Page 5 of Bitten & Burned

For a blood curse, Silas claimed, it could absorb more than just disease. It could drink the curse itself.

As I dragged the pendant back and forth on the strong silver chain, my thoughts slid, uninvited, to my father—an arcane silversmith who could coax wonders from raw metal and magic.

He used to say silver remembered every touch of the gods, that it bent more easily for those who prayed while hammering.

Father had tried several times to teach me about silver’s healing abilities. But I hadn’t listened as well as I should have. And this amulet wasn’t his work. Maybe that was why I hadn’t reached out to him very much lately.

The space between us felt wider than any curse, forged from years of disappointment and silence. If I went to him wearing another arcanist’s handiwork, he might just scowl himself into an early grave.

“It was lucky Dr. Drummond had a piece of bloodstone he could cut for me,” I said, running my fingertips around the pendant’s edge.

“I had several pieces I could have given him,” Vael muttered.

I sighed, ignoring him. “I just wish it didn’t need cleansing so often. But I suppose I can’t exactly wear the twenty-five-pound slab he keeps in his office.”

“I wish he’d see you at night,” Vael groused, tucking his shirt back into his trousers, “so I could go with you. Learn something.”

“He’s not a night owl like me,” I said. “Or you.”

“Still.” Vael’s tone sharpened. “Feels like he’s purposefully excluding me.”

Old scholarly grudges ran like ink in Verdune—many in the Arcanum still bristled at the idea of vampiric scholars rubbing shoulders with humans, no matter how useful those scholars might be, but Vael had no reason to suspect Silas Drummond counted among those close-minded Arcanists.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, reaching for him. “Why would he exclude you? He’s my mentor—”

“Former mentor,” Vael corrected.

“He still helps me with things; he’s still my mentor.”

His eyebrow arched slightly, but he didn’t press the issue further.

“Besides, he cares about me, I care about you—therefore, he cares about you.” I knew I was stretching logic thin, but the alternative was harder to swallow. I never liked to admit Vael was right about anything.

He snorted. “Rowena, no. I’m a vampire, and he’s made no secret how he feels about vampires—or vampires courting humans. Or anyone besides humans courting humans.”

“That’s conjecture. He’s never said anything to me to support such a theory.”

“I don’t need him to say it. You don’t live as long as I have without developing a sixth sense for these things. It’s my survival sense.”

“That’s not a real thing.”

“Reality’s what we make it. What’s real to you might not be real to me—we’ve lived different lives. You might not have a survival sense, but I do, and I’m a hundred and twenty years old. So…” He let it hang.

“So…?” I prompted. “You know better than me?”

“Exactly.” He smirked, buttoning his cuffs as I swatted at him.

“I can’t help it if I’m a wise old vampire.”

“You’re a wise old something,” I shot back.

He only grinned, turning away to slip on his waistcoat and button it.

Vael crossed slowly to his armoire and opened one of the doors. He ran his fingers through the variety of cravats he kept there before settling on a royal blue one.

He walked over in front of the mirror to tie on his cravat. He caught my gaze in the reflection.

“By the way, Dmitri came by before you woke,” he said as he deftly tied it. “Dropped off more of that tea blend you liked last time you visited. He left it in the kitchen. He told me to tell you to ‘drink up, Mishka’…it sounded better when he said it.”

‘That tea blend I liked’ was a blend Dmitri got from his mother when she was alive. It was a common, old-Norlese tea blend, a favorite of the Volkov family, but it was hard to come by now.

I chuckled. “That was nice of him. I wish he’d stuck around so I could talk to him.”

“Yeah… that might have been my fault.” Vael’s smile turned apologetic. “I may have implied that we had…” he coughed, “plans for later.”

“He’s bound to think I’m some kind of nymphomaniac with all the plans you keep hinting at.”

“Dmitri would never think that. Anton, on the other hand…”

“Oh gods, you didn’t tell Anton that, did you? I’d never be able to keep a straight face around him.”

“No, I didn’t. I did, however, tell him you’re coming up to Halemont for a visit this weekend—and he’s excited to make your favorite pain au chocolat. You know how he is with puff pastry.”

“Were you planning to tell me I’m coming up for a visit?”

“I meant to ask, then forgot, and I know you don’t have plans, so…”

“Fine, I guess…” I sighed with mock exasperation. “I’ll gorge on pastries and play with Fig in the library.”

Fig’s bell jingled in the living room, where he’d run off to when Vael and I had turned amorous.

Vael chose a cravat pin from a tray on top of the chest of drawers, one with a sapphire to match the cravat. “We’ll go over all the plans your heart desires. But do you mind terribly coming up to the manor this weekend? You can, of course, bring Fig.”

“Fig loves it up there. Must be something in the air… or the mice. Either way, he’s one happy kitty when we’re there.”

“He’s one happy kitty anywhere you are,” Vael countered. “You didn’t answer—do you mind coming up this weekend?”

“I never mind. I love going. Love seeing everyone—Cassian, Dmitri, Anton… even Quil. I suppose.”

“You’re a dream, a vision of acceptance,” Vael teased, choosing a royal purple velvet coat from the armoire and sliding it on. “Speaking of Cassian, he passed along a message: bring your chess set. He wants to play you again.”

I laughed. “He always loses. I think he does it on purpose. There’s no way someone that experienced in tactics and…” I waved a hand, “…things would lose that many times. To me.”

