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Gideon and I, along with Silver, and another small circle of notorious kids, needed a place to relax away from the crowd, only allowing people we trusted.

Vance, an old school buddy with a crush on Silver, obvious to everyone except her—poor thing, he hadnochance—didn’t have a lot of money, wasn’t the best student in our year, and lacked magical abilities here. It would have been different if he lived out there in the outside world. He would have been a prodigy wizard around people who struggled to summon a ball of fire. In Highvale, he sucked. But it was his home nonetheless. His family, just like my father’s, moved when the regular humans realized supernatural creatures existed, and responded with worldwide attacks on sups, until vampires took over for a half decade so bloody we referred to it as the Age of Blood. Highvale allowed in hundreds of thousands of sups, regardless of abilities. Vance was born here, just like the rest of us. Sadly, this world didn’t truly have a place for him.

I remembered wincing when Silver, blunt and oblivious as ever, asked him what his plans were after graduation. I doubted he’d have many.

The man blushed and stammered, “I applied to a few restaurants, to help out in the kitchen. Maybe one day, if I save enough, I can open my own bar. I dunno. I like making drinks and talking to people, plus I’m not bad with numbers.”

That stayed with me for days. The unfairness that our world wouldn’t allow him to progress beyond the level of a busboy although he had the same bachelor’s degree as the rest of us, andwe could waltz into prestigious careers was irritating. His dream of owning a bar sounded perfect for him. But how long would it take for him to save enough on a kitchen hand’s salary?

I mentioned it to my cousin, and next thing I knew, we were both sitting in my father’s office, Gideon spouting an impassioned speech, and me nodding along, throwing in a few pleases, rights, and absolutelys. Gideon loved the idea of an exclusive bar, and so did I.

Vance didn’t even know we’d gone to our patriarch. When I walked up to him with the deed to the Silvervine in my hands, and an offer to run the day-to-day operations for a manager’s salary that was rather generous, he cried so much the first page was all splotchy to this day.

Fast forward two years, and I couldn’t imagine a world where I didn’t have this place to chill. It saved my sanity. Not only was the clientele closely selected, the use of tech that could record us barred, and no journalists permitted at the door, but we also had the back room when we really didn’t want to be seen. Not that I ever did anything crazy, like dancing on top of the table—that was Silver’s department. But the point was, if the mood struck, I could. I felt more at home in the Silvervine than, well, in my actual home. The only place as peaceful for me was Uncle Leo and Auntie Hilda’s modest house on the 24th circle.

Even Dad was happy with the purchase. The Silvervine apparently turned a nice profit. I hadn’t doubted it would: Vancewasgood with numbers. We operated with a membership fee, covering free drinks year around. When members brought guests, they coughed up a hundred per guest unless the person ended up joining the club, in which case, the fee was refunded. It wasn’t cheap, but that was the point: keeping this place exclusive. And if that made me an elitist, well, everyone already thought I was, so I saw no harm in fitting the cliché occasionally.

And now, the Silvervine was hosting Lucian Regis’s farewell party. Wasn’t that positively wild?

We might have both grown up in the same city, but the vale and the underside might as well belong to two different universes. We didn’t mix. From what I’d seen it was a conscious effort on both parts; they didn’t acknowledge us, we pretended they didn’t exist. Honestly, it was all rather silly in my opinion. Didn’t Lucian and Gideon’s clear friendship prove there wasn’t such a distinction between us?

Before he started at the Guard, I’d seen him up close one time, in his own home. It was my first week as a trainee and Silver and I had been assigned to shadow a senior protector for the day, when a stranger—a gentry fae from another world, of all things—came in to hire Lucian. I honestly couldn’t believe my luck. Every single moment deserved pages and pages in my notebook.

I’d never seen magic used the way Lucian did that day, summoning a damn demon from another dimension like it was a walk in the park, forcing it to remain in its circle, sending it back with a wave of his hand.

Until then, I’d only caught glimpses of him from a distance, across ballrooms.

I'd watched. How could I not? Lucian Regis commanded attention from the moment he entered any room, but when he danced, he seemed to weave a spell in space and time, moving like something else in the guise of a man. A fairy prince, a demon sent to make every woman lose their minds, Apollo himself.

It shouldn’t have been possible for a man of his stature to be that graceful, in all his dignified, stiff formality, but many impossible things happened in Highvale every day.

He always danced exactly twice: to open the ball, with his regal, austere mother, and to close it, his dark-haired beauty, Kore, on his arm.

She and I were the same age.I doubted she'd talked to me ever.

I could see, how, in time, Kore might grow to look and even act like Cassiopea Regis. How very Freudian of him to choose a partner so much like his mother.

And now he was here with Ronan Nachtigall, another member of the Highvale old-school nobility. If we were the kind of club who advertised, I’d take a picture and ask for a quote.“Nice mead. Lovely padding on the bar stools. Worthy of our royal tushes.”

I quietly chuckled to myself as I finished helping our bartender, Vance’s little brother, and made my way out of the bar again.

Aware that I had a habit of making a nuisance of myself around Lucian, I fully intended to walk straight towards Gideon, at the center of the attention as usual. My cousin was in the middle of his umpteenth reenactment of almost falling to his death while a vampire was running straight at him. Apparently, that was entertaining to him.

I almost had a heart attack the first time he told me.

All my good intentions disappeared as I passed by the two outsiders, chatting away at the bar, because I felt it again. Thatcompulsionto approach Lucian. Only this time it was stronger. More specific. I knewwhy.

“You’resick,” I told him, sounding accusatory.

It was annoying to realize that he could be unwell. That he was normal enough to have a weakness. Almost real. Approachable. In reality, he was none of those things. He was still Lucian Regis.

Startled, he took a second to answer. “Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

He had the gall to smirk.

Irritated enough to act, I reached for his head. “Don’t move.”

He wasn’t. In fact, he was currently as still as a statue, like I’d frozen him in place with a spell, when what I was doing was absorbing the waves of dark gooey-ish energy fucking with his system, and burning it out.