Page 36 of The Midnight Order (The Thorngray Vampires Duet #1)

Silver

The man has fangs. Not only that, but they’re dripping with blood. His eyes look so familiar, but I can’t place his face.

There’s a woman in his grasp, and her hair is damp with her blood. The dripping on the ground below was nearly audible.

“I do this to protect you. I will do what I must to protect you.” His words are imprinted in my brain.

My feet are so cold, and a shiver works through me, culminating in my spine. When I give it power and allow it to pass, the man is gone.

So is the bloody woman.

Looking around, I cover my chest with my arms, wishing I had a jacket or something to keep me warm. There’s no one.

I’m alone.

The surrounding woods are thick, and I don’t understand how he could’ve moved as fast as he did.

My cold feet slosh through wet muck, and my eyes turn downward, freezing on the puddle of blood they’re standing in.

My scream curdles through the still night, sending birds from trees and silence from the air.

“Silver!” a voice yells, but it’s not here.

It’s beyond.

Beyond me. Beyond understanding.

“Silver! Wake up!”

I gasp awake, sitting up as the same chill in my dream causes me to shiver. Jasper is in front of me, his red eyes filled with concern.

“What was that? Are you alright?” His hands on my shoulders are the only thing keeping me from closing my eyes and traveling back.

“It was a dream,” I realize out loud.

“It was. You’re alright now,” he soothes, tucking me into him as he gets on the bed.

“You came back?”

He spoons behind me, and his warmth chases away the lingering cold from the dream. “I did. Lowell couldn’t… he had to go, so he sent me to watch you. I heard you screaming.”

I was screaming?

My eyes are fixed on the opposing wall. I count all the imperfections in the wallpaper and follow the angles of what looks to be a water stain on its surface.

“Will you tell me about it?” he whispers, his breath doing funny things to my insides.

“There was a man there. Well, I don’t think he was a man, actually. He had a woman in his hand. She was dead, covered in blood. He had fangs and red eyes. Her blood dripped from his mouth.”

“Vampire.”

I nod as a singular tear makes its way down my cheek. “He kept saying he did it for my protection. Something about always protecting me.”

“Who was he? Did you get a feeling you knew him?”

“I did.”

His soothing caresses along my hair have my body relaxing, and I know that sounds insane because he could kill me before I’ve registered that he’s moved at all.

“What do you think it means?” I ask him.

“You’re more than a key to some curse, Silver. But I don’t know what that means for you or all of us. Only time will tell.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Why?” His lips brush the shell of my ear, and I elongate my neck, knowing full well what I’m doing to both of us.

“Because what will we be when the other shoe drops? How far will we have gone down this rabbit hole of us?”

He stops teasing my throat with his fangs as he lays me on my back and looms over me. His red eyes bore into mine. “Will it matter?”

I swallow. The weight of his question is heavy. Damning, even. “Of course it matters. Because if I continue down the path that I’m on, I’ll burn this town, the world, and myself to ash to protect the four of you when two weeks ago, I was only a New York City real estate broker.”

His answering chuckle is dark as he leans down, hovering his lips over mine. “My dearest Silver, you were always more than that. We both know it.”

I don’t even have time to ponder his words before his lips crash into mine. His kiss is as all-consuming as it was in the gazebo, and my hands find their way to his hair as I feel the last visages of the nightmare crawl away from my psyche under each lash of his tongue.

When he finally pulls back, I’m breathless, and he’s hungry. “We should stop.”

He presses his forehead against mine before retreating, tugging me back into him as he holds me tightly. “Sleep, Sweet Silver. I’ll keep watch.”

I meant to say something sassy back, but I didn’t have the time. I’m too comfortable.

Jasper left early this morning, and I got up to start cleaning up some of the mess they left behind in their haste to renovate my house.

It’s a sweet gesture, but I wanted this project to be my own.

I called the firm, and Cara told me all was well.

She caught me up on some of the newest listings, recently closed deals, and some deals that went south—to be expected in a business as cyclical as mine.

It made me feel more normal to have such a typical conversation with Cara, especially when she went on and on about John and his antics.

Now, I’m rummaging through the attic, where it seems I missed a lot of boxes of Soliel’s for donation.

I’ve been organizing all morning, and it’s not until the mid-afternoon sun is bleeding through the few small attic windows at the roof’s peak that I find a box labeled Silver that makes me stop in my tracks.

It’s a file box, white and dusty. A brown stain on one of the corners adds to its air of mystery.

I trudge it toward the window, where a god-awful yellow couch waits. I want to burn it to the ground because it’s an eyesore, but now isn’t the right time.

I plop down and dust billows around me.

Coughing, I dust off the top of the box to see if there’s anything else labeled.

It’s just my name.

No dates; nothing.

My hands shake as I slide the lid upward, then pull it off and toss it onto the floor.

Staring up at me are files packed from front to back. The first of which is labeled birth information .

I smudge my index fingertip across the lettering scrawled there. It’s Soliel’s writing. The first file contains only one document.

