Chapter Text
And now what? What happens now? What is the fate of the Cinnamon Roll Queen who kills master vampires, the unassuming baker of Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras and the Death of Marat and... hell, there might be a theme here. Maybe I should watch that if I ever get around to naming the cherry tarts. The damn things were getting even more popular as we neared the end of cherry season, but if I named them, I’d be stuck making them forever.
And forever, or at least a really long lifespan, was starting to seem like a real possibility. If I was a big thor magic user after all and not just some red-eyed bad cross partblood who hadn’t yet gone on a murder rampage. I’d certainly had plenty of opportunities to trigger a bloody spree. It was a good sign that I hadn’t. A very good sign. Practically a certainty.
And then there was Con. I had more or less come to terms with all the little affinities for the dark that kept popping up after my bond with him - seeing in the dark like a vampire, traveling through Other-space like a vampire... But the continued presence of the vampire himself? That was a problem that I just didn’t seem willing to let go of, although I had offered.
And the vampire involved should be glad to be free of an unwilling alliance with a human, even one that had resulted in the destruction of a rival that had tried to kill him, right? Instead, we’d gone ambling around Other-space before he escorted me home in time for my 4am shift at the coffeehouse. It’s not like we had a heart-to-heart or anything. We didn’t even talk as we strolled around. And holding my hand the whole time was probably more to keep me from wandering off into vampiric potholes, because it certainly couldn’t have been anything else, right? There absolutely wasn’t any uncomfortable attraction between us, any reason to read into how he warmed his body to match mine, matched his stride to mine, the very gentle way his fingers moved against mine...
Right.
It had been interesting to drift through Other-space without being in a deadly hurry, though, without a pulsating beacon of evil hovering like a thunderstorm at the edge of my vision. And still I’d kept turning my head like I was trying to triangulate some distant sound you’re not sure if you’re hearing.
“All of Bo’s followers will have been used up in his defense or ceased to exist in our final confrontation.”
I’d sighed. Had Con ever observed social niceties when he was human? Like light conversation, or gently leading up to a subject? “Thanks?”
“Does it ease your mind to know that?”
Since it actually did, I’d shut my mouth and kept strolling.
When we’d arrived back at Yolande’s house, my balcony taking shape between one step and the next, I’d been disappointed to find his hand slipping from mine.
“You will call if you have need of me,” he’d said. Not an order, just a statement. I’d nodded and let him go, watched him step backwards into Other-space. To go feed. Because he was a vampire. Just not...the really really bad kind? Oh Sunshine, dangerous slope there.
I shoved my twitching conscience down for later avoidance and went to make cinnamon rolls at Charlie’s Coffeehouse. Which was my job. And my passion, actually, and the closest thing I had to a reason for being. I mean, there was nothing else to do, right? We’d destroyed the evil master vampire and his gang of suckers and lived to tell the tale. I just needed to tidy up the loose ends with a bunch of lies to my friends and family and the Special Other Forces who wanted all vampires dead and then get on with things. While consorting with one of the Darkest Others that were attempting to roll the entire human race into darkness and slavery. Just like a story. Nice and neat by the last page. Sure.
There was a table full of SOF in the coffeehouse when I poked my face out of the bakery after the morning rush. Jesse smiled but Pat only waved a greeting and kept shoveling muffins into his mouth. They kept the table all morning, swapping out people now and again, although Pat and Theo stayed the whole time. I guess they were keeping as low a profile as they could manage.
As long as no one tried to drag me off to talk to the goddess of pain anytime soon, I figured I was ahead of the game. Temporarily. I was under no illusions that I’d been forgotten. She wasn't just going to forget me, especially after my mysterious friend and I had managed to emerge, relatively unscathed, from the ruins of a sucker nest. But by the end of my shift, they hadn’t come back to talk with me or tried to drag me off in a specially-outfitted vehicle. So I settled behind Mel on his motorcycle and went back with him to his place where we did some good old-fashioned human bonding, naked and sweaty skin and racing heartbeats and dull human teeth making soft marks just for pleasure’s sake. I tried not to think about the future or compare Mel’s hot weight above me to the way Con had felt, there in his dark lair, when I’d thought we were about to... stop it, Sunshine.
I hoped Mel hadn’t noticed any distraction on my part, but he didn’t mention it if he did. And it wasn’t like I wanted Mel any less. Mel made me happier than anyone else ever had, he was steady and strong and good-hearted, and made my heart beat faster every time he stroked a finger across my skin just so...
I settled into the curve of his shoulder with his arm around me and breathed. And for the moment, I let all thoughts of the dark go.
For the next couple of weeks, there was a pause of sorts. SOF agents were in the coffeehouse every day that I was, but they made no moves. I got no royal summons, and no one approached me. But I knew I was watched. All the time. Every morning there were fresh tire tracks from parked cars outside the wards around Yolande’s place.
