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Kara Danvers had three notebooks, two broken pencils, and one very stubborn theory: the Luthors were dirty.
She explained this at length to the stranger who had been unlucky enough to sit at the next booth in Rosie's Diner.
"Three weeks," Kara said, stabbing a fry into the ketchup. "They move into the old blackstone manor, three weeks ago, with more money than this whole town has seen in a decade. No company filings. No charity galas. No anything. Just endless, quiet, suspicious wealth."
The stranger, a pale young woman with black hair and green eyes, had been in the middle of a sip of coffee. She made a small, strangled noise and set the cup down very carefully.
"Suspicious," she repeated.
"Corruption. Money laundering. Maybe art theft." Kara leaned across the aisle. "I'm Kara, by the way. Danvers. Midvale Gazette. Well, intern. But it's a very promising internship."
"Lena," said the stranger, and did not offer a last name. Kara didn't notice. Kara was already flipping to a fresh page.
Lena Luthor, who had lived for nineteen years as the daughter of a man who had watched empires fall, stared at the most beautiful, most oblivious girl in Midvale and thought: I am going to have to help her.
It was the only way to keep her alive.
"Lead number one," Kara announced the next evening, sliding a notebook across the table at the library. "Mr. Luthor never eats in public."
"Perhaps he's private."
"Perhaps he's allergic to garlic."
Lena blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Garlic! It's a classic tell. I asked Mrs. Hartley at the deli if he'd ever ordered anything with garlic. She said no." Kara looked up with the wide, hopeful eyes of someone who thought she had cracked the case. "Suspicious, right?"
Lena's father did not eat in public because he found the sight of people chewing to be, in his words, aggressively undignified. The garlic thing had been a myth for four hundred years, and he ate it on toast when nobody was watching.
"Very suspicious," Lena said.
She wrote garlic on the notepad in neat handwriting and drew a very small, very tired frowny face next to it.
Lead number two was that Mr. Luthor never wore short sleeves.
"It's autumn," Lena pointed out.
"He wore long sleeves in August. Mrs. Hartley says so."
Lena made a mental note to have a word with Mrs. Hartley, who evidently saw far too much.
Lead number three was the mirrors. Or rather, the lack of a mirror in the front parlor, which Kara had discovered by peering through a window with binoculars from the tree line.
"You were spying on the house?"
"Observing," Kara corrected. "There's a difference."
"There's really not."
"And then, lead number four." Kara leaned in and lowered her voice as if the library shelves might be listening. "I think he doesn't have a shadow."
"Kara."
"I mean, I couldn't say for sure. The light was bad. But I looked really hard."
Lena pinched the bridge of her nose. Her father's shadow was perfectly normal and rather bulky. It had once knocked over a lamp.
Her blood, which never quite warmed the way it should, had begun to boil in the small, irritated way it did whenever someone brought up the sparkling. She had suffered through years of movies and paperbacks about her kind, brooding in the rain, glittering in the sun, falling in love with teenagers, and every bit of it had made her want to lie down in a coffin, if only she owned one.
"You know," she said, in a voice she was proud of for its evenness, "most people would call that a very thin theory."
"Most people aren't paying attention." Kara's smile was blinding. It didn't seem to matter that it was half-cocked. "You believe me, though. Don't you?"
The library was warm. Kara was warm. She smelled like coffee and pencil shavings, and there was a smear of ink on her cheekbone that Lena had been trying very hard not to look at for the last ten minutes.
Oh, thought Lena. Oh no.
"I believe," she said carefully, "that you should not go anywhere near that house."
"That's the thing." Kara closed the notebook with a snap. "I have to."
The gold, at least, was easy to explain, and Lena had done it herself in the way she explained everything: with a shrug.
"Old family money," she said as they walked home under the streetlights. "People save."
"For centuries?"
"Some families are very patient."
Her father had once told her, with the dry irritation of a man who'd watched too many fortunes vanish, that if you lived for centuries and still ended up poor, you deserved to walk into the sunrise and be done with it. It was the only joke he had. He told it every Christmas.
"Well, patient or not." Kara bounced on her toes, hands shoved in her coat pockets. "Tomorrow night, I'm going in."
Lena stopped walking.
"You're going to break into a house."
"Investigative reporting."
