I did not move.
The knob turned the rest of the way and stopped against the lock. Something clicked softly, delicately, the sound of a key that wasn't there. The deadbolt slid back on its own.
My apartment had one door and one window, and the window was on the fourth floor. I backed away from the door until my legs touched the edge of the table, and the phone slid off and clattered across the floor.
The door swung inward without a sound.
She stood in the hallway with her hands folded in front of her, perfectly calm, like a guest who had arrived exactly on time. She was tall, and her long dress was the color of milk, with sleeves that covered her wrists. Her hair was black and fell straight past her waist. Her lips were painted a deep, glossy red, the only color on her. Everything else about her was pale and flawless, like a statue someone had carved too carefully.
Cold, sweet air rolled in around her feet. Old flowers. Lilies left too long in a vase.
She had no heartbeat either.
"Good evening, David," she said. "I do apologize for the hour. I would have come earlier, but the sun and I have never been friends."
She didn't step inside. Her toes rested exactly at the edge of the threshold, and the line of her shadow stopped there too, as if the doorway were a wall of glass.
She cannot enter, the voice said inside my head, calm and quick. Not unless you invite her. Do not.
"Who are you?" I said.
"Isolde." She smiled with her mouth only, and her eyes stayed fixed on mine. "I belong to the Court of the Pale Moon. We have been waiting a very long time for you. Longer than your country has had a name."
"I don't know what that means."
"Of course you don't. Nobody has told you the truth, have they?" Her gaze drifted slowly across my body, taking in the broader shoulders, the torn sleeves, the faint gold of my eyes. "There is a man in a black coat who has been following you. Silver-flask Cassian. Did he tell you he was your friend?"
I said nothing, and she laughed softly.
"Ah. He did. He always does. He has been telling that story for four hundred years, to every one of your kind he found, and it has always ended the same way."
"What way?"
"With the Progenitor dead," Isolde said gently, "and Cassian holding the blade."
The room tilted. I gripped the table behind me, and the wood creaked.
"He told me he served the last one."
"He did. Right up to the moment he decided that the First Blood was too dangerous to leave alive." Her voice never rose, and that made it worse. "Eleven years he has watched you, David. Eleven years, waiting for the moon. Why do you think he came to you first, before the hunger, before the Court, before anyone else could?"
She is lying, said the voice.
Is she?
Not about everything.
It was not the answer I had wanted.
"Why would you tell me this?" I asked.
"Because I would like you to live." Isolde took one slow breath she didn't need, and for an instant her perfect face cracked, just slightly, into something that looked like grief. "The Court wishes to protect you. To teach you. To kneel to you, if you will allow us. We have no wish to cage the First Blood. That is the difference between us and him."
"I don't want anyone kneeling."
"You will. Tonight, tomorrow, the night after. When the hunger comes in earnest, you will want everything." She tilted her head toward the dim room behind me. "Invite me in, David. Let me show you what you are. One conversation. If you dislike what you hear, I will leave, and you may never see me again."
The words curled around me, soft and warm and reasonable. My tongue was already shaping the first syllable of come in when the voice cut through, sharp as glass:
DAVID. NO.
My mouth snapped shut.
Isolde's smile thinned, just a little. "You have a very protective friend in there."
"You know about the voice?"
"I know that the First Blood does not speak to anyone it has not already decided to protect." She studied me for a long moment, the way you might study a lock. "Interesting. Very well."
She reached into her sleeve and drew out a single white lily, its petals edged with red like something had bled on it. She set it on the floor just beyond the threshold, carefully, the way you set down an offering.
"Keep that where you can see it. When you are ready to learn what Cassian did, burn it, and I will come to you." She straightened, folded her hands again, and said, more quietly, "He is not what he seems, David. Neither is the voice."
"Get out," I said, and it came out low, with something underneath it I didn't recognize. The air in the room seemed to press down. The lights flickered. Across the hallway, the window glass trembled in its frame.
Isolde's eyes widened. For the first time, she took a half-step back.
"So it is true," she whispered. "It really is true."
"Leave."
She inclined her head, almost a bow, and the hallway behind her swallowed her up. I heard no footsteps, only the faint hush of fabric, and then nothing at all.
I stood in the middle of my apartment and realized I was holding the edge of the table so hard that I'd pressed my fingerprints into the wood.
