After a delayed moment where his brain fought to make sense of the pun, Rahil cracked up. He was still laughing when Merc resumed his metalwork, but he could spot the humor on the smith’s face, and he vowed to himself that somehow, someday, he’d turn that gentle quirk into a proper smile.
10
MERCER
Mercer had framed it like he was partnering with Anthony—painted himself as having an agency he wasn’t quite sure he possessed. He felt like a small cog in a machine he couldn’t see the whole of. But if he knew anything, it was the powerlessness of watching your child suffer when they should have been thriving, of doing everything he could as a parent and still coming up short. If there was someone out there with the power and means to help their vampiric kid live a normal, full life—perhaps even one in the sun, going to school and not fearing the touch of holy silver or the reaction of garlic—and more vampires through them, he wanted to do his part in that.
But, goddamn, this was harder than he’d expected.
The odd little burst of joy that Rahil—of all people; he couldn’t quite fathom it yet—granted him was slowly fading into frustration. He could feel his brow beginning to pinch and the tightness in his jaw growing uncomfortable. Each time he rubbed unconsciously at his temples, he had to pause to check himself for an oncoming migraine.Somethingwas certainly growing behind his eyes.
Finally, Mercer sighed and pulled out his phone.
Leah’s cords slid free of Rahil and retreated into the trap’s containment unit mounted in the central crook of the shed’s vaulted ceiling. Rahil rolled his wrists and stretched his arms behind his head, at which point Mercer forced himself to stop watching. He didn’t need any more fodder for his mind to latch to in dark, private spaces where he wasn’t himself and his shame couldn’t quite reach. And after allowing the vampire to flirt so outrageously for so long, he also couldn’t support any subconscious beliefs that there might be hope yet for the two of them.
Mercer focused instead on putting back the various forms of silver he’d been experimenting with.
“No luck yet?” Rahil asked.
Merc shook his head. “Nothing I’m doing to the silver is moving it toward the holy version’s result without creating the holy version in full.”
Rahil looked like he understood half of that explanation at best, but he gave an encouraging grin. “My skin looks better in gold anyway.”
Mercer froze. “Gold, huh?” He headed across the shed to shift through his ornamentation drawers, retrieving a small stick of gleaming yellow metal. Just the feel of it in his fingers already seemed right. “It’s a low karat option, but it’s all I have at the moment.”
Rahil held out both wrists expectantly. “Hurt me, daddy.”
Mercer wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Or die, perhaps. What his mouth said was, “Not today,” followed by, “Your skin is giving me a headache.”
Rahil lifted a brow with a smirk.
“Not like that,” Mercer clarified, scowling at him. The expression only made his face hurt more. He sighed again instead and found himself patting Rahil’s still-outstretched wrists like he had to comfort the vampire. “You’re free to hang out until the sun is acceptable.”
“What a radical change of treatment.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Honey, all I’ve been doing is tempting you, and it clearly hasn’t worked.” Based on Rahil’s smile, he was not the least bit offended by this. It was sweet, actually. As pushy as he was, he truly didn’t seem to have any expectations, just the desire to be listened to and perhaps appreciated.
It made Mercer’s chest warm and opened a soft, achy space where one absolutely wasn’t allowed to be. He slammed his ribs closed on it with a snort, beginning to shuffle the used metal pieces back into bags so he could sort them later, when his head didn’t hurt and his heart wasn’t being so disruptive. When he reached the holy silver, though, the tingle along his fingertips ignited the memory of all that he’d felt when he’d first created the metal. That had been a very different sensation, not just in his chest, but his whole body, the consuming feeling of loving and losing, the empty place in his heart coming with the eternal knowledge that someone he adored with all his being could be ripped away at a moment’s notice.
Pulling out the lockbox of holy silver, seeing the trap in the ceiling coming to life again for the first time in years, the startles of his anxiety at every knock at the door, and the warmth of blooming connection at Rahil’s laugh all made Leah seem closer than she had in years, and through that, brought closer her death—so slow for something so painful, and so fast for a thing that took the love of his life away from him.
Rahil was clearly more than just a good listener, but a good emotional interpreter too. His words gentle, he asked, “Last time I was here, you said you made that metal for one vampire in particular?”
Rahil was just a passing figure in his life: someone who’d stumbled his way into being a momentary work necessity, albeit a gorgeous one. Mercer owed him nothing. But he was a vampire who didn’t hide what he was, and with all that Mercer had seen of the world, that must have brought him as much pain as it did joy, yet he’d been willing to undergo more of that pain to be understood by Mercer.
And a tiny, traitorous part of Mercer wanted to be understood by him, too.
“Yes,” Mercer replied, crouching at the lockbox to drop the metal back into place. He couldn’t bring himself to close it afterward—to pull away from the memories it forged. Cautiously, he reached behind the silver to something he hadn’t touched in years: a little case still tucked in the back. He could never stand the thought of throwing it away.
Mercer barely looked at it as he lifted it out, snapping open the top. Crouching before Rahil, it felt like offering up an engagement ring. The thought made Mercer feel faint.
“This is the mold of their fangs,” he said, the sound of his own voice a distant thing. He could not remember the horrific casting, only the emotions that had driven him, the terror that had overwhelmed his entire being as Leah’s corpse slowly cooled around the metal, and the agonizing flood of his fae spark that had helped him sense every perimeter and ridge of the oozing bite mark.
Rahil touched the edge of the box, like he was convincing himself it was real. But he didn’t look disgusted or scared. He lookedconcerned. For Mercer.
“I wasn’t thinking at the time,” Mercer clarified. “I suppose I needed evidence. They didn’t want to take my wife’s body—like it was contagious, somehow—and I—I snapped.” After watching her fade through the agonizing pain, her life going out little by little, and knowing someone had inflicted that upon her—some vampire who’d drunk her so carelessly, so cruelly, that she’d become a statistic. Thirty-one point something, he’d read recently, now that someone had finally bothered to do a study on the numbers. “There is a vampire out there somewhere who threw my wife’s life away, and I could do nothing about it but make a protective shield of holy silver in the hopes that it wouldn’t happen again.”
