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Chapter Text

Dany does not need to look at her watch to know Jaime Lannister is offensively late.

And it is fucking hot.

She fiddles with her phone as the sharp twang of a guitar thrums against the heartbeat staccato of a snare drum. They both float over the bar’s speakers, barely audible over the dull thunder of conversation and the hum of a handful of fans that are woefully inadequate in the humid evening heat. The scent of grease, musk, and the brightly blooming freesias that pepper the bar’s outdoor patio choke the air and almost make the platter of fries she shares with Margaery inedible. Which, she thinks as she eyes the adjacent patio with no little annoyance, is a shame because the fries are terribly good. The Starfall Bar & Grill may not be a glamorous place, but it damn sure knows how to make decent food.

But the bar’s employees have swung open the doors to the patio in a desperate, futile attempt to let in some air (and at least one very noisy, ambitious cricket). Predictably, it isn’t really doing much—it’s still offensively hot and Dany feels like her pale, silvery hair is plastered to the back of her neck with sweat.

“He must be running on that famous Lannister timetable,” Margaery says as she rolls her eyes, reaching for a fry. The only daughter of the Tyrell political dynasty (insomuch as there can be a dynasty in such a little town as Starfall, let alone how such a dynasty doesn't crumble into ruin with Mace Tyrell as mayor) is a stickler for people being on time to important meetings. Dany knows that while Tywin Lannister is almost self-righteously punctual, his children have not seemed to inherit that trait. “I am so thrilled I could be here instead of my dad.”

Margaery, of course, looks unbothered by the heat, her tawny hair pulled up into a stylish high bun, her blouse airy and refusing to stick to her skin. She actually looks to be invigorated by the heat, that bitch.

“It’s fine,” her friend says jovially as a waitress returns from the bar with a martini glass full of something red and dangerous-looking, setting it in front of Margaery. Dany eyes the drink with jealousy, smelling the faint scent of honey and cloves and briefly wishing that she had ordered a cold beer—the humidity, even in the evening, is absolutely lethal. “At least Jaime isn’t holding up my grandmother.”

Dany snorts.

“He wouldn’t dare if it was your grandmother.”

As Margaery daintily sips from her martini glass with a smug smile, Dany reaches for a glass of water that is slippery with condensation, hoping that the few melted dredges of ice left at the bottom might perform a miracle and cool her off. She realizes, with some annoyance, that she has been working in the cities of the North for too long—she is now a stranger to the sticky-sweet summers that half of Dorne is famous for (the other half is just as hot but as dry as Dany’s sex life).

Her older brother Viserys and, by extension, their adoptive mum Ashara, would laugh at her if they were here. As she absently fans herself with the pub’s paper menu and grimaces at the way her tee is sticking to her, she knows she’ll have to deal with their teasing on Sunday when she meets up with them for dinner. In her defense, she thinks it is wildly unfair that the North, of all places, understands the importance of air conditioning while Dorne seems to shrug about it. The invention of central air may have been the best thing since the wheel, but god forbid Dorne keep up with the times. If it wasn't for this meeting, Dany would be at home at least melting in the comfort of her apartment.

Instead, they are meeting at this bar that is threatening to become the mouth of hell to discuss the upcoming fundraising ball that the Tyrell family puts together to raise money for civic projects. These used to be the highlight of Dany’s summers before she moved to the gargantuan metropolis of King’s Landing for uni a handful of years ago, and then farther north still when she secured a marketing job with a social outreach program in Winterfell, her alma mater city’s frozen northern equivalent. Coming back to her hometown, which has a fraction of those cities’ populations, has been both a homecoming and a culture shock.

She glances down at her phone. Jaime is forty minutes late. She may not have Margaery’s sense of propriety when it comes to timeliness, but she loathes wasting time she could be using to be productive elsewhere waiting for people.

Plus, there’s this fucking heat.

“Listen,” she finally says, tone sharper than she intends, as she imagines a very cold shower waiting for her at home. “If he’s not here in five minutes, I’m closing my tab and heading back to my apartment. I’ve still got work to finish up tonight, and I’d rather not have to fight the cats while making a tenth cup of coffee.”

“Too busy to spend time with me at least?” Margaery asks with a teasing smile. Dany throws a balled-up cocktail napkin at her.

“No jokes about that,” she replies, jabbing a finger at Margaery. “Especially since the reason I’m so behind on everything is because I’m helping you with this fundraising nonsense.” An affronted look crosses Margaery’s face.

“Nonsense?” she says, her catlike eyes comically large in faux offense. “You used to love this nonsense. I swear, Dany, you went away for a couple of years and became insufferable. Look at you over there, sweating like a pig in heat. You forgot all the charm that comes with living in a small town now that you’ve been in Winterfell for three years.”

“Two and a half, and I’d love this place a little more if the town invested in central air in its buildings.” Dany gives her friend a pleading look. “Do you think that’s something we can add to the fundraising docket? The Lannisters can surely shell out some extra money for that.”

“The Lannisters,” a new voice breaks in with a familiar drawl, “are a little busy being ostentatious and offended at the rest of their family at the moment.”

The two young women turn to see the golden-haired Jaime Lannister approaching them. He is still in his sheriff’s uniform, the only officer in Starfall’s unit who manages to make the uniform look like haute couture. Like Margaery, he also doesn’t look bothered by the humidity within the bar, though he calls to the bartender, “I hope you don’t think these fans are actually doing anything.”

“They don’t pay me enough to think that the fans are doing anything,” the black-haired bartender replies with a shrug. “Beer?” Jaime shakes his head, pulling a seat from another table to sit at the table Dany and Margaery are already at.

“No, I’m not staying too long. Still on the clock, unfortunately.”

It is only then that Dany takes in the rest of Jaime’s appearance. Despite the fashionable cut of his uniform, she notes that the usually clean-shaven golden son of Tywin Lannister is sporting the makings of a five o’clock shadow. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his easygoing smirk is oddly strained at the edges. Dany has been gone from Starfall for years now, but she has always been good at reading people’s expressions—a leftover defense mechanism from her childhood before Ashara had fostered and later adopted her and Viserys—and she wonders what in god’s name has the usually nonchalant sheriff so stressed.

Margaery, equally as observant but far less likely to mince her words around close associates, raises her eyebrow at Jaime. “I hope being ridiculously late isn’t a new trend for you. It is incredibly unattractive.” Jaime holds up his hands in a pleading motion, shaking his head.

“Sorry. It's been hectic around the office today,” he answers in his defense. Dany watches Margaery perk up.

“Anything I should know about?”

“Probably.” But Jaime doesn’t elaborate, though Dany sees his green eyes cut almost longingly towards the bar. “Anyway, I just dropped by because, despite being very busy and in need of something to eat other than a stale muffin Brienne touts as healthy, I wanted to drop off the department’s contribution to your little party. My father wants Olenna to know that he will be keeping an eye on the allocation of those funds this year because he doesn’t want her to spend it on anything frivolous like last year.”

The offhand mention of last year's fundraiser makes Dany's lip curl in annoyance as she is once again reminded why she doesn’t care for Tywin Lannister. Ashara had informed her of that whole debacle while she was still living up north in Winterfell. “Since when is a library renovation considered frivolous?” Jaime laughs, and some of the strain vanishes from his face.

“Since he and Olenna have decided to launch a competition to see which of them can get their family name on the most amount of buildings in Starfall.” He gestures at Margaery, who is rolling her eyes. “Who’s in the lead?”

“My family so far. But the gala might give you all the edge, considering the ostentatious amount of your donations.”

It is such a ridiculously small-town thing to fight over, Dany thinks. The Daynes have never had the clout of the Tyrells, who are the most politically powerful family in Starfall, or the Lannisters, who are the wealthiest. The Daynes are not one of the families of Founders, but even though most of that branch had moved away from Starfall decades ago, they were still an old established family in town. Still, only Ashara—and by extension, Dany and Viserys—had stayed (and Dany and Viserys aren't even Daynes, but that is something Dany doesn't like to think about too often).

“Where am I going to find a house as nice as this one in the rest of Westeros without paying an arm, a leg, and probably both of you?” Ashara had laughed when they questioned why she hadn't left too. Dany doesn’t mind it so much, though she does find that after a few years away, Starfall, while being home, is once again starting to feel too small. Viserys similarly had moved away for college and never once looked back. She is glad at least that he’s here visiting for a few weeks before flying back to King’s Landing.

“Would he consider central air frivolous?” Dany finally replies, crossing her arms. Jaime snorts.

“You can’t plaster your name all over a central air unit unless you invent it, so probably. Besides, everyone in this town considers heat intolerance a moral failing. My father probably thinks suffering through summer here builds character.”

He’s probably right. Dany makes a face and pops one of the few remaining ice cubes from her glass of water into her mouth.

“Your dad’s an asshole, Jaime.”

“Well…” Jaime shrugs with a what-can-you-do expression. He then reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out a crisp white envelope. Dany hides a smile when she sees Margaery scoff so hard that it is nearly a cough—the letter is embossed with the Lannister figurehead and, of all things, stamped with a gold wax seal bearing the Lannister lion. Jaime hands the envelope to Margaery. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

“We might need new plumbing in the high school bathrooms,” Margaery replies sweetly. "Your father's full of shit, so it would be very apropos."

“Low-hanging fruit, Marg,” Jaime chides. He then rises to his feet, shaking his head. “Anyway, would love to stay and chat more, but Tyrion and Brienne are most likely counting down the seconds until I’m back, and I still need to stop and bring back coffee.” Dany frowns. It is rare when both the sheriff and Starfall’s two senior officers are working on the same thing. Exactly how serious is this mysterious case anyway?

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Margaery cross her arms and knows that she has jumped to the same conclusion, but Jaime is already telling the bartender to start serving coffee at the bar. The young man only scoffs and tells him that if he wants to put Ashara out of business, then he is more than welcome to try. Jaime only tosses Dany a friendly grin at that before he is gone as quickly as he came.

The moment the bar door swings closed, Margaery spins to face Dany.

“Do you know anything about what he's talking about?”

“I just moved back here,” Dany says, reaching for the menu again to fan herself. “What makes you think I know any of the gossip around here? Why don’t you ask your grandmother? I’m sure she probably knows more about whatever Jaime is working on than even he does.”

Margaery purses her lips and sits back in her chair, pale eyes bright with suspicion. Dany inwardly sighs. She loves her hometown, she does, but the small-town feel of it, the knowledge that any secret worth knowing will become public knowledge within a week, is not something she misses.

Absently, she moves to twist a ring that no longer sits on her finger, a ring that she hasn’t worn in years. She remembers the secrets and gossip about her that led to her fleeing to the capital for college and then farther north still for a job. She still remembers the weight of the gold band and the bright smile of the boy who had given it to her—the town’s golden couple, the high school sweethearts, the perfect ones.

She closes her eyes.

Marry me, he had said in front of the red door of her childhood home. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

Yes, she had said, young and uncertain and maybe a little in love, but not the way he needed her to be. Not the way she wanted to be.

I can’t, she had then told him months later on a glorious summer afternoon in front of that same red door, with a kiss and a goodbye and no little relief. She had run and run and run, and she has not seen him since she has been back. She has not asked about him. She does not care to. It will not change anything.

It will not change who she is.

Dany knows this place has always been too small to carry and hold the dreams of someone like her. It is a town full of secrets and stories, a place where everyone knows everyone and history lives in the quaint signs on Main, in the sweet vodka sodas on muggy summer nights at the local bar, and in the rivalry between the great families of Founders that have lived here for generations.

Her hometown always is and will always be this: a small corner of the world that will never change. All secrets are stories, and all stories must be shared. She decides that whatever is happening is curious, but it doesn't concern her, because whatever is happening won't be anything worthwhile.

After all, nothing bad ever happens in Starfall.

Abruptly, one of the bar’s waitresses, a girl named Irri, comes over and plants a drink in front of Dany—the same frosted red drink that Margaery has, a curling orange peel hanging off the salted rim. Dany blinks up at her.

“I didn’t order this.”

“Courtesy of the gentleman at the bar,” Irri says with something that looks like a jealous pout, gesturing wanly behind her. Margaery takes one look at the drink, one look at Dany, and then cranes her neck around to gaze at the bar. Dany would have to twist around to see who the mysterious gentleman is, and she is not sure she wants to be bothered. She sniffs at it. It smells like citrus.

“An out-of-towner,” notes her friend with a wrinkled nose and an air of disapproval. “An out-of-towner who is wearing a jacket in this heat and who also has a girl at his hip. That’s already two points against him.”

“No, I don’t think they’re together,” Irri argues, ignoring the rest of the bar’s patrons in favor of some gossip. “They might be related. They look too similar.”

“Either way, who sends drinks anymore? Is this a big city thing? And he’s wearing a jacket, Irri.”

“I mean, he is very handsome…”

“He’s also looking this way. Dany, don’t turn around.”

Dany, of course, rolls her eyes and turns around, the idle, speculative chatter doing little more than exasperating her rather than informing her about the man. She follows their gazes across the bar and immediately sees him.

He is leaning against the bar and gazing over at her with such intensity that Dany is immediately unnerved. His thick curls and his stubble are the rust-auburn of dried blood, and even from across the room, Dany can see that his eyes are very, very blue. He stands next to a young woman whose thick cascade of hair is a few shades lighter than his, her back turned from where she is perched gracefully on a barstool. Dany can only see her face in profile, but Irri is probably right—the two look far too similar to be anything other than family, perhaps even siblings.

And they are both wearing jackets, apparently oblivious to the suffocating heat inside the bar.

Out-of-towners, Dany mentally agrees with Irri. She frowns…and the man’s face abruptly softens with a grin. He pats his companion on the arm, and when she turns, he nods his head in the direction of their table. The young woman glances over at them, and Dany sees that her eyes are the same glacial shade of blue as the man’s. She sees her lean toward the man and whisper something, her expression twisted into something that Dany can’t decipher at this distance. The man shakes his head and then pushes off against the bar to begin walking toward them.

“Don’t drink that,” Margaery warns.

“Am I supposed to not trust the bartender?” Dany asks as Irri looks affronted on her coworker’s behalf.

“He could be a serial killer. Or he dropped something in there while Gendry wasn’t looking.”

“Never heard of a serial killer who kills people in public with martinis.”

But by then, the man has reached them, and Margaery’s face has shifted from cold suspicion to affable warmth with the chameleon-like swiftness that the Tyrell family (well, at least the matriarch) is known for. Still, Dany feels the urge to kick her friend beneath the table, just to remind her not to employ that equally famous Tyrell barbed tongue.

“Hey,” the man says by way of a greeting. She can’t pinpoint his accent, though it has traces of the North in it. “You looked like you were melting over here.”

“It’s hot,” Dany says plainly, unimpressed by his observation. “And I have a water.”

The man’s eyes slide toward the empty glass of water with its nearly melted ice cubes. “I see.”

“Aren’t you polite?” Margaery interrupts, and this time, Dany does almost kick her under the table. There is a glint in her friend’s eyes that she immediately mistrusts. “I’m Margaery Tyrell, by the way. Mace Tyrell is my father. We don’t see many new faces in Starfall this time of year. Visiting family?”

The man laughs, shaking his head.

“Not really. My family hasn’t lived here in years.” He holds out his hand to Dany, those very blue eyes intently focusing on her. She notices a ring with some sort of lupine crest on it on his right ring finger, the silver catching the dim light of the bar. “I’m Robb.”

Dany eyes the proffered hand warily, but when she sees Margaery’s expression turn homicidal, she decides to risk it just to mess with her friend. She shakes his hand, starts with a blink, and then thinks she understands why he is wearing a jacket—his hand is freezing cold.

“Dany,” she introduces herself as Robb lowers himself into an empty chair at an adjoining table. “Fair warning, though—I’m not on the market. I appreciate the drink, though.” Robb nods in understanding, though he looks far less disappointed than she expects a man who has just been turned down to look. Maybe Margaery is right, and there is something in the drink.

She still does not pick it up as he leans back in his chair and says, “Probably a good thing. My sister thought it wasn’t a very good move. But she has always been opinionated about such things.” He gestures back to the beautiful redhead who is still sitting at the bar. Dany sees, slightly discomfited, that the young woman is giving her a look that she can now pinpoint as suspicion. Over what, Dany can only guess at, but she does know that it is too fucking hot for this, and she does not have the patience to deal with a combination of flirtation and skepticism. So instead she gives Robb a wan, droll smile.

“It isn’t.” She glances back at Margaery. “We should probably head out. The sheriff had the right of it.”

If she thought dropping Jaime’s title would unsettle the man, she is mistaken—he only looks mildly disappointed as Margaery begins to reach for her purse. As Dany shoves her chair back, preparing to stand, she finds herself glancing at the young man in vague annoyance when he doesn't make room for her to leave...and she is once again startled by how distractingly blue his eyes are. It is almost unsettling.

“You should stay awhile,” he suggests with a warm smile. “Tell me about yourself. I promise you that I’m just a newcomer to town looking to make a friend.”

Out of the corner of her eyes, Dany sees Margaery go stiff with irritation. “Don’t tell her what—”

“You can leave, though,” the young man continues with that same smile, turning his gaze briefly to Margaery. “I won’t hurt your friend. I think the bartender might have some words with me if I tried.”

“It’s fine, Marg,” Dany replies, even as she retakes her seat with a roll of her eyes. But to her surprise, Margaery has already gathered up her purse and stormed out of the bar without another word. She wonders briefly if her friend is more irritated that Dany is the recipient of a handsome man’s affections rather than her. She will have to text her later to assure the other young woman that she has no interest in pursuing a relationship with this man or any man in Starfall at all. She begins to turn back to the friendly stranger. “I’m—”

“Very thirsty, if I recall,” Robb reminds her with a laugh.

Damn him. He’s right. Dany takes one glance at her empty glass of water and the martini that still sits untouched. She begins to raise her hand to flag Irri down to order another water.

But Robb stops her.

“It’s a good martini. I’ve heard your bartender makes a mean special. You should drink it.”

“Gendry makes a mean tap, you mean,” Dany corrects him with an exasperated shake of her head, but she reaches for the glass and takes a cautious sip. Surprisingly, it does taste good—and not particularly poisonous, though she supposes one of the benefits of arsenic is that it has no discernible taste. There is something slightly bitter to the drink, but after a moment of not having her throat close up or her eyesight go blurry, Dany thinks maybe it actually is just a regular drink.

She puts the glass back down on the table, though. It is cold and almost refreshing, and she might be tempted to down it. “Alright. So you’re not trying to kill me. Congratulations—you’re only a little suspicious.” She glances back up at him, ready to interrogate him about his poor flirtation methods, and almost frowns. Is that uncertainty in his eyes? Confusion? She blinks again, and whatever it was that was in his eyes is gone, and she wonders if it was simply her imagination because he gives her that friendly smile again.

“It’s the coat, isn’t it?”

“It’s an oven in here, so yes. It’s the coat.”

“Would it help if I took it off?”

“Absolutely not. You’ve already committed the faux pas of wearing it in the first place without sweating.”

His smile widens.

“Fair enough.” He leans forward, his blue eyes shining in the dim light of the bar. His voice drops in volume, and yet she can still hear him even over the thrumming bass of the music blaring over the speakers. He says something, and she knows that he says something. She knows that he asks her something that is clear as day, and that she answers. She answers and she answers and she answers, her words twisting and pulled from her easily. There is no fog here. There is only a strangeness to the words, a strangeness to the questions, and even though she is telling him so much about herself, there is something odd about it. A story unravels from her, and he listens, his blue eyes focused on her, a troubled frown weaving in and out of his expression, even as he smiles at the same time.

Tell me about yourself.

Something is wrong.

Tell me.

Isn't it?

Tell me.

Something is...

Tell me.

She does not finish her drink, but she blinks suddenly, and then there is Gendry standing in front of her, a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder as he hands her a new glass of water brimming with ice. A new song is playing over the speakers. Or is it the same one as before? She absently rubs at her arm with a frown as she takes the glass from Gendry.

“Am I closing you out?" he asks. "Or did you want to shut down the bar?”

What?

She looks around and realizes that she is sitting alone at her table, her phone held loosely in her hands like a foreign object. She looks down at it. She is in the middle of a text to Missandei. She does not recall beginning it.

And Robb…

Robb is gone.

God, she must be tired. But even as she hands over a few bills to cover the plate of fries, in the back of her mind, she still hears the echo of Robb's voice, and something in his words causes a shiver to run down her spine.

Tell me.

It's nothing.

It's nothing.

Right?

Outside the bar, a young woman waits for her companion.

“Well?” she asks when he steps out of the bar. There is a distracted look in his eyes. He shakes his head, briefly running a hand through his dark red hair.

“She didn’t react to the vervain in her drink.” He gives the young woman an aside look. “And I was able to compel her.” The girl grimaces.

“That could mean anything. It could be a trick. I don’t like it.”

“Me neither, especially with those bodies. But I still don’t know what this actually means—we’ve always been careful.” He slips a phone out of his pocket, but then hesitates. He looks back up. “What do you think?”

“It’s going to be a problem if it’s her.”

“I thought you’d say that.” He sighs, a troubled knot forming between his brow. “We were all there, though, when it happened. Why would he lie?”

The young woman looks tempted to give him an incredibly unimpressed look as she leans back against a bike rack. But instead, her ice-blue eyes briefly flicker up to the sky. Overhead, a fat red comet sits high above the eastern horizon, slicing through the sky in a blaze of fire. He follows her gaze upwards and presses his lips into a thin line.

They both know what this comet means.

“He has never had the best judgment when it comes to her, you know that,” the young woman finally replies quietly. He laughs, though there is no humor in it.

“You never liked her.”

“She rarely gave me a reason to.” She gestures at the phone. “Call him. I’ll text the others.”

He twists his lips into a frown and then presses a button on the screen. As the other line rings, he watches as his sister steps into the dark embrace of a nearby alley, her phone screen lighting up her pale face. He looks back up at the blue velvet sky and the red-gold comet, and he momentarily closes his eyes just as the line connects.

“We have a problem,” he says flatly before the other person can speak. “And I’m only going to ask you this once, and I need you to tell me the truth.”

There is wary silence on the other end of the line. He opens his eyes and glares up at the red comet, the harbinger of all things that is meant to decide everything, the fucking thrice-cursed omen that got them all into this mess in the first place. He lets out an aggrieved breath.

Seven bloody hells.

“So tell it truly, cos—did you or did you not kill Daenerys Targaryen?”

Chapter Text

Dany watches the raven that is perched out on the picket fence and thinks that Starfall is so much more different than Winterfell.

She sits on the porch swing of her childhood home, frowning at the bright red front door and the twilight-blue paint on the porch’s wooden columns. The iron chains creak quietly as she uses one foot to swing back and forth, her other foot tucked beneath her. She thinks of her tiny but spotless flat back in Winterfell, the one with all the sunlight and its stark white walls and maple paneling, the stainless steel appliances broken only by a single pop of color in her cherry-red tea kettle to remind her of home. Her childhood home, as simply elegant as it is, is almost garish by contrast—an odd comparison to the rest of Starfall.

The little town is quiet at this hour of the morning but it is far quieter than the wintry city of Winterfell even during the height of the day. It is still the grey-blue hour of dawn when the sun has not yet risen above the horizon yet the sky blooms with the promise of light. There is no morning traffic to hum in the background, only a symphony of southern chickadees and black sparrows and red mourning doves. She might hear the rhythmic thumping of sneakers on asphalt and the steady breathing from an early morning jogger but that’s it.

She sighs and leans forward on the porch swing, rocking herself a little harder as she lets this version of a homecoming embrace her. The morning humidity, cool as a kiss, rests against her skin as she pores over the documents laid out on her tablet, the work she brought with her to Starfall still pressing, still urgent. The town’s fundraiser has not at all helped matters and her head swims with upcoming deadlines.

A few days ago, Margaery had asked her if she was attending the gala. Dany had hemmed and hawed about it, reluctant to commit to such a social gathering so soon after her arrival. She likes being around people, she does. And it would be nice to meet up with old friends and neighbors whom she hasn’t seen in years. Yet word travels fast in a small town and she knows that people already know she has come back—to be surrounded by the gossipers and naysayers makes her want to shut herself up in her apartment and never come out.

Marry me. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

I love you better and more, she remembers the woman saying as the man smiled shyly in a watercolor memory.

Yes.

And I love you best and most.

But she remembers the river too.

I can’t.

The raven suddenly lets out a warble, snapping her out of her thoughts. She sees it fix her with one obsidian eye before, with a rustle of feathers, it takes off to fly somewhere up and over the roof of the house.

Good morning to you too.

Dany rubs at the bridge of her nose. It makes sense that coming home would bring back all of these memories but that doesn’t mean she needs to appreciate them. She brings her tablet closer to peer at the design on the screen just as she hears the screen door swing open.

“You know we’re all in the same timezone, Danydoll.”

Dany does not try to hide her smile at the old nickname as Ashara Dayne slides onto the porch swing next to her, her adoptive mum’s hands wrapped around a steaming mug of lavender tea. Despite the early hour, Ashara is as glamorous as ever, wrapped in a silken dressing gown the color of cornflowers, the shimmering blues bringing out the laughing violet of her eyes. Her black hair, so different from Dany and Viserys’s silvery hues, is cut into a full bob that frames an angular face gently touched with age. She is tall and elegant and enviously beautiful and looks nothing like the sort of woman who’d graciously adopt a pair of children after their parents died in a car crash.

Appearances have always been deceiving, Dany thinks with an inward grimace, even as she smiles over at Ashara. She shifts slightly on the swing as it creaks pleasantly beneath the weight of two bodies, lifting her own mug of coffee in greeting. “Thank goodness, or else I’d have missed several deadlines by now. Vis still asleep?”

It’s a silly question to ask. She knows her brother will stay abed for as long as possible before finally making an appearance in the kitchen, haggard and in need of caffeine.

As if to drive the point home, Ashara doesn’t answer her anyway, sipping her tea. Mug still pressed to her lips, she notes, “You’ve barely looked up from that thing since you’ve been here. Are you that much in a hurry to get back to your life in Winterfell?” Dany wants to frown but somehow manages to keep her expression pleasantly neutral.

“I’m here for a while, Ashara. Are you trying to get rid of me? Vis will go through your pantry faster than I will.” Her brother at least had taken up Ashara’s offer to stay at the house. Dany, furiously independent to the last, has subleased an apartment for the duration of her six-month stay. The cats, at least, in all their fickle nature, preferred it.

Next to her, Ashara cocks one dark eyebrow. “Running from my cooking then?”

“I could just be in a hurry to get back to a place that believes in air conditioning,” Dany says in a lighthearted tone to alleviate the tension in her chest. She places her mug down on the arm of the swing in order to pull her hair away from her face. As she battles with her hair tie, Ashara hums thoughtfully.

“You could always just move back permanently, you know.”

“I’m not sure this is the conversation I want to have before breakfast.” The tension returns to her chest. She tries softening the razor edges around the warning as she pins her hair up into a sloppy bun, silvery tendrils escaping to frame her face and skim her collarbone. “You’d have better luck with Vis. At least the town doesn’t gossip about his past relationships as much as they do mine.”

Ashara chuckles, that deep throaty sound that had once made her the object of all young men’s desires in this town. “Oh, so moving back is a topic non grata but your engagement isn’t? He’s still here, you know. Still an absolute sweetheart, still an absolute rake, still absolutely pining over the girl who got away. Don’t give me that look, Danydoll—you probably knew he was still here before I said a word.”

Dany grimaces, sweeping her eyes back toward the promotional images she has been designing on her tablet. Ashara isn’t wrong. She knows he’s here and maybe if she is very, very, very lucky, she can avoid him for the duration of her visit. “I’m not here for him, Ashara.”

“Boyfriend in Winterfell?”

“Happily single in Winterfell.” Mildly true. A few unimpressive one-night stands and even less impressive second dates eventually petered out into the longest dry spell Dany has had in some time. “Didn’t you see the cats I brought with me? I am very confident in my ability to morph into a businesswoman with no love life and a questionable number of cats. I’d rather have that than—”

“A small life in a small town?” When Dany guiltily looks up, Ashara only shakes her head. “I don’t fault you for your choices, my dear. I doubt your parents would have wanted to keep you here either. You’ve always been meant for things bigger than Starfall. You and your brother.”

“Ashara—”

“But those are conversations best had over and after breakfast,” the older woman says, rising to her feet in an elegant sweep of her dressing gown. She smiles gently down at Dany. “I’ll start something. That should get your loaf of a brother up, at least. Anything in particular you want?”

She thinks this is an apology for broaching this topic of conversation, though Dany knows Ashara far too well to believe that it won’t be a recurring topic over the next several weeks. And at Dany’s “I’m fine with coffee,” Ashara only gives her an exasperated look. “I can cook, you know.”

“There’s a reason why you run a coffee bar instead of a restaurant, Ashara.” The woman’s cooking is mediocre at best. And she does not ask why she isn’t at work at this hour—despite opening up much later than the time most people would drink their coffee, Ashara has long since exploited the need for people to immediately need a sweeter caffeine boost within an hour or two of their workday. “I’ll take my chances with coffee.”

Ashara lets out a huff of air that, in anyone else, may have been a snort, and then she has swept back inside with a warning for Dany not to stay out here too much longer. The screen door shuts with a clatter, though the other woman leaves the front door open—ostensibly to let some fresh air filter through the house. After all, it is promising to be yet another sweltering day here in the south of Westeros.

Dany leans back in the porch swing, letting out a long sigh as she peers out at the neighborhood over the edge of her tablet. Hanging above the rooftops, still frighteningly bright in the pre-dawn sky, she sees a slash of red slicing through the grey-blue sky. Once the sun rises over the horizon, she knows the comet will all but disappear, brilliant but not as brilliant as the star. She watches the blood-red glow with a thoughtful frown. She is no astronomer but they’d spoken of this comet up in Winterfell, where it sat far closer to the horizon than it does here in Starfall.

What did they call it, Dany thinks absently. Something ostentatious, wasn’t it?

She debates looking it up on her phone but she’ll also see the dozens of unread texts from her friends back up north, the texts asking where in the world she’s disappeared to on such short notice. Doreah will be irritated. Ornela will be concerned. Ros will most likely have been nosy enough to track her down and will now be asking about the male populace of Starfall and their sexual preferences.

I just went home, Dany consoles herself. People go home all the time.

She is not sure why she has to keep telling herself that.

She starts to stand, thinking she should snag a few slices of peanut butter toast in the kitchen before Ashara gets it into her head to make something more complicated, when a different shade of red catches her attention out of the corner of her eye. She peers around the bushes that stand guard in front of the porch and she frowns, tucking her tablet beneath her arm.

“Good morning…?” she calls uncertainly. The willowy and very familiar-looking young woman who is making her way up the path toward the Daynes’ house does not even pause. Instead, a polite smile that does not reach her ice-blue eyes crosses her face as she climbs up the front steps.

“Good morning,” the strange girl from the bar replies amiably, tossing her paprika-red hair in a cascade of autumn over one shoulder. The jean jacket from that night at the bar is still draped languidly over her shoulders; beneath it, Dany sees a frothy sundress the color of peaches and cherry blossoms that bares long, pale legs and that Dany thinks would look absolutely ridiculous on anyone else at this hour. In the pale light of the morning, she also spots a glint of silver on her right hand. The girl nods her head in greeting. “It’s Dany, isn’t it? You met my brother at the bar the other night.”

“I remember.” Dany also remembers the cool, suspicious way this other young woman had been looking at her across from the bar. Even now, it is almost impossible to read her expression beyond that mild skepticism. It is unnerving. Pointedly, she asks, “I didn’t meet you though.”

Does something flicker in the girl’s eyes? It’s hard to say and Dany wants to grit her teeth in frustration. But the girl herself smiles nonetheless—that same polite but chill smile as before.

“My apologies,” the other young woman murmurs, in a low contralto that is rich with an accent noticeably different from her brother’s. “I’m Sansa. Robb’s my older brother, though I suppose he may have told you the sibling part of it. It’s always…nice to make acquaintances so quickly in a new town, though he’s quicker at it than I am. I’m afraid my family's been gone far too long for anyone to remember old ties.”

Dany frowns. Before moving away a few years ago, she had lived her entire life here in Starfall. Considering how close in age the two siblings are to her, she should know them even if they’d moved away when they were all children. But she can’t recall anyone who quite fits the physical description of either Robb or Sansa. She may be getting older but her memory surely isn’t that bad. She shakes her head.

“I’m sorry but have we met before? How did you know where I live?”

Sansa laughs.

“It’s a very small town. Everyone knows everyone. I just had to ask around.” Without answering the first question, the taller girl reaches into her purse and pulls out an envelope. “My family would be remiss if we didn’t donate to the fundraising ball coming up. I used to think the world of these sorts of things when I was little and I told Robb it wouldn’t ingratiate us with anyone here if we didn’t even bring a welcome present.”

“It’s not mandatory,” Dany explains, though she reaches to take the envelope anyway. There is nothing written on the exterior, though the envelope itself is sealed with a smudge of silver wax, imprinted with what looks like a howling wolf. Charming. She is not sure why Sansa would give this to her though. Is it because she's the only one the siblings know in Starfall? “You shouldn’t feel obligated to donate.”

Tywin Lannister might have some thoughts about that but Tywin Lannister has always been the very least of Dany’s worries. Maybe Robb and Sansa know anyway, considering the pretentious way of sealing a letter is so reminiscent of the Lannister patriarch’s. Either way, Sansa waves her objection aside.

“It’s no obligation. My family used to donate all the time. I’m sure the Tyrells have it buried somewhere in the town records.”

“Your family…?”

“Stark.” Sansa’s smile turns a shade more brittle and expectant at the edges. “We’re not terribly popular around here anymore.”

An understatement, Dany thinks. There is something vaguely familiar about the surname but she’ll be damned if she can figure out why something is nagging at her memory. Had Robb mentioned something of their family that night at the bar? No, she doesn’t think so—but her memory of that night is frustratingly foggy. She cannot recall much of what she and Robb discussed, though she had felt strangely at ease and open with him.

She frowns down at the envelope. Stark. A howling wolf motif. The silvery grey wax.

It hits her a moment later.

“Oh!” She glances up at Sansa, who is watching her curiously. “Stark. I’ve seen that name on the town charter. You’re part of the families of Founders.”

But…there haven’t been any Starks in Starfall in decades, at the very least. She remembers Missandei telling her that once. As far as Dany knows, the last record of any Starks residing in the old manor that once belonged to their family was…damn, was Olenna Tyrell even born at the time? Had she barely been more than a child? The more she thinks of it, the more she is sure that must be the case. Families come and go from Starfall all the time—the Daynes are an example—but there is always at least one or two remaining connections to the town. The Starks had all but vanished one day. It is not a historical mystery so much as a historical blip.

Dany studies Sansa for a moment. She thought that her sudden return to the town was going to be awkward. She can’t imagine the churning the gossip mill must be doing at the return of a wayward family of Founders. Abruptly, despite the girl’s lukewarm nature, a sting of sympathy washes through her and she wonders if Sansa’s glacial treatment of her has anything to do with being a newcomer in a strange new town.

“Is it just you and your brother then?” Dany ventures. At least she can attempt to show some warmth towards the statuesque redhead. Sansa tilts her head to the side, an almost birdlike gesture. A smile briefly flickers over her face.

“For a time,” she answers vaguely. “We’ll see how things go. The manor’s going to take some time to air out. And it would be nice to dig up a bit of the past in the meanwhile.”

“My friend works at Town Hall. If you need any records about your family…”

To her surprise, Sansa laughs again quietly, shaking her head.

“No need. I’m sure we’ll find everything we need buried in the manor’s attic or something.”

Somewhere behind her in the house, Dany hears Ashara calling her name, a signal that breakfast is ready. She hesitates for a moment, glancing from the open red door to the young woman still perched politely on the top steps of the porch.

To hell with it, Dany thinks. Ashara would murder her for being less than hospitable, thinking she had forgotten all of her southern manners while living in Winterfell. “Do you want to come in?”

She watches with some vague amusement and confusion as a spasm of surprise flickers across Sansa’s face, a fine crack in her icy veneer. The first rays of dawn beaming over the rooftops catch in her hair and turn it into a halo of fire. “You’re inviting me in?”

“I mean, you shouldn’t expect anything gourmet from my mum,” Dany warns, “but she does own the local coffee bar and can make a mean cup of coffee if you’d like. She also hears more gossip than most people in town so you might find out some information about your family that you won’t be able to find at the manor.”

The expression on Sansa’s face doesn’t quite reset to its previous aloof mask. The shock—and why should she be shocked at a merely polite gesture, did she and Robb just move from King’s Landing, for god’s sake?—fades. It is replaced by a strange disquiet and wariness…and no little uncertainty. Dany sees that she seems to be clutching the strap of her purse a bit tighter, and the glimmer from before, the ring that sits on her right hand, flickers in Dany’s eyes.

“That would be…nice, I suppose,” Sansa murmurs, though it sounds mostly like an afterthought. “This is your family’s house, isn’t it?”

