Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

Vale’s blood was beautiful. There was no other way to describe it—it was as undeniably aesthetically pleasing as a field of flowers.

It was almost dawn by the time I returned home that night. I wasn’t tired, though—no, far from it. I was literally shaking with excitement, my mind running over every moment of that visit over and over and over again, burning it to memory. I hugged my pack to my chest for most of the walk, as if to shield it from the world. It was contraband, after all.

When I got home, I went straight to my office and bolted the door behind me. I didn’t need Mina knowing what I was up to, both for her sake and mine. The less I involved her in my blasphemous little scheme, the better.

But there were no footsteps in the house yet. Mina was still fast asleep. I pulled out my instruments, messing up everything I had been so careful to neaten before my departure. I dragged a side table to the center of the floor, setting my seeing lens atop it—a device comprised of many brass rings stacked on top of each other, the top one on hinges and covered in glass so that it could be positioned upright. Runes and sigils had been carved into each ring of metal, and when I touched it, I could feel the magic pulsing from it. I grabbed my ink and stuck my finger into it, drawing a series of marks around the outermost circle of the device.

I didn’t have a shred of magic myself, of course, nor did I especially want any—I’d seen many times how it could lead to ruin. But the tools magic could produce were undeniably useful. This one had been created by a priestess of Srana, the Goddess of Seeing and Knowing. I did like to see things, so at least I could be grateful to Srana for that.

I finished the runes, placed my vial at the center of the device, and blew out the candles. The uppermost ring of copper glowed with steady warmth, and when I adjusted the hinge, a ring of light was cast upon the wall.

Within that ring was Vale’s blood—his blood at its most base level, the tiniest particles of life within him. They looked like a field of red-black flower petals across the plaster, moving in slow constellations like the stars across the sky.

Sometimes people talked of vampires as if they were living death, nothing more than animated corpses. One look at Vale told me that wasn’t true. Still, I knew that vampires had a closer relationship to death than humans did, so perhaps I might have expected to see some of it in the makeup of Vale’s body.

No. None of this was death. It was beauty and life and an astounding miracle. He was hundreds of years old and yet his blood was healthy and thriving. It was graceful, elegant. It looked so different from human blood, and I was certain that it would react differently to every test. And yet, there was something so familiar in it too, as if we had been the originals and he had been the improvement.

Maybe the vampires’ heretic goddess had been onto something, after all.

I stared for far too long, transfixed.

My instrument had been created with the magic of Srana, a goddess of the White Pantheon—the White Pantheon that despised Nyaxia, the mother of vampires, which meant I had to be very careful with the instruments I used around this blood.

Even the fact that I had it at all… here, in a town that worshipped Vitarus…

I blinked and saw my father kneeling in that field of death, knuckles trembling around a fistful of doom, ready to spite a god that would happily spite him back.

I pushed the thought away and quickly broke down the instrument, tucking Vale’s blood into a drawer.

Still, I couldn’t help but take it out every few hours to peer at it, even if only for seconds at a time. I told myself it was for work—and it mostly was, because I didn’t stop working for more than ten minutes at a time those next few days—but really, I was… well, a little transfixed by it. Every time those splotches of black lit up my wall, I released an exhale of awe.

“What’s that?”

I spun around. Mina stood in the doorway. For a moment, in contrast to the elegant vitality of Vale’s blood, the sheer withering mortality of her shocked me. Darkness ringed her eyes and dusted the deepening hollows of her cheeks. Once, she had been a strikingly beautiful girl—and she still was, but now hauntingly so, like the face of a stone goddess at a grave site. I glanced down. How long had she been here? I wasn’t sure which answer was worse. Longer, and she saw more of what I was doing. Less, and I could be more concerned about the distinct layer of dusted skin that already coated the floor around her feet.

“What’s that?” she asked, again.

“Nothing,” I said, even though my sister knew me well enough to know when nothing meant everything.

I thrust the vials and my lens into my bag, buttoned it, and rose.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m visiting Farrow. Rosa will be by with dinner for you, and—”

I stepped past her, but Mina barely moved aside. When I brushed by her, I tried not to notice the faint fall of fine dust to the floor, steady as seconds ticking by.

“Lilith, wait—” she said.

I stopped, but did not turn back.

“What?”

I sounded colder than I wished I did. I wished I could be warm like Mina was. Like our mother had been. Our father. In a family of warmth, I was the strange, cold one—the one who could decipher textbooks and equations but struggled to decipher the exact cadence of a voice that made a name a term of endearment, nor the pattern of a touch that made it a caress.

“Stay with me today,” she said. “We can take a walk.”

“I wish I could. But I have too much work to do.”

Even I knew how to recognize the frustration in her voice when she said, “Why?”

I knew what she meant: What could be more important?

Growing up, people would always ask me, Why do you work so hard? They would always ask in the same tone of voice—confused, pitying—the kind of tone that told me they were asking me a different question than their words alone conveyed. In that tone, I heard all the implications. The implication that I was wasting my life. I had so little of it, after all. Why spend it toiling away?

I heard that in Mina’s voice now. That same judgment, same confusion. Except now she was the one whose time was running out, begging me to take some of it from her.

And that, in the end, was the answer.

Why was I working so hard? I was working so hard because none of it would ever be enough. I would continue until I had nothing left to give. Force myself through the grinding machinery of the mind.

Better this than to spend time making it harder for her to say goodbye to me one day. My love gave my sister nothing. But my work gave her a chance.

“I have to go,” I said again, and left Mina in the hall, watching after me.

She wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain it to her. She didn’t know death like I did. After all, she was never the sister who was supposed to die.