Chapter 4 — The Invitation (1)

Three days after the raven brought the letter, Lila Moore stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop and started waiting for it to bring soup.

The shoe, it turned out, was never coming. What came instead was a routine so absurd she had to write it down to believe it. Seven a.m.: she woke to the sound of Kael standing in the middle of her room, perfectly still, watching her sleep like a man guarding a museum exhibit. Eight a.m.: coffee, which he made wrong every single morning — grounds in the pot, water in the grinder, every time, like he was testing physics to see when it would snap. Nine a.m.: painting, with him seated three meters away on a chair that looked carved for a king, holding a book he wasn't reading, because he was watching her.

"Are you going to do that all day?" she asked on the second morning, brush mid-air.

"Do what."

"Stare at me like I'm a painting you're afraid to smudge."

"I'm not afraid." He paused. "I'm memorizing."

"Memorizing what?"

"The way you hold the brush." He said it like it was obvious. "Your thumb sits lower than the other painters I've watched. It's… interesting."

"You've watched painters?"

"Three." He counted on his fingers. "One in Florence, 1504. One in Paris, 1878. One in a basement in Queens, last Tuesday. She was better than she knew."

Lila dropped her brush. "You were at my old studio?"

"Through the window." He said it like this was normal. "You left the curtain open. You painted at two in the morning and argued with a mouse."

"I don't have a mouse."

"You do now." He nodded toward the windowsill, where a very plump, very smug tabby was curled on her sketchbook. "He came in through the window. I let him. He's warm."

Lila stared at the cat. The cat stared back, blinked slowly, and went back to sleep.

"His name?" she said.

"Raven said you named him Lunch."

"I named him Lunch because he looked like lunch."

"He looks like he has opinions." Kael watched the cat with something like respect. "I like him. He's not afraid of me."

"That's because he's an outdoor cat and doesn't read the news."

By day four, she'd also learned the hard way that a two-thousand-seven-hundred-year-old immortal did not understand showers. She'd come downstairs to find him standing in the bathroom doorway, fully dressed, watching the steam curl out of the shower stall.

"What are you doing."

"Observing."

"Observing what."

"Your species." He tilted his head. "You spend a third of your lives under water. It's a strange ritual. I want to know why."

"Because we get dirty."

"Why do you get dirty."

"Because we're alive, Kael. We sweat. We shed. We have skin." She poked her head out from behind the shower curtain, and watched him take one involuntary step back. "You can smell that through a door?"

"I can smell it through a wall."

"Then close the door."

"I like the smell." He said it flatly, without embarrassment, the way another man might say he liked the rain. "It's warm. It's—" He stopped. Searched for a word. "—it's yours."

Lila closed the curtain. Her face was hot, and it wasn't from the water.

* * *

The study was the one door in the castle that was always closed.

She told herself she wasn't going in. She told herself this three times, standing outside it with her coffee, like a person lecturing a vending machine. But Kael had ridden out at dusk — something about a meeting with his subordinate, the one who bought phones in bulk and clearly had a business profile — and the castle was so quiet she could hear her own heartbeat, and the door was slightly ajar, and she was twenty-two years old with the self-control of a raccoon in a pantry.

She pushed it open.

The study was nothing like she expected. She expected grimoires, candles, walls lined with human skulls. What she got was a library the size of a cathedral, floor to ceiling, books in languages she couldn't name, a desk the size of a battleship, and on the desk — a single open folio, pages thick with age, a leather bookmark sticking out of a chapter that had been deliberately torn.

The tear was fresh. The paper around it was brittle, but the ragged line looked like it had been made in a hurry. Maybe days ago. Maybe the night of the letter.

She shouldn't have read it. She did.

The page began in a script so old the letters looked like claws. She made out the words slowly, sounding them out in her head:

"…and it is written that the First-Born shall walk in the cold for three hundred years, and his senses shall fail him, and his heart shall turn to ash. Yet there remains a way, a forbidden way, a heresy among the elders: a soul, pure and mortal, untainted by the blood of the old lines, may press its light against the curse and dissolve it as morning dissolves frost. It is said—"

And there the page ended. The next page was gone. Torn out. The words that would have told her what it cost were missing, leaving only the ragged ghost of the last line:

"—but the price shall be—"

That was all. Price. What price?

Lila stood very still. Outside, an owl called. Somewhere far off, a wolf answered.

A pure mortal soul. She thought of herself. She thought of the way he listened to her heartbeat like it was music. She thought of the sandwich, the porridge, the candied apple at three in the morning. She thought of him standing in her doorway at dawn, not sleeping, not blinking, just there, because the night was long and he was alone.