No, a part of Dany thinks, even after all these years. Outwardly, she nods. “It’s where I grew up. Really, it’s the only house that I’d actually call home.”

Again, there is that moment of hesitation. She sees Sansa’s eyes dart towards the door, her lips pressed into a thin, thoughtful line. It looks as though she is having a strangely tumultuous inner battle with herself over accepting the invite inside and Dany is tempted to just roll her eyes and drag the young woman inside when a voice down by the sidewalk calls her name.

“Daenerys Dayne, what are you doing awake so early this morning?”

Sansa goes rigid at the shout, her eyes narrowing imperceptibly at Dany. But Dany herself is too distracted by the voice to pay the look much attention, peering past Sansa’s shoulder to see two young women stepping away from a tiny red hatchback. One of them is Margaery, looking as casual and posh as always, and the other is a bespectacled young woman with honey-brown skin and a cloud of deep brown curls, an illuminating grin on her face. Dany feels her own mouth widen with a smile.

“Missy!”

“No hello for me this morning?” Margaery asks as Missandei envelops Dany in a crushing hug. She gives a curious smile to Sansa. “Hello again.”

“When did you get back into town?” Dany asks, her words slightly muffled by Missandei’s tight grip. The taller girl pulls away, straightening her glasses that have been knocked slightly askew by the force of the hug. When Dany had arrived in town two weeks ago, it was to discover her best friend since nursery school was off visiting family in Naath, with a questionable date of return. Missandei beams at her.

“Just this morning. I sent you several texts.” There is a prick of guilt within her at that, as she remembers purposely not looking at her ever-growing backlog of texts on her phone. It must show on her face because Missandei only laughs gently. “Don’t worry about it. Fortunately, political scandal in a small town never sleeps and Margaery was able to pick me up from the train station.”

A knot of tension that has been sitting in Dany’s chest that she hadn’t even realized she had gotten used to over these past couple of weeks slowly warms and begins to unravel. Missandei has always had that effect on her—she is the calm one of the two, the gentle wave in comparison to Dany’s tumultuous temper. Leaving her behind in Starfall, she thinks, had been so much harder than leaving him.

I never wanted that. Not really. I was always lying to myself.

Unbidden, a voice in the back of her head washes through her memories, warm and comforting and strange.

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

She pauses, her hands stuttering around Missandei’s arms. The words are familiar, as though woven through a memory, but they are only words—she cannot imagine who said them, or when. She wonders briefly if she read them in a book some time ago, and her mind is helpfully trying to assure her that every decision she has made in the past several years has been the right one.

“I should go,” Sansa says quietly, breaking Dany out of her thoughts. She takes a step away from the three friends, nodding at Dany, that austere expression back on her face. “It was lovely to officially meet you, Dany. You should drop by the manor once we’ve gotten things straightened up over there.”

“I’d love to.” It falls out of her mouth before she can stop herself. She sees Margaery smirk out of the corner of her eye, the other young woman playfully jostling her in the arm at the odd eagerness in her voice. But Dany also notices then that Missandei is watching Sansa with a peculiar look in her eyes, an uncharacteristic frown on the taller girl’s pretty features. If Sansa notices though, she doesn’t let on. Dany gives Missandei a quizzical look before smiling at Sansa. “I’ll see you around then?”

Sansa’s response is only another one of those strange little smiles and then she turns on her heel and is swiftly gone.

“So the sister is already visiting you,” Margaery laughs, ignoring Dany’s unimpressed look. “You must have really made an impression on Tall, Ginger, and Handsome. He must think you’re enchanting.”

No one has ever called her enchanting before. Not even him. Dany makes a face at Margaery before thrusting the envelope at her. “No, she came to drop off a donation for the fundraiser. Apparently, she and her brother are from a family of Founders.”

“Oh?” Margaery slides a thumb beneath the wax seal, ignoring propriety and decorum. “I feel like I would have known…”

“Stark, she said.”

For some reason, Missandei’s frown only deepens but Dany is distracted by the pleased if surprised hum from Margaery as she glances at the cheque nestled within the envelope. “Well. That is quite a few zeroes. It seems as though the Tyrells and Lannisters might have some competition, which I’m sure my grandmother will love to hear. Maybe I need to leave Starfall for a few decades and invest my money elsewhere too.”

So, not only are the mysterious newcomers the descendants of a vanished family of Founders but they are wealthy at that? Perhaps Dany will go to this fundraising ball after all. Her own broken engagement made be worthy of salacious gossip but she knows the denizens of Starfall cannot abide an unsolved mystery—and the unmarried bachelors and bachelorettes of the town will certainly be eager to make the acquaintance of these Starks. Her own personal drama pales in comparison.

As they start to make their way inside, prompted by Ashara calling for her yet again, Dany nudges Missandei in the arm. “Are you okay?”

“Hmm?” Missandei blinks. “Yes, I’m fine. Why?”

“You looked a little spooked by Sansa.” She gives her friend a good-natured smile. “Did you think I was scouting for people to replace you as my best friend?”

Missandei’s returning smile is abashed—but Dany notices that it seems strangely strained.

“Of course not. I just think the jet lag is starting to catch up with me.” Dany laughs.

“Alright. Well, let’s get you some of Ashara’s coffee and pray that she hasn’t decided to serve up raw bacon.”

She is sitting alone at a booth at the Starfall Bar & Grill, having exasperated Gendry by continually ordering water after water with her long-since devoured plate of fries. She has her laptop set up at the edge of the table, but it has long since gone to sleep—she has been sketching and erasing and resketching new typography designs on her tablet for the past hour. She is running up against a deadline for this project for her company and she had hoped a change in scenery beyond the walls of her apartment might help spur her creativity. It had not.

So engrossed with the swirling letters on her screen, she does not realize someone is hovering by her table until they take a seat on the bench opposite from her.

“Mind if I join you?” Her head shoots up at the sound of the familiar voice. Robb Stark sits across from her, giving her a crooked, apologetic smile. He has forgone his jacket, opting instead for a far more weather-appropriate deep blue tee. “If you’re busy, I’ll leave you alone.”

“You wouldn’t have sat down if you didn’t want to interrupt,” Dany points out archly, though she softens her words with a smile of her own, placing the tablet down on the tabletop. “All of my work is starting to look the same so I probably need a break anyway. And Gendry might actually kick me out of this bar if I don’t order more food or actual alcohol soon.” Robb glances at the perspiring glass of water.

“You know what you like. No shame in that.”

“Not everyone usually agrees so thank you for that.”

“It’s the least I can do, I think.” Before she can ask what he means, Robb waves down one of the servers and orders another plate of fries, a refill of water for Dany, and a glass of whiskey for himself. When Dany only gives him a perplexed look, Robb rubs the back of his neck in an affected nervous gesture. “Sorry. But consider this an apology for running out on you here a few days ago. I got an urgent call and didn’t want to bother you with it.”

Is that why he left? Dany frowns. Honestly, she can’t remember. So much of their conversation is a strange blur of half-remembered words and gauzy memories. When the server arrives with Robb’s whiskey and a refill of water for Dany, Robb splays his hands out onto the table with a smile.

“So I heard my sister paid you a visit this morning.”

“She did.” In the intervening hours, Dany is still not sure how she feels about Sansa Stark. The other young woman is polite, sure. But there is something about her that unsettles her. “Is she usually that…?” She fails to come up with a word to describe the tall redhead that wouldn’t seem rude. But Robb seems to understand what she’s struggling for because he laughs, taking a swig of the whiskey.

“Sorry, you’ll have to forgive her,” he says as he rubs at the scruff on his face. “She can be the most devoted person you’ll ever meet but it just takes a while to get her to open up. Did she drop off our donation? I was hoping that we didn’t miss a deadline. I always forget that small towns run on their own schedules that you usually have to be in the know to be aware of.”

“It’s in safe hands,” Dany reassures him, though she knows Margaery is probably neck-deep in gossip from her grandmother because of the amount written on the cheque. She tilts her head to the side, curiosity getting the better of her. “Sansa said your last name was Stark. I really did think the Daynes were the only family here in Starfall that barely had a presence in town anymore but I think you all have us beat there.”

“Every family has a black sheep.” It isn’t an explanation or answer. For some reason, it only makes Dany even more curious. She asks him about what prompted their return to their family’s town and Robb’s smile becomes a little more reserved. He sits back in his booth and studies her thoughtfully. “Why not? Everyone wants to get back to their roots sometimes. Maybe after living abroad for so long, we wanted to see what small-town life is really like.”

She can’t help it—she laughs. “Here I am trying to get away from a small-town life and you two are out searching for it.”

“I think you mentioned that the other night.” Robb’s smile fades a little more as the server returns with a plate of fries. “Doesn’t it make you feel unmoored?”

Unmoored. Is that what she feels? She had never questioned it while she was in Winterfell. She simply lived her life, a life that would have been impossible within the confines of Starfall. She shrugs, absently reaching for a fry just to do something with her hands. “I don’t often have conversations about existentialism with strangers.”

“Am I a stranger?”

“I feel like you know more about me than I know about you,” Dany points out, aiming a fry at him. “Though I was very serious when I said I wasn’t on the market the other day. Telling me more about yourself and buying me fries isn’t going to change my mind.”

Robb crosses his arms, one brow playfully cocked. “My sister says I’m too much like our father to pursue a woman who does not want to be chased.”

“And when should I expect to see Mr. Stark wandering around these parts? Is he already at the manor while his son roams about town, buying unavailable women fries?”

The young man shakes his head and though his smile is still on his face, it is sobered by the sad sheen that sweeps through his blue eyes. “Not quite. My father—and my mother—died a very long time ago. It’s just me and my siblings now.”

There it is again—that pang of sympathy that she had felt for Sansa this morning when she realized how lonely moving to a new town must be for someone clearly uncomfortable with making new friends. The humor drops from her tone and she feels a brief flush of embarrassment rise up her neck at her teasing. “Oh. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—” Siblings? Is there more than just him and Sansa? Do they live here too? “I’m sorry for your loss. Losing your parents…it’s not an easy thing.”

“Don’t worry about it. It was such a long time ago. And me and my brothers and sisters…we’ve taken good care of each other.”

His words make Dany think of Viserys and Ashara. Viserys has always done his best to care for Dany, even as strange and bossy and eccentric as he is. And Ashara, of course, has always shown nothing but kindness, even though she is in no way related to them. She had stepped up in lieu of next of kin, as she had always been close friends with Dany’s biological mum.

But something about Robb’s words makes her briefly chew on her inner cheek thoughtfully before she says, “That sounds like something the oldest sibling would say. So I’m assuming you’re the oldest?” Robb laughs, an abashed sound, and he scrapes his fingers through his hair.

“Sort of.”

“How can you sort of be the oldest sibling?”

There is something wistful in Robb’s eyes now, something that Dany, for all of her ability to read people’s expressions, cannot understand. She watches as he swallows another mouthful of whiskey before he shrugs ruefully, letting a slow, unaffected smile start to spread across his face.

“I split the duty with a cousin." Before she can ask him to expound on that, Robb is already brushing past that topic. "Anyway, at the risk of this conversation becoming more disheartening, I need to ask: are you going to the fundraising ball?”

The sudden switch in topics almost makes Dany’s head spin. She chews on the end of a fry in order to give herself enough time to compose an answer that isn’t an outright no. Hadn’t she thought about reconsidering once she learned just a little more about the mysterious circumstances around the Stark family? Has that really determined whether she is going to go or not? It’s a masked ball, for god’s sake—something rarely done outside of holidays in Winterfell.

As Robb watches her expectantly, Dany takes another slow bite of her fry. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I have a lot of work I need to get done and it doesn’t really seem to be my thing.”

“If you want to go, I would like to take you.”

“She would love to,” a new voice purrs over Dany’s shoulder, and then Margaery Tyrell is sliding into the booth next to her in a wave of perfume and lipgloss. Dany gapes at her friend, though it quickly becomes a glower as Margaery sets vodka soda on the table, her catlike smile turning alarmingly bright in Robb’s direction. “So kind of you to ask.”

“Ah.” Robb frowns. “I’m not sure if—”

“Marg…” Dany hisses, pinching the other young woman’s thigh. Margaery, of course, ignores her.

“My grandmother wanted me to thank you for your donation. She was quite surprised by it since she was sure that the Starks wanted to wipe their slate clean when they left Starfall all those years ago. She thought it was nice to see that at least some folks in the family have some town pride.” She winks at Dany. “I drove by the old Stark manor today too. You should see what they’ve already done with the place. It’s nice to know that all those years are rebuffing Tywin Lannister’s demands to bulldoze the place to the ground actually paid off.”

Robb’s smile is tight as he explains to Dany, “Sansa adores flowers. It's starting to look more like a botanical garden than a house.”

“Well, you should be able to renovate the place with no issue. I’m sure if I asked Missy, she might even be able to find photos of the original interior design from a century ago. You’ll certainly have to have a party to celebrate once it’s been refurbished.”

From the glint in Margaery’s eye, she wonders what her friend will do if Robb refuses. She sighs, picking her tablet up and reopening her abandoned design. “You don’t have to. Margaery is just being pushy. If there’s anything this town likes more than gossip, it’s dressing up in tuxedos and gowns and trying to convince one another that their family contributed the most to the history of this place.”

“People are just proud of their legacies, Dany,” Margaery chides magnanimously and Dany only snorts as she reaches for her water.

“There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you came from,” she replies, in a tone that clearly marks how often they’ve had this argument, “but people are so busy looking back, they rarely look forward.”

“You’ve just never been a fan of history.”

“I’m not a fan of living in the past.”

Robb has been looking back and forth between them as though he has been watching a tennis match, and Dany feels a bit annoyed that Margaery had to bring this topic up around him so soon after she found out about his parents. She gives him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Ignore us. Plan a party if you’d like. I’m sure a lot of people would like to see what the inside of the old Stark manor looks like once it’s finally been cleaned up properly.”

“What you said,” Robb begins, “about people looking to the past…is that a thing for you?” Dany shrugs.

“If I look back, I’m lost,” she explains—and Robb is looking at her so intently now that she is abruptly reminded of the way he had looked at her the night they met, eyes as blue as the heart of the fire, an almost ravenous need to understand her in his gaze. She pulls away slightly. “My mum used to say something like that. Not Ashara. My, ah…”

She almost says “real” mum. But something like shame trips up her tongue at the last minute. And now Margaery is giving her a look that is equal parts sympathy and confusion and Robb is staring at her as though she is a complete fucking enigma and suddenly she wants to be out of this booth and back in the peace and quiet of her home where she doesn’t have to think of the past or any of the horrible, strange things that have garnered her these looks.

And Dany is about to tell him that no, Robb doesn’t want to take her to the ball and yes, he is very nice and friendly but she has told him that she is not interested in dating anyone. But before she can say anything and even as Margaery opens her mouth to change the subject to something more lighthearted, the front doors to the bar swing open and Jaime Lannister and his partner Brienne enter, their faces masks of emotionlessness. Dany absently notices them talking with the hostess, who glances around the restaurant before meeting her gaze and pointing their way.

“Afternoon,” Jaime greets with false cheer as they approach the table. Dany sees the thin lines of stress around his eyes and the grim set of Brienne’s mouth. Something settles into her stomach like a stone, especially as Jaime turns to her and gently says, “Is there anywhere we could speak in private?”

Dany feels the first dredges of panic claw up her chest. Nothing that ever begins with that question is ever good. “Is…is it Ashara? Vis? Are they okay? Did something happen?” Jaime and Brienne share looks but it is Brienne who shakes her head.

“No, Miss Dayne. But we would like to ask you some questions.”

“Well, what is going on?” Margaery demands, her eyes narrowing. Her voice has delved into those soft low tones that threateningly promise to become louder if one person says something that rankles her. “Is she under arrest for something?”

“No,” Jaime assures Margaery, only looking mildly exasperated. But his green gaze still softens with what Dany can only assume is sympathy when he looks back at her. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions in private.”

Dany rises unsteadily. “I’m…what is this about? Am I in trouble?”

“Yes, what is this about?” Margaery demands again. Robb says nothing, though he glances between the people gathered at the table with a concerned knot forming between his brows. Clearly, for as much as everyone knows everyone and everything in this town, Jaime and Brienne don’t want to reveal the need for this visit in front of someone who is still a new resident.

Now he’ll think I’m a convict and won’t need to ask me to a gala, Dany thinks numbly as she follows Jaime and Brienne through the winding tables and chairs of the grill. Jaime stops briefly to ask Gendry a question and the black-haired bartender nods before pointing them around the corner. They walk down a short hallway designated for staff only before Brienne quietly pushes open a door to a breakroom. Margaery is right on their heels.

“I want to make sure you’re respecting her rights,” Margaery says flatly when Jaime tries to dissuade her from entering.

“It’s fine.” Dany’s tongue feels awkward in her mouth. Why all of this secrecy? Beyond the swinging doors of the room, she is sure she can still see Robb sitting in the booth. What a greeting to this new town, to have the girl you may have been interested in whisked away by the sheriff. She does not sit, feeling as though her nerves are about to rattle out of her bones. “Marg can stay if it’s not…it’s not bad, is it?”

Again, that grim look settles over Jaime’s face. He and Brienne share another set of looks. Margaery crosses her arms. Finally, Jaime says, “A few days ago, the department received a call about a badly decomposed body found off the old high road that leads up to the Red Mountains. We received a call back from the medical examiner this morning positively identifying the body.”

Margaery makes a confused noise. “What does this have to do with Dany? She hasn’t even been back in town for two weeks yet.”

But suddenly Dany knows. She knows exactly why Jaime and Brienne are giving her those pitying looks, those looks that she remembers. She knows why they would ask to speak to her in private, why she of all people would be so closely tied to this. She knows, she knows, she knows.

The world tilts.

“I’m sorry, Dany,” Jaime is saying but all she can hear is a young man’s words from so many years ago, a man she hadn’t loved, not really, but who had been such a big chunk of her old life and the catalyst of her new one.

Marry me. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

Daario.

The castle’s granite walls rise out of the mists and the snow like a dream.

Beneath the immense walls, men have left off work on repairing shattered and shorn brick, the ground black and thick with mud and snowmelt and horse shit. The outer courtyard that sits between the outer walls and the inner keep has been cleaned up as much as possible, though the soot of war and battle still clings stubbornly to the walls. The clean, sharp scent of winter has blown away the chaff and ash that may have lingered but a moment, a pause, a hesitation can bring the salty tang of blood onto anyone’s tongue.

The wordless roar of dozens of conversations that may have filled the air has petered off into soft, uncertain murmurs as the party arrives through the gates of the castle, a retinue of knights and guards, soldiers and sellswords. These are the unfamiliar faces of foreigners—strangely garbed and with peculiar weapons, the newly-arrived forces cause the citizens within the outer courtyard to share uneasy looks.

Riding through the gates too, sitting proudly atop a white mare, is a young woman dressed all in white. Her hair is the same color as the snowdrifts that have risen in waves around the castle. Her expression is unreadable as she gazes about at the pale-faced citizens who have lined up to watch her approach.

As they pass through to the inner courtyard, a larger majority of the party that had not been made of the foot and infantry left beyond the outer walls comes to a halt. The young woman and a dozen others continue into the inner courtyard where weather-beaten banners hang heavy and faded over the walls.

In the inner courtyard, the ground is steadier. The young woman looks around and then finds that the man who had been riding at her side has already dismounted and is offering her an assisting hand. She gladly takes it.

“Don’t be nervous,” he murmurs as she regains her footing on solid ground. “You are the queen.”

Her hand briefly tightens around his before she drops it. Tilting her chin high, she allows the man to lead her toward the household of cloaked and wary-looking people who stand in respectful rows before her. It feels as though the eyes of the world are on her.

Her dark-haired companion steps between her and the cautiously smiling man with his auburn curls. At the young man’s side stands a young woman with hair the same autumnal hue as his. Her expression is far less welcoming.

“Cousin,” her companion begins, “may I introduce to you Queen Daenerys of House Targaryen, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm?”

“You have done us a great honor, Your Grace,” the young man says with a courteous bow. The young woman’s eyes flicker but then she nods, saying nothing. Her companion seems to note that with a spasm of a grim smile but when he turns back to her, she can see warmth in his eyes. There is strength to be had in that, perhaps.

“Your Grace,” he says, and only he can say such a heavy, weighted title with such fond compassion. “These are my cousins, Lord Robb Stark, and his sister, Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell.”

“Thank you for inviting us into your home, my lord, my lady,” she says with a regal nod of her head. “The North is as beautiful as your cousin has claimed.”

The young woman watches her for a moment more before her features soften. She sweeps into an elegant curtsy, her head bowed in deference.

“Winterfell is yours, Your Grace.”

Something cold alights on her brow.

It has begun to snow.

There is a knock on the front door a little before midnight.

When he opens the door, he finds a stranger with very familiar eyes standing out on the porch. She is tucking her glasses into the collar of her shirt with one hand and holding her umbrella with the other, her dark eyes narrowing as they land on him.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“I know who you are,” the young woman says flatly and without preamble, her expression serious. “And you know what I am.”

He pauses. After a moment, he nods warily. “What do you want?”

There is a presence at his back then, and he knows his sister is standing behind him. The young woman at the door glances over his shoulder, her frown deepening, before she meets his gaze again. She does not need to glower at him in intimidation. She does not need to threaten. They know the sum of the other’s strengths and weaknesses.

“I heard what happened with Daario,” the dark-haired woman on the porch replies. She shifts the umbrella slightly so that raindrops scatter across her cloud of coils. “I don’t know why you’ve come back to Starfall, but Dany isn’t her. Leave my friend out of whatever you’re scheming.”

“What makes you think we’re scheming anything?” he asks, unable to keep the thread of irritation out of his voice. The young woman lifts one dark brow in challenge.

“The spirits and stars don’t lie, Robb Stark. And neither does that comet.” She takes a step away from the door. “This is the only warning you’ll get. Dany has suffered enough with this town for you all to drag her into something worse. So maybe it’s best if the Stark family leaves Starfall again and this time for good.”

She gives them both one last warning look before she steps back, her booted heels crunching in the gravelly walkway, and vanishes into the rainy night.

A doorbell rings elsewhere in the town too.

The front door of the Tyrell mansion swings open some moments later, revealing Margaery Tyrell, bathed in the golden light of the mansion’s front foyer. She looks stressed and despondent and annoyed, a blistering reproach already on the tip of her tongue, but she stops. She blinks in recognition at the shadow standing just beyond the light of the foyer before a sad but exasperated smile glides onto her face.

“It’s past midnight. Couldn’t sleep?”

For a brief moment, there is no answer. Then, “May I come in?”

“Of course. You could have called. This whole thing with Daario is just…god, it’s awful. What are you—”

The words trail off into nothingness. The figure in the shadows has stepped into the light. And only then does Margaery see their eyes.

Red. Red. Red.

“Saying hello, of course.”

Margaery inhales sharply, taking an alarmed step backward but it is not fast enough—the figure has already grabbed her arm and, with barely more than a casual toss of their arm, has flung Margaery out into the rain and the grass. Turning with an almost careless nonchalance, they raise a wrist to their mouth, and Margaery, struggling to regain her bearings on the damp grass and in the darkness of a storm, hears the sickeningly wet sound of flesh being punctured, of skin tearing. When they lower their arm, she sees that their mouth is dripping crimson with blood.

Margaery opens her mouth to scream and the shadow’s smile grows wider.

“Oh, dear heart. Don’t do that. It’s impolite.”

Then, with their fangs still bared and slick with red saliva, they lunge.

The silence of the night is broken only by a furious, muffled gag, a pop of sharp, splintering cracks, and then the dull thud of a body hitting the ground.

Moments later, there is nothing but the rain and the thunder and a night as silent as the grave.

Chapter Text

Dany thinks that the dress in front of her is about as appropriate for a funeral as it is for a gala.

The cats have long since vanished to somewhere beneath her couch where it is simultaneously cool and drenched in the late morning sunlight. She meanwhile is still in her bedroom, peering down at the black cocktail dress that she has laid across her bed. She has not packed many dresses and she has certainly not packed anything that might be worn to her ex-boyfriend’s funeral.

And there will be a funeral, she thinks, and soon. The sheriff’s office has not released details yet but this is Starfall—people talk and she is certain that the gossip mill has been going into overdrive these past few days as news of Daario’s death spreads throughout the town. She knows, at the very least, the news has made its way to the Tyrells and the Lannisters but heaven forbid either of them folds first when it comes to canceling the gala. No, it will turn into a memorial of sorts, a chance to increase donations in Daario’s name, an opportunity to remember and honor a long-time citizen of the town.

Dany sits on the edge of her bed, fiddling with the silken hemline of the dress. She feels guilty. There is no other way to put it. She feels guilty because she knows she should be more upset. She is upset—she had dated Daario for years, how can she not be unmoved—but she does wonder if she is still in shock over the news. She should feel more than this. She should at least cry.

He always hated this town, Dany thinks, collapsing back against the jewel-toned pillows that bury her bed (the rest of her sublet is bare bones and neutral but her bedroom is a spectacle of color, the only thing of her flat in Winterfell that she allowed herself here). But he never would have gone far. He never would have come with me.

Of course, she had never asked and now it is too late to know if he actually would have.

Fuck her.

There is a knock on her front door.

An irritated meow from Drogon makes known his annoyance at being woken up from his nap somewhere in the living room. Dany frowns, tossing her phone down onto the bed before she crosses through her flat. No one has tried to buzz themselves in and she hasn’t received any texts from the handful of people who are willing to speak to her saying that they were coming over. She stands up on tiptoe to peer through the peephole…and smiles.

“You could have called,” she chides as she opens the door, letting Viserys and Missandei in. Viserys, being Viserys, immediately makes a beeline for her kitchen while Missandei gives her a brief hug. “It’s not like I’m drowning in texts or phone calls from other people here.”

“Well, you’re a big marketing hotshot up in Winterfell now,” remarks Viserys from where his head is half-stuck in the fridge. “I don’t know what your schedule looks like.”

“Sorry for bringing him,” Missandei apologizes as Drogon sidles out from beneath the couch. The black cat stretches with a squint before meowing his hello and sauntering over to Missandei for tummy rubs. Dany sees two pairs of green and amber eyes peering out from beneath the shadows of the couch but Rhaegal and Viserion do not make any attempt to come out to greet her visitors. “I was low on gas and needed a ride. You really did decide you had to move halfway across town from Ashara.”

“It’s only for six months, Missy,” Dany reminds her best friend with a small laugh. “What brings you over anyway? Did you just want to see how poorly I decorated my new place?”

Viserys pops his head up from the fridge, a container of uneaten noodles in his hands. He is already tossing it in her microwave. “We came to make sure you’re doing okay with the Daario news.”

Missandei grimaces at the look that must cross Dany’s face. “In so many words…yes. How are you holding up?”

“I didn’t expect to come back home and learn that the guy I used to be engaged to died,” Dany says with a lightheartedness she does not feel. Missandei’s warm brown eyes soften but a brief glance towards the kitchen must cause her to bite her tongue. Dany knows that Viserys’s idea of comfort is inappropriate at best and harsh at worst and understands her friend’s reluctance. She lies, “I’m fine. It’s just…shocking.”

They sit on the couch and are rewarded with a single grey paw emerging from beneath it to bat at their ankles before it retracts with a satisfied meow. Missandei smiles but the concern in her eyes doesn’t lessen.

“Still nothing from the coroner?” Dany shakes her head.

“No.” None of Daario’s family lives here in Starfall—he never knew his dad, his mother had passed some years back, and he was estranged from the rest of his relatives. Despite all of his friends and despite their break-up, Dany is still probably the closest thing he had to next of kin. “I’m not sure I want to find out even when the coroner finishes.”

And that’s at least the truth. Dany wants to chalk all of this up to an accident. Daario was always so vivacious, she cannot even begin to fathom that it might have been some undiagnosed health issue. Worse yet, what if he had been sick and he had simply never told her? The guilt would eat away at her. Even now, thinking about the potential guilt and how it worries her more than her lack of grief over his death fills her with uncertain remorse.

I loved him, Dany tells herself. I did. I’m upset that he’s gone.

Yet…

Viserys, with his newly-heated carton of Dany’s noodles, heads back into the living room, collapsing in the armchair across from the couch. “Hopefully Jaime at least knows to keep the gossipers from churning out too many theories about what happened to him. They’re already going to have an absolute time of it with you coming back to town.”

Dany flinches and Missandei gives Viserys a flat glare. “You came back too, Vis.” The pale-haired young man shrugs.

“I also wasn’t engaged to him.”

And that is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Jaime has already reassured Dany that she isn’t a suspect and that Daario’s death doesn’t look to be suspicious. But she also knows that their small-town coroner is being usurped by a forensics team from the capital. Sure, the team is only three people, but it is unheard of for King’s Landing to send medical teams all the way to Starfall for anyone’s death.

Dany imagines what the people of Starfall will start saying if Daario’s death is anything except a tragic accident. She wonders how long she will be able to stand it, how long before the pity becomes suspicion. Her hand once again goes to her empty ring finger.

It’s not my fault, she thinks. I cared for him once. But that’s it. That’s not my fault. So lost in her thoughts, it takes her a moment to realize that Missandei is trying to hand her something. She blinks as something cold and silvery is dropped onto her lap. “What is this?”

“Superstition,” Missandei answers with an abashed smile. “It’s a charm. I know it’s silly but I want you to wear it while you’re here in town. There’s so much that’s happening and I just want you to be safe. Just in case.”

Dany peers down at the necklace that sits pooled on her lap. It is not very ostentatious—the charm itself looks far more battered than the chain that it hangs from. A sliver of obsidian, glimmering with shades of violet and deep blue, ripples through the face of a charm that Dany realizes after a moment is actually a locket. She slides a thumbnail through the clasp to open it but it doesn’t budge. She looks up at Missandei curiously but her friend shrugs. “Maybe I spelled it shut.”

“You spelled it shut,” Dany repeats with a small smile. “An amulet, a spell—did you get into witchcraft when I moved away?”

“And if you did,” Viserys interrupts, a forkful of noodles paused halfway to his mouth, “how come she gets a charm and I don’t? Don’t I deserve some protection?” Missandei rolls her eyes.

“You’ll be fine, Vis,” she says. “And it’s just something I picked up a while back. Indulge me.” Dany laughs and then swipes her hair away from her shoulder, clasping the necklace in place. The silver chain feels cool and soothing against her skin like a kiss and the locket sits primly atop her breastbone. For some reason, it is almost warm in comparison. She thinks it must be because it had been nestled in Missandei’s hand for a few minutes. She smiles at her friend.

“Thank you. I’m not sure it’ll do much good but I appreciate it.”

“Now if you’ll just promise me that you won’t go to the fundraising gala with anyone except me.” Dany laughs again.

“Well, Margaery has already accepted an invite from Robb Stark on my behalf so I’m not sure I can promise that.” Dany shrugs as her mind drifts to the genial red-haired young man. It’s not as though she doesn’t like him but she does think that he might be trying a little too hard to befriend her. “You may need to fight with her about it.”

Missandei frowns. “I would if she’d return any of my texts. I haven’t heard from her in a few days.” She gives Dany a look. “And I get very strange vibes around Robb and his sister. I’d really prefer if you were more cautious around them.”

Dany can’t help it—she snorts, swatting in her friend’s direction.

“Spells, lockets, and vibes, Missy? Are you sure you didn’t become a witch while I was gone?” When Missandei doesn’t look convinced, Dany’s smile gentles. “He’s harmless. If anything, he is trying way too hard to make friends here. It can’t be easy to be new in town, especially a town like this. I’m sure the Tyrells and the Lannisters already have them set out to be rivals thanks to that donation they made.”

“Who is Robb Stark?” Viserys asks, raising an eyebrow at Dany, his tone suddenly suspicious. Dany almost rolls her eyes and thanks whatever god she needs to that Viserys has next to no concept of the small-town gossip that filters through the town. He has always been ambivalent to it except when it comes to rumors that have to deal with his sister and then he uses them only to tease her mercilessly. “New boyfriend already?”

“No, because I didn’t come back to Starfall for a boyfriend, Vis.”

“Is he…cute?” Viserys wrinkles his nose. Dany throws a couch pillow at him but her brother expertly dodges with a smirk. “Well, go to the gala and show why you’re better than them anyway. It’s not like they have anything to show for their boring lives except irrelevant slander.”

Missandei only shakes her head, a smile at the edge of her lips but there is still worry brimming in her eyes. Dany is not sure why her friend is so unsettled by Robb and Sansa—they are awkward at worst but certainly nothing to be concerned about. And besides, other than this horrible event with Daario, nothing bad ever happens in Starfall.

Save for gossip.

Save for a ruined reputation.

“You can be my date,” Dany says to soothe Missandei’s worry anyway, trying once more to shake her misgivings about her hometown. “And maybe I’ll just save one dance for Robb Stark.” Missandei sighs.

“One dance. And if he asks for more, I’ll turn him into a toad.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

Their steps are swallowed up in the strange silence that surrounds them atop the walkways of Winterfell, a silence that seems intrinsic to a land carpeted with snow. There is something about these lands that seems almost fantastical—the hills a blinding white as far as the eye can see, the sky a dazzlingly clear shade of ice-blue, the towering forest to the west thick with trees so dark a green they are nearly black against the horizon. It is so different from the capital with its red-tiled roofs and its massive castle, the heat of a million people nearly suffocating on even the coolest of autumn days.

The words she has spoken feel stiff and too strangely formal on her tongue. She wants them to be sincere, even though the loss is not her fault. But the blood still drenches her family name, and it will be her duty to always apologize, apologize, apologize.

The young man walking next to her, as dark-haired and dark-eyed as his cousin (though far taller and more gangly), grimaces, shaking his head.

“Thank you,” Brandon Stark says quietly, his hand gently resting in the silvery-grey ruff of the large wolf that walks by his side. He is a sweet boy and she has taken kindly to his courteous, soft-spoken manner (the wolves of the Stark children she is still getting used to). He pauses and adds, “It was not your fault, Your Grace. But it is kind of you to say so. My father is…he was a good man.”

“War makes monsters of us all,” comes the reply to her left where the sister walks along with them. She carries no illusion that Sansa Stark has any affection for her—the other young woman still harbors unspoken resentment that hides beneath icy courtesy. She wonders if the lady Catelyn Stark has been the same, though the matriarch of the Stark family had died of illness some months past. “And sometimes it reveals the monsters within.”

She bites her tongue at that. She wonders how much insolence she needs to tolerate. It is Brandon though who gives his older sister a quelling look.

“Her Grace has more than made amends for the wrongs House Targaryen did to our family,” he chastises, cutting a brief, apologetic look towards her—but does she see wariness in those dark eyes? She had thought his cousin’s expressions were impossible to read. “She bears no responsibility for the actions of her father.”

Or my brother, she thinks, the unspoken part of the accusation that does not get acknowledged here in Winterfell. She knows why. They all know why.

But if this does anything to change the lady of Winterfell’s mind, she does not show it. Instead, the tall young woman gives her brother a flat look before saying to them both, “I spoke out of turn. I apologize.”

She is glad that it is mostly the young lord here that she must appease—Robb Stark is far more gracious than his sister and she likes and admires the young man. In fact, the rest of the family is remarkably kind and polite, at least to her face. True, the youngest of the clan, a wild boy of five-and-ten, had been blunt with his mistrust at first, but he has at least built a wary, amused tolerance of her. The youngest daughter she has not yet met, having been told she is off across the sea for reasons that the siblings had hemmed and hawed about until their cousin, with some amusement, informed her that she is a student of the blade, a lady knight-in-training.

She thinks she might like the youngest daughter.

Still, the sting of Sansa Stark’s words does not quite go away. She has done nothing wrong. She has done her best to fix the mistakes her family has upended upon the kingdom. What more must she do? What more must she sacrifice? She fixes a smile that does not reach her eyes on her face.

“We all carry our griefs with us,” she says as diplomatically as possible. Brandon nods in agreement but Sansa’s expression is remote, distant. Nothing she can say will ever make this woman forgive her.

She is about to beg their leave, feeling the twinges of a headache coming on from dealing with them, as they approach the open arch of one of the towers along the walkway. But in the shadows within, she catches sight of a familiar figure, and something untwists in her heart. Warm relief floods through her…

…and, as always, a whisper of fear.

“My lord,” she greets with a nod of her head.

“Your Grace,” he returns politely, his tone almost disinterested, before his eyes find the tall young man. A flicker of a smile crosses his face. “Maester Luwin has been looking for you, Bran. He said something about how even some who want to be knights shouldn’t neglect their studies.”

Brandon flushes and even Sansa smiles a little. But the queen’s eyes have not left the newcomer.

You know who he is, the fear murmurs. You know what he is, you know, you know.

It does not matter in the end, she thinks. These people do not matter. This snow-choked land does not matter. Everything she has done, everything they have all lost—none of it matters. But he does.

And when he finally realizes that, she will be damned.

