Chapter Four — The Girl with the Burning Blood (2)

Layla stared at the symbol in the photo. The man and woman in the picture — her parents — were standing in front of it. Smiling. Holding her.

"My parents died in a fire," she said slowly. "The orphanage burned when I was three. I was the only survivor. They said it was a gas leak."

Locke's face went careful. "And you're wondering why the orphanage had the Blood Court's sigil carved into its front door."

"Something like that."

"Lady." Locke put a huge hand on her shoulder. "I'm going to say this as a friend. Some doors, once you open them, you can't close. The King's cage door was like that. He opened it, and it cost him everything, and he's still bleeding from it. Are you sure you want to open yours?"

Layla looked at the photo. At the smiling strangers who'd died to keep her safe. At the symbol that had followed her out of the fire.

"I have to," she said. "Because if I don't find out what I am, the old laws are going to kill him. And I'm not letting that happen. Not for a sigil, not for a prophecy, not for anything."

Locke sighed the sigh of a man who'd seen this exact expression on exactly one other face.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. But we do this my way. Library at night, no telling the King, and if we get caught, I'm blaming the ghosts."

"There are ghosts?"

"There are absolutely ghosts. They're very helpful. One of them owes me money."

* * *

The book Locke found for her was older than human civilization, bound in leather that might have been skin (Locke said it wasn't; Locke was a terrible liar).

THE BLOODLINES OF THE ETERNAL — VOLUME VII: THE HOUSE OF THORNS

Layla opened it with shaking hands. The pages were yellowed, the ink faded, but the diagrams were unmistakable: the crescent in the thorned ring, repeated a hundred times, branching like a family tree that had been growing since before the first city.

And there, on page two hundred and seven, was a section that made her blood run cold:

THE GRAY BLOODLINE. EXTINCT. LAST KNOWN SURVIVOR: FEMALE, AGE THREE, 2007. STATUS: UNKNOWN.

The Gray bloodline.

Her name was Gray.

Below it, in handwriting that was not print — that was a note, added later, in ink the color of old blood — someone had written:

The child survived the fire. The child remembers nothing. The child must never be found.

And beneath that, in a different hand, elegant and cruel:

Too late.

Layla's hands were shaking. The room was cold. Somewhere in the palace, she could hear the King's pack settling for the night, and beneath it, faintly, the low, restless sound of a wolf dreaming of the hunt.

"Locke," she said, her voice very small. "Why would a human orphanage be in a book about immortal bloodlines?"

Locke was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, carefully:

"Because you're not human, lady. I don't know what you are. But I've watched you break the King's killing field, calm his wolf with a touch, and make the old laws bleed faster than they've ever bled for anyone. You're not human."

Layla looked down at her own hands. Ordinary hands. Scraped knuckles, chipped nail polish, the faint scar from the fork incident.

"Then what am I?"

"I don't know," Locke said. "But there's one person in this city who might." He nodded toward the window, where, beyond the palace walls, a tower rose against the moon — the Blood Court's tower, pale as a bone.

"The Duke," Layla said.

"The Duke," Locke agreed. "And I'm going to pretend I didn't just say that, because if the King finds out I pointed you at a vampire, I'm going to be a rug."

"Locke."

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

Locke's face did something complicated. "Yeah, well. Somebody's gotta be the bad influence around here, and the King's taken 'morally upright' as a personality."

* * *

That night, Layla couldn't sleep.

She sat on the windowsill of her suite, looking at her own reflection in the dark glass. Ordinary. Boring. A girl who microwaved forks and locked herself out of apartments and had student loan debt and a keychain that said DELIVERY QUEEN.

A girl whose bloodline was listed in a vampire encyclopedia as extinct.

She'd cut her finger that afternoon, testing — a stupid, nervous thing, a kitchen knife, a thin red line. And it hadn't just bled. It had sung. The blood on her skin had smelled like lightning and winter and something ancient, and the wolf guards in the corridor had gone silent, ears pricked, noses twitching, like they could hear it too.

Her blood remembered things.

The door opened. Karen Thorne stood in the doorway, still pale, still weak, wrapped in a black robe and radiating wounded dignity.

"You weren't in your room," he said. "I panicked."

"I was—"

"Locke told me about the library." His jaw tightened. "About the book. About the Gray bloodline."

Layla's heart stopped. "Karen—"

"I'm not angry." He crossed the room, slowly, like each step cost him something, and sat on the windowsill across from her. "I'm terrified. There's a difference."

"I had to know."

"I know." He reached for her hand — the one with the cut — and turned it over. His thumb brushed the thin red line, and she felt it: the bond, flaring, the heat of him racing up her arm. His eyes flickered gold. "You're bleeding."

"It's just a cut."

"It's you." He lifted her hand to his mouth, and Layla forgot how to breathe. "Every drop of you is precious to me. Every molecule. I would die for any of them, and I would kill for all of them."

"Karen, that's—that's a very dramatic way to say 'you should use a bandage.'"

"Bandages are for people who aren't the last survivor of a bloodline the vampires tried to erase," said the King of the wolves. "You get the whole speech."

Layla laughed. It came out wet. "You're impossible."

"I'm yours," he said, simply. "Which is worse."

He kissed her knuckles — a soft, devastating brush of lips against skin — and Layla felt the fire in her chest flare up in answer. The bond. The old laws. The bill that was killing him by inches.

I have to save him*, she thought. *Whatever I am, whatever it costs me — I have to save him.

From the tower beyond the walls, Abel Moreau watched the two of them through a glass of something that was not wine.

"Interesting," he murmured. "She's starting to remember."

He set the glass down.

"Let her dig, then. The deeper she digs, the easier she'll be to bury."

* * *

To be continued.

Next chapter: The King Apologizes — in which the Elders demand a human head, the King learns the ancient art of saying sorry, and someone in the Blood Court starts sharpening knives.