EPISODE 4 "First Blood" — Part 1
956 Words
THE SEVENTH KING
Every empire begins with a boy they dared to forget.
EPISODE 4 — "First Blood" — Part 1
The city at night was different.
Ethan had known this, intellectually. He'd worked enough night shifts to have experienced the specific hollow quality of streets at 3 a.m. But now the city at night was a completely different sensory event.
He could see heat signatures, faintly, at the edges of his vision.
He could hear the subway two levels underground.
He could smell the river twelve blocks east.
He walked without destination, hands in his pockets, processing. Kael had given him four hours of information about seven kingdoms and three centuries of war. His mind was still sorting it into usable categories.
The hunger was there. He was managing it.
He turned a corner and stopped.
Derek Hollis was standing outside a bar.
Ethan recognized him immediately, the way you recognized people from specific chapters of your life — not fondly, not angrily, just with the flat recognition of someone your nervous system had catalogued as a source of danger.
They had attended the same university. Derek had not made it through the first year, for reasons that were not academic.
He was currently explaining something to a younger student — a kid Ethan vaguely recognized from the engineering department, first year, quiet — in the specific tone that wasn't quite a threat but was designed to feel like one. Close. Positioned between the kid and the exit. Hand on the wall beside his head.
The kid's heartbeat, which Ethan could hear from twelve feet away, was elevated.
Ethan walked over.
He didn't plan to. He'd spent three years crossing streets to avoid interactions like this. But he walked over, and he stood next to Derek, and he said, very quietly:
"Hey."
Derek turned. Recognized him. The expression that crossed his face was the specific expression of someone encountering a target they thought they'd finished with.
"Grey," he said. "Didn't know you came out at night."
"I'm expanding my habits."
Derek's eyes moved over him — the quick, assessing look of someone whose entire social toolkit was built on identifying weakness.
Ethan watched him do it.
And felt the hunger redirect itself with a focus that was almost clarifying.
Not toward blood.
Toward information.
Blood Memory, Kael had said. You absorbed a man's entire history.
"Walk away," Ethan said to the first-year kid. He said it without looking at him — kept his eyes on Derek. "Go inside or go home."
He heard the kid's footsteps recede. Quickly.
Derek smiled. "You've got a thing about stepping in, huh?"
"Probably," Ethan agreed.
Derek moved — not a real swing, the kind designed to make someone flinch. Ethan didn't flinch. He caught Derek's wrist — not tightly, not aggressively, just firmly — and held it.
And then it happened.
It was like being flooded.
Not pleasantly. Not unpleasantly. Just overwhelmingly.
A life arriving all at once, out of sequence — a childhood in a house with too much noise and not enough space. A father who had taught his son, very thoroughly and without words, that the world was a hierarchy and the only question was whether you were above or below the person in front of you.
Years of learning that lesson and applying it.
A fear underneath all of it — constant, structural, so familiar it had become invisible — of being the one at the bottom.
It was over in four seconds.
Derek was on his knees on the sidewalk. Conscious. Eyes open, staring at nothing. His heartbeat was steady. He wasn't harmed.
He simply looked emptied. Temporarily.
Ethan let go of his wrist.
He stood over him and felt the last of the hunger recede. And he felt also the specific weight of what he now carried — a life's worth of context about a person he had actively avoided for three years.
The specific, uncomfortable compassion that came with understanding how someone became the thing they became.
He did not feel sorry for Derek Hollis.
But he understood him now in a way that made simple anger feel insufficient.
He turned and walked away.
His phone rang two blocks later.
Mara. He answered.
"Ethan, where are you? I've been calling—"
"I'm near campus. I'm fine."
"You looked different this morning. I didn't say anything because it wasn't the moment, but something was wrong." A pause. "I need you to tell me what it was."
He stopped walking.
The city went on around him — a taxi, a couple arguing outside a restaurant, music from a window somewhere above.
"I found something in that basement," he said. "I told you that."
"You told me you found something. You didn't tell me what."
"I know." He exhaled. "Mara. I need a couple of days. I need to process." He paused. "Can you give me that?"
A long silence.
"Two days," she said finally. "Then you tell me everything."
"Two days," he agreed.
"And Ethan?"
"Yeah."
"Whatever it is." Her voice was quiet. "You don't have to handle it alone."
He opened his mouth to say I know.
What came out instead was nothing — because at that moment, from the alley twenty feet to his left, he heard something he recognized as wrong before he could identify why.
Two heartbeats. Rapid. Moving toward him.
Not human.
He turned.
The alley was dark. But Ethan's eyes adjusted in half a second — a new development — and in the darkness he saw two figures in tactical clothing. Moving fast, with the specific coordinated efficiency of people who had done this before.
Dawnhold Hunters.
They had found him.
— END OF EPISODE 4 —
- Writer
