Page 8 of Bitten & Burned
My skirt had slid off the chair when I sat. I scooped it up and stepped into it, shimmying the fabric into place.
Vael started shrugging on his waistcoat. “Well, I’ll hand it to Silas, that amulet has been the most… useful thing we’ve found.”
I touched the jewelry in question—a long silver chain with a polished, emerald-cut piece of bloodstone. Silas had carved it from a larger stone in his office, saying that bloodstone held trace amounts of ancient blood. Probably the reason most of Camarae’s followers used them in their worship of the goddess.
For a blood curse, Silas claimed, it could absorb more than just disease. It could drink the curse itself.
As I dragged the pendant back and forth on the strong silver chain, my thoughts slid, uninvited, to my father—an arcane silversmith who could coax wonders from raw metal and magic. He used to say silver remembered every touch of the gods, that it bent more easily for those who prayed while hammering.
Father had tried several times to teach me about silver’shealing abilities. But I hadn’t listened as well as I should have. And this amulet wasn’t his work. Maybe that was why I hadn’t reached out to him very much lately.
The space between us felt wider than any curse, forged from years of disappointment and silence. If I went to him wearing another arcanist’s handiwork, he might just scowl himself into an early grave.
“It was lucky Dr. Drummond had a piece of bloodstone he could cut for me,” I said, running my fingertips around the pendant’s edge.
“I had several pieces I could have given him,” Vael muttered.
I sighed, ignoring him. “I just wish it didn’t need cleansing so often. But I suppose I can’t exactly wear the twenty-five-pound slab he keeps in his office.”
“Iwish he’d see you at night,” Vael groused, tucking his shirt back into his trousers, “so I could go with you. Learn something.”
“He’s not a night owl like me,” I said. “Or you.”
“Still.” Vael’s tone sharpened. “Feels like he’s purposefully excluding me.”
Old scholarly grudges ran like ink in Verdune—many in the Arcanum still bristled at the idea of vampiric scholars rubbing shoulders with humans, no matter how useful those scholars might be, but Vael had no reason to suspect Silas Drummond counted among those close-minded Arcanists.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, reaching for him. “Why would he exclude you? He’s my mentor?—”
“Formermentor,” Vael corrected.
“He still helps me with things; he’s still my mentor.”
His eyebrow arched slightly, but he didn’t press the issue further.
“Besides, he cares about me, I care about you—therefore,hecares about you.” I knew I was stretching logic thin, but the alternative was harder to swallow. I never liked to admit Vael was right about anything.
He snorted. “Rowena, no. I’m a vampire, and he’s made nosecret how he feels about vampires—or vampires courting humans. Or anyone besides humans courting humans.”
“That’s conjecture. He’s never said anything to me to support such a theory.”
“I don’t need him to say it. You don’t live as long as I have without developing a sixth sense for these things. It’s my survival sense.”
“That’s not a real thing.”
“Reality’s what we make it. What’s real to you might not be real to me—we’ve lived different lives. You might not have a survival sense, but I do, and I’m a hundred and twenty years old. So…” He let it hang.
“So…?” I prompted. “You know better than me?”
“Exactly.” He smirked, buttoning his cuffs as I swatted at him.
“I can’t help it if I’m a wise old vampire.”
“You’re a wise old something,” I shot back.
He only grinned, turning away to slip on his waistcoat and button it.
Vael crossed slowly to his armoire and opened one of the doors. He ran his fingers through the variety of cravats he kept there before settling on a royal blue one.
