Dracula turned.
The whites of his eyes were gone, drowned in blood-red, the crimson pooling against irises like molten garnet. Tracks of the same red streaked from the corners, cutting through the pale of his cheeks. He was crying blood.
Lisa, still shaking off the whip-crack of the fold, finally focused on him. Her breath caught—just a soft gasp—and then her hands flew to her mouth. Tears welled and spilled before she could even speak.
"Vlad…" It was barely a whisper.
His gaze locked on her, and something shifted. Astonishment cracked his face open first—then relief, raw and dangerous in its purity. But it didn't last. His eyes scanned her, slow and deliberate, from the uneven ends of her hacked hair to the bruises blooming along her arms, to the way she held herself too still, too careful. Realization set in like a weight.
Then his eyes snapped to me.
I didn't move, just stood a few steps behind her, looking at him like I'd just stumbled into the shadow of a nuclear bomb that had decided to check my dental records before detonation.
The fury in his face deepened. His jaw flexed, and I saw the tension bleed into his posture—shoulders drawing back, hands curling, breath sharp through his nose.
"Whoa," I said quickly, lifting both hands in the universal I'm not here to kill your wife gesture. "Let's just—"
He moved.
Not walked. Not ran. He blurred—an afterimage with weight, the sound of boots hitting earth almost an afterthought. He closed the space between us so fast the air buckled.
My eyes went wide—panic, cold and clear in the same instant—and my hand twitched on instinct.
"Flock!"
Light burst from my shoulders—eight star-birds flaring into existence, wings drawn wide as I yanked them into intercept paths.
The first impact felt like trying to block a train with a kite. Dracula's claws hit the lead bird and ripped through it like smoke, the blow still carrying enough force to slam into my raised forearms. Pain shot up the bones, my boots skidding back through the dirt.
Another shadow—he was already to my right—swipe for my neck. I ducked, the wind of his strike hot against my ear, one bird jamming itself into his arm to slow it by a fraction. I pivoted, tried to open space, but he was on me again, this time low, sweeping my legs.
Star-Limb flared—one burst—and I vaulted over him, twisting midair just in time to see his head snap up, eyes burning brighter.
Two birds dove for his face. He tore them apart. Literally—one claw hooking and splitting them in half before they dissolved to motes.
"Persistent," he growled, and the sound was less a voice and more an earthquake learning to talk.
He lunged, and this time I wasn't fast enough. His hand closed around my throat—iron fingers, cold as stone—and slammed me back against the charred remains of a wall. Breath punched out of me in one ugly sound.
My vision sparked. I jammed the First Star into my hand, slashing upward, but he caught my wrist mid-swing and squeezed. My fingers went numb instantly. The blade fell.
I grabbed at his wrist with my free hand, more for leverage than escape, my boots scrabbling against the wood for a purchase that didn't exist.
He leaned in. The crimson in his eyes swirled, his fangs just visible between parted lips. "You took her from me."
I opened my mouth—whether to explain or beg, I don't know—but all that came out was a strangled, "Wait—"
And then—
"Vlad!"
Lisa's voice, sharp and breaking.
The pressure around my throat stopped, frozen mid-crush. His head turned, slow, as if the air itself had thickened between us.
She had stepped forward, tears streaking her cheeks, her gaze locked on him like nothing else in the world existed.
He dropped me. Not gently—my knees buckled, and I hit the ground coughing—but he didn't finish it. His body pivoted fully toward her, tension still rolling off him like heat from stone.
I stayed crouched there for a beat, sucking air like I'd just been reborn. Then I let out a breath that had been trapped since the moment he turned around.
"Holy…" I didn't finish. I just rubbed at my throat and thanked whatever cosmic scheduling error had kept my head attached.
Dracula stood there, chest rising like a slow tide, every muscle drawn taut as if the next movement might shatter the ground.
Lisa didn't flinch. She stepped forward again—small, careful steps, like approaching a wounded animal with teeth sharp enough to end her.
"It's me," she said. Her voice trembled at the edges, but the core was steady. "It's really me, Vlad."
He stared at her as if daring the world to prove her false. His eyes were still drowning in that unnatural red, but they moved over her face with aching precision—every line, every bruise, every uneven breath. His fingers twitched at his sides, like they were fighting the urge to reach for her.
Lisa took the last step. "I'm here."
The dam broke.
Dracula's arms came up, almost hesitant at first, then crushingly certain. He pulled her into him, folding her into his chest as if she might vanish if he loosened his grip for even a heartbeat. His eyes closed, and the tension in his frame bled out in one long, ragged breath that sounded half like a sob.
Lisa clung back just as fiercely, her shoulders shaking. "I thought I'd never see you again," she whispered into the fabric of his coat.
