The court receives our company with polite smiles and a careful façade of respect. By virtue of their stations, Chryseus and Canus are able to directly approach the Prince, who looks aged in a way that only vampires can. He can’t have been more than twenty when he became immortal, but, at first glance, nobody would ever realise it. There’s a strange sense of fatigue, of parchment fragility, that is utterly incongruous with his youthful appearance. I pay more attention to his features this time around. His hair is blond, paler than Canus and less saturated than Chryseus, and his eyes are a fathomless green. He shares a nose and a mouth with Canus, and the shape of his eyes are identical to Chryseus’s, down to their long eyelashes in dark blond. All three of them have similar jawlines and eyebrows, and they share, too, an eerie beauty that I begin to suspect is a vestige of their dhampiric heritage. Most immortals are attractive, of course. For one, most vampires go out of their way t

The crowd near me has thickened over the past little while, and Chryseus meanders as he makes his way through, a circling vulture in a room of winding reptiles. I perk up once it becomes clear that he’s planning to talk to me, acting as flattered as anyone else might be when singled out by such an important man. ‘Lord Chryseus,’ I say, standing up and making as if to bow. He waves a hand to stop me. ‘Please, not on my account, my dear. After all, we’re practically family.’ I giggle obligingly. ‘I wouldn’t want to presume.’ ‘I thought I’d keep you company for a while. It’s very negligent of my brother to leave you here all on your own, and on your first night, no less.’ He sits down, not in the nearby chaise longue, nor in the three-seat sofa perpendicular to me, but directly next to me in the loveseat itself, the spot that Canus vacated only a short while ago. I tense automatically, and he seems to notice, moving back a little. ‘It’s my own fault,’ I say. ‘I forgot to go hunting

‘What are you?’ Annia gasps.‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you,’ I demand instead of answering. And it feels so good, the glow of light flaring around me, sustaining me with its power, that I know I can do it too. I can, and I should.Annia knows too much. She saw me draw shadows around myself, stood by as I successfully spied on her Sire, and now cowers, blinded by the radiance of my light, this strange power that feels like sorcery but can’t be, because my blood is that of an immortal, it’s that of a creature that shies away from all true light, be it sun or fire or even electric bulbs.But I don’t want to. Even as Annia whimpers and cries, I come to the sudden realisation that it’s not her fault. She wasn’t the one who decided I needed watching. She could have told Chryseus at any point before now about how I followed him, but she hasn’t. She couldn’t promise to keep it from him forever, of course, but how could she? He’s her Sire.‘Please,’ Annia says, but I’ve already retracted t

Chalcea had been agitated all day, and as evening approached, it only got worse. It made no sense—eighteen was an important age for normal humans, and sure, she might have been more excited for it if she were human. Except, she wasn’t human, and she didn’t feel any positive anticipation for tonight, not when all that had been planned was a family gathering—an intimate one, no thralls or progeny allowed, but still just the same as had been planned ever since she became old enough to expect special treatment for her birthday.As a dhampir, being eighteen was merely what happened in the year between being seventeen and being nineteen. It wasn’t the big coming-of-age that humans saw it as. Chalcea’s physical ageing had already slowed, too; whenever she snuck out of the estate to enter the human parts of the city, people kept assuming she was only fourteen or fifteen. This hadn’t been so bad last year or the year before, but lately she’d become increasingly annoyed by it. She didn’t know h

By the time Canus is back at court, I’ve already excused myself from Chalcea’s presence, following Annia along a winding path back to the main hall. The walk is a tense one; I still don’t trust Annia, for all that she’s been perfectly respectful, acting almost as if I didn’t almost burn her to a crisp. I understand that she seems convinced that I’m supposedly the subject of this ancient prophecy, but part of me is still baffled that she forgave me for humiliation. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t regret sparing her (un)life. For one, if she proves trustworthy, then it’ll be good to have someone in Chryseus’s camp who’s willing to cover for me. If Chryseus really does remember the same thirty years that I do, then he must be suspicious about the deviations in this timeline, and his suspicions will only increase if one of his progeny ends up dead or missing. For another, I hate to say it, but Annia seems nice. There’s a solidity to her, a sort of earthbound conviction that’s rare among our k