"It's trespassing with extra steps."
"I've got a lock-picking kit." Kara pulled a small black case from her coat and held it up with pride. "I borrowed it from the hardware store."
"You borrowed it."
"I'm going to return it."
Somewhere on the hill above them, in the old blackstone manor, a light burned in a second-floor window. Lena did not look at it. She knew who stood behind that light, and what he would do if a human girl with a lock-picking kit walked into his study at midnight.
Not because he was cruel. He wasn't, anymore. But he was old, and old things startled.
She looked at Kara. Kara looked back with a hope so open it hurt.
"I'll come with you," Lena said.
"You will?" Kara beamed. "Really? You're the best research partner."
"Somebody has to keep you from getting arrested."
"Or eaten."
Lena's stomach dropped.
"...by a bear," Kara clarified. "There are bears in the orchard. Mrs. Hartley says."
"Mrs. Hartley," said Lena faintly, "says a great many things."
They parted at the corner where the road split, Kara heading down toward the lights of town, Lena heading up toward the dark. She stood there a long time, watching the small, brave figure until it disappeared around the bend, and only then let herself say it out loud, quietly, to no one at all.
"I am so, so in love with her."
Her father, watching from the window with a cup of something that was very definitely not wine, raised one eyebrow.
Then, being a discreet old monster, he pulled the curtain shut.
---
The orchard behind the blackstone manor was very dark, very wet, and, according to Mrs. Hartley, full of bears.
"There are no bears," Lena whispered.
"Mrs. Hartley says—"
"Mrs. Hartley also says the moon landing was filmed in Topeka."
Kara, dressed head to toe in black with a knit hat pulled over her ears, crept between the apple trees like a very determined cat burglar. Lena followed a step behind, silent on the wet grass in a way Kara didn't seem to notice. Lena had spent nineteen years learning to walk without making a sound. It was the one useful thing her father had ever taught her, besides fencing and how to fold a fitted sheet.
"The side gate's broken," Lena said.
"How do you know?"
"I... walk by. A lot."
Kara nodded, thoroughly satisfied, and Lena silently thanked whatever gods looked after doomed women with terrible cover stories.
The gate, in fact, was not broken. Lena had unlatched it at dusk, when nobody was looking.
Kara's lock-picking kit was a triumph of optimism over skill. She spent eleven minutes on the kitchen door, muttering, prodding, and finally kicking the frame in frustration, at which point Lena reached past her and turned the knob.
"It's open," Lena said.
"It was not open a second ago."
"It was very slightly open."
"That's not—" Kara stopped. Squinted. "You're a really good lucky charm, you know that?"
Please stop being adorable, thought Lena. I'm trying to protect you from my family.
The manor smelled like old wood, beeswax, and a faint trace of something copper-sweet that Lena hoped Kara would blame on the plumbing. They crept through the kitchen, into the hall, past a suit of armor Kara greeted with a whispered "hello, sir," and into a long gallery lined with paintings.
Kara froze.
"No mirrors," she breathed, sweeping her flashlight along the wall. "There's no mirrors. There's not even a hallway mirror!"
"Some people don't like mirrors."
"And look." Kara pointed her beam at a braid hanging from a hook by the pantry door. "Garlic."
"It's decorative."
"It's a trap. He's put it there to test people."
Lena closed her eyes. Her father, who ate garlic on toast when nobody was watching, had hung that braid there in a moment of genuine sentimentality, because Lena's mother had loved the smell. Lena was not about to explain that in a hallway at midnight.
Then footsteps sounded on the floor above.
Slow. Measured. Unhurried, in the way of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it.
Kara went stiff. Lena moved.
She didn't mean to be fast. She only meant to get them out of the hallway, and then somehow they were inside the shallow dumbwaiter closet under the stairs, Kara pressed against the wall and Lena's hand clamped over her mouth, and Kara's eyes were huge and startled above her fingers.
The steps passed. A door opened, closed, and the house sighed back into stillness.
Lena let go. Kara sucked in a breath.
"Your hand is freezing."
"Poor circulation."
"And you moved like— like—"
"Ballet," said Lena. "Very intensive ballet. As a child."
Kara stared at her a long, long moment. Lena's cold heart, which had beaten unnecessarily for nineteen years, decided to test out a few extra beats for good measure.
