The Ashen Court, Eastern Carpathians.
The present day.
The castle of the Ashen Court had been dying for two hundred years, and Cassian Veyr liked it that way.
He said rot was honest.
He said a ruin told the truth about the world: that everything beautiful was only something that hadn’t finished falling yet.
He said a lot of things, usually while someone was screaming, and Magnus had learned long ago that the safest place to be when Veyr was talking was very still and very quiet, somewhere near a wall.
The cellars were the safest place of all, because Veyr almost never came down into them.
There were nine ghouls in the Ashen Court that winter.
There had been more once.
Silas said there had been forty in the old days, when Veyr still held the whole valley and three villages paid him tithes in blood and silence.
But the villages had emptied as the young people left for Bucharest and Vienna and London, and the old people died, and nobody was born.
Veyr’s territory had shrunk to the castle and the forest and the one road up the mountain.
His household had shrunk with it.
Nine ghouls.
They slept in the old wine cellar under the east tower, on straw that never got changed, in the dark, because Veyr said ghouls did not need light and should not get used to wanting things they did not need.
Magnus had been one of them for five years.
He was lying awake on his straw now, an hour before sundown, listening.
It was the habit he had kept the longest, longer than his name, longer than the memory of what food tasted like.
Listening.
Old Bogdan snoring in the corner, wet and rattling, the way he had snored ever since the master broke his ribs at Easter and they had grown back crooked.
Ana and Florin murmuring together, the way they always did, in a Romanian so old and rural that Magnus understood only one word in four.
The Quiet Ones, the three ghouls in the far alcove who had been here so long that they no longer spoke at all, breathing slow and even, like cattle.
And Petra, on the straw beside him, humming under her breath.
She had been in the Ashen Court for two years, which made her the newest.
She had been twenty when Veyr took her from a nightclub in Brașov, and she still did things the others had forgotten how to do.
She hummed.
She counted the days by scratching marks on the cellar wall with a nail.
She asked questions.
“What day is it?” she whispered now, the way she did every evening.
“Thursday,” Magnus said.
He had no idea.
He said Thursday because she liked Thursdays.
“Thursday.” He heard her smile.
“Thursday was pizza night.
At my mother’s.
She made it terrible, the crust was like cardboard, and my little brother put ketchup on it, and I used to scream at him.” A pause.
“I can’t remember what pizza tastes like.” “Nobody can,” said Silas, from the dark on Magnus’s other side.
“Go to sleep, girl.” “It’s almost night.
We’re supposed to be waking up.” “Then wake up quietly.” Petra laughed, very softly, and went back to humming.
Magnus lay between them and looked up at the ceiling he could not see, and felt, for a moment, something that was almost peace.
It was a strange thing to feel in a place like this.
But he had learned that peace did not need much room.
It could fit in an hour before sundown, in the space between two people breathing in the dark.
Silas was the oldest of them, and the closest thing the cellar had to a teacher.
He had been a shepherd, or a soldier, or a schoolteacher, depending on the night and how much he remembered.
He had been made a ghoul in 1953, the year a dead Russian dictator’s statues were still standing in every town square, and he had served Cassian Veyr longer than Magnus had been alive.
His hair had gone white long before he was taken, and his body had stopped aging the night he was made, so he was old in a way that would never get older.
He moved slowly, deliberately, as though conserving something, and he had a voice like a creaking door.
In Magnus’s first year, when the hunger came and Magnus thought it would split him open from the inside, it was Silas who held his head and told him what he was.
“A ghoul is a broken vampire,” Silas had said, in that first winter, while Magnus shook and sweated and bit through his own lip.
“A vampire is made when a vampire wants to make one.
He gives his blood, and his will, and something else, something none of us understand.
Like breathing into a fire.
But a ghoul is made when he only wants a servant.
He gives you just enough blood to change you, and not enough to finish it.
You get the strength.
You get the long life.
You get the hunger.
But you don’t get the rest.” “What’s the rest?” Magnus had asked, through his teeth.
“Freedom.” Silas had wiped the blood off Magnus’s chin with his thumb.
