Alex
Skye is pressed to my chest when I open my eyes. I stroke my fingers down her spine while staring aimlessly at the ceiling. She has to leave today for the funeral and to spend some time with her family. I already put in her bereavement leave, not that it matters. The campus is shut down as it stands. I doubt I’ll be able to access the lab.
I jolt, gripping the fabric of Skye’s flannel pajamas at the base of her spine. She flinches but settles back into sleep with the deepest, most exhausted sigh I’ve ever heard, and I glance at the clock on her bedside table. It’s early morning.
We spent the night at my place. I don’t remember coming here….
I slide away from her, careful not to wake her, and reality hits me the second I glance down at my thermal pants, which are hacked off at the knee.
I was in the lab last night. We were drilling, finally bringing what should have gone down as a successful production to fruition after weeks of preparation and careful planning.
It all went to hell, and I was buried under the ice.
I whirl back to Skye, who has dark circles under her eyes, and her fingertips, now clutching the pillow I just vacated, are tinged blue.
“Hey!” Toby hisses from the door, which is open just a crack, just enough for me to see his bared teeth and wild eyes.
“What the fuck?”
He shushes me and slowly opens the door. “I have coffee going. Do not wake her up. I’m shocked she even agreed to go to bed.”
“What happened, Toby?” I step into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind us. He waves a hand toward a stack of clothing on the kitchen counter. It’s from my condo, which he has the code to, but still. “How long have I been out?”
“Maybe four hours?”
Relief washes through me, numbing some of my sharper senses that are currently going haywire. Toby tries to pour another cup of coffee, but the pot is empty, nothing but smooth black droplets that he frowns at, and meets my eyes. “Shit. You don’t actually drink coffee, do you?”
“I honestly don’t mind it,” I admit.
“Take a shower, and I’ll make another pot. We have some shit to discuss.”
I turn back to the hallway, but my gaze catches on Skye’s door. “What did she do?”
“We have time–”
“Please. I need to know.”
“She got you out of the tunnels. Used her magic or whatever. I’ll go into detail once you’re out of those blood-soaked clothes. I already spent an hour scrubbing her carpet free of your blood. I’d rather not ruin her couch.”
Twenty minutes later, just past 7:00 in the morning, I’m pacing the room while Toby pours himself what I think might be his fifth cup of coffee in the time span of an hour, and I’m listening to him explain what happened after the tunnel collapse.
“I called her yesterday. The funeral was yesterday. She didn’t say she was coming back,” I argue when he mentions Skye suddenly showed up outside of the lower levels of the biology department shortly after the collapse happened, and the evacuation of campus began.
“She’s got a weird thing going on,” he says, motioning to his head. “She made me get a bunch of gear from the locker room while I argued with Abby about how you’re a vampire, which she now knows, by the way. I was distracted by my mate, and Skye took advantage of that. One second, I catch her pulling on a beanie, and the next moment, she’s in my head, looking for you. It was the strangest, most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“She’s a mystic.”
“She said as much, but aren’t they supposed to, like, read prophecies and shit? She was in my head!”
“She’s a little different.”
“You don’t say?” He laughs and promptly burns his mouth on his coffee. “She knew where to find you. She told us to meet her here in twenty minutes. Abby passed out. I was hanging on by a thread but managed to get us here in fifteen minutes, and she was already here–with you.”
I scrub my hand over my face. “She spirited to me and brought us here the same way.”
He blinks several times and cocks his head. “She what?”
“She can travel from one place to another by breaking herself apart on a molecular level.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
He’s stunned into silence, blinking slowly like an owl. “I don’t get it.”
“A few weeks ago, when she accidentally came in contact with Stardust, and I told you she was hungover… I lied. Her reaction to Stardust was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I’d know, because you were hooked on it our junior year.”
“I was not.”
I fix him with a sharp look.
“Okay, fine. A little bit.”
“She,” I cut in, “is made of it. It’s naturally in her blood. The synthetic variant riled her senses, made her powers… act funny. But–” I step toward him, my hands outstretched in surrender. “Stardust is meteors, right? Ground up with synthetics strong enough to deliver it into the bloodstream for the thrill. Skye is made of the same thing. It’s something she naturally produces.”
“She’s a meteor?”
I heave an annoyed breath. “It’s her magic. It comes from somewhere else.”
He nods like he understands some of this nonsense. Because to scientists like us, this is exactly what nonsense sounds like. “The realm of the gods is a real thing then, isn’t it? It would align with her current research into far-off star systems.”
“It doesn’t matter because it’s not something I’m ever going to be able to reproduce. I got a blood sample from her. Laney–Laney processed it for me, and I’ve pored over that same slide over and over again. I’ve tasted her, for fuck’s sake, and her blood doesn’t give me a high. It’s… normal. Beautiful but not…. Her magic isn’t carried in her blood, but it’s there in the sample. I just can’t access it. She… has to give it away.”