The baptism record for one: Silver Tenebris.

At least my name is correct. I’ve already been grappling with the idea that I wasn’t a Dormund. If my first name had been something like Katherine, I would have lost it.

The document trembles in my hands as I gaze over its worn, dark brown edges and fading, hand-scrawled ink.

My mind is whirring, and the gears are turning. I pull the file from the box, turn it upside down, and shake it to see if anything else is inside.

There isn’t.

There are so many more file folders in the box, but I can’t get my hands to put the registry down to search them. Before I know it, my feet are carrying me onto the porch.

The scent of newly applied paint and sealant wafts up my nose, and tears warm my cheeks.

This is the first evidence supporting Corvin’s findings in my blood and its lineage. The first evidence of who I truly am.

Part of me wishes I would’ve stayed out of that damned attic because there’s no going back now.

You can’t unknow something once it’s been revealed, and knowing this feels monumental.

“I don’t know which of you is out there today, but I need you,” I squeak, emotion choking off any more words before Lowell is before me, cupping my cheek and looking down at me in concern.

“Little lamb, what is it? Another dream?”

So Jasper has already relayed my nightmare to them. Great.

I know it’s for the best, but it makes me feel splayed open like I’m something they’re examining, like their project.

“I found something,” I whisper, unable to help the warmth bleeding into my tone that his touch is causing.

Looking down, he takes in the paper before I hand it over.

He carefully examines it as if he can sense the document’s age.

“Silver Tenebris. So, Corvin was correct,” he says, more to himself than to me.

“Seems so.”

“Where did you find this?” His red eyes lock on mine, and I can’t breathe beneath their glow.

“A box in the attic. It had my name on it. Only my name. The file that was in said birth record , but that’s not a birth record at all.”

“Birth records didn’t exist until much later. This serves as your birth record. You’d have been a year old when you were baptized.”

“Baptized. Into a church? It’s very lacking in information.”

“It’s not. You see that seal?” He turns the page toward me, and my eyes travel down to the bright red seal on the bottom. “That’s the seal of The Griceoferi.”

“The what?”

“The Griceoferi was a holy order. They operated the Church of the Damned.”

A shocked chuckle rumbles out of me. “Why does that sound like it’s straight out of a horror film?”

Lowell doesn’t laugh or look away from the seal at the bottom of my baptism registry.

“You do not become a part of our community until you’re baptized into the church. You don’t exist until you are. But if they were trying to hide you…”

“Why did they baptize me?”

He finally breaks his eyes away from the page. “That’s what we need to figure out. Where is this box you found now?”

“Upstairs still. I didn’t go through anything else.”

“Good. It’s probably best to do so together and in a safe space.”

“Safe?” My voice cracks.

“Someone drugged you and, in turn, drugged us. Someone knows we’re close to something bigger than us. We need to secure whatever you’ve found. Also, some of these pages are bound to be very old. To maintain their integrity, they need to be in a dry, acrid space.”

He’s making complete sense, but something in my chest urges me to hoard the documents. To tell him to fuck off and hide them away.

“In the hidden room, then?” I ask him.

“The hidden room?”

“In the manor. The one with a key and everything from your past lives.”

His eyes narrow. “Who took you there? How do you know about that?”

“Jasper took me. He wanted me to see what triggering my gene could do. Wanted me to see how many lives you’ve lived.”

“He doesn’t want you to feed,” he whispers, looking down at the document in his hand as if it’s growing heavier by the moment.

“He didn’t seem like it, no.”

“He’s always been the wisest of us.”

He hands my baptism record back to me and takes a step down the stairs away from me, and I feel like the gesture allows me to take the first deep breath I’ve been able to since I opened that damned box.

“What you do with the contents of that box is up to you.” His tone is guarded and sharp, and I feel my lip warble at the change.

Telling him what Jasper said to me has triggered a change in him, and I don’t like it.

“You don’t want me to change either?” I forget the paper, letting the hand that holds it drop to my side. “If I start the testing all over again, do you even want to know if I’m the key to the curse? Will you refuse to test me again? Is this all for naught?”

He takes another step back. “Silver, you know I can’t partake of your blood.”

“I know little about you, Lowell. You won’t let me in!” I know my voice will carry to the other vampires I can feel lurking in the woods beyond the house, but I don’t care.

A whoosh of air deposits Lowell nose-to-nose with me. “The last time I let someone in, I nearly died!

“Lowell, I would never…” My voice is cut off by his hand surrounding my throat.

“You don’t know that. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep, little lamb. You don’t know who you’ll become when your undead heart beats for the first time. One can never know.”

It’s the first time any of them have let on that the change will do more than just give me fangs.

Knowing that triggering the gene will change me has me questioning if I’d ever do so for the first time since I found out about it.

Even if it’s who I am at my very center, I have a choice.

“I can’t lose you, little lamb,” Lowell whispers, pressing his forehead against mine, and the emotion in his tone clenches my heart in its grip like a vise.

“You won’t.”