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“It’s been almost three weeks, Bas. Get over it already.”
I scowled at Emalyn. “Can you blame me?”
We were in the training cave, slumped beside each other against the wall in the sand. I stared up at the rocky ceiling, which glimmered in the reflection of the small pool on the other side of the circular space. Its lapping was peaceful, calming my adrenaline from the mock fight we had just finished.
Emalyn took a fistful of sand and plunked it on my leg. “Sensitive boy.” She sighed dramatically.
I dusted the grains off. “I’m not sensitive. I’m prideful.”
She snorted, giving me a sarcastic look. Her brown eyes reflected the water light, dancing on her light brown skin, though it didn’t shine much on her choppy black hair when it was mussed and flecked with sand. “The last thing you are is prideful, Bas, and I say that with so much love.”
“Oh,” I responded with the same level of playful mimicry, “so just because you add ‘love’ means I’ll forgive you? Prideful, maybe not. Sensitive, no. Gullible? Totally.”
Em was fighting a grin now. “Tess won the guess fair and square. Admit you lost.”
I nudged her with my shoulder a little too accidentally hard. She caught herself from falling onto the sand and laughed incredulously. “Whoops, sorry.”
She feigned devastation. “I’ll never forgive you now.”
“Guess I’ll have to train with someone else then,” I mused, playing along.
“Hm, I wonder who you have in mind?”
“The betrayer, in my eyes.”
Em shoved me, though she had to exert much more effort to knock me down. I let her so that she could beam with satisfaction. “Friends and family mean nothing when it comes to the cow count.”
“I can’t believe we call it that. She won only because I was ten seconds late. I was snubbed.”
The Kairos of the underground tunnel network of Ophir sometimes didn’t have much to do, so they invented certain things to pass the time, most of them rather silly. One of them was guessing the weight of the biggest cow from one of the human farms we traded with; the closest guess got to be first in line for breakfast, lunch, and dinner above the entire Ophir population for a month. She got the freshest cut of meat for an entire moon cycle.
It was a giant family affair. While everyone gathered to submit their guesses, I was asleep, snagged into someone else’s memory. It had taken me only a second to recognize it as Ciel’s because I felt her sense of haughtiness and bitterness as if they were my own. She strode down the streets of a non-destroyed Sanlow under a dark night sky, curling her lip at every passing human as if they were some disgusting bug.
The heir—I refused to call her my sister, even if the proof was undeniable—stopped short when she saw a human speaking heatedly with Cirillo, her back turned to Ciel.
Faces weren’t as blurry as they used to be; I could see the former Moros coven leader as clearly as I saw my own reflection. Ciel definitely took after him. He was decked out in black, tall, pale, sharp-jawed, sharp-eyed, and gold-white-haired. He looked like a villain, a monster who would take advantage of a young human woman.
I looked nothing like him, and that was the most satisfying thing that could ever happen to me.
Ciel stormed over to interrupt the conversation, and I figuratively perked my ears to glean anything. That was when one of the Kairos ran past my room and shouted for me to meet in the Main for the guessing because we were both late. I jerked awake, disappointment making my teeth clench, but I hurried to the gathering place.
I already had my guess written out, but by the time I dropped it in the bowl, Leysa had just called the cutoff time. She saw my number and grinned crookedly. Because she liked to make small commotions, she murmured, “Spot on. Too late.” Louder, she called, “Tessia Akeso, one pound off. Congratulations.”
Amongst the groans of disappointment, Tess weaved through the crowd. She stopped beside me to close my jaw, which had dropped in disbelief. Her pale blue eyes gleamed with mischievousness. “Train with me tonight if you want to lose a second time.”
I couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or thrilled that she was actually acknowledging me after our arguments just two days after the Ciel encounter. Her words from the first argument at the Redfang compound still echoed in my mind.
“Because I care about you!” I had shouted.
“Why?” Tess had shouted back. “What have I done to deserve someone as kind and absurd as you? All you care about is something as innocent as being friends! I have more serious things to worry about. My entire future hinges on how I act and who I interact with! If I slip up, everything is ruined! So I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and you’re just going to have to deal with that!”
And then there was the argument at the inn at Tarbent.
“There is no ‘we,’ Bastian! If I am to reclaim my place as an heir, I cannot be associated with someone like you.”
Three weeks had passed since then. We hadn’t talked about it since then, either. We both acted like it hadn’t happened. But it changed our dynamic. All of a sudden, she was being nice to me, teasing me the same way we teased with Em. Part of me wondered if she was under mind control or something.
So I met with her that night, and we trained until we were blue in the face. We both needed to work off frustrations, both with ourselves and with each other, and we were the other’s perfect opponent to do that. The emotions welled in her eyes toward the end, so strong that it surprised me, and I let her win the fight. When my back hit the sandy ground, Tess gasped and apologized quickly, suddenly rushing out of the cave. We didn’t talk about that, either. Instead of explaining her reasoning, Tess turned my lapse into a hard-won victory for herself, teasing me every chance she got.
