Page 136 of Bone Year

I giggle.

He snatches the bottle out of my hand so fast I lose my breath. His expression has gone hard in a way I haven’t seen since the snow this morning, and the room has gotten very quiet. I’m suddenly aware of every place we are touching. My shoulder against his. My knee, close enough to his thigh to feel the heat. The slow rise and fall of his good wing tucked behind him.

If I were sober I think this silence would be unbearable, but the whiskey has put a soft layer between me and the moment, and I wait and watch the side of his face in the lamplight.

“Who told you?” he says at last.

It’s a confirmation, and we both know it.

“Nella’s journal.”

His jaw moves.

“She figured it out and was going to confront you about it, I think. She never got the chance.”

“Smart girl.”

He reaches over and sets the bottle on the nightstand, and I get the sense that we have both had enough whiskey for the moment. He tips his head back against the headboard and closes his eyes for a beat, and I watch the line of his throat in the dim light.

I slide down under the covers and rest my head on the pillow. The ceiling above us is old and water-stained, and the cracks in the plaster make shapes I trace with my eyes to distract my mind. After a moment, Draven turns out the light and slides down beside me, careful with the wing, and we are lying side by side, staring at the same ceiling, and the only sound in the room is the wind outside and the small steady pop of the fire bleeding through the door from the nave.

“Alucard is my mother’s last name,” he says quietly. “I prefer it to Aldric. It’s less known.”

“Do a lot of people at Ashwell know who you really are?”

“The headmaster. A few of the professors. Some of the vampires, but not all.”

So that’s why his little circle is always around him. They are not friends, or not only friends. They are his court. The vampires at Ashwell with the right blood and the right names know exactly who he is, and they have been orbiting him this whole time, and I never saw it because I wasn’t looking for it. I’m shocked Ellavee didn’t see it. I almost let the prince of Valen die in the snow today. I think about that and cannot tell whether the cold feeling in my chest is the whiskey or the realization.

He probably would not have died. We would have found help eventually, but he sure as hell would not have been able to fly again. The man beside me is the heir to the Obsidian Throne and very nearly lost his wing because I couldn’t move my hand fast enough.

I roll onto my side to face him.

He stays on his back. His eyes are still on the ceiling.

“Why keep it a secret?” I ask. “Why are you at Ashwell at all?”

The moonlight is shining on the side of his face, and I can see him deciding how much to say and how much to hold back, so I don’t push. With Draven, the silence is part of the answer.

When he finally speaks, his voice has gone lower. “I went to the Vanguard Academy in the Shadowlands when I was young. I trained as a Vanguard and served as one for years. Vampires who graduate as Vanguards are arms of the Obsidian Throne. We do what the Throne asks of us. We hunt twisted creatures when there are creatures to hunt, and when there aren’t, we handle the rest. Threats to vampire dominance. Threats to the family. Threats my father deemed it best to remove quietly.”

He raises one hand and rubs his face slowly, like he is trying to wipe something off that isn’t there.

“I have been killing things since I was sixteen, that’s fifteen years of deaths on my hands. For a long time, I didn’t think much about it. It was work. It was what I was raised to do. And then somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to remember the reasons, and I started having to invent them after the fact, and that was when I knew something in me had broken.”

I don’t breathe as my heart starts to pump faster behind my sternum.

“I told my father I was done. I told him I wanted to learn to do something other than take lives. I told him I wanted to come here and be a healer. He laughed at me, and I went anyway. The best Veilguard who ever lived has saved more lives than even the worst Vanguard has taken. I figured if I could be that, even half of that, then maybe whatever waits for me after this life would have a harder time deciding which side of the door to put me on.”

It’s not bitter. It’s the voice of a man who has done the math and is making peace with the answer.

I want to reach out and touch him so badly my hand actually eases a half inch on the blanket before I stop it.

I stay quiet, waiting to see if there is more.

“I don’t want the throne.” His voice has gone almost too soft to hear. “I owe my father one more thing. After that, I’m done.”

He reaches for the bottle on the nightstand and takes another long pull, and I sit up too, but I don’t want any more whiskey. I face him on the bed with my legs folded under me.