“When an emberlink snaps, it’s not grief.” He pauses, his jaw working. “It’s amputation. One second they’re there, and then…” He doesn’t finish.
I reach for his hand and squeeze it.
Because he’s not thinking about Avery and Oliver. He’s remembering Miles. And ever since his emberlinked partner’s death—minus his confession on the Crown—Logan refuses to talk about Miles. So, I say nothing, waiting for the moment to pass.
I’m still watching Avery and Tobias when a voice I really don’t feel like hearing cuts through the noise of the party.
“Logan. Jade.”
I turn to find Callie Bennett approaching, every muscle in my body tensing in preparation for whatever psychological warfare she has in store for us tonight.
TOBIAS
The Forge Partyin the Obsidian Caves is one of the worst possible places for someone carrying eight centuries of vampire memories.
Students cluster around a makeshift bar near the entrance, their laughter bouncing off the stone and multiplying until it sounds like a hundred voices instead of twenty. A second-year boy tips his head back to drain his cup while the girl beside him sways to the music, her shoulder brushing his arm in a way that’s probably not accidental.
Salvatore loved gatherings like this one.
And just like that, warmth curls through my stomach, the laughter blurs, and the obsidian walls shimmer into marble and candlelight.
The string quartet in a Venetian ballroom shifts into a waltz, and a girl in green silk turns toward the music, her throat pale and perfect above her neckline. Hunger coils in my stomach, burning through my veins, and then I’m closing the distance, leaning close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin as I tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the room.
When I guide her out to the terrace, she follows without hesitation.
She won’t scream. They never do. Not when I make it feel like seduction instead of slaughter.
No. Stop.
This isn’t real.
I twist the ring on my right hand and press the hidden spike into the pad of my thumb until blood wells up. It’s warm, and it’s mine, and in seconds, the ballroom dissolves back into volcanic glass and laughter bouncing off stone walls.
The memories belong to Salvatore. Salvatore is dead. I’m Tobias Cane. I’m twenty-five years old. I’m standing in an obsidian cave at Blaze Academy, here to help investigate the murder of one student and the disappearances of another student and a professor.
I take a few deep breaths, inhaling cheap alcohol and sulfuric rock, and count the stones in the nearest wall until the iron taste fades and my hands stop shaking.
It works. It always works.
With the memories appropriately compartmentalized, I look around the Forge Party to observe the students. That is, after all, why Helen wanted me here in the first place.
The girl near the entrance keeps touching her friend’s elbow, like she’s making sure the friend is still real. The boy at the makeshift bar is laughing too loudly, trying to fill more space than his body allows. A cluster of second-years near the back wall have their drinks raised and their mouths curved into smiles, but one girl keeps glancing at the tunnel entrances, and the boy beside her won’t stop tapping the outside of his glass.
Then, my eyes land on a flash of honey-blonde hair on the far side of the cave.
Avery Chambers is standing apart from the crowd with a drink in her hand, her body angled toward the wall like she’strying to disappear into the stone. The floating flames cast shifting shadows across her face, and in the unsteady light, the hollows beneath her eyes look deep enough to drown in.
I know those hollows. I wore them for months after the attack, when the mirror showed me Salvatore’s hunger instead of my own face and sleep meant diving deeper into eight hundred years of nightmares I couldn’t wake up from.
I want to go to her. I want to comfort her, to help her, to know what it could feel like to connect with a person who might understand what it’s like to stand here and pretend to be normal when all you feel is the fracture that runs deep in your soul.
But I shouldn’t. There’s no way it will end well—it never does for me.
The last girl I tried to get close to asked me point-blank if I’d read her mind while she slept. The one before that couldn’t touch me without flinching. The one before that kissed me once and spent the rest of the evening with her arms crossed, as if keeping her body closed off would keep her thoughts safe, even though I hadn’t entered her mind once, not even for a second.
After enough of those conversations, you stop reaching, and you tell yourself that keeping people at a distance is a choice instead of a wound.
But I interviewed Avery a week ago, and her memories of the Halloween Ball were blurred and fragmented in all the ways too much alcohol makes them blurred and fragmented. Technically, it made perfect sense. Except there’s a splinter in the back of my mind that won’t work itself loose, a quiet nagging that the picture was almost too tidy, and I can’t explain why.