“To you? You say that as though you aren’t ranked.”

“I’m barely ranked.”

“Candidate Master.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Barely a rank.”

“It has ‘master’ in it, Ro.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please. You could probably beat me.”

“No, and I don’t want to try.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I won, you’d sulk. And if I lost, you’d never let me live it down. You’d be unbearable.”

I smirked. “That sounds more like Quil.”

“Cassian at least loses gracefully,” Vael said. “Quil would turn chess into a fistfight.”

“Exactly,” I said, laughing. “Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play a game. Unless you count coming up with ways to insult me. If you do, he’s a candidate master at that.”

“He doesn’t hate you, Rowena. He’s just… resistant to change.”

“I’ve been coming there every other weekend for months now. And hey—I never said he hated me!”

“You said he insults you.”

“Not the same as hate… wait…” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Does he hate me? What do you know?”

Vael’s gaze flicked away—brief, but enough to make my stomach drop. “Nothing.”

“Vael.”

“Nothing! I swear!” Vael raised both hands in surrender. “And he doesn’t hate you. I think.”

I scoffed. “Can I bring him something? Bribe him, maybe?”

Vael snorted. “Why do you care what he thinks of you?”

“Because. He’s in your coven. I care about you; therefore, I want your coven to like me. And that includes Quil.”

Vael’s smile was easy, but his eyes lingered on me a moment too long. “Well. You’ve never failed at anything once you’ve set your mind to it.”

“Thank you,” I said, snuggling up to him.

“Can you put your mind to making him like me, too, while you’re at it?” Vael asked.

I laughed. “I’m a high achiever, not a Quil-whisperer.”

He chuckled and kissed the top of my head. “I believe in you, Witchling. You can do anything. Even make that grump like you.” He buttoned the coat and turned towards me. “Breakfast? I will have to start it over, but you should eat something after all that—”

“Energy I just exerted?”

He smirked. “Blood loss. But yes, I suppose you did work yourself up into a frenzy.”

“A frenzy?” I squealed. “A frenzy? You’re the one who—”

Vael grinned and pulled me into his arms for a smoldering kiss.

“You make me a weak man, Witchling. Only for you.” He swept from the room, and I swayed a bit on my feet.

Either from the blood loss he’d mentioned, or maybe just from the kiss.

I followed him, sat in the kitchen while he prepared my breakfast with an apron over his impeccable outfit.

He messed up the first two, sliding them onto a separate plate. “I suppose those are mine!” I smiled. It seemed as if sometimes, he did it on purpose so he could eat them.

It might have been surprising to some, but lots of vampires ate food; they didn’t need to, but they could if they wished.

Dmitri claimed it tethered them to their human years, Anton said it made the blood sit sweeter, and Vael—predictably—called it nostalgia wrapped in etiquette.

“It helps humans feel more at home around us, it’s a service, truly,” he’d said, mouth full of tea and toast.

Regardless of Vael’s cooking “mishaps”, I was soon eating my eggs and toast, sipping a fresh cup of tea with my bare foot in Vael’s lap. His hands were rubbing the sole, and he looked… pensive.

I hadn’t forgotten what Vael had said before, but it didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up. He was only half-paying attention.

No… less than that. Quarter-paying attention, at best.

“Will you let me look at that amulet sometime?” he asked, proving a point without even knowing it.

“Sure. You want it now?” I fingered the chain where it lay against my chest, then slipped it free and let the silver links slide into my palm. I passed it to him.

It felt oddly warm as it left my skin—probably my imagination. Or not. Everything about the amulet was strange.

Vael turned it over, tracing the back of the setting.

Watching him examine it pulled me back to the moment Silas first gave it to me, apologizing for the chain being silver, worried it might harm Vael.

I’d laughed at the thought. The old myths were just that.

Silver wasn’t dangerous to vampires unless they had some rare allergy, like a nosegay to humans.

It seemed like something my mentor should know, but perhaps not.

Almost everyone in Vael’s coven had handled the amulet at least once. Anton had joked that it gave him a weird tingling. Dmitri had grunted something noncommittal. Cassian had held it with only his fingertips, studying the runes as Vael did now.

Only Quil had kept his distance. He didn’t like to touch me—let alone the amulet.

Nothing bad had happened to any of them.

Vael nodded. “Yeah, let me just go look at it closely back at my office, and I’ll use the fineglass the Arcanum owns—it’s better than mine here.”

He started to rise, but his movement stalled. A wince flickered across his face, and he swallowed hard before trying again. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”

The shift in his tone tugged me out of my own thoughts. He meant the echo of my pain in his veins.

“Sorry,” I said quietly.

He shook his head, but I knew what he meant.

That was the way my pain affected him whenever he drank from me—only a faint echo, but enough to register.

He said it was like a headache, though after more than a century without one, I doubted he remembered the sensation well.

Still, he felt it. And I hated that he did.

Which was why he was so supportive now. Not that he hadn’t been before he’d started taking it on, but when he felt even a fraction of my pain through my blood, he couldn’t shake the guilt that I lived with it every single day.

Six months.

Six months landed me in the month of Vony: half a year after Ledix, when I’d first been afflicted. It was proof that this curse had straddled seasons and priests’ prayers alike.

Half a year of burning, gnawing, sleepless nights.