Chapter 4 Hope Is Dangerous

Chapter 4: Hope Is Dangerous

Caelum's POV

She's mine.

The words sit twisted in my mouth. I don't say things like that.

Rain slides down the windows in slow lines, turning the city beneath Vaelthorn into blurred headlights and gold towers dissolving into fog. The room smells faintly of blood beneath the downpour, sweet beneath the metallic edge of it.

I should have opened the window before she woke up.

Behind me, the mirror reflects the length of my back. Bare skin, pale beneath the dim light. Water slides down muscle from the shower, trailing slow that I notice every inch of it leaving

The wound near my ribs refuses to close.

That's the problem.

My knuckles brush the torn flesh. Pain bites back, irritating more than anything. The bullet hole has closed down to a thin red slit, knitting more slowly than it should. Hunters use silver. Silver heal but this wasn't only silver.

A line of blood slips lower, disappearing beneath the waistband of my sweatpants. The serpent tattoo across my back shifts when I move, the black ink winding from shoulder blade to spine. It's been so long that I no longer remember sitting through it, only waking afterward with blood on my palms and my father calling it a necessary symbol. Necessary for what was never explained.

At the corner of the room, sheets rustle. "You're staring at yourself again." Her voice comes out hoarse tinged with amusement.

I lift my eyes toward her. She's sprawled across the center of the bed exactly where I left her. Naked against grey silk sheets with her gold hair tangled across my pillows. Bite marks darkening at the curve of her throat.

A human mother and a fae father make an unfortunate combination for survival, but an excellent combination for blood.

I met her Friday night at the club while handling business for Felix. She offered, smiled while doing it, and I've never seen the point in refusing a willing victim. Then yesterday she saw me crossing campus and realized we attend the same university.

Now she's here. An unlikely sequence of events.

Her gaze drifts to the wound. "That looks painful."

"It isn't."

Pain stopped being important somewhere around my second century alive, but inconvenience irritates me regardless. Two days should have healed it completely. Instead the skin keeps sealing halfway before tearing open again.

The hunter's bullet passed through me because I stepped between it and a girl holding broken glass, fighting off a vampire who could have snapped her neck by the time she finished raising her arm.

I didn't need to say it. The vampire already understood she was under my protection the second I intervened, yet the declaration left my mouth anyway.

The blonde stretches onto one elbow, sheets slipping lower. "You vanished after the club without even saying goodbye. I wondered if you didn't like me."

"I liked your blood."

She laughs at that, choosing to hear charm instead of fact. Humans always mistake honesty for flirting when it comes out of a pretty mouth. I pick my shirt up from the chair beside the mirror and pull it on, the fabric dragging across damp skin while the muscle pulls tight beneath black cotton. The wound burns in protest.

I ignore it.

"You should leave ahead of sunrise."

She studies me, searching for a warmth I never implied existed. "Do you ever ask people to stay?"

"No."

She smiles anyway, the expression caught between warmth and disappointment. She rises from the bed without embarrassment, gathering pieces of expensive clothing from the floor while the rain keeps tapping against the glass. By the time she finishes dressing, I'm halfway down the stairs.

Felix lounges across my kitchen island, strumming a guitar across his lap as if he's been waiting for an audience. He tosses me a bottle the second I enter the room, and I catch it with one hand.

"Your blonde looked offended on her way out."

"She'll recover."

"After using her to feed and yet looking irritated? Hopefully."

I unscrew the bottle and drink. Whiskey stings my throat. Human-made and too weak to affect me anymore, but I like the burn.

Felix watches me over the rim of his own glass, his eyes flicking briefly to my ribs. "It's healing."

"Slowly."

Lightning flashes against the window, throwing shadows across the kitchen. Felix tilts his head. "So. The map girl."

I keep drinking and his grin only widens. "There he is."

"She's a sealer." I correct.

"She's a girl who declared war on campus maps and is currently losing." The grin doesn't move. If anything it gets worse.

"She's both."

"That sound dangerously close to interest." He leans closer, and I set the bottle down, aiming a glare directly at his face. Felix has known me long enough to recognize when my patience thins, but he enjoys pushing. "You took a hunter bullet for her Friday night."

"I wasn't going to let one of the last surviving sealers die in a club."

"Mm right. Especially now with Vance's people in the room. But you've been healing for two days. I'm so glad it wasn't me."

