SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 703: Afraid

Trafalgar reached his room with Aurevane sitting at the front of his mind.The corridor behind him had already begun to quiet. Lamps burned along the walls, warm and even, while the Academy eased into that late-evening rhythm where footsteps thinned, doors closed, and voices dropped to something private. It should have helped, and it did not. Alfons was watching him because someone had ordered it, and that was the part that would not leave him alone.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The first thing he caught was the window. Open. Not wide, only enough for the curtain to breathe with the night air.

Trafalgar stopped with one foot past the threshold. His hand came up before the thought behind it had finished, and Maledicta formed in his grip, black and familiar, its weight answering him like a second pulse. The edge found the far side of the room, where a small dark form clung to the open frame.

A bat.

For half a breath, neither of them moved. The bat let go of the frame. Darkness unfolded out of its body, spreading like ink through water. Wings became arms. Thin bone lengthened. Cloth wove itself from shadow and red thread, and Selendra au Nocthar stood in his room with one hand resting on the windowsill, as though she had walked in through the door like a guest with manners.

"Easy," she said. "It's only me."

Trafalgar did not lower Maledicta. "Selendra." It was not quite a question. He knew exactly who she was. What he did not know was why she was standing three wards and a guarded floor deep inside the Academy.

"It's been a while," she offered.

"It has. Which makes me wonder what you think you're doing in my room."

"Paying a visit."

"Through the window?"

"You left it open." A small tilt of her head. "I'd have taken the door, but the building has guards, and the guards have a list, and my name is not on it."

"An open window is not an invitation."

"No. But it made this a great deal easier than the alternative."

Trafalgar studied her. The Academy had guards, wards, rules stacked on rules, all of them built to stop precisely this, doubly so on a floor kept for the heirs of the Eight Great Families.

The trouble was that every one of those layers assumed a person: a body at a door, a registered thread of mana, a name to check against a list. None of them had been written with a bat in mind, slipping through a window someone had been careless enough to leave open.

He should have shut it. That bothered him more than her being there did.

"You can leave the way you came in," he said. "Unless you'd rather I call security and let you explain why a Nocthar heir who isn't even enrolled here is standing in an heir's room after dark."

She didn't answer with the smile he expected, and that was when he actually looked at her.

Her face was pale even for a vampire. Her eyes had not lost their light, but there was no game behind it tonight. The red in them looked strained, stretched thin over something she had not yet worked out how to say. She held herself straight, and the hand on the sill pressed down hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

His grip on Maledicta shifted. "What do you want?"

"To see you."

"That much is obvious. Try again."

"There's something you need to know." Her voice stayed level, but it cost her to keep it there. "Something important. It's why I'm standing here instead of somewhere safer."

He held her eyes a while longer before letting Maledicta go. The weapon came apart into shadow and sank back into him, though he did not step away from the door.

"All right. Say I'm listening." His tone stayed flat. "What is it?"

Her gaze flicked once to the shut door behind him and back to his. "I had another vision."

The air in the room changed around the words.

Trafalgar gave little away on the surface, but the sentence struck somewhere precise. He remembered the last one. Blue fire. Bodies strewn across a field. Void Creatures, a figure in black armor, and a future that had refused to feel far enough away to dismiss. Pieces of it had already started coming true. That was the trouble with Selendra's visions. They were rarely clear, and they did not have the decency to disappear simply because a person wished they would.

"You didn't have my blood this time," he said.

"No."

"So how can you be certain I was in it?"

"I never said it was a vision of you." She met the look without flinching. "It was Alfons au Vaelion's."

That did more than hold his attention. It closed off the rest of the room.

Alfons, who had gone back to Vaelion territory for two days. Alfons, who had come home and started watching him clumsily enough that even Xavier had caught it. Alfons, whose family had every reason to be staring hard at Aurevane, at Selara, at Esmond, at the homunculus, at every buried thing House Vaelion had failed to put deep enough into the ground.

His face did not give easily. It rarely did. But tonight she read right through him.

"You want to know," she said.

"Start talking."

She lifted her hand from the sill and folded it against her side, fingers closing over her own sleeve. "I was in Vaelion territory not long ago. At the Eightfold Hold."

"Alone? Why?"

"Not alone, I was with my mother, because she had business with Roderic." A pause. "Alfons came home while we were there. His father had called him back, and I waited for him."

He took that in without cutting across it.

Her voice dropped a register. "I told him part of what I'd seen before. A battlefield. Eight towers. A figure with red eyes pulling on more than one element at once. I believed it was him, but I didn't have the clarity to be sure. He wanted more than belief."

"So he gave you his blood."

