I grip him tighter, pulling him closer as I taste both of us on his tongue. He tips my head, I release my jaw, the kiss deepens. His fangs graze against my lower lip. More blood. More power. More of the purest pleasure that should have never existed for me, and now I can’t get enough. This is everything that was denied to me in the hamlet and now everything that I want. That I might have always wanted if I’d ever let myself even try to imagine.
And yet, even as I indulge in him, a scrap of common sense—of my dignity as a human of Hunter’s Hamlet—returns to me. The heat in my lower stomach begins to boil with conflict.What am I doing?the woman who was raised in the hamlet asks from the corner of my mind.This is the vampir lord!
I release him, shoving him away. The world tilts slightly; I wonder how much blood I’ve lost. But thanks to his blood surging through me I can stand tall. We’ve intertwined ourselves deeper still. I can almosthearhis thoughts now.
“You…” He can’t form words while he licks his lips.
“I can’t—We can’t—I don’t but I also—I can’t think clearly right now—You should go.” I stumble over my words and adjust my clothes, wondering when they became so skewed. I was certainly very aware of his hands moving…but I didn’t think he was touching me that much. Everything is a pleasurable blur. “I have work to do.”
Ruvan steps forward; his fingertips graze my arm. “The work will keep. Come back with me to my quarters. Stay with me tonight.” His eyes are still drunken. I hate how deeply his lust still stirs me. Even when I have just satiated that need it threatens to return again. Maybe this is why I was always denied carnal pleasure. It’s a distraction. A delicious, decadent distraction.
“We have what we needed. I need some time alone to my thoughts. Please, go.” I say the last word with the edge of a command. Hurt has him retreating. He’s confused by my demeanor.
Good, so am I.I’m a walking contradiction right now and his presence is a reminder of all the reasons why. I can’t just erase, or ignore, a lifetime of training for a few moonlight kisses, however good they are.
Ruvan leaves without another word. But I can feel him—his restless, toe-curling, fiery energy—up until the moment that I presume he falls asleep. Because then the world is still, and I’m finally able to get work done.
CHAPTER22
The sky is already turninga hazy amber; the sun will be up within the hour. I imagine that they’ll all sleep through the day after the festivities tonight, which means I have anywhere between eight and ten hours of uninterrupted solitude.
It’s time to get to work.
With Ruvan’s magic still burning within me I ignite the forge, turning it from red, to orange, to yellow in tandem with the sky. The power within me is as bright and hot as the flames that dance in my hearth. Taking the disk from my pocket, I place it in the center of one of the tables and simply stare at it. What books are to scholars, metal is to me. I scan and search it for whatever information it will yield from a glance alone.
When I’m done, I pick it up. I bite, taste, scratch at, drop, and scuff it. I tap it lightly with a hammer. I do everything I can to feel and inspect it without materially damaging the disk. As curious as I am about its secrets, it’s still more precious to me intact—at least until I can confidently recreate it. So, for now, I can’t risk smelting it or any other more intensive investigations.
My inspections reaffirm my existing suspicion that it’s certainly unlike any other silver I’ve come across thus far. Excitement tingles through me. A new metal to explore. To try and recreate.
I roll up my sleeves and don one of the heavy leather aprons that hang on one of the pegs in the smithy. I then begin to scrounge for supplies. Fortunately for me, this smithy was left well-stocked when it was abandoned. There are ingots of iron, copper, brass, steel, even some gold.
Pure silver is missing, however.Of course it would be.If they had pure silver then they wouldn’t need to steal the weapons from hunters during the Blood Moon.
An idea strikes me.
I speed back up the hall to the upper armory, grateful I don’t run into anyone along the way. There, I pick through the oldest of the weapons that have been collected from the hunters across the centuries. Given what Ruvan said, the Succumbed are the only ones to wander to our world regularly. Vampir like him have only come once every five hundred years. But if there’s a broadsword here, there must be—
My fingers land on a small, needlelike dagger. Silver.Puresilver. I can tell by sight, touch, and sound. There are four of them in total. I cradle the weapons in my hands. They were made by one of my ancestors, easily over two thousand years ago, when we didn’t know yet how to make silver steel.
“Thank you,” I whisper to whatever great-great-grandmother made this for me to find and return to the forge.
I place the four daggers inside the crucible. It’s going to take every try I have to get this right, if I’m able to at all, and it’s best not to waste more than I need to. Once I have the daggers melted down, I pour the majority of the metal into a channel. When the silver has almost cooled completely, I break it into pieces while it’s still malleable.
My resources secured, I go back to the crucible. What I’m about to do isn’t like any sort of forging I’ve ever done. I don’t know anything about magic, or blood lore…not really. But I’m learning. And what I do know is that blood—my blood—holds power. And that power might just be what I need.
I dig the point of one of the sickles I sharpened before we left into my forearm near the elbow. It’s a small cut, enough to drip five droplets into the crucible. The blood bubbles and hisses the second it meets the hot metal, turning it black. I let my body decide how much to start with. Using as much as I bled before my wound healed over.
Magic in my blood… It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the truth but I believe it at this point. However, it uncomfortably blurs the line between human and vampir. Vampir were always the ones with magic in the stories and they hunted us purely for the sake of food. Humans had no innate power.
It was a lie. Humans carry our own magic. Was the deceit among the people of Hunter’s Hamlet intentional? Or merely a forgotten part of our history? What will either case mean for our future?
I briefly wonder what my own innate ability of blood lore is. If it’s anything, it must be forging.
The metal has cooled to the point I was waiting for and I banish the worrying thoughts from my mind as I carefully lift the vessel with tongs and pour the liquid into a second, small, rectangular mold.
I work quickly and confidently up until when the metal has cooled into the shape of a new ingot. I hold the tiny bar in one hand, the disk in the other, and close my eyes. I test their weight, temperature, smoothness. As expected, it’s not right. Not even close. But there’s still more to try.
The door in the depths of the old castle was able to channel magic through it. That was how the lock was disengaged. The pure silver of the handle was made to ward off vampir—curious on its own, but a topic to muse over another time—but this metal was what the power within the blood moved through.
