Luke's knuckles brushed the rough doorframe, stopping her with a touch.
"This is why I am here," he murmured—low, a rumble under words—gold catching in his eyes. "To keep you safe, when you don't even know what from."
Elara held his gaze for a breath she didn't have. The corridor smelled of old stone and smoke, the quiet after a long day settling like ash. She wanted to ask from what, wanted to press him until whatever he kept behind that unreadable face slipped free. But she could feel Caleb at her shoulder, the warmth of him steady and human and hers, and the question caged itself behind her teeth.
She nodded once, slipped past Luke, and closed the door.
Inside: a bed, a chair, a stub of candle stuttering against the dark. She sat, half-unlacing her boots and forgetting to finish, the image of that man at the gate sliding back over her vision—the pale face, the ordinary features, the way his eyes had caught the light and held it like something living. Violet. Not yellow like ferals. Not amber like Luke's. Violet, seen only by her.
Not fear, exactly. Not yet. Just a wrongness, a splinter her thoughts couldn't shake free of.
The latch clicked.
"El?" Caleb's whisper threaded through the room.
She looked up, and everything in her eased. He slipped inside, shut the door quick as if the hallway might change its mind, and stood there for a second, looking at her like he was memorizing her breath.
"You should sleep," she said, soft.
"So should you." He came to his knees beside the cot and took her hands to still their trembling. "Your fingers," he said, trying for a smile that almost held, "they're no good at bootlaces tonight."
She laughed under her breath and let him finish what she'd started. He tugged the leather free, set the boots by the bed with the old care of habit, then sat beside her so their shoulders touched.
"You felt it when it happened," he said finally. Not a question. "Today."
Elara swallowed. She didn't pretend not to understand. Caleb had been there when the feral's jaws tore her shoulder ten days ago, when everyone shouted and fired and bled and she—didn't—turn. He'd seen the veins surge blue beneath her skin like moonlight finding a river. He'd held her while the burning passed and the glow dimmed, and he'd not asked for a name because they didn't have one yet.
"It was the same sort of… pull," she said. "Like color under the dark. Like a thread I could almost see."
"The man at the gate?" Caleb's mouth tightened. "He looked like nothing. Like anyone."
"To you," she said. "To me—there was something." She lifted her hand, searching for words. "Not… danger. Just not human. My skin knew before my head did."
He nodded, as if this fit into a fear he'd already folded and kept in his pocket. "I keep thinking of that day," he said, voice low. "Of your veins. Of how you didn't change when you should have. How you glowed instead." He swallowed. "I keep thinking there's a thing in the world that wants you, El. That wants whatever that is." His hand hovered, then rested light at the healed edge of the bite through her sleeve. "And I can't fight a thing I can't see."
She turned her hand and twined their fingers. "You don't have to see it," she whispered. "You only have to stay."
His breath left him like a prayer. He leaned in, and she met him, the kiss soft and sure, the kind that wasn't about hunger so much as staying alive together. He tasted of smoke and mint and the iron tang of the day. When his forehead dropped to hers, his voice was steadier.
"You know I was there when it happened," he said. "I'll be there when it happens again. Whatever it is."
They lay back on the narrow cot, the candle throwing slow gold up the stone. They didn't rush. They didn't need to. Two bodies speaking a language learned in the dark and rewritten every night the world didn't end. In the stillness between kisses, they talked the way people do on a knife's edge—half memory, half promise. The time he'd traded his last cartridge for her a scrap of bread when she was fourteen. The day she'd stitched his palm and teased him for flinching. The years they'd woken to howls and still found each other's hands.
When they finally stilled, breath evening, Caleb brushed a stray hair from her cheek and looked at her like she was the only map that mattered.
"I don't understand it," he said. "The blue. The way you're seeing things now. The way some wolves talk and some tear you apart. I don't understand any of it. But I know this." He kissed her knuckles, one by one. "I'm not letting go."
Her throat burned. "Don't," she said. "Please don't."
"I'll be right outside," he murmured, pressing his lips to her brow. "Always."
He sat, tugged his shirt on, and stood in that reluctant way of someone taking his hand off a wound he's just learned to live with. When he cracked the door, the corridor breathed back at them—the hush, the smoke, a shape leaning in the torch-low.
Luke was waiting where she'd left him, arms folded, eyes steady.
For a beat, the air between the two boys changed shape. Not threat—Caleb had never been foolish—but something set and gravelled and old as a road that's had to carry too much.
"You don't have to post yourself there," Caleb said, quiet iron. "She's not a corridor to be guarded."
Luke's answer flowed with no edge and no apology. "It's safer if I can see her."
Caleb's jaw ticked. He looked at Elara like he had one more thing to say, then didn't. "Lock the door," he said to her instead, a gentleness that felt like armor. "Wake me if anything feels wrong."
She nodded. He left without another word, boots fading into the keep's slow heartbeat.
Luke didn't move until the steps died. Then he glanced in, one clean sweep of the room, and stepped through the door.
"Luke," she said, not sure whether she meant thank you or please go or tell me what I am.
He set a small wrapped blanket on the floor by the foot of the bed, unrolled it with a soldier's economy, and sat on it cross-legged for a moment before shifting to his side, propped on an elbow so his gaze kept the door.
"You can't sleep there," she said, a useless protest for the sake of having one.
"I can," he said simply. After a breath, softer: "It's easier this way."
She pulled her blanket up and stared at the ceiling. For a time there was only the candle's shallow breath and Luke's slow one to measure against it. The wrongness of the violet eyes tried to creep back, but what came instead was the barn—the big shape of Riven in it, the way his bones had done something they shouldn't have and then should have, the way his voice had been a voice and not a growl when he spoke. Not all wolves are feral. She knew that now. Knew it in the hinge of the world.
