The 200 Year Blood Swap

(Maxine)

Every other bride in the hall looked like she was being walked to her own execution. I looked like I’d won a raffle, which, as far as three hundred of the most important supernatural families in the world were concerned, I had.

I made no effort to correct them.

The Supernatural Council’s Pentagon rose out of its private island like something built to intimidate the ocean — five wings for five species, fifty miles of cold water between us and anyone who might have talked us out of this. They’d flown us in that morning, past the checkpoints and the wards and the very serious men with very serious guns, and funneled the five of us into a hall the size of a cathedral so the two-hundred-year cycle could begin again on schedule.

Peace through marriage. Trade a daughter into another kingdom, keep the union alive ten years, buy yourself a hundred and ninety years of nobody setting anyone on fire. It had worked, more or less, for eight centuries. That most of the couples spent the decade despising each other was apparently a feature, not a flaw.

You could see it on them. The elf princess up front stood with her spine locked and her jaw set like a woman counting exits. She’d drawn the werewolf king, which explained the murder in her posture. Behind her, a fairy bride one bad word from crying. A werewolf girl one bad word from biting. And then me.

Maxine Varco. The vampire. The one who’d shown up on time, in a dress that cost more than most of the guest list, smiling like the wedding was a present instead of a sentence.

“Social climber.” A woman’s voice, low and amused, close enough that she meant me to hear it. One of ours, by the cool cadence — some Marinescu matron who’d had the Marwick match earmarked for a daughter of her own. “Non-royal House Varco, and she still landed a prince. You have to admire the ambition.”

I did admire it, actually. It had taken four months, two bought endorsements, one genuinely expensive favor, and a lie I’d told my own father, to make certain that when the vampire kingdom’s name got matched to the mage kingdom’s prince, the daughter attached to it was me.

They thought I wanted the crown.

They had no idea.

Let them think it. A grasping little vampire who’d clawed her way into a prince. It was the most useful thing they could believe about me, and it had the twin virtues of being flattering and completely wrong.

I wanted this marriage badly. I’d wanted it since the moment I understood what he was. And in about an hour, behind a closed door, I intended to find out whether the wanting had been worth every lie it cost me.

***

They brought the grooms in through the north doors, and the hall did the thing crowds do when something worth looking at arrives: a ripple, a hush, a hundred heads turning at once.

My father escorted me down. Dominic Varco did everything correctly: hand at my elbow, chin level, the faint proprietary pride of a man donating his daughter to history. He’d believed the version I’d sold him — ambitious girl, advantageous match, no harm in letting the family name marry up into Nachtigall. what I was really here to take.

“Try,” he murmured, for the benefit of the crowd, “to look slightly less thrilled. People are watching.”

“That’s rather the point,” I said, and smiled wider. “It’s my wedding day, after all.”

I’d read a file on my groom thick enough to prop a door. Twice. So I already knew Prince Morrison Marwick III was tall, dark-blond, and assembled like the answer to a question nobody had the nerve to ask out loud.

The photographs had undersold him.

Not by lying. By failing to keep up. No still image caught the way he held a room he clearly didn’t want to be standing in — controlled, unhurried, every small movement a decision he’d approved in advance. He wore the formal grey of the Coven like armor, and maybe it was. His face gave away precisely nothing, which was its own kind of tell. People with nothing to hide don’t practice that hard.

He watched me cross the floor toward him. I let him. I took my time about the looking too, my gaze caressing those shoulders, mouth, the long clever hands, back up to the mouth. Slow enough that a muscle in his jaw ticked once and went still.

There you are, I thought.

My father set my hand on Morrison’s sleeve, said something gracious to no one in particular, and left me. There were no vows. These bride-swap weddings didn’t run on promises other than to tolerate each other for at least ten years. Nobody at this level trusted a promise beyond that.

Instead an official in layered robes stepped up swinging a censer, sweet smoke curling between us, chanting in a language older than either of our kingdoms. At his nod, we turned to face each other and clasped hands to each other’s wrists the way the rite demanded.

Which was how I came to have two fingers resting directly over Prince Morrison Marwick’s pulse.

Slow. Even. A metronome. The heartbeat of a man who had never once in his life been caught off guard, and I discovered I wanted very badly to change that.