"He did."

"With no terms set first?"

"None."

Trafalgar looked at her, and for the first time that night something near disbelief crossed his face.

Her mouth tightened. "He wasn't as careful as you were."

"No," Trafalgar said. "He clearly wasn't."

That difference was not a small one. When he had let Selendra drink from him, he had bound her with a Blood Contract first.

Whatever she saw, whatever she walked away knowing, could not simply be carried off and poured into another house's hands. Alfons had opened a vein and tied down nothing at all. It wasn't stupidity, exactly. It was pride moving faster than caution, an expensive flaw, and one she had plainly been willing to use.

"What did you see?" he asked.

She didn't answer at once, and the pause did enough talking on its own. "House Vaelion," she said finally. "Their territory. The eight towers broken, some of them near collapse. A field after the worst of the fighting had already moved through it. Three people left standing, and no more than that."

Trafalgar watched her face. "Was Alfons one of them?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"At the center of it."

"And the other two?"

"One to either side of him."

He waited.

Selendra's eyes fixed on his and held there.

"You were one of them, Trafalgar du Morgain." She went on before he could form the question. "I didn't tell Alfons that part."

"Why not?"

"Because he never asked for terms. Because he wanted information more than he wanted protection. And because if he knew everything I saw, he might move toward it, or away from it, and either road could be the one that drags the vision into being."

His gaze cooled. "And you're telling me because?"

"Because you were in it."

"That isn't enough, and you know it."

"No," she admitted. "It isn't."

Her composure thinned at the edges. Nothing theatrical, nothing staged for him. It showed in the press of her fingers against her sleeve, in how shallow she was keeping her breath, in the way her eyes kept trying to leave his and kept failing.

"Tell me the real reason," he said.

She swallowed. "Fear."

That was not the word he'd braced for. She caught the shift in him and pushed on quickly, before either of them could wrap the word in something more comfortable. "Curiosity is what brought me to your blood the first time. Curiosity has brought me to most things in my life. This wasn't that. I came tonight because I needed you to know enough to be careful."

"What else did you see?"

Her jaw set.

"Selendra."

"I won't tell you all of it."

His eyes went colder. "You break into my room. You tell me I stand in a future tied to Alfons and House Vaelion. You admit fear is what carried you here. And now you want to keep the rest of it behind your teeth."

"Yes."

"That's a poor way to ask anyone for cooperation."

"I know it is."

"So talk."

"If I do, you may try to stop it."

"That is usually the entire point of a warning."

"Not always." Her voice shook once and steadied. "Some futures happen because a person heard too much about them beforehand. A man turns left because he was warned the right-hand road ends in fire, and the left-hand road is exactly where the fire was waiting for him. I don't know yet which part of what I saw is the warning, and which part is the bait."

He said nothing. It was the first thing she'd said all night that didn't sound like a dodge. It sounded afraid.

She took a single step closer, no more. "If another vision comes, I may need your blood again. Not tonight. Not soon, perhaps. But if it happens, Trafalgar, I'll need you to work with me."

"No." The word came without a gap.

Her face tightened.

"You don't get to come through my window," he went on, "hand me half a nightmare, and ask for blood as though you're asking for a cup of tea."

"I'm asking because I think this runs past Alfons."

"I'd already assumed that."

"It may run past Vaelion."

"Assumed that as well."

"So you understand why I came."

"I understand why you believe you had to." His voice dropped. "That isn't the same thing as me agreeing."

She held his gaze, and for a breath the vampire slipped far enough for him to see the girl underneath it. Young. Powerful. Dangerous. And badly frightened by a future she couldn't safely put into words.

"I did this without telling my mother," she said.

That was not a small admission, and he understood it at once. Lady Lysaria au Nocthar would not take kindly to being kept blind to one of her daughter's visions.

House Nocthar dealt in blood, in secrets, and in the narrow places where the two ran together. For Selendra to come here without reporting it meant she had judged the danger of speaking higher than the danger of crossing her own matriarch. Or she wanted him to believe exactly that. Both readings were worth keeping.

"Does anyone else know you're here?" he asked.

"No."

"Does Alfons know I was in the vision?"

"No."

"Does he know you came to me at all?"

"No."

"All right."

A short, mirthless breath left her. "That's your answer?"

"For now."

He turned to the window and looked out. The Academy grounds spread below him, cut through by lamps, bridges, courtyards, and figures that moved between them. Beyond the walls, Velkaris burned in layers of light. Farther out than that, past all of it, lay Aurevane, quiet as a wound that had been bound but not closed.

