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62. The Vault
publish date:
2026-10-21 06:30:52(Maxine)
We found the vault because the house ran out of ordinary rooms to give us.
Three days in, we'd opened everything that opened and read everything that could be read, and I'd started to think the coordinates had brought us to a beautiful dead end and a great deal of other people's laundry. Then Morrison, being Morrison, noticed that the cellar was the wro
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The 200 Year Blood Swap 65. The Name
(Morrison)We left most of them where they fell. I don't take prisoners for sport and neither does she, but we needed one who could talk, so when it came down to the last mage, the youngest of them, his working-hand already broken by a door Maxine had introduced him to, we took him instead.He was Nachtigall, all right. Some weird hope inside me had hoped he was one of those mages raised outside Nachtigall borders and acted as a mage-for-hire. But his accent, his working-style, the Coven cadence in the half-spell he tried to spit before I bound his jaw, all of it spelled home.These weren't foreign agents. The mages hunting us were my own people, trained in my own tradition, sent by someone who could requisition Coven killers and point them across a border at a Marwick prince.
The 200 Year Blood Swap 64. Hunted
(Morrison)They came in from the sea side, which is what I would have done, because the sea side was the only approach where the old wards had worn thin enough to let a stranger near.The first I knew of it as a fight rather than an alarm was a round of bullets punching through the window a handspan from my head, and a breath behind it the whole frame blown inward as a working shattered it. Modern steel and mage-fire, arriving together. That told me more about who had sent them than anything in the ten minutes that followed.I still couldn’t quite believe. I should have believed it. Vampires and mages.I'd read it off the perimeter, but reading a thing and watching it come through your windows are different educations. The vampires moved like the lig
The 200 Year Blood Swap 63. The Alarm
(Maxine)I put my hand flat on the outer seal, the one that had let us in, half-expecting nothing.I got everything.The vault went away. The cold went away. I was somewhere else, some when else, and I was not myself.I was Eveline.I was Eveline, and I was terrified, and there was blood on my hands that wasn't mine. Cassian lay on the floor of this same chamber, this same vault, newer then, the metal bright instead of black, and he was bleeding from a wound in his side that no amount of borrowed vampire healing was closing fast enough. I had his head in my lap. I was pressing my hand
The 200 Year Blood Swap 62. The Vault
(Maxine)We found the vault because the house ran out of ordinary rooms to give us.Three days in, we'd opened everything that opened and read everything that could be read, and I'd started to think the coordinates had brought us to a beautiful dead end and a great deal of other people's laundry. Then Morrison, being Morrison, noticed that the cellar was the wrong size."The floor plan lies," he said, standing down there with a measuring string and the quiet satisfaction of catching a building in a fib. "There are twelve feet on the far side of that wall that don't exist on any level above it."The hidden wall didn't have a door. It had a seal, and by now I know a Marwick working when I see one, even a dead one. A disc of dark metal set flush into the stone, cha
The 200 Year Blood Swap 61. Why?
(Morrison)We are not the first. We are the sequel.And I kept wondering: if the case of Eveline and Cassian had not been swept under a rug for so long, would someone have prevented a Marwick-Varco marriage happening in an official 200-Year Bride Swap? The Vampires, specifically, lived long lives. Surely someone, at least one Varco, would have remembered and warned ‘this is a terrible idea’?I had spent the night reading how the first one ends, and then I looked at the ceiling, at the boards Maxine slept above, and let myself be afraid. Honestly afraid, the kind of fear I was never trained to carry, because it comes with no plan attached to it. The woman asleep upstairs was the only person alive who has ever wanted me for who I am as a person, and two hundred years of record said that was exactl
The 200 Year Blood Swap 60. Two Hundred Years Ago
(Morrison)Maxine slept. I read.The house gave up its history as grudgingly as it gave up its cupboards, one drawer at a time and only to the two of us, so I woke Maxine twice in the night to set her hand on a cabinet before letting her sleep again. By dawn I had most of it spread across a dead couple's kitchen table, and most of it made a story the official record had spent two centuries pretending never happened.Two hundred years ago there was a Varco called Eveline, of the same House I'd married into, the same moneyed, non-royal, dangerous line that produced my wife. And there was a Marwick called Cassian, a prince of the ruling Coven of Nachtigall, a working mage of the first rank, and, like me, a second child with an elder sister who, in a matriarchal society like Nachtigall, would always inherit the
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