Night Blessed

  Begrudgingly, Julian said, "That is acceptable."

  "But what of Lucien?" Alec, a sunstrider almost as old as Roisin and I said. "Ragnar may be dead, but his progeny remains."

  I licked my lips. "I'll find him," I said. "I swear it."

  She Writes

  His face is frozen forever on the pages of the folio Adelia gave me. Lucien Dubois, as he should be—as he should have always been—young and smiling, hair short and curly-black. Eyes of sky blue. Skin of milky tea.

  A mouth devoid of fangs.

  But there are many blank pages in his folio, and his likeness does not end here, mortal and glowing, as it should have done. My heart aches, but the pages flip easily. Past the first knowledge of him, traveling to the monastery. Past the last recorded sighting of him, impossibly, a hundred years later—to the blank spaces. The empty pages. The places left for me to fill.

  My quill scratches like claws against glass as I write.

  I know his sire. I know the moment of his transformation, laying bloodied in the froth of sea and sand as I spilled my blood into the waters to beg for his restoration.

  I know, too, the path he took afterwards—his struggles against the man who made him.

  His faith that I, whom he had loved, would find a way to do the right thing. To fix what Ragnar had wrought, though I had been a tool of Ragnar's plans all along.

  All of this I write, my words short and precise, shorn of any emotion. This is a record. A log. A piece of history for future minds to reference and, hopefully, to learn from.

  The bracelets Maeve crafted for me drag across the paper. They are shackles, engraved with magics to stem my access to nightwalker powers until it can be determined whether my oath remains. It is hard, sometimes, not to think about how much they resemble the chains I'd found around Lucien's wrists. Maeve is a fast learner.

  Though I do not write it—not yet—I know, too, the end of his story, or how it must be. That which is born in blood must end in blood. This is the way of things, the sway of the world from point A to point B. To know your making, your birthing, is to know the path of your life. The cause of its inevitable destruction.

  The ink spills, pools in black voids across the page.

  Who made me?

  [END]

  Magdalene's story continues in Shadow Redeemed...

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