Two boys playing in a garden drenched in gold light. One with snow-white hair and eyes the color of burnished bronze. The other with skin like polished mahogany and eyes like molten gold.
Brothers. Inseparable. Until they weren’t.
“Enough,” Kaelith said, pulling his wrist away, blood trailing down his arm.
I staggered back, wiping my mouth with a shaking hand.
What had I done?
Another single strip of crimson blood leaked from Kaelith’s nose. He wiped it away with a careless swipe of his hand.
Then he picked up the dagger again.
“Your turn,” he said, voice heavy with dark satisfaction.
Terror seized my limbs.
“No,” I said, but my voice was too weak.
He grabbed my wrist with careful precision and dragged the blade across my skin. A sharp, burning pain flared through my arm. I gasped, paralyzed by it.
Kaelith brought my bleeding wrist to his mouth, his canines flashing in the firelight. He drank. Deeply. And as he drank, I felt the world tilt again. Felt something ancient and heavy coil around my spine. Binding me. Changing me.
He pulled away, licking the open wound before dropping my arm.
“I can’t have you choosing to die on me to back out of our arrangement, now can I,” Kaelith said, almost casually, as hewiped my blood from his mouth. “I noticed you don’t have a mark of immortality yet.”
The reminder burned. Unmarked meant mortal. Mortal meant killable.
He took a step closer, watching me like a cat watches a cornered mouse.
A dull ache bloomed in my chest. At first, I thought it was just the adrenaline finally crashing down.
But then, the pain spread.
A thousand needles of lightning, branching out across my wrist, stabbing deep into the half-healed wound Kaelith had opened.
I stumbled back, clutching at my chest as something else—something cold and wrong—writhed beneath my skin.
Darkness began to leak from me. Shadows, thick and oily, curling into the air.
“I can’t—” I gasped, the words sticking in my throat. “I can’t breathe?—”
Panic clawed at my chest. I dropped to my knees, hands scrabbling at the floor, desperate for air that wouldn’t come.
“What’s happening to me?” I rasped.
Kaelith knelt before me, his bloody smile widening until it split his face into something monstrous.
“You’re dying, my nýchta,” he said, almost lovingly.
The world narrowed to a single point of agony. Shadows poured from my skin, thick as tar, twisting like they meant to strangle me.
And the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole?—
was his teeth.
Too sharp. Too bright. And stained with my blood.