And every few nights, Con would take me into Other-space for a few hours and, though it felt something like a companionable ramble, I could sense we moved in ever-widening spirals. I was slowly learning how to navigate, how Other-space mapped to the real world, though I doubted it was more than the clumsiest of associations. My vampire-gifts were still awkward to use, but apparently I was going to get training.
Bo’s taint was gone, the aether clear of his misshapen and malevolent guardians, but there were faint traces of other influences that Con seemed to be tracking. Some of them felt vampirish, but others were entirely unfamiliar.
“Are we putting SOF out of work then?” I asked one night as we arrived back in my living room and Con’s hand was slipping from mine. “Playing guard dog so no one else moves in?”
He stilled, watching me in a way that made me instantly wary. “In removing Bo, we have created a suspicious void that makes us a focus of much attention, some of it from Others who would like to take advantage. It seems wise to...mark the territory."
“Wise.” I was suddenly more than suspicious. “Stupid question, but we’re not doing this for the health and safety of the human population around here, are we?”
“As much as I desire to keep you safe, no. We are baiting a trap.”
My breath caught. I should have known, but I supposed I hadn’t wanted to think about it. “For anything, or anyone, in particular?”
“Not in particular, Sunshine. The strongest of my kind are unlikely to leave the kingdoms they have already built. But the younger, those who have followers but no established territory, or territory that infringes on another, more powerful, vampire? Those will certainly come.”
I felt sick at the thought of more fights and Con reached out to take both my hands, rubbing his thumbs over my palms. “It will not be like Bo. And they will provide the practice you will need.”
“Practice?” My voice cracked a little.
He met my eyes, a green fire flickering behind his gaze. “We are the best weapon available against my kind. It is what we seem made for, Sunshine.” As my mouth hung open, he slipped away into the night.
What we seem made for. Those words were echoing in my head all day in the bakery. They reminded me of what Con had said about his master - that Con had been ‘apt to his purpose’. Did Con know something he hadn’t mentioned? Okay, that was a beyond stupid question, Sunshine, an idiocy of carthaginian proportions. Of course Con knew something he hadn’t mentioned.
From behind my mother's closed office door, I could hear my stepbrother Kenny being grounded yet again. The night Con and I had taken out Bo, he’d come home, past curfew, with a cut on his cheek. He’d claimed it was a fight, in that blustery teenage boy way, but he’d been watching me warily ever since and avoiding me as much as possible, not to mention staying out late almost every night since. I’d begun to consider that he’d seen me that night in Old Town, but what could I do about it if he had?
He stormed out of mom’s office, slamming the door behind him, and into the kitchen, where I could hear a faint comforting murmur from Mel. My blood ran cold at Kenny’s response, far louder than necessary.
“Yeah, biker boy, maybe you should pay more attention to Rae since she’s started looking elsewhere for company.”
I burst into the kitchen and grabbed Kenny by the arm, dragging him into the bakery. “What in any Kali hell is wrong with you?” I hissed at him.
“Oh, what?” he sneered. “Tired of getting all the attention?” He yanked a piece of crumpled paper out of his jacket and flung it at me. “Mom’s been a bitch ever since this all started and it’s all your fault!“
He stormed out of the bakery as I picked up the paper. It was a letter, a bit yellowed with age at the edges but the ink was still sharp and bright. As it settled in my hands I got a shock of recognition. This was from my father, and not just from my father, but hand-written by him. I felt a jolt run up my hands and arms and settle into my chest with a tingle. As I stared, one phrase jumped out at me.
...because you had no discernible partblood, Sadie...
My heart skipped a beat and I focused fiercely. My mother had reached out to my father. And he’d written back.
She’d taken me and left him and his magic-using family and refused all contact. As far as I’d been told, she’d never communicated with him again. But the date at the top was before she’d met Charlie, when we’d still lived in the tiny dark apartment with few windows and I’d started to get so sick. She must have been frantic with worry to have contacted him after all.
I blinked and refocused on the letter.
...or that the Blaises engage, like all the magic families, in a kind of selective breeding is absolutely no surprise to you, I know. That we have been striving for particular traits and powers in our offspring for centuries should not be any more surprising. That we did indeed hope for something specific with Raven, but apparently failed to accomplish it, caused a disappointment with my family, certainly, but...
Ah. Yeah. I didn’t have strong memories of my father but this letter was bringing them back in unpleasant ways. Where had Kenny dug this up? Why had he gone snooping through Mom’s things? And why had she kept this old letter? I felt the tingle in my fingertips again and almost dropped the paper. There was magic in it. It called to me like the necklace Con had given me as a key to his lair.
