Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

The Elder's Blood

He was woken before dawn by screaming.

Not a fight-scream. Not a pain-scream. The other kind, the kind that comes from the throat of someone who has seen something they cannot unsee and the body is responding before the mind has finished understanding what the eyes have delivered.

Klaus was on his feet before he was fully conscious. Fourteen years of combat training had made a hair-trigger out of his reflexes, and he crossed his room and got his door open before the second scream finished, his hand already reaching for the knife he had left on the table,which was not where he kept it, he kept it under his pillow, why was it on the table…

He ran.

The settlement was waking up around him, lights flickering on in windows, doors opening, voices low and alarmed and asking the same questions of each other with no answers available yet. 

He followed the direction of the screaming, which had stopped now and been replaced by something worse: a crowd gathering in silence, the specific silence of people standing around something they cannot explain.

Elder Cassian's quarters.

Klaus pushed through the edge of the crowd. He was the Beta,people moved for him without being asked, the reflex of pack hierarchy responding automatically. He pushed through to the center and stopped.

The Elder was on the ground.

He had been dead for some time. Long enough for the blood to dry at the edges. Long enough for the body to settle. He lay on his back near his doorway, which was open, as though he had been walking out or someone had been walking in. His white hair fanned around his head on the packed earth. His sharp old eyes were open.

Klaus crouched. He looked at the wound, a single clean strike, deep and deliberate. Precise. The work of someone who knew what they were doing and had taken their time doing it.

He became aware, slowly, of the smell.

He became aware of it the way you become aware of something wrong with your own reflection,not all at once, not with immediate understanding, but gradually, with the sick deepening certainty that something is not right.

The smell was blood and it was on the Elder and it was also on Klaus 's hands.

He looked down.

His palms were dark with it. Dried and flaking at the edges. Not a wound,he checked, quickly, methodically, the way he had been trained to do even when the body was doing something that interfered with clear thinking. Not his blood. He had not been cut. 

There was no wound, no scrape, nothing that explained how blood that was not his had gotten onto his hands while he slept.

He became aware that the crowd had gone very still.

He became aware that they were looking at his hands.

He became aware, all at once, of how this looked.

"That's…that's not…"

He stood. He turned. He looked at the faces of his pack, and what he found there was something he had never seen directed at him before in fifteen years.

Fear.

Not of the thing that had killed the Elder. Of him.

"I didn't…"

He stopped. His throat had closed around the rest of it.

From the back of the crowd, moving through it the way water moves through sand, without hurry, with absolute certainty, came Vanitas Dravon.

The Alpha's face, when it came into the light, was the face of a man who had just had something terrible confirmed.

The face of a brother who did not want to believe what he was seeing.

"Klaus ."

Aldric's voice was quiet. Careful.

"What happened here?"

Klaus looked at his hands. Looked at his brother. Looked at the Elder's body and the blood and the crowd and the silence, and felt something he had not felt since he was very young,a specific, groundless terror, the terror of someone who knows they are innocent and cannot make that fact visible.

"I don't know."

He said it clearly. Steadily. The way he always said things.

"I woke up to the screaming. I came out of my quarters and I ran here and…"

He stopped.

Because he could see it already. Could see the shape of what this was, the way you can see the shape of something in the dark before your eyes have adjusted, just the outline, just the edges, just enough to know it is very large and very close.

He looked at his brother.

Vanitas looked back.

And for one fraction of one second, so brief that Klaus 's rational mind immediately told him he had imagined it,something moved in his brother's grey eyes that was not grief, and was not shock, and was not the expression of a man who was surprised.

Then it was gone.

"We need to talk."

Vanitas said, his voice roughening with something that sounded exactly like pain.

"The council chambers. Now. All of us."

He did not look at Klaus again as he walked away.