Chapter 3 The First blood

Elias was ordinary in all the best ways. He left keys in the wrong place, laughed at his own jokes, and brought extra tea when Seraphina forgot to boil water. He taught history at the university and had a hundred small rituals that made his ordinary life magical. To Seraphina he was a reminder that some things survived time without needing power or magic.

She told herself not to get attached. It was easier that way. She’d lost people before and learned to close the door fast. Still, she answered his knocks, let him in for tea, and listened while he talked about books and students and the small disasters of life. He never asked why she kept odd hours or why she flinched when someone moved behind her. He just stayed.

The night the hunters came for him, she was closing the shop. A late rain had cleaned the street. Elias had promised to bring a record to play over tea the next morning. He waved, walked back across the courtyard, and was gone.

Around midnight, the ring pulsed and something inside her snapped. She could feel the Court moving like a hand across the city, fingers searching. The pull was sharp, a direction she couldn’t ignore. She left the shop unlocked and walked toward his building.

She found him in the stairwell.

He lay halfway down the concrete steps, his face pale, one hand splayed over his chest. His cat, thin and loud, circled him and cried. Seraphina dropped to her knees and pressed her fingers to the wounds. They were small, precise; made by blades the hunters used. Clean kills. Not savage, not messy. Professional.

Pinned to his shirt with a black stitch was a small scrap of paper. Caelum’s sigil, the serpent through the rose, had been burned into the fabric in ash and blood. It meant the Court had marked him. It meant they had killed him to get to her.

Elias looked at her with clear, surprised eyes. “Sera?” he whispered, voice soft like he’d woken from a nap. His hand trembled. “They— they said—”

He tried to speak, but he coughed, and the sound was wrong. His breath limited itself into a thin rattle. Her fingers moved faster. Magic flared beneath the skin, small threads of Vale power she’d kept locked down for years. She tried to pull for a heal, for a warmth, but the wounds were more than blade-deep. Whoever had done this had used more than steel.

She felt the panic that every human mother felt when a child breaks a bone, only multiplied by the unnatural cold in her chest. She bent closer and whispered old words under her breath, words she hadn’t spoken to heal in a long time. They were small calls, more to steady Elias than to fix what had been done. The room filled with the smell of wet paper and iron. His fingers slipped from her hand.

“Don’t,” he gasped. “Run. Please.”

His eyes found hers and for a moment the whole city narrowed to that stairwell, that single exchange. He’d known the risk in being close, and he still stayed. That thought made something heavy and terrible roll through her. Anger was a slow thing at first, then volcanic.

She had three choices in the time before the light left his eyes. She could let him go and hide. She could hunt whoever did this and risk more lives. Or she could kill so loudly that the Court would answer.

She should have run. She had been running for centuries. Instead she pressed her forehead to his, feeling the quick, fragile warmth of him. “Forgive me,” she said, though he had nothing to forgive. He smiled weakly, blood at the corner of his mouth.

When his eyes closed, a piece of her that had been sleeping for hundreds of years cracked open. The grief hit and then blurred into a cold, clean purpose. Elias’s life had been small but whole. The Court had taken it as a message. She would return that message tenfold.

She lifted her face and saw the stairwell across the courtyard. A shadow slipped into the alley, too fast to be human. The hunters didn’t hide their movements; they owned the dark. They meant for her to find Elias like this.

Seraphina stood, her hands shaking. Her palms smelled faintly of iron. She wrapped Elias’s scarf around her shoulders because she could not bear to leave him naked to the rain. Then she walked outside into the empty night.

She moved fast and clean. At the corner she found the black feather again, tucked into the slit of a drain. Their signature, their warning. She crushed it underfoot and kept walking.

She had kept secrets for centuries. She had hidden what she could do. Tonight the secret changed sides. She would not be hunted into silence. She would go after the teeth that had bitten her.

Her first move was simple: find anyone who had watched her and make them fear discovery. Fear would spread faster than rumor. Fear would force the Court to show a face. She would learn how Caelum’s people thought, where they kept their lists, who answered to whose name.

She started where the hunters started; she worked backward. She visited the alleys they used, the clubs where they fed, the backrooms where an unwise vampire bragged. She listened. She watched. She learned. Within two nights she had a name Orien, a mid-ranking hunter who had been present in the stairwell, the one who left tracks in the dust.

She found him in a doorway near the docks, arrogant and sure in his youth. He laughed when he saw her. “You should be dead,” he said, as if reciting his orders.

“Maybe I am,” she replied. “Maybe I was. But tonight you will answer for what you did.”

The fight was quick. He moved with the confidence bred by numbers and backing. She moved with the quiet of someone who’d survived the end of worlds. He never felt the blade until it was through him. He went to ash with a single, final hiss, like a match blown out.

She stood over the dust and drew a simple mark in the air, a Vale symbol that meant warning. Leave one, take one. The message would travel up the ranks: kill our people, lose yours. It was not what the Court expected. It would make them careful. It would make them curious.

Back at the stairwell, Elias’s cat sat on the step where he’d fallen, looking at her with a small, steady eye. She picked it up and carried it back to the shop. She wrapped it in a towel, fed it, and let its small purr press against the place where her heart would have been.

She thought of Elias’s laugh, of his clumsy kindness. She whispered to the empty room, “You won’t have died for nothing.”

The ring at her throat pulsed once, then quieted. Night kept moving. The Court had seen her answer. Now the game was different. She had crossed a line.

She would hunt them. She would find Caelum’s network and unravel it. She would take her heart back or die trying. Either way, the Court would remember that human life had a price.

She made a list in her head: Orien’s last known hangout, the next hunters assigned to patrol the West End, the witch covens that owed allegiance to Elysande. She would move fast, and she would not hesitate.

Outside, the city continued, unaware. Inside, Seraphina set a match to a candle and watched the flame burn steady. She would need every piece of herself to do this. She would need the thousand years she’d survived.

She closed her eyes and spoke Elias’s name once, like a promise. Then she opened them and began to plan.