Chapter 4: The Terms

They emerged into the third level of the archive, and Casimir moved through it as if the century and change of darkness was something he could navigate by memory alone. Nora followed, her flashlight beam playing across the leather spines of books that had been sealed away from the world, and she realized she was holding her breath. Again. She seemed to be doing that frequently in this man's presence.

He stopped at what appeared to be a sitting area that she hadn't discovered in her three weeks of exploration: an arrangement of old chairs around a table that looked like it had been placed there in preparation for a conversation that might never come. He sat, moving with the care of someone assessing a body that had been inactive for more than a century, and gestured for her to do the same.

Nora sat. Her notebook was still in her pocket, her pen clipped to the spine. She didn't take them out, though she wanted to. Every instinct she possessed was urging her toward documentation.

"I will be direct with you," Casimir said, once she was settled across from him. "Because you have already proven that you don't respond to obfuscation, and because lying to you would be an insult to the heritage running through your blood. I am weakened. One hundred and seven years without feeding has left me in a state that is manageable but not ideal. I chose to sleep rather than become something I no longer wish to be, but sleep has consequences." He paused, his dark eyes on her face. "The archivist bloodline is rare. Your blood carries properties that amplify the recovery of my kind. If you were to allow me to feed from you, my strength would return more quickly than through any other means available to me."

Nora processed this with the clinical detachment of someone cataloguing a text in an unfamiliar language. Feed. Bloodline. Amplify. She gathered the words into a structure that made sense, even if the sense it made was the sense of something that shouldn't exist.

"How much faster?" she asked.

"Weeks instead of months or years," he said. "Your blood is specific in its properties. Archivist families developed a natural resistance to compulsion, which is why they were so valuable historically to our kind. But the resistance comes with a marker, a frequency in the blood itself. It's hereditary. You have it." Another pause. "I can smell it on you. It's very strong."

Nora was aware of her heart rate increasing. She was aware of her hands becoming very still. She was aware that she should probably be afraid, and that instead she was cataloguing this the way she catalogued everything else: as information that needed to be organized into a coherent structure.