Humidity clings to Dany like a shawl as she climbs the steps of the Tyrell mansion, already longing for an icy flute of sparkling wine to stave off the heat.

The mansion, a grand old thing that is near the twin to the Lannister mansion on the other side of town, is decked with golden lights that lend an inviting aura to its imposing columns and stalwart pale walls. Dany can already hear music floating in from the terrace garden and the low murmur of conversation coming in from the high-vaulted ceilings of the inner ballroom. It would not be too much to surmise that the entire town is here.

“You look like you’re walking to your execution,” Missandei says. Her friend has linked their arms together and her dark eyes dance with amusement beneath the sunburst mask that complements her bronze dress. The other young woman looks practically ethereal. “Should we get some wine before you have to talk to anyone? Or should we find Ashara?”

“I’m fine,” Dany says, somehow managing not to say it through gritted teeth. Viserys’s advice had bolstered her well enough while she had been getting ready but now that she is finally here, all she can wonder is what is she thinking being here? “But that wine sounds like a good idea.”

As they step into the mansion, she can already feel people’s curious gazes turn to her. She has tried to dress as unassuming as possible—the black dress and a red lacquered mask she had managed to find in Ashara’s cache—but she had forgotten that only she and Viserys have that striking shade of silver-gold hair. No matter everything else about her appearance, her hair acts like a beacon of moonlight. 

She should have fucking dyed it.

A server passes by with a tray laden with sparkling wine. Missandei swipes two flutes and hands one to Dany.

“We don’t have to stay,” her best friend reminds her, expertly leading her away from the curious, judgmental stares of people Dany has known her entire life. “An hour at the most if you want. We can heat a pizza back at your place and watch terrible movies over a bottle of wine.”

“I’ll be fine.” She manages to find a brittle smile somewhere behind her emotional wall. “When have you ever known me to back away from a fight?”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Missandei notes, and though her tone is light, there is a small wrinkle of disquiet between her brows. That does make Dany laugh and it loosens a little bit of the tightness within her chest. She takes a sip of the cool wine, almost sighing with relief as the icy bubbles dance across her tongue. The Tyrells have never been ones to skimp on the top-shelf alcohol for these events, and Dany plans on getting as close to tipsy as possible tonight without people wagging their tongues at her less-than-sober behavior.

How would you have me act, Dany wonders. The man I might’ve married is dead. She tries not to think about what she feels—or more importantly, what she doesn’t feel—about that.

Still, it turns out that she was right to suspect that the rumors within Starfall had already started churning. Perhaps people didn’t know the details, but a lifetime of small-town living had led people to learn to ask the right questions. They might not know how Daario had died but they did know that the sheriff’s department had found a body and had identified said body as belonging to Daario Naharis. It does not subdue the atmosphere with grief and mourning though Dany senses some frantic tension in their air.

And so everywhere she turns, she is greeted by words of consolation and shock. Everyone wonders what happened and it is so strange that they found him out on that lone high road and does he have any relatives Dany knows to contact and oh how she must be devastated to learn of his death and they really did make such a perfect couple so many years ago and everyone was so sure that they were going to get married in the summer and isn’t it such poor timing that they found his body so close to her return to town?

It is the implication of the latter question that reeks of vile gossip, and there is only one person she knows who would start it. Every time Dany hears those too-sweet words and sees who says them, a burning ember within her chest grows slightly bigger, slightly hotter. Even at her side, she can feel Missandei go stiff with irritation every time someone mentions the suspicious timing of Dany’s return and Daario’s death.

“Thank you,” Dany says to the most recent woman who has dropped effusive, sugary sympathy on her shoulders. “I’m still in a bit of a shock.”

“Of course you are!” the woman purrs, patting her arm. But there is a glint in her eyes that Dany dislikes greatly. “You wouldn’t even be here if your head was on straight. Why, I don’t know what I’d do if my Orton died. I love him so much that I would just be a wreck. You wouldn’t see me for weeks, let alone a few days after learning of it. Oh, what would people think of me? You are so strong for being here tonight. I couldn’t be you. I’d just be too devastated.”

Dany is not entirely sure how devastated a woman like Taena Merryweather might be, considering she is sure the woman still has a rotating list of young men who eagerly volunteer to have their faces planted between her legs while her husband is away on business. But she only bites her tongue and says, “I hope Orton has many more years ahead of him.”

“More years than you had with Daario certainly.”

The new voice makes Dany go rigid and she feels Missandei’s hand tighten around her arm. Taena’s dark eyes go smug as she lifts her own flute of wine to her lips. Dany schools her expression into cool disinterest before she turns and comes face-to-face with an achingly familiar green-eyed gaze.

“Cersei.”

Now Dany likes Jaime. The sheriff can be headstrong and blunt and infuriatingly arrogant, but she knows that over the years, Tyrion and Brienne have softened those hard edges. Sure, he still deserves to get knocked down a peg or two—her years away have not changed that opinion of him—but he is a friend she does not mind having a beer with every so often.

His twin sister, on the other hand, is a fucking nightmare.

The self-perceived gift to humanity stands behind her, an ever-present glass of something as red as blood in her perfectly manicured hand. The Baratheon widow is a vision in red and gold—of course she is, Tywin Lannister’s only daughter does not comprehend a world where the masses don’t flock to her and grovel at her feet—and the disparaging smirk on her lips could curdle souls. She and Margaery Tyrell have been bickering for years over who should be the social doyenne of Starfall, a bloodless battle that is just as ruthless as actual warfare.

“Daenerys Dayne,” Cersei greets as she lifts her wine glass to her lips, her voice dripping with venom. “I heard you’d come crawling back to town. A shame that your timing is as ill-advised as that dress, but I suppose you can be forgiven for such a social faux pas. You and Ashara were never terribly good at grasping them.”

Missandei’s grip on her arm is almost enough to leave bruises, a silent warning. Dany knows that Ashara might simply excuse herself with a roll of her eyes. But Dany, being Dany, ignores her friend’s subtle admonition and her adoptive mum’s likely actions and instead wipes all traces of warm decorum from her face and her tone.

“It is incredibly difficult,” Dany says flatly, “to take any of what you say seriously. You are the queen of a sandcastle.”

“So says the pawn.” Cersei smiles with all the sweetness of a rancid apple. “Don’t bother trying to be witty, my dear. Any bite you may have had was rendered toothless when you ran away all those years ago. Don’t you see? Everyone here pities you not because you left. They pity you because you came back.”

It is a slap to her pride. Dany wants to argue, to say that she is only here for a few months, that she didn’t come back to stay in this godforsaken little town with all of its secrets and gossip. But she knows how it looks. She knows that arguing will only convince Cersei that she is protesting too much, that her pride will not suffer her shame if those few months turn into a year, turn into two, turn into five, turn into a whole life here that she tried to run away from. And she cannot fault Ashara for staying but she cannot bear it if she finds herself trapped here with a house and the fundraisers and a husband she tolerates and everything about a life turned into a cage of a few miles and nothing more.

Frustration and panic strangle her voice and to her embarrassment, she finds she cannot come up with any sort of retort.

“Oh, Cersei,” Taena murmurs with false sincerity, “you hurt her feelings.”

“A shame,” Cersei replies without a shred of remorse in her voice. “Perhaps it is best to leave this event to people who’ll appreciate it.”

“I appreciate it,” a new voice pipes in, and then Robb Stark is sidling in from the crowd. He is wearing a simple white domino mask that complements his silvery-grey suit but his auburn curls are a dead giveaway as to his identity. Dany feels Missandei flinch at her side, though she still cannot say why her friend dislikes the Stark man so much, especially as the young man replaces their empty flutes with full ones from the tray of a passing waiter. “And I’ve very much appreciated Dany’s company since I moved here.”

The green in Cersei’s eyes flares hot with annoyance, Dany notes with some satisfaction. “And you are?”

“Robb Stark,” Robb says with a cool smile. “And you must be Cersei Lannister. I met your father a few days ago.”

Dany watches as several interesting emotions pass across Cersei’s face upon hearing Robb’s name: recognition, surprise, annoyance, frustration, anger. The blonde woman’s eyes cut back toward her. “Well. Our little Dany sure works fast.”

“I think we should go find something to eat,” Missandei interrupts, tugging on Dany’s arm. Strangely enough, Dany sees that she is still looking at Robb with extreme dislike and she is not sure what the source of this is—Missandei is far more friendly than even Dany herself is most of the time.

Meanwhile, Taena is looking at Robb as though she is already imagining what it would be like to cajole him into her bed. Dany feels her ire rising at being caught in the middle of all of this and realizes she hates even more that Robb has stepped in to fight her battles. There is that trying too hard again.

Before she can say anything though, Robb is saying, “I’ve heard the Tyrells have an amazing ballroom. Would you care to dance, Dany?”

No, she should say. And she sees Missandei shaking her head. She meets her friend’s eyes and in those dark brown depths, she thinks Missandei is trying to warn her of something. She pauses just for a moment, thinking that if there was something wrong with Robb, her friend would have said so when Sansa visited her the other day. Intuition is not a warning. “I—”

“I’m a little hungry,” Missandei interrupts, giving Dany a significant look. “Should we go, Dany?”

“You should stay,” Robb says with a friendly smile and she is struck once again by how impossibly blue his eyes are. “I would really like to dance with you.”

It is as if Cersei and Taena are not even there, though Dany is sure she can hear Cersei gritting her teeth in annoyance. Still, she sighs, shrugging in exasperation as she gives Missandei a small smile, handing her the still-full flute that Robb had given her. “Missy, it’s fine. It’s just one dance, remember?”

“Dany, I don’t think—”

“Just one dance,” Robb promises. “I promise to return her in one piece.”

If Missandei’s gaze could kill, Dany is certain Robb would be six feet under and rotting. She can feel her friend’s eyes on her even as Robb sweeps her from the room, though she supposes it is only slightly less concerning than the furious look Cersei is giving her. She is certain a new round of rumors will be making their way through the fundraiser soon—how wise is it to be seen in a new man’s arms so soon after the news of Daario?

What do I care what anyone thinks, Dany thinks with a sharp shake of her head. Especially anyone in this town? Yet she still cannot ignore how unsettled Cersei’s taunts had made her.

“I don’t think your friend likes me much,” Robb notes as he settles an arm around Dany’s waist to lead her in a slow dance that requires little more than rocking back and forth. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended her in some way. That’s a lovely necklace by the way.”

“Thank you. And Missy’s just protective of me,” Dany says, though she doubts that is the reason why Missandei looked ready to murder Robb where he stood. She almost reaches to touch the dainty locket that rests below her collarbone. “Rumors travel fast in small towns like this and not everyone has been kind since I’ve returned to town, as you’ve probably guessed. I didn’t leave under the best circumstances.”

“You told me you grew up here.”

Did she? Dany frowns. That first night she met Robb is still strange in her mind, blurry and indistinct. Slowly, she says, “I suppose I did.” But because she is unnerved by the interest, she quickly asks, “What about you? Your family’s originally from here but the Starks haven’t lived here in ages.” Robb laughs ruefully, shaking his head.

“No, my siblings and I have been all over,” he replies with a good-natured grin. “We’re pretty nomadic. I heard it’s the in thing to do nowadays.”

“That can’t have been easy.”

“Is that sympathy I hear in your voice?”

“No, it’s just…” Dany hesitates, remembering the look in Missandei’s eyes. She shrugs. “You ask a lot about me. Maybe I was just trying to balance this out.”

“Fair enough,” Robb concedes. His blue eyes are unreadable behind his mask. “But I do think you’re a kind person by nature. Maybe your friend was right.”

Dany can’t help it—she laughs. “You barely know me. And what friend? I just told you I’m incredibly unpopular here. I can count on one hand the number of friends I still have.”

His grip tightens around her waist, drawing her in closer. But for some reason, despite his questions and despite his smiles, Dany is starting to get the feeling that Robb is not interested in her at all. She cannot pinpoint why she thinks that—he is following all the cues that men have used in the past to get to know her romantically—but there is something about his tone, his manner, his very words that make her think that Robb is looking for something else entirely.

I hope he doesn’t think I’m rich like he is, Dany thinks with some faint amusement. “Is your sister here tonight?”

“Oh, she’s around somewhere.” Robb glances over her shoulder briefly. “I told her to attempt to make friends with some other people tonight. I’m not sure how well she is succeeding. She might have just gone home. She told me she might have a standing coffee date with you.”

Maybe it’s the sister who is interested. Somehow Dany thinks that equally as unlikely. She raises a dark brow at Robb. “You’re both new to town and I am a social pariah. I will take coffee with whomever I can.”

“If you ever feel like inviting me, I never say no to coffee.”

Okay, Dany amends mentally, unsure once again. Maybe he is flirting with me. “You’ll have to make nice with Missy.” Something shifts in Robb’s eyes at that, a flicker of a shadow, but he smiles that same courteous smile as before.

“I’ll do my best.”

She almost says more, almost lets herself relax in his arms (she would not dare rest her head on his shoulder, not with everyone already giving her disapproving looks), when she hears a commotion on the other side of the room. Both she and Robb pause in the middle of their dance, and Dany turns to see Margaery storming through the ballroom.

The young woman is not dressed for the gala at all—the blouse and dark jeans she is wearing are surely expensive but certainly not on par with the cocktail attire her family’s guests are in, and there is no mask anywhere to be seen. She looks oddly unkempt and frazzled, her eyes slightly wild at the edges, and she is ignoring her older brother who is following after her, clearly upset.

“Marg!” Loras hisses, trying to reach for his sister’s arm. He looks around, clearly unsettled by the attention they’re drawing. “Marg, what is wrong with you? Can we…can we go somewhere quieter?”

“I’m fine!” Margaery seethes, shoving past masked men and women who immediately begin to murmur as the golden Tyrell daughter passes them. “Leave me alone.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dany sees a startled look spasm across Robb’s face and before she can turn to either him or Loras, he has already disentangled himself from Dany’s embrace. When she turns to face him, he does not even meet her eyes—he seems entirely distracted by Margaery and Loras. She catches his eye just as he takes a step backward.

“I’m sorry,” Robb says hastily. “I need to find Sansa.”

“Is everything alright?” Dany asks, not sure if she can juggle both concern for Robb’s sudden alarmed recalcitrance and for Margaery’s obvious distress. Robb shakes his head distractedly.

“It’s fine. There’s just something I forgot I need to tell her.”

It is a lie. Dany knows that it is a lie, and a poorly conceived one at that. She glances back at where Loras and Margaery are crossing to the far end of the ballroom, wondering if it has something to do with the ruckus her friend has caused. She begins to move towards her friend and her brother before she sees Margaery abruptly whirl and shove Loras away. The curly-haired young man stumbles backward from the force of the shove and trips into one of the waiters. Flutes of sparkling wine crash to the floor. Conversation sputters. 

Margaery doesn’t even stop. She simply whirls around in a spray of honey-brown hair and then she has vanished out the door.

“I should go after her,” Dany begins to say, turning back to Robb…but he is gone. She looks around the ballroom, startled, but there is no sign of his telltale red curls. She does catch Cersei smirking at her and whispering something to Taena, who only looks at Dany and laughs. Behind them, Loras is brushing himself off and scowling, already storming off in the same direction Margaery vanished in.

The sudden concern for Margaery is washed away in the spray of cold realization as she sees several eyes turn towards her and her solitary status on the dance floor.

Her friend doesn’t need her. Her friend has a support group of friends and family, people that Dany had abandoned on her flight away from Starfall years ago. She knows she promised Missandei to come find her after her dance with Robb but suddenly, standing here alone on the dance floor, she wants nothing more than just to be by herself. She can already feel the eyes of some of the other couples falling on her. She is the pariah, the black sheep, the one who left, the one who lost. Something twists uncomfortably in her stomach and she does her best not to curl her hands into fists at her side as she turns on her heel and heads towards the patio.

The thick, cloying air of the summer night wraps around her like a noose the moment she steps outside. Even with the onset of the evening, the air is still heavy with moisture and the near-overpowering scent of roses from the countless rosebushes that surround the Tyrell mansion. Through the golden-lit violet evening, Dany sees lightning bugs flicker through the black leaves and thorns of the bushes. The lingering sharp bite of alcohol still sits on her tongue, no longer cool, no longer comforting.

The gazebo out back is empty of people and she settles into a wicker settee that is hidden from the guests in the backyard by a trellis thick with rose-strangled vines. She tucks her legs under her and then pulls her phone out of her purse, absently starting to scroll through her apps in hopes that one of them promises a distraction.

She should not have come here tonight. No matter what Viserys said, no matter what Missandei promised, she should not be here. This town and all of its secrets and all of its horrors—she left for a reason. Nothing will change how these people see her.

Why did she run back here? Why did she come back to this place she still stupidly calls home?

Daario shouldn’t be dead, she thinks. He should still be running that garage and flirting with the pretty girls and being a good person but never good enough. What if he was right? What if I’m chasing nothing? He always did have the last laugh. He always did want to be right about everything.

Tears threaten to pinch her eyes. She refuses to cry. She won’t cry. She—

“I think you’re missing the party.”

The sudden voice startles her out of her thoughts. Her head jerks up and she sees that she is no longer alone on the gazebo, though she had not heard anyone approach. She eyes the newcomer warily. He stands a few feet away from her, painted in the shadows of the night: from his suit to his lacquered mask to his dark curls and stubble to the eyes that watch her in cautious, curious amusement—he seems to be doused in black or at least colors dark enough to make no difference.

It takes her a moment to realize that an accent was woven through his words, one that she feels is both familiar and incredibly strange. She peers up at him for a moment, swallowing thickly to collect herself. She is not sure she could stand it if she cried in front of this stranger.

“I’m not really in the mood for a party.” To her surprise, the man nods.

“If it helps, I don’t care for these either. Too many people.” He gestures to the empty seat beside her with a glass of what smells like whiskey in his hand. “Do you mind company?”

“You look like you were looking for solitude.”

“Well,” the man says with a faint self-deprecating smile, “I’ve heard misery loves company.”

“And what do you have to be miserable about?” She knows she is being difficult but her mood has tanked considerably. She does not mean to sound as though she has a monopoly on the emotion that is currently galloping through her chest but neither is she so relaxed as to make small talk with yet another stranger. If he wants to be miserable, he can find somewhere else to mope. “You’ll probably find better company in the house. The Tyrells do love a party.”

To his credit, the man does not take her tone as teasing and he does not sit down. Instead, he leans against the railing of the gazebo, glancing down at his whiskey as he swirls the contents of his glass.

“Maybe it’s the perspective,” he answers after a moment, raising the glass to his lips. “I’m just passing through. The things I’m miserable about are things I’m running from. It sounds like you might be the same.”

“You don’t know me.”

“No, I don’t.” He holds up his hands at her glare. “Am I wrong though?”

Dany frowns at the stranger for a long, silent moment before her gaze wanders down to the phone in her hands. No messages are waiting for her. There is the life she left in Winterfell, the life she made for herself, and it is as though she has stepped out the road and people have continued on without her. There is her work of course and she is incredibly proud of that. But the self-doubt that sits within her, the second-guessing of all of her choices, is like a lodestone that has been calcifying within her.

He is still watching her. She lets out a breath and asks, “Are you going to sit down?”

It is not an answer to his question. She does not want to give him one. Still, the man gives her that faint smile again.

“If you don’t mind.” Dany thinks about it for a moment.

“It’s too hot out here to stand.” She shifts farther to the side and then watches as the man approaches. He sits next to her, leaving ample space between them. She studies his profile in silence, not sure entirely what to make of this man whose features are still mostly hidden behind the mask. There is something oddly familiar about him this close, though she cannot pinpoint what it is. “If you’re just passing through, why come to a party when you don’t like people?’

The man lets out a huff of a rueful laugh, shaking his head.

“I could ask you the same question,” he counters. “If you’re not in the mood for a party, why come?”

A thousand different answers fly through her head. They are all more the stranger deserves. And yet the words that leave her mouth are, “I just found out the man I used to be engaged to died.”

The newcomer’s eyes shift towards her. They are as dark as she thought, though the color is a grey that is nearly black in the dim golden light of the gazebo. She sees regret in that gaze, and sympathy too. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” she admits, picking at the nonexistent frays along the hem of her dress. Why is she telling him this? “I know I should be. Everyone is telling me I should be. And I am sad. But…I should feel something more, shouldn’t I? Does that make me a monster if I don’t? I was going to marry him. I loved him.”

The man is silent for several moments and Dany wants to curse herself. First, she had seemingly spilled her entire life story to Robb. And now here she is, pouring her fears out to this strange man. What is wrong with her? She can be warm. She can be open-hearted. But in this? No, this makes no sense. She should not be telling him any of these things.

She says as much, preparing to tuck her phone into her purse. She should find Missandei and leave. This whole night was a terrible idea. She just needs to sleep. And she really needs to start packing up her bags and think about heading back to Winterfell. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t—

“I think what you’re feeling is very human, to be honest,” the man says, interrupting her thoughts. She turns to him in surprise and finds him studying her. There is no disgust in his expression, nor shock. Strangely enough, he looks…sad? “Grief is…complicated. And it’s immense. It can be as calm as a pond or as vengeful as a storm. You can’t look at the ocean and understand it and wonder how you’ll swim across it. The most you can do is survive it.”

Dany stares at him. Then, despite herself, she finds the corners of her mouth threatening to tilt upwards in a small smile. “Okay, mysterious stranger with all of the answers. Do you usually give out wisdom to people having absolutely terrible weeks?” Again, the man lets out a quiet laugh.

“Let’s just say I’ve been around a long time. I’ve learned a few things about life and all of the things that come along with it.”

“So you’re an old soul?”

“Something like that.” There is a slight twist to the man’s mouth at the words. Dany wants to press him further, not entirely sure why her curiosity is piqued. But she settles for holding out her hand.

“Dany,” she says by way of introduction. The stranger looks down at her hand in surprise and then lifts his gaze to meet hers. He smiles again and reaches forward.

But if he is about to introduce himself, he never does. Abruptly, his head snaps in the other direction and he jerks to his feet with an enviable grace and alarming speed. Dany only gets to feel the barest twinge of rejection starting to unfold within her when she sees someone approaching across the black expanse of lawn, stumbling but silent—she is not sure how he even heard in the first place. She peers past him and blinks when she realizes that she recognizes the newest arrival.

“Marg? Are you alright?” She starts to stand too, especially now that she realizes that this guy she’s been talking to is rude and pretentious as all hell, but she finds herself blocked by the same man. She scowls at him as she tries to maneuver around him. “Move.”

“Shit,” the man curses beneath his breath, ignoring her even as he holds out his arm to prevent Dany from approaching Margaery. “Where are they?”

“I said move,” Dany repeats, all of her ire flooding back into her. She shoves against the man’s arm and lets out a surprised cry as her wrists twist painfully—it is like she tried to shove a brick wall. He didn’t budge at all. “What the hell, you ass?”

But his eyes don’t stray from Margaery, even as the tawny-haired young woman looks up at them. Dany sees her face is drawn and pale but her pale blue eyes are fixed on Dany, seemingly dull with incomprehension. She uncharacteristically says nothing snippy at the man for his behavior towards Dany, and something twists in her stomach as she remembers the way her friend had stormed through the ballroom earlier, shoving her brother into a waiter before vanishing upstairs.

“Dany?” Margaery murmurs, blinking. She is still staring at her, dazed. “I’m…god, I’m so…”

She trails off and the worry climbs into Dany’s throat. She tries to step around the man again. “Marg…?”

“Don’t,” the man warns, pushing her back. “I’ll find you and explain later but you need to get back inside right now.”

What the hell? And leave you here with her alone? “Absolutely not.” She shoves at him again and again, he does not so much as stumble. “Get out of my—”

What happens next is almost too fast to comprehend.

Margaery suddenly launches herself forward, her eyes still fixed intently on Dany, an inhuman growl piercing through the air. Dany takes a step forward, confusion igniting within her chest, but before she can do anything more, the man swipes his arm out, connecting with Margaery right in the chest. The sharp, brittle sounds of cracking bones splinter through the rush of silence and then Margaery is flying back through the gazebo, colliding with a bone-shattering thud against the railing. Wood cracks and shatters beneath the force and splinters of painted wood go flying through the air.

Dany lets out a wordless shout of fury and alarm and she ducks under the stranger’s arm to run towards Margaery who is sprawled on the grass just beyond the gazebo. She needs to get away from this psychotic man and she needs to get to her friend and dear fucking god, how did he just throw her like—

“Wait!”

Margaery looks up.

And only then does Dany see fangs.

Oh my god.

Her friend’s face twists into a demonic mask of unrecognizable hunger and before Dany can recoil, she is violently pinned, the grass cold and damp against the thin fabric of her dress, and there is a body above hers and a blaze of agonizing pain at her throat and something hot and wet dripping down her neck. She is screaming—from terror, from confusion, from pain—and clawing at Margaery’s arms, her chest, anything, trying to shove her away, trying to get away from this nightmare, and it hurts, oh god it hurts, it hurts, it hurts…

There is a muffled shout and then she is staring up at the hazy star-spattered sky that is as lurid and dark as a bruise, splintered with that streak of a red comet, and she can breathe again. There is no more weight on her chest and no more biting pain in the curve of her neck but she feels unmoored, dizzy. The world is spinning. A face comes into view. She recognizes it.

“You bastard,” she breathes, though even saying that takes too much energy. The stranger’s face twists in a grimace and he looks off to his right.

“Where were you?” he demands of someone, and Dany slowly turns her head to see…Robb and Sansa? The older sibling has Margarey pinned to the ground as she thrashes, tears dampening her pale cheeks. But her mouth is sodden with something black and glistening and her eyes…her eyes are…

“Compelling half the people in there,” she hears Sansa say, the beautiful young woman’s face dark with a frown. “This is a mess.”

“I’m sorry,” Margaery gasps as she struggles futilely in Robb’s arms. “I’m so sorry. I was just…oh my god, I was just hungry. Oh god, oh god, what’s happening to me?”

“Did she—?” the stranger begins and Robb shakes his head.

“A Lannister. I had to compel even more people.”

“Shit,” the stranger curses again before lifting his wrist to his mouth. Dany hears the sound of tearing flesh and feels nausea, sour and bitter, rising up her throat. She can only struggle weakly in the stranger’s arms as he presses his wrist to her mouth and she tastes something warm and coppery on her lips and on her tongue. Her thoughts feel sluggish and broken and so the answer comes to her slowly.

Blood.

It’s his blood.

Somewhere distant, she hears someone tell her in an apologetic tone, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Don’t look.”

She gags and chokes and retches on the tang of blood on her tongue, her eyes watering. She sees Sansa step up to the struggling Margaery still in Robb’s arms, kneeling down and murmuring something hushed to Margaery. Her friend, her expression still furious and her face still wet with tears, stills, blinking uncertainly at Sansa.

And then Dany watches in horror as the willowy young woman reaches out and, with careless, grim grace, viciously snaps Margaery’s head to one side with a stomach-churning crack.

Blood continues to fill her mouth.

Blood.

Blood.

Blood.

Margaery crumples and the world dims at the edges even as a scream dies on Dany’s lips.

This is his fault, she thinks wildly. The pain in her neck has receded to a dull throb but her head is swimming. This is their fault. Dark eyes meet hers.

Daenerys?

Well…yes. But most people call me Dany.

Oh. I’m sorry. You just look so much like… She thinks she remembers that smile. She thinks she remembers that sadness in his eyes from long, long ago. I’m Jon.

“Jon,” she bites out weakly and she sees a startled, stricken look cross the stranger’s face before everything goes dark.

There is a knock on the door.

Daenerys Targaryen has been sitting by the fire, the snowflakes from earlier long since melted into her pale hair. Even though the castle has hot water running through the immense stone walls, it is impossible to get warm here. The days are cold and the nights are even colder. The people are kind enough, though she knows that she has no love here. Her father has made that impossible.

She gathers the fur shawl around her shoulders and walks to the door, her slippered feet whispering across the rushes. What hour of night it is? She does not know. The nights here seem neverending and when the lavender dawn breaks, it seems more illusion than truth.

When she opens the door, a man is standing there, half a shadow, half a dream. Her guards are nowhere to be seen in the flickering golden light of the hall yet she is not concerned. She says nothing as she meets his eyes and the polite acknowledgment in his gaze.

“My lord,” she says with little affection.

“Your Grace,” he replies with a nod.

After a few seconds, she lowers her eyes and steps aside. He brushes past her into her room, all cold shadow and lingering warmth. She pauses for a moment more, looking out into the shifting golden shadows of the hall. Then she closes the door.

And when she turns, he is there, all of his reserve gone, his mouth hungry and desperate against hers, his arm wrapping tightly around her waist

Yes.

Yes.

She does not push him away. This is the heat she has been sorely longing for all of these nights, the fire within him enough to chase away the cold. A longing gasp slips past her lips as he lifts her and presses her up against the sturdy wooden door, his body caging her in. Her legs are canted around his narrow hips and her long hair painfully catches between her shoulders and the door—but then she is nipping at his lower lip and one of his hands is at the front clasps of her dress and her legs slip and it is suddenly a pain she can bear.

She hears him laugh into the kiss and it sends fire coursing down to the pit of her belly and between her legs. He laughs so rarely these days. But then again, neither does she. They are bound to their roles now and nights like these are too few and too far between.

This is an affair that no one must know about. They will judge him harshly for this and they will murmur in disquiet if they knew she has repeatedly taken him into her bed (into her tent, onto desks, onto tables, on floors, in the quiet open fields beneath the sky). There is a part of her that does not care. There is a part of her that wishes to damn them all—she is their queen now, they should listen to her, they should obey, they should kneel.

Yet there is fear in here. There is fear over what she might lose. There is a secret within her that is too terrible, that might tear this fragile alliance apart.

So she loses herself to this, to his touch, to his love, and hopes that it is enough.

A sibilant gasp hisses through her teeth and she whimpers his name as his lips and tongue ghost down the long lines of her neck and into the sensitive hollow of her throat, the scuff of his stubble tickling the sensitive skin of her throat, a branding kiss seared on the slope of her shoulder. Her fingers rake carelessly through his dark curls and then his mouth is on hers again and she tastes the remnants of salt and wine on his tongue as she plunges her own past his eager kiss.

Haste and absence and desire make their hands clumsy, tripping over clasps and buckles and fabric in a need to feel skin against heated skin. Her dress may be torn and his armor might be in shambles but neither of them seems to care about that with the promise of heat and friction right there. She feels herself fall back onto the furs atop her bed, the fire casting strange shadows over her skin and his, and his body is a welcome, familiar weight atop hers. Already, she can feel sweat beginning to pepper her skin.

If they had time, she might simply lie here kissing him and touching him forever, letting her hands wander over the assured, graceful strength of his body. But her desire is already damp and hot between her legs, and she wants him. She wants him and she needs him and she might just love him if she allows herself to.

She feels him pause for a moment, his breath warm against the curve of her cheek. She leans into the almost reverent caress of his hands, his callused touch wandering down the slope of her breast, the puckered furl of a rosy nipple, the cool lines of her waist, settling with an almost bruising possessiveness on her hip. She hears him whisper her name with such tenderness, such devotion, that she almost breaks then. She almost tells him every secret she holds within her.

If only he knew…

But she says nothing. Instead, she tilts her chin up, pressing her lips to his with wild abandon, cradling him between her legs—and then there is the hot, sharp punch of him within her as he thrusts forward, stretching the slick heat of her, a gasp, a groan, something perfect. She closes her eyes even as a moan rumbles low in her chest, her nails biting into the quicksilver strength of his shoulders, her knees pressing into his sides.

It has been too long for them to take care with the slow and the gentle. The pace he sets is swift and punishing and her whimpers eventually turn to cries of pleasure that he tries to muffle by placing his hand over her mouth.

“They’ll hear,” he warns, his breath hot against the sensitive shell of her ear. But she also sees that her smothered keening only makes his heated gaze more feral—her gasps, the sharp slap of skin against skin, the lewd and wet sounds of their coupling, it is all too much. She feels reckless with need and lust and she does not care if his family and the whole of this castle hear him fucking her senseless. She bites at the fleshly skin of his palm and she hears him growl in frustration.

But he does not stop and neither does she.

When she finally comes, she buries her scream into his shoulder, feeling her core quake around him, feeling molten heat spread from between her legs to the tips of her fingers to the blistering kiss that falters as she clenches around him. He slows, his thrusts stuttering against that bundle of nerves that sends delicious shocks of pleasure through her still. Then she hears his own tattered grunt and she feels the pulse of him within her, feels the strain of his cock as he spills his seed into her womb.

My wolf, she thinks dazedly, stroking her fingers through his hair, even as lingering shocks of pleasure splinter through her. My knight, my king…

Awareness seems to come back to him as he slowly shifts his weight atop hers, pulling back slightly so he can meet her gaze. She feels oddly bereft, even with him still inside her, and she wants nothing more than to climb atop him and kiss him and fuck him and love him until the dawn finally returns. She places a hand against his chest, hot and sticky with sweat, and feels his heart beating thunderously beneath her fingertips. She has missed this. She has missed him.

Yet she knows this will not last.

It cannot.

It scares her.

“Promise me,” she suddenly whispers as he brushes her hair back away from her face. There is a tightness in her chest that even the heat of their bodies cannot soothe. “Promise me you’ll stay. Promise me this is forever.”

Until the end of all time.

Now and always.

He is silent for a long moment and she feels something like panic flutter within her heart, something that feels like a loss and anger and despair and all the terrible, broken things in the world. He has to stay. He has to. He has to promise. He…

And then he leans down to kiss her, more gentle than before though no less consuming, and it is warm and it is right and it is perfect.

“I’ll stay,” Jon Snow murmurs, his forehead against hers. “I promise.”

Chapter Text

In her dreams, she walks down the old lone high road out of Starfall.

Gravel crunches beneath her sneakers as she weaves her way around the faded white pavement markings that separate the two lanes of the road. It is night and, next to the splattered canopy of constellations and pale shooting stars that litter the sky, the white moon is the only source of light. A scarlet gash in the wine-blue sky marks the comet’s path high above the shadowed jigsaw of trees that line the road. The scent of decay and moss is thick and rich in the humid night air, so pungent that she can almost taste it. In the distance, she can hear coyotes.

This is a road she has gone down a hundred times before. She remembers the camping trips of her youth when Ashara would lead her and Viserys up into the Red Mountains, both of them too young to protest with excuses of being too busy with work or friends or other adult commitments that wash away childhood. Those memories taste of burnt marshmallows and of briny freshwater trout up in the icy lake nestled deep within the mountain range—and briefly, for a moment, her dream wavers to memories older than that, of long night drives and of childish laughter and of backcountry music echoing from the radio.

She hears that music in her dream now, a haunting sigh with no discernible source seeping through the black shadows of the woods that strangle either side of the road. She looks behind her. There is nothing but the road, fading off into the night and the dream. Ahead of her, it is the same. The moon is so bright but the night itself seems darker around her because of it.

She walks faster.

The low, crooning music continues to drift from the woods like a wail. Her footsteps sound louder but muffled. She hears her own heartbeat in her ears. She walks faster. The screams of the coyotes go chillingly silent and there is a finger of ice in the humid air now. The blazing trail of the comet is luridly crimson in the dark. It is like blood. It is like the sky itself has had its throat ripped open and it is raining blood.

Daenerys. She hears her name through the song.

She is nearly running.

Something is wrong. She knows something is wrong. Something is ahead of her. Something is ahead of her, standing on the road, standing in shadow. But this road should end. There should be lights here. Her heartbeat is a drum in her ears: thud, thud, thud. It is not an oft-traveled road but there should be at least one or two cars driving down it. Where are the lights? Where are the cars?

Something is wrong. Thud. She should turn around. Thud. Something is wrong. She should run. Thud. Something is—

An icy hand wraps around her wrist.

Daenerys.

Thud.

Daenerys.

Thud.

Daenerys.

She turns…and looks up at a man’s ruined, rotting face.

It is a mask of death, almost unrecognizable in its decay as the charmingly handsome man she had once known. It has caverns for eyes and brittle, mud-crusted straw for hair and its flesh is black and cratered. The corpse gapes down at her with that horrifying skeletal scream of the decomposing dead, and its hand—bone and gristle and dried blood—clamps down further on her wrist.

The coyotes begin baying again. The music from the woods gets louder. Blood splatters from the torn open sky. The corpse leans toward her, its mouth widening in a death howl.

She flinches away violently…

…and then Dany wakes up.

It takes her several long moments to parse her strange surroundings. She is in a bedroom, she thinks. It must still be night outside because the heavy curtains off to her right are not quite drawn and no sunlight filters in from beyond them. An ambient golden glow filters into the room from somewhere off to her left, highlighting the simple luxury of the cherry-wood walls. The scent of dust and sandalwood and clean cotton tickles her nose…and there is something else too, something sharply metallic and bitter.