“You’re staring,” he said, barely moving his mouth, while the official began winding a length of pale cloth over our joined hands.

“You’re worth it. It’d be rude not to.”

“You’ve been rude since you walked in.”

“I’ve been honest since I walked in. There’s a difference. You strike me as a man who’d want that distinction on the record.”

His pulse skipped under my fingers. Once. His expression didn’t move at all and that gap, the still face, the stuttering heart, was the most interesting thing I’d felt in months.

The cloth pulled taut. The official chanted something with an air of finality. A fanfare went up, absurd and enormous, and the Supernatural Council declared us, against both our better judgments, married.

***

They led each couple out behind the smoking censer and down a corridor lined with doors, one room apiece, just for us. Somewhere to get acquainted, the officials said, before the couples were flown off to their new kingdoms within the hour. Every other woman in that corridor walked toward her door like it was a cell.

I got Morrison through ours and let it click shut behind me.

The room was small and warm, a single settee in the middle and not much else. He put the settee between us on instinct and stood with his hands loose at his sides, which, on a man that controlled, was the equivalent of raising a shield.

“Whatever you’re planning,” he said, “you should know I don’t perform on schedule.”

“Good.” I came around the settee. “I hate a schedule.”

“I mean it. I don’t know you. We have ten years to—”

I stopped right in front of him, took a fist of shirt to pull him closer and I kissed him.

For one long second he stood there like a man who’d decided in advance not to be moved, and I felt the exact moment the decision died. His hand came up to my jaw, not gentle, and he kissed me back like he resented every part of it, which was so much better than the alternative. I’d expected control. I hadn’t expected the control to be this — the slow, deliberate way he took my mouth apart, like he had all night and fully intended to use it.

His pulse was roaring now. I could feel it everywhere I touched him, that clean electric edge of a careful man losing the thread.

I got a hand inside his jacket. He backed me into the door, his mouth dragging down to my throat, and I laughed, breathless and delighted, because of course the mage went for the vampire’s neck, and of course it worked.

Heat pooled low and insistent. My fangs ached against my gums. For a few honest seconds I forgot I hadn’t come here for this at all. Then he braced his hand flat against the door beside my head. Wrist bare. Pulse right there, close enough that I could feel the warmth of it against my cheek.

Now or never. I’m sorry, I thought, and found, a little to my own surprise, that I mostly wasn’t.

I turned my head and bit down.

Not a graze. Not a lover’s nip. I sank my fangs into the inside of his wrist and took, and mage blood — poison to my kind, every physician had sworn it, my own body shrieking wrong, danger, spit it out the instant it touched my tongue—

didn’t break down. Didn’t burn.

It woke up.

His magic went through me like a match dropped down a fuse, tearing along every nerve I owned, faster than thought and brighter than pain. It found the ache he’d already built low in my body and it detonated there. I heard myself cry out against his skin. My knees buckled. Pleasure ripped up my spine with no hands on me, no warning, no mercy at all, and I came apart against the door with his blood in my mouth and his name half-formed on my tongue, shaking, undone, wrecked by something I hadn’t known a body could do.

And Morrison answered.

Not with his hands. With his magic. Power slammed out of him in one hard defensive wave, the little room bending around it, and it caught me square in the chest and threw me. I went over the settee and hit the floor beyond it, the taste of him still impossibly bright on my tongue, my whole body still ringing with an aftershock I had no right to feel.

I lay there. Panting. Grinning, probably, in a way that looked unhinged.

Because it had worked. Whatever I’d gambled on when I closed my teeth over a mage’s wrist — the thing that should have killed me, the thing every physician alive would have sworn would kill me — it hadn’t. It had done something no one had a name for, and it had done it because of him.

Him, specifically.

I was sure of that the way I’d never been sure of anything, and I was still shaking with it as he stood over me, blood sliding down his wrist, something cold and furious rebuilding behind his eyes.

“It’s you,” I whispered.

Morrison looked at his bleeding wrist. Then he looked at me, sprawled and shivering on the floor of a room that was supposed to make two strangers slightly less strange to each other.

“Who,” he said, very quietly, in the voice of a man discovering exactly how badly he had misjudged the situation, “the fuck are you?”