Page 18

Maurice

F ucking fuck . This couldn’t have gone worse.

Reijo’s heels clack on the pavement as he flees, but I can’t focus on what he’s doing. Not when Njáll is on his knees, hands bracing him on the pavement, struggling to stuck in a breath.

Reijo is strong for a selkie, but he has nothing on me. Nothing on what the Huntsman gave back to me. I unwind the magic from around Njáll’s ribcage with barely a thought, but it takes him a few moments more to come back to himself.

Not breathing shouldn’t technically kill any vampire—the death magic driving us would keep us in stasis—but it is still an unpleasant feeling and mixing fae magic in with that can only make things worse.

Njáll sits back on his heels and looks up at me as though he is expecting me to be angry. I am but not with him. I should have known better than to bring him here and, even if that proved to be inevitable, I should never have allowed him to be injured.

“Come on,” I say and extend a hand to help him up.

Njáll stares at my outstretched palm for a moment before he grasps my hand and gets to his feet. There is a bench just across the road, so I lead him there, noting absently how warm his skin is against my own. He blinks at me, confused when I usher him to sit down.

I cannot feel any disturbance in Njáll’s death magic, but his hands shake a little when I let go of him. I reach out with the magic I have, soothing him, then with my hand, taking hold of his chin and turning his face from side to side.

“Maurice?” Njáll asks. He sounds almost breathless, and my frown deepens.

“What did you feel?”

“Pain. Just… pain.”

Reijo was not trying hard, then. All selkies have magic—stories are one thing, but a person who steals a selkie’s sealskin rarely makes off with it for long. I want to go after him, but I know better than that. I will tell Vlad, instead. Reijo is his contact; he can deal with him.

“And now?” I ask. “Has it gone?”

“Yes. Did you get rid of it?”

I nod and let go of Njáll’s chin. “Do you need blood?”

His eyes darken. He was not badly injured, but my blood will bolster his nerves if nothing else. To my surprise, he shakes his head. “I am fine, Maurice. I need to be level-headed.”

Fair. I sigh and lean back on the bench. We should head back—the clan will be missing Njáll, and I am not inclined to hunt down any more of Vlad’s contacts tonight, since I have no way of knowing if Reijo has let them know ahead of time that I might be on my way.

“How do you do that?” Njáll asks, and when I sweep my gaze over to him, he shakes his head. “Magic. I thought vampires couldn’t do magic after we’re turned.”

“We can’t,” I reply. I should keep this to myself.

Technically, it is part of the Hunt’s business and therefore should remain with us.

But Njáll is not a fool. He has already figured it out, so I would only be confirming what he already knows.

“But when I joined the Wild Hunt, I received the Huntsman’s blessing.

Not unlike your mages. My magic returned to me. ”

“Like the mages?” Njáll’s brow furrows. “They’re… It’s all rather confusing.”

I hum and fidget around until I’m in a comfortable position, my left ankle resting on the opposite knee. “I was a witch before I was turned,” I say, “so I had magic that came from within. Then I was a vampire, so I had no magic at all except that which kept me alive.”

Njáll nods. “Okay…”

“When the Huntsman asked me to join the Hunt, he gave me a fae blessing. It allows me to access the magic I used to have, and to some extent, to pull from the natural world, like the fae do.”

“The humans we have with magic, are they like you?”

“There used to be more of them,” I say. “Many mages, descended from a handful of fae-blessed witches. They mostly wiped each other out, so most humans you meet with magic now will be witches—they only draw from their own internal power.”

“But the mages can draw from both?”

“Yes.”

Njáll goes quiet, apparently considering what I’ve told him. I resist the urge to wriggle around and change position so I have something to focus on that’s not him.

“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

“Now? Yes, I’m fine.” He dredges up a wan smile, one of the worst I’ve seen on him, which is saying a lot. At least half the smiles he gives in a night are fake, and I am not the only one to have noticed. “All this magic is… confusing. I never knew a witch or a mage before I was turned.”

“Really?”

He snorts, shaking his head. The light from the streetlamp catches on the silver of a bead in his braid.

I’ve noticed he only has the one, and I don’t know if it means anything or if it is purely decorative.

“I was a sailor. Not even a particularly skilled one. A vampire bit me, turned me, and now I’m here. ”

“And your sire?”

“She didn’t care much to keep me around after the first few decades,” Njáll says with a shrug.

For the first time since I’ve met him, I think his even tone is a fair representation of his feelings towards her.

“I get it. I’ve never felt the urge to turn anyone, myself.

She taught me how to hunt, how to stay hidden, and that was it for our relationship. ”

I sniff. “It’s the bare minimum.”

