The Parasite Rose

Chapter 13 — The Trading Table

Knox's message was simple: hunters in wolf territory. Tell the vampire.

He didn't say "please." He didn't say "it's important." He said it the way he said everything—like a command that happened to be phrased as a statement. Ryker had relayed it to me at the tunnel entrance, his face blank, his voice flat. "Alpha wants the Duke to know. Hunters. East border. Three days ago."

"And he wants me to be the messenger?"

"He wants you to be the carrier. There's a difference."

"Both of them involve me walking into a vampire palace with information I don't fully understand. The difference is cosmetic."

Ryker didn't respond to that. He just stepped aside and let me climb the tunnel steps back toward the Court.

I carried the message. Not because I was anyone's carrier, but because Knox was right—hunter activity near wolf territory was bad for everyone. If the hunters were moving east, they might sweep through the grey zones between territories. My grey zones. The routes I used to get between the Court and the Iron Cage.

Damian received the information the way he received everything—with the calm of someone who'd already factored it in. He was in his study, the candle burning low, a book open on his desk that he closed when I entered. The motion was smooth, practiced, the kind of muscle memory that said he'd been hiding what he read for a very long time.

"Hunters in the eastern sector," I said. "Three days ago. Knox wanted you to know."

He didn't look surprised. He didn't look anything. His face was a mask of polite attention, the kind you'd wear when a stranger told you the weather.

"I know."

I waited. He didn't elaborate.

"You already knew."

"The Court maintains its own intelligence network. We've been tracking hunter movements for the past two weeks." He opened the book again—not the same one, a different one, this one bound in dark blue leather. "Their eastward push is not about the wolves. It's about us."

"About the Court?"

"The hunter organization has been repositioning assets toward our borders. The wolf territory is a staging ground—a place to gather without drawing attention. The real target is the Blood Court." He turned a page. "Knox's message confirms what I suspected. The difference between suspicion and confirmation is significant."

"So Knox is two weeks late."

"Knox is exactly on time. He doesn't know what I know, and I don't know what he knows. We're operating from different angles." He looked up. "Which is precisely why you're useful. You're the only person who knows both sides."

The words landed in the space between us. He'd said useful—not important, not valuable. Useful. The word of a man who'd spent three centuries thinking in terms of utility.

"And what are you going to do with what you know?"

"Nothing. Yet." He turned another page. "I have more pressing concerns at the moment."

The way he said it—pressing concerns—and the way his eyes stayed on me for a beat too long, made me want to be somewhere else. His gaze wasn't predatory. It was analytical. The look of someone studying a variable that had started behaving unexpectedly.

"Right," I said. "I'll be going."

"You do that."

I made it three steps to the door before his voice caught me.

"The hunters' movements are not random. They're mapping the Court's defenses. Someone is feeding them information." He paused. "Be careful who you trust."

I looked back. His eyes were on the book, but his hand had stopped turning pages.

"Everyone in this palace is someone I shouldn't trust," I said. "That's not news."

"Everyone in every palace is someone you shouldn't trust. That's not a problem. That's a condition."

I left before the conversation could go anywhere else.

The note was under my pillow.

I found it when I lay down that night—folded once, small enough to fit in a palm, written on paper that smelled faintly of metal. Silver. The kind of metal that only one group used.

I unfolded it with my fingertips. One line, in neat, angular handwriting:

East wing, third corridor, midnight.

No signature. None needed.

Cassius.

My first thought was: how did he get into my room? My second thought was: how long had the note been there? My third thought was: I'd been in this room since evening, and I hadn't sensed anyone.

That last one was the problem. My blood senses should have caught an intruder—any living body with a pulse was detectable within a thirty-foot radius. Either Cassius had entered the room without a pulse, which was impossible, or he had help from someone inside the Court.

Someone who could move through the vampire palace undetected.

Someone who could walk past guards and locks and blood-scenting sentries, and place a piece of paper under the pillow of the parasite that three factions were fighting over.

I burned the note. Held it over the candle until the paper blackened and curled and the handwriting disappeared into ash. The ash fell to the floor in a small pile. I stared at it.

The ash smelled like silver.

Not just the paper. The ink. Cassius had written the note with a silver-tipped pen—the kind used in hunter blood rituals. The metallic scent was baked into the fibers, embedded so deeply that burning couldn't destroy it.

And there was something else in the smell. Underneath the silver, another scent—faint, almost invisible, but there. The smell of a different blood. Not Cassius's. Not mine. Something sweeter, with a faint undercurrent of iron that I couldn't place.

I knelt and examined the ash pile. Among the black flakes, a single hair. Not mine—mine was dark brown, coarse, the kind that broke when you pulled it. This one was fine, golden, caught in the fold of the paper. It curled slightly at the end, the way hair does when it's been exposed to heat.

Someone else had held this note. Someone with golden hair, close enough to leave a strand behind. Someone who'd passed it into the vampire palace while carrying it from outside.

The hunter organization had an inside person in the Blood Court.

I picked up the hair with the tip of my knife and held it to the candlelight. Gold. Thin. The kind of hair that caught light and threw it back. The kind of hair that belonged to someone who moved through the world with the kind of confidence that said "no one will stop me."

I thought of the guards I'd passed in the corridors—their eyes sliding over me, their attention already elsewhere. I thought of the servants who cleaned the rooms, the ones who never looked up, who moved through the palace like ghosts. I thought of Isolde, with her silver hair and her cold eyes and her political machinery that extended into every corner of the Court.

But the hair was gold, not silver. And the scent was wrong for Isolde.

I burned the hair too. Watched it curl and blacken and disappear. The flame caught the end and the hair shriveled, the gold darkening to brown, then to black, then to nothing.

Then I sat on the bed and stared at the ash on the floor. Two piles now—the paper and the hair, side by side, indistinguishable in the dark.

Someone in this palace was working with the hunters. Someone who had access to my room. Someone who'd been close enough to brush against the note and leave a piece of themselves behind.

I bit into my wrist. Blood welled—copper-sweet, alive. I pressed my nose to the wound and breathed in.

Sweet. My blood tasted sweet. Sweeter than last time. Sweeter than the time before that. The sweetness was increasing like a countdown, each exchange adding another layer of sugar to the taste, and I didn't know what it meant.

I pressed my hand flat against the mattress and felt the tally marks under the fabric. Counted them by touch. Each one an exchange. Each one a price. The prices were getting sweeter, and sweetness—my instincts told me—was never a good thing in blood.

Sweetness meant something was breaking down. Something was being consumed. The question was: what?

I lay awake for a long time after that. The palace was silent—the deep, heavy silence of a building full of sleeping predators. My blood senses picked up the faintest hum of heartbeats behind locked doors, slow and rhythmic, the pulse of creatures who'd been sleeping for centuries.

One of those heartbeats was faster than the others. Not by much—a few beats per minute—but enough for my senses to notice. It was coming from the direction of Isolde's wing.

She wasn't sleeping.

I closed my eyes. The sweetness of my own blood still lingered on my tongue.

The clock was ticking. I just couldn't hear it yet.