He let his mind run over it once. Esmond. The homunculus. Selara. Vaelion stirring at last, with Alfons as the hand they'd pushed nearest the fire, and now a Blood Oracle frightened enough to come to him as a bat through a window she'd had to pry open.

None of it stood as a single answer. It hung together as a knot, drawn tighter by hands he couldn't yet see. He had lived through wars, through an attack on a moving train, through family politics knife-edged enough to draw blood, through monsters older than any name he'd been taught, through secrets that should have crushed people far older than he was.

This felt different. This felt like a future leaning in.

He looked back at her. "Here's what I'll give you. If another vision comes and you truly need me, you reach me properly. Not like this."

Her expression changed. "That won't always be possible."

"It will be, if you'd rather I didn't put a sword through you on reflex one of these nights."

"Trafalgar."

"No." The word came quietly, and the room obeyed it anyway. "Don't appear in here without warning again."

She glanced at the open window. "That may be impossible. I hope you'll understand that."

"I understand that you're very comfortable saying impossible when what you actually mean is inconvenient."

"This time," she said, "I mean impossible."

He studied her, and she offered nothing more. She wouldn't, and he hadn't expected her to. He let the quiet carry the rest for him.

She stepped back toward the window. Shadow gathered along her shoulders, folding inward like wings the body recalled before they were real.

"Don't confront Alfons," she said.

"I wasn't going to."

"Don't let him learn that you know."

"Wasn't planning on that either."

The shadow drew tight. Her body narrowed, bone folding, the cloak collapsing into wings, until a bat clung to the sill where Selendra had stood. Its red eyes held on him one last breath. Then it dropped into the night.

Trafalgar crossed to the window and watched the small dark figure cut across the Academy air, threading between the lamps until the dark took it. He stayed there long after she was gone.

For once he let himself look at the whole of it, instead of one piece at a time.

Aurevane lay at the heart of everything. What had begun as a glittering gathering of engineers and alchemists, of great houses and famous inventors trading on prestige, had peeled open to show what the city kept underneath. Sealed records. Old experiments. People bought and used and written out of their own lives. Laboratories no one was meant to find, pacts no one was meant to name, and beneath the shine, a tangle of interests reaching into houses far too powerful to be embarrassed in daylight.

He had not simply watched that come apart; he had reached into it with both hands. Esmond had been brought down, and now it was Trafalgar who held him, a fact House Vaelion would have given a great deal to learn.

The homunculus had passed into Selara's keeping, and Selara was no mere head of a school but one of the Academy's four directors, her history knotted into Esmond and the old alchemy long before most of the Academy knew the man had ever drawn breath.

None of it had stayed buried when the noise died down. It had turned into something slower and worse, a wound in the politics of half a dozen houses that went on bleeding quietly after everyone looked away.

And now, at last, House Vaelion had begun to move over it. Roderic had gathered his family and set them loose along every thread Aurevane left exposed, and Alfons was only the hand he'd pushed nearest the flame. The boy haunting the courtyard below was not a rival nursing wounded pride. He was an opening move in a much larger game.

His own house was not still either. Things were shifting inside House Morgain in ways he could feel even from this distance, the way a person feels weather turn before it arrives. Valttair's shadow lay long over all of it, and there were currents running under the surface of the family that he had not been shown the whole of yet. He would have to turn and face that soon. But not tonight.

There was also the truth of what he was. Half-human, half-Primordial, a thing the world had no comfortable place for. He had stopped carrying it entirely alone this past while; he had let a handful of people he trusted hold pieces of it, knowing full well what it cost to be known at all.

And something had come looking for him out of that part of his life. Dravok. A Primordial who had offered, of all things, help, and who claimed to know where others of his kind lay sleeping, scattered and waiting across the world.

Past the Academy, past Velkaris, his own city was waiting as well. Euclid was his to answer for. His land, his name, his people, and his duty to stand between them and whatever came for them, a weight he had not asked for and would not put down.

He had done hard things to reach this point, and he would do harder ones before it was over. He carried no illusions left about that. A person did not pass through wars and old monsters and the quiet cruelties of great families and come out the other side unmarked.

Yet when he let the thought finish, what surprised him was not the danger. It was that he would not be facing it on his own. For all of it, for everything he had already done and everything the coming years would ask of him, there were people who had chosen to stand at his side and not move, people who knew exactly what he was and had stayed regardless. That was not nothing. On the worst nights, it was the only part of the board he trusted.

The wind pulled at the curtain. Far out over the rooftops, the last trace of a small dark figure folded into the black and was gone.

Trafalgar looked into the night and felt, for the first time in a long while, that the world had begun to move before he had chosen where to stand in it.