Page 37 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"You weren't an accident, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I won't lie — that'd be the worst thing I ever did you, I only kept it quiet. I laid the road. The debt. The broker. The relic surfacing close to a thief nobody powerful would think to fear. I taught you locks and patience and how to spot the planted mistake because someday the world might rest on a person no king ever bothered to watch. I begged whatever's listening that it wouldn't be you. But if Lucien moved, you'd be in the open whether I warned you or not. So I chose the version where you had a chance. By now, you already know what these people are. Vampires. Some can be trusted, others you can't, and Lucien you can't."

A crackle eats half a breath. Then, smaller: "West, Riley. Past where the roads stop pretending to be roads. An old blood cathedral, now buried — keeper ground beneath a dead mission, deep wilderness. That's the door. I trust you to find the rest, refuse the obvious answer. I will always love you."

The hum splinters. The glass dims, the etched lines folding into dark. Once, exactly as promised. Riley is frozen to the core.

"He engineered me. Like— Every game, every wrong detail, every rule hidden inside a mess. He made my head the lockpick and called it raising me." Her gaze comes up, raw and direct.

"I won't say he was right." I keep my hands at my sides where she can see them. "He used you."

"Lucien." Cassandra breaks through. "There's movement where he is."

She drags the heel of her hand across her face, once, brutal, and stands.

"He knows. We must beat him there. My father turned me into a key. I'm finished being one for anybody but me. We move. Now."

"Cass, route us west. Gabriel, papers and wheels at the line." I shout.

"Already mobilizing on our end," Cass says. "And Nico — his money started moving twenty minutes ago. He felt the match strike."

Outside, the cold has teeth, and far to the west an old monster has turned his face toward the same dark we're about to drive into.

25

RILEY

The coordinates won't come loose, and I've been prying at them since the lamp guttered low somewhere past midnight.

Gabriel caught us at the county line in a white SUV, and a tank full of gas. Cassandra was already in the passenger seat, case across her knees, burner pressed to her ear, looking like sleep had personally offended her.

"Nice of everyone to show up for the family disaster tour," I said, climbing into the back.

Gabriel looked at me in the mirror. "I brought wheels, papers, weapons, and coffee."

"Proposal accepted."

Nico slid in beside me before the door had finished shutting.

My father's last message keeps looping while we move. He never spoke of poetry when a riddle would do the same job better. I've got what I wrote down from the recording spread across my lap, Cassandra's copied archive leaves clipped beneath it, and the obsidian relic wrapped in my scarf between my boots. I'm doing the thing he drilled into me before I was tall enough to see over the kitchen counter.

When I was seven he used to hide my birthday cake. He'd hand me a battered children's atlas with the page numbers inked out, a list of stars printed beside it, and I had to match each constellation to its latitude until the digits resolved into a place — usually the bakery where the cake already sat boxed and waiting. I despised those games. I have also never forgotten a single one of them, which I suspect was the entire point.

"You're smiling," Cassandra says from the front passenger seat, not bothering to turn around. "Is that very good news or are we all about to die."

"Both, probably." I tap the seventh entry on his star list. "He buried the latitude in the order he named them. Not the constellations — the order. Dad never cared what the stars were. He cared which one you looked at first."

She leans over, amber eyes moving down my scribbled columns. For a vampire who has catalogued contested history before, Cass has a rare talent for letting a human finish a thought, and she holds her tongue while the last figure clicks into place.

Fifty-six degrees north. A hundred and twenty-nine west. A spine of mountains nobody bothered to settle, three days' hard travel above the last paved road in British Columbia.

"There's nothing out there," I say.

"There's Sablecrest." Cassandra goes rigid. "It isn't recorded anywhere. The archives whisper about it. A redoubt the old builders raised when they still feared the daylight more than they feared each other. We treated it like old keeper folklore."

I should feel triumphant. I solved it — the last riddle of a man who hid an entire life from me. Instead what rises is older and harder to name, the particular ache of being loved in code. Every clue I've chased was a letter he never trusted me enough to send while he was alive. He taught me to read clues so that one day, long after they put him in the ground, I could find my way to the thing I think he died protecting. It is the most elaborate apology I have ever received, and I am still not certain I forgive him for it. But my hands keep working anyway. They always do. I drift off on Nico's shoulder as our long journey to the location carries on.

British Columbia closes around us, we have been driving for three days in ugly shifts — Gabriel at night, Nico through the worst roads, Cassandra awake whenever records need translating, me sleeping in twenty-minute scraps with my father's words chewing holes through every dream. The last paved road ended an hour ago. There is a smell of ice, diesel, and decisions nobody wants to make. Now the SUV crawls between black pines and old avalanche scars, dirty pockets of snow still trapped in the shadowed cuts, the mountain ahead rising like a locked jaw.

Gabriel slows at a washed-out logging turn. "Company," he says. "Two convoys behind us. Lucien's people on the lower road. The quiet lot taking the ridge. Professionals."