“His blood is in you, so his voice is in you.
When he speaks, you’ll obey.
You won’t be able to help it.
And you’ll need his blood, a little, every week, or you’ll go Grey.” Magnus had learned what Grey meant the following spring, when a ghoul named Tomas angered Veyr and was denied the cup for a month.
He had watched Tomas’s skin go the color of ash, then the texture of paper.
He had watched Tomas’s eyes cloud like an old dog’s.
He had watched him stop talking, then stop eating, then stop moving, and finally, on the thirty-first day, begin to crumble at the fingers and the lips, like a sandcastle in the wind.
Veyr had come down to the cellar for that.
He had wanted to watch.
That was the lesson of the Ashen Court, the one beneath all of Silas’s other lessons: there was nowhere to run.
Not because of the walls, or the forest, or the snow.
Because you carried your master inside you.
Because without him, you died.
Magnus had stopped thinking about running in his second year.
He had stopped thinking about much of anything, in his third.
The bell rang at sundown.
It was a small brass bell, hung at the top of the cellar stairs, and it rang by itself.
Magnus had never seen anyone pull the cord.
He had asked Silas about it, once, and Silas had just shrugged and said, The house wants us.
The nine of them rose without speaking, brushed the straw off their clothes, and climbed the stairs single file into the great hall.
The castle had been magnificent, once.
You could still see it if you knew how to look: the vaulted ceiling, ribbed like the inside of a whale; the long gothic windows, their stained glass mostly gone now, replaced with boards and plastic sheeting that snapped in the wind; the gallery that ran around three sides of the hall, where musicians had played for a court of a hundred vampires in the days when the Ashen Court still mattered.
The statues of saints along the walls had all had their faces chiseled off.
Veyr’s doing.
He said he could not stand being looked at by people who had died for something.
Now rain leaked through a hole in the roof the size of a car and ran in black threads down the stones and pooled in the center of the floor.
Somewhere above, a shutter banged in the wind with the patience of a clock.
Veyr was already there.
He usually was.
He lounged in the only intact chair in the hall: a tall black throne on a stone dais, carved with ravens and thorns, that had belonged to someone grander than him.
One long leg was hooked over its arm.
In the candlelight he looked like a painting of a prince: pale, fine-boned, his dark hair tied back with a ribbon the color of old wine, his shirt open at the throat, rings on every finger.
He had been beautiful for four hundred years and had never once let anyone forget it.
He was holding the cup.
It was silver, which always seemed to Magnus like a private joke.
A wide shallow bowl on a stem, crusted black around the rim.
Once a week, on no fixed day, Veyr opened a vein in his own wrist and let a few dark drops fall into it, and the ghouls of the Ashen Court came forward one by one, on their knees, to drink.
The nine of them lined up before the dais and knelt in the wet.
Magnus felt the cold soak through the knees of his trousers, and felt nothing about it.
He kept his eyes on the floor.
“My darlings,” said Veyr.
His voice was soft and warm, like a hand on the back of your neck.
“Did you sleep well?” “Yes, master,” said nine voices.
“Liars.” He sounded delighted.
“You never sleep well.
Nobody sleeps well in this house.
It’s one of its charms.” He swung his leg down off the arm of the throne and leaned forward, and the cup gleamed in his hand.
“I’m in a generous mood tonight.
Do you know why I’m in a generous mood?” Nobody answered.
Nobody ever answered that kind of question.
“I’ve had a letter,” Veyr said.
“From Vienna.
From one of the little nobodies who still think the Ashen Court is worth writing to.
And do you know what it says?” He pulled a folded sheet of heavy cream paper from inside his shirt and waved it.
“It says that Viktor Sokolov has sent envoys to the Crimson Court.
To Seraphine.
It says the Lords are talking about a council.
A real one, the first in fifty years.
To discuss,” and here his voice became a perfect, cruel imitation of someone pompous and old, “the declining condition of our people.” He laughed.
It echoed in the vaulted ceiling.
“Declining.
As if we haven’t been declining since the night Van Helsing pinned the old King to his library floor like a butterfly.
As if anybody cares.
