Page 16 of Blood Currents
But even as he held me, even as his lips pressed soft kisses to my temple, I could feel something shifting.Not a retreat exactly, but a careful gathering of walls I’d thought we’d torn down completely.
“What happens now?”I asked, my voice barely audible.
He didn’t answer right away.When he did, his voice was so quiet I barely caught it.
“Now we survive.However we can.”
The careful neutrality was creeping back, the studied distance.Not completely—his arms were still around me, his body still warm against mine.But something had changed, some invisible line had been drawn.
“Elio—”
“Go to bed, Mari.”He pressed a kiss to my forehead, soft and heartbreakingly formal.“Tomorrow will be complicated enough.”
7
Marigold
Sleep wasn’t coming.Again.
The dorm was quiet, but my thoughts weren’t.They spun in circles like caged birds, too frantic to land.I sat at my desk in my study, one hand braced on the open Magical Theory textbook, the other absently stroking Scout’s bony skull where he lay coiled on the desktop.The words on the page refused to settle into meaning.I reread the same paragraph three times and still couldn’t tell you what it said.
Keane.Elio.The council.
Keane’s face kept rising in my mind.I hadn’t seen him since that night.Hadn’t heard his voice.I didn’t even know if he was alive.
And Elio—what were we even doing?We’d moved past the masks and games to find something real together.So why did it feel like he was suddenly saying goodbye?
I was supposed to study.Iwantedto study.
But instead, I stared at the shadows the lamp cast on the walls, watching them flicker and shift.The longer I watched, the more the shadows felt alive.Not in a frightening way but in a familiar, bone-deep way.My magic was responding.
The wellspring.
Its presence was always here, a low hum beneath the stones of Wickem, especially here in the royal dorm.Normally it was easy to ignore, like background music.But tonight, it thrummed louder, unsteady and restless, like something beneath the surface was straining to be heard.
I wanted to go to it, to see the wellspring itself, but the increased Shroud Guard presence on campus—all looking for Keane—made leaving the dorm less than pleasant.They patrolled throughout the campus, looking for vampires, they said, but really watching us with too-knowing eyes.
Sighing, I looked at my book again and then shook my head.Scout wandered to the edge of my desk.He peered back at me, hollow sockets glowing with that faint green shimmer.Tiny shadows twitched around his joints as his tail bones curled into a question mark.
“What do you think?”I asked.
He tilted his skull, the gesture so eerily human it almost made me smile.
I turned in my chair, pressing my palm against the wall.The stone was cool.Unyielding.But beneath it, I felt the current—the subtle pulse of ancient magic that ran like blood through the academy’s veins.
Show me, I thought.Please.I need to know he’s safe.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then slowly, the sensation shifted.
The hum grew jagged, erratic.My magic senses sharpened, narrowing in on something like a tangle in the flow, a knot in the weave of the wellspring’s energy.Not a place of death, exactly, but a place where the natural current of magic warped, as though flowing around something unnatural.Unwelcome.
I closed my eyes, reaching deeper.
It wasn’t a vision.More like a pressure on my mind.A directional pull.And it led—unmistakably—to Keane’s suite.
My eyes snapped open.
