Five people sat around a table of expensive wood. On each tray in front of them, plastic bags of blood. Not wine. Not food. Blood, the way other families served dinner.

"I called this meeting," Sophia Vale said, "because Bala has informed us the government can no longer send criminals."

The walls of the room were covered in photographs. Decades of them. Generations. The same faces in each one, unchanged, looking back from different eras wearing different clothes, the only constant their eyes and the specific quality of their stillness.

"Is this a joke?" Steff asked. The middle-aged Vale with grey hair.

Vince sat beside Celestine. Carrise, the youngest, across from them.

"No," Sophia said. "The walls are under pressure. Losing people now would be the worst possible decision the government could make. We need to find other sources."

Steff laughed. The laugh of someone who found the premise insulting. "Sophie. We have sacrificed more than these mortals can comprehend. There is nothing they can offer us in return."

Sophia recognized the tone. She had been managing it for longer than she wanted to remember. She turned to the girls.

"We’re fine with alternatives," Celestine and Carrise said together.

She turned to Vince. She saw it immediately. Something was wrong. Not the usual coldness. Something active underneath it, a current running too close to the surface.

He picked up his blood bag, squeezed it until it burst, and stood.

"Vincent," Sophia said.

"Don’t position yourself as our leader, SOOPHIA." The tone stopped Steff mid-motion. Vince had called her aunt since he could speak. Something had broken in him tonight and whatever had broken it was not in this room.

"Vince," Carrise said softly.

He turned to her. Grabbed her jaw with one hand.

"Don’t speak when I’m talking."

Steff moved in a blink, covering the distance in no time. Vince hit him with his left hand and Steff went into the wall like furniture. Then Vince lifted Carrise from her chair, dropped her on the ground, and walked out.

Celestine sat with her blood bag and watched the whole thing with the comfortable attention of someone watching something she had expected and found entertaining anyway.

"Should I go after him?" Carrise asked from the floor.

"No," Sophia said. "Leave him."

His voice carried back through the corridor as he moved away.

"I have lived for thousands of years. I will not watch my family submit to mortals and drink bear blood."

Then silence.

The family looked at each other. None of them could see what Sophia could almost see. The shape of what had set him off. The specific name of it.

On Vince’s mind, moving through the dark corridors of the mansion toward the campus, was Abram Nadez.

You put your hands on my slave, he thought. And then you stood between me and my girl. Tonight I drain you and put you under water where no one finds you.

He had spent decades learning to control the lust. Decades of discipline and restraint that most of the family hadn’t managed. He had been proud of that control. Tonight he didn’t want it.

He didn’t walk from the mansion to School Central. He simply appeared in the dark outside Vale 2, the way things appear when distance is optional, and he stood and he waited and he watched.

Across the campus, Abram Nadez was holding Ivy’s hand outside the hostel entrance.

Another girl, Vince thought, watching.

Harmione had ended things. Said she had met someone. Said it differently from how she usually said things, like she meant it this time, like something had shifted in her while Vince was occupied elsewhere.

Years of keeping her at the right distance. Keeping Azure for the other thing. Keeping everything organized and controlled and exactly where he had put it.

One boy from Hogsby had walked onto this campus two days ago and everything was crooked.

I’m going to kill you, Vince thought, watching him hold the other girl in the dark. I’m going to kill you now.

****

We reached Vale 2.

I was holding Ivy’s hand, her fingers smaller inside mine, and she turned and put her arms around me, her head against my chest. She held that for a moment without moving. No urgency. Just staying.

I didn’t know what she saw in me. Two days. That was all we’d had. But the outside had taught me that people decided things fast when the environment moved fast, and whatever Ivy had decided, she’d decided it without apology.

I rubbed her back slowly and she let go.

[Countdown: 00:15:21]

"Aren’t you coming in?" she asked, the alluring tone that reminded me of May.

"Not tonight," I said.

She kissed my cheek. "The bell rings soon. Walk fast when it does." She turned and went inside.

I didn’t move. I stood and listened to her footsteps go up the stairs, heard the door open and then close. Safe. Then I started walking.

[Countdown: 00:12:13]

The bell rang. One clear note across the campus, the kind that carried. Last night I hadn’t heard it. Last night I had been in Azure’s room understanding what I was. Tonight I heard it and understood what it meant. I looked back.

Vale 2’s lights went out. One window at a time, each one going dark in sequence, a practiced rhythm, students who had learned the schedule down to the minute. Then the other hostels. Then the security lights along the path. Campus dark. Complete.

[Countdown: 00:09:58]

A second bell. Single note. The first had been a warning. This one was something else.

The wind changed. Not stronger. Different in character, carrying a cold that didn’t belong to the temperature, the specific cold that had been following me since the Vale mansion, since the trees, since a woman in the dark had asked me what I was and hadn’t gotten a satisfying answer.

I stood in the dark and put my hand in my pocket and felt the folded page.

Easiest Way to Kill a Vampire.

I had read it enough times that I could recite it. The question was whether reading it was the same as being ready to use it, in the dark, against something that had lived for thousands of years and had spent the last several hours deciding.

[Countdown: 00:00:06] 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

I looked at the dark campus around me and took a breath and let the plain version of me come fully forward. The one that had survived twenty years of things that wanted to kill it.

Come on then, I thought.

Let’s see what a thousand years is worth.