Chapter 1 — The Intruder and the Expired Sculpture (2)

"Drawing you." Lila didn't look up. "Don't move. That pose you've got going is perfect — decadent, world-weary, thoroughly over it. I need that energy for a piece."

A long silence. The dust in the hall held its breath.

"…Do you know where you are."

"Yeah. I climbed the fence." She finally looked up and smiled at him. "Also, heads up, you should replace your hounds. I think yours are made of cardboard."

She watched him process that. There was no expression to read — his face was the human equivalent of a deleted file. But she'd swear something in him paused, like a clock that had been running on empty suddenly registering an anomaly.

"I am Kael Ravencroft."

"Oh, hey, Kael Ravencroft." She waved her pencil at him. "I'm Lila. Painter. Mind if I borrow your living room for three days until the rain stops? I won't steal anything. Maybe two dead roses for a still life. Deal?"

He stood up.

That was the moment Lila understood why the owner of this castle didn't lock his doors — because he didn't need locks. When he rose, the air in the hall got sucked out of the room. Her pencil lead snapped. The sketchbook hit the floor. She stepped back, then back again, until her spine hit the cold stone wall.

Fear was honest. Her legs were shaking. Her brain was screaming: run. But her feet were nailed to the floor — because she'd seen his eyes.

He was looking at her and seeing nothing. Like two windows into an endless night. Like a man who had been dead for a very long time and simply forgotten to lie down.

There was a word for this feeling, she'd learned it in art school: the sublime. The terror of standing in front of something so much bigger than you that your brain stops making sense of it and just hands you awe instead. She'd felt it once, in front of a Rothko. She'd felt it again, in front of a cathedral in Florence. She was feeling it now, in front of a man in a suit who hadn't blinked in two minutes.

"You broke into my home." He walked toward her, step by step, each heel strike a countdown. "You looked at me. You drew me. And you negotiated."

"…I'm sorry." Lila swallowed, but her mouth had a mind of its own. "I shouldn't have said you look like a sculpture. Sculptures are at least respectable. You look like… expired merchandise. Premium. But expired."

She watched his footsteps stop.

Two thousand seven hundred years. And for the first time, a human had told him, to his face, that he was dead — in a way that was somehow both insulting and kind.

Kael Ravencroft looked down at this sopping-wet woman with eyes like wildfire. He had planned to snap her neck. Like the hundred and thirty-seven intruders before her. Neat, efficient, feeling nothing.

But he couldn't lift his hand.

Because something absurd was happening: he could smell her.

Rain. Paint. Cheap shampoo. And — a heartbeat. Hot, alive, like it was trying to detonate out of her chest. Like fire.

He stood there and let the sensation run through him like an electrical fault. Two thousand seven hundred years of dead taste buds, dead nerve endings, dead everything — and this one human girl was broadcasting on every frequency he'd lost. Her heartbeat alone was doing more damage than a stake. It was a sound he'd stopped hearing before Rome fell, and now it was the only sound in the world.

Two thousand seven hundred years. His senses had been dead for a thousand years. He couldn't taste. He couldn't feel heat or cold. He couldn't hear the wind through the windows. He'd accepted, long ago, that he would never feel anything again.

And now he could smell her. He could hear her. He could swear that heartbeat had burned him.

Kael Ravencroft stood in silence for a very long time. Then he heard himself ask a question that didn't sound like his:

"…How old are you?"

"Twenty-two. Why, am I too young for you?" Lila squinted at him suspiciously. "Just so we're clear, I get paid before I leave. I don't do credit."

He didn't answer. He was thinking: twenty-two. Only twenty-two. In his two thousand seven hundred years, twenty-two was shorter than a single breath.

And she stood there, a fire that had no business existing in a dead city.

He felt something absurd rise in him. Absurd enough that he almost laughed — he'd forgotten what laughing felt like.

"Leave," he said. His voice was calmer than he'd ever heard it. "Before I change my mind."

Lila didn't move. She should have. Every survival instinct she had was screaming at her to take the exit he was offering, to back away from the beautiful dead man and never look back. But she was an artist, and artists are cursed with the need to look at things other people look away from. She looked at his face — at those gold eyes full of nothing — and she noticed the small things: the way his collar sat exactly right, the way his hands hung at his sides like they'd forgotten what they were for, the way he'd said "leave" like he was reading it off a wall.