Chapter Text
The cathedral had been abandoned long enough for the forest to begin reclaiming it. Ivy had forced its way through the mortar and spread across the western wall, strangling the carved saints until only fragments of their faces remained visible beneath the leaves. Half the stained glass had fallen inward years ago, and moonlight passed through the empty frames without color, illuminating the broken pews and the weeds growing between the stones. The bell still hung in the tower, though its rope had rotted away and no human hand had called the faithful to prayer in decades.
David had chosen it because no one would hear Michael die.
Michael stood beneath what remained of the rose window, his dark hair stirred by the cold air spilling through the shattered glass. He had removed his coat and folded it over the end of a pew with absurd care, as though he expected to retrieve it later. His shirt lay open at the throat, exposing the drying streak of blood that began beneath his jaw and disappeared under the fabric. David had bitten him less than an hour ago, not deeply enough to kill him, but deeply enough that the scent had followed them through the woods and now saturated the ruined cathedral.
David could hear his heart from across the nave. It was beating too quickly, although Michael’s face remained calm.
“You can still change your mind,” David said.
Michael glanced toward the doors through which they had entered. One hung crookedly from its hinges; the other had collapsed onto the floor and was slowly being consumed by moss. Beyond them waited the long road back to a village where Michael had already been mourned more than he had ever been loved.
“Can I?”
David hated how quietly he asked it. “I can take you somewhere else. Somewhere they will never find you.”
“They always find me.”
“Then I’ll kill them.”
“All of them?”
“If that is what it takes.”
Michael’s mouth softened, but it was not quite a smile. He had looked at David that way the first time David promised to kill for him, before either of them understood that David did not make such promises lightly. Michael had been bleeding then as well, one hand pressed to his ribs while men with torches searched the road below. David had carried him into the mountains and remained beside him until he could breathe without pain. By sunrise, Michael had known what David was. By the following night, he had stopped pretending to be afraid.
Now he crossed the broken floor until only inches remained between them. “You cannot spend eternity killing every man who decides to hurt me.”
“I could.”
“I know.” Michael touched the side of his face, his thumb following the sharp line of David’s cheekbone. “That is part of the problem.”
David turned into the touch despite himself. Michael’s hand was warm. By the end of the night, it would never be warm in quite the same way again.
He had explained everything. He had told Michael what the blood would do and what it would take from him, how hunger would become a second heartbeat and sunlight an execution. He had described the first death, the waking, and the terrible hours in between when the body was neither fully human nor yet vampire. He had told him about the violence that lived beneath David’s skin and warned him that immortality did not soften a man’s worst instincts. It gave them time to sharpen.
Michael had listened without interrupting. When David finished, he had asked whether they would be together.
David had lied only once.
Forever, he had said, although nothing belonging to David could ever truly be promised while Max still lived.
Michael’s fingers slid into his hair and curled against the back of his neck. “You are trying to frighten me again.”
“I am trying to make certain you understand.”
“You have explained it every night for three months. If I did not understand by now, there would be little hope of eternity improving me.”
“This is not something you can regret afterward.”
“I have regretted most of my life while I was living it. I would like the opportunity to regret something after.”
David almost laughed. The sound caught painfully behind his ribs instead. Michael saw it happen, because Michael saw too much where David was concerned, and drew him closer until their foreheads rested together.
“You do not have to do this,” Michael murmured. “You do not have to be the one who ends my life.”
“There can be no one else.”
It emerged with more force than David intended, sharpened by a possessiveness he had spent months trying to conceal. He could not bear the thought of another vampire’s blood inside Michael, another immortal hand becoming the last thing he felt as a human. If Michael was going to die, David would carry the weight of it. If he woke hungry and terrified, David would be the first thing he saw.
If he did not wake at all, David would follow him before dawn.
Michael drew back enough to study him. The moonlight caught in his dark eyes, reflecting silver around pupils so wide that they nearly swallowed the color. “Then stop asking me to leave.”
David searched his face for hesitation and found fear instead. It was not the fear of a man wishing to escape. Michael was afraid because he understood, because he had listened to every warning and chosen this with the full knowledge of what it would cost him.
David raised his wrist to his mouth-
Michael caught his hand before his teeth could break the skin. For one terrible instant, David thought he had changed his mind. Then Michael turned David’s arm and pressed his lips to the pale underside of his wrist, directly over the pulse that had not moved in more years than David cared to count.
“Upstairs,” Michael said.
David frowned. “Why?”
“If this is the last place I stand as a living man, I want to see the sky.”