To my surprise, Njáll laughs. “I wasn’t a child , Maurice. She was pleasant enough. Never nice , but sometimes kind. I could have had a much worse start to this life.”

His expression darkens, and I know he’s thinking of all that happened recently—and probably of a dozen other vampires he knows who had terrible sires.

I sigh and lean back on the bench. Things are different now.

Not even just here, where the clan makes sure to keep a tight grip on who is turned and when and why.

It’s just not done to abandon your turn nowadays. Hasn’t been for a hundred years or more. My mind drifts to Grant and Vlad, and I wonder, not for the first time, what must have come over Vlad in that moment, to have turned Grant despite the Huntsman’s express forbiddance of that act.

Maybe whatever came over Njáll’s sire. Maybe it can happen to any of us, at any time, some strange, magical urge to help our species survive.

Njáll’s expression goes softer. “What are you thinking about?”

“Just…” I wave a hand carelessly. “All of that. Thinking about turning. Sires.”

My own is long dead. I killed him myself, not long after I was out of my bloodlust. Just long enough he wouldn’t see it coming.

And then… freedom. Decades of it, sweet and bright, until the Huntsman came and offered me the one thing I truly missed.

“Have you turned anyone?”

“No!” The word is too sharp, so I soften it when I speak again. “No, it’s—We can’t.”

“Oh, you’re not…”

“I can’t talk about it,” I say, begging him to understand. Telling him about myself is one thing, especially when I know there is at least one true mage in this city who he has met before. I can’t tell him about the Hunt; at least, not more than he already knows.

“Yes. All right.” Njáll clasps his hands in front of him, leaning forward. His hair hides his profile, and I tip my head back to stare up at the sky. I can’t see a single bloody star in this city, and anger tightens my throat, quick and sudden.

I shouldn’t be here.

If I weren’t, Njáll wouldn’t have needed healing. He wouldn’t have been in danger.

“What’s our next move, then?” Njáll asks, and it takes a moment for me to parse the question.

“What?”

“Our next move?” He looks at me, eyes all innocent. “Reijo knows the selkie. How else can we find her?”

“I-I’m not—You’re not…”

“I’m going to help you,” Njáll says. “The selkie didn’t try to kill me. The dryad did.”

“He did,” I agree, my voice sounding flat and absent. Oh, this is bad. I certainly should not allow Njáll to help. The Huntsman will be furious; at best, he will revoke my blessing and take my magic, but at worst—

“Let me help,” Njáll says. His voice is softer, this time almost pleading. “I need to do something. Something that will help my clan. This city.”

“That is your entire job.”

“Yes, but I… You know I’m no good at it, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the clan figures it out, too. Let me help them this way. You don’t know London that well, and I might not know about the fae, but I can help when it comes to the city.”

This is a bad idea. The worst.

And yet… I’m swayed. Vlad is always willing to help, of course, but I suspect his urge to keep Grant out of danger is stronger than mine when it comes to Njáll, and I suspect, too, that Vlad has a trickier time of it. The Huntsman may not come back here for decades. He may never have to know.

“All right,” I say, and Njáll’s expression is far too surprised; he expected me to argue some more. “But there will be rules, and you will follow them. We will not have a repeat of what happened tonight.”

“Yes, of course.”

I get to my feet, brushing imaginary lint from my trousers as I do. “Come on. We’ve done enough for tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll visit another of the fae on Vlad’s list.”

We walk back to the clan house, taking a side door back inside, and when I pause at Njáll’s office door, he looks at me expectantly. “Are you…?”

“No. I need to call Vlad and tell him about Reijo.” I need more information for tomorrow, too. We’re not going in without it. “You’ll stay here all night?”

Njáll smiles. It lights up his face, and something in my chest squeezes because it’s the first true smile I’ve seen from him in days. “I will,” he says, then, more solemnly, “I promise.”

“You shouldn’t promise the fae anything, you know.”

“You’re not fae.”

“Blessed by one.” I raise an eyebrow. “Make sure you keep that in mind.”

His smile doesn’t fade. If anything, it only widens, and his voice is lower when he says, “Oh, I certainly will.”

I falter. I don’t know what it is—his smile, his voice, the way he’s leaning in the doorway to his office as though he feels at home here. My mouth goes dry and if Njáll notices, he says nothing about it.

“See you tomorrow night, Maurice.”

“Yes, I—” I swallow, shake my head. “See you tomorrow.”

I stride away before he closes the door, hating the heat I feel in my cheeks. A moment of weakness. Another moment of weakness.

I cannot afford any more of them. No. As long as Njáll and I are working together on this, as long as I am protecting him, then he is off-limits. Off-limits to everyone—that’s the point—but especially to me.