My Vampire King

What is the end of darkness? Light, everyone says. I used to say it too — back when light was something that happened outside windows I did not own, when I was sold before I was ever asked and fought in that dark for its owners' amusement. I was property first and a person only by accident. Then he arrived to claim me. Edison. The Vampire King. My owner, my doom, and — though it took us both a shamefully long time to admit it — my mate.

Nobody warns you that a king can be petty. He was arrogant, cold, and so far above me that arguing should have been suicide. I argued anyway. I was a slave with nothing left to lose and a mouth that never learned fear, and somewhere between my escape attempts and his bruised pride, the old bond snapped taut: his blood called to mine, permanent as a crown, wanted or not. He did not want it. I wanted my freedom. Neither of us got what we wanted, which is how I knew it was love. For an immortal, wanting anything is a weakness, and weaknesses are how thrones change hands. He planned to want me quietly, forever, and never say so.

The truth I did not know was worse than slavery. My bloodline — the Alne, and I am the last of it — carried a price older than my whole life, a curse meant to chain my wolf forever, and a king in the north who had signed for my family's deaths before I was born. When the wolf finally tore out of me, I ran. Seven months as a white shadow in the wild; seven months of a king ripping the world apart for the mate he was too proud to keep.

He found me. Of course he found me; the man is ridiculous. And when the truth about my parents came out of a monster's mouth — Fred, a hybrid who kept me alive only because I was useful, who slipped through our dreams to prove cruelty was his native language — I stopped running and started burning. His compound went to ash. His ledgers came out of the fire stamped with a seal that led us north, into the snow, to the hall of the wolf king who had ordered the killing of a family of three and built a kingdom on the fear of it.

The north marched under a white banner to demand the last of the Alne blood, and got me instead: the last Alne, a Vampire King at her back, an old debt to collect. What followed was parley, green fire, and a confession read aloud at every howl-moot, so the packs' young learn what a crown costs.

And the end of the dark? It was not the dawn. It was this: cake at midnight, a wolf asleep in the hearth-light, brothers squabbling over dice, a lullaby hummed wrong on purpose, and a vampire's voice in my mind, saying my name with the care of a man handed the one thing he had refused to hope for. I fell for the leech I swore to annoy forever. He let me win. Every character in this story is an adult, and the worst of the heat stays behind closed doors.