But that I wasn’t partblood? That I didn’t have to keep wondering if I had the sort of demon blood that meant I’d be turning homicidal and cannibalistic any day now? The release of that was so overwhelming that I couldn’t feel it yet past the outrage that I’d been bred for something.
I was still scowling at the letter when I heard the warning sounds of my mother emerging from her office. I folded it back up and shoved it in a pocket, fast. I didn’t even want to imagine the fallout of mom catching me with it. It sat in my pocket like a lead weight the rest of my shift.
I stopped in the kitchen before I left to give Mel a hug. He kissed the top of my head and gave me a searching look before he turned back to work, and I made a mental note that we actually had to have a conversation at some point soon, no matter how much I didn't want to. I sighed. One of the difficult things rearing up and demanding attention.
Yolande met me on the front porch. My landlady looked faintly worried and I had a moment of anxiety. Had SOF stopped by? A pack of ghouls? A roof leak?
“You have a link on you,” she said, holding up a hand to stop me before I could come up the steps. “A powerful one. I felt it come through the outer wards.”
A splash of panic flashed through me before I connected it to what I had in my pocket. “An old letter from my father to my mother.”
Her eyes lit with interest. I’d told her a fair amount of my history throughout the Bo thing so I didn’t have to explain their relationship, at least. Or lack thereof. She gestured me inside, to her workshop.
I laid the letter on her table and she raised an eyebrow at me. “Go ahead,” I muttered. “It’s all old news.”
She glanced through it without touching it, nodding to herself. “Your mother may not have realised she kept this. It has a very powerful misdirection on it. But she did have enough awareness of it that it must have been locked away with several powerful charms. You see how the paper itself has aged, but the ink is crisp and sharp?”
I stared at the writing, seeing the grasp of the Blaises reaching out after all these years.
Yolande picked up a dark candle that smelled of pine and rosemary and lit it carefully, holding it above the letter on the table. After the flame steadied, she gently blew it out and I watched the smoke rise from the glowing wick. It wavered, dipping down toward the letter, but dissipated before reaching the surface.
“Unanchored,” she pronounced crisply. “No one active at the other end.” She glanced at me. “That has nothing to do with the well-being, or not, of the person who set the spell. It simply means the other end of the spell has lapsed. But what was set into the ink remains viable.”
“...to do what with?”
“It is set for finding. But without an active end, I do not know what you will find.”
“Could it be reactivated from that end?”
“Not without having the letter itself.”
I picked up the letter and slowly folded it. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t let it be.
I knew SOF was keeping an eye on me beyond showing up at the coffeehouse and bogarting a table every morning. The tire tracks along the road at home that meant parked cars at night – they were probably watching for Con to show up. I knew they had to have gone to explore the lake where he’d given a bogus address. I’d expected to be pulled back into the goddess' office right away, but apparently she was content to wait for developments. Which was almost scarier. How long would she wait?
I was really coming to hate the pervasive sense of being watched all day. I often didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I was at home, safely behind wards. As safe as wards could make me, although Yolande's wards were much more powerful than any I'd ever seen. The only other place I ever felt that sense of relief was, oddly enough, at Mel’s.
My vampire never came to the front door anyway. I’d given him permission to enter the day he’d carried me home from our escape, bloody and exhausted. Now he just stepped from nothing into my living room without leaving a visible clue for anyone outside.
I put the letter on the coffee table and set about making dinner. When Con showed up that night, his head turned toward it almost immediately and he froze, settling into that stillness that indicated startlement in a vampire. Or at least, in my vampire.
I sipped my tea. “From my father to my mother, years ago.”
“May I?”
I nodded, watching him approach the letter with all the wariness of a hunting cat stalking a snake.
“A powerful magic,” he finally pronounced, putting it down again. “But unanchored.”
“Yolande said the same thing.”
He gave an infinitesimal nod. “Bring it. We will see where it leads us.”
I nearly spat out my tea. “What?”
“I suspect it will take us to the place it was written.” He paused. “But I am forgetting your discomfort with matters of your family.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was damn right I didn’t want anything to do with them and paused. That I wasn’t, apparently, partblood, was such an amazing relief that I hadn’t entirely processed it yet. I kept having to remind that still-intermittently-panicking part of my mind to let that go. But that I was part of some breeding experiment...that made me angry all over again. Was it possible to find out what they had been breeding for?
“Right.” I swigged back the last of my tea and stood to slip on my shoes.
When we stepped into Other-space, the letter in my hand gave a little twitch and then tugged, like a child dragging an adult somewhere. Con let me lead, his fingers entwined in mine, and simply followed me. It wasn’t a long walk before the live thing in my hand went still and behaved like ink and paper again. I supposed that meant either somewhere close, location-wise, or somewhere familiar to me.
I took a step toward the space I could almost feel waiting, beyond the boundary of Other-space, but Con didn't move. I looked at him in surprise.