"Luke," she said into the dim. "What was he? The man at the gate. No—don't say man. I know he wasn't."
He considered for a heartbeat that felt longer.
"Nightkind," he said at last. "Your people used to call them vampires."
The word settled cold and certain. Not a story, then. Not a dream. A name that fit the color she'd seen like a key fits a long-rusted lock.
"And I only saw him because…" She trailed off, tasting the answer and hating how right it felt.
"Because you're waking," Luke said. Not unkind. Not kind either. "Not from sleep. From… what's in your blood."
"My blood was sleeping for ten years?" she asked, and even to her own ears the small bit of mockery there sounded like a shield.
"Hidden," he said. "Quiet. Like an ember under ash. You were a child when the world broke. A lot of things hid to keep living." He shifted his weight, the blanket whispering against stone. "Some wolves burned and broke. Some didn't. You saw that with my Alpha. You already know it. But seeing and sensing aren't the same thing."
She turned onto her side to look at him. He hadn't taken his eyes off the door, but she felt the sense of him shift when she moved, as if some part of him counted every breath in the room.
"What changed?" she asked. "Why now?"
"The bite," he said, simple as a stone dropped in water. "It should have unmade you. It didn't. It woke what was yours already." His gaze flicked to her sleeve, to where the scars lay hidden—then away, as if he wouldn't take what he hadn't been offered. "Blue is yours. Moon-color. It means you won't go the way the broken ones do."
Her skin tingled where memory met meaning. "And the eyes?"
He was quiet long enough she thought he might not answer. When he did, his voice stayed level.
"We see each other, the kinds of us," he said. "If you know how to look. If you can look. The broken glow yellow—they burn it into the dark whether they mean to or not. My kind holds amber, even when we don't show it. The nightkind wear violet when the veil is thin, when the light hits wrong, when someone like you is close enough to pull it out of hiding."
"So Caleb didn't see because he's—"
"Human," Luke finished. "And safe from seeing. Safer, at least." A pause. "Humans can stare straight into a mouth of teeth and tell themselves it's only shadow if they need to. It's how they lived long enough to build walls."
"And me?"
"You don't get to lie to yourself anymore," he said, and it was almost gentle. "Your blood won't let you."
Elara lay there, feeling the words find the empty places inside her and make homes there. A vampire. Nightkind. Violet that only she could see. Luke's amber. Riven's impossible voice. Ten years of not knowing, pressed thin and folded away, now opening like a map that had always been in her pocket.
"What does that make me?" she asked, before she could stop herself. The question hung there, a thing too big for the room.
Luke didn't flinch. "It makes you someone I'm supposed to keep breathing," he said. "That's all I need to know tonight."
"That can't be all," she said, a rough laugh breaking out of her because if she didn't laugh she might have done something else. "You and your Alpha—the way you look at me, like I'm a riddle you've seen written on a wall before."
His jaw worked once. Then: "There are words the old ones kept. Not mine to throw around like seed in a wind. You'll hear them when you need them." A beat. "But you asked why now. That I can answer. It isn't random. It isn't mercy. The Blood Moon comes in circles. It makes and unmakes. Some of us woke ten years ago. Some of us are waking now."
"Because I was bitten."
"Because you were bitten," he agreed. "And because you didn't break."
Silence stretched, but it wasn't empty now. It had shape. It had a name.
"My eyes," she said, before she could stop herself. "Do they—"
"Not like his," Luke said. "Not like mine. I've only seen yours in the dark. When you were burning it back down." He didn't say beautiful. He didn't have to. "They'll do what they do. We'll keep people from seeing when they shouldn't."
We. The word tightened something in her chest and eased something else.
Outside, a wind fingered the keep and made it creak like an old ship. Somewhere distant, laughter rose and skittered away; somewhere closer, a guard coughed and spat. The world was the same as it had been an hour ago, a year ago, ten years ago. Only it wasn't, because there were now threads under the dark she hadn't known how to touch until today.
"Luke," she said, quieter than before. "Will he—will they—come back? The nightkind?"
"They don't have to come back," he said. "They're already here."
Her breath stalled. Not from panic—just from the scale of it. The way a horizon does when you realize the road doesn't stop where you thought.
He must have sensed it, because his next line held something like comfort, stripped of sweetness.
"They're not the ones scratching at the gates," he said. "Not most nights. You keep your sleeve down. You keep your head down. You let me do my job. That will be enough for now."
"And your job is to sleep on my floor?" she asked, and there was real warmth in it this time, a crooked smile she didn't have to force.
"It's to be between you and the door," he said, matter-of-fact. He shifted, set his shoulder against the wooden footboard like a brace. "And to wake before anything else does."
She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling until the planks resolved into lines and not a sky trying to fall. The candle gave up and guttered out, leaving the room to the softer gray of banked coals and night that had learned to be kind to people.
"Luke?" she said into the dark. "Thank you."
He didn't answer for a long time. When he did, it was almost too quiet to hear.
"This is why I am here."
His breathing evened. She matched it without meaning to, counting it like steps.
Caleb's warmth still clung to her skin. Luke's presence settled at her feet like a weight on a tent seam in a storm. Between them, she should have felt invincible. Instead, she felt awake in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Violet. Amber. Blue.
She closed her eyes, and the colors came, threads under the black, and then the black softened, and then even the colors thinned and let go.
Sleep took her—not cleanly, not kind, but it took her all the same.