With a muffled groan, she slowly sits up in the bed she is in. This too is unfamiliar. Her hand splays on the empty quilt at her side. The fabric is old and worn, the pattern on it long since faded—but it is clearly well-cared for. She stares down at the grey-and-white print, her fingers ghosting along the blue stitching. It seems vaguely familiar and she is not sure—

“Dany!” She turns at the familiar voice and sees Missandei rush into the room, her best friend’s brow knotted with worry. She is still wearing her shimmering bronze dress from the fundraising gala, though her mask is nowhere to be seen and she has replaced her spiked stilettos with ballet flats. She immediately climbs onto the bed to wrap Dany in a hug. “I am so glad you’re alright!”

Relief floods through her and Dany fiercely clings to the coily-haired young woman as the pieces of her memory slowly start to unjumble in her mind and fall into place. She remembers the gala and Cersei Lannister’s cruel remarks. She remembers dancing with Robb. She remembers…she remembers…

Oh god.

“Missy,” Dany gasps, pulling away. “Missy, we have to call—”

“You’re still wearing your amulet?” Missandei reaches forward to gently touch the silver locket that sits coolly on Dany’s breastbone. “Thank god.”

Absently, Dany’s hand wanders up to the locket. She wants to tear it off her neck and throw it away but finds she can do little more than angrily tug at it in frustration. Missandei had said it was supposed to be for protection. It had done little enough earlier.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dany says, waving her hand off, trying to quell the panic and horror within her as she recalls the ease with which Sansa had snapped Margaery’s neck. Her friend's body had collapsed in an ungainly sprawl of limbs, her eyes unseeing. The image burns in her mind's eye. She feels sick. “We need to call Jaime. We need to call the po—”

“Oh,” a new voice interrupts from the door. Both Dany and Missandei turn to see a young man sitting in the doorway, silhouetted by the golden light from the hall. His dark hair is gently tousled with waves, his eyes warm with concern, and his pale face seems familiar with an expression that Dany cannot pinpoint. “I didn’t know you’d wake up so fast. How are you feeling?”

It also takes Dany a few seconds to realize he is sitting because he is in a wheelchair. She gapes at the unfamiliar young man as he wheels himself into the bedroom, briefly flicking the light switch near the door, causing several lamps around the room to sputter to life.

“Did you want something to drink?” the boy asks as he maneuvers closer to the bed, the wheels of his chair soundless against the hardwood floors. “I can ask my brother to bring in a glass of water if you want.” Dany shoots Missandei a confused, startled look but her friend only looks grim…and vaguely irritated, an expression she has rarely if ever seen on the dark-haired young woman’s face.

“Where’s my purse?” Dany asks plaintively. “Where’s my phone?” The boy blinks.

“Oh. I think it’s around here somewhere.” He smiles uncertainly at her. “I’m Brandon, by the way. You can call me Bran.”

“I don’t want to call you anything. I want to call the police.”

She hears heavy footsteps in the hallway and suddenly there is another stranger in the door, his silhouette nearly blocking out the light. This newcomer looks to be a couple of years younger than the boy in the wheelchair, his coppery-brown hair a tangled mess of curls. He leans against the doorframe, hands fisted in the pocket of his grey sweatshirt as he takes one look at Dany and Missandei and grins. There is a sparkle of mischief in his eyes that seems slightly wilder than the spark she normally sees in boys his age.

“I can compel ‘em if you want,” the boy suggests with a chipper note in his voice. “It would be so much easier if they just forgot all of this. Robb says she’s not even our Daenerys anyway.”

The young man in the wheelchair—Brandon, no, Bran—grimaces and Missandei’s own expression turns flinty. Dany has no idea whatsoever what he’s talking about but the mention of Robb’s name causes a chill to run down her spine. She remembers how the man, previously so charming and friendly, had pinned Margaery down so that Sansa could easily walk up and break her neck with careless grace. She thinks she has no qualms with knocking over either teenager to escape this room with Missandei.

But to her surprise, Missandei only wraps a protective arm around Dany’s shoulders and says, “You tell her or I will—and I will be far less diplomatic in my assessment of you all.”

The boy in the door rolls his eyes, peeling himself away from the doorframe and sauntering back the way he came, while Bran lets out what can only be described as a defeated sigh. He backs away from them with a shake of his head. “Your purse is out in the parlor. Follow me.”

And what else is out in the parlor, Dany thinks. She cannot help but remember the demonic look in Margaery’s bloodshot eyes, the black veins spiraling out onto pale skin beneath tears, the red stain on her lips and her teeth. Sansa killed her. Robb held her still and Sansa killed her. It feels like cold fingers have crushed her heart in her chest, her lungs tight with a breath that feels half-strangled in her throat. She looks over at Missandei as the taller young woman helps her from the bed. “Missy, where are we? We need to leave.”

But Missandei only shakes her head and says nothing.

As they follow the dark-haired young man out into the hall, Dany tries to gauge how much trouble she and Missandei are in. Bran seems kind enough but that might mean nothing. And the other boy…his words settle uneasily within her. There is the promise of something terrible here, she thinks. And that coppery scent that tinges the air seems to be getting stronger the farther down the hall they walk.

Absently, she raises her hand to her neck. She expects her fingers to come away bloody but when she glances down at them, there is nothing on her fingertips. A sharp memory of hot, tangy blood coating her tongue catches her unaware and she swallows hard, trying not to stumble as they pass ancient paintings in gilded frames and slim hallway tables decorated with ornate lamps, books, and trinkets. For some reason, despite the scent of citrus and pine in the air, she half-expects to see a fine layer of dust on everything—wherever they are, this building is old.

And other than the bedroom she was just in, she hasn’t seen a single exit to the outside.

She is starting to put the shattered pieces of her memory into place and she is not at all liking the picture it is forming. She is about to pull Missandei to a halt, to drag her friend into any of these closed doors they are passing to at least put a solid barrier between them and whatever the hell is waiting for them in the parlor, when Bran suddenly comes to a halt. With surprising ease and dexterity, he spins his wheelchair to face them.

“I just want you to know,” he says, “that we didn’t hurt your friend.”

We? Dany stares at him. And then she sees it: there is a band of intricate silver on his right hand. It is not identical to the one she has seen on Robb’s hand or Sansa’s but the snarling wolf symbol is similar. Did the boy in the door have the same? She is not sure—his hands had been stuffed in his sweatshirt pocket. But she is starting to get the sinking feeling that if they had not been, she would have seen the wolf crest on his hand as well.

“I know what I saw,” Dany murmurs, her feet suddenly planted onto the hardwood beneath her. She cannot move forward. She cannot. She does not know what is in the parlor but it can be nothing good. She digs her fingers into Missandei’s arm. “I know what I saw, Missy.”

“I know,” Missandei says, her voice soft as she lays her own hand across Dany’s. “I know exactly what it looked like. But please trust me. They’ll explain it. And if they don’t, I will.”

“Explain what?”

From somewhere around the corner at the end of the hall, the teenage boy from earlier calls, “I told you we should just compel them! Or we can just eat them!”

The alarms that had already been chiming loudly in Dany's head turn into nuclear sirens.

Absolutely fucking not.

She no longer cares if Missandei is seemingly cool with whatever bizarre horror show they have walked into but there is no way she is walking into the parlor. She tightens her grip on her friend’s arm, spins, and runs for it, dragging a surprised Missandei along with her.

Behind her, she hears Bran let out a surprised shout but she does not care. She grabs the doorknob of the first door she comes across, slamming her shoulder into the door to bang it open. Pain shoots down her arm like lightning. The door is not locked but it seems to be jammed in its frame from disuse. It gives a little but not all the way.

“Dany!” Missandei yells, breathless behind her. “Dany, wait!”

Adrenaline burns through her. She throws her weight behind the door again, grimacing at the agonizing, bruising thud—but she lets out a sigh of relief when the door groans and gives beneath her weight. She thinks Missandei is still calling her name but god, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t like this house. Her instincts are screaming at her that they are in danger. One more shove should—

She does not hear any shouting. She does not hear any footsteps on the hardwood floors of the hall. There is a breath of wind and it is the only warning she gets.

“Stop.”

The next thing she knows, someone has wrapped their arm around her waist and is pulling her away from the door. She shouts and she thrashes, beating down on the arm as strong and unmovable as corded steel that loops around her. Whoever is holding her is carrying her back in the direction of the parlor. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Bran shooting both Dany and Missandei an apologetic look as he spins his chair to follow them. Missandei, on the other hand, looks livid as she rushes after Dany and her captor.

“Let me go!” Dany yells, clawing at the faceless person who is dragging her off. In King’s Landing, Dany had taken more than one self-defense course during her time in the city. Of course, all of those lessons have flown straight out of her head in her panic. “I said, let me go, you bastard!”

“Calm down,” a familiar voice says, mouth close enough to her ear that she shudders. “I’m not trying to hurt you! Dany. Calm down!”

“Hey!” And suddenly Robb is right there in front of her too, grabbing at her flailing wrists, his expression grim. “Hey, it’s me! Please—none of us mean you any harm, we swear.”

That is no good. She remembers him holding Margaery down as Sansa stepped towards her. She remembers the resigned look in his eyes when his sister snapped one of her friend’s necks. She tries kicking Robb, though whoever is holding her spins her away before her foot can connect with his groin. Why are all of these people so disgustingly strong? She continues to fight, to drag her heels on the ground, to attempt to get out of the stranger’s grasp while kicking in Robb’s general direction when another voice causes her to go still.

“Dany, it’s alright.” Margaery doesn’t even need to raise her voice beyond its usual commanding tone. “I’m fine. It’s…I’m fine.”

Dany glances wildly around her and sees that at some point during her furious thrashing, whoever was holding her has managed to pull her into the parlor. It is a grand, opulent space, rich with mahogany crown molding, jewel–toned lamps that cast a golden glow across the room, and tall, velvet curtains barring the night out of the room. One of the walls is lined with solid oak bookshelves, overflowing with ancient books that spill out like a jigsaw puzzle onto the rug-strewn floor. A chandelier hangs low beneath the vaulted ceiling, dripping crystal down onto two couches and the scattered upholstered chairs littered in front of the unlit fireplace.

And sitting on one of the couches, looking prim if unnerved, is Margaery Tyrell.

Dany stares at the other young woman for a long, stunned moment in silence. Margaery looks no worse for the wear, beyond a little peaked. There is no wet black stain around her mouth. Her eyes are not wild with a monstrous, ravenous hunger. Her cheeks are dry of tears.

But, Dany thinks, confused, even as she is gently lowered to the ground, I know what I saw. It was impossible but I know…she was screaming. She was crying. And Sansa…I saw it. I know I saw it. Could she have been hallucinating? Dreaming? Impossible. She shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts. What she saw was impossible but she knows she was entirely lucid when she saw it.

“You know, I’m kind of glad she’s not our Daenerys,” the teenage boy says as he strolls into the room and flops down onto one couch opposite Margaery’s. “She probably would have shucked Robb’s head right off if she was.”

“You died,” Dany murmurs at Margaery, ignoring the boy and his strange words. “I saw her break your neck.”

“I did break her neck,” Sansa Stark says as she also sweeps into the room, holding a hatch-cut decanter filled with something darkly crimson and viscous. She is still wearing her lacy white dress from earlier, her autumn-hued hair cascading over one shoulder. She heads toward a liquor cabinet against the far wall that is brimming with snifters and other cocktail glasses, her blue eyes enflamed with annoyance. She pours herself a few fingers of the liquid. “The whole night was inconvenient.”

There is warmth in her hand now and Dany turns to see Missandei standing by her side again. She is glaring at whoever is behind Dany who is just now untangling their arm from around her waist. She turns to give the person a tongue-lashing…only to find the same dark-haired stranger she had been speaking with on the gazebo standing behind her, watching her silently.

The words die on her tongue.

He had been the one to gently reassure her before she watched her friend’s neck get broken right in front of her. He had been the one who pressed his torn wrist to her mouth. And it had been his blood that had trickled hot and coppery onto her tongue, even as her world shattered into chaos. She thinks she had said something before the darkness had claimed her. A curse? Something else? It does not come to mind. She can only stare at him.

As for the man, his dark grey eyes only momentarily meet hers. There is something in his expression that Dany, despite all of her talent for it, cannot read. Then his gaze skitters away and he steps back, walking over to where Sansa is sipping at her drink to also pour himself a glass. He asks if anyone wants a drink in that strange accent of his and Robb grunts an affirmative, rubbing at his brow as if fighting off a headache.

“I’m sorry,” Missandei says as she leads Dany over to the couch Margaery sits on. “None of this should have happened tonight. I would have told you if I hadn't thought I was protecting you.”

"Protecting me from what?"

“Any word from Arya?” Dany hears Robb whisper low to Sansa and the dark-haired man. Both of them shake their heads. Dany does not know who Arya is. She does not know who half of these people are and now she is sitting next to a friend who may have tried to rip her throat out earlier. She closes her eyes and begins desperately counting back from ten to regain some sense of control over the situation.

This is not happening. This cannot be happening.

“Alright,” she hears Robb say. “First things first—your friend is right. None of this should have happened. We should have kept our distance once we realized that you weren’t who we thought you were. Believe us when we say we meant you no harm. But then this thing happened with Ms. Tyrell and we—”

“What,” Dany interrupts sharply, not bothering to open her eyes, “thing?”

She feels Margaery stiffen at her side. Missandei’s hand tightens around hers. For a long moment, there is only an uncomfortable silence in the room, as if no one wants to answer that impossible question with an even more impossible answer.

Blood in the dark, she thinks. Hunger and fangs and impossible speed and her eyes were wrong.

And Dany is not stupid.

“You already know.” This time she does open her eyes and she looks over at the dark-haired man. He is standing the farthest away from her on the opposite side of the couch the teenager is sprawled on. It is strange after his kind familiarity earlier and she gets the distinct impression that this distance he has put between them is on purpose. He does not look at her as he continues, “You’re too smart not to know.”

She agrees. But the whole thing is ridiculous. “Vampires don’t exist.” The teenager on the couch snorts.

“No, werewolves don’t exist,” he corrects cheerfully. “Neither do goblins or mermaids or unicorns, though I’m not sure about the Mothman. Vampires, on the other hand, are very real.”

Dany stares at the boy for a long time. Then her eyes sweep over the others in the room. Robb is grimacing at the boy’s words—he looks as if he is only one ribald joke away from pacing or collapsing in a chair with his head in his hands. Sansa’s expression meanwhile is cold and unreadable as she takes another ladylike sip of the dark red liquid staining the sides of the snifter in her hand. The teenager has an incorrigible grin on his face and Bran has his eyes downcast to the phone that is now in his hands, his dark eyes narrowed in intense concentration.

And the dark-haired man, still dressed in his blacks, continues to studiously ignore her.

I came back to a nightmare, Dany thinks. She glances around the room, taking in the old-fashioned palatial décor. Beneath the smell of pine and citrus, there is the smell of age…and blood. Her grip tightens on Missandei’s hand. She suddenly knows exactly where she is. Hadn’t Robb and Sansa mentioned their renovations on the Stark manor what feels like a lifetime ago?

She shudders. “The last time anyone lived here…”

“Eighty-seven years and ten months ago…give or take a few days,” Bran finishes, looking up from his phone wearily. He follows Dany’s gaze around the room. “We left in a bit of a rush but thankfully not a lot of it has changed. I honestly thought some vandals would’ve gotten to it but looks like it was just dust and a lot of mothballs.”

“I locked the door!” the teenager (who, Dany realizes with a sick twist in her gut, probably hasn’t been a true teenager in some time) protests in a tone that suggests that this is a frequent argument.

“No, you didn’t, Rickon. Arya had to come back and do it for you.”

Dany does not sit back on the couch, though her thoughts are swimming. Her spine is rigid with adrenaline. She is not a believer. She cannot be a believer. Vampires aren’t real. There is no such thing as immortal monsters that wear the faces of normal people, who thrive on the blood of living creatures. The world she knows is a world of small-town gossip and car accidents that take parents away from their too-young children and people who run away from their problems to big cities that give them a different set of problems. That is the real world. Not monsters, not myth, not this.

But Margaery… She looks over at her friend. “You’re…”

“I don’t know,” Margaery says, her usually assured tone uncertain. Her cat-like blue eyes are fixed on the rug in front of her. “I’m so sorry. I never meant— I don’t know what happened. I never meant to hurt you, Dany. I swear.”

“Is this…is this recent?” When Margaery only sighs dispiritedly and nods, Dany cuts a look over to Robb and Sansa. But before she can accuse them of doing…whatever it is that turned Margaery into a bloodthirsty creature, Robb shakes his head.

“It wasn’t us, Dany,” he answers. “I know it doesn’t sound convincing but the reason we’re still here is because it wasn’t any of us. There is someone here in Starfall that turned Ms. Tyrell and killed Mr. Naharis and we’re trying to figure out who it is. We think they were drawn back by the comet as we were but we can’t be—”

“Robb,” the dark-haired man warns quietly, pointedly—but it is too late and Dany scarcely notices his eyes finally resting apologetically on her. She barely heard anything after the terrible, sickening confirmation that Daario’s death had been no accident, no mystery of misadventure.

Someone—something—killed him.

God.

It feels like barbed wire scraping through her chest. It is not the grief that she wanted nor the grief that she had been expecting to finally catch up with her, to drown her in its immensity. That lingering hurt is still absent and the hole in her heart where it should be is grievous. But this shock and this pain within her is red hot and searing. It is her dream all over again, writ large—the corpse on the high road, its throat torn open, its handsome features obliterated by ruin. It is a nightmare and she is in a room with the people—with the monsters—who can cause this horror over and over again.

She stumbles to her feet. “I want to go home.”

Missandei stands too. “Dany…”

“No.” She snatches her hand out of Missandei’s grasp and tries not to let the hurt expression on her best friend’s face sting. “You knew something about this, didn’t you? That’s why you’ve been so calm. Missy, you’re my best friend and you knew. You knew. And you’re protecting them? Why? Why?”

“No,” Sansa answers flatly before Missandei can say a word. Dany whips her head around to glare at the willowy redhead who only purses her lips in disapproval. “Your friend is the Starfall witch. She is no friend of ours.”

“Witches also exist,” Rickon supplies helpfully.

But it is too much. It is too much and Daario is dead and these people are demons and her friend almost tried to kill her. And beyond the walls of the Stark manor, there is a town oblivious to any of this, who will greet her with gossip and suspicion and it isn’t her fault and this is not the homecoming she wanted. This is not the life she had planned to come back to. She flinches away from Missandei and Margaery. Her head is throbbing with the onslaught of a headache.

“Dany…”

“No,” she says through gritted teeth, trying to put as much space between her and these…these creatures as possible. “If you really mean me no harm, you’ll let me go.”

Please.

This is not what I want.

This is a nightmare.

Please let me wake up.

Please.

The Starks all exchange a single glance before Robb eventually sighs and nods.

“But Dany—”

She does not wait for him to finish that sentence. She rips the locket from around her neck, all of the lies and the bad luck twisted in the chain, burning a stinging line of fire along her skin. She hurls it away from her, pain and panic simmering viciously in her belly.

And she runs.

“They say the crypts beneath Winterfell are haunted.”

She walks beside him now, listening to the echoing sound of dripping water somewhere far down the corridor they walk down now. The hem of her dress is already sodden from the damp stone floor beneath her feet. The torch in his hand casts golden shadows along the dank blue walls that shimmer wetly in the darkness and it makes it seem like the eyes of those crypt statues follow her as they walk along. It is unnerving but she dare not say it less he gently tease her of her fears.

She has only been down here once during her weeks-long visit to the northernmost kingdom of her realm. She had not liked it then, though she knew it was appropriate to pay her respects, and she does not like it now. To be buried so far away from the sky—it is like a dungeon for the dead. She shivers.

“Perhaps,” he allows, glancing around at the cold, stone faces of the ancient kings of winter. “We all have our ghosts. This may be where they rest when they don’t remind us of all our mistakes and our duties to the things they wanted and fought for.”

“There are no crypts in the capital.” She tries to keep her tone light. “Where might my ghosts hide?” She thinks she sees a smile tease the edge of his lips but the flickering light of the torch makes it uncertain.

They arrive at the newly-constructed crypts near the middle of the corridor. Empty hollows continue farther down to await the bones of those still living, black and foreboding and ominous. She wonders if he will end up in one of those crypts one day. It does not bear thinking about, even as she looks up at the sternly-carved face of Eddard Stark. He grips an iron sword in his hand, a sword that still glints sharply—his death is too recent for the sword to have crumpled into rust.

She glances at her companion out of the corner of her eye. He is looking up at his uncle with grief and regret, though he has never given voice to any of the thoughts running through his head regarding the man’s death. To keep the realm at peace, he cannot give voice to any of his thoughts regarding the scandal that tore the realm asunder.

Because if there is any man alive whose opinion about the war is forbidden, it is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.

“Will you return to Winterfell once you’ve escorted me to the capital?” she asks him. She wants him to stay with her. It is a selfish request and certainly one that would set the realm aflame with gossip and fury again. But it might also soothe the remaining hurts the North held toward House Targaryen. There is nothing she wants more than to ask him to stay with her, to rule by her side, to warm her bed, to provide her counsel, the wagging tongues of the realm of be damned.

“Aye,” he answers. “The North is my home. We Starks have never done well in the south.”

It is a bitter truth, and it stings. He has always considered himself more Stark than Targaryen. She cannot blame him for wanting to stay as far away from the capital as possible. She wishes that being queen allowed her to be more selfish, to keep the things she wanted closer to her heart. There is already one thing she has risked and the guilt of it follows her everywhere now. If anyone knew, if anyone guessed what she had done…

“Then I will have to return you to your ghosts when I say farewell.” She smiles up at him. “Until then, it is a very cold journey south. I would appreciate some warmth, especially when the nights are so frozen now in the depth of winter.”

“We are all ghosts in the end, aren’t we?” But she catches his genuine smile this time as he looks back at her. “But if Your Grace commands, I will do what I can to keep her warm.”

It will be harder on the road south, even more than it had been here in the capital. But they had managed it before on the way to Winterfell. She wants him. She wants him so much that there is an ache in her soul. It is the wanting and the passion that has always consumed her and she wishes—oh, how she wishes—that she could just have more time to get it all right.

We are all ghosts in the end, she repeats to herself in her mind. She wants to shake her head. Not her. Never her.

She would rather not die at all.

The trek back to Ashara’s is long and dark but Dany scarcely remembers it.

She saw Missandei’s car out front of the Stark manor, as well as a handful of cars that could only belong to the Starks themselves, but she could not bring herself to ask her friend nor the family of vampires for a ride home. She thinks about what they had said, about something in town killing people, turning people into demons—but it is all lost in a haze of shock and by the time she reaches her mum’s front porch, it is all she can do to stumble in and up the stairs and collapse in the guestroom bed.

Her dreams are grey and murky and filled with blood—she can taste it on her tongue, can feel it dripping hot down her pale skin, can smell the coppery tang of it heavy in the cloying Dornish humidity. No matter how her dreams shift with faceless forms chasing after her, the blood is always present. The corpse is there too, following after her, the gaping hollows of its eyes and the soundless howl of its yawning jaw like walking damnation.

And through it all, something pale and red-eyed prowls after her, silent and ghostly and monstrous. When she wakes a few hours later, her mouth feels stale with the memory of blood.

She stares at the ceiling of the guest bedroom for the longest time. The mid-morning sun paints tattoos of light across the walls and the ceiling and it is almost enough to banish the shadows of her memories. But they are still persistent and they are bleak and there is a part of her that wants nothing more than to curl up beneath the duvet and tumble into a dreamless sleep, to ignore all of this, to forget.

Eventually, she manages to pull herself from the bed and head towards the bathroom. Her silver-gold hair is a nest of tangles. Her eyeshadow has smudged into the hollows beneath her eyes. Her dress is wrinkled and smells of sweat from her long walk home. But she notices that there is no bite mark on her neck—no broken skin, no teeth marks, no lingering bloodstains, nothing that shows Margaery had nearly torn open her carotid artery.

Dany stares at herself unblinking for a long moment before unconsciously raising her fingers to her lips. The dark-haired man had force-fed her his blood. What does this mean for her?

Please let it be a nightmare. It has to be. It can’t be real.

She washes up as best as she can before scouring Ashara’s room for a pair of joggers and a tank top. Downstairs, the house is quiet and empty. Ashara has left a note for her, gently berating her for the house at which she barged into the house without a phone call but also advising of the freshly ground coffee beans sitting in the coffee machine and the muffins on the counter. Raking her pale hair out of her eyes, Dany retrieves a mug from the cabinet, sets it beneath the drip, and tries desperately not to think of last night.

She has left her phone upstairs but she assumes that when she looks at it, it will be cluttered with text notifications from Missandei and Margaery. She does not want to talk to either of them—Missandei, for hiding such a world-shattering truth from her, and Margaery…well, she does not think any of this is Margaery’s fault. Whatever has happened, her friend is a victim of circumstance.

But Margaery is a vampire now too.

This isn’t real, Dany thinks, pacing the kitchen and trying to breathe through the memories of last night. Her chest feels tight with the weight of it all. Things like this don’t happen to people, not in real life. But as much as she keeps repeating that like a mantra in her head, she can’t deny the things she saw or heard last night. They loop through her mind like some terrible, neverending film. What if it’s just a prank? What if I just made it all up in my head? Vampires aren’t real. And Daario is…Daario is…

Then the doorbell rings and Dany nearly jumps out of her skin.

The coffee is still percolating. The scent of it makes her mouth water but that only serves to remind her of the blood gushing on her tongue last. She closes her eyes and takes in a shaky breath through her nose. She should answer the door. It’s probably Viserys or one of the neighbors looking for Ashara. She crosses from the kitchen to the living room and the front hall, the hardwood floor cold beneath her bare feet.

Thoughts still muddled and distracted from the previous night, she unlocks the front door without checking the peephole. She throws open the door…and violently flinches away from the person standing there.

“You.”

The dark-haired man from the previous night stands out on the porch, watching her with those sympathetic dark grey eyes. The blacks that he had worn at the gala are gone, replaced by dark-wash jeans, runners, and a black tee, his curls half pulled away from his handsome face. He does not lunge forward to snap her neck nor does he look particularly annoyed or homicidal. Still, there is something unnerving about the way his eyes settle on her, as if he knows every secret she has ever hidden away from the world. Had he looked at her like that last night before the world had exploded into unexplainable chaos? She can’t remember.

“Sorry for stopping by,” he says by way of greeting. The burr in his voice is still warm. She doesn’t like it. “I wanted to check on you. Make sure you were alright.”

“Check on me? Are you mad?” Dany nearly spits. She feels dizzy with the overwhelming memories from last night. But through the roar in her head, strands of lore crawl forth—things she has read in books, things she has seen in movies. Hurriedly, she says, “You can’t come in. I don’t invite you in.”

The man’s smile is crooked.

“No, after last night, I didn’t think you would.” He eyes the threshold of the house with something akin to wariness but he doesn’t step forward. He meets her gaze again and there is something in his eyes that causes her fury to both hesitate and boil up. “Listen, yesterday was…not our finest hour. We made a mistake. You shouldn’t’ve been dragged into any of this. And believe me when I say that none of us want to hurt you. But I think you’re owed an explanation, at least more than the one you got last night.”

Dany lets out a shaky breath. She is still gripping the door as though it is some sort of shield. She wishes she could throw it at him. “I don’t want an explanation. I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“I know,” the man says with a startling amount of regret in his voice, though she is not sure if it is supposed to be directed at her or the circumstances. He pauses for a moment before adding, “I could make you forget. That’s an option too.”

Make her forget? She does not like the sound of that. “I can’t forget what I saw.”

“Not without your friend’s necklace around your neck,” he replies, nodding at the angry red line around her neck that marks where the chain once sat. Dany almost reaches for it but stops herself just in time, remembering her rage and the feeling of betrayal that sat heavy in her chest last night. “You’re fortunate to have a powerful witch as your best friend, though last night was probably not the best time to find that out.”

Dany does not know what means and she sure as hell doesn’t want to ask. She shies back a little farther into the house. “Leave Missy alone.”

The man lets out a huff of a laugh. “The Starfall witch can handle herself, believe me.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m trying to be honest with you right now. And I’m trying to be honest with you because what you know can put a lot of people in danger.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Are you always this suspicious?” The look on her face must be answer enough because the man puts up his hands in surrender. “No, I’m not threatening you. But there is something here in Starfall that is dangerous to us and it’s dangerous to all the people here. My cousins and I are trying to find out what’s going on before anyone else gets hurt. But if people know who we are—if they know what we are…” He trails off.

Dany shakes her head, disbelieving. She cannot understand why he is asking her to keep something this monumental secret. Even if no one believed the vampiric nature of her story, she might at least point the sheriff’s office in the right direction of who murdered Daario. “Why shouldn’t I tell anyone? Margaery’s already been…turned into one of you. Someone’s already been killed. You’re dangerous. You’re a threat. And this is still my home and there are people here I want to protect. I gain nothing by not telling everyone what you really are.”

The man stares at her for a long beat, his brow furrowed in thought. She wonders if he is angry with her. She wonders if she will be able to leave this house without worrying that one of these Starks will appear out of nowhere to rip out her throat. What can she dare do with that sort of threat looming over her? Leave Starfall? Pretend none of this has ever happened?

She can’t. She won’t.

Eventually, the man takes a step backward. His expression has shuttered but there is nothing cruel in his dark eyes. If anything, she can only see the faint glimmer of resignation.

“Robb is helping your friend adjust to being…what she is,” he says. “The witch will make sure she’s not bound by the moon either.”

“Bound by the moon?”

The man holds up his right hand and Dany catches sight of a ring she had never noticed him wearing the night before. It is not quite the same as Robb’s but the wolf motif is similar enough. “I know the lore as well as you do. You didn’t wonder how we walked around in the middle of the day?”

This is absurd. She almost says so but bites her tongue. The man seemingly waits for her reaction, any reaction, but when she doesn’t give it, he only gives her a small, half-hearted smile. And strangely enough, he turns away, the conversation clearly at an end. Dany watches him start to descend the steps toward the sidewalk, a knot starting to form in her chest with questions and confusion and ire.

“Wait.” He turns back. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

He blinks up at her and for the first time since he arrived, she sees uncertainty flicker in his eyes. “I thought you knew it.”

“You never told me. How would I know it?”

The intensity with which he stares at her then makes goosepimples trickle down her arm. She is not sure what is so strange about what she has said. Why should she know this stranger’s name? He never gave it. And she has never met him before. She is certain she would have made it a habit not to purposely run into vampires if she had.

Finally, the man quietly replies, “It’s Jon. Jon Snow.” She frowns.

“Not Stark?”

“It’s a very long story.” And from the way he doesn’t expound on it, she suspects it will not be a story she gets easily or at all.

“Alright…Jon.” The name sounds…odd, on her tongue. It feels right but it also feels like she has tasted the first dredges of a toxin. She stamps down a shiver. “I’ll do what I need to do to protect my mum and to protect my brother and even all of the people in this town from whatever you all are planning. This is my choice.”

“That’s fair.” For a brief moment, he looks like he wants to argue. But instead, he shakes his head. “I do hope you change your mind though.”

Will I? Why would I want to? She gnaws on her bottom lip for a second before blurting, “Jon?” He glances back at her. The question sits within her like a lodestone. This is not a thread she wants to pull. She does not. She should not. And yet… “What the boy said last night…what did he mean? When he said that I wasn’t your Daenerys?”

This time she does not miss it—something black and terrible flashes in Jon’s eyes at her question. It is pain and it is anger and it is loss and it is almost unfathomable. He turns his head away before she can fully grasp the depth of it but it still leaves her nearly reeling. Her grip turns white-knuckled along the door frame.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you, Dany,” Jon murmurs, his voice suddenly as frigid and remote as the ice-choked lands of the distant north. “It won’t happen again.”

And before she can so much as blink, he is gone.

Dany stands in the door for a very long time, feeling as though her world is tilting on its axis. It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. Yet if she looks around her, the world looks exactly as it did yesterday and the day before and all during her childhood. The world is different and yet the world has not changed at all. It is the weight within her that is tearing her down, this forbidden knowledge of the archaic and the impossible, all of it blood-soaked and whispering of shadows dark and near.

There is death in her. There is danger in the heart of her mind. What she knows is damnation and judgment. So what does she do now? What can she do? She stares down the street for a few moments more.

Then she takes a breath and closes the door.

Shit.

Chapter Text

Dany wakes to the sound of her phone buzzing loudly in her ear.

Pale dawn is seeping through the thin, gossamer curtains of her bedroom, spilling onto the towers of still unpacked cardboard boxes that she has yet to get to (and most likely never will). From the paleness of the pink hue outside, she gathers that the sun has not quite risen yet and she grimaces. She cannot quite turn in her bed—a quick glance down reveals that Drogon has curled up against one thigh, Viserion against the other, and Rhaegal has draped himself across her ankle. All three cats are fast asleep.

She wishes she could sleep so soundly. She reaches for her phone blearily and catches both the name and the time on the screen. She sighs, flicking the green accept button. Of course.

“Have you gone to bed yet or are you just waking up?”

There is only one person in her friend group who keeps such wildly variable hours, and hundreds of miles away and cradled right next to her ear, Doreah scoffs.

“I’ll let you guess.” On the other side of the phone, Dany hears the percolating hum of a coffeemaker. “How’s no man’s land? I saw your weather yesterday was soup and the day before was soup and the day before that was also soup. Ros said you were coming home early so it must be as horrible as it sounds.”

“Ros is a goddamned gossip,” Dany mutters, wriggling her legs free of her cats’ weight. Three pairs of feline eyes open and glare in annoyance at her, with Rhaegal hissing in sleepy petulance. But all three cats, after determining that she is not going to dump them on the floor, immediately curl up and go back to sleep once she swings her legs over the edge of her bed. “What else did she say?”

“Nothing,” Doreah notes and Dany can almost hear her rolling her eyes. “Are you coming back up to Winterfell because you miss saving the world? I wish you would—Mormont and Drogo both keep saying I’m such a flake at handling half your projects. I think they wanted you to end your sabbatical the day after you left.”

“Stop being shit at my projects and maybe they’ll stop saying so.” As Doreah immediately launches into her grievances about covering for Dany, Dany ambles into the tiny bathroom of her sublet. The fluorescent lights reveal what she has been doing her damnedest to conceal: the dark circles beneath her eyes, the wan pallor of her face, the messy bird’s nest that is her hair. Ever since that terrible evening and subsequent morning at the fundraising gala and the Stark manor, Dany’s sleep has been plagued by nightmares.

She rakes her fingers through her snow-blond hair with one hand, placing the phone on the edge of the sink with the other, turning on the speaker so that Doreah’s strong Lysene accent fills the bathroom. Every time she thinks that all of this was simply a terrible dream, that she hadn’t woken up in a house full of vampires, she’ll get a text notification from Missandei. The bell on her apartment will chime and the camera in the lobby will reveal Margaery. She’ll receive a town newsletter that contains information about the return of the Starks and the renovations they are undertaking at the old, abandoned manor. If it is a nightmare, if it is all a dream, it is one she can’t wake up from.

Over the past week, Dany has spent far too much time over at Ashara’s. She is not sure how thresholds for rented spaces work with vampires—is it the ownership that counts or the protection of a place considered home?—but she wanted to take her chances at her adoptive mum’s. At least there, she could also keep an eye on Ashara and Viserys too. She could protect them the way she never would have been able to save Daario.

The reminder of her former boyfriend’s murder sends a sickening chill down her spine. The Starks said they had nothing to do with it. But how can she believe that? Nothing like this has ever happened in Starfall, nothing as terrible as a violent murder, until they arrived. It does not matter the reason why they’re here—they are monsters.

Yet she has not called the sheriff’s office to tell them what she knows.

She tells herself that it is because she does not want anything to happen to Margaery—whatever creature she is now, Margaery is still one of her closest friends. Even with her anger towards Missandei too, she does not want her friend dragged into the nonsense that the Starks have brought to town with them. She tells herself that it is for them and them alone that she hasn’t given the whole story to Jaime.

She’ll be lying to herself though if she says that Jon Snow’s words do not sit uncomfortably within her chest.

But if people know who we are—if they know what we are…

I know, Dany thinks. I know what they’ve done. To Daario, to Marg, to Lancel…

That latter bit of knowledge had come a few days after. Lancel Lannister had disappeared the night of the fundraising gala. His father Kevan thought the young man had simply run away. The handful of others he had been with said that he left town that night while most of Starfall was at the gala. But Dany remembers, through a haze of memory and pain, Robb’s words from that night.

A Lannister. I had to compel even more people.

Margaery had done something to Lancel, she is sure of it. Perhaps, as a newly turned vampire, she had ripped the boy’s throat out, unaware of her strength or her hunger. Dany does not know what Robb meant when he said he had to compel people, but she does recall Jon and Rickon mentioning something about memories. Can vampires control people’s memories? Their thoughts? The idea makes her shiver, despite the cloying humidity that she knows waits for her outside like a cloak. How has she stepped into a supernatural nightmare? And why does it seem like there is more to do with her than any of these Starks are letting on?

