Sofía Tepes's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

By the next dusk, Sofía had the rite spread on a stone table, but the words meant nothing without the hands to shape them. She was the one who fed on animals, who hated her husband, who wanted every vampire freed from the human throat. Yet she was young. She had never worked white magic. She could read the runes aloud, but the rite needed gestures, a slow braid of the fingers to fold stored moonlight into blood. One wrong sign, and the fire would turn inward. It would burn Miguel to ash instead of freeing him. Miguel knelt across from her. He wore his white catsuit, his pale reddish hair loose. He was Dracula's son, born of the witch mother, one of only two vampires ever born and not made. Sofía had raised him from birth. She had named him for her own father. Now she had to be the one to bind him to animal blood forever, and her hands shook. "I can say the words," she said. "I can't make the signs. If I slip, I kill you." "Then don't slip," Miguel said. He gave her the smallest nod. "You taught me the blade. Teach your own hands now." But she couldn't. She lifted her fingers and froze. The runes swam. Her mind was weaker than her body, and she knew it. She had never crossed a mall floor or sat in a human theater, never done any of the small brave things she dreamed of. She could not do this either. The fear grew teeth. Her chest locked. A hot pressure climbed her throat, the old sickness her people called the light of Walachia. Her skin flushed. Her hands split with heat. "Mother," Miguel said, sharp. "Your arms." She looked down. Fire ran under her skin like lava. It poured up her wrists, over her shoulders, until her whole body burned gold and red. The seizure took her. She could not stop it. The moonlight from the stones bent toward the flame in her hands, drawn in. Miguel did not run. He caught her burning wrists and held them steady. "Say the words," he ordered. "Only the words. Let the fire make the signs." Sofía read the rite aloud through gritted teeth. The lava in her hands moved on its own. It traced the braids and turns she could never have shaped by choice. White light met the fire and sank into Miguel's chest. He gasped. The glow ran through him and went still. The fire drained from her body. She dropped to her knees, cold and shaking, human-pale again. A stray dog barked somewhere in the dark yard. A cat crossed the doorway and stopped to watch. Miguel touched his own chest. "It's done," he said quietly. "I'm bound. No human blood. Ever." Sofía had freed her son. But she stared at her spent hands, and the moonlight stones were dark. She had burned all of it. There was none left for the next vampire, and Dracula now knew her law was broken.