"You won't lose me again," he murmured, the deep timbre of his voice carrying both a vow and a threat to anyone who might try. His hand came up, threading through her short, uneven hair, palm cupping the back of her head.
I stayed very, very still where I'd landed, on my knees in the dirt, rubbing the bruises forming around my throat. My mind was running a hundred-yard dash while the rest of me pretended to be a piece of scenery.
Options: run? No—folding blind would drop me God-knows-where and probably straight into a pack of Church thugs. Attack? Absolutely not, unless I was looking to see how many seconds my body stayed recognizable. Talk? That could go either way, depending on whether he was still in "rip out your spine" mode.
Slowly—like ink diluting in water—the red in Dracula's eyes began to fade. The bleeding whites returned, human again in color if not in depth. His shoulders loosened fractionally. The grip he had on Lisa gentled, becoming something protective rather than desperate.
For a long moment, they just stood there—two people the world had tried to break, stealing back the time between heartbeats.
Then he finally, finally, turned toward me.
I froze.
Still on my knees, one hand at my throat, I might as well have been a deer catching sight of a wolf from ten feet away. My brain did that very helpful thing where it decided to remind me—in vivid, cinematic detail—exactly how fast he'd moved before.
His gaze pinned me. Silent. Measuring.
And I didn't dare breathe.
Dracula's gaze held me where I knelt—unblinking, forensic, the way a predator studies the distance between hunger and consequence. Lisa's hands were still fisted in the fabric of his coat, grounding him, but the line of his shoulders said it would take very little for the night to split open again.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Not loud. Not even particularly deep this time. But it was the kind of quiet that made the air behave.
I coughed—an undignified, rasping scrape that reminded my throat what it felt like to be a wineglass in a fist.
"Sable," I managed, palm to the bruise blooming under my jaw. "Sable Nova."
His eyes flicked to my hand, to the constellation-lit seams in my robe, to the silver-threaded dreads tied back at my nape. He said nothing. The ruined timbers around us creaked as a cold breeze combed the ash, lifting a thin veil that moved like breath over the blackened ground. Somewhere behind the church, a horse stamped once and then thought better of making noise.
I planted my boots and pushed up to standing—slow, telegraphing every inch of height like I was approaching a skittish god with a bad track record. The world tilted; ash smell went sharp; the ground steadied.
"I—" I started, then stopped. If I offered too much, it'd sound like a plea. Too little, it'd sound like a lie. My tongue, exceedingly helpful, tried both.
"I'm… not from here," I said, because understatement is my spiritual gift. "I found her in Târgoviște. At the stake. The priests had already—"
Lisa's fingers tightened in his coat, a gentle press at his ribs. Her voice came in, soft but carrying. "Vlad. Let me."
He didn't look at her. Not yet. But the tension in his jaw eased by a fraction, and his head dipped an almost-imperceptible degree—permission, or at least a stay of execution.
She stepped half a pace forward, the way a person does when they want to put themselves between two forces without making a scene of it. She didn't stand in front of him; she stood just at his side, where he could feel her there if he reached.
"They came to the house first," she said, and her voice skimmed along the surface of the words instead of sinking into them. "Questions. Accusations. An old woman saw my instruments—glass, copper, a coil I'd made for heat. They called it witchcraft. I told them I was a doctor." Her mouth tightened. "They told me I was what they said I was."
Images flashed behind her eyes that she didn't offer us: a table knocked over, vials shattered, rough hands, a doorframe taking an imprint of a shoulder. She gave us only what we needed.
"They took me to Târgoviște," she continued. "No trial—only a sermon."
At that, the muscle in Dracula's cheek jumped. His hand, hanging at his side, flexed once like a claw remembering a throat.
"They tied me to the stake," she said, and her breath did the smallest, most treacherous stutter. She mastered it on the next word. "They lit it. And then Sable appeared. Cut me free. Brought me to the forest." She looked back at me as if to confirm to herself that I was still there. "He carried me when I couldn't walk. He brought me here, because I told him this is my home."
I dipped my head—just enough for her to see what the words were in my skull: thank you for telling him, thank you for not letting me talk myself into getting eaten, please keep doing whatever magic that is with your hand on his heart.
Dracula finally glanced down at her, and the red haze lingering at the rims of his irises retreated another shade. When he lifted his gaze to me again, the white had bled back fully, leaving only the unnatural, candle-hot carmine of his pupils. The heat behind them hadn't lessened; he'd only set it behind glass.
"You appeared," he said, tasting the word as if it were a species he'd read about but never bothered to hunt. "You cut her free. You moved her across distance like a step taken in a room. And you brought her to me."
"Yes." Keep it simple, Sable. "Those are the relevant parts."
"You are not human," he said, still toneless, as if filing the observation where it belonged.
"Debatable," I said before my sense of self-preservation could throttle me. "But I pass in good lighting."