"Okay," Kara whispered finally. "That's actually really cool."
The portraits in the gallery were old. Very old. Kara moved along them in the dark, tracing the frames with her light, and read the plaques under her breath: Lucian Luthor, 1612. Marguerite Luthor, 1804. Men with cold eyes. A woman in a high lace collar with Lena's exact chin.
"These are ancestors," Kara said. "Somebody put a lot of money into these."
"Kara. We should go."
"One second." Kara had stopped at the last frame, half-hidden in the shadow at the end of the hall. It was smaller than the others, a girl of nine or ten with black hair and a fierce, unimpressed expression, seated in a chair too big for her.
The plaque beneath it read: Lena Luthor.
The hallway went very quiet.
Kara turned the flashlight on the portrait. Then on Lena. Then on the portrait again.
"That," she said slowly, "looks a lot like you."
"It's a common face."
"Lena."
Lena had faced down a lifetime of family secrets, a father who used to be the worst monster in Europe, and the entire Midvale Ladies' Auxiliary. She found, to her surprise, that none of it prepared her for the way Kara Danvers looked at her right now.
Not angry. Hurt. Small, and open, and ten times worse.
"You're a Luthor."
"...Yes."
"You've been helping me investigate your own family."
"I was trying to keep you alive."
"From what?"
Lena opened her mouth to lie. She had lied so smoothly for three weeks, about garlic and sleeves and ballet. It should have been easy.
Instead, from somewhere inside the study across the hall, a light flicked on.
It was the worst possible room to be caught in.
An oak desk. A ledger open across it, in cramped Latin script. A letter opener shaped like a tiny silver stake. And on a silver tray, a half-empty crystal bottle of something dark and viscous that was definitely, absolutely not wine.
Kara took one look and whispered, "Oh my god."
Lena's blood, cold as it was, began to simmer.
"It's beet juice," Kara said, with dawning wonder. "He's a beet juice guy. That's why he doesn't eat in public. It's a cleanse."
"Kara—"
"No, wait, I've got it. He's sparkly." Kara turned to her with the shining eyes of someone who'd finally cracked it. "That's why he never goes out in the sun! He doesn't burn, he just... glitters. And there's no mirrors because he doesn't want to see it. It's Twilight, Lena! Your dad is a Twilight vampire!"
Something inside Lena, some final delicate thread she'd held taut for three weeks, three weeks of garlic and shadows and beet juice, gave way with an audible snap.
"Nobody sparkles!"
Kara blinked.
"Nobody sparkles, Danvers! Nobody has ever sparkled! Do you know what it's like to spend your whole life being told you're supposed to glitter in the sunlight and brood in the rain and fall in love with a high school student?" She was pacing now, arms flung wide. "My father is a vampire! A real one! He's been alive for six centuries! He eats garlic on toast! His shadow knocks over lamps! And the gold isn't laundered or stolen, it's savings! Six hundred years of savings!"
Silence.
"And I'm half," Lena added, more quietly. "My mother was human. Which makes me a dhampir. Which is not a Twilight thing either, before you ask."
Kara's mouth opened. Closed. She took one careful step backward.
Lena's stomach went to ice.
"...Do you want to eat me?" Kara asked, very small.
"What? No! Kara, no! I've had pie with you every Thursday for three weeks. I would have eaten you by now, don't you think?"
A pause.
"...That's not reassuring," said Kara.
"I know. I'm sorry. I'm not—" Lena pressed her palms to her eyes. "I was going to tell you. I just didn't know how. Everyone in my family who's ever told a human the truth has ended up with a stake in their chest or a very long conversation with the local priest."
She heard the smallest rustle of movement. When she looked up, Kara was standing right in front of her, hat askew, glasses fogged, staring at her with an expression Lena couldn't read.
"Okay." Kara let out a breath so shaky it turned into a laugh. "Okay. Vampires. Real ones. I— okay. I have a lot of questions."
"I know."
"A lot."
"I know." Lena's voice cracked. "Ask me anything. I'll tell you every truth I can, I swear." Then, because she was a Luthor and Luthors bargained, and because her heart was a foolish thing, she added, "One kiss at a time."
Kara stared at her.
Then, slowly, a grin spread over her face, bright and reckless and entirely too fond.
