Page 9 of Veinblood
Each step sends wrong signals through my nervous system. My body seems heavier, the air thicker. The sounds of traffic and Christmas shoppers create a volume of noise that my senses are struggling to filter.
In Meridian, I learned to hear the whisper of wind through stone, the distant cry of hawks, the subtle shift in breathing that meant danger. Here, car horns and shouting voices and music from storefronts assault my ears without meaning.
How did I deal with this every day? How did it not bother me?
A digital display in a bank window flashes the date and time. December 23, 5:47 P.M. Barely minutes after I disappeared. It’s as though no time has passed at all here while I spent months in Meridian learning to fight, learning to survive, learning to love.
It makes no sense.
This has to be some kind of illusion. Maybe a trick of Sereven's, designed to break my spirit.
But my building comes into view anyway, bringing both relief and despair. The familiar red brick facade, the chipped paint on the entrance door I’ve walked through a thousand times.
This can’t be real. It can’t be real.
I ride the elevator to my floor in a daze, watching the numbers climb while my heart hammers against my ribs. My key slides into the lock after three attempts, hands trembling too badly to get it right the first time. The deadbolt clicks, and I push the door open to step into the unsettling view of a life I thought I’d left behind forever.
Dishes sit in the rack where I left them a lifetime ago. A book lies open and facedown on the coffee table, marking the page from when my biggest concern was finishing the story and finding out whether the characters could get past their differences and find love. Christmas tree lights blink in slow patterns, casting red and green shadows across the walls like some cheerful mockery of the power that now flows through my veins.
Everything is undisturbed. Everything belongs to a woman who no longer exists.
I move through the apartment on autopilot, trailing my fingers along the furniture. The couch where I’d curl up with wine and a streaming service. The kitchen where I made elaborate Sunday breakfasts for one. The bedroom that I never shared with anyone.
That woman never suspected she'd been born in anotherworld. Never imagined she had power sleeping in her blood, waiting for the right moment to wake. Never dreamed she'd find her other half in a man who commanded shadows and suffered through torture that would have broken lesser souls.
In the bathroom, a stranger with my face stares back through the mirror. My cheekbones and jawline are more defined now, shaped by months of better nutrition than processed food and stress eating. My eyes are no longer simple brown. They shine with silver flecks that are clearly visible under the fluorescent light. My hair is longer, more silver than brown, and pulled back into an intricate braid that Mira taught me.
All physical evidence of the power that awakened in me. Changes that I’ll never be able to explain to friends and neighbors I never thought I’d see again.
Pressing my palm against the mirror, I watch the silver light ripple along the back of my hand and down my fingers. When I focus, drawing on the control Telren taught, and Sacha helped me forge, the light brightens slightly then fades.
Stripping out of my clothes slowly, I fold each item, and place them on the countertop, then step naked into the shower. I turn the water as hot as I can stand. The scalding spray burns my skin, but I welcome the pain. It's something real, somethingthat cuts through the numbness threatening to swallow me whole. Water streams down my face, mixing with tears I didn’t realize were falling.
Sacha.
His absence hits me again. The memory of his hands on my skin, shadows trailing across my shoulders like the softest silk. The way his control would crackjust slightlywhen we kissed, power rising between us in ways that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with trust. The careful way he’d hold me, as if I were something precious he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to have. The vulnerability he'd show only to me, when the mask came down and I could see the man beneath the legend.
I press my forehead against the shower wall and sob until my head aches. It comes in waves, grief and terror and rage mixing into something that threatens to tear me apart. When it finally subsides, I straighten and wash mechanically, hoping the routine will steady me.
Through my exhaustion, through the fog of grief, the silver-haired woman’s words from my vision whisper into my mind.
The crystal did not destroy. It separated. What belongs together will find its way back.
Separated. Not destroyed. The distinction matters, though I can’t grasp how it helps. If we’re truly meant to be together, if that prophecy about shadow and storm has any truth to it at all, then this separation can’t be permanent.
Therehasto be a way back.
There has to be!
Closing my eyes, I tip my head back, and let the water flow over my hair and face. My mind races through possibilities, each one more desperate than the last. Magic brought me to Meridian. Magic could return me there. But how?
I need to know where Sacha is, whether Mira and the others are still alive and waiting for us outside Thornspire. If Varam has started the evacuation of Stonehaven. And whether Lisandra still sits in her cell below Sacha’s chambers.
When the water runs cold, I turn off the shower and step out, drying on a towel that I can’t help but compare to the rough cloth in Meridian. Walking naked into my bedroom, I open the closet and take out clothes. The jeans are too stiff, the sweater too soft, even my underwear feels wrong. Everything is designed for comfort rather than survival, for a life built around ease rather than purpose. I dress anyway, because walking around naked won't solve anything.
In the kitchen, I stare blankly at appliances that once seemed essential, and now feel like frivolous luxuries. An electric can opener. A stand mixer I used twice. A coffee maker with fourteen different settings because apparently choice in coffee was once important enough to justify counter space.
I start the coffee anyway and walk to the living room, where the remote control waits on the coffee table exactly where I left it. The television flickers to life when I press the power button, the screen brightening to show a weatherman gesturing at swirling patterns of blue and white covering the Midwest.