The tower stairs had partially collapsed, forcing them to climb over fallen stone and the remains of birds’ nests. David went ahead where the passage narrowed, testing each step before allowing Michael to follow. It was ridiculous caution when they had come there to kill him, but Michael did not remark upon it. He only kept one hand against David’s back as they climbed, maintaining contact as though David might vanish if he let go.
The bell tower opened above the treetops. What remained of the roof leaned inward at a dangerous angle, and the enormous bronze bell hung motionless in its wooden frame. Far below, the forest stretched in every direction, dark hills folding into one another beneath the moon. The wind was stronger there, carrying the scent of rain and pine and distant woodsmoke. Michael walked to the broken parapet and looked down.
David did not follow him immediately.
“You said the blood begins the change,” Michael said. “Death completes it.”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“Minutes. Perhaps hours.”
“That is not what I meant.”
David watched Michael’s hair whip across his forehead. “The fall will kill you immediately.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Yes.”
Michael nodded, accepting the answer without flinching. David wished he had lied. It would have been a small cruelty compared to the truth, but Michael had not asked for comfort. He had asked to know what David intended to do to him.
When Michael turned away from the edge, his expression was gentler than David could endure. “Give me your blood.”
David crossed the space between them before fear could stop him. He opened his wrist with his fangs and pressed the wound to Michael’s mouth, expecting caution, perhaps revulsion. Michael gave him neither. His lips closed over David’s skin, and the first pull of his mouth was so intimate that David’s knees nearly weakened.
Human teeth pressed against his wrist. Michael swallowed once, then again, his hand tightening around David’s forearm as the blood touched something hungry inside him. David felt it awaken before Michael did. The change reached toward the blood as though it had been waiting all his life for permission, and Michael made a low sound against his skin, startled by the force of his own need.
David should have pulled away sooner. Instead, he watched Michael drink, watched color rise beneath his skin while David’s blood stained his mouth. He imagined that mouth unchanged by death, those dark eyes opening with the same intelligence they held now, and for a few stolen seconds he allowed himself to believe that wanting something this desperately might be enough to keep it safe.
Then the bond to Max tightened.
The pressure came without warning, a cold hand closing around the base of David’s skull. Max was far away, but distance had never granted David freedom from him. Something had stirred along the sire bond in response to Michael drinking, not recognition yet, only suspicion. A sleeping predator disturbed by movement within its territory.
David tore his wrist from Michael’s mouth.
Michael swayed toward him before catching himself. His pupils had consumed nearly all of his irises, and David’s blood shone wetly across his lips. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Do not lie to me tonight.”
David looked toward the forest as though Max might already be standing among the trees. The pressure receded, leaving behind the promise of attention. “We need to finish before he realizes what I have done.”
“Your sire.”
“Yes.”
“Will he feel me?”
“I don’t know.” David had never made another vampire. Max had forbidden it, though he had disguised the order as concern, insisting that David was too young and too reckless to bear responsibility for an immortal life. The false concern is what gave him the chance to disobey now. “He may feel the change through me. Once you wake, I can hide you until you are strong enough to leave.”
“You said we would leave together.”
“We will.”
Another lie, or perhaps only a promise David did not yet know how to keep.
Michael wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His gaze remained on David, lingering with an uncomfortable understanding that made David wonder how many of his lies had ever truly been believed.
“Come here,” Michael said.
David obeyed before he could consider why the ease of it frightened him.
Michael kissed him with David’s blood still warm between them. He tasted alive. Warmth, breath, and the faint salt of fear beneath the copper, and David committed every part of it to memory. Michael held him with both hands, one curved around his neck and the other pressed between his shoulders, refusing to allow even an inch of distance to open between their bodies.
When the kiss ended, Michael remained close enough that their mouths brushed as he spoke. “You will wait for me.”
“However long it takes.”
“If I wake wrong-”
“You won’t.”
“If I do.”
David’s hands tightened around his waist. “Then I will help you remember.”
Michael closed his eyes. “Varesh.”
The word hurt more than it should have. In Michael’s language, it meant fire, but not the kind that consumed cities or blackened bodies upon a battlefield. It was the flame kept burning in a window through the longest night, tended by someone who believed the person they loved would eventually find the road home.
My fire.
Michael had first called him that weeks after they met, when David confessed that he could not remember the last name his mother had given him. He had said it teasingly then, amused by David’s pale hair and colder temper, but the name had gradually become something spoken only in darkness, breathed against David’s mouth or the hollow beneath his jaw.