A beeping noise disrupts her thoughts. She glances down at the phone, sees the call waiting signal, and sighs. Doreah’s tirade is on its second or third encore. “Dor, can I call you back? Ashara’s on the other line.”

“Have you told her and Vis yet that you’re coming back up to Winterfell early?”

She hears the concern filtering through Doreah's voice now—she's never been able to stay irritated with Dany for too long. But the concern causes her to pause.Has she decided that yet? Her stomach churns. She should leave. She knows she should leave. If she is not going to tell Jaime or anyone from the sheriff’s office all that has happened, then she should at least go back to the normalcy of Winterfell. Escape the heat, escape the horror. She grimaces. “Not yet.”

“Well, let me know when you’re back so I can tell Mormont and Drogo to fuck off.”

Dany smiles in spite of herself and wishes Doreah well before switching over to Ashara’s hovering picture. “Morning.”

“Good morning to you too, Danydoll.” Her mum sounds poised and chipper, as she always does in the morning. Dany wonders if she is headed to her little café or if she is already setting up inside the town’s beloved coffee shop. “This would be so much easier if you just stayed the night like you’ve been doing. You realize that I’ve had nothing but your brother’s company for the past couple of nights. I’d much rather have my darling girl here to chat with.”

From the lack of outraged protest in the background, Dany realizes she has an answer to her previous thought. “A bit late to the coffee shop this morning, aren’t you?”

“Not really.” She can hear the sound of mugs rattling in the background. The coffee shop is set up inside a vintage caboose, its insides long since converted to a cozy little café near the library and town hall at the center of town. Dany remembers when Ashara’s brother Arthur had been working on it one sticky summer when she was about eight or nine, remembers fetching tools and water and snacks for him as she watched in childish delight and wonder as the lush decadence of the early century was refurbished into an eclectic, quaint café for his younger sister. “Are you swinging by? You should work from here today. No one should be shut up inside all day.”

Telling Ashara that she is cutting her trip early by nearly five months will certainly be kinder to do in person than over the phone. She glances behind her at the trio of cats still sleeping on the bed. “Doreah called. It sounds like Drogo and Jorah have been running her ragged while she covers my projects.”

“Well, from what I know of Doreah, she’ll be able to handle herself just fine.” Ashara hums thoughtfully over the phone. “You, on the other hand, are supposed to be cutting back on your work for a few months. You chose her because you knew she’d get the work done. Come down to the shop and grab something to eat and a coffee. Heaven knows you need some sun and some company.”

Dany sits down on the edge of the toilet seat. “Ashara—”

“Yes, Danydoll?” She can imagine her mum standing against the tiller stand at the back of the café, one fist planted on her hip, her jet-black hair swept carelessly and artfully to one side. “I know that tone of voice. You are coming down here in fifteen minutes and you are going to have a fantastically delicious latte with a scone fresh from Hot Pie’s and you are not going to crack open that laptop of yours once. And then you are going to come over for dinner with friends tonight to get your mind off things.”

She wants to groan. She wants to protest. But she can only cant her head back against the wall, thinking of all the responsibilities she has fled from, as if she too has chased the red comet back home. She stares up at the bathroom ceiling for a long moment, trying to decide the best way to argue with Ashara.

But startingly enough, the words that fall out of her mouth are: “Do you know why my mum chose my name?”

The question feels jarring on her lips and from the surprised silence on the other end of the call, she knows that Ashara is just as taken aback by the question as she is. Dany knows that her and Viserys’s full names are uncommon. Less than uncommon, really—they are ancient and Valyrian, prone to a thousand and one misspellings and mispronunciations over the years. Dany has always loved the exoticism of her name, the odd strength that it gave her to have something that she is sure no one else in the world has…

…except now she can’t shake the boy’s words from the other day: Robb says she’s not even our Daenerys anyway.

Your Daenerys, Dany thinks, pressing her lips into a thin, bloodless line. She recalls the expression of pain and anger and loss that had flitted across Jon Snow’s face when she asked. What does that mean?

“Well,” Ashara says, a puzzled note in her voice. “Such a strange question to ask so early in the morning! What brought this on?”

Starks. Vampires. A nightmare. Dany bites her tongue against those answers. “I was just wondering.”

Ashara had been her mum’s best friend growing up—it was why she had fought so hard to foster and later adopt her and Viserys after their parents died in the car accident. Dany had been far too young at the time to ask her biological mum anything about their history, had cared more about playing with dolls and making up fairy tales about them than she had cared about her family lineage. But the Starks have left her feeling unbalanced and uncertain, her entire world turned on its head in a single night.

She thought maybe, just maybe, there’d only be one earth-shattering night in her life, a night that had already taken so much from her.

On the other end of the call, Dany hears Ashara say something muffled to Myrcella, the chipper young woman who works as Ashara’s assistant barista (much to her mother Cersei’s displeasure). Then there is the sound of the bell above the door ringing melodiously, followed by the sounds of a handful of sparrows, the usual lot that gathers around the café in the morning for their breakfast of rice that Ashara feeds them.

“Have you been delving into the town charter while you’ve been here?” Ashara teases, though Dany hears the concern warming her words. “Have you finally found another Daenerys in the world?”

Has she? She’s not sure. “Mum was a history buff, wasn’t she?”

“Mmhm.” She imagines Ashara settling down on top of the stairs at the back of the caboose, all vintage elegance and timeless beauty clad in a thin spaghetti strap top and long flowing skirt. “She was always testing higher than me in our history exams in school. I don’t know how she was able to memorize dates and places and events like she did. When I was off reading those trashy romance novels, she had her nose buried deep in those tomes about neoclassical Westeros. It was absurd. Viserys got that nonsense from her.” But Dany can hear the smile on her face when she says that.

She grabs her phone and paces back into the bedroom. Had the Starks mentioned how old they are? The Stark manor had been abandoned for decades and decades before the Starks recently returned. Save for Bran and Rickon, who both look to be in their mid-to-late teens, the other Starks (and Snow) all appear to be around her age, give or take a handful of years. But if they had once lived here in Starfall, someone with her name must not have—Dany knows her town history too well and never has there ever been another Daenerys Targaryen who has lived here. The Founders who had been Targaryens had been named Jaehaerys and Alysanne. Throughout the years there have been Aemons and Visenyas, Saeras and Maegors and far too many Aegons to count—but never another Daenerys.

Phone still on speaker, she pulls up a browser app and immediately types her name in. “It’s just an odd name,” she says quietly, as she looks at the search engine result page. The only results are…well, the only results are her, mostly under the name Daenerys Dayne. She flips to the second and third and fourth page, as the results become more and more off-topic. Social media sites, articles about her marketing work at her company, her company’s own site—the only woman who has ever been Daenerys Targaryen is…

…wait.

She squints down at her phone. There is her name, preceded by the word queen. It is embedded in a forum discussion on a popular social media site. The forum subject, conspiracy theories, makes her wrinkle her nose but she taps on the link anyway—it seems to be a recent addition, having been posted a couple of days ago. “So she probably just made it up? Do you think she saw a variation of it while reading one of those history books about Valyria?”

“Might be,” Ashara admits. “I wouldn’t put it past her to name you after some obscure heroine from an unheard-of battle from six hundred years ago.”

But Dany is only half paying attention. She is reading the blurb: …rumored that it wasnt just the red keep and by queen Daenerys Targaryen but I can’t find any…

She clicks on the link…and is immediately greeted with an error message: this page cannot be found.

She lets out a huff of annoyance. It was probably too good to be true. She hits the back button to take her back to the search engine page.

When the page reloads, the link to the site is gone.

Dany blinks, uncertain. She scrolls up and down the page but cannot find the link again—the link before it and the link after it are still there but it is strangely like the forum query never existed. She updates her search query to include the forum discussion after her name…and nothing, save for marketing forums that mention her. She pulls up the social media site, navigating in growing confusion to the conspiracy theories page, and does an internal search there for her name.

Nothing.

“Danydoll? You still there? Did you hear what I said?”

“I’m…yeah. I’m here. Sorry. I was reading an email.” She closes the browser app, frowning. It’s nothing. She knows it’s nothing and that she is making a fuss over nonsense. “What were you saying? As soon as I get dressed, I’ll head over.”

Ashara laughs. “I was just saying that I hope you don’t find an excuse to get out of dinner tonight.”

“Oh. Ashara, I’m not really sure if—”

“No, no,” her adoptive mum chides gently. Dany hears Myrcella’s voice calling for Ashara somewhere on the other end. “I want you to get out of that apartment of yours and come by for a backyard potluck. It’s just a few people and I promise Cersei Lannister won’t be there. I think a little gathering will be a much better social introduction back into town rather than a whole gala. I still can’t believe you left that without telling me.”

Dany almost rolls her eyes but settles for throwing open a dresser drawer and perusing the clothes neatly folded within. She’ll have to pack these up too. She did say it would be better to tell Ashara she was leaving in person rather than over the phone. Maybe she might be able to do it tonight after everyone has left. Ashara’s cooking skills are questionable but depending on who she has asked over, there might at least be some decent barbecue.

“Fine. Who all’s going to be there? And are you going to make sure Vis doesn’t eat everything first?”

“Very funny,” Ashara chides. Dany hears the bell to the café ring and she overhears Ashara greet a handful of people who must have recently arrived in the café to overwhelm more Myrcella. “And it’s just a few people. Unella, to annoy Cersei. Tyrion, to also annoy Cersei. Gendry, so I don’t have to make any drinks myself. Maybe a few others too. Oh, and the Starks. They seem like they could use some friends their age—this town can be very cliquish when it wants to be, even for a family of Founders. Do you think Missy’s busy?”

Dany’s heart drops into her stomach. But before she can protest, before she can think of a reason—any reason at all—for Ashara to not invite a flock of fucking vampires into her house, her mum trills, “Oh, doll, I’ve got to go. Loras Tyrell is threatening to be snippy with the person who makes his coffee this morning.” Dany can hear Loras begin to argue in the background but Ashara only laughs that low, lovely laugh of hers. “I’ll see you tonight, Danydoll. Bring beer.”

The call abruptly ends.

And Dany is left staring at her phone, bile and panic rising in her throat as she contemplates the hell that she has unwittingly been invited to.

Fuck.

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

The low, quiet voice catches her off guard. She turns to see the second youngest of the Stark children standing in the doorway of the guest solar, watching her with those fathomless dark eyes of his. As always, she thinks he looks like a lankier, more angular version of his cousin, younger and more wide-eyed, surely, but just as solemn, just as kind. When she says nothing, a rebuke caught blistering on her tongue, Brandon Stark gives her a small apologetic smile before entering the solar to sit on a bench.

She leaves Winterfell on the morrow to travel back to King’s Landing. It is a long journey and not one she is particularly looking forward to, but she knows they must leave before autumn lets out—winter comes early in the north, and if they don’t leave soon, they won’t leave until spring.

Not for the first time, she wonders how Jon will manage the trip back.

“I didn’t mean to pry, Your Grace,” Brandon says, keeping his voice hushed. She knows there are nowhere near as many listening ears in Winterfell as there are in the Red Keep but it pays to be cautious. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think my brothers or my sister know. You both have been very good at keeping your distance from one another.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says curtly, turning her back on the young man to walk over to the windows that look out over the sweeping hills and woods that consume the westernmost Stark lands. She sees a pair of wolves loping through the snow as they race toward the woods; from their coloring, she supposes they might be Grey Wind and Summer. Her tone chill, she adds, “You should not indulge or encourage rumors, Brandon Stark. Especially not rumors regarding your queen.”

Brandon looks contrite.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he says, leaning forward with that same boyish earnestness she has come to like about him. “But Jon’s my family as much as he is yours. Perhaps more so since he’s been here for so long. If anyone else finds out about him, if anyone else finds out about you both…”

She crosses her arms but does not fully turn back to look at him. “The realm already knows who he is. That’s why he won’t stay in the capital. We’ve already discussed it. He’ll turn back at Darry. It’s better for your family and mine if he stays as far away from the throne as possible.”

She does not like it, no. She is queen—she should be able to have him by her side if she wants. What does it matter to her the things that Rhaegar did that nearly tore the realm asunder? Why does it matter that her father’s rule had kept the realm cowed for decades? She has come into power to make things right, even if her secrets are buried deep within the heart of the Red Keep. Being with Jon should unite the kingdoms, not tear them apart.

But she knows she is the only one who thinks this way. And so she lies. And so she denies herself.

“Then let him stay here,” Brandon argues plaintively. His eyes are bright with his plea. “It was already dangerous for him to go as far as he did to meet you. The last time any of us went so far south, it was when Father answered the king’s summons and he never came back. So please let Jon stay here. Let Robb escort you to White Harbor. The Manderlys are our bannerman and will take you safely to the capital.”

There is a sharp twinge of jealousy and loneliness within her at the young man’s words. Her life has been one of solitude ever since her mother died five years ago. Rhaegar had been gone long before she understood what his disappearance meant and there had been no other siblings to fill the void of his absence. The love she has for her father knows no bounds but he had kept her as a prize that no lord was worthy of, the king’s paranoia that she might marry someone who would raise his banners against him too great. Her handmaidens were replaced too often to form friendships, her only friends truly only the knights of the kingsguard and even then, at the end of the day, they were her father’s men.

Meeting Jon at the Wall in the wake of her coronation two years ago had been an accident that many people still suspect was not—but she has not regretted it. There are many mistakes she has made in her life, many secrets that she still harbors and that she prays will never see the light of day until she can make them understand, but she does not think she would ever want to go back and never meet Jon. There are only a few instances of happiness in her life and she guards them jealously.

“He has already given me his word,” she replies, keeping her voice steady. “You Starks are known for your honor, aren’t you? Would you have him break his word because of your fear?”

“I don’t want to lose him, Your Grace.” Brandon lowers his eyes. “None of us do. You have to see the way Robb and Sansa are protective of all of us. After the death of the king and our father…we don’t have much family left.”

“Neither do I.” The words sound stiff on her tongue. But she sits down next to Brandon on the bench, mustering up a smile. “You would think I’d knowingly put him in danger? I am the queen. I will protect all of the people in this realm, no matter what the past dictates. He is part of the realm, just as your family is. It is my duty to make sure no harm comes to you or to him.”

But when the worry in Brandon’s eyes fails to dissipate, she realizes that there is little she can say to assuage his fears. That causes something within her to shudder sharply. People who are afraid do illogical things—like reveal secrets that do not belong to them. She pauses for a moment, thinking her words over, before she says, “Would it settle your nerves if you came with us?”

“Me?” Brandon blinks at her. “What good would I do? I’m no knight.”

“Would you like to be?” When the young man only gapes at her, she gives him a smile. “I think it is something your father wanted for you, wasn’t it? I personally think you’re far too clever to waste on a sword but I’ve seen you in the bailey with Ser Rodrick. You have promise. And there are a great many tales of scholarly knights. I’m sure any of my queensguard would be delighted to take you under their wing. Ser Barristan, perhaps?”

She sees the hesitation in the boy’s dark eyes but she sees the unspoken longing too—and she knows that she has him. It is perhaps a cruel thing to offer, a granted wish with a mummer’s strings attached, but she loves Jon too much to let his family step in the way. If she must placate them with poisonous offerings of their heart’s desires, so be it.

She has been alone too long to let a moment of happiness escape her.

And she knows all too well how desire can be used as a web, how longing can be nothing more than a trap.

By the time Dany approaches Ashara’s house that evening, the red-violet hue of sunset has already dimmed into black velvet, the sky lurid with a cacophony of stars and the bloody gash of the comet that still streaks overhead. The street is quiet save for an occasional passing car, cicadas still whistling their songs in the canopy of trees that line the street. Lightning bugs dance merrily over lawns, uncaring of the sticky-sweet humidity that clings stubbornly to the air, florid with the scent of gardenias and roses. The street lamps cast a pale buttery glow onto the asphalt and onto the cherry-red door of Ashara’s house and all Dany can taste on her tongue is the memory of blood.

She stares at the door for a long time, rooted into place by apprehension and anger.

I shouldn’t be here, Dany thinks, cold despite the sweltering heat of the evening. I should have told Ashara everything, even if she wouldn’t believe me. I should have told Jaime or Tyrion or anyone what happened to Daario.

What is wrong with her? Why hasn’t she said a word? Isn’t the reason she is so undecided about leaving Starfall and running back to Winterfell because of the family she has here? Anger boils within her chest as she thinks about it and her hands clench into fists at her side. This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare and she is making all of the wrong decisions.

She never did end up going to Ashara’s cafe. Instead, she had spent the day in a whirlwind, simultaneously packing and researching vampire lore on her laptop and trying to ignore all of it by burying herself in work. Ashara had tried calling again at some point, Ros too, but she’d ignored all of their calls, feeling as though she was being pulled apart by everything that was happening. Too often, she’d ended up throwing a pillow or a book at a wall in frustration, sitting down in the middle of the chaos as one or two or all three cats tried to comfort her by sprawling across her lap, purring loudly.

As she eyes the door warily, Dany wonders what good any of that had done. All she is now is exhausted and wary and confused. Every bit of lore she had found, she found herself doubting. The Starks could already move about in the sunlight. What else was wrong with the lore? Did garlic ward them off? Blessed water? Mirrors? Would stabbing any of them through the heart with a wooden stake kill them?

And Margaery had been turned. How? Dany hadn’t turned, even though she remembers her mouth full of Jon’s blood the night of the gala.

It was questions and questions and questions and nothing close to resembling answers.

But Ashara and Viserys are unprotected thanks to her cowardice and hesitation. She cannot leave them here alone. She owes it to them to fix this.

Somehow.

She heads inside the house and immediately hears commotion and conversation coming from the kitchen when she opens the front door. She recognizes all of the voices, though she does not want to recognize some of them. It causes her heart to sink into the floor—it means that Ashara has invited them all in. They could enter the house and snap her neck or Viserys’s neck at any time they wanted. Her phone feels slick in her hand. Her heart feels sick.

Ashara pokes her head from around the corner upon hearing the door close behind Dany. Her smile is bright. “Ah, there you are. I was wondering if I’d have to send Jaime off to find you.”

“Considering how much overtime my brother has been putting in lately, I dare say he might thank you for the distraction.” Dany watches as Tyrion Lannister crosses from behind Ashara, a glass of wine in his hand. Trailing him is a nervous-looking rookie officer whose face looks familiar but whose name eludes Dany at the moment. Tyrion lifts his glass in a toast to Dany. “I don’t think I’ve had the time to welcome you home yet, Miss Dayne. So welcome back to this swamp of gossip and villainy led by my sister.”

“Is she really that bad?” That is Robb’s voice. As Dany cautiously approaches the kitchen, she sees that he is leaning against the island, stealing bits of cheese and sausage off the charcuterie board his sister is trying to arrange. “She doesn’t seem half as scary as her father.”

“She won’t be half as scary as I can be if you take one more piece of gouda off this board,” Sansa warns before turning a faint smile to Dany. Only the flash of suspicion in her pale eyes is any indication that something might be amiss. “Hello, Dany. Glad Ashara could talk you into coming.”

Robb waves at her and Dany does not miss the flicker of apprehension in his expression. Ashara grabs a bottle of Arbor gold from the wine rack in the hallway with one hand, wrapping an arm around Dany in a hug with the other. Her perfume swaddles Dany like a promise. “I was going to have this in the backyard but I wasn’t aware of Brandon’s wheelchair so we just moved everything inside.”

“You can call me Bran,” Bran calls from the living room, where apparently a video game tournament has been unleashed between him, Viserys, Gendry, and Rickon. Viserys, she knows, is horrid at video games and from the whooping and hollering Rickon is doing, nothing has seemed to change.

At the dining room table sit Unella and Margaery’s mother Alerie. Upon hearing Cersei’s name, Unella’s head had lifted and she says, in her usual droll, dry tones, “Cersei Lannister has all the charm of a burning orphanage.” Alerie gives a very unladylike snort, hiding her smile behind her wine glass. Dany’s own smile is strained—Cersei and Unella’s bitter feud is infamous but she cannot help but continue to count how many people are in this house now, how many potential bodies.

She feels Ashara pressing a glass of water into her hand. She wonders about it at first before her mum smiles gently at her, taking her to the side to whisper, “You look pale, Danydoll. Are you feeling well? Is that why you didn’t come to the cafe this morning?”

“I’m fine,” Dany lies. With Robb and Sansa trading friendly banter with Tyrion and the rookie whose name still escapes Dany, and the video game tournament in the living room, this feels all disturbingly normal. “Did you invite them all?”

“Of course,” Ashara replies with an easy smile. “Just some good old southern hospitality.”

Not with them though, Dany thinks despairingly, even as Rickon cheers his brother’s latest victory. Her eyes land on Bran’s wheelchair and she hesitates. Could she be wrong again? Can vampires be broken like that? What if he is actually in his late teens and the other Starks are only distant ancestors? Is he as much a victim here as the rest of them may be? Does she tell Alerie that these people turned her daughter into a monster?

Her lack of response must be enough to convince Ashara that she is not feeling well. A moment later, she finds herself gently but forcefully pushed into one of the armchairs in the living room, a small plate of cheese and sausages resting on the side table next to it. Ashara then tosses an old throw over her legs and gestures toward the television, where the racing game is still underway. It is Rickon versus Gendry this time—Viserys is wandering back to the kitchen, muttering obscenities under his breath, and Bran is fiddling around on his phone.

“Sit here for a bit,” Ashara says sternly. “I’ll go and grab some ibuprofen for you.”

“Ashara, I’m fine,” Dany insists, even as her heart beats calamitously in her ears. The other Starks are here—where the hell is Jon Snow? “I just need…”

“To stay right in that seat. I’ll be right back with the aspirin.” She is gone before Dany can protest anymore.

What if someone cuts themselves tonight, Dany thinks, throwing her blanket to one side. What if they smell blood? What if they lose control? What if…

“Hi again,” Bran breaks through the panicked diatribe in her head. He has rolled his wheelchair back toward her, his dark eyes soft with friendly concern. She sees the silvery glint of the ring on his right hand as he moves toward her, but she realizes after a moment that he has not blocked her in. He rests his hands on the wheels of the chair, absently rocking back and forth as he peers at her. “We’re sorry about this. Ashara insisted. I promise that we didn’t compel her to do anything.”

There is that compulsion thing again. “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” Bran glances around the living room. Gendry and Rickon are clearly too enthralled with yelling insults at each other and their voices are loud enough to muffle Bran’s words from Alerie and Unella in the adjoining room.

“It’s a little complicated,” Bran says, looking oddly guilty about it. There is something guileless about his expression that almost makes her let her guard down. But the moment she starts to waver, her back is immediately infused with steel again and she narrows her eyes at the boy who most likely is no boy, wheelchair be damned.

“What’s complicated,” she hisses lowly, “is whatever game you’re playing. Your cousin already asked me not to tell anyone what’s going on here and I’m going to need a damned better reason than ‘it’s complicated.’” Bran blinks.

“Jon talked to you?”

That is the thing he picked up on? Dany’s brow furrows. “He asked me to keep my mouth shut, more or less. Why should I? After everything that has happened since you all have been here…” She glances over at Tyrion, who is telling some sort of ribald joke over in the kitchen that Robb is grinning wildly about while Sansa shakes her head in exasperation. “After everything, even if you didn’t hurt Daario, you did something to Margaery. Why isn’t she here?”

“She’s at home.” Bran’s face twists in sympathy. “The transition…it can be hard. It’s been a while for all of us but we remember what it was like. She has a lot more resilience than we did but she told Robb she didn’t want to be around this many people so soon, just in case…”

Just in case she tries to attack one of us. Dany’s hand begins to absently rise to her neck, to the invisible scars from the night Margaery had nearly ripped her throat out in a state of bloodlust. She drops her hand back onto her lap. “Why should I believe you?” Bran watches her for a moment before he just shrugs.

“I’m not sure if you should. But Robb thinks we might be able to trust you. So does Jon.” He trails off, glancing down at his phone. For a moment, his mouth screws up faintly as though in annoyance before his eyes flash back up to Dany. He tucks his phone away in his sweatshirt pocket. “I just want you to know that we can control our hunger. And we really don’t mean to hurt anyone while we’re here. Everyone is safe from us, I promise.”

But does that promise mean anything? It bears thinking about, especially as Ashara returns with a couple of aspirin. She stands next to the armchair, a fist propped on her hip, until Dany dry swallows both pills with a grimace.

“Good,” Ashara murmurs before giving Bran a friendly smile. “Don’t grow up to be as stubborn as she is.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Dany mutters beneath her breath while Bran only laughs, clearly pretending not to have heard Dany. Ashara gives Dany’s head a maternal stroke and a brief kiss before she wanders over to the dining room table to chat with Unella and Alerie. Bran watches her go and Dany fixes him with a look. “How old are you anyway?”

“I’ve been seventeen for several centuries now.” There is a shade of sadness to his smile now. “It’s not the age I would have chosen for immortality but all of that was beyond my control, unfortunately.”

Despite her wariness, curiosity sparks like lightning within her. “How…?” But Bran is already shaking his head.

“A long story and not mine to tell. Not really, anyway.” He runs a hand through his thick dark hair, his brow creased with his own frown. “I think Robb and Jon are probably right about you. You’re…you’re kind. And I know you’re scared but you haven’t told anyone about us. I don’t know why you haven’t and I think we’re in your debt for it but I just wanted to say thank you. This isn’t easy—not for any of us. It never has been.”

The sincerity in his voice hurts. Dany does not know what to make of it. She doubts she is truly as kind as he has made her out to be—she cares about her family and her friends, yes, but she thinks it is fear and uncertainty that have kept her from telling Jaime. Tyrion is here tonight too; she could tell him all that she knows. She could tell him what happened to Margaery and that she knows what happened to Daario and…

She won’t.

She realizes that she won’t.

Why, she wonders fitfully. They’re dangerous. They could hurt more people. But for all the reasons that sit within her like a boulder, she finds that it is running up against another conviction, a suspicion that started building from the moment she first met Robb that night at the bar. She does not trust them, no. Their secret eats away at her like a venomous poison. Yet the idea of telling anyone, the idea of breaking this mind-bogglingly misplaced trust in her…she does not understand her sudden reluctance.

For a moment, her hand comes up to touch the spot where Missandei’s locket had been.

Protecting me. They all say they’re protecting me. I wouldn’t need any of this if…

But she cannot finish the thought.

The next hour passes in a blur. Her fight-or-flight instincts war within her all through dinner—it feels as though there is a buzzing in her head that simply won’t go away, and she finds that she is unable to contribute much to any of the conversations that swirl around her. She can sense Ashara’s concerned violet gaze on her throughout dinner, can hear Viserys’s jokes about her useless sabbatical. Words ebb and flow around her and she cannot make sense of any of it. Everything is too normal and nothing makes sense anymore. Half the people at this table have been alive for centuries.

It feels like she is going mad.

When Dany finally gets up to take plates to the kitchen, she is distracted enough to not realize that Sansa is already there, rinsing out one of the salad bowls that had been on the dining table. The vampire narrows her eyes as Dany enters the kitchen but makes no move to stop her as she opens up the dishwasher.

“You haven’t told anyone.” It isn’t a question.

“No,” Dany replies flatly and softly, quickly glancing over at the dining room table. The others seem to be engrossed in conversation and are paying no attention to the sudden tension in the kitchen (except for the rookie officer, but he seems to be looking at Sansa less in fear and more with the longing of someone who has accidentally fallen head over in heels into…something). She eyes Sansa warily. “Your cousin asked me not to.”

Sansa is silent for a moment, the dishrag in her hand scraping along the salad bowl with far more force than is probably necessary. Then, “Because he asked you to, you won’t? That sounds stupid. You don’t know him. You don’t know us.”

“Do you want me to tell?” When the older girl only grimaces her response, Dany tries to stamp out the confused frustration burning through her. “I should, you know. You snapped Margaery’s neck.”

“She had already turned,” Sansa says, voice devoid of emotion. “I didn’t do anything to her that she couldn’t recover from.”

“But you did it all the same.” Sansa’s eyes burn blue as she scowls at Dany.

“I could have told Robb to let her go. She could have finished ripping your throat out and this would have saved us a lot of problems. But now my family’s safety depends on if you can keep a secret. You.”

The vehemence in Sansa’s words is strange. Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, she is not sure she deserves half of this embittered nonsense. Perhaps if a family of vampires hadn’t arrived in town at the same time as she had, if they had just kept to themselves as they had said they would, maybe none of this would have happened in the first place.

She wants to tell Sansa this. She wants to tell her that nothing that has happened has been because of her, that none of this is her fault, that they dragged her into this hell.

But she sees that the taller girl’s eyes, coldly furious are also lost in a memory that Dany cannot hope to understand. Whatever blame, whatever incident has caused this unprecedented annoyance, is beyond her. Her jaw clenched, Dany slams the dishwasher door shut before leaving the vampire behind with her thoughts.

“I need some air,” she hurriedly says to Ashara as she grabs a beer from off the counter. “I’ll be right back.” She doesn’t wait to hear her mum’s protest—Dany is out the door before she can scream in exasperation.

She steps out onto the porch, her sneakers scuffing against the painted wood. Not much has changed since she walked inside—it is perhaps a little cooler but the southern heat still clings to the air with a fierce, suffocating embrace. Already, pinpricks of perspiration are starting to freckle her skin, the beer bottle in her hand becoming dotted with condensation. She takes a brief swig of the ale, thoughts racing.

What am I doing? Why am I doing this?

She breathes in deeply, tasting the sweet humidity of Starfall on her tongue. It is only then, as she wraps her arms around her middle, that she realizes that she is not alone on the porch.

Jon Snow is sitting on the porch swing off to her right, hunched forward, elbows on his knees. Despite the sultry warmth of the night, he is wearing a leather jacket that makes Dany’s skin itch with imagined heat. He is not looking at her, his deep grey eyes instead fixed on the scarlet comet that streaks through the sky like a blot of rouge. In the faint warm glow of the porch lights, she can see the glint of silver on his right hand from where he absently twists the ring around in circles.

It is such an intimately familiar gesture, so similar to the times when she has reached for the missing engagement ring on her finger, that the flash of anger and suspicion within her is dampened slightly by sympathy.

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. “What are you doing here?”

“Your mum invited me.” He briefly glances over at her before he shrugs, returning his gaze back to the comet. “I heard you inside though. Figured you probably had your hands full with my cousins without me adding to your worries.”

“So you decided to lurk out here on the porch instead.” He lets out a huff of a laugh.

“Is this lurking?”

Dany glares at him. She wants to tell him that he shouldn’t have come, that there is no place for him here. Already, his cousins have rattled her nerves with their presence. Though she thinks that they will be true to their word, that they won’t hurt Ashara or Viserys, it is like trusting a caged wolf—even behind the iron bars, you never forget that those jaws can easily lock around your neck, that the animal locked within, no matter how tame, might surely kill you if given the chance.

The memory of Margaery’s bloodshot eyes, the black veins spiraling out from the pale blue, and her fangs glistening black with blood makes Dany shiver. None of the Starks had shown that demonic side but she has the feeling that just because she hasn’t seen it yet doesn’t mean she never will.

Still, she doesn’t retreat back into the house. Neither does she take a step closer to him. She puts the balusters of the porch to her back, facing him cautiously. He doesn’t seem terribly interested in her, but for the life of her, she cannot tell why he has come here tonight if he was just going to sit out here on the porch for all the neighbors to see, and brood. She lets her gaze wander to the houses across the street before it settles on him again. Momentarily pursing her lips, she says, “I read about…what you all are.”

“Oh? Find anything interesting?”

Dany thinks he might be inwardly laughing at her, judging from his tone. She cannot keep the scowl off her face. “I found a lot. And I don’t think I can trust half of it.”

“That already makes you smarter than most people,” Jon replies with that maddeningly faint smile. “Most people would take all that lore for face value and assume it wasn’t written by the very thing they were trying to protect themselves from.”

That makes her start. “Wait. You all…?”

“Some of it’s true,” Jon reveals with a grimace. “Not all of it. Deleting written and virtual record is easy enough. Word-of-mouth is a lot harder. Even if we tried to control the story, some of the truth eventually seeped through over the centuries. But most of it is fiction.”

“Like werewolves?”

“Bran, Arya, and Rickon were bored one century.”

They were bored one century. One fucking century. It is absurd. It is completely and utterly absurd. But Dany finds herself laughing despite herself. There is little humor in it—it is the laugh of someone who must choose between that and screaming or crying. She thinks if she keeps laughing, it might take on a hysterical edge and she won’t be able to stop. How has she found herself neck-deep in pure, unadulterated bullshit?

She rubs at her face with her free hand, fingers momentarily pressed to her lips to contain the sob that she knows wants to break free. When she finally speaks again, her voice is subdued, cracked.

“Why are you all here? You keep saying you don’t want to hurt anyone in this town but simply being here and staying here means you can’t guarantee that.”

Jon is quiet for a long moment before he nods in the direction of the houses across the street.

“That.”

She follows his gaze, confused at first…until she spots the comet, bright and red and bloody, arching above the houses in the black sky. She hears him continue, “That comet doesn’t appear too often, only every two hundred years or so. It’s even rarer it appears before another one that should be arriving within the next few months. Last time it happened was a good eleven hundred years ago.”

Eleven hundred… she tries not to gape at him and fails. Bran had mentioned several centuries. She did not think he meant nearly a dozen. “Is that…is that how old you all are? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’d pick a smaller number but you wanted us to be honest.” The joke falls flat and he seems to know it because regretful apology spasms across his face. “Aye. That’s about right. Last time any of us saw the second comet, we were all human.”

There are a thousand questions she might ask now. What does the comet mean? Why had it drawn them back to Starfall? What—or more importantly, who—had turned them into vampires a thousand years ago? Was the town going to become overrun with demons who lived by feeding on humans? Who killed Daario if it wasn’t them?

But all of the questions that come roaring forth crowd each other in her mind until there is nothing except a loud buzzing sound in her head, the precipice of the headache that Ashara had already prepped her for. She takes another sip of her beer just to distract herself, to keep herself from asking anything that she’ll regret.

The conversation within the house is muted but friendly and shows no signs of abating despite the hour. There have been no screams, no sobs, no shouts for help. As the silence outside wears on though, she realizes that it is an oddly companionable one. Jon continues to watch the comet with a distant, troubled look in his eyes, paying her little enough mind, his fingers fiddling with the ring on his right hand.

She studies him quietly. Robb has been friendly, though she now suspects it initially had all been a ploy to learn more about her, to make sure that she herself was not a threat to him and his siblings. Sansa had been suspicious from the start and remains so, her gaze often cool and unforgiving. There is also wariness in Bran, despite his friendly nature. Rickon seems far more amused by her than anything. And there is the mysterious fifth sibling, someone named Arya, who she has not met yet. What will she be like?

But Jon…there is something different about Jon. Dany cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but it unsettles her. She watches him for a moment longer before one of the questions within her finally breaks through the chaotic tumble. Before she can second-guess herself, she finds herself asking, “Who is Daenerys?”

Before, when she had asked him something similar, pain and rage and incomprehensible loss had flared across his face. It had been both an answer and another enigma wrapped into one. She hadn’t understood it at the time but she thinks the answer to that question might help her understand the rest of this whole nightmare.

This time though, Jon’s expression shutters. He does not meet her eyes. There is a chilly static to the air now that pierces through the heat and humidity. The silence that falls between them this time is so long and so weighted that Dany wonders simultaneously if he even heard her correctly and if he is going to bother to answer at all. She presses the rim of the beer bottle against her lower lip. “I just—”

“She was…someone we all knew. A very long time ago.”

A thousand years, Dany thinks. How many people have the Starks lost in a thousand years? How many people have come and gone in the span of a breath for someone who cannot die? She feels her face drop, a strange sadness tugging at her heart.

“I’m sorry. She must have been an extraordinary person if she made that much of an impression on you all so many years later.”

“She was.” There is something sharp in Jon’s words now. Dany is not sure she wants to touch them, for fear that she may just slice her own heart open. “Very passionate, very driven, often kind. When she told you she could change the world, you’d believe her. But she was also…complicated. Her temper could blind her to her own faults. And she could be cruel because of it.”

“Complicated,” Dany repeats. She sighs. “Most people are, aren’t they?”

Jon looks up at her then, and though there is an emotion in his eyes that she will never understand, his tired smile seems agreeable enough.

“Aye. That’s true enough.”

For a moment, Dany wonders if it is their Daenerys, lost somewhere in the annals of history, who her mum had named her after. Her search history earlier made it incredibly unlikely. Whoever it was, whatever mysterious allure she held through centuries—it has no bearing on her, save for a shared name centuries and centuries apart. She take another sip of her beer, the yeasty flavor no longer cold on her tongue.

“When the comets leave, will you?” When he nods, she wrinkles her nose. “Even though it’s your home?”

“The thing about being alive for several hundred years is that you tend to gather homes like dust.”