"You're threatening me with a good time, little devil."
Lena's breath caught.
"Double prize," said Kara, and stepped in close, and pressed the softest, briefest kiss to the corner of Lena's mouth. Just a test. Just a question.
Lena's eyes slid shut.
"Lena, darling," drawled a low, amused voice from the doorway. "If you're going to bring strays home, at least warn me so I can put the good silver away."
They ran.
Out through the French doors, across the wet lawn, through the orchard with Kara's hand tight in hers and her laughter ringing up into the branches. Somewhere behind them, a flashlight beam swept the trees, and a very smug voice murmured, "Ha. I knew it." Then the beam clicked off, and there was only the sound of someone walking home, extremely satisfied.
"Mrs. Hartley?" Kara wheezed.
"I told you she says a lot of things."
They didn't stop until the manor was only a dark shape on the hill, and Kara had to brace her hands on her knees, gasping.
"That," she managed, "was the best night of my life."
Lena stared at her, chest still bright and strange and full.
"One truth, one kiss," Kara said, straightening, grinning at her, cheeks flushed in the moonlight. "That was the deal, right?"
"That was the deal."
"Then start talking, Luthor."
----
They ended up on the low stone wall at the edge of the orchard, the manor a dark shape on the hill behind them and the whole town of Midvale spread out below, asleep. Kara sat cross-legged with her notebook open on her knee and a pencil behind her ear, and looked, Lena thought, like someone about to be handed the greatest gift of her life.
"Rules," Kara said.
"You're making rules?"
"I'm a journalist. There are always rules." She held up one finger. "I ask, you answer honestly. No dodging."
"And the kiss?"
Kara went pink to the tips of her ears. "The kiss is... at your discretion. You said one at a time. I'm just being a good listener."
Lena bit back a smile. "Ask."
Kara clicked her pencil. "What do you eat?"
"Everything you do." Lena shrugged. "Pie on Thursdays. Toast. Terrible coffee at Rosie's. Blood, once a week, from a very boring medical supplier, the way you'd take vitamins." She paused. "I don't hunt people, Kara. Neither does my father, anymore."
Kara wrote pie, vitamins and underlined it twice. Then she looked up.
Lena leaned over and kissed her cheek, quick and light.
"That's for the good question," she said.
Kara made a small, strangled sound and scribbled something that was definitely not a note.
"Sunlight?"
"Doesn't burn me. Doesn't burn my father either, whatever the movies say. It just makes us feel like very expensive lamps left on too long. Tired. Cranky. Sunburned only if we're stupid about it."
"Reflections?"
"I have one. He doesn't like his." Lena looked out at the sleeping town. "Six hundred years is a long time to look at the same face. He took the mirrors down years ago."
"Oh." Kara's pencil paused. "That's kind of sad."
"He'd be furious if you said that out loud."
Kara grinned. She scratched something out. Lena kissed her on the forehead, under the edge of the knit hat, and felt Kara go very still under her lips.
"Shadows?" Kara whispered.
"Perfectly normal. And bulky." Lena's mouth twitched. "You were right about the lamp, though."
"I wasn't wrong."
"Kara."
"I got the garlic wrong."
"You got the garlic very wrong."
Kara laughed, bright and helpless, and Lena decided that a kiss on the corner of the mouth was fair payment for the way it made her chest feel.
"Your mother?" Kara asked, and this time her voice was gentler.
Lena didn't answer right away.
The wind moved through the orchard. Somewhere in the dark a night bird made a small, questioning sound.
"She was human," Lena said at last. "She died when I was seven. Ordinary, quiet, an illness the doctors couldn't do anything about. My father had been... the worst thing in Europe for a very long time, and then he met her, and she didn't run. She made him tea. She asked him what he was afraid of." A small, wobbly breath. "He stopped being a monster because she asked. And when she was gone, he stayed that way, because it was the only thing of hers he had left."
Kara's eyes were bright.
"The garlic braid," she said softly.
"She loved the smell."
Kara put the notebook down. She didn't write anything. She took Lena's cold hand in both of her warm ones and held it in her lap.
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago."
"It doesn't have to have been recent to matter."
Lena couldn't speak for a moment. When she found her voice, it was barely there. "That's the first kiss I don't know how to give you."