“You’re talking about the Goddess particle, aren’t you?” Toby straightens and sets his coffee mug on the kitchen island.
“Of course I am. It’s the one thing I’ve dedicated my research to for my entire career. It’s what I’ve been praying we’ll find traces of in those fossils and artifacts. But I can’t harness it. I can’t reproduce it. Skye is the Goddess particle, and she’s–mine. I can’t use her. I won’t.”
“She healed you.”
“What?”
“Your legs were broken. Like, crushed.” He leans his hip on the counter and folds his arms across his chest. “I gave you five healing tonics, and that stopped the bleeding. Then, I gave you a little bit of my blood.”
“You what?”
He holds up his hand, rotating his palm so I can see the bandage. “Don’t worry, man,” he says with a smirk. “I just sliced myself open and dropped some blood into your mouth. It wasn’t intimate or anything.”
“Do not–”
“Do that again? You were dying, and Skye was the same color as the walls. She looked like she was dying and started pulling off her clothes to offer you what little life she had left on a silver platter. I sent her to bed. You’re welcome.”
“Do you see now why I’ve–”
“Why you kept her at arm’s length? Yeah, trust me. After last night, I get it. Who else knows what she is and what she can do?”
“Her being a mystic is common knowledge, given who her father is.”
“We suspect the tunnel collapse wasn’t a random event, and the data Abby collected proves it,” he guts out, his eyes holding intensely on mine.
I brace a hand on the wall and turn my face toward the window, closing my eyes.
Toby continues, “You told me you thought someone was still in the main channel. I think you were right. There was someone there, someone who wasn’t part of the lab. Someone who shouldn’t have been there. Someone that I–I thought was you when I got on the elevator with the last of the lab assistants, and then he disappeared when we got to the surface.”
“Toby?”
“You need to be honest with me, man. I need you to trust me with this. You told me you were a vampire, and what did I do? I fucking shrugged, asked if you can still eat steak or just suck them dry, right? I don’t fucking care, but I care about this. Abby is involved now. Skye is heavily involved. Our women. My mate and your–well, knowing Skye for as long as I have, if she’s even remotely interested in you, it’s a big fucking deal to her.”
I shake my head, but Toby crosses the room, dead set on cornering me.
“I’ve known you for a decade. I’ve known you, this version of you, and I like you. I don’t want you to get hurt again. Last night fucking sucked, and I know, for a fact, we’re going to be running around with our heads cut off today trying to make sense of what the university expects us to do now that millions of dollars and ten years of research are gone in a matter of seconds.”
“I’m a prince, Toby,” I cut in, turning to meet his gaze. “My parents are king and queen of a kingdom with predominantly vampire populations thousands upon thousands of miles from here, over the north pole. I was twenty when I left. I wandered for three years before I stumbled into Lunaria, half dead, and lied my way into getting admission to the university.”
Toby doesn’t move. He doesn’t so much as breathe, just stares, his cheeks stained a soft pink with emotion he refuses to voice, let alone show.
“There was a war. It dragged on for nine years, and I put an end to it.”
“How?”
“I killed a rival queen of an enemy kingdom. I had her cornered by some miracle–showed up at the right place at the right time–and she was alone. I had one shot to just end it, and I did, but she had a son my age. A real fucking piece of work. He was the one leading her armies against my parents’ kingdom and doing everything in his power to turn the public against my mother.”
Toby’s shoulders slump just a touch, his body adjusting to the torrent of information moving between us–my life’s story, now his to know.
“My mother isn’t like me. She’s a turned vampire, and Queen Matilda started campaigning for a true vampire empire where born vampires rule and turned vampires go back to being the slaves they were originally created to be, in her opinion. Shifters, too. She said they were meant for food and shouldn’t have their own kingdoms and territories, so she targeted them first, her armies, led by her son, raiding entire packs and sucking them dry. The shifters barely had a leg in the fight. My uncle Michael, a hybrid, got involved, so my father got involved. I was a kid. I was a kid hearing that Queen Matilda’s war was being waged against my mother, who was turned against her will hundreds of years ago by vampires like me. I enlisted as soon as I was old enough to fight and had been wielding blades and honing my skills long before that. I stepped onto the battlefield at sixteen and saw the worst of the world for those three years. I trained in apothecary medicine just to save what mortal lives I could when the witches and shifters joined the fight, but we kept losing, and then–then I had her, and she was right there, and I didn’t think. I didn’t think I’d never be able to go home and see my parents again. I just killed her, and her son vowed to spend the rest of his immortal life hunting me down, and now he has.”
“You think he’s here?”
I push off the wall, pacing past Toby. “He’s been here. He’s been killing again. And he’ll target Skye to get to me, just like he used Laney to get my attention.”
I look up from my pacing and find Skye huddled in the archway leading to her bedroom, her weary eyes locked on my face.