I did not touch the lily. It lay on the floor outside the door, white against the gray carpet, and every few seconds I found myself staring at it and thinking about the knife in Cassian's coat that I'd never seen but now couldn't stop imagining.
I closed the door. The lock turned by itself, but it was my lock this time, my hand, my will, and I leaned my forehead against the wood and breathed.
Why didn't you tell me about the invitation rule? I asked silently.
You did not ask.
Is Cassian going to kill me?
A pause. A long one.
I do not know.
I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor. The voice had never lied to me, not once, not in a single sentence, which meant its honesty frightened me more than any lie could have.
Then what do you know?
That I have waited for you for longer than you can imagine, it said. That there are things in your blood you are not ready to remember. And that the two of them are both telling you the truth, and both leaving out the part that matters.
Which part?
That is for you to learn.
I laughed, a cracked, tired sound. "Everyone's being so helpful."
The hunger had begun to stir again, a low, patient pull behind my ribs. I dug the flask out of my bag and took a small swallow, then another, forcing myself to stop before I wanted to. It tasted less like a sin this time and more like medicine. That scared me too: how quickly I was learning to accept it.
Somewhere in the building, a television murmured, a pot clinked, a child laughed. Eleven apartments. Forty-one heartbeats. I counted them without meaning to, and each one felt like a promise I had not agreed to make: keep every single one of them safe from me.
My phone buzzed against the floor.
I crawled over and picked it up, expecting Marcus. It wasn't Marcus. The screen read Unknown Number, and the message was short.
Your hands are shaking.
I looked at my hands. They weren't. I had not let them shake. I looked up, slowly, at the curtains drawn across the window, the one window on the fourth floor, and a cold knot formed in my stomach.
A second message arrived.
Do not be afraid. I am the one who called you. I only wished to see whether you would answer.
My breath caught. I turned the phone over and over, as though that would change it. The number was the one from the call log, the same unnamed, nonexistent line.
Don't answer, said the voice, and for the first time it sounded afraid.
A third message appeared.
Open the window.
The knock at the door this time was sharp, fast, human. Three quick raps, then a pause, then a fourth.
"David." Cassian's voice, low and urgent. "It is me. Open the door. Now."
I should have been relieved. I wasn't. Isolde's words had taken root, and all I could think was blade, blade, blade. I stood slowly and walked to the door, but I didn't touch the lock.
"How do I know it's you?"
"Because the last time you saw me, you drank from a silver flask in the east stairwell, and I told you that the hardest part is the wanting." A beat. "She was here."
"Who?"
"A woman in white with a lily. I can smell her through the wood." His voice dropped. "David, I need you to listen. Whatever she said—"
"She said you killed the last Progenitor."
Silence on the other side. Heavy, absolute.
Then, with a weariness I had not heard from him before: "Yes."
My stomach dropped through the floor.
"I did," Cassian said. "And I would do it again, because he asked me to."
"He asked you to kill him?"
"He asked me to end him before the blood finished what it was doing to him." Through the wood, I could hear him breathe, which he did not need to do either, and I understood it was a habit he had kept, the way people keep a ring after a funeral. "The First Blood does not only wake a vampire. It wakes everything that sleeps beneath the vampire. Everything that was buried to keep the world safe. He felt it rising, and he knew the only thing strong enough to stop it was him, and the only way to stop it was to die before it took him."
"That's—" I couldn't find the word. "That's insane."
"It is the truest thing I know. He was my friend, David. The only one I have ever had. I held the blade because no one else loved him enough to do it properly." His voice cracked on the last word, a small, human flaw. "Isolde knows this. She was there. She chose to tell you half."
Half, the voice murmured. Everyone gives you half.
"If you want my help, open the door. If you do not, I will stay out here until morning. But we do not have until morning." A pause. "Something else is on this roof."
"What?"
"Whatever sent you those messages." His voice sharpened. "Did it ask you to open the window?"
I stared at the phone in my hand. "How do you know that?"
"Because it asked the last one the same thing. Do not open that window, David. Do not look at it. Do not answer it."
The temperature in the room dropped. I could see my breath, though I wasn't breathing, and the curtains, which had hung perfectly still a moment ago, began to stir, as if something on the other side were pressing its face against the glass and drawing in a long, slow breath of its own.
Above us, so softly that I almost didn't hear it, something scraped across the roof tiles, slow and deliberate, as if long fingers were testing each one in turn.
On the screen, one last message lit up:
Marcus has a lovely heartbeat.