If Lisa hadn't been standing there, I suspect I'd have learned how far into the soil a body can be pressed before it becomes an archaeological exhibit. As it was, her hand spread flat at his sternum, a wordless now is not the time, and the corner of his mouth made a minute, reluctant motion that might have been the ghost of a smirk in a kinder century.
"What are you?" he asked.
"Traveler," I said. "Foreign. Wrong clothes, worse timing. I don't belong to your church, or any other. I saw a fire being used for something it shouldn't be used for and decided to make that someone else's problem."
The red flickered at the edges of his pupils again—anger, or memory. "The Bishop," he said, and the title came out like a verdict. "His men."
"Yes," Lisa said, and for the first time there was iron in it. "He called it righteousness. He has decided that God agrees with every thought he's ever had."
Dracula's head tilted. The wind shifted; the ash smell changed to something like old paper and wet stone. He looked past me, toward the smoldering ribs of the house, the charcoaled skeleton of a life. A woman's kettle melted to a useless flower. A child's stool black as bone.
"This is where you lived with me," he said to Lisa, and the softness of it hurt. He reached out and, with two fingers, touched what had once been the threshold. The black flaked like a scab. He lifted the hand and looked at the soot on his skin as if it had done something to him and he wasn't sure whether to be offended or amused.
Lisa turned slightly toward him, her voice dipping low. "I told you the world could be cruel, Vlad," she said. "But I told you, too, that it could be learned. Don't let this moment teach you the wrong lesson."
His eyes closed for a single beat; when they opened, the blood-bright rims had faded almost entirely. He drew in a breath, the kind you take when you're about to set a bone and know it will break again if you do it wrong.
Then he looked back to me.
I made very sure my hands were empty—the First Star asleep at my wrist, the proxies spread like pale sparks in the bare trees around us, silent and still. I kept my weight on my heels, my throat deliberately exposed; every muscle in my back wanted to do the opposite, but telegraphing surrender is an art form if you're committed to living.
"Thank you," he said.
No ceremony. No flourishes. Just the words, like a heavy thing put down between us so we could both see it.
I blinked. "I'm sorry—what?"
He inclined his head. Not a court bow. Not the old theatrical sweep that would have made mockery of the moment. A warrior's nod across a battlefield where the thing slain wasn't each other. "You saved my wife," he said. "I owe you a debt."
It should not have astonished me as much as it did, but there I was, teetering on the edge of a laugh because my brain had not yet recovered from being nearly unscrewed from my neck. For a second I genuinely wondered if my vision was still sparkling from lack of oxygen and my mind had helpfully produced a polite Dracula to keep me docile.
"Right," I said, eloquent as a rock. "Great. That's… good. I thought I was hallucinating from being—" I made a vague circling motion at my throat. "—but this is better."
Lisa made a sound that was almost a laugh, the kind that starts in the chest and comes out as steam because it's been a long day. Dracula's gaze cut to her, softened, then returned to me with that measured stillness.
"Your magic," he said. "It is not the clergy's. It is not of their saints."
"No," I said. "I wouldn't know what to do with a saint if one did me the courtesy of showing up. It's my own. From… far away." I let the words lie simple. I'd watched too many men in positions of violent curiosity latch onto complexity like a dog on a ham bone. "I don't preach. I don't take tithes. I don't need a congregation. I needed to make sure Lisa Țepeș didn't turn into a cautionary wet log."
A pause. The ash hissed in a ruined beam as something within it finally surrendered.
"Will you hunt them?" I asked before I could stop myself. I didn't say them like a man begging justice; I said it like a man measuring how much time he had left to be out of the way of a storm.
His teeth bared. Not a smile. Not quite a snarl. "If I cannot find mercy for them," he said, and for a fragment of a second I heard the man Lisa had taught manners. "I will find them, yes."
Lisa's hand pressed, a little more firmly. "Begin with mercy," she said. "Choose it. If not for them—for me."
He drew another slow breath. The wind moved his hair across his shoulders like a dark river. When he spoke again, it was lower, like stone cooling.
"I will consider it," he said.
Which, coming from the thing in the stories mothers tell to get children to stay inside, was either a promise or the only lie he'd tell this week. Lisa seemed to accept it for what it was. I filed it under variables with teeth.
He turned his attention back to me one more time, and this time the look was less should I remove your spine and more what else do I need to know before I decide whether you are a problem.
"You say you are a traveler," he said. "You have… unusual ways." His eyes dipped, very briefly, to the white lines glowing faintly under the skin of my forearms, then back up. "What do you seek in my land?"
Honesty has a way of disarming monsters because they're used to being fed either screams or flattery. I chose a trimmed version of the truth and kept it steady.
"I'm looking for a way home," I said. "Between now and then, I try not to let the worst people win."