“Don’t be a smartass.” When Jon only laughs, Dany adds more seriously, “Honestly. Can I trust that you won’t come back to hurt my family? My friends? Can I trust you now?”

Jon looks up at her then, his head tilted in contemplation. The steadiness of that storm-grey gaze, the reserved way that he composes himself—it causes her to stiffen in suspicion, her grip tightening around the neck of her bottle as she stands a little straighter. Sansa’s mistrust is plain, the friendly skepticism of her brothers understandable—but of all the Starks, he is the one that she still does not understand, the one that she feels might easily break his promise to her if he thought it was the right thing to do. After all, his moods are too mercurial, his eyes too dark with a thousand and one secrets. His words are somehow both glib and too honest. When she thinks of the night of the gala, she wonders if there had been any vulnerability, any true honesty in what he was saying.

Jon reaches into the pocket of his jacket, a slow but assured movement, and Dany feels her jaw clench around a shout—but then he removes his hand, silver glittering in the muggy night air.

It is her necklace.

Without meaning to, her hand flies to her neck. The angry red line that had been left behind after she’d torn it off in a rage has faded days ago, but the guilt of doing so, the confusing melt of anger and betrayal that flares to life every time she recalls Missandei’s hurt expression, has not. “Why do you have that?”

“Why don’t you?” he retorts, getting to his feet. He is taller than her—most people are—but not overwhelmingly so. He does not tower over her the way so many people have done in the past to intimidate her. “She was trying to protect you, you know. The locket is spelled shut but there’s vervain inside.”

“Vervain?” His smile is crooked and half-hearted.

“I told you that half the lore is wrong.” He unhooks the clasp of the necklace. “Garlic, holy water, most wooden stakes—they won’t do anything. Vervain’s a little different. On a human, it’ll protect you from compulsion. The witch must’ve known what Robb was trying to do when she gave this to you. She was right to be cautious, though maybe not for the reasons she thought.”

“She lied to me.”

“You’ll find that people do that a lot.”

When he takes a few steps closer, Dany is surprised to find that she doesn’t immediately recoil or flinch away. She realizes, with some tiredness, that she is mostly confused.

“What about you? Have you lied to me?”

His grey eyes flash, again with that emotion that Dany cannot understand.

“Of course I have.”

And yet despite his words, despite knowing what he is, despite knowing that he might easily break her neck right there, she does not stop him as he lifts the chain to her neck, the sleeves of his jacket tingling along her collarbone. He is too close, his arms around her to sweep her hair back, the scent of pine and soap sharp in the air, and she thinks that none of this is right. None of this should be happening. Yet she knows it is not a dream. It is not a nightmare. It is her life and it is falling around her like dominos.

“I know you don’t trust us,” Jon says quietly, his callused fingers brushing the back of her neck as he hooks the chain of the necklace into place. The locket sits cool and heavy above her breastbone. “And we haven’t given you a lot of reasons to, not with everything that’s happened. But promise me you won’t take this off again. Your friend was right. We won’t hurt you, but it still protects you from us.”

It protects you from me.

He does not say the words, but she hears them anyway. His hands drop away from her, scarcely ghosting across her skin. Dany feels her hair fall like a curtain of rain against her face as she stares up at him in bewilderment. There is something else unsaid here, something quiet and profound in this moment—an understanding, a want, a secret.

He’s warm, she realizes, suddenly unsure. His hands are warm.

But she says nothing as he takes a step away from her and offers her that brief, enigmatic flicker of a smile.

“Goodnight, Dany.”

Chapter Text

Dany thinks that this may be one of the most awkward moments in her life.

She sits at one of the bistro tables outside of the Starfall Bar & Grill, listening to the drone of cicadas as she wilts beneath a sun that has bleached the sky of all color, the air a wet rag of stifling humidity. Absently, she fiddles with her sunglasses, with the hem of her thin olive cami, with the straw jammed into her overly sweet iced tea. The tea does little to keep heat from blazing down her neck and across her cheeks. It does little to penetrate the silence that has settled at the table.

Missandei at least looks suitably guilty and miserable, her eyes dark and cast down onto the top of the table. It is that guilt and that misery that makes Dany feel even worse about the tension that is lurking as heavy as the intense scent of syrupy freesias and overheated asphalt hanging in the air. Missandei does not have an unkind bone in her body and it feels wrong to harbor any sort of grudge against her. She knows certainly that her friend had been trying to protect her, however dismally that plan had failed.

But then she remembers Daario. Then she remembers the Starks. And the words that she needs to say get twisted and broken on the tip of her tongue.

In contrast, Margaery looks…exasperated.

The new vampire sits with her hands wrapped around the sweating glass of iced tea that she’d ordered, sipping from it occasionally but saying nothing. She looks entirely normal in her blouse and designer jeans, her hair spiraling in waves around her heart-shaped face. There is no hint of the monster she’d become that night of the fundraising gala—no fangs, no lips stained black with Dany’s blood, no bloodshot eyes.

It is unnerving.

As the silence drags on, Irri comes by again and asks if they want to order anything except drinks. To Dany’s surprise, Margaery, now looking completely fed up with the silence, says, “Fries and onion rings. And a round of tequila shots.” When Irri only raises an eyebrow, glancing at her watch, Margaery adds flatly, “Two rounds.”

When the doe-eyed young woman vanishes to put in the order, an amused grin on her face, Dany finds herself giving Margaery a curious side-eye. She remembers the plate of fries she and Robb had shared at the bar what feels like a lifetime ago and she remembers the tumblers of whiskey both Robb and Jon had been drinking at one point. She does not know enough about vampires or vampire anatomy to figure out how the hell that works—a dead body technically doesn’t need food, right?

A dead body, she reminds herself, as she glances over at Margaery, also doesn’t look that irritated. And a dead body can’t do shots either.

A memory sidles its way to the forefront of her mind: a dark-haired man’s warm hands grazing her neck, the heat of his body close to hers in the firefly-laden evening, his grey eyes soft with amusement and remorse and secrets as old as the grave…

She brushes the memory away, annoyed. Why is she even thinking about him?

Still, once the food and the drinks arrive and Margaery immediately knocks down her shot, Dany can’t help but frown. Even her insatiable curiosity can’t be quelled by what she feels should be her knowledge of simple biology.

“How do you do that?”

“What?” Margaery, reaching for the platter of fries, pauses. The ring on her right hand—an unobtrusive band of rose gold engraved with vines—glimmers faintly in the late morning sun. Her pale cat-like eyes flicker down to the empty shot glass in front of her and then towards the platter laden with fries and beer-battered onion rings. Realization dawns in her eyes. “Oh. I…don’t know. They…I didn’t ask.”

Both Dany and Margaery turn to Missandei, who is folding her napkin into strange origami shapes. She doesn’t look up under the weight of their curious stares, though she does lift one slim shoulder in a shrug. “Your body functions like it used to, so long as you consume blood.”

“And have you?” Dany asks cautiously, eyes momentarily darting about to make sure that no one is eavesdropping on their bizarre conversation. “Been consuming…?”

Margaery’s eyes flash and she snatches an onion ring off the platter.

“Yes. Blood bags. But what does it even matter to you?”

This time, Missandei does look up, something brightly remorseful in her eyes—but there is also a sharp warning in those dark depths too. “Marg…”

“What?”

“Why are you so angry?” Dany asks, though she regrets the words the moment they leave her lips. Missandei flinches and Margaery spins to face her, her eyes cold and narrow and burning with a furious pale light.

“You want to know why I’m angry?” she hisses quietly. “I’m angry because I haven’t slept in my bed in two weeks. I’m angry because I can’t enter my own house without an invitation because surprise—my grandmother still owns my house. I’m angry because I suddenly crave blood all the time and I feel like I have been PMSing ever since the night of the fundraising gala. And I’m angry because I went through something horrible and life-changing and wretched and one of the dearest people in the world to me decided I was too much of a monster to understand how I felt about any of it.”

Guilt seeps through her at the hurt and anger in her friend’s voice. Margaery has always been one of those people who seems unruffled by the world, a quiet self-assurance within her of who she is and her place in the order of things. To hear the wrecked tatters of rage in her voice, to recall that the night of the gala had been a nightmare unfolding on multiple sides makes something painful and rancid fill her stomach.

An argument tickles the back of her throat. She can say that Margaery tried to rip her throat out that night, that she had done something to Lancel Lannister, certainly—but the protest dies weakly on her lips. “Marg, I didn’t mean it like that.” She has never been very good at apologizing for her behavior. But she tries now, despite it all. “Everything that’s happened…I didn’t know what to think.”

“You knew exactly what you were doing,” Margaery points out. Her voice is softer now, if no less angry. “You always put up this wall. You did it with Daario. You did it with this whole town. And now you’re doing it again.”

Anger immediately snuffs out the guilt. “What are you talking about? I don’t—”

“Missy was trying to protect you. And for all the Starks’ nonsense, I think they’re trying to protect you too.” Margaery bites into an onion ring with far more force than is necessary. “And your answer to this is to…what, exactly? Push everyone away? Solve your problems yourself? Heaven forbid anyone else go through something similar.”

It is Missandei who interrupts before heat and flames can pour out of Dany. She puts one hand on Dany’s knee and slides her one of the tequila shots with the other hand. Her smile is small and apologetic but her words are firm.

“I understand why you did it, Dany. But you do have a habit of doing this.”

She wants to say that she doesn’t. After all, she left Daario because she knew that their relationship would have trapped them both, would have left happiness dry and bitter on their tongues. She left Starfall because all her dreams, all her longing, all of what she wanted from life is far too big to be contained in such a small town. But how can she explain that without sounding cruel? How can she want any of that, especially after she has returned to Starfall after all these years, after her world—their world—has been turned inside out?

The fight within her dwindles. She goes to twist the ring that no longer sits on her finger, a pang of loss and knowing shooting through her heart.

“I would have told you if I’d thought it would have helped,” Missandei admits. “I didn’t want to drag either of you into this.”

And there is the other crux of the matter. Dany glances over at her friend, who sits looking completely innocuous in her tee and glasses and cutoff shorts, a handful of beaded bracelets clicking on one slender wrist. She does not look the part of a witch, no more than Margaery looks to be a vampire. But she wonders how much of that lore is also false, how many more lies drown the history books to protect the people who crafted them in the first place.

What the hell. Dany grabs the shot of tequila and knocks it back. The alcohol tastes of citrus and black pepper, scorching a path down her throat. Maybe Margaery had the right idea.

“Starfall wasn’t like this when I left,” she finally says weakly, placing the shot glass back down on the table. Missandei gives her a grim smile.

“Starfall has its secrets. Most places in Westeros do.” Missandei picks up a fry but does not eat it. Instead, she examines it as though it holds all the answers to the universe. “Honestly, even if I’ve been doing this for a while, I don’t have all the answers. My grandmother told me that the gifts come and go in our family but the bloodline of witches can trace its roots back to Volantis and Asshai. They’ve been watered down over the years though. I’m probably nowhere near as powerful as the Starks think I am.”

Margaery snorts, raking her hair back away from her face with one perfectly manicured hand. “You do realize how bloody mad we all sound? Vampires and witches and magic and…everything. What does it even mean to be the Starfall witch? Robb wouldn’t say.”

But Missandei only shrugs again, finally biting into her fry. Dany sees that she seems vaguely troubled by the question. “I don’t know. Whenever I’m around the Starks, all I see is ravens and blood and wolves.” She pauses, a wrinkle forming between her brows, before she offers up a small smile as a grimace. “Would it help if I say everything I know is from the stars and spirits?”

“No,” Margaery says immediately before Dany can say anything. “And we only have two rounds of tequila here. Don’t have me make it three. Besides, Robb already said you threatened them if they kept pestering Dany. I’d love to keep this illusion of you being a big, bad witch.”

“You did what?” Dany shoots Missandei a shocked, reprimanding look and the girl at least has the grace to flush in embarrassment. “Missy.”

“They just need to think I’m more powerful than I am,” Missandei argues, snatching up a handful of fries and onion rings to move to her plate in defense. “I am not sure the Starks mean any real harm but if the comet pulled them here, it is clearly pulling other vampires here too. Someone turned Marg and it wasn’t one of the Starks. I can’t cast a spell to protect the whole town and I can’t exactly fill the water supply with vervain. Whether we like it or not, we need their help until the last comet passes.”

There is the unspoken part of Missandei’s conviction, that knowledge that someone had killed Daario. This time, Dany reaches for a couple of fries in order to ignore the guilt within her that seemingly will never stop festering, that will never stop reminding her of the feelings she should have for the man she had once cared for.

“How many vampires are there?” The idea of the town becoming overrun with monsters makes something twist tightly in her belly. Daario’s memorial is set for a few days from now. Her feelings for him might be tilted and confused but the idea of losing Ashara and Viserys, of attending one of their funerals, sends a flutter of panic flailing in her chest. She doesn’t have a lot of people in the world to call her own. She can’t afford to lose the few she does have.

Including Missandei and Margaery.

God, what is she doing? How is this her life now? The darkness that lurks in Starfall, the blood and the horror and the decay of everything she has left behind brimming with life now that she is back—she cannot let go. She might never be able to let go. For all that she has run away, for all that she has built up elsewhere to make something of herself that is not defined by this town, it still all leads back here.

“I’m sorry,” she finally admits, even as the sun sears her bare shoulders red and the hum of screaming cicadas fills her ears. She feels Missandei and Margaery’s eyes on her. Something in her spine goes hard as stone. “I’m sorry for everything. Everything that’s been happening…it’s happening to all of us, isn’t it? Every story we’ve ever read about, every myth, every legend—it’s all true. It’s all coming for us and I just got into my head about it.”

Margaery stares at her for a long moment. And then her lips curl up into a feline smile. “Well, I suppose I did try to kill you. You can be forgiven for being mad at me for that.” She takes a sip of her neglected lemonade. “Though an apology from Daenerys Dayne is a rare thing. Remind me to have you record it on my phone for posterity.”

“I take it back then.” Dany turns to Missandei. “I’m only apologizing to you. Marg can choke.”

Missandei hides her smile as Margaery scoffs, throwing a fry at Dany. Dany does not feel…lighter, exactly. The scope of what they are facing—the unknown and the damned—still sits heavily on her chest. There is still so much she does not know about Missandei’s powers or how long her friend has even been a witch. And she suspects that for all of Margaery’s sly smirks, there is guilt within her for most likely killing Lancel Lannister.

Monsters. Monsters and myths and blood.

But it is a start.

“So what do we do now?” Dany asks, a no-nonsense thread weaving its way through her voice. If they are going to deal with it, then they are going to deal with it. “Jon said that the comet is what brought them back but why? What does the comet mean?”

“Jon said, is it?” Margaery notes with a raised eyebrow. “And when did you talk to him? Didn’t you swear off all vampires?”

With both Missandei and Margaery’s eyes on her, Dany tries to be as nonchalant as possible as she shrugs, reaching for her second shot glass of tequila. “Ashara invited some people over to her house for dinner, including the Starks. I couldn’t not show up.” She cuts Margaery a flat look. “I’m surprised Robb didn’t tell you that since he seems to be telling you so much.”

“Being a vampire didn’t exactly come with a training manual, Dany,” Margaery retorts, but Dany notes that she avoids her eyes. “Who else am I supposed to learn from?”

“The thing is,” Missandei interrupts before her two friends can start sniping at one another, “we just don’t know. The only thing I know for certain is that it has something to do with you…or at least someone they thought you to be.”

She’s not our Daenerys.

She was…someone we all knew. A very long time ago.

Dany recalls the sadness in Jon’s eyes when he spoke of the woman who shared her name, someone who had apparently left an extraordinary mark on the lives of him and his cousins, and someone who is clearly long dead, judging from the depth of loss she had seen in Jon’s expression. She wonders what it might be like to live a life so grand and so full of purpose that you are remembered a thousand years after you’ve gone.

Well, almost remembered. She thinks back to the vanished forum page. Surely she hadn’t imagined that. Aloud, she only says, “I’m not a vampire or a witch. I have nothing to do with this world unless someone desperately wants the company of orphaned Starfall residents.” She raises an eyebrow at Margaery. “Did Robb say anything about that?”

Margaery rolls her eyes. “No.”

“I’ll ask my mum and Nonna,” Missandei says, looking thoughtful. “I’ve never even heard of the name Daenerys outside of Starfall before. But the Starks…I don’t know. I don’t think they’re good people necessarily but I do think they might want to protect the town from the storm that’s about to hit it.”

“Is there…” Dany frowns, rethinks her questions, and then presses on. “The Starks need those rings to walk around in the daylight. What about other vampires? Is that still true about them being bound by the moon?”

Margaery lifts a single eyebrow. “Bound by the— Robb said something similar. Exactly how much did Jon tell you anyway? Especially since you’ve decided not to speak to vampires?”

While Dany debates dumping the platter of fries and onion rings atop Margaery’s immaculate curls, Missandei shakes her head. “As far as I know, vampires would need a spell in order to protect them from sunlight. Unless other vampires are on good terms with a witch, then I can’t say for certain. I’m not even sure what witch would have given the Starks their protection in the first place.”

This is an absurd conversation we’re having, Dany thinks, grabbing the plastic drink menu, sticky from countless numbers of spilled mint juleps and whiskey sours, to fan herself. “Can’t Margaery just ask Robb?” When Margaery only shoots her another withering look, Dany’s lips quirk upwards in a limp smile. “Where are you staying anyway?”

“She’s with me,” Missandei answers. “I figure she’s safer at my place than with the Starks, at least until we know a little more about them and why they’re here.”

Then she reaches down into her knapsack that has been sitting next to her chair, rustling through it. A moment later, her curly head reappears over the edge of the table. She quickly looks around before she holds up a small leather pouch, upending it onto the table. Out spill a handful of bracelets and necklaces, their braided leather cords tangled around one another. A trio of glass beads are strung through the cords of both the necklaces and the bracelets, and frozen within the glass are tiny, immaculate bluish-purple flowers.

“Vervain,” Missandei says quietly, untangling the leather cords with quick, deft fingers. As she does so, she briefly nods at the silver locket that hangs from Dany’s neck. “I know it’s not a lot but it gives some protection to your families. Vervain acts as a barrier to a vampire’s compulsion. And it’s toxic for them to consume. It might be smart to add a bit of it to your tea and water every day. Get it into your bloodstream.”

But Margaery is looking at the necklaces and bracelets on the table as though Missandei has dumped a viper on top of their fries.

“You just said they’re toxic. I’m not touching those, Missy.”

“It’s fine,” Dany notes absently, even as she helps the witch untangle a few stubborn cords. “Jon gave me back my locket and it didn’t seem to bother him.”

Missandei glances at her out of the corner of her eye but Margaery’s expression is a mix of smugness and disbelief. “Oh. So Jon had your locket. And when did he give it back to you? When you had all of these mysterious conversations with him, hmm?”

Dany almost snaps back at Margaery that it is none of her business, especially considering how much she is speaking about Robb Stark. But once again, the memory comes back to her of Jon Snow clasping the necklace back around her neck, the scent of pine and soap enveloping her, the sleeves of his leather jacket brushing against her skin in the cricket-song of the evening…

Instead, she picks up her shot glass and raises it in a toast over the cooling pile of fries and onion rings and magical herbs wrapped in glass.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she says. “Here’s to us and whatever the hell our lives are now.”

Missandei laughs quietly, picking up her own glass. Margaery only rolls her eyes, though her familiar crooked smile has returned to her face. The three of them clink their shot glasses together and immediately down the tequila.

But even as the liquid fire works its way down her throat, Dany’s thoughts cannot help but circle back to Jon and all of the secrets he and his family are hiding. Dany does not like secrets. She especially does not like secrets that could hurt the few people left in the world whom she cares about.

And what do I do about it? What can I do about it?

She thinks of a night under a gazebo, of a man’s quiet laugh and his gentle advice…and curses. She knows exactly what she has to do.

She just wishes it was less of a stupid plan.

The cemetery is as predictably gothic as one might expect in an old southern Westerosi town like Starfall. Up on a hill beyond a southern copse of trees, a wrought iron fence, nearly as old as the town itself, surrounds the graveyard, the posts taller than most people Dany knows. Within the black gates, a gravel path circles around chipped, mossy tombstones and great ostentatious sculptures of the Seven, faces obliterated by time and storm. Ancient oaks and old weeping willows stand silent guard throughout the carefully tendered lawn, the only living things in Starfall that will outlive all of its residents and watch over them in death.

Outlive most, Dany thinks as her sneakers crunch in the gravel path. The sun dips low on the horizon—it is dangerously too close to the evening. Not knowing how many vampires are out there means that the safest place to be come sunset is behind the protective walls of a home and the enchantment that is an invitation.

She glances at her watch. Thirty minutes. That’s enough time.

The marble headstone beneath the bent black oak looks exactly as it did when Dany fled Starfall several years ago. The last time she had come here was to make her peace with her decision to leave this town and its heartache behind, to chase bigger things beyond the county line into the great, shining metropolises of Westeros.

And now here she is, back again, a cloud of magic and mystery and death trailing after her like some scorned lover. Soon enough, there will be another grave she needs to visit, another person whose ghost she needs to apologize to.

“Hey, Mum. Hey, Daddy.” She does not sit down like she used to. She does not have time. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to come visit.”

How much can a child really remember parents lost so young? Dany’s memories are watercolored and faint but Ashara always made sure to tell her and Viserys all of the details that childhood usually swallows up. Ashara’s stories are the reason why Dany feels as though everything she does remember of her parents is crystalline and vivid, every memory etched in bold, vibrant color and sound. Does it matter if it is only Ashara’s memories that she is borrowing, colored in by her own imagination?

She is not sure. She doesn’t think it really matters, not anymore. She wonders if Daario will eventually become the same in her mind—a ghost filled in by the details others remember of him but not those of the woman who had once thought to spend her life with him.

Dany stares down at the headstone, running her fingers along the cool marble. There is so much she needs to say. She might speak of King’s Landing and college. She could speak of her marketing job with the social outreach program, of the friends she’d left behind in the frozen city of Winterfell. There is, of course, her sudden return to town and Daario’s death and the Starks and vampires and Missandei’s powers and Margaery’s turn and a woman who died so long ago, a woman who also had her name, and surely her mum would know all about that, would know the reason why she chose this name for her daughter.

But none of it comes out. It is all too much and the time she has to speak all of it to life is not enough. Instead, Dany lets out a long sigh, closing her eyes.

“I miss you both,” she finally says. “I wish…I wish you all could tell me what I should do.”

She has a plan, of course, no matter how ill-advised. She needs more information to make a better decision and the only way she’s going to get more information is by spending time with the Starks. But still it makes no sense. She doesn’t lose her way. She has always forged self-reliant paths for herself, unconventional and bullish. How can she be lost now? How can she let all of what has happened make her cower?

What the hell is she even doing?

“Well, well,” someone says from behind her and Dany spins to see the familiar figure of Tyrion Lannister approaching her from across the way. There are dark shadows in his eyes but his smile is friendly enough as he saunters on stunted legs through the grass toward her. “It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one with a flair for the macabre. There are not many people I know who visit graveyards when it’s nearly dusk.”

“Detective,” Dany begins with wary politeness, but Tyrion snorts, waving his hand.

“None of that—I’m off the clock for the first time in what feels like weeks. Don’t remind me that I actually have a job to go back to tomorrow afternoon.” He nods at the marble headstone. “Visiting the parents, I see.”

“I was just about to leave.”

It is half-true. Of the three Lannister siblings, Tyrion may be the most conversational, but Dany doesn’t exactly feel up for his quips and dry humor this evening. She had been able to easily avoid him the night of Ashara’s get-together—if the Starks had let slip anything to him that they were anything but human, that was their problem. She’d done her part. She can’t guarantee the same if she tries to fend off Tyrion’s curiosity solo.

“Ah, I see,” Tyrion murmurs. He squints in the fading light at the names etched in the double headstone, the dull orange glow of the setting sun painting strange, shifting shadows in the marble. Nearly two decades worth of storm and rain and wind have done little to make the names unreadable—the groundskeeper Edd Tollett is extremely dutiful at keeping the cemetery and Starfall’s parks in order, no matter how much he grumps about it. “I’m sure they’re pleased that the prodigal daughter has returned after all this time. I’m sorry that your homecoming has been…less than pleasant, let’s say. The news about Daario came as a shock to all of us.”

Dany stiffens. Would the medical examiner in King’s Landing have pinpointed the unnatural cause of Daario’s death? Is that why they had taken over the case, because the Starfall coroner had suspected something unusual? Everyone in town knows that the body found on the high road was Daario but the sheriff’s department has said little in the way of cause of death beyond “no suspicion of foul play”—but then again, Tyrion and Jaime’s father is Tywin Lannister, a man notorious for building a small town society on ruthless secrets.

Maybe. Maybe not.

She averts her eyes, hoping that it appears that she is merely uncomfortable with discussing the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend and not that she knows his death is a supernatural homicide. “And who are you visiting?”

Tyrion grunts, rubbing at his scarred nose. “I’m afraid I also tend to keep company with the ghosts of those long dead.” But the question has clearly not distracted him from his earlier line of thought because he continues blithely, “You know, I always thought they would have supported you and your brother’s decision to leave. Staying here would have been like making a bargain with the Stranger.”

That is surprising to hear, though in retrospect Tyrion Lannister might be the only person in town other than Ashara with even a modicum of understanding of that decision. But she keeps her expression and her tone neutral as she replies, “Leaving can be the same. Sometimes the world beyond Starfall isn’t what we might’ve hoped.”

Tyrion shrugs. “Maybe. But I never thought you’d have been happy with Daario. The small-town life—the quaint marriage, the children, the life of a dowager socialite my sister has so readily embraced—seemed like it would be a cage to you. I was frankly unsurprised when I heard you broke off the engagement.” When Dany snaps her head toward the small man, she sees that his hands are jammed in his jacket pockets, his gaze still fixed on her parents’ tombstone. “I’m sure that makes me a ghoul who doesn’t enjoy other’s happiness but I was rather proud of you for not settling.”

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

The half-memory floats through her mind, the words that she still cannot pinpoint the source of. It is a comforting thought, even if it seems useless now. Is this everything she had been looking for? The work she does now in social outreach, helping financially disenfranchised communities across the country, working alongside friends whose drive and ambition she admires—it’s everything she wanted. It’s why she left.

Everything is…fine.

“I think you’re probably braver than most of us here.” She glances back at Tyrion and sees that his gaze has drifted up away from her parents’ tombstone to the comet that can barely be seen through the canopy of trees to the east. She raises an eyebrow at him.

“Didn’t you leave too?” Tyrion’s mouth twists into a facsimile of a smile.

“Once.” But he doesn’t elaborate beyond that. Instead he shifts his weight and then tilts his head in the direction of the cemetery’s entrance. “If you’re headed out, let me walk you to your car.”

Dany looks up at the sky. The golden hour is all but gone. She really should be headed back. Her thoughts are too muddled now to even begin unwinding them to the silent ghosts of her long-dead parents. She presses her lips into a grim smile, watching as the streetlamps flicker in the distance.

“Alright. Thank you.”

Tyrion is not known for sitting easily within comfortable silences and soon he is wandering aloud if the return of the Starks means they’ll finally plant a weirwood in the cemetery. Dany is familiar enough with the shockingly white trees with branches that wept leaves as red as blood. Once or twice since she’s lived in Winterfell, she even stumbled across a heart tree, the carved faces sticky with crimson sap and grim with ancient knowing. Tyrion makes some off-color joke about the local septon, a kindly if obstinately pious man, being rather bullheaded about faiths other than the Faith of the Seven in town.

Dany can only smile thinly. She scarcely believes in the supernatural things that have swarmed over her life; heaven knows she has long since given up believing in higher powers.

They are rounding the path toward the entrance when Dany hears another pair of footsteps on the gravel behind them. Dusk has now settled in over Starfall, the western horizon burning with the remnants of sunlight. Hackles rising, she glances behind her to see someone quietly approaching them on the path. His face is vaguely familiar but Dany has been gone too long to figure out a name. She relaxes just slightly.

Tyrion must hear the footsteps too because he looks over his shoulder, eyebrow raised.

“Didn’t think you were the type to visit the dead, Waymar. They don’t tend to compliment you on your looks.”

Tyrion’s words unlock familiarity within her. Waymar Royce, Dany thinks, slowing to a surprised halt. Waymar had been a year ahead of her in school. He’d been a handsome boy who had grown into a handsome young man who unfortunately knew it. He wore arrogance and entitlement like badges of honor and Dany had been glad she’d only heard of him from afar.

She squints at him now through the falling shadows. The young man’s head is cocked to the side, an easy smile on his pretty face. His eyes…

Something…

Something is wrong.

“No,” she hears herself whisper, even as Waymar’s smile grows wider.

“Daenerys Targaryen,” the young man greets, a note of playful malice in his voice that sends a violent chill of dread down her spine. “Welcome home.”

And she watches as the whites of his eyes go dark with blood, black veins spiraling out from his eyes as his lips peel back in a snarl to reveal pointed, wickedly sharp canines.

She thinks she hears Tyrion curse at her side but she can barely make it out, panic and adrenaline rushing to her head. She whips her head around to look for something—anything—that can be used as a weapon but she is not quick enough. She feels a breath of wind on her cheek, and suddenly Waymar is right there, eyes crimson, teeth bared, and she remembers how strong Jon had been when he grabbed her at the manor. She remembers the sharp pain at her neck when Margaery had latched onto her artery and fed.

Instinct and all of those goddamned self-defense classes finally kick back in. She knees Waymar violently in the groin, and when he doubles over with a yelp of surprise and pain, she pulls back her fist. He must be a relatively new vampire because he does not react quickly enough to dodge as she knocks him clean in the jaw. She feels bone crunch beneath her knuckles.

“Dany!” she hears Tyrion shout through the roar in her head. She scrambles backward, nearly tripping over her feet as she turns to run. He’s off-duty, she thinks to herself wildly. He won’t have a gun. He won’t…Waymar is…

“Run!”

The trees spin around her wildly. Gravel sprays up from beneath her sneakers as she pivots. But she is only human. She is only desperately, painfully human. She looks around, trying to spot Tyrion. Where is he? They need to get to her car. They need to get out of here. She has to run. She has to run. She stumbles against an old headstone, feels something hot against her palm. She has to—

“Dany! Where—”

Thud.

Pain explodes along her ribs. The air leaves her lungs in a painful rush as she finds herself abruptly on her back, staring up in dazed pain at the violet expanse of stars and clouds far overhead. The sweet smell of dirt and decay and blood fills her nose. And then there is a face in her vision—a handsome face, too pale, too demonic, eyes gone red with hunger.

“That wasn’t very nice, love,” Waymar murmurs as he straddles her. He grabs her wrist, holding up her hand. In the dusky shadows, Dany sees blood seeping from a long thin cut across her palm. She lets out an agonized groan of protest. “I wish I didn’t have to do this. But gods, I am so fucking hungry. You have no idea what it’s like.”

He brings her palm to his face and inhales deeply. “I promise it won’t hurt too long, love.”

“Fuck off,” Dany wheezes, trying to wrench herself free. Did Tyrion get away? She does not want to die here. She does not want to die mere yards away from her parents’ buried bodies, in this godforsaken cemetery in this half-cursed town. She can’t. She won’t. Gods, no, she won’t. “Let me go. Let me go!”

Panicking, her free hand fumbles for the bracelets Missandei had given her that she had shoved into her pocket. Her fingers wrap around the leather and the glass and she swiftly snatches them up. Waymar doesn’t see. He doesn’t know. She hears him snarl. She sees him lunge forward, fangs bared.

And she shoves one of the bracelets into his mouth, her flesh scraping on the edge of his teeth. Glass shatters as he bites down. Pinpricks and sand and saliva rain down on her face. For a moment, there is only silence, only confusion.

Then the vampire begins screaming.

The weight on her chest is suddenly gone, the air filled with a loud, sharp crack. Chest heaving, she sits up. Her limps feel like tissue paper and she realizes she is trembling violently. She looks up to see Waymar gagging and clawing at his tongue, having thrown himself backward into a tree with enough force to crack the poor oak in half. He is screaming and cursing, his mouth red with blisters and burns.

As the young man continues spitting out the glass and remnants of vervain on his tongue, a shadow drops from out of the broken tree. Waymar does not notice at first, his eyes malevolently gazing back at Dany. His face twists again, all expression of playful teasing gone as he takes one stumbling step toward her. But the shadow takes a step too…and grins.

“You suck at being a vampire, mate,” Rickon Stark chirps. Waymar spins around at the sound of his voice just as the teenager kicks him in the chest. Even from where she lies sprawled on the ground, Dany can hear the sound of ribs shattering as Waymar goes flying backward from the supernatural force of the kick.

“Dany, are you alright?” There is a hand on her shoulder and she jumps, turning to see Tyrion Lannister. His face is bloodless, almost grey. “Come on, get up. Are you hurt?”

Dany’s hand throbs from where she cut it and her ribs protest as she struggles to her feet. She has the feeling her entire chest is going to be black and blue tomorrow. Yet somehow she manages to stumble to her knees, wiping her bloody palm on her shorts. Her gaze darts over to Rickon, who is waving at them cheerfully. Her mouth feels drier than the desert as she staggers upright.

“How—”

“Dany!”

She hears the growl behind her but the blow never comes. Instead, she barely manages to turn as Waymar stumbles forward into her line of sight, choking and gasping as he crumples to his knees. His hands are wrapped futilely around what looks like one of the bars of the cemetery's wrought iron fence that is piercing him straight through his belly. The vampire lets out a deep, pained groan as he struggles to pull the iron from his stomach with a slurping, crunching sound that makes Dany’s own belly flip with nausea.

She turns just as Tyrion does to see Jon and Sansa walking up along the gravel path of the cemetery. It reminds Dany far too much of the night at the Tyrell mansion, of the gazebo, and she can only stare, her tongue like sandpaper, as Jon shoves Waymar onto his back, the other vampire whimpering in pain as he falls further on the iron bar.

“Who sent you?” Jon asks quietly, almost politely, that strange foreign burr of his vibrating through the eerie silence of the graveyard. When Waymar only chokes out a curse, Dany watches as Jon wraps his hand around the pole and drives it further into Waymar’s belly. The newly turned vampire lets out a shout of agony. If it bothers Jon at all, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he calmly repeats himself. “Who sent you? Who turned you?”

“He’s compelled, just like the Tyrell girl was. He won’t remember anything.” Sansa does not turn to look at her cousin as she approaches Dany and Tyrion. She gives Dany a long, unreadable look, her pale eyes as frozen as winter. Briefly, that gaze skitters over to Tyrion before landing on Dany again. “Congratulations on being the most popular human in Starfall these days. Where are you bleeding?”

Dany gapes at her, her head spinning. “Why aren’t…”

“I’ve been alive for a thousand years,” Sansa says, her low contralto sounding vaguely bored. She gives Dany a thoughtful, narrow-eyed look again before her eyes fall on her hand. The smile that appears on her face is humorless, grim. “A cut isn’t going to bother me. If you were hemorrhaging, that’s another story—though I doubt you’d care how much of a problem you were going to be at that point.”

“I still think our problems would be solved if we just ate her,” notes Rickon as he strolls up to his dark-haired cousin. He leans over Waymar, hands on his hips. “Hey, do you happen to know who we are at least?”

“Fucking…Starks.” Waymar gasps and then groans as Jon leans more of his weight onto the iron pole.

“Oh. Well, great. He doesn’t know anything.” Rickon reaches into his pocket and then hands something to Jon. Dany feels something queer and foreboding reach up into her throat, strangling the scream that should try to make it past her lips. Instead, she can only stare mutely as Jon, still as a stone, looks down at the struggling vampire before he reaches up to take the proffered item from his cousin.

“One more time,” she hears him murmur, and in the darkness, she sees a strange silver glint in his grey eyes. Even she can hear the warning in Jon’s voice. It chills her.

Waymar must not. His face contorts in a raging snarl and, in spite of the pain that he just be in, he heaves himself up the pole pinning him into the grass, the blood crimson with blood beneath his body. A snarl on his lips, his hands hurl forward, aimed at Jon’s neck.

Jon barely flinches back. His hand moves, faster than Dany can comprehend. There is another wet, crunching noise—

—and then there is a gaping, ragged hole in Waymar’s chest. His body goes limp on the iron pole, dark eyes staring blankly upwards, mouth open in a silent howl. Jon peers at him for a long, silent moment…and then drops the vampire’s heart onto the grass next to his body.

Dany feels bile rise up her throat.

A second later, the lighter that Rickon gave Jon sparks to life, and suddenly the night is illuminated with Waymar’s burning vampiric corpse, the scent of dry, burning flesh choking the air. Vaguely, Dany is aware of Sansa turning back to them and kneeling down in the grass. She turns just in enough time to see the beautiful woman tilt Tyrion’s shocked gaze toward her own.

