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32. Reasons Left Out
publish date:
2026-10-05 07:00:16(Morrison)
"I know precisely what it is. I know it's a threat to everything my line has held for eight centuries. A vampire with a living key to Marwick magic, bound to my second son, setting harder every time the two of you can't keep your hands to yourselves." Her voice didn't rise. My mother's voice has never once needed to rise.
"I arranged you a marri
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The 200 Year Blood Swap 51. Choice
(Morrison)The summons reached me at first light, keyed to my blood so it would open for no one else. When I broke the seal the working stood up off the page and put my mother in the room, or near enough. A sending. Her voice, the cold suggestion of her face, thrown four hundred miles across a hostile border into a Varco guest chamber she'd never once set foot in alive.She didn't ask how I was."You're considering a procedure that would make your bond with the Varco woman permanent. Don't waste breath asking how I know. Tell me instead whether you've thought past your own wants to what a permanent Concordance is."I said nothing, which she took as license to continue. She always does."A permanent bond is a permanen
The 200 Year Blood Swap 50. The Price of Help
(Maxine)Ferren was waiting in the hall, and she wasn't wearing the grief face or the triage face. She had on the other one, the one I'd learned meant she'd found her way around a corner the rest of us hadn't reached yet."I've been reading what the two of you brought up from that lab," she said. "The dead couple did more than build the lock. They studied it from the inside. There are pages on entering a working like this through a compatible resonance. Cassian could map what Eveline had built without cutting it open, because his magic and her blood were keyed to each other. The way yours are."It took me a second. "You're saying Morrison and I could get inside the thing in Theo. See how it's put together?""See how it's built, yes. How it's keyed. Possibly how
The 200 Year Blood Swap 50. He’s dying
(Maxine)I made it as far as the corridor before my legs stopped taking instructions.I'd done this. Me. I'd stood in that room and begged the one person who has never once refused me, and he'd opened a vein for my brother because I asked, and the whole time I'd been quietly congratulating myself on how honestly I'd asked. No seduction. No leverage. Look how much I've grown. And I had fed the thing that's killing Theo the best meal it has ever had.Ferren had said it plainly, the mercy stripped out for our own good. The feeding hadn't fought the Bloodlock. It had fed it. Every measure of Morrison's blood I'd talked him into, the lock had folded in and used to build itself thicker, and the stabilizing we'd all wept over for six shining minutes had been the sound of a trap getting a fresh coat of paint.
The 200 Year Blood Swap 49. His Blood
(Morrison)So we did it the vampire way, which is to say he fed. A transfusion was my instinct, a mage's instinct, a tube and a measured drip, tidy and clinical and wrong for the body on the bed. Ferren corrected me without a word. Vampires don't take blood through a line. They drink it.I opened a vein into one of her shallow silver bowls, and she doled it out a mouthful at a time, reading her instruments between each one, ready to pull it the instant his body turned. Theo was too far gone to lift the bowl himself, so Maxine held it to his lips. There was nothing tender in it. Nothing of whatever the gossip streams would have built out of a vampire drinking down a Marwick prince. It was slow and grim and exact, a dying young man taking my blood a swallow at a time while a witch counted drops, and I stood over him with my sleeve shoved up and my own bl
The 200 Year Blood Swap 48. Given Freely
(Morrison)Theo crashed at the third hour past midnight.I'd been awake anyway. I don't sleep well in the Varco house, something about lying still in a fortress built by people who'd cheerfully drain me, so I was already in the corridor when the healer's runner came through it at a dead sprint, and I reached Theo's room a step behind Maxine and half a step ahead of her father.Theo was the color of the sheets. Worse. His body had stopped doing the one thing a vampire's body is built to do, which is take in blood and turn it into life, and Ferren had two vials open and a third going in and none of it was holding. He'd take it, and his body would refuse it, again and again, the lattice under his skin flaring darker every time he tried, and I watched a twenty-three-year-old drown on dry land in a bed gone slic
The 200 Year Blood Swap 47. Twelve people
(Maxine)Morrison didn't tell me to calm down.That was the first thing. Every man I've ever known would have told me to calm down, would have put himself between me and the wall and made soothing noises until I was manageable again. Morrison stood exactly where he was and let me have the rage, and when it had burned down enough that I could hear him, he said the only thing that could have reached me."We'll find them."Not I'll handle it. Not let me take care of this. Not the lone-hero nonsense I'd have thrown back in his face. We."You don't ev
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