Silver dipped in holy oil and blood magic. Worst combination either of us has seen in a long time.

"If the council discovers her ahead of my securing her loyalty, they'll weaponize her," I say.

Felix's expression loses some of its amusement. "And if your father finds her first?" he asks.

The silence answers for me.

The wound beneath my ribs pulses, as if it heard the conversation. Felix catches the shift in my posture immediately. "That bad?"

"No."

"Liar." He walks away, humming a tune he reserves for moments he intends to bring up again later, repeatedly, for centuries.

I noticed her Friday night without deciding to. Not because she was beautiful. Vaelthorn is full of beautiful people, supernatural bloodlines tend to breed toward symmetry eventually. But it was because she looked afraid and dangerous at the same time. Her gaze scanned the room for exits ahead of finishing her walk into it. Then the pendant slipped loose beneath the club lights. Jade carrying Helen's mark.

The girl became the most important person I'd seen in fifteen years.

I should care only about that. Instead I keep thinking about how she looked at me in the courtyard today and didn't look away first.

†★†

Rain hits hard once I step outside, rolling off my leather jacket in sheets. The Aston Martin waits beneath the stone archway, slick with water and reflected city light. The engine growls the moment I start it and the campus disappears quickly behind me.

Vaelthorn sits high above the rest of the city, all black towers, stained glass and stone that has stopped bothering to look new. The roads twist downward through rain and sleeping streets until the university lights vanish behind the trees.

The estate waits forty minutes outside the city limits. There are no neighboring houses and no visible roads from the highway, just iron gates emerging through the fog and forest. Most people think the Ashgrave estate is abandoned, and we encourage that belief.

The gates open as I approach. Long stone driveway and centuries pressed into every inch of the place.

Home, unfortunately.

The front doors open as I reach the steps. Staff line the entrance hall, heads lowered the second I walk inside. Nobody instructed them to. Fear teaches routines fast.

Water drips from my leather onto the marble floors while the butler steps forward.

"Welcome home, Master Caelum."

Alistair has worked for my family for centuries, a witness to the rise and fall of modern institutions. He was human once, but he is something else now. I hand him the coat without looking.

"Your parents departed yesterday evening," he says as we walk through the corridor. "The council requested their presence in Prague."

The supernatural council only summons my parents for three specific reasons: war, politics, or execution.

"How long?"

"Undetermined."

The chandeliers above us glow gold against ceilings stories high, illuminating portraits of generations of Ashgrave blood staring down with matching silver eyes and varying levels of cruelty. I head toward the eastern wing, the temperature dropping the deeper I go. No staff follow me past the second hallway, none of them are foolish enough for that.

The corridor holds nothing but the echo of my boots against marble until her door appears. I push it open.

Soft light spills across white curtains, revealing a room untouched by time.

And Seraphine.

She looks the same as she did the day the magic took her. Dark hair arranged in the same part the healer gave her fifteen years ago, her face unaged because whatever holds her suspended doesn't allow time to touch her. The first year, I told myself she looked asleep. I stopped lying to myself after the fifth.

I sit in the chair beside her bed and take her hand. Her fingers hold no warmth.

"I found one, Sera."

The room doesn't answer. It never does. That's the entire reason I come here, the one audience in my existence that cannot judge a single word I say.

"A sealer with Helen's mark pressed into jade." For the first time all day, a dangerous thread of anticipation moves through me, though hope doesn't survive long in this house.

"She's eighteen. Looks untrained." My thumb brushes against Seraphine's knuckles. "Walks around armed with broken glass and terrible decisions."

Fifteen years of healers, rituals, bargains, blood, and false hope narrowing into one scholarship student dragging a suitcase through my gates, an accident that finally landed right.

A sealer can break magic older than kingdoms. A sealer can do what no healer in four centuries has managed for Seraphine. That is the only reason this should matter.

"I'll fix this, Sera. I found her."

I stay longer than intended, and by the time I finally leave, night has swallowed most of the estate. I tell itself I'm returning to the city because I have work to finish, but instead, I stop the car beside an overlook facing Vaelthorn's distant towers glowing faintly through the weather.

My gaze moves toward the lit courtyards below, searching until it finds her. She crosses the lawn carrying coffee in one hand, turning her map sideways, realizing only after that it's upside down. Her light laugh carries across the damp air.

I feel my mouth threaten an unfamiliar pull at the corner again. The expression disappears immediately.

This is becoming a problem.