"That's okay," said Kara. "You don't owe me one for that. I'll owe you."
She leaned in and kissed Lena's knuckles, one at a time, as if the idea had come to her in the middle of the sentence and she'd decided to trust it.
The sky at the edge of the valley had begun to turn from black to a deep, bruised blue, the color that comes just before anything is possible. The stars were thinning out. Somewhere far off, a rooster was making a very poor first attempt.
"Last question," said Kara.
"Only one?"
"For tonight." She looked down at her hands, at Lena's hand still held in them. "Why did you help me? Really. You could have let me poke around and get caught. You could have told me to stop. You spent three weeks pretending garlic was a real clue."
"It was an awful clue."
"Lena."
The truth was very simple. It was also the biggest one she had.
"Because you sat at the next booth at Rosie's and told a complete stranger her father was a criminal," said Lena, "and you did it with so much hope that I couldn't stand the idea of anything hurting you. Because you have ink on your face right now and you don't know it. Because you say hello, sir to suits of armor." She swallowed. "Because I'm in love with you, Kara Danvers. I have been since about the second fry."
The silence lasted three whole heartbeats.
Then Kara set the notebook aside, took Lena's face in her hands as gently as if it might crack, and kissed her.
It wasn't a peck. It wasn't a question. It was slow, and warm, and sure, and somewhere in the middle of it, Lena felt the heart she'd always thought was a decoration beat, hard and quick and entirely real.
When they parted, Kara was breathless and smiling, her glasses crooked, her cheeks bright.
"Can I say my truth now?"
"...Yes."
"I noticed you first," Kara said. "At the library. Your second day in town. You were reading a book about medieval fencing, and you frowned at the whole page like it had personally offended you. I thought, who is that? And then I heard the Luthors had moved in, and I was so excited to have an excuse to talk to anyone at all, and I..." She flushed. "I sort of made up half the investigation. The rest was true. But the first part was just wanting to meet you."
Lena stared at her.
"You made up the shadow theory to talk to me?"
"That was a pure bonus, honestly."
Lena laughed, helpless and surprised, and it turned into another kiss, and then another, and neither of them was counting.
The notebook was still lying on the wall between them. Kara picked it up, flipped past pages of garlic and mirrors and shadows, and tore out every one. She folded them into a small, careful square and put them in her pocket.
"What are you doing?"
"Closing the case." She wrote something across the top of the last blank page and turned it around.
Luthors: private family. Nothing to report. Story dropped.
Underneath, in smaller letters: Ask Lena about Thursday.
"You're going to ask me about Thursday?"
"There's pie on Thursday." Kara's grin was blinding. "I'm not an idiot."
The first true light crept over the ridge, gold at the edges. Lena tilted her face up and felt the sunlight settle on her skin like a warm, insistent, faintly irritating hand.
"Cranky?" Kara asked.
"Extremely."
"Want to go home?"
"In a minute." Lena slipped her hand into Kara's. "I'd like to stay for the twilight."
"It's the morning kind."
"It's the best kind," said Lena, and meant it.
At half past seven, a small, brisk woman in a quilted coat marched up the long drive of the blackstone manor with a covered dish held out in front of her like a shield.
She rang the bell twice. The door opened on Lionel Luthor, pale, tall, and tired, still in the same long-sleeved shirt he'd worn for the last six centuries.
"Mrs. Hartley," he said, with the wary politeness of a man who had been caught out.
"Casserole," said Mrs. Hartley, and handed it over. "Chicken and rice. No garlic." She looked him up and down, chin raised. "I was right, you know. About everything."
"I gathered."
"I won't be telling a soul. I have no interest in anyone else's business. I only wanted you to know that I knew."
Lionel considered her for a long moment. Then, somewhere behind the old, careful lines of his face, something unbent.
"Would you care to come in for tea?"
"I'll have one," said Mrs. Hartley, with dignity, "but I'm not staying."
She stayed for two hours.
In the orchard, two girls sat on a stone wall watching the sun come up. In the manor kitchen, an old vampire who had once been a monster and had chosen not to be sat across from a very smug woman in a quilted coat and poured her a second cup of tea.
It had been six hundred years since anyone had brought him a casserole.
It was, he decided, a very good start.