Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

Silver and Crimson

Three weeks into vampire territory, the Silverstone Pack sent hunters across the border.

Klaus knew they were coming before he saw them. This was one of the things that had changed, one of the subtle, unnerving, remarkably useful things that had been changing since the night in the forest when the thing in his blood had pushed back against the dark. His awareness had extended. 

Not dramatically, not in any way he could explain with the language he had grown up using, but in the specific practical sense that the forest told him things now. Pressure changes in the air. The particular silence that descended on a stretch of terrain when something organized and purposeful was moving through it.

Six wolves. Shifted forms, moving in the hunting formation that Silverstone used for disciplined pursuit, not searching, not scouting. Hunting. They had a specific target and they were moving with the specific efficiency of people who knew where it was.

He was in the open ground near the outer edge of Nocthaven's forest when they found him.

Seraphine was beside him.

She had taken to accompanying him on the boundary walks, which she framed as monitoring, and which he had stopped trying to reframe because the conversation was not productive. She was there. She was always at a carefully maintained distance that she managed with the precision of someone who was very aware of the distance and was not going to stop being aware of it.

The lead wolf shifted human when he was ten feet away. Klaus recognized him, Bren, one of the senior hunters, a man he had run training exercises with two years ago. A man who had stood in the hall three weeks ago and chanted his name.

Bren looked at him the way you look at something you have been told is dangerous.

"The Alpha's Beta, hunkered down in vampire land."

He said it with a particular sneer.

"Look at that. How the mighty fall. Making friends with bloodsuckers, Klaus ? That's a new low."

Behind him, the other five wolves paced. Shifted. Waiting.

"The Alpha wants you found."

Bren said. His hand moved to the blade at his hip, silver-edged, the kind used specifically for wolves who could shift.

"He wants you brought back. Or brought back mostly. He wasn't specific."

Klaus said nothing.

He was very still.

Seraphine, beside him, had gone the specific quality of still that old vampires went when they were deciding whether to move.

"Come quietly."

Bren said.

"And maybe it ends fast."

Something happened.

Klaus would not be able to describe it accurately afterward, not to Seraphine, not to anyone. It was not a decision. It was not a calculation.

 It was the feeling of a door opening inside him that he had not known was closed, and on the other side of the door was something that had been waiting a very long time and had simply run out of patience.

The silver blade in Bren's hand snapped.

Not through impact. Not through force. It simply broke, at the hilt, cleanly, as though it had always been brittle and the pieces fell into the grass.

Bren stumbled backward.

Klaus 's eyes were no longer grey.

They were burning amber, bright and deep and old, the color of something that had existed before language had words for it. The air around him was doing something. Not wind, there was no wind. 

The air was responding to him, pressing outward in slow concentric pulses, and where it pressed, the grass flattened and the light changed and the five shifted wolves behind Bren all dropped their heads at the same time with the involuntary submission of animals responding to something ancient in their own blood that recognized a hierarchy they had no modern context for.

They ran, all six of them.

Without orders, without coordinating, without the professional composure that defined a trained hunting party.

They simply ran, the silence that followed was absolute.

………………………….

Klaus 's vision cleared slowly.

The amber faded from his eyes, he could feel it fade the way you feel color draining from skin that has been in cold water. He was standing in the same place he had been standing. His hands were at his sides. He had not moved.

He looked at Seraphine.

She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before. He had learned her face in three weeks, had catalogued it the way he catalogued everything, without deciding to, out of habit. He knew her careful expressions and her controlled ones and the extremely rare ones that got through anyway. He did not know this one.

"Are you all right?"

Her voice was even. Professional. She had it back under control.

"Yes."

He looked at his hands. They were not shaking.

"What was that?"

She looked at him for a long moment. And then she said, the way she said everything, directly, without softening, because she was not built for softening, what she had been holding back since the forest, since the night she had sat with him in the dark and watched him breathe and told herself it was monitoring.

"That was the beginning."

She crossed the space between them. She was not a person who crossed spaces between herself and other people without specific intention, and she did it now with the deliberate quality of someone making a choice they have examined from all angles and decided to make anyway.

"You're not a wolf with an anomaly. You're what existed before wolves and vampires decided to be separate things. Your bloodline is the origin of half the supernatural lineages currently operating in this region. The power in your blood is older than the Silverstone pack. Older than Nocthaven. Older than almost anything, still walking."

She stopped in front of him.

"Your brother didn't exile you because you killed the Elder. He exiled you because he found out what you were carrying. Because it was going to wake up eventually and when it did, everything he built would exist in the shadow of it."

Klaus looked at her. She was close enough that he could see her eyes clearly, the crimson of them, which was not a warm color but was honest, which he had come to understand was her version of warmth. He could see the thing she was not saying along with everything she was.

"You've known this for three years."

"Yes."

"You were waiting for someone to break me enough that it would wake up."

A pause.

"Yes."

He looked at her for a long time.

"And?"

She held his eyes.

"And I did not expect you to be…"

She stopped herself.