“I do not have an invitation to enter,” he said simply.
“Can I invite you if I go in?”
He tilted his head. “If you wish,” he said finally, as if surprised.
“Is there someone there? Inside?”
“No. Not at the moment.”
He let my hand drop and Other-space faded around me, always a bit of a relief. The human world solidified, shelves and tables and storage chests; a library of sorts? A workroom? The air grew thick and hard to breathe and a painful prickle began in my chest like thorns growing in my lungs. I felt a thousand eyes focus on me with sharp intention. And then everything just...stopped. The air was just air, and no one was watching me.
The books on the nearest shelf had the Blaise family crest. Perhaps I had been recognized, in some nebulous way, as family. Allowed.
Now how did you invite a vampire in who was waiting in Other-space? After a moment’s thought, I shrugged and turned in the direction I could still feel him, held out my hand, and said his name. The watching presences snapped awake again as soon as he appeared, but subsided with almost audible grumblings when he took my hand. They didn’t like it, but apparently they, whatever they were, weren’t going to argue with a Blaise. After a moment, I let his hand drop, and though there remained a lingering sense of wariness, there was no further protest.
Con was already studying the area around us and I turned back to my explorations as well. It definitely had overtones of a library, and also a mad scientist’s lair. There were mysterious pieces of what could have been medical equipment. There were bottles, jars, and flasks, all in jewel tones or clear carved crystal. Huge leather-bound chests with metal clasps squatted here and there.
Everything was spotless, not a speck of dust anywhere. “Either someone comes in here to dust or there’s a thor cleaning spell that someone could’ve made a fortune off of.”
“Someone comes in regularly. Male.” Con glanced around, emitting faint frown overtones though nothing showed in his face. “This is a stronghold, but long disused. A work shop, a library, and a treasury.”
I looked around helplessly, the letter clutched in my hand. “I have no idea what to do now.”
Con slowly turned his head, scanning. “There,” he said. “There is something that emanates your power.”
He was pointing at a set of shelves near the back of the room. On the top shelf, above my head, there was a stack of thick books lying flat. The cover of the top book was slightly lifted by something inside. I pulled the book down and flipped it open.
A ring, green stones surrounded by baroque curls of gold, lay there. I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes.
“Your work,” Con said from behind me. “It bears the signature of your power.”
“My grandmother’s ring.” My throat felt thick and tight.
He let his hand hover over it and then tapped the page beside it. “Left here as a clue for you.”
I focused on the slightly faded writing there. An older tome, with slightly archaic language, discussing the Blaise family’s breeding program. I felt a shudder run through me.
Con took the book from my hands and guided me to a chair. I clutched my grandmother’s ring in one hand and set my father’s letter on the page like a bookmark while Con took a seat nearby.
I stared down at the book...no, better to call it what it was – a stock registry for humans. Was it better that I was no partblood on my mother’s side if it meant that I was the discarded product of some eugenics program instead?
A creaking noise overhead had me freezing and staring at the ceiling. I realized then that there were no windows or doors, only a slim spiral staircase in the center of the room. We were in a basement or some other underground construction.
Con was still watching me but I could tell he was tracking the noises overhead. When his head turned toward the stairwell, I tensed. He stood and drifted further into a dark corner, waiting.
A pair of boots appeared at the top of the stairs, then jeans, then a familiar-looking shirt and tattooed arms. “Don’t!” I cried even as Con was streaking forward, and then Mel was standing there, blank and wide-eyed and unfocused. Under the dark. My boyfriend, here in a Blaise archive, held in my vampire‘s control. Yeah, that sounded about as good as the actual situation.
“This human is bound,” Con said thoughtfully.
I bit my lip. “You don’t mean by you, just now.”
“He is under a permanent binding imposed by another source, some time in the past.”
“Oh. Er... Con, this is my boyfriend Mel.”
“The caretaker of your family’s treasury.”
“And the head cook at the coffeehouse.”
Con slowly circled him. “He has many powerful tattoos. Unusual.”
I nodded.
“This one.” He indicated a jagged and abstract lightning bolt at the base of Mel’s skull, under his hair. With shock, I realised for the first time the resemblance to the Blaise family crest. Mel was under a Blaise binding?
Con turned to look at me. “You have affection for him.”
I nodded again, feeling a chill creep over me.
“He returns this affection.”
It was a statement and not a question, but I answered anyway. “I thought so.”
Con considered that. “I do not think you should doubt your judgement. He is bound to some service, but it should have no control over his emotions.”
I stared, stricken, at Mel. “He’s not aware of this conversation, right?”
“No.”
“And he’ll be fine after we leave?”
Con gave me an odd look. “Yes.”
I gathered up the stack of books that had been under my grandmother’s ring and thrust them at Con. He took them, holding the heavy leatherbound tomes with ease. “I want to go home.”