His head tilted, considering. "And if your way home requires… the worst people."
"Then I take longer," I said. "And I make myself very annoying on the route."
The corner of his mouth twitched again—less reluctant this time. He looked to Lisa; she was watching me with a physician's diagnostic calm and a woman's gratitude she hadn't yet spent.
"He is impertinent," Dracula said, more to her than to me.
"He saved me," she said. "And he is clever." A beat. "You might like him, if you let yourself."
"You are asking too much," he murmured, but the bite of it had dulled. His gaze shifted over my shoulder, to the dark road where ash unsettled into little ghosts. "The Bishop will run to Târgoviște. He will call himself righteous. He will call for men." He looked back to me. "You have made yourself known."
"I'm a quiet rumor in a crowd," I said. "I prefer it that way. Unfortunately, the part where I popped into existence on a bonfire to steal their sermon illustration has probably downgraded me to blasphemous spectacle."
Lisa's mouth drew up at one corner. "They will tell stories," she said. "But I will tell the right ones."
That, more than any thanks, landed like a weight I wanted to carry.
Dracula drew himself straighter, as if memory of court life had settled over him like a cloak. The small bow he had given me had been a warrior's nod; what came now was something older, a gesture crafted centuries ago in halls of firelight and knives, trimmed down to the essentials by a man who did not care for theater but understood what it could do.
"Sable Nova," he said, my name coming out like the notches in an oath. "I do not forgive easily. I do not forget. Tonight, I will try to do both, because you brought my wife back to me when the world had already chosen to take her."
The words were a warmth and a warning both.
"I'll take 'try' from you," I said, because I had not yet learned to stop when I was ahead. "And if you ever feel the urge to practice on the Bishop, I'm happy to set a target and clap."
Lisa looked at me with a mix of exasperation and surprise that might grow into fondness if I didn't get myself murdered. Dracula's eyes cooled by a degree, and there was a sliver of something almost like humor buried in the red.
"You are very brave," he said.
"He's very tired," Lisa corrected, gently.
"Both can be true," I croaked, then remembered to lower my hands and stop posturing like a man being tried by a magistrate who ate magistrates.
Silence stretched—not awkward, but taut, like cloth being fitted over a shape. The night pressed in. The smoldering timbers sighed. Far out over the road, a faint chorus of boots drifted and faded again; my proxies fed the sound back along their thin threads.
I felt the tug and let a fraction of my focus slide up into a high fir where one bird watched the road with its small, steady light. More men would come. Not now. Not for an hour, maybe two. But they would come, like rot spreads: slowly, then suddenly, and with an odor you can't wash out.
"We should move," I said. "We're sitting in a candle stub. The Bishop's men will be here as soon as they decide the story plays better with an audience."
Dracula's jaw worked once. He looked at Lisa. He did not ask her if she could travel; he did not suggest she might need to rest; he did not do any of the thousand patronizing things men do when they want to look kind. He looked at her, and in that look asked a question that required only her answer.
"I can walk," she said. "You taught me to. Remember?" The old tease glinted there—tiny, brave.
Something eased in his face. He slid an arm around her, firm without being possessive, an instinct older than the language for it. Then he looked to me again, the calculation back in place but turned down from lethal to professional.
"You can move us as you moved her," he said. Not a demand. A strategy.
"Yes," I said. "Short distances without an anchor. Longer if I plant something first. I can take us into the treeline. After that, we walk, and I keep the sky watching for us."
"Good," he said. "I dislike the road when it is full of men who love their own voices."
Lisa's mouth softened. "We agree on something," she murmured.
"On many things," he returned, and the red in his eyes gentled another shade as he said it.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd kept in a chokehold since I'd seen him standing like a statue in the ruin. The night didn't get warmer; the ground didn't get kinder. But the shape of the danger had changed—from a blade at my throat to a blade at our backs, which, believe me, is an upgrade.
"Alright," I said, rolling my shoulders until vertebrae clicked back into a manageable alignment. "On my word—one step becomes another place. Don't let go of each other when it happens. Some people do and then they fall down and I have to pretend I didn't see it."
Dracula's look said no one has ever made me fall down. Lisa's said I absolutely would, and you will be polite about it if I do.
For the briefest heartbeat, in the ash and the cold and the memory of screaming wood, I almost smiled.
I reached—not to the Chalice (which stayed tucked away and quiet), but to that inner seam I pull when I tell space it is smaller than it thinks it is. The proxies brightened in the corners of my mind. The world around us tightened like a drawstring.
"Three," I said.
Lisa's fingers laced in Dracula's.
"Two."
His free hand cut a fraction closer to her ribs.
"One."
The smoldering bones of the house blurred, streaked, folded—like a page turned with decisive fingers—and the ruin vanished into trees.