"This is where grandmother kept her poison garden," Iris explains, gesturing to the neat rows. "Useful plants, but aggressive. Everything fighting for dominance. I've been trying to teach them to cooperate instead."
"You're trying to reform plants?"
"You can reform anything if you're patient enough." She kneels beside a bed of what looks like dormant lavender. "Watch."
She places both hands on the soil, closes her eyes, and I feel her magic rise. It's different from the warm, food-scented magic she uses in cooking. This is rawer. Deeper. Green and growing and alive in a way that makes the air itself feel charged. There is power there too. So much power it’s like a punch in the gut. She has no idea how strong she is.
The lavender responds immediately. Buds that were closed begin to open. Stems straighten. Color deepens from gray-green to vivid purple.
"It's not forcing them," she murmurs, eyes still closed. "It's just... asking. Reminding them what they are. What they want to be. Then giving them the strength to become it."
Under her hands, the lavender blooms: impossible, beautiful, completely at odds with the winter outside.
"Your magic feels like sunlight," I say without thinking.
She opens her eyes, looking up at me. "What does yours feel like?"
Darker answer than she probably wants: "Blood and ashes."
"Can I?" She stands, brushing dirt from her hands. "Can I feel it? Your magic?"
"I don't use magic the way you do."
"But you have it. Vampire magic. The speed, the strength, the way you move through shadows. That's magic." She steps closer. "I want to feel what it's like."
I should say no. Should maintain distance. Should remember that she's my master and I'm her bound familiar and we're already too close to proper boundaries.
Instead, I take her hand.
Her magic is immediately there: warm and green and alive. It flows into me like sunlight, like water, like everything I've been denied for centuries. I gasp at the intensity of it.
"That's what life feels like," she says softly. "That's what you could feel all the time if you let yourself."
"It's too much."
"It's exactly enough." She steps closer now that we're touching. "Now you. Show me yours."
I don't know how to show her. My magic isn't something I call like hers, it just is. The cold, the strength, the predator that lives under my skin.
But I try. I let her feel what I am when I'm not carefully controlling it. The hunger that's always there. The darkness. The thing that's existed for hundreds of years and has forgotten what warmth feels like.
She doesn't flinch. Doesn't pull away.
"It's not blood and ashes," she says quietly. "It's winter. Deep winter. The kind that kills but also preserves. The kind that looks like death but is really just dormancy." She squeezes my hand. "Waiting for spring."
The metaphor is almost painfully optimistic. But feeling her magic still flowing into me, warm and alive and insistent, I almost believe it.
"I can feel it," I say, and my voice comes out rough and deep. "Your magic. It's..."
"Soft?" she offers.
"Yes. But beautiful." I look at our joined hands, at the way her magic and mine are mixing, green warmth and cold darkness, finding some kind of balance. "I'd forgotten what beautiful felt like."
"Then I'll keep reminding you. Every day. Until you remember."
The moment stretches, heavily. Her hand in mine. Magic flowing between us. The greenhouse warm around us while winter presses against the glass.
I should pull away. Should remember my place. Should maintain proper distance.