I drew my thoughts back to the present. As if Em sensed my mind drifting, she nudged me lightly. “You two are getting along surprisingly well. Weirdly...well.”
“Do you know why she’s being so nice to me as if suddenly we can be friends?” I blurted, hoping their sisterly connection went deep enough for that secret.
“You mean you haven’t talked about your arguments?” Em asked with a blink.
“She’s not much of a talker.”
“No,” Em agreed musingly. She got to her feet and held her hand out for me to take. “Come on. Let’s find her, and I’ll mediate if need be.”
I hesitated. “Do we have to? I like nice Tess. I don’t miss prickly Tess. Well, kind of,” I rambled. “Her being nice is weird.”
“It’s cute how much you like her,” Em noted.
“I’m not cute,” I protested, accepting her hand. “I am a hardened soldier of justice.”
Em was already across the cave, dusting sand off her. “So you’re telling me you’re not afraid to talk about your feelings?”
I caught up to her in a blink. “Of course I’m not.”
“Right. Just look at me when you don’t know what to say next.”
We traversed the torch- and glowworm-lit tunnels toward the residential sector, where we knew Tess would be in her room, likely reading or practicing spells. Our many near-death experiences inspired us to push ourselves further in our training. We needed to be stronger, faster, and smarter than our immortal enemies. It was hard to tell who blamed themselves more, me or her, for anything that went wrong on our “adventure.”
The citlali speckled the walls like stars guiding our path. I focused on them more than meeting the wary looks my fellow Kairos members shot me as we passed.
News that I was the son of Cirillo Kaladin swept through the vampire-hunting organization like a sandstorm. Although everyone knew that I was an orphan half-blood saved by Koen Blackwood seventeen years ago and raised in Ophir for seven years, suddenly, it seemed they viewed me not as a friend but as a potential traitor. The fact that I had interacted with Ciel didn’t help.
Tess, Em, Koen, Rhetta, Sloan, Leysa, and Vidar all vouched heavily for me when there was public unrest for almost a week straight. Some of those I once called friends wanted to banish me for fear that I was plotting with Ciel. Others didn’t trust me because I shared blood with the former leader. Part of me understood when there was a small population of former Moros coven witches and human escapees that lived here. Now, I was a reminder of one of the vampires who’d traumatized them and their families.
Not many were particularly happy about my and the girls’ accomplishments after the initial welcome-back celebration. We were showered with praise over our efforts that eliminated an entire coven and blood cattle system. But after that died down, no one could stop seeing us as giant red targets. We dismantled a coven, sure, but other covens could enact revenge on Redfang’s behalf.
Em stopped at Tess’s curtained-off room and asked to enter. Em didn’t need heightened vampire senses to hear Tess’s scrambling. Something hard hit the floor, and she swore, her feet scuffing the rocky ground. A moment later, she yanked the opaque curtain aside and panted, “Hi.”
I quirked a grin. “Guilty of something?”
Tess narrowed her eyes in a glare, but there was no menace in it. “What would I be guilty about?”
I opened my mouth for a quip, but then I noticed how tired she looked. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was mussed. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.”
“You were up all night studying, weren’t you?” Em asked sternly, then pushed past Tess into her room.
Despite Tess’s noise of protest, I squeezed past to see Em pick up a thick, leatherbound book. “What’s that?”
Tess tried to grab for it, but Em was surprisingly quick to spin out of the way as she flipped through the pages. “Tessia! This is one of the forbidden spellbooks!”
“Well, why do we have it if it can’t be read?”
Em tossed the book over Tess’s head for me to catch. I leafed through it, holding it above my head where she couldn’t reach. I scanned the unfamiliar spells and frowned. “I had no idea there were this many spells witches could practice. Some of these are dark, Tess.”
Tess gave up and crossed her arms to glare between us. “I’m not learning the bad ones. I’m learning the useful ones. We barely know ten spells to help our cause of killing vampires and saving humans. We almost died several times because we couldn’t defend ourselves against stupid leather masks and ropes. I want to learn more skills to stop that from happening so often.
“We’re witches from long, powerful bloodlines,” she continued, looking at Em, whose father, Wren, indeed came from a pureblood line of witches. “Do you think ropes should stop us?”
Em bit her lip uncertainly, glancing at me when I returned Tess the spellbook. “No, but I also don’t think we should look through forbidden texts without permission.”
Tess’s pale blue eyes flicked to my grayish ones. “Your mom has witch blood, and whether you like it or not, you’re the son of one of the most powerful, feared vampires of all time. You might not look or be like him or his psycho daughter, but his power has to mean something inside you.”
She breathed in deeply, then continued on the exhale when I didn’t respond, “Bastian, you are the kindest soul I have ever met, and I know you want to prove yourself to be a worthy Kairos member. What’s a little fudging the rules when the world won’t be kind to you back?”
