It hits me then that I could have saved him—could have saved Gunter, had I only asked Nox not to harm him, not to harm me.

One glance at Nox tells me he’s already realized this himself.

We carry on, neither of us wishing to tread that territory, the implications of it yet.

I frown, because there’s something not fitting together, and Nox answers my question before I have to ask.

“The ritual worked. Not as we intended, but as she intended. It freed her from her tie to the moon. It would have meant she inhabited your body permanently.”

His stare is icy now, cold. As if he’s waiting for me to make the connections myself. Like he’s back to giving me lectures on elemental magic or the properties of moonstone or…

I want you to snap my neck if that ever happens.

A cracking sound. A sharp pain; over so quickly it’s as if it never happened.

And then nothing. Darkness and dreams and Nox burning and our children screaming and Ellie dead.

And me.

So very hungry.

It’s then that I realize what the coppery liquid inside the flask was. What few drops still seem to whisper my name as I try to focus.

Why I am so, so thirsty.

“I died.”

The shadows under Nox’s eyes deepen. “I killed you. Before I really understood what was happening. She told me that the change was going to be permanent, and the next thing I knew, I had snapped her—your—neck.”

His words are devoid of emotion, like he’s already recited them to himself a thousand times.

Perhaps because he’s already explained them to the queen a thousand times.

“You performed the ritual. With Farin’s ashes. You brought me back.”

Nox lets out a shaky breath. “No. I would never, Blaise. I would never condemn you to the life I live.”

I snap my head up. “Then how?”

“There’s something else about my blood that I didn’t understand. It’s never been tested before. I think there were secrets—secrets even Cinderella’s vampire lover wouldn’t tell her. I’ve been mulling over it”—indeed, there are scribbles and equations all over the chalkboard—“and I think you were doomed to this life the moment my blood touched your lips.”

My fingers absentmindedly find the curve of my mouth, which I imagine is still stained with blood. I expect my skin to be dry, but my fingertips are soft and supple.

Healthy, in the coldest sort of way.

When I push my finger against the outer rim of my gum, I feel a bulge that wasn’t there before. An extra set of canines tucked safely away, lying in wait.

“Have I killed anyone?” I ask, remembering Nox’s stories from directly following his Turning. Wondering how many bodies litter the path of my dreams.

Nox shakes his head. “No one. You’ve just now woken up.”

The way he says it, just now, makes it feel inevitable. That being awake is all it takes to snap, to lose control and feast on the blood of another.

It’s then I remember the dream, the way Ellie’s blood called to me.

The way I didn’t lose control as much as I forgot it was a thing that exists.

“So all this happened to me because I drank your blood once, then died?” I ask, scanning my body for the first time. I’ve always been somewhat scrawny, but even after days left unconscious, I can tell muscle has packed onto my thighs, my hips, that it spreads like a leaf along both sides of my back.

“That’s the theory,” says Nox, “but I’m still not sure if there would have been an expiration date to my blood in your system. You drank my blood during the last full moon, but would it have had the same effect if you had…”

“If I had waited a year to die.”

Nox swallows, and guilt pangs at my chest. It had annoyed me that he was speaking of my death in such logical terms, but now as I trace the shadows under his eyes, I can tell his detachment from my death has nothing to do with letting his curiosity get the better of him, and much more to do with coping however he can. A way to feel that he was helping me when he didn’t know if I would wake.

When he didn’t know if I would wake.

“I’ll help you. You won’t have to hurt anyone,” he says. Lies are more than free to spill from his mouth—the fae curse doesn’t bind him. I’m sure of it now.

I believe him anyway.

I nod, and though that should be the question haunting my mind at the moment, of whether I’ll survive this transition without taking the lives of the innocent, it isn’t what plagues me at the moment.

“And the parasite?” I ask.

The lantern light flickers, and with it, Nox’s expression. “I don’t know.”

My brow furrows, and something squeezes my chest from the inside. I wonder if it’s the parasite teasing me, informing me that it’s still there.

Dread soaks my limbs. I can’t imagine having more self-control than Nox—not when I’m not exactly known to possess such as a strength. I’d rather not consider what the parasite will do with this bloodlust of mine when she gets a hold of my body during the next full moon.

“It’s possible your Turning destroyed it,” says Nox. “That it didn’t survive the dark magic poisoning your mind, your blood.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I ask with a huff, tracing circles in the dust on the altar.

The edges of his lips twitch into something resembling a smile. “If anyone can wade through the darkness and come out the other side brighter than ever, my money would be on you.”

“I was under the impression that as a slave you didn’t have any money,” I say, and I’m almost teasing. Almost.

“I have enough,” he says, and something in the way his pupils dilate tells me he’s not speaking of coin anymore.

But I can’t bear to listen to him speak like that, to hint about me, about the future I pretended to hope for with him. Because…because… “So we didn’t deliver it to the queen. Meaning we didn’t fulfill our end of the bargain.”

Nox swallows and tears his gaze from me. The sharp line of his jaw highlighted by the shadows framing his profile.

The little bit of the Blaise that was left, the fragment I was hanging onto, the Blaise that could pretend that she and Nox had a future, slips through my fingertips. Falls fast asleep.

“And if it wasn’t destroyed? If it’s still inside me?” The pang of the very question radiates through me. Implications that I might never be free. One stupid trip to a cosmetics boutique would leave me enslaved for the rest of my life. For eternity, if being a vampire involved immortality. I run my fingers through my hair, feeling for whether the change has made me like Nox, but my ears are still rounded.