They’ll meet, and they’ll drink, and Seraphine will wear something tasteless, and Sokolov will threaten everyone, and nothing will happen.
Nothing ever happens.
That’s what we are now, my darlings.
A people to whom nothing ever happens.” He crumpled the letter and tossed it into the rain puddle on the floor.
“And they didn’t invite me.” That was it, then.
That was the mood.
Magnus felt it settle over the hall like a cold front.
When Cassian Veyr was insulted, someone bled.
“Silas,” Veyr said.
“Come here.” It took an hour.
Veyr did not touch Silas himself.
He rarely did.
It was more interesting, he said, to watch people do it to themselves.
He had Silas take the silver chain from the iron box beside the throne.
He had him wrap it around his own forearm, and pull it tight, and hold it there while the skin hissed and blackened and the smell rose, sweet and wrong, like meat left too close to a stove.
“Again,” Veyr said, every time Silas’s arm began to heal.
The other ghouls knelt in a line and watched, because they had been told to watch.
Magnus watched.
He watched the way he watched everything now, from somewhere far back inside his own head, the way you watch rain on a window.
He was aware of Petra beside him shaking.
He was aware of Bogdan’s wet breathing.
He was aware, distantly, that Silas was the only person in the world who had ever been kind to him in this place, and that he ought to feel something about what was happening.
He did not feel anything.
He had trained himself not to.
It was the only kind of freedom the cellar allowed.
Around the fortieth minute, Silas stopped screaming.
That was almost worse.
He knelt there in the center of the hall with the chain wrapped around an arm that was more black than white now, and his face went calm.
Not empty, like the Quiet Ones.
Calm.
Like a man who has made up his mind.
Veyr sighed and sank back in his throne.
“You’re no fun when you’re brave,” he said.
“It doesn’t suit you.
You’re a ghoul.
Ghouls aren’t brave.
Ghouls are furniture.” He turned his head, lazily, and his eyes found Magnus at the end of the line.
“Isn’t that right?” The words went into Magnus the way they always did.
Not through his ears.
Through his blood.
Answer.
“Yes, master,” Magnus heard himself say.
He had stopped hating the sound of his own voice saying it.
That was the part that frightened him, on the nights he still had enough of himself left to be frightened.
Five years ago he had screamed until his throat bled every time Veyr made him speak.
Four years ago he had only cried.
Three years ago he had started to forget what his voice sounded like when it belonged to him.
Now it just came out.
Smooth and quiet.
Furniture.
“Come here, Magnus.” His legs moved.
He watched them do it.
Up off the wet stone, across the floor, through the puddles, past the faceless saints.
He stopped beside Silas and looked down.
Up close the arm was worse.
The silver had eaten down almost to the bone.
Silas was trembling all over, very finely, like a struck wire.
But he looked up at Magnus and smiled, a small cracked thing.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
“Kid.
It’s all right.” “He’s tired,” Veyr said behind them.
“Look at him.
Seventy years.
He’s so tired, Magnus.
And I’m so tired of him.” A pause, long and pleased.
“I think it would be a kindness, don’t you?
You’re the strongest of them.
You were always the strongest; I never knew why.
Do it quickly.” And then, almost gently: “Finish him.” The command hit like a hook in the spine.
Finish him.
Magnus’s right hand rose.
He felt his fingers curl.
He felt the strength in them, the terrible strength Veyr had poured into him five years ago in a forest outside Brașov, when Magnus had been a dying thing in a hospital gown with fresh stitches in his chest.
He could crush Silas’s throat with this hand.
He could put it through the old man’s ribs.
He had done worse, on Veyr’s orders.
He had done so much worse that some nights he lay on the straw and could not remember all of it, and was grateful.
Silas closed his eyes.
And something in Magnus’s chest went thud.
Not his heart.
He knew his heart.
It had been beating slow and cold and obedient since the night he was made.
This was something else.
Something underneath it, deeper, behind the long ugly scar the surgeons had left down his sternum.
Like a second drum in a room he hadn’t known was there.
Thud.
His hand stopped.