He waited.

She started again.

"I did not expect the circumstances to make what happened next necessary."

It was the most careful sentence he had ever heard her construct, and he recognized the carefulness for what it was, which was the opposite of what she normally did, which was to say things with surgical precision and no more words than required.

He almost said: you could just say it.

He didn't. He understood why she wasn't. He was not entirely sure he could say it either, and he had spent less time pretending it wasn't true.

He was going to say something. He had figured out what he was going to say, something that acknowledged what she was not saying without making her say it, something that moved them into the next thing without requiring either of them to be different than they were.

He was going to say it.

And then three things happened at once.

The first: a sound in the trees at the northeast edge of the clearing. Not the retreating wolves,they were gone, their scent and sound receding. Something else. Something that had been very still and very patient and had timed its move perfectly.

The second: Seraphine's head turning toward the sound, her body shifting into the pre-movement state of a vampire who has processed a threat faster than his human-speed nervous system could catch up with.

The third: the thing that came out of the trees was carrying a blade, and it was not silver, and it was not aimed at Seraphine.

………………..

Klaus had time to see the face of the person who held it.

He recognized it. He would not say whose face it was. Not yet. The recognition landed in him and became one more thing he would carry forward, one more piece of the shape of what had been done and who had done it.

Then the blade came in.

He had been watching the wrong thing.

It caught him below the right shoulder, a different place than the last wound, worse in some ways, better in others. He knew instantly, the way you knew with injuries if you had enough experience with them, what it had and had not hit. Not the lung. Not the shoulder joint. But deep, and the blade had been pulled across rather than simply thrust in, which meant the damage was wide.

He did not fall.

He heard Seraphine move, the sound a vampire made when they had stopped being careful about human-observable speed, which was almost no sound at all and then a different sound, and then silence.

He pressed a hand to the wound.

His vision was doing something.

He had been wounded before. He knew what blood loss felt like in its stages. He knew the particular way the world went when the body's first priority shifted from function to survival, when it began rationing resources in ways that affected perception. He knew all of this.

Knowing it did not make his vision less blurry.

The edges of things were losing definition. The trees at the edge of the clearing were smearing. The grey sky above them was expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched his heartbeat. His legs were making a decision he had not authorized.

He went to one knee.

Not all the way down. One knee, his hand in the grass, his other hand still pressing on the wound.

He was going to get up in a moment. He was simply pausing. He was assessing. He was…

Footsteps.

Quiet ones. The specific quiet of someone who had learned to move without sound over a very long time and no longer needed to think about it.

He looked up.

And the world, which had been blurring, went momentarily clear.

The way vision did, sometimes, in the seconds before you lost it entirely, the way the body made one final effort, one last sharpening, before it stopped being able to.

Seraphine was crouching in front of him.

This close. This was the closest she had been, closer than the night in the forest, closer than the three weeks of careful maintained distance. He could see her with the absolute clarity of that final sharpening, the white hair, loose from whatever she had worn it in, falling in a curtain around both of them. 

The fine angles of her face. The line of her jaw, the particular shape of her mouth, the deep crimson of her eyes which at this distance were not a single color but many,layers of it, old and complex, like something that had been a long time becoming what it was.

She was not performing clinical detachment.

She was not performing anything.

Her hands were on his face, both of them, cool and very still, holding him the way you held something you did not want to fall.

"Stay with me."

She said it quietly. Without the precision she used for most things. Without the measured distance.

"Klaus . Stay with me."

He was looking at her face.

He was thinking several things at once, which was normal for him, which was something he had always done and which the blood loss was reducing but not eliminating. 

He was thinking about the wound and its location and his probability of being upright again in the next thirty seconds, which was not high. He was thinking about the face of the person who had held the blade. He was thinking about his brother and Liora looking away and Elder Cassian's open eyes in the dark.

He was thinking about Seraphine saying: I did not expect you to be…

And not finishing it.

He wanted to tell her she could finish it. That she could say the rest of that sentence and he would not make it something to be careful about.

 That three weeks of watching her be precise and controlled and extremely professional about absolutely everything had given him a fairly clear picture of what she was being precise and controlled about, and he had no objection to any of it, and she was not going to get to finish the sentence right now because his vision was doing a thing.

He could feel the amber trying to come back into his eyes. The thing in his blood was awake, had been awake, was more awake now, was responding to the injury the way it had responded in the forest, pushing back against the dark with the insistent warmth of something that had no intention of letting him die here.

Later, he thought. Later it could push back. He would need it later.

Right now his hand was in the grass and Seraphine's hands were on his face and she was very close and the last clear thing he saw was her eyes, the deep crimson of them, and the thing in them that she had not been able to control in the same moment she stopped trying to.

He opened his mouth.

He said something. He thought he said something. He was not entirely certain it made it out.

The edges of the world folded in.

Gently, the way a tide comes in.

The last thing he was aware of was her hands, still holding him.

And then the dark.

And in the dark, deep and quiet and very patient, the thing in his blood burned on