SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Selendra looked at his offered hand.

For the first time that night, she did not answer at once. Her eyes dropped to his palm, his wrist, the pulse under the skin. The warded quiet held around them, but the air had changed. What had been a conversation was now a threshold.

”Do not pull away,” she said.

”I gave you permission. I did not give you my trust, and I would rather you knew the difference before your teeth do.”

”I did not ask for your trust.”

That answer suited her, in a way few of her others had.

He kept his hand raised, fingers steady, his arm drawn tight. She closed the last step between them, near enough that a scent of cold flowers and iron reached him, and took his wrist in both cool hands. The chill of her grip sank past the skin at once.

”Look at me,” she said.

”And why would I do that.”

”Because some of what comes next will pull at you, and you will want a fixed point to hold. Use my eyes for it.”

He did not care for the answer. He obeyed it anyway.

Her gaze held on him, steady where the rest of the room had gone uncertain, and he fixed on it the way a man fixes on the horizon to keep from being sick. There was an absurdity in taking steadying advice from the creature about to open his vein, and he chose not to dwell on it.

Selendra brought his hand to her mouth and bit into the flesh below his thumb.

Pain cut quick and bright, a thin line of fire under the skin. He clenched his jaw against the sound trying to climb out of him and refused to give it the satisfaction. The first pull of blood was small, almost careful. The second was not. It dragged heat out of his arm and sent a slow, crawling weakness up toward his chest, the particular wrongness of feeling himself leave his own body one mouthful at a time.

He had expected the pain. He had not expected this. The bite was the smaller part of it. The greater part was the steady draw of her, patient and unhurried, pulling something out of him that he could feel and not see, and could not have stopped if he had tried. His pulse beat against her mouth, loud in his own ears, every beat drawing the next pull after it. He had bled before, for healers and for the small cruelties of training, and none of it had felt like this, like being read at the same moment he was emptied.

He kept his eyes on her face, as she had told him to.

And her face changed.

The focus went out of her eyes by degrees, the way a lamp dims when someone carries it into another room. She was looking at him, and a breath later she was looking through him, and a breath beyond that she was not looking at anything before her at all. Her pupils widened. Her lips parted on a breath that did not finish. Somewhere behind those eyes a place had opened that he had no door into.

That was the part that turned his stomach.

His blood. Her sight. He stood there bleeding into a vampire while she watched some future spool out of him, and the future was hers to read, not his. He felt the cost of it in his arm and the back of his throat, and he could not see one thing it bought. He had handed her a window and been left standing on the wrong side of the glass.

The grip on his wrist tightened. Her fingers pressed down as if the floor had tilted under her and his arm was the one thing keeping her upright.

A small sound left her, low in her throat, and it was neither pleasure nor pain but recognition. She had found something in the blood, and whatever it was had reached up and taken hold of her the way nothing in their conversation had managed.

He counted his own heartbeats to keep from speaking, and lost the count somewhere past twenty. Whatever she had found, it held her now, fully, and it made the warded room feel very far away.

Alfons did not move. He let her drink, because pulling back now felt worse than the bite, and because some cold, careful part of him wanted to see how the thing on her face would end.

The seconds stretched. The wards hummed in the walls. The towers stood black and whole beyond the glass, indifferent to whatever was passing between the two people in the room.

Then her shoulders drew in tight, as though something had struck the far end of what she was seeing, and her eyes came back.

They came back wrong. Brighter than before, and far less certain than any look she had given him all night. Whatever composure she had carried into his house had a crack running through it now, fine but real.

Selendra lifted her mouth from his skin and let his hand go. She stepped back, one slow pace, and the cold of her grip stayed on his wrist like a print pressed into snow.

A thin line of blood marked the wound below his left thumb. He did not look at it. He was watching her.

She wiped a trace of red from her lower lip with her thumb, the motion automatic, her gaze fixed somewhere past his shoulder as though the room had turned unfamiliar around her. Her face had lost its color. Whatever she had seen had not been small, it had not been kind, and it had been about him.

He drew his hand to his chest, not from fear, but because the steadiness of the room felt obscene next to the look on her face. The wards held. The towers stood. Nothing here had broken. Everything in her expression said something already had, somewhere down a road she had just walked without him.

He made himself speak, and kept his voice level, because the alternative was letting her hear how badly he wanted the answer.

”What did you see?”