It stopped in the air, inches from Silas’s throat, and it trembled.
“Magnus.” Veyr’s voice sharpened.
“I said finish him.” The hook pulled.
Magnus felt it tear through him, Veyr’s will dragging at every vein, at every muscle, at the base of his skull where the old ache lived.
It had never failed.
Not once in five years.
He felt his fingers twitch forward.
Thud.
The second heartbeat answered, louder, and the hook slipped.
It was like being underwater for five years and suddenly finding the surface.
Air hit him all at once.
Sound.
Cold.
The smell of burned skin and old stone and Veyr’s perfume, cloves and something sweet underneath.
The rain on his face.
The weight of his own body, his own body, belonging to nobody but him.
Magnus lowered his hand.
“No,” he said.
The hall went silent.
Even the shutter seemed to stop.
Behind him, he heard Petra make a small sound, like a gasp swallowed halfway.
Slowly, Cassian Veyr sat up in his stolen throne.
“What,” he said softly, “did you say?” Magnus turned around.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done, harder than the surgeries, harder than waking in the forest, harder than the first time he had fed.
Every instinct Veyr had built into him screamed at him to drop to his knees.
He felt the domination clawing at him, trying to find a grip, sliding off something smooth and hot that hadn’t been there an hour ago.
“I said no.” Veyr stared at him.
For one long, beautiful moment, the Lord of the Ashen Court looked confused.
Then he laughed.
“Oh, Magnus,” he said.
“Oh, you poor thing.
You’ve finally broken.
I wondered when it would happen.
They all go eventually, you know.
Something snaps, and they start believing they’re people again.” He rose, unhurried, and came down the steps of the dais, the cup still in his hand.
“It’s always so sad.
I’ll have to put you down myself.
Do you know how long it took to train you?” He stopped in front of Magnus.
He was taller, and he smelled like old blood under the cloves, and his eyes had gone red at the centers like coals.
“Kneel,” he said, and put everything he had into it.
The word hit Magnus like a wall falling.
His knees buckled.
The stone rushed up at him, and for a terrible second he was going down, the way he always did, and Silas was going to die, and it would be Magnus’s fault because he had been too weak, again, always too weak— Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
The second heart was pounding now, fast and enormous, and with every beat something poured out of it into Magnus’s veins.
Not warmth.
Something older than warmth.
It tasted like iron and smoke and winter.
It spread through his chest and down his arms and into his hands, and where it went, Veyr’s command simply wasn’t.
Magnus caught himself on one knee.
Then he stood back up.
Veyr’s laughter stopped.
For the first time in five years, Magnus looked his master in the eye without being told to.
He saw something there he had never seen before, never once, not in all the nights of cellars and chains and orders.
He saw fear.
“What are you?” Veyr whispered.
Magnus didn’t know.
He didn’t care.
He moved.
He had never moved like this.
Veyr had made him fast, but this was something else: the hall seemed to slow around him like honey poured on stone.
He saw Veyr’s hand come up, claws sliding from his fingertips like knives from a sheath.
He saw the silver cup falling from the other hand, turning over and over, spilling its few black drops in a slow arc.
He saw the rain falling through the hole in the roof in individual silver beads.
He saw Silas, still on his knees, turning his head with infinite slowness to watch.
Veyr was four hundred years old, and he was strong, and he fought like a cornered animal.
His claws opened Magnus’s shoulder to the bone.
His teeth found Magnus’s forearm and ground down until something cracked.
He threw Magnus into the stone dais hard enough to split it, and then came down on top of him, and for a moment Magnus was pinned with Veyr’s knee on his chest and Veyr’s claws at his throat and Veyr’s beautiful face inches from his, snarling, lips pulled back over long white fangs.
“I made you,” Veyr hissed.
“You’re mine.
You were a corpse in a ditch, and I picked you up, and I gave you everything—” Thud, went the second heart.
Magnus caught Veyr’s wrist.
He did not know he was going to do it until he had.
He squeezed, and felt the bones grind, and saw Veyr’s eyes widen.
Then he heaved, and Veyr flew.
They went through a statue together.