David pressed his face into Michael’s hair and held him as though his arms could prevent the next moment from arriving. “I am here.”
“I know.”
“I will be here when you wake.”
“I know that too.”
Michael drew away first. David allowed his hands to slip from Michael’s waist, although every part of him screamed to tighten his grip. Michael climbed onto the remains of the parapet and stood with his back to the open sky. The forest lay far beneath him. Wind pulled at his clothes and swept his dark curls away from his face, revealing the blood drying at the corner of his mouth.
David could not move.
Michael waited. When it became clear that David was not going to cross the distance between them, he extended one hand.
David took it.
Michael’s fingers were warm around his. The pulse in his wrist beat desperately against David’s palm, announcing every second they had left. David stared at their joined hands because looking into Michael’s face would end him before the fall ever could.
“You have to let go,” Michael said.
“I can’t.”
“Then push me.”
David’s head snapped up. “No.”
“You said the fall would be fast.”
“There are other ways.”
“Ways that require you to watch me die slowly. Ways that leave you wondering whether you stopped my heart too soon or held my throat too long.” Michael tightened his grip and pulled David closer to the edge. “You brought me here because you knew this was the kindest death available to us.”
“I brought you here because I am a selfish fool.”
“Yes.” Michael smiled, and tears brightened his eyes even as his voice remained steady. “You are. So am I.”
The bell shifted above them as the wind moved through the broken tower. Metal groaned against old wood, deep enough that David felt the vibration beneath his feet. The cathedral seemed to draw one final breath around them.
Michael released David’s hand and placed both palms against David’s chest. “I choose you.”
David covered one of his hands. “Michael.”
“I choose the hunger. I choose the night. I choose every terrible thing you have warned me about because they come with you.” Michael’s first tear escaped, tracking silently down his cheek, but he did not look away. “I will not make you pretend this is anything other than what it is. You are going to kill me, and I am asking you to do it.”
David had killed more men than he could remember. He had broken necks beneath his hands and opened throats with his teeth. He had listened to prayers, curses, bargains, and the wet choking sounds of people discovering that their gods would not intervene. Until that moment, he had not known that killing could be an act of faith.
Michael stepped backward until his heels reached the edge.
“Push me,” he whispered. “Then come and find me.”
David kissed him once more. He tried to make it gentle, but grief turned it desperate, and Michael answered with equal force until their teeth struck and David tasted fresh blood. Michael’s arms circled his neck. David held his waist. For one impossible instant, they might have remained that way forever, balanced at the edge between one life and the next.
Then David shoved him.
Michael’s hands slipped from his shoulders. His face vanished beneath the broken parapet, and David heard the rush of fabric, the sharp interruption of tree branches, and finally the sound of Michael’s body striking the stone courtyard below.
The silence afterward was absolute.
David went over the edge.
He landed hard enough to crack the paving stones, but the pain never reached him. Michael lay several feet away, his body twisted where it had struck. One arm had folded beneath him. Blood spread slowly from the back of his skull, catching silver in the moonlight.
David crawled the final distance.
He gathered Michael into his arms and pulled him against his chest, correcting the terrible angle of his neck even though he knew it no longer mattered. Michael’s eyes were partially open, but there was nothing behind them. His mouth remained stained with David’s blood.
“No,” David whispered, as though someone else had done this. “No, no, no.”
He pressed his ear to Michael’s chest. The heart beneath it gave one weak, broken flutter and stopped.
David had promised to wait, but he had not understood how long a minute could become when measured against a silent heart. He held Michael and listened to nothing. Blood soaked through his clothes. The warmth began to leave Michael’s skin, slowly at first and then with horrifying speed, and David rubbed his hands over Michael’s arms as though friction could preserve the life he had deliberately ended.
He spoke to him without knowing what he said. Promises became apologies, apologies collapsed into pleading. He told Michael about cities they had never seen and oceans they had never crossed. He swore they would go everywhere. He swore Michael would never again belong to anyone who hurt him. He swore he would tear the world apart if that was what Michael needed, and when there was nothing left to promise, David bowed over the broken body and wept.
Max stirred at the far end of the sire bond.
This time, the attention was unmistakable.
The cold presence pushed into David’s mind, searching for the source of his anguish. David threw every defense he possessed against it, burying Michael beneath grief so vast that even Max might mistake it for ordinary loss. He had disobeyed before, and Max understood his capacity for mourning. Perhaps he would assume David had become attached to another mortal and failed to restrain his hunger.
David clung to that hope while the pressure sharpened.
Michael remained dead.
