Chapter 9 — The Moonlight in Her Blood
568 Words
The library was three floors of books and one floor of secrets.
I found the secret floor by accident — which seemed to be how I found everything important in this castle — when a book I pulled from a shelf turned out to be a door.
Beyond it was a circular room with a domed ceiling painted in astronomical patterns and a single reading table lit by a lamp that burned without flame. Every surface was books and scrolls and documents in handwriting so old the ink had turned to silver.
And on the reading table, open, clearly recently consulted: a text about the Moonblood lineage.
I sat down and began to read.
An hour later, I understood.
The Moonblood line — a human bloodline so old it predated the vampire kingdoms — had been believed extinct for three centuries. Its carriers were born not knowing what they were. The blood did not grant strength or speed or power. It granted something quieter and rarer: the ability to exist alongside vampires without the slow corrosive drain that eventually destroyed every human who stayed too close to the immortal.
More than that: it healed. Not wounds — something deeper. The isolation that accumulated in immortal beings over centuries. The emotional calcification that set in when you had lived long enough to lose everyone you loved repeatedly.
In other words: I was, apparently, exactly what a thousand-year-old vampire king suffering under a two-hundred-year grief had needed.
I was still sitting with this when the door opened and Damien came in.
He saw the open book immediately. His face went very still.
"You found it," he said.
"You left it out."
A pause. "Yes."
I looked at him. "You wanted me to find it."
He crossed the room slowly and sat in the chair across from me, and for a moment we just looked at each other over the ancient text.
"I didn't know how to tell you," he said. "It felt — I didn't want you to think that was why I —" He stopped. Tried again. "When I claimed you in that room, I didn't know what you were. I found out afterward. And I have been trying, since then, to determine whether what I feel when you're near me is —"
"Real," I said.
"Yes."
"And?"
He looked at me for a long time. Long enough that the lamplight shifted.
"Yes," he said. "It is real. Whatever the blood does — it doesn't manufacture feeling. It only removes the noise. What's underneath is —" He stopped again. "Mine."
I closed the book.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"That's the second time you've been surprised when I said okay." I leaned forward slightly. "I'm not going to run away from you, Damien. I walked through your door by accident and you spent the first night making sure I had something to eat. You've been careful with me every single day and you think I haven't noticed, but I have, because noticing is what I do." I met his eyes. "So okay."
The room was very quiet.
Then he reached across the table and covered my hand with his.
"You are," he said slowly, "the most unexpected thing that has happened to me in a thousand years."
"Good," I said. "You needed unexpected."
His hand was warm over mine.
Neither of us moved to take it away.
- Writer
