Page 8 of Flirting with Darkness

“After so long, you realize that knowing things doesn’t especially matter very much. Knowledge with no context is meaningless. That’s not the real treasure.”

“Oh?” I tucked away my tools and stood. “What is, then?”

Vale stood, too. He was quite tall, and he looked down at me with a wolfish kind of delight. He smiled, revealing those deadly fangs. The moonlight from the window glinted in his amber eyes.

I felt, all at once, like an idiot for thinking before that he didn’t look monstrous. Because in this moment, with that smirk on his lips, I glimpsed the man of the legends. The monster of the whispers.

“Curiosity,” he said.

PARTII

THE SECOND ROSE

4

Vale’s blood was beautiful. There was no other way to describe it—it was as undeniably aesthetically pleasing as a field of flowers.

It was almost dawn by the time I returned home that night. I wasn’t tired, though—no, far from it. I was literally shaking with excitement, my mind running over every moment of that visit over and over and over again, burning it to memory. I hugged my pack to my chest for most of the walk, as if to shield it from the world. It was contraband, after all.

When I got home, I went straight to my office and bolted the door behind me. I didn’t need Mina knowing what I was up to, both for her sake and mine. The less I involved her in my blasphemous little scheme, the better.

But there were no footsteps in the house yet. Mina was still fast asleep. I pulled out my instruments, messing up everything I had been so careful to neaten before my departure. I dragged a side table to the center of the floor, setting my seeing lens atop it—a device comprised of many brass rings stacked on top of each other, the top one on hinges and covered in glass, so it could be positioned upright. Runes and sigils had been carved into each ring of metal, and when I touched it, I could feel the magic pulsing from it. I grabbed my ink and stuck my finger into it, drawing a series of marks around the outermost circle of the device.

I didn’t have a shred of magic myself, of course, nor did I especially want any—I’d seen many times how it could lead to ruin. But the tools magic could produce were undeniably useful. This one had been created by a priestess of Srana, the Goddess of Seeing and Knowing. I did like to see things, so at least I could be grateful to Srana for that.

I finished the runes, placed my vial at the center of the device, and blew out the candles. The uppermost ring of copper glowed with steady warmth, and when I adjusted the hinge, a ring of light was cast upon the wall.

Within that ring was Vale’s blood—his blood at its most base level, the tiniest particles of life within him. They looked like a field of red-black flower petals across the plaster, moving in slow constellations like the stars across the sky.

Sometimes people talked of vampires as if they were living death, nothing more than animated corpses. One look at Vale told me that wasn’t true. Still, I knew that vampires had a closer relationship to death than humans did, so perhaps I might have expected to see some of it in the makeup of Vale’s body.

No. None of this was death. It was beauty and life and an astounding miracle. He was hundreds of years old and yet his blood was healthy and thriving. It was graceful, elegant. It looked so different from human blood, and I was certain that it would react differently to every test. And yet, there was something so familiar in it too, as if we had been the originals and he had been the improvement.

Maybe the vampires’ heretic goddess had been onto something after all.

I stared for far too long, transfixed.

My instrument had been created with the magic of Srana, a goddess of the White Pantheon—the White Pantheon despised Nyaxia, the mother of vampires, which meant I had to be very careful with the instruments I used around this blood.

Even the fact that I had it at all… here, in a town that worshipped Vitarus…

I blinked and saw my father kneeling in that field of death, knuckles trembling around a fistful of doom, ready to spite a god that would happily spite him back.

I pushed the thought away and quickly broke down the instrument, tucking Vale’s blood into a drawer.

Still, I couldn’t help but take it out every few hours to peer at it, even if only for seconds at a time. I told myself it was for work—and it mostly was, because I didn’t stop working for more than ten minutes at a time those next few days—but really, I was… well, a little transfixed by it. Every time those splotches of black lit up my wall, I released an exhale of awe.

“What’s that?”

I spun around. Mina stood in the doorway. For a moment, in contrast to the elegant vitality of Vale’s blood, the sheer withering mortality of her shocked me. Darkness ringed her eyes and dusted the deepening hollows of her cheeks. Once, she had been a strikingly beautiful girl—and she still was, but now hauntingly so, like the face of a stone goddess at a grave site. I glanced down. How long had she been here? I wasn’t sure which answer was worse. Longer, and she saw more of what I was doing. Less, and I could be more concerned for the distinct layer of dusted skin that already coated the floor around her feet.

“What’s that?” she asked, again.

“Nothing,” I said, even though my sister knew me well enough to know when nothing meant everything.

I thrust the vials and my lens into my bag, buttoned it, and rose.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m visiting Farrow. Rosa will be by with dinner for you, and—”

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