The blood beneath him had stopped spreading. The forest continued around them, indifferent to the end of David’s world. Somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, an animal moved through the undergrowth. The bell above them groaned again, and the first drops of rain passed through the ruined roof.
David lowered his mouth to Michael’s cold forehead. “Please.”
Michael’s back arched violently.
Air tore into his lungs with a broken, agonized gasp. His heart struck once beneath David’s hand, hard enough to shake his entire body, then again, and again, each beat forcing the change deeper into muscle and bone. Michael screamed. The sound became a snarl before it left him, and his eyes opened with no trace of humanity visible inside them.
David barely had time to say his name before Michael attacked.
New fangs ripped into David’s throat. The force drove him onto his back, Michael following him down with one hand tangled in his hair and the other braced against his chest. He drank without rhythm or restraint, dragging blood from David so quickly that the night tilted around them.
David could have stopped him. Michael was newly risen, half-mad with pain and hunger, his limbs still repairing themselves from the fall. Instead, David wrapped both arms around him and held him closer.
“That’s it,” he murmured, his voice weakening as Michael fed. “Take what you need.”
The bond opened between them.
It did not form gently. It tore through David with the violence of the fall, splitting open every locked chamber of his mind and flooding them with Michael. Hunger came first, enormous and bewildering, followed by the memory of stone rushing upward and the certainty, in the instant before impact, that David would be waiting below. David felt Michael’s death from inside him. Michael felt David holding his corpse, weeping into his dark hair and promising impossible things to a man who could no longer hear.
Their minds struck each other and held.
David cried out beneath him. Blood ran from his nose and slipped warm into his hair, but he could not close the bond or protect himself from it. Michael was everywhere. Beneath his skin, behind his eyes, wound through every thought. David felt the moment Michael recognized him not through sight or scent, but through the burning presence he had carried with him across death.
Varesh
The word moved through the bond without sound.
Michael stopped drinking.
He lifted his head slowly, blood covering his mouth and running down his chin. His face had begun to heal. The ruin of his neck had straightened, and the wounds from the fall were closing beneath his clothes, but terror remained in his eyes.
“David?”
David laughed through his tears. It emerged broken and breathless, but Michael knew it for what it was. He touched David’s face with trembling fingers, smearing blood across his cheek as he searched him for proof.
“I can feel you,” Michael whispered.
David covered Michael’s hand with his own. “You came back.”
“I can feel everything.”
The bond widened in answer. David’s love rushed through before he could restrain it, tangled with terror, relief, and the terrible knowledge that if Michael had not risen, the sunrise would have found two bodies in the courtyard instead of one.
Michael recoiled.
Not from David.
His attention snapped toward the darkness beyond the cathedral walls. His newly changed face sharpened, fangs descending as his body instinctively placed itself between David and a threat that had no physical shape. Through the bond, he had found the cold chain buried inside David’s mind. He felt Max’s suspicion moving along it, felt the old command woven through David’s blood, and understood at once what David had carefully avoided telling him.
“What is that?” Michael asked.
David tried to pull the bond closed around it, but Michael caught the movement and followed it deeper. The moment he touched the sire bond, pain passed between them. David heard Max’s voice through memories he had never willingly shared. He felt Michael see punishment disguised as guidance, obedience renamed devotion, and ownership spoken so often that David had begun to mistake it for love.
“My sire,” David said.
Michael’s gaze returned to him. Hunger still distorted his features, and David’s blood remained bright upon his mouth, but his expression belonged entirely to the man David had loved before the fall.
“He hurts you.”
“He made me.”
“That was not what I said.”
The pressure of Max’s attention intensified, drawn toward the second presence now burning inside David’s mind. They had little time. Max would come, and if he understood what Michael was to David, if he discovered how deep the bond already ran, he would use Michael to tighten the leash he had kept around David’s throat for more than a century.
David pushed himself upright. “We have to leave.”
Michael did not move. His eyes remained fixed on David as he explored the shape of the chain between sire and fledgling, discovering every place it had been wrapped around David’s will. Rage gathered through their new bond, cold and precise beneath the lingering chaos of hunger.
“You told me we would be free,” Michael said.
“We will find a way.”
“How?”
David looked toward the forest. Even now, after all his promises, the thought of defying Max directly filled him with a fear so old it felt like instinct. “I don’t know yet.”
Michael took David’s bleeding wrist and brought it to his mouth again. This time, he did not bite. He pressed a bloodstained kiss over the wound, his dark eyes never leaving David’s.
“Then we kill him first.”