“You’re going to go home,” Sansa whispers gently, her eyes almost violently blue in the golden shadows of the burning corpse. “You didn’t see anyone here at the cemetery. You’re going to drink a bottle of one of your finest vintages of wine. You are going to read a book that you enjoy and you are only going to remember that you visited the cemetery and left and nothing out of the ordinary happened. It was a normal night. Do you understand?”

“I…understand,” replies Tyrion woodenly. Sansa smiles before her eyes skate back over to Dany. Dany is not sure what she sees in the vampire’s eyes but there is certainly no compassion in there. Instead, there seems to be annoyance and…reluctant admiration.

“That was quick thinking with the vervain,” the redhead admits, though it sounds as though the words are as broken as the glass that had shattered in Waymar’s mouth. Somehow, a shaky laugh manages to fall from Dany, though even she hears the panicked, ragged edges of it, as though it was a breath from dissolving into sheer hysterics.

“Don’t hurt yourself giving me a compliment, Sansa.”

A bark of a laugh behind them alerts Dany to Rickon walking up to them, his boyish features bright with an easygoing smile. It is as though his cousin did not just rip someone’s heart out of their chest a mere moment ago.

“You’re going to be a pain in the arse to keep alive,” Rickon notes, “but at least you’re funny.”

“Are you alright?” This comes from Jon. He seems hesitant, a furrow of anxiety tucked between his brow. His hand is dark and shiny in the flickering light of the flames. “We would have kept our distance but…”

“No. No, I’m glad you didn’t.” Dany feels light-headed. She sees Tyrion out of the corner of her eye turn and walk off into the evening, never once looking back at them. It’s the compulsion, she realizes. It is what Sansa just used on him. It is, she thinks, what Robb must have used on her that handful of weeks ago.

She might just be sick.

Avoiding looking at the burning body behind them (the Starks hardly seem worried about it), Dany swallows back everything that wants to spill out of her. She wraps her uninjured arm around her stomach, though she doubts that will do much to keep her from falling apart in front of these immortal creatures who are watching her as though they are just waiting for her to dissolve into sobbing, nonsensible screams. God, what is she feeling? What is she…?

“I think,” she says slowly, “that I am having a very, very terrible month.”

Rickon laughs again. Even Sansa’s disapproving expression flickers with the threat of a smile. Jon’s eyes go soft though. He shakes his head.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Does she? That had been the plan all along, hadn’t it? To protect her family, to protect this damned town—it was always going to be a deal with the devil. Yet somehow, despite her worries, despite her anxieties that she is throwing herself into the monster’s den, she cannot help but think that the Starks may end up being her best chance to survive whatever the hell is going to sweep Starfall into its nightmarish wake.

“Yes. Yes, I think I would.”

And when he smiles at her, Dany thinks that she may be damned in more ways than one.

By the time the world stops spinning and melts back into moon-dripped shadows and gentle flame, Daenerys knows for certain that she cannot give him up.

Her arms are wrapped loosely around his neck and she shivers from the sensation of his uneven breath hot and moist against her breastbone. They are both winded and flushed and sweat-slicked, skin chafing raw against one another. She feels the warm drip of his seed down her thigh as she rakes her hands through his unruly dark curls, her nails scraping along his scalp. She hears him let out a ragged groan, his embrace around her tightening, and she smiles though she knows he cannot see it.

She wants to say something in this moment, the heat of the pavilion almost overbearing in the aftermath of their frenzied, reckless lovemaking. But instead, she only presses a gentle kiss to his forehead before peeling herself off him, rising just a little unsteadily to her feet. She thinks she hears him laugh lowly behind her and she turns to fix him with a playful glare. His eyes are dark in the shifting shadows of her tent. His cock, softening now in the aftermath of their coupling, glistens wetly in the firelight from a mix of his seed and her arousal. She quickly averts her eyes, lest she push him back down onto the pillows strewn about the floor of the pavilion, to take him again and again and again until grey dawn pierces the horizon.

She feels his eyes stay on her as she scoops up a robe made of black brocade silk and drapes it over her goose-pimpled skin. She cannot even imagine what she must look like. He’d come to her several hours ago to discuss the next few days of their journey and she had immediately thrown herself into his arms with an intensity that frightened her. Amidst ravenous kisses and roving hands, he had pressed her roughly into the cushions and velvet rugs scattered on the floor of the pavilion, taking her from behind as she smothered her cries in pillows.

But it had been the last time that night that she’d allowed Jon to take control.

She hears him sit up straighter behind her, can imagine him combing his fingers through his hair. He will feel guilt and uncertainty over this before she does, she knows. But she lets him collect his thoughts first, even as much as she wants to swallow his argument and his protests with a kiss.

“Your Grace…” she hears him start. She ignores the sharp feeling that spirals through her at his use of her title instead of her name.

“I was something other than the queen a few moments ago, my lord,” she says as she begins the arduous process of braiding her hair, keeping her tone light. She glances back over her shoulder at him and lets her eyes lazily drift down his body. “Does your memory wane more quickly than that?”

Something sparks in his grey eyes then and he laughs, ducking his head. It is a soft, quiet sound—they are still surrounded by a fair number of guards in their traveling retinue, his cousin somewhere amongst them.

“Daenerys.” Her name sounds like smoke and wine and velvet on his tongue. “We’ll be in Darry in a few days.”

Her smile falls.

They’d left Winterfell several weeks ago, making their long winding way down the kingsroad toward the capital. She thinks the departure was pleasant enough. Lord Robb had wished them nothing but safe travels. Even Lady Sansa, though still somewhat aloof, had warmed to her during her visit, repeating her brother’s words earnestly. Rickon, the youngest of the Starks, had even apologized for the pranks he had pulled on her guards (though the apology had come under the unsmiling supervision of his eldest brother).

Traveling south through the realm at a far more leisurely pace than they had going north has been pleasant. The people who had been wary of the king’s daughter, now their newly-crowned queen, a couple of months ago have almost warmed to the idea of her as they travel back south. She is determined to remake the shattered realm that her father had broken, no matter what. Making amends to the Starks, the family whose losses had instigated a rebellion and then war, had been the first step.

Yet now, as she looks back at the product of that first rebellion, she is loath to accept it.

How is she to change anything without changing this? He is a prince, if not by name then at least by blood—her brother’s greatest folly. In another life, if things had turned out differently, she would not have been the one to inherit the throne. It would have been him. But the scars of the rebellion are gouged deeply on the soul of the realm and some people cannot forget what was lost in these past twenty some years.

She turns away again, letting one hand absently brush her flat belly. She’d hoped…but ah, there is still time, isn’t there? There must be.

I want you to stay with me, she thinks to herself. Let the people whisper. Let them murmur. I am their queen and they’ve lived too long in my father’s shadow to know what is right anymore. But I know. I know, and I will make everything better for everyone.

She is about to say as much out loud—but then a rich, accented, and very familiar voice comes from just beyond the entrance to the pavilion, like a fire sweeping up the thick, heavy curtains.

“Your Grace.” A smile alights back onto her face.

“Come in, my lady.” Out of the corner of her eye, she feels Jon give her an alarmed look but she shakes her head, even as the tall, slim form of a woman slips in silently, letting not a single shadow or sound enter or escape the tent. Her features are hidden behind a mask of red lacquer, save for a pair of dark, knowing eyes. Behind her, and just as silent, trots in a massive white wolf, its eyes as red as burning coals. “Quaithe is a trusted friend.”

Jon does not look quite convinced, though he does let out a breath as the wolf bumps his nose against his bare shoulder. Silently, he begins getting dressed.

“I apologize for arriving unannounced, Your Grace,” Quaithe says, her voice soft but strangely unmuffled behind her mask. If she is at all surprised to see Jon Snow here or the state of undress of either occupant, she does not show it. With all her gifts, many of which Daenerys still cannot understand, she might have already known of the illicit affair. “I would have had a maester send a raven but I did not know when I’d come across the traveling party. May we speak privately?”

Daenerys nods, turning back to Jon. His previously open expression has become a mask of indifference yet again—the same mask she must also wear when they are no longer in the privacy of one another’s company. Still, she presses a gentle kiss to his lips. It is everything she knows she cannot say, not with the quiet reserve he has placed around himself in this moment.

He meets her eyes. Though he does not smile, she knows what he means to say too.

A few moments later, he is gone, along with the white wolf, with no sign that he was ever within the tent except for the sweet ache between her thighs. Her fingers absently move to finish twining together several thick strands of pale hair. Quaithe has not moved far from the entrance of the palatial tent, her fathomless eyes still fixed on the queen.

A shiver running through her, Daenerys says, “Speak, my lady. Is there anything amiss?”

“Amiss? No,” Quaithe replies with a shake of her head. There is a light in her eyes now that speaks of disquiet, perhaps even disapproval. “But there is a sensitive matter I wanted to speak with you about, one that you came to me for some time ago.”

Daenerys’s hands drop to her sides. She can feel her pulse quicken.

“Show me.”

After the queen quickly dresses, they emerge from the tent into the silvery darkness of the night. The moon sits high and searingly bright in the sky, near as luminous as the sun, lending a strange, ominous whimsy to their path as they walk amongst the tents. Snow has not yet made it this far south, though she must assume that they are barely more than a week or two ahead of the beginnings of the southern winter storms. If they manage to make it all the way to the capital without seeing more than a morning frost, it will be a miracle.

Quaithe leads her to the very edge of the camp. They pass Northern guards who seem wary of the tall woman’s presence and southern guards who easily let them pass, already familiar (if no less cautious) of the queen’s most mysterious advisor, this shadowbinder from Asshai. Ahead of them, the riverlands sprawl black and broad in the night, separated only from a sky just as inky by the splatter of brilliant stars that stop at the horizon and—

She stops.

There, sitting high on the eastern horizon, is a comet.

The bloody gash streaks across the sky, as lurid and scarlet as a flame, scorching the tops of the trees that pepper the hills around them. She stares up at it silently for a moment before she turns to her advisor who is peering up at the comet with something like reverence…and trepidation.

“Will it work then? What I’ve asked you to do? The comet is what you needed, isn’t it?”

Quaithe remains unnervingly silent, tearing her eyes away from the night sky. There is a slight frown in her black eyes, as though she is disappointed with Daenerys for not appreciating the wonder of seeing the comet in the first place. The shadowbinder says, “You are still set on it then.”

It is not a question.

“You wouldn’t have come all this way if you thought I wouldn’t be,” Daenerys points out, a sudden and frantic heat in her voice. Will she refuse? She mustn’t. She mustn’t. “Do not attempt to convince me otherwise.”

“The dragon’s comet and its wandering dark sister can portend a great many things.” Quaithe’s voice is hushed but stern. “There are other wiser things you might ask for, Daenerys Stormborn. Things that do not require such dark, dangerous magic. You might ask for a just, peaceful rule. Wisdom to choose a husband who has no ambition for the crown. You might even pray to the gods for a child to grow in the hollowness of your belly. Instead, you whisper a prayer that can only be granted by the gods who answer prayers in the blackest hour of the night. Those are gods of tremendous power. To give you the impossible, the price they ask is nothing short of your very soul.”

Fear and anger twist within the pit of her, vicious and hot and consuming. She snaps her gaze away from the woman, letting the words she wants to say blister on her tongue. “I am Daenerys Stormborn. I fear no gods. And what I ask is not impossible. You told me so.”

There it is again, that warning look in Quaithe’s eyes. “I told you the price. Would that not in itself be impossible?” She pauses, and then, a whisper of caution in her voice, adds, “Your father…”

Yes. Her father. A man who had not known the cost of what he might ask, who had foolishly assumed that so little a price might garner him so much. It had been that oversight that had nearly lost her family the entire dynasty, the entire realm. That blindness, and Rhaegar’s foolishness.

But she is not her father’s daughter.

“If I look back, I am lost,” she tells Quaithe. “You told me that once, did you not? And now that I look forward, you tell me to close my eyes. To wish for things that will fall apart in my old age, that will turn to chaff on the wind the moment my bones are in the ground. I know what I ask. I know what needs to be done. My father made the mistake of not realizing what such a request might mean. But I have weighed the cost, my lady. For peace, for justice, it is a small enough price to be paid.”

Quaithe shakes her head. “Your Grace, I must remind you again that this is the foulest of magic. I have told you that only death can pay for life and what you ask is…” The darkness in her eyes is sharp with admonition. “If you bear no love for my advice, then I ask that at least for the love you bear for your brother’s son that you ask for anything else. But not this. I will not grant you this.”

“If you will not, I will find someone who will.”

She has brought the realm together, hasn’t she? She has broken herself—her body, her mind, her heart—over the debris of the ruin created by her father, created by Rhaegar. And she has done it even though the people have reviled her, even though the people fear her as much as they feared the shadow of her father. She’s made peace with the Starks, has tried to assuage the hatred of the Baratheons, has made supplication after supplication to the Arryns and the Tullys, has promised the world to the Martells and the Lannisters.

She has denied herself to mend. To yield. To plead.

To shatter.

How can what she wants now be anything except good? How can what she wants now be anything except better?

“Your Grace…”

“Leave me.” Her voice is sharp and brittle now. “I wish to be alone.”

Quaithe pauses for a long, dreadful moment. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees the shadowbinder nod her head and disappear back into the warm embrace of the camp. She is alone now, surrounded by the infinite black of the riverlands, wind whistling forlorn songs through the skeletal branches of trees, the stars a bright labyrinthine canopy overhead.

Angry tears prick her eyes. But she will not cry. Everything will be better, she knows it. She knows what is good. She knows what is right. And she has become very good at sacrificing it all for peace, for a future that she cannot guarantee unless…unless…

Only death can pay for life, Quaithe said.

He’ll understand, she thinks, gazing up at the comet. Something hot and immense roils within her. He’ll understand that the wheel needs to be broken. We will make this world right. We will make this world better.

The enormity of it all sits within her like a siege. It must not be that. It must not be greater than she lets it be. She is the blood of old Valyria. She is stronger than everyone assumes. They will underestimate her and she will prove them wrong.

She will see this through to the end—no matter what. And death—well, it is a small enough price to pay for a thousand years.

It is a small enough price to pay for forever.

Tyrion Lannister closes the front door to his bungalow. It is quiet and dark within the foyer and he does not bother flicking on the lights. He places his keys in a misshapen clay bowl his nephew Tommen had made for him back when the lad was in primary school.

A fat blue tabby pokes its head around a corner, letting out an annoyed mrow in greeting. The cat had been with him ever since he rescued it as a kitten from Joffrey’s sadistic hands nearly a decade ago. For some reason, he has never been quite able to part with it. Now the cat is a constant, annoying fixture around his house, arguably eating more kibble than Tyrion consumes wine.

Speaking of wine, he walks over to the wine rack in his kitchen, perusing the choices in front of him before cursing silently. He grabs one bottle, heedless of the vintage, and pops the cork with careless, practiced ease. He does not bother with a glass.

He climbs into a plush, expensive armchair in his living room, the dry red scraping at his tongue as his eyes sweep the shadows of the room. There is no television here, unlike most houses in Starfall. Tyrion has a library overflowing with books. He does not need a television.

Books tell him everything he needs to know about the world.

He stares, almost blindly, at the familiar shadows of the living room and the buttery light sweeping in from the front lawn. The nameless cat, having realized it will not be getting any snacks, jumps onto the arm of the chair with considerable grace considering its size and watches him with wise golden eyes as its owner tips the bottle of wine back to his mouth.

After a long, long moment, Tyrion lets out a shuttered breath. He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket, retrieving his wallet. Silently, he pulls out the small, battered prayer book that sits tucked within. He is not a religious man. He has long since found that the gods are scarcely more than a paper wall of fanciful hope to explain impossible things to those who cannot and will not understand.

But Tysha had always believed. She had always been a sweet and lovely young woman, whose heart was too kind and too good for someone like him.

He opens the book. Pressed within it is a handful of sprigs of dried flowers. He reverently runs a single finger down the cracked stems, the violet petals as thin and fragile as gossamer.

Tysha had always loved pretty, simple things. Even now, he can still remember her beatific smile as she would wind wildflowers into her hair. Even now, he can still remember her laugh as she gleefully tucked sprigs of rosemary and sage and lavender into his aged books with their cracked spines and faded cloth covers.

Even now, he can remember her body on the floor of their cottage, her eyes wide and blankly staring, her throat torn and shredded and blackened with blood.

Just as Daario Naharis’s rotting body had been.

“Well,” he tells the cat, looking down at the vervain, “Miss Dayne certainly has an appetite for trouble, doesn’t she?”

Chapter Text

It is sunny the day that they bury Daario Naharis.

Dany stands at the back of the sept, watching as the brilliant kaleidoscope of colors filters in through the stained glass images of the Seven, the shattered remnants of a dream painting the white walls blue and orange and red and green. She’d never been much of a believer and she knows that Daario himself had little use for piety or faith, remembering when he used to murmur heretical obscenities into the shell of her ear when they fucked on lazy Sunday mornings. She thinks the only thing he’d be pleased about with this whole service is the fact that it isn’t overcast outside.

She has ignored most of the sidelong stares from the townspeople who have filtered in late. She had purposely tried to cut her arrival as close to the start of the service as possible to avoid those alternatively pitying and suspicious glances. Ashara and Viserys are somewhere within the gathered crowd near the front of the sept but the idea of having all of those eyes on her had turned Dany’s stomach.

She leans against the back wall, listening to the septon drone on about the love and kindness of the Mother and the peculiar but gentle mercy of the Stranger. But there is a reason it’s a closed-casket funeral. Dany suspects that no one would ever look at Daario’s body and think his death had been a gentle mercy.

Animal attack. They’re calling it an animal attack.

It is a better answer than “vampire”, she supposes. She never did ask Jaime or Brienne for more information than that and she is pretty sure neither Jon nor his cousins will ever go into details about vampire feeding habits. Margaery had almost torn her throat out the night of the fundraising gala—that is enough information for her. Her nightmares can fill in the details.

Dany shifts uncomfortably in the new black dress that she has had to purchase. The one she wore to the gala had been completely ruined that night from blood and sweat and grass-stained rips—yet another reminder of this uncanny world of the supernatural she has found herself in. She goes to unconsciously twist the long-absent ring on her finger as the septon’s words stream over her head but instead finds herself gently touching the locket hanging over her breastbone.

I should be grieving more than this, she thinks yet again. Even with everything that happened, she knows that Daario’s murder should devastate her. She’d hoped that grief would split her open when she arrived here today. But instead, a strange sort of acceptance lies curled within her. He is gone and there is nothing she can do about it. Who killed him ties back to everything her life has suddenly become. A mystery. I really am more interested in finding out who killed him than the fact that he’s dead.

She is not sure which makes her a more horrible person.

Her thoughts are still swimming in guilt and uncertainty when there is suddenly a presence, cool and quiet as a shadow, at her right side. She does not have to turn to see who it is. She already knows.

“I’m not sure you really want to be seen with me,” she says, her voice hushed. “I’m the town pariah.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees a flicker of a smile.

“No one knows or cares who I am,” Jon Snow replies in that unfamiliar burr he shares with Robb, giving a good-natured shrug. “I think I’ll be fine.”

Dany knows Robb and Bran are here somewhere too. She thinks it is a clever ploy on their part. Robb is disarmingly charming (she would know after his attempts to distract her), Bran has a sweet-natured disposition, and they both carry the Stark name, one of the oldest names of Founders in Starfall. If they want to win over a small town full of tight-knit people willing to gossip about anything and everything, paying their respects to someone who is entirely a stranger to them is a good start.

She steals a look at Jon. He leans against the wall next to her, arms crossed and dressed all in black, though this seems to just be his color of choice. His hair is pulled back away from his face again and the wolf crest emblazoned on his ring glimmers from the cacophony of colors melting into the room from the stained glass. She turns her eyes back to the front of the sept. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.”

Jon is thoughtfully quiet for a moment. “And how does my reputation sit with you?”

You pulled someone’s heart out of their chest, Dany thinks. Aloud, she only says, “You’re a bit like a bad habit I can’t outgrow.” She shakes her head. “But honestly? It could be worse.”

That night at the cemetery, Jon had offered her a listening ear as he walked her back to her car. But she’d found herself tongue-tied and still shocked by what she had seen, both the horrific violence and the supernatural qualities possessed by the Starks. They’ve never been quite as monstrous as Margaery or Waymar but she knows that no one’s kick should send someone flying so far as Rickon’s had. No one should be able to tear someone’s heart out of their chest as Jon did. No one should be able to compel anyone to lose their memories with a few honeyed words like Sansa and Robb had been able to. She had spent the night in her rented flat waking up from nightmares that had left her sweating and miserable come the morning.

“Aye. I suppose it could be.” Jon looks around the sept. “Good day for the service.”

“Is there ever a good day for a funeral?” She senses Jon turn to her but she can’t quite meet his gaze. Instead she says, unsure of why she’s telling him this, “The school carnival begins today. It’s always this time of year but…the carnival was our first date. He always hated it but I really wanted to go that first time. He probably enjoyed himself though he’d never admit it. I’m sure no one planned for this but what can you do when your next-of-kin is happenstance?”

Dany wonders if Daario ever went back there in the years after she’d broken their engagement. She knows he had seen plenty of other women in the intervening years. She doesn’t blame him for it. She had even encouraged it when she had left him in front of the red door and fled Starfall. But had he ever taken any of them to the carnival? Had he groused about the games but played them anyway? Had he slipped a hand under their skirts at the top of the Ferris wheel, making them come with an embarrassed curse at the top of the world?

Dany lets out a breath. She is getting in her head again, though she figures that’s what funerals are for. Daario had been her friend. At one time, she had surely loved him enough to agree to marry him. But all of that is gone now and she just has her memories. Try as she might, she can’t conflate those memories into something they’re not.

Jon has remained quiet at her side, letting her stew in her thoughts. She still doesn’t quite know what to make of him. For all of his kindness and affability, there is something wickedly sharp around his edges, even though she hasn’t seen him be anything except a gentleman. It is the strangest feeling of knowing him without knowing him.

“The townsfolk are already gossiping, you know,” she says, canting her head back against the wall. “I’m used to it but maybe you’re not. They’ve already seen me with Robb and if there’s one thing that Cersei’s good at, it’s spreading rumors. She’s never liked Ashara and she’s never liked me.”

“Why do you care what she says?” The question is innocent enough but it still rankles her pride. She grimaces, trying to hide her annoyance.

“I don’t. I’ve been called a lot worse. But maybe I just don’t like the double standard of expectations.” Jon holds up his hands defensively, giving her a small apologetic smile.

“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.” She snorts quietly before glancing back at him and realizing, with some surprise, that he’s genuinely serious. Most people she knows only apologize on reflex. She studies him for a long, silent moment before she returns to looking at the septon, unsure if she wants to define this strange feeling stirring within the pit of her stomach.

“It’s fine. You’re fine.”

They fall into a companionable silence that is only slightly marred by the confusion within her. When the service finally drags to an end sometime later, she quickly ducks out of the door, not willing to listen to the platitudes—most sincere, some not—of the people streaming out of the service. Jon falls into step with her, clearly not interested in talking to anyone else either.

However, when they stop at a massive grey pickup truck sitting near the back of the lot, Dany slows to a halt. She doesn’t know what kind of car she was expecting a vampire to have but she just assumed it would have been something small, fast, vintage, and vaguely phallic in appearance. A new model pickup truck doesn’t exactly fit that description and she finds herself giving Jon an incredulous glare.

“Is this yours?” Jon shrugs.

“It’s mine,” he confirms. He nods to the passenger door, suddenly looking hesitant. “Do you want to talk? If you have something to do, I could—”

“We can talk.” She doesn’t think Jon lets out a sigh of relief (honestly, she should ask him why he and his cousins breathe if they’re all technically dead anyway) before she hears the passenger door unlock. The wall of suffocating heat that has been trapped within the truck is quickly drowned by the air conditioner going full blast a moment later. Even the brief walk across the parking lot has caused her pale hair to stick to her neck, already peppered with sweat from the heat.

The interior of the truck is spotless and huge and she feels ridiculously tiny inside of it. She tucks her legs beneath her as she drops her purse onto her lap, pulling her hair up into a high ponytail with the hairband that had been snatched around her wrist. Strands of some rock band that reached its height a quarter century ago rumble through the truck, and as she struggles not to hum along to the power ballad, she does not take her eyes off Jon Snow.

“This car is prime real estate,” she mutters, glancing at the backseat of the cab and then the empty bed just beyond. “You could rent out the whole bed of the truck as a flat. Why do you even need a truck this big? Do you live your entire life out of this car?”

“Might be a waste with the manor.” Jon crosses his arms, turning to face her. There is nothing vampirish in his features—the bloodshot eyes and the black veins and the fangs that Margaery and Waymar had shown are nowhere to be seen on his handsome face. His dark grey eyes seem tinged with amusement. “I keep my own place on the grounds though. It can get loud with my cousins running around so it’s nice to have some peace and quiet when we all finally come back here.”

No one can hear you kill anyone there either, her mind intrusively supplies. But she doubts that she believes it (for the most part)—she wouldn’t be sitting here in his truck with him, all the way to the back of the parking lot, if she did. So she says, “How mysterious of you.”

“I’m an open book.” Dany gives Jon a very, very long look that becomes more skeptical as the seconds tick away, a scoff sitting in the back of her throat. Finally, he has the decency to duck his head with a self-deprecating smile, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s a very long book.”

She can’t help it—she arches one disbelieving eyebrow. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re the reason why literacy rates are plummeting.”

But when Jon lets out a bark of a laugh, she can’t help but smile slightly too.

“I know you’ve had a ton of questions about me and my cousins but is it alright if I ask you a question this time?” Dany frowns uncertainly, feeling herself sit up a little straighter, a little more defensively. To his credit, Jon doesn’t look as though he’s about to leap for her throat as he continues, “You don’t have to answer…but why did you come back to Starfall? You lived in Winterfell, didn’t you?”

“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?” Dany blows a breath upward, sending a stray lock of white blonde hair out of her eyes. Of course he’d ask that. After all, the Starks had been drawn to Starfall because of the comet. It stands to reason that they’d assume that her inauspicious timing might also be the result of something supernatural instead of something as mind-numbingly human as a quarter-life crisis. “I came home for the same reason every person from a small town who moves to a big city comes back home—they overestimated themselves.”

When Jon doesn’t interrupt, Dany shakes her head, gaze wandering out over the parking lot and the people who are returning to their cars. And once the words start, they do not stop—they come spilling out of her like a broken dam.

“Everyone always said I was destined for greater things but it’s hard to believe that when you don’t achieve it right away. I know I’m doing good things in Winterfell but it never feels like enough. And it somehow also feels like too much, which I suppose is a very mortal thing to complain about. We get eighty-some years to do anything with our lives and most people don’t and that’s okay. But there’s a part of me that wants to reach that end and think that maybe I made a difference in at least one person’s life, that I changed someone’s life for the better. And the more I think about it, the more I think how impossible something that ineffable is to measure. So what else can a person do when they face that sort of reckoning except come back to the place where it doesn’t matter, where none of it means anything?”

The silence that falls now is nearly choking and Dany can feel a flush that has nothing to do with the heat rise into her cheeks. Why has she told him all of that? She doesn’t trust him. He’s not her friend. He’s just some creature who has barreled into her life with his family, bringing blood and horror and mayhem.

But, sitting across from her now, a pensive frown on his very human features, she is struck by how utterly normal this whole situation feels. It feels like she could be chatting away with any old guy in the front seat of his ridiculous truck, serenaded by a half-dozen screeching cicadas in the muggy summer heat, a lone rock ballad on the radio.

If only she hadn’t just left her ex’s funeral.

She is about to plunge into a different topic—any topic at all to break this awkward silence—when she hears Jon quietly say, “I’ve known a lot of people in all the time I’ve been around and I can tell you that every last one of them made a difference to someone, somewhere, at some point in their life.”

Dany snorts. “You can say that because you’ve been around forever.” Jon chuckles, sitting back in his seat.

“I can say that because I know nothing lasts.” When Dany only scoffs, the small smile that she has become familiar with teases the corner of his mouth. “Dany, if there’s one thing immortality has taught me, it’s that life isn’t all big gestures. Everyone thinks it should be that but it’s not. And when you’ve lived as long as I have, you sort of discover that there’s something really profound in the small things that don’t last forever.”

“Except you and your cousins.”

The smile becomes a shade sadder.

“Except me and my cousins. But we were human too once. I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t have enough time.”

That causes Dany to pause. She shifts further in her seat, readjusting the hem of her dress so she doesn’t accidentally flash him (though, unlike Robb, she thinks Jon isn’t even remotely interested in her beyond trying to protect his family). She crosses her arms and leans back against the arm of the door, peering at him thoughtfully.

“How did you turn anyway? That night Marg attacked me, you gave me your blood, didn’t you? Why didn’t I turn?”

“You have to die with vampire blood in your system. You really should stop reading all of those bloody vampire books.” Dany only rolls her eyes at the jab but still impatiently gestures for Jon to continue. He shakes his head. “No one…it wasn’t the same with us.”

When he doesn’t immediately go on, Dany tilts her head to the side. “Care to elaborate on that?”

“No.”

She scowls, taken aback. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to lie to you.” When Dany is about to sharply remind him that he has already said he’s lied to her before, he gives her a pained smile that is more of a grimace than anything. “The lies I told you before were to protect you or my family. The lie I would tell you now is neither.”

What other reason would he have to lie? What or who in the world could he possibly be protecting her from with that knowledge? Dany gives a long look before she turns away. Fine. She won’t press the issue. She’ll figure it out eventually.

She always does.

“Can you tell me at least the real reason why you’re back in town? Tonight’s the last night to see the comet and if that’s what brought you here in the first place, you all should be leaving.”

“You must really want us gone.”

“You’ve made my life and my friends’ lives pretty damned complicated since you’ve been here. Forgive me for not wanting you to stick around.”

“Fair enough.” Jon falls silent and for a moment, Dany doesn’t think he is going to tell her anything. She continues to fix him with an expectant look though, even as his fingers absently drum the steering wheel. She wonders how much of a lie he is concocting in his head, if it is even worth it to have asked the question in the first place. She is neck-deep in this supernatural nonsense but she is still frustratingly blind to most of it. But, to her surprise, Jon eventually says, “We can’t leave yet. We’re looking for something.”

That…is not the answer she was expecting. “Looking for…what exactly?”

“There…” He pauses again, his mouth twisting as if he struggling to find the right words to explain. Finally, he lets out a troubled breath. “Has your friend told you what it’s like for her? To be a vampire?”

Dany recalls Margaery’s furious rant with her outside the Starfall Bar & Grill the other day, the way guilt had swarmed into her as she realized what she had abandoned her friend to in the aftermath of the gala. Yes, Margaery had attacked her in the confusion of her transition but Margaery is still her friend—she never would have wanted to leave her to that fate, that voracious hunger she couldn’t control at first. Cautiously she says, “A little. Why?”

The tapping on the steering wheel continues, an off-beat rhythm that Dany finds distracting. Is he…nervous? She tilts her head to the side, perplexed. Why the hell would a thousand-year-old vampire be nervous around her?

“We’ve been doing this for a while,” Jon murmurs, interrupting her thoughts. “Most of what Margaery would have told you—the hunger, the heightened emotions, everything that comes with being a vampire, even long after transition—is something we all have had hundreds of years to…get under control, I guess. It’s not that it ever goes away. It’s just…” He gestures vaguely, trailing off. Dany narrows her eyes.

“I guess it helps to have someone with experience to teach you.” She pauses and then decides to hedge a bet with some humor. “So who taught you? Is there some three-thousand-year-old vampire out there that I also have to be worried about?” Jon shakes his head.

“There’s no one older than us.”

Okay. Well, that…doesn’t make any sense. “Did they all die or…?”

“There’s never been anyone older than us, Dany. We’re the first vampires. We’re the originals.”

That…

Oh.

What?

The admission sparks a hundred questions in her mind, questions she doubts that the man across from her will be willing to answer. She tries to piece together what she already knows of the Starks, what they have already told her. There is the comet, of course—that’s why they’re here. And another comet is approaching within the next few months. It is a once-in-a-millennium occurrence. She thinks of blood and she thinks of mortality and she thinks of magic…

The answer is right on the tip of her tongue but she can’t figure it out for the life of her. She shakes her head to clear it and wrinkles her nose. “Not that I don’t believe you but I am pretty sure vampire legend is a lot older than the turn of the past millennium.” Jon’s laugh is half-hearted.

“Aye, that sounds like you believe me.”

“Humor me.” Jon tears his gaze away from whatever he has been focusing on in the parking lot and meets her eyes. One of his eyebrows is raised just slightly, almost as if in challenge, and that ghostly smile still tugs at the edge of his mouth.

“Do you remember that I told you that my younger cousins made up the werewolf myth? Robb wasn’t too happy about it but they thought it’d be funny, considering our family sigil is the direwolf.” Dany thinks about the rings she has seen all of the cousins wear, all distinctly unique to each of their personal styles, tied together only by a howling wolf motif. She nods and Jon continues, “It’s impossible trying to keep up with oral tradition which spreads like bloody wildfire. But the thing with books and computers is that they can be changed to be anything you want—if you know who to compel and how to hack a mainframe.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“I’ve never really asked. Technology isn’t my thing. But Bran’s got eyes everywhere.” He shrugs. “Guess it helps to have a vampire who can actually keep up with technology.”

“Bran?” But she thinks back to the wheelchair-bound boy and the way his attention always seemed to be redirected to his smartphone—especially since she has yet to see his cousin or any of his siblings with equivalent technology. She wonders if by having eyes everywhere, Bran might have found the chatter on the forum about the other Daenerys Targaryen, deleting it before anyone was the wiser. She wonders if he has been following her movements online to know to look in that forum in the first place. The thought irritates her. “Great. He’d better keep his eyes to himself.”

Jon laughs. “I’ll be sure to tell him. We try to make it easier on him by being as inconspicuous as possible through the centuries. Arya’s always been a lot better than the rest of us at changing her appearance.” When Dany only gives him a confused look, Jon shrugs. “Technology makes things easier and harder at the same time, but you’d be surprised how many people you can fool by changing one thing about your appearance. Sansa’s been blond for more decades than I can keep track of.”

“Oh?” Dany can’t help it—she hears the teasing note sneak into her voice as she asks, “And what have you done, Jon Snow? Are there pictures of you brooding somewhere? Renowned portraits? Surely there’s some embarrassing painting of you hanging in a galley somewhere that your brother couldn’t erase.”

“Oh. Right. I’m not telling you anything else.”

“So there is!”

“No. We’re not having this conversation.” But the faint blush in his cheeks is answer enough for her and Dany throws her head back to laugh. She’ll leave questions about vampire biology to a later day because it is far too hot outside to even begin pondering how a technically dead body can change its appearance. Jon makes a face at her. “You’re laughing. I’m telling you all these damning secrets about me and my cousins and you’re laughing.”

“Why are you telling me about this?” She keeps the smile on her face but even she can hear the sober weight behind her words. “Simply because I asked? You could’ve just wiped my memories. I don’t think any of you have gotten to where you are by trusting people so implicitly.”

Is it because of the other girl they once knew who was also named Daenerys Targaryen? It wouldn’t shock her if that really is the only reason.

But to her surprise, Jon only gives her that small smile again.

“I think you have a good heart,” he admits. “That’s really all there is to it.”

It is an oddly sincere remark and Dany does not quite know what to do with it. It is the sort of thing she’d never expect to hear from someone this side of the century. But it’s a fitting sentiment coming from this young man who was born and raised in another time that she doesn’t think she’ll ever understand.

“Well,” she replies, suddenly uncertain, “you’re kinder than most people, I suppose. I doubt many would say I have a good anything. What am I supposed to do with all of these compliments you’ve given me?”

“Come with me to the carnival tonight.”

What? The suddenness of the question takes her by surprise. She hadn’t actually been expecting an answer from him. She gapes at him. “Why?” Jon rubs his hand against his thigh.

“As an apology for making your life pretty damned complicated.”

“It sounds like you’re asking me out on a date,” Dany accuses, narrowing her eyes at him and watching with some faint amusement as Jon refuses to meet her gaze, the drumming on the steering wheel starting back up. So it is a nervous gesture.

“It does sound like that.”

Seven hells, is he actually asking me out? A part of her wants to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation and the other part of her wants to bury her face in her hands and groan. She has not asked for any of this. She has definitely not asked to be the center of attention of a family of vampires who initially seemed to think she was someone else entirely. Eleven hundred years and not a single shred of social skills to be found in most of them.

Still, she realizes she’d be lying to herself if she said that there isn’t something between them. Her interactions with Robb and Sansa had initially been borne out of compulsion and southern politeness. But ever since she first met Jon on the gazebo that night a handful of weeks ago, she can’t deny that there is a spark of something here—something that isn’t quite friendship, isn’t quite attraction.

And there is a part of Dany that both desperately needs and is utterly terrified to define what that something is.

“Alright,” she agrees, letting the rock ballad ghost over her skin. “I’ll go.”

It is only later that Dany realizes that he never answered her question.

