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"Aye," Lachlan whispers, his jaw setting hard. "It shouldn’t have."

"Instead, it woke up." I look up into his stormy eyes.

Lachlan doesn't answer right away. He stares at the smoking grimoire.

"It wasn't an anomaly, was it?" I ask, my voice dropping to a whisper. "The bookstore. Melting that vampire's face. And now this book."

Lachlan looks down at me, his hazel eyes dark.

"No, lass," he says softly, his fingers tightening against my wrist. "It wasn't an anomaly. You carry House Midnight in your bones, but whatever else runs in your blood... "

A cold wind sweeps through the dead garden, making the skeletal branches above us dance.

I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders, sitting in the lap of an ancient Highland warrior, staring at a book written in blood.

“I have blood magic, don’t I?” I don’t know what that means, not really, but it’s the only thing that really makes any sense. “Whatever it is the Sanguine house has, yeah? This isn’t Midnight magic.”

“I don’t know, but I do know we’re going to figure it out.” He sounds sure, but I can feel his distress in the stiff way he holds me.

Twelve days until the ritual.

Twelve days until I walk into the house of a faction who wants me dead—carrying their own magic inside my veins.

Twenty-Three

Lachlan

Itell myself it’s duty.

A warden keeps his charge alive. That’s the oath. It’s been the oath since 1492, etched into the slate of the hearth and beaten into my ribs before the claymore was cold in my hand. It has nothing to do with the way her pulse flutters beneath my thumb when I check her wrist for magic spikes, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my beast paces behind my ribs like a caged wolf every time she leaves the room.

It’s discipline. Pure, professional discipline.

I repeat the lie so many times over the next few days that it starts to sound like gospel.

By day six, the library smells permanently of dark roast coffee, old paper, and her.

She doesn’t leave the room. She drags a massive wingback chair directly into the patch of sunlight beneath the high stained-glass arch, piles two thick quilts over her knees, and surrounds herself with a fortress of leather-bound folios on House Sanguine.

She won't touch the books with bare skin—not after the courtyard—so she reads them wearing a pair of thin leather driving gloves she badgered the dressing room into providing. A ballpoint pen is shoved through her messy bun, half her dark hair is spilling into her eyes, and her nose is smudged with ink.

"Lachlan, listen to this," she announces to the empty air, her voice hoarse from hours of silence. "According to this 1680 treatise, Sanguine blood mages can't even cast a basic tracking ward without dramatic bloodletting. Like, an entire chalice. If these people spent half as much time in therapy as they do obsessing over the viscosity of human plasma, the French Revolution literally never would have happened."

"Go to bed, Vivienne," I say from the arched doorway.

I’m leaning against the wood with my arms crossed over my chest. I’ve been standing there for three hours. My shoulders are stiff, my legs locked, but if I sit down next to her, the heat coming off her skin makes my teeth ache.

"I can't go to bed, I'm doing reconnaissance," she mutters, turning a brittle page with gloved fingers. "Did you know they categorize blood by vintage? Vintage! Like it's a cabernet sauvignon! 'A crisp, youthful iron with notes of despair.' It’s so aggressively goth. I swear, if Julian St. George hands me a blood bag that looks like a Capri Sun tomorrow, I'm going to throw up on him a second time."

"Julian St. George has lived for six centuries, lass. He drinks from kings, not juice boxes."

"Well, he sounds like a pretentious prick who desperately needs a hobby that isn't hematology." She yawns, a massive, unhinged jaw-cracker, rubbing her eyes with the back of her gloved hand. "I just don't get how I triggered their magic. Sanguine spells require an active biological sacrifice. Midnight doesn't. How does a mortal body do both without instantly melting?"

"We'll figure it out," I tell her. "In the morning. Ten minutes, Vivienne."

"Ten minutes," she mumbles, her eyes already glazing over the Latin text.

Twenty minutes later, the pen slips from her hair.