A faceless saint broke in half across Veyr’s back, and its head bounced across the floor and rolled into a puddle.
Veyr was up again in an instant, but slower now, his left wrist hanging wrong, and Magnus was already on him.
Veyr had spent four centuries being obeyed.
He had forgotten how to fight something that wasn’t afraid of him.
Magnus had spent five years being afraid of nothing else.
He knew every one of Veyr’s habits.
Every flinch, every tell, every place he favored.
He had learned them the way a prisoner learns a guard’s footsteps, because his life had depended on it, and now he found that every one of those lessons was a weapon.
It ended in the rain, under the hole in the roof, with Veyr on his back in the black water and Magnus’s hand buried in his chest, fingers closed around something that was still trying to beat.
Veyr looked up at him.
His beautiful face was ruined, and his lips were red, and he was smiling.
“You won’t survive this,” he said.
“Whatever you are.
They’ll come for you.
All of them.
They’ll tear you apart to find out what’s inside.” “They already did,” Magnus said, and pulled.
The Lord of the Ashen Court died with his mouth open, and the rain kept falling into it.
For a long time, Magnus knelt there.
The hall was very quiet.
He was aware, in a far-off way, of the other ghouls.
Of Petra, standing now, with both hands over her mouth.
Of Bogdan and Ana and Florin, frozen where they had knelt.
Of the Quiet Ones, who had not moved at all, who were staring at Veyr’s body with something that, on any other face, he might have called hunger.
Of Silas, who had pulled the silver chain off his ruined arm and was crawling toward him through the puddles.
The second heart was slowing.
The strange cold fire was draining out of Magnus’s arms, and in its place came something he knew far too well.
Hunger.
It came up through him like a tide.
Five years of rationed blood, of the weekly cup, of being kept just strong enough to serve and just weak enough to obey.
And now, with Veyr dead, he felt something else under it: the thing Silas had warned him about, the slow pull of the Grey.
Without a master’s blood, a ghoul begins to die.
He could already feel it starting, a faint dry tightness in his skin, like a crack forming in a dam.
His hands started to shake.
His vision went red at the edges.
He could hear Silas breathing behind him, could hear the slow, labored drum of the old ghoul’s pulse, and for one dreadful second it sounded like food.
Magnus wrenched his head away from the sound.
Veyr’s blood was pooling in the water under him.
Black-red, thick, shining.
It smelled like nothing Magnus had ever smelled.
It smelled like power.
It smelled like four hundred years.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice he had heard once, a long time ago, through a haze of anesthetic and fluorescent light, said: Subject shows no measurable response.
Recommend termination.
Another voice, much deeper, one he had never heard before at all, said: Drink.
“Magnus,” Silas said.
He had reached him.
His hand, the good one, closed on Magnus’s shoulder.
“Kid.
Listen to me.
Don’t.
A ghoul can’t take that much.
A Lord’s blood, all at once, it’ll burn you out.
It’ll kill you.” Magnus looked at him.
Silas’s face was gray with pain, and terrified, and full of something Magnus had not seen directed at himself in five years.
Love.
It looked like love.
“I’m dying anyway,” Magnus said.
“We all are.
Without him.” Silas’s grip tightened.
He opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it, because it was true.
“If it works,” Magnus said.
“If I don’t die.
I’ll find a way to keep you alive.
All of you.
I promise.” “You can’t promise that.” “I just did.” He bent his head and drank.
It was like swallowing lightning.
It burned on his tongue and down his throat and exploded in his chest, and the second heart answered it with a single beat so huge that Magnus felt it in his teeth.
The world went white.
Then red.
Then he was seeing things that weren’t there: a ballroom full of candles, a woman in a green dress laughing, a field of snow under a winter moon, a dying man’s face in the dark, Veyr’s memories pouring into him like water through a broken dam, four hundred years of them, too many and too fast.
And under all of them, older than all of them, something vast and patient turned over in the deep places of his blood, like a sleeper rolling toward a voice.
Then black.
The last thing Magnus heard before the dark took him was Silas, very far away, saying his name over and over, as if afraid of what might answer to it when he woke.