'd known he was careless with money, with promises, with people — with her especially, in the quiet ways that fathers who weren't cruel could still manage to cause damage. She had not known he was the kind of man who signed blood contracts with vampire lords and then spent nineteen years pretending everything was fine.

He'd died six weeks ago. A stroke, sudden and undramatic, in the middle of a Tuesday. Even his dying had waited for the wrong day.

She hadn't cried at the funeral. She'd tried, and felt guilty when nothing came, and then spent the drive home deciding that grief didn't always look like tears and sometimes it looked like standing at your father's grave feeling cheated of something you'd never even had.

Now, apparently, she was also cheated into a debt.

She poured her tea, sat down, and read the letter a fourth time.

One year of service.

The phrasing was careful. Service could mean anything. It almost certainly meant something specific and specific was almost certainly terrible. She thought about calling a lawyer, and then remembered that the wax seal didn't belong to any firm she'd ever heard of, and that the letter had arrived sealed with a substance that was probably not wax, and that terms like blood contract and shadow realm didn't exactly fall within the purview of anyone she could find in the phonebook.

She thought about running. The letter hadn't included a phone number, which suggested that whoever had sent it wasn't particularly worried about her bolting. That suggested, with a nauseous certainty, that running wasn't really an option.

She thought about her sister, Petra, who was twenty-four and finishing a degree in marine biology and had no idea their father had left a supernatural debt in his wake like a bad inheritance.

She thought about Dorian Ashveil, a name she had never heard, and found that despite herself she was already building a picture: stone corridors, cold fireplaces, something inhuman watching her from a chair.

She was probably right, she realized. That was the worst part. She was probably right.

She called Petra that evening and said only that there had been some complications with the estate. Petra, who was good at not pushing, said she was sorry and asked if Lena needed anything.

"No," Lena said. "I'll handle it."

She always handled it.

She spent the next six days in a state of furious preparation. She researched blood contracts — the internet was useless, the library marginally better, an old occult text she found in a secondhand shop genuinely illuminating and also deeply alarming. She packed a bag with the kind of deliberate precision that meant she was not allowing herself to think about what she was packing for. She put in practical clothes, a good pair of boots, the small folding knife she'd carried since she was nineteen and working night shifts at the hospital. She put in her journal. She put in a photograph of Petra and herself from last summer, squinting into the sun on a beach, grinning like people who didn't know what was coming.

She did not tell anyone where she was going. Partly because she wasn't sure how to explain it, and partly because she'd read enough about the realm of Veth — tucked into footnotes and apologetic parentheses in the occult text, as if the author felt embarrassed to have included it — to understand that no one could follow her there.

Veth was a shadow realm, meaning it existed as a kind of dark mirror alongside the mortal world, accessible only to those with vampire blood, sorcerers of considerable power, or — apparently — mortals bound by contract to someone inside it. Once the binding activated, the path opened. Once she presented herself, she would be able to enter.

Once she entered, she would be there for a year.

On the seventh day, she stood at the coordinates the letter had included, which turned out to be an unremarkable stretch of road on the outskirts of a town that didn't appear on any map she owned. It was early evening. The trees on either side of the road were old and dense, and they leaned inward over the asphalt in the manner of things that had been growing without interruption for a very long time.

She unfolded the letter and read the final line, which she'd been avoiding:

Speak your name and your intent at the threshold, and the way will open.

She felt, very specifically, like an idiot.

"Lena Vale," she said, to the road and the trees and the empty evening. "I'm here to pay a debt that isn't mine. I'd like it noted that I'm doing this under protest."

The air shifted. It did not shimmer or crack or do anything cinematic — it simply changed, the way a room changes when the temperature drops, subtly and all at once, and then there was a gate where there had not been a gate before. Iron, tall, worked into shapes she preferred not to look at directly. Beyond it, a long road lined with trees even older than the ones behind her.

Beyond that, at the end of the road, something vast and dark against a sky that held no stars she recognized.

Ashveil Manor.

Lena picked up her bag, squared her shoulders, and walked through the gate.

She had spent twenty-seven years learning that the worst thing about fear was letting it make decisions for you. She was afraid now — she wasn't a fool, and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise — but she was going to be afraid with her chin up and her eyes open, because if Dorian Ashveil expected a frightened girl, she intended to be the most disappointing visitor he'd ever received.

The gate swung shut behind her. The sound of it closing was final and very quiet, like a period at the end of a long sentence.

She walked.

The trees on either side of the road were not quite the same as mortal trees. They were the right shape, the right height, but they held themselves differently — too still, even in the cold wind that moved through Veth in waves, as if the darkness itself was breathing. She kept her gaze forward. The manor grew larger as she approached, resolving from a dark shape into a dark shape with windows, and then into a dark shape with windows and towers and more architectural ambition than she had expected from something that essentially functioned as a supernatural prison.

It was, she admitted reluctantly, extremely beautiful. Black stone, pale at the edges where moonlight — from a moon she didn't recognize — caught the corners. Windows lit from within in amber and deep blue. Gargoyles or things that looked like gargoyles crouched at the roofline, and she was almost certain that two of them had turned their heads to watch her walk up the path.

She chose not to address the gargoyles. She had her limits.

The front door was open by the time she reached it. A woman stood in the frame — old, small, with the posture of someone who had not moved quickly in centuries and saw no reason to start. Her eyes were kind and evaluating in equal measure.

"Miss Vale," the woman said. "I am Maren. I keep the manor." She stepped back to make room. "Lord Ashveil will receive you in the morning. Tonight, you rest."

Lena stepped inside. The warmth of the interior hit her immediately — unexpected, not unpleasant, a fire burning somewhere close.

"I don't need rest," Lena said, on principle.

Maren looked at her with the calm patience of someone who had heard this before. "You've crossed into Veth for the first time. Your body doesn't know it yet, but it will." She turned and walked into the hallway, clearly expecting to be followed. "In the morning, you'll meet Lord Ashveil. Tonight, there is a room, a fire, and a meal waiting."

Lena followed. The hallway was long and paneled in dark wood, hung with portraits she wasn't quite ready to look at. Her boots were quiet on the stone floor. Her heart was not quiet anywhere.

One year, she told herself. Three hundred and sixty-five days. She had survived worse than a year.

She wasn't sure, precisely, what worse looked like in this context — but she had never let uncertainty stop her before, and she didn't intend to start now.

She followed Maren up the stairs and into her year.