We can’t leave yet.

We’re looking for something.

But what?

It is late in the morning by the time the Red Witch arrives.

Daenerys has been back in the capital for weeks now but it feels like half a lifetime has gone. Has it really only been a handful of months since she last roamed the halls of Winterfell? Already, winter has touched the dusty walls of the capital, weeping tears of snow across the high battlements and red towers of the Keep. Every morning, it gets just a little colder, a little greyer, the breath of winter bearing down on the south in a rage.

And there is discord in the streets of the capital. Her spies and her advisors tell her about it. They all speak of the Mad King’s daughter in increasingly spiteful tones, as if she herself can control the weather. Her kingdom sits on a precipice of failure and it does not matter how much she tries, there will always be an enemy somewhere whispering lies into the ears of the commoners.

She hates it.

One of her guards announces the presence of the Red Witch outside of her solar where she is pacing irritably. Already this morning she has received a raven from Storm’s End regarding the obstinate refusal of the Baratheons to see her as anything other than a potential bride to one of the stag sons whom they think should be ruling in her place. She has thrown the message into the fire, rage bubbling within her. She does not want to speak of it, does not want to acknowledge any of it.

“Your Grace,” the Red Witch says with a deep curtsy. Daenerys’s smile feels rancid and bitter on her lips as she crosses the room to gesture for the other woman to rise.

“You’ve received my message.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the Red Witch says, sweeping to her feet. Her eyes are as red as her robes and her hair and the slash of a smile on her pale face. “I apologize for my delay. I am glad to hear that your trip to Winterfell was a success. What did you find there?’

“Suspicion,” Daenerys replies. Yet she nods toward the ornate box that sits on a table near the fire. “Will that be enough?”

The Red Witch walks over to the box before gently unlatching it and flipping the top open. “You asked Quaithe to do this for you, have you not?”

“I have known Quaithe longer than I have known you,” Daenerys retorts. “But she only speaks to me in half-riddles and prophecies. I have no need for any of that. I need solid truth. I need action. I need a solution to all of this.” She watches as the Red Witch parts the folds of black silk and she frowns as a thoughtful crease appears above the other woman’s brow.

“And what has the shadowbinder told you?”

“That only death can pay for life.” She turns away. “But what I ask for is not unreasonable. I am only protecting myself. You know what happened to my father, to Rhaegar. I will not suffer the same fate.”

The Red Witch is quiet for a moment, her hand reaching forward to pick up the small glass container within the box. The ashes within shift as she examines it and her lips twist, almost as though she has had a humorous thought. “Yes, Your Grace. The fires have told me. I do know what happened to your father and to your brother.”

Something goes cold in Daenerys’s belly. “Then you’ll—”

“I cannot do what you ask.” When Daenerys feels her face collapse in fury, the Red Witch looks up. “Quaithe was wrong. The fires tell me. It is not death that pays for life and the ashes of the Stark fallen will not grant you what you need. The shadows of her magic blind her to the truth. Death is the darkness that the fire burns away. The fire is life and life is blood, Your Grace. It is blood that will pay for life. It is blood that will pay for what you want.”

Blood. That is far a simpler request than what she initially believed. “What else?”

“Your ring will suffice,” the Red Witch says, gesturing to the band that sits on Daenerys’s hand, the band that Jon had given her so long ago, a symbol of an unspoken promise. “The ring will bind the spell. But to power it, I will need fire and blood.”

Fire and blood—her family’s words. It is what she should have washed the city with in those days after her father’s fall. But instead, desperate to paint herself as the queen of a new age, she had buried herself. If she had only been stronger, then perhaps she may not have needed this. She should have found the source of the rumors and the whispers and pulled them out root and stem.

No matter. She will do it now. She will ensure that she is safe. She will rule and everything will be fine.

Yet she turns to the Red Witch and asks, “And what if I want to protect someone else? What if I want him with me?”

The Red Witch’s eyes are flames.

“The man you ask about is as much a Stark as he is a Targaryen, Your Grace.”

Daenerys frowns, crossing her arms to hide the fact that she is surprised the Red Witch knows about Jon. But she also knows about Daenerys’s father—why shouldn’t she also know of the man she has fallen in love with? “My blood will not be enough then to protect him?”

“You would protect the Targaryen part of him. You would not protect the wolf. He would always be vulnerable.”

The realm knows that he is Rhaegar’s son. They know that he is the result of the war that had nearly torn the realm to shreds. If he comes to the capital and she loses him because of it, if the city turns against either of them because of the actions of her father or his, she would not be able to stand it.

But she should be able to have him at her side—a consort, a king, someone who will always choose her, no matter what.

“He will not come to the capital even if I ask it,” Daenerys says, slipping off her ring and handing it over to the Red Witch. She knows he will not—it is too dangerous and he would not risk it. “His cousin is here though. The Starks are all very close. If Brandon asked, I’m sure Jon would come at least as far as Darry again. Or Starfall, if need be.” The Red Witch nods.

“Bring me his blood. When the comet’s dark sister arrives at the turn of the moon, I will cast the spell. Fire and blood give life, Your Grace, and fire and blood will grant you everything that your heart has ever desired.”

“So…it’s a date.”

Viserys lounges on the couch in Ashara’s living room, watching Dany as his sister finishes pinning her braided bun into place. She has tried to ignore him ever since she got here an hour ago, evading all of his increasingly nosy questions with scowls and pointed silence. She almost wishes she had told Jon just to meet her at the carnival or her own rented flat instead of picking her up at Ashara’s. But her mum had called her over to ask her to pick something up so here she is.

When she agreed, she unfortunately had forgotten to account for how insufferable Viserys can be when he latches onto some gossip like a dog with a bone.

“It’s not a date.” She probably would have cared more about her outfit it was. A scarlet cami, a light cardigan, and a pair of dark wash jeans that she hurriedly threw on before driving to Ashara’s do not exactly scream that she’s trying to impress anyone. “We already agreed that it wasn’t. You of all people should know that I’m not that much of a ghoul.”

She already knows that going to the carnival tonight with Jon, mere hours after Daario’s funeral, is going to bury her in vicious rumors. From the apologetic wince on Viserys’s face, she knows he realizes it too. Her brother holds his hands up in apology. “Sorry. But I think you should think of it like a date. You and Daario went your separate ways ages ago.”

“It’s not a date,” she repeats again, picking up a throw pillow and tossing it at his face. Viserys swats it out of the way with a snort. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be chasing after someone at the carnival?”

“Unlike you, I’m leaving by the end of next week,” Viserys reminds her. “Why should I chase anyone when they can all chase me? I’m a catch.”

Dany is not sure she can roll her eyes any harder. But just as she is about to retort, Ashara sweeps down the stairs and into the living room. Dany is not surprised that she is not already down at the carnival managing her little coffee booth. More likely than not, Myrcella has been holding down the fort just fine to spite her mother. Dany only had to peek in the actual cafe once to see that Myrcella may have received her beauty from her mum, but her management skills are entirely reminiscent of her uncle and her grandfather.

Ashara goes into the kitchen, opening the fridge to pull out a can of sparkling water. As she flips the top open, she glances over at Dany and remarks, “That’s a lovely date outfit, Danydoll.”

“I don’t know why I bother coming here,” Dany says as Viserys laughs. Ashara gives her the usual beautiful smile before gesturing for Dany to join her in the kitchen. Dany levels one last glare at her brother before joining her adoptive mum at the kitchen counter. “I just want to make it very clear that Jon and I are not on a date.”

“Of course you’re not,” Ashara agrees, too casually for Dany’s liking. But she opens one of the kitchen drawers and slides out a manila envelope, sliding it across the island countertop to Dany. “This came in the mail for you today. I wish you would have told me that you forwarded your mail here. I almost opened it.”

“You would have opened it anyway because you’re as nosy as Vis,” teases Dany, though she glances down at the manila envelope in confusion. She hasn’t forwarded her mail to Ashara’s. It is addressed to her but there is no return address and the handwriting for the recipient's address looks strangely familiar. The envelope itself seems to be cushioned within by bubble wrap but it lays flat. From running her hands over it, it seems that there might be a book inside. “Maybe I ordered something online and all those online sites are getting too lazy to even bother putting shipment labels on anything.”

Ashara laughs quietly as she flits from cupboard to cupboard, dropping in a handful of various items into a tote bag she has pulled from a lower drawer. “Well, let’s not pretend I’m a courier service.”

Dany runs a finger along the sealed flap, ignoring the familiarity of the handwriting, hoping to pass it off as a coincidence. Once the envelope is unsealed, she gently slides out its contents…and to her surprise, she finds that it is not a random hardcover book but a leatherbound journal. Judging from the worn and weathered state of the cover, as well as the edges of stained, waterlogged pages, it must be old as all seven hells. She takes a peak into the envelope but does not see anything else within—no shipment paper, no note, nothing.

“What is it?” Ashara asks from over her shoulder. “Did you order a book?”

“It looks like a journal.” Dany unfurls the frayed leather cord that keeps the book closed. Slowly, carefully, gently, she peels open the cover. The faint scent of vanilla seeps into the kitchen. The writing within has not quite faded with the passage of time but Dany still has to squint to make out the letters. There is nothing dated on the page, though it looks to be written in the Common Tongue. “You said this came in the mail?”

“Well, not really.” Ashara leans against the counter, swiping her black hair back away from her face with an elegant gesture. “Someone rang the doorbell and I found this out on the welcome mat. I assumed the delivery drivers were doing their usual hit-and-runs.”

Considering the supernatural state of Dany’s life right now, the idea that someone has left this for her sends a bite of unease jumping through her. She absently flips through the pages but while there are a few illustrations peppered in throughout the pages, it seems to be nothing but a journal. No random sheets of paper fall out. There is nothing tucked in either the front cover or the back.

Yet she cannot help but feel like this is tied in some way to the world she has found herself neck-deep in.

“You know,” Ashara muses, “it is alright if you want to see someone else after Daario.”

The abrupt shift back to the previous conversation causes Dany to snap the journal shut. “Ashara, please. Can you just leave it? I’m not interested in Jon.”

“I’m not saying it has to be Jon.” Her eyes briefly flicker over the living room where Viserys’s bright head is bent over his phone, engrossed. When she turns back to Dany, Ashara’s violet eyes are soft with kindness. “But you’ve been beating yourself up over things you can’t control since you’ve arrived back in town, my love. Whether it’s what’s happening up north in Winterfell or all that you left behind when you moved years ago—you are going around as if the world itself is on your shoulders and you are shrinking yourself away from everyone except Missy and Marg. You know one of the reasons why I invited the Starks over was so that you might find some new friends instead of hiding yourself away.”

I’m not hiding myself, Dany wants to argue. She may have run away from Winterfell for all of the reasons she confessed to Jon but she isn’t hiding herself here. She just would rather not be at the center of so many curious gazes—the girl who ran away and the girl who came back and the girl who dreamed too big and was burned by the sun. But instead, she says, “Would any of this have changed if it hadn’t been Daario’s body they found on the high road?”

Ashara hums thoughtfully, a gentle smile touching the edge of her lips as she says, “We’ll never know. But all of that happened before you came back to town, Danydoll. Whatever it is you’re punishing yourself for, whatever ideals you believed you didn’t live up to, you need to give yourself some grace.”

“Well, I’m heading out tonight with a new friend so that must count towards something,” Dany replies with far more cheer than she feels. Ashara is not fooled—she can tell by the sad look in her adoptive mum’s eyes. The older woman pulls her close to plant a kiss atop her head.

“Just be safe tonight,” Ashara reminds her before hiking her bag up over her shoulder. “And remember to have fun. You shouldn’t waste the present and the future grieving over the past. Your happiness is not the punishment you are painting it as and your regret is not a reward for your perceived mistakes.”

But Dany is already happy. She is content even if she is confused about the fork in the road her life has become. She is happy and she is satisfied and she doesn’t need anything else. Her eyes wander down to the book.

Right?

As Ashara heads toward the front door though, the doorbell rings. Viserys’s head shoots up and Dany throws a warning glance his way as Ashara smiles. “Don’t you say a word.”

“I’m your older brother. I should be able to—”

“Vis.”

But Ashara, laughing, has already thrown the front door open.

“I didn’t know you young people did anything other than text your arrival these days.”

Jon, who is standing at the threshold of the house with his hands jammed in the pockets of his leather jacket, gives Ashara a slightly abashed smile. Beyond him, black night has already settled over Starfall, the night sky just above his raven curls flush with stars.

“I guess I’m old-fashioned.” His eyes drift past Ashara’s shoulder to land on Dany and though his smile does not become any bigger, she sees his eyes crinkle at the edges when he spots her. “Ready?”

Before Dany can say anything though, Viserys has already vaulted over the edge of the couch and is striding toward the front door ahead of her. Dany rushes to block him but finds that even though Viserys isn’t terribly tall, he is still longer-legged than she is and he makes it to Jon first. Her brother’s arms are crossed. “Is this a date?”

“This is not a date, Viserys,” Dany grouses, grabbing her purse and shouldering her way between Ashara and Viserys. She uses one hand to propel Jon backward, shooting both her brother and her mum an irritable look over her shoulder. “And if either of you blow up my phone tonight trying to get details about this non-existent date, I will go back to Winterfell immediately after the carnival.”

Viserys shrugs. “Just trying to look out for my baby sister.”

“You’re being an irreprehensible gossip, that’s what you’re doing. I’m twenty-four, not fourteen.”

Viserys opens his mouth, looking for all the neighborhood like someone intent on doggedly pursuing this conversation into the ground. But Ashara deftly intercepts him, kissing him on the cheek as she also sidles out the front door. “Don’t eat me out of house and home, Vis. I am going to give you a bill for the sheer amount of food you’ve consumed while you’ve been here.”

And with that, she shuts the front door behind her, winking at Dany before crossing the lawn to her car parked out on street just ahead of Jon’s grey pickup. A moment later, Ashara is gone.

“I would have met you there,” Jon says with some apology in his voice as they walk to his car. Dany shrugs.

“They would have both given me grief about this.” She only falters slightly when Jon opens the passenger door for her, giving him a brief smile before she climbs into the front seat. She wonders if Viserys is watching from the living room, quietly adding teasing material to his arsenal. She buries the thought. Old-fashioned chivalry is not unheard of and Jon and his cousins are centuries old—what should she expect? But then Jon enters the truck, she gives him a long look. “Are you sure you’re just not trying to impress my family?”

Jon laughs. “Robb would have done the same. Sorry.” He nods to her lap though as he starts the engine. “Planning on documenting the night out?”

Dany belatedly realizes that in her hurry to get out of Viserys’s teasing range, she hasn’t shoved the journal into her bag. She wrinkles her nose and shoves the battered book into her bag. “No. Someone sent me a journal. It was strange. But that seems to be the state of my life nowadays.”

“Good thing you’re not dating a vampire,” Jon says and Dany can hear the smile in his voice. She rolls her eyes, her fingers briefly ghosting over the vervain-filled locket sitting over her breastbone before she sits back in her seat.

The drive doesn’t take long. The carnival is being held on the high school grounds and the golden glow from the midway soaks into the night sky long before the school itself comes into view around the corner. The Ferris wheel, adorned with sparkling lights in seemingly every color of the rainbow, can be seen towering over the shadowy sprawl of trees in the night. In one of the few surviving memories from before the accident, Dany remembers sitting in one of those little cars with her mum. Years later, she had sat with Daario at the top of the world, drunk on cheap beer, cotton candy, and impossibly young love.

The muted roar of the crowd, the bells of dozens of carnival games, and the cheery strands of otherwise non-descript music float out through the high school parking lot. Even as she jumps out of the truck, the cool humidity of the night spins around her hair, sweet and fragrant with the smell of cotton candy, popcorn, and funnel cake. She can almost taste the sugar and grease in the air.

“Did you eat?” Jon asks as they begin walking toward the carnival. Dany shakes her head.

“I’m fine. I grabbed a protein bar earlier.” But she hesitates, giving him an aside glance. Lowering her voice, she asks, “Do you need to…you know…”

She is rewarded with that low laugh of his.

“How long have you been wondering about this?” Dany wants to curse and she hopes the garish lights of the carnival and the shadows of the night hide the blush that has suddenly enflamed her cheeks. It is a perfectly reasonable question to think about, that ass. But she is moderately thankful when Jon just shrugs and, matching Dany’s low tones, replies, “Our bodies function just like any human’s as long as we keep up a healthy diet of blood.”

“Remind me of that if I ever get my neck snapped in the future.” She pauses. “You should know that I keep having to replace the top spot of the most mindbogglingly absurd conversations I’ve had in my life. This past month has just been…”

She trails off but Jon seems to pick up on what she’s not saying.

“Sure you don’t want a beer? Might help with all of those mindbogglingly absurd conversations.” She shoots him a look, only to find that he is wearing a strangely serious expression. She narrows her eyes at him and that seems to be all it takes for the facade to crack just slightly—he ducks his head with a smile. She scowls.

“Fine. I wouldn’t mind a beer.”

Within the carnival grounds, they find an empty bench located near the food stalls. Jon tells her that he’ll return with the questionably cheap beer and she wonders briefly, as he vanishes into the crowd, how he’ll manage to nab any alcohol without an ID she suspects he doesn’t have anyway but then she sighs—she supposes compulsion might have its perks beyond making people forget seeing that they just saw someone’s heart get ripped out of their chest.

Not interested in perusing the dozens of unanswered texts on her phone, Dany instead pulls the journal out of her bag. The ambient light in Ashara’s kitchen had barely been enough to read the faded writing—she has no hope of reading it here at the carnival, surrounded by night shadows and the undulating of the carnival games. Instead, she slowly flips through page after page, wondering who in the world left her such a dull book. She does not recognize any of the names that she manages to make out on the pages.

Jojen. Theon. Tormund. Davos. The names are old, she thinks. She cannot recall if she’s ever met anyone with those names. She continues to flip through the journal before she absently comes across the first illustration in the book: a ring, surrounded by painstakingly drawn vines and what appears to be different stages of the waxing and waning moon. She peers down at it, tracing her finger along the stained pages and—

“Daenerys?”

She does not know why but she slams the journal shut, looking up sharply at the sound of her name…and nearly jumps. At some point, someone has sat down directly across from her, as silent and unobtrusive as a shadow, and is currently staring at her in wide-eyed confusion. The girl’s hazel eyes are almost black in the flickering lights of the midway and beneath the brim of her baseball cap, and she is staring at Dany as though trying to unravel a puzzle.

Dany might have gotten over the fact that the girl has been able to sneak up on her like a ghost. What she can’t get over is the size of the goddamned wolf sitting next to her.

“No,” the girl says after a moment, leaning forward, oblivious to the fact that Dany is panicking at the sight of the gigantic beast sitting barely an arm's length away from her. “You must be Dany. I think I know why my brother’s being so stupid about you.”

It takes Dany’s mind a moment to jump over the repeated refrain of claws teeth jaws wolf to land on the operative word: brother. She does not tear her eyes away from the wolf even as she weakly manages, “...brother?”

Dany thinks the girl shrugs.

“We all grew up together. He’s basically my big brother.” She does not miss the flash of a grin though and manages to drag her gaze away from the wolf to see the girl smirking at her, chin propped in her fist. “I’m Arya, by the way.”

Arya.

Arya.

Dany blinks.

“Oh. You’re the missing sister.” Arya’s grin grows wider.

“That sounds mysterious. I like it. It’s nice to know I get described as missing just because I spent a couple decades away from the brooding mass of drama that is my family.” She does not turn to the wolf but she does bury her hand in the animal’s thick grey-and-white ruff. “This is Nymeria. Nymeria, this is Dany. Don’t worry—she doesn’t bite.”

Dany is not sure if Arya is referring to her or her wolf and debates if she should be offended. But Nymeria comically cocks her head to the side before yawning, almost as if bored senseless by Dany’s presence. She then lays down on the ground, her head vanishing over the edge of the table as she lays her head atop her front paws. Dany has the feeling that if both girl and wolf stood up, they might possibly be the same height. She does not like what that means for her—it doesn’t look like she’s much taller than Arya.

But she finds herself on the receiving end of that amused, curious stare again and she shifts uncomfortably. Arya must be another vampire too. That would at least explain how she was so quickly and silently able to secure a seat across from Dany. It doesn’t exactly settle her nerves.

“Sansa has been telling me about you,” Arya continues blithely. Whatever expression crosses Dany’s face must be enough to tell Arya what she thinks of that because the girl smirks and rolls her eyes. “She doesn’t love you but the fact that she’s been tolerating you for Jon’s sake at least means she likes you. Anyway, what were you reading?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” It is a knee-jerk reaction—for some reason, she doesn’t want to share anything about the journal and its mysterious origins with anyone else yet. Still, Arya lets out a peal of laughter that draws the eyes of others around them. It is a bright, dry thing that Dany feels has probably put the fear of god into more than one person. She adds on, with an unimpressed note in her voice, “Why would you want to leave your family for decades?”

Arya tilts her head to the side, a different light coming into her eyes. It is the strangest expression and it is accompanied by even stranger words.

“Oh. Maybe he hasn’t told you everything after all.”

Dany thinks of her and Jon’s conversation after the funeral earlier and frowns. She knows that she is still circling the very edge of the depths of understanding that is the Starks’ history and their secrets but she had hoped that earlier she had made more than a dent in that lack of knowledge. “What else is there to know?”

But Arya only shakes her head.

“He hasn’t told you about why we’re in town?”

“He said it had something to do with the comet,” Dany answers. She knows the comet in question sits very low on the horizon now, practically hidden by the hills and the woods that surround Starfall. By dawn, it will be gone. “And that you were looking for something.” Arya nods, that strange expression still on her face.

“Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could erase?” When Dany only shrugs noncommittally—who hasn’t lived with such mistakes?—Arya’s smile turns slightly grim. “Jon’s a good man and he’s my brother and I love him more than anything in the world. But he tends to blame himself for things that…well, things that happened in the past that might not have happened if any of us had made different decisions. The past can haunt but nothing haunts worse than a curse or a mistake centuries old.”

Whatever it is you’re punishing yourself for, whatever ideals you believed you didn’t live up to, you need to give yourself some grace. Dany shoves Ashara’s words to the back of her mind.

“What was the mistake?”

“Well,” Arya replies, tugging on the brim of her hat, “it really depends on who you ask. Bran will tell you a different story than Sansa, who will tell you a different story than Robb, who will tell you a different story than Jon.”

That answers nothing. “What story would I hear from you?”

That odd light in Arya’s eyes shifts.

“I’d tell you that I’ve learned to know monsters when I see them. But I learned that lesson far too late.”

But Dany never finds out if Arya might have said more about that because at that moment, the girl’s head lifts and her smile becomes a shade less grim, a fraction more wicked. A second later, Jon lowers himself onto the bench next to Dany, handing her a capped bottle of beer that is already coated with condensation in the evening heat. Arya chirps, “You’re ridiculous, you know.”

“Nice to see you too, little sister.”

Jon doesn’t protest as the small young woman snatches his bottle out of his hand, taking a swig of it before handing it back. Dany pops off her own cap along the edge of the bench with a practiced twist of her wrist. As she does so, she looks back and forth between the two cousins. Like Bran, Jon shares more in common physically with Arya than either Bran or Arya do with their actual older siblings. She wonders what the older generation of Starks had looked like, people long dead centuries and centuries ago.

She raises the bottle of beer to her lips as Arya continues, “The others are back on the manor grounds. I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you.”

When Dany only gives Jon a quizzical look, he explains, “The direwolves. We all have one. Nymeria is Arya’s but Arya usually watches over the rest of them anyway for the rest of us.”

Dany makes an incredulous sound in the back of her throat. “Don’t tell me this is what helped you all sell the werewolf thing.” Her words cause Arya to burst into laughter and for Jon to pinch the bridge of his nose in what is clearly a long-standing joke between them. Neither of them has to answer for Dany to realize that this is precisely what helped contribute to the werewolf myth.

“Am I going to find the others wandering around here?” Arya asks, slowly unfolding herself from off the bench. At her side, Nymeria lets out another yawn before rising gracefully to her feet. Dany sees that the wolf does not quite dwarf Arya but she is still a tiny thing next to it, enough to earn a few startled whispers from the surrounding tables. “I figure I should try to find them before I try to find a snack.”

“She doesn’t mean a person,” Jon clarifies at Dany’s alarmed look, even though Arya’s mischievous wink begs to differ. As the girl comes around the table to throw her arms around Jon’s shoulders, he says, “But aye—they should be here somewhere. I think they’ll all be glad to see Grey Wind and the lot again.”

“Thanks, brother.”

Arya gives Dany a brief wave before she wanders off into the crowd, her enormous wolf at her side. Dany overhears a few startled exclamations and curses in the general direction they disappear off into. Once they have vanished, she spins around on the bench so that she is straddling it, propping an elbow onto the wooden tabletop as she studies Jon.

When he finally notices her staring, he gives her an aside look, lowering his beer bottle. “What is it?”

“I’m just trying to decide something about you.”

“That doesn’t sound good. One of the worse things about having family stick with you for a few centuries if they know all your secrets.” Dany smiles but it disappears as quickly as it flickers onto her face. She takes a brief sip of her beer before she places it back on the table.

She has been trying to put together the puzzle that is the Starks for weeks now. Running away from the problem hadn’t solved anything. Ignoring it had done even less. Now that she has fully decided to commit to being part of it—for whatever reason that had attracted the entirety of the supernatural world to her in the first place—she has tried to make the story make more sense in her head. It is not particularly a riddle she thinks she can easily solve but she might have some ideas as to the outlines of it.

“My parents were killed in a car crash when Vis and I were kids,” she finally says and that is enough for Jon to turn to face her fully. “We bounced around in foster homes for a while before Ashara officially adopted us. I’ve been Dany Dayne for so long that sometimes it’s hard to remember a time when I was Daenerys Targaryen. Like, how much does a little girl truly remember from years and years ago? Sometimes I wonder if my memories of my parents are just figments of my imagination. Did we really used to go on long drives up through the Red Mountains at night? Did my mum used to tell stories about dragons sitting atop my nightlight so I wouldn’t be afraid of the dark?”

When Jon says nothing, Dany picks at the edge of the beer label, a sad smile on her lips. “And the thing is I’m not sure if I’ll ever be sure. I’m more Ashara’s daughter than I’ll ever be my birth parents’ daughter anymore. And the town has always treated me the same. The people who have lived here the longest remember my parents but to so many people, I’ve never been Daenerys Targaryen.”

“I’m sorry that you lost your parents so young,” Jon murmurs. She can detect the honesty in his voice but she knows she cannot be distracted by his sympathy right now. She lifts her beer bottle back to her lips, eyes wandering over to the crowds milling around the food stalls and the carnival games—all of the bright lights and smoke and shadows.

“I’ve always been Dany Dayne for most people in Starfall,” she continues, “which is why I’ve been wondering why Waymar, who didn’t move here with his family until I was twelve, called me Daenerys Targaryen.”

To his credit, Jon does not look surprised by her words. Instead, he only frowns. “Dany, the woman I knew as Daenerys Targaryen, the woman we all knew back when this all started…she died a long time ago. You’re not her.”

“But I look a little like her, don’t I?” Jon’s sudden and carefully blank expression is answer enough. She sighs. “I’d imagine that I was going to put it together eventually for as many times as you all kept assuring one another that I’m not her. If you all didn’t turn Waymar, then I have to assume that someone who used to know the original Daenerys did. It might even be the same person who turned Margaery.”

Jon is quiet for so long that Dany almost thinks he won’t answer. But eventually, he lowers his head in agreement. “We thought the same.”

“Is that why you won’t leave?” Dany does not like the idea that the reason a wave of vampires is suddenly attracted to this town is because she reminds them of a long-dead woman. But she thinks it is at least reasonable to assume the Starks feel some sense of responsibility to her because she resembles an old friend of theirs. “I’m not mad. I just want you to know that I understand that your friendship with me is based on your friendship with her.”

The look on Jon’s face now is so remarkably contrite that Dany almost feels bad for calling him out on it. He looks strangely hurt—and something else too. Dany has no idea what it means and Jon keeps his feelings too closely concealed for her to really figure out what’s going on in his head.

“Listen,” she continues, leaning forward, “I get it. I do. And I think I know why you all at least are here. I’ll do whatever I can to help you out. But if I’m going to help you and if I’m going to be in danger from this, I can’t have you all always hiding the truth from me to protect me. I need to know enough to protect myself. Missy and Marg are already pulled into this and I don’t want to drag Vis and Ashara into it too.”

Dany does not love this town. She can’t, not after everything that has happened. But she also does not want to see it burned. If she is the reason why all of this death is coming here, she will not stand idly by and just let it.

“So…do we have a deal?”

“Are you making demands now?”

“I don’t know. Are you agreeing that secrets help neither of us?”

Jon lets out a disbelieving snort, shaking his head ruefully. He takes a pull of his beer before he reaches forward to clink the neck of the glass against Dany’s own bottle.

“Alright. We have a deal.” Dany beams at him.

“Fantastic.”

But when Jon’s eyes crinkle at the edges with his own smile, she is nearly struck sideways by the sudden and absolutely ridiculous notion that she wants to kiss him. She wants to kiss him and it is wrong and it is stupid and clearly this cheap beer has gone straight to her head. She rapidly shakes her head to clear her thoughts.

Even after telling Ashara all of that earlier… “Now tell me what you need.”

“Well…” Jon rubs the back of his neck. “We need a ring and we need a witch.”

“Okay.” Dany frowns, still disturbed by the odd fluttering in the pit of her belly. “Well, Missy doesn’t like any of you but if it means getting rid of the vampires in town, she might be willing to help at least. I could ask her. As for the ring, there’s a jewelry center in the historic downtown area…”

But Jon waves his hand to cut her off.

“No. It’s a specific ring.” He gestures at his right hand, to the wolf crest that sits on his right ring finger. “Sort of like this.”

“You might be in luck,” Dany notes dryly. “Something that hideously large should be easy to find.”

“It doesn’t look like mine.” The smile that had appeared on Jon’s face at her joke turns a little sadder, as if he is lost in a memory. “It’s smaller. Silver. It actually looks very plain but there is a ring of fire engraved around the outside that almost looks like a vine. And on the inside, there is an engraved message. I never spoke Valyrian that well but I was told it said…”

He pauses and in the silence, Dany can feel the world shift beneath her feet and then plummet into the darkness of the abyss that is a thousand years and more.

“Zaldrīzes buzdari—”

“—iksos daor,” Dany finishes, feeling as though her throat is full of sand. When Jon only gives her a startled look, she somehow finds the words to choke out the translation, “‘A dragon is not a slave.’”

“How did you know that?” When Dany doesn’t immediately answer, Jon drops his bottle onto the table with a thud and almost looks to move to grab her arm. He restrains himself at the last moment but Dany sees him tremble with the effort. “Dany. How did you know that?”

But it all comes back to a decision she made so long ago, doesn’t it? It all comes back to a boy and an answer and the red door and the death of a thousand dreams that she should never have dreamt in the first place. It was and is the start of everything and the end of so many other things.

Because she remembers the weight of her “no” and she remembers the ghost of a promise on her hand.

Marry me. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

She was damned even before she came back to Starfall.

“Because,” she finally says, the world too dark and too bright and too much, her memory strangling her, “that was my engagement ring. That was Daario’s ring.”

A labyrinth lies beneath the Red Keep.

It is easy to keep a lie hidden beneath the ground when the builders of this monstrous castle barely knew the cavernous depths that they created at the whim of a cruel madman. She used to play in the upper levels of the maze of dark corridors beneath the palace, jumping in and out of dragon skulls and telling herself that unknown treasures waited at the bottom for the very brave (or the very foolish).

She does not know which one of the two she is now.

She knows these corridors better than most people alive. Beneath the cells that hold petty criminals are the deep, dark dungeons that hold those who committed even more heinous crimes. After her coronation, she had emptied those cells, sending men far north to the Wall. It is better to hide secrets in the dark when there is no chance of prying eyes to reveal the truth in exchange for freedom.

She reaches a door and knocks gently before pushing it open. The room is spacious though not nearly as luxurious as the rooms situated above ground. The light here is entirely provided by Melisandre’s fires, glowing like the fires of hell deep within the bowels of the earth. The marble here is smooth beneath her booted feet as she slips her torch into a sconce before lowering her hood. The door behind her closes, the red witch waiting just beyond until she is done.

She steps further into the room, the vaulted ceiling rising high over her head. Ahead of her, a man sits in a chair, engrossed with a ratty tome that rests on his lap. He is not so old, though his hair is the same shade of pale moonlight as hers, long and plaited. There is a gauntness to his frame that is not so much the result of his enchanted imprisonment here beneath the castle but of the magic that still sluices through his bones, the spell of protection and immortality that had not worked for him.

The spell that Daenerys is determined to master.

She reaches him and kneels at his feet, a faint smile drifting across her face. He looks up at her then, the eyes so similar to her own peering down at her. He reaches forward to gently stroke her hair.

“Ah, my little dragon. I’ve been waiting.”

She has lied to the entire kingdom. Her reign is built on a throne of shattered words and the rotten scaffolding of misplaced trust. But she knows it had been the only way, the only way for the realm to keep faith with the dragons, the only way to cement her rise to power. It is the secret that Jon will never forgive her for keeping, the secret that has been paid for in blood.

And she does not care.

We will all be safe, she thinks. Everything will be alright in the end. I will fix it all. We will all be together and I will make all of this worth it.

She smiles up at the man she both loves and loathes and takes his hand.

“I’ll always come back, Father.”

Tywin Lannister is not a man given to flights of fancy.

He sits in the chair of his spacious office, perusing the photographs that have fallen out of the manila envelope that sits discarded to the side. There is a sense of blue-blooded opulence in the room, and a sense that everything within it stands or sits in its rightful place. He has half-governed this small town alongside the Tyrells and Arryns for decades now and he has no patience for the sort of nonsense that has suddenly arrived under his jurisdiction.

“I suppose we have you to thank for that foolishness involving Waymar Royce,” he says flatly to the man who stands just inside the door of the study. The man tilts his head in acknowledgment and Tywin frowns. It is not a scowl. It is barely a passing annoyance at the chaos that had unfolded earlier this month. It is a calculated understanding of the things that are quietly—and not so quietly—happening in this small town and finding the whole thing to be a terrible inconvenience. “And what do you intend to do about it?”

“Come to you, of course,” the man says simply.

“That does not take care of my problem nor does it answer why I should trust either of you.”

“Do you even know what the problem is?” When Tywin does not immediately answer, only lifting a single eyebrow in a silent challenge, the man says, almost sadly, “You may not trust us or believe in what we do but the Founders kept extensive records. I’m sure you know what you’re up against.”

“I know that the Founders believed in nonsense,” Tywin counters, though not angrily. He says it with all the belief of a man who clearly believes he is wasting his time. “The last thing I need is Olenna Tyrell finding any reason to discredit the records.”

There is a laugh, bright and dry.

“There’s no need for that.”

The shadow of a woman speaks from the man’s side. She steps forward and settles herself into the chair directly across from Tywin. The man at the door does not move. But the small woman, with her eyes shining like quicksilver in the lamplight and something dangerous sparking across her youthful face…

She smiles.

“Vampires have returned to Starfall, Mr. Lannister. We’re going to help you get rid of them.”

Chapter Text

“An engagement ring?”

The parlor in the Stark manor looks so much different during the day than it does at night. Sunlight dances past the thick open curtains, gilding the dust motes that drift lazily through the air. At night, with a fire blazing in the fireplace and a half-dozen jeweled lamps casting warm shadows and a chandelier bubbling light as frothy as a sparkling wine, the parlor had seemed homey, lived-in. In the cooler light of day, the room seems positively ancient.

Its far more ancient occupants have gathered in the parlor just as they had the night of the fundraising gala. Robb is pacing back and forth between the two overstuffed couches, his brow furrowed. Both Arya and Rickon sit on one of the couches, Rickon’s curly head in Arya’s lap as he tosses a rather expensive-looking bauble back and forth in his hands. Sansa stands off to the side by the bookcases overflowing with books, a look of cool frustration laced through her expression. Save for Rickon, who only looks bored, no one appears pleased by the situation.

Bran is missing though. Earlier, Jon had sent the second youngest of the Stark siblings a text message before they’d arrived, telling him of Dany’s connection to the ring. Bran had quickly texted back to confirm he was looking into it and Dany has to assume that his “looking into it” involves him holed up in front of a computer somewhere, if Jon’s comments about his cousin’s tech savviness are true.

My own fault for agreeing to help with this.

She sits on the couch across from Arya and Rickon, perched on the very edge of the cushion and feeling strangely jittery. Jon leans against the arm of the couch, his arms crossed, his dark grey eyes distant and pensive as he watches Robb pace back and forth. Dany looks back and forth between the both of them before she finally nods.

“Yes. It used to be mine.”

“Are we sure she’s not our Daenerys?” Rickon asks, glancing over at Dany with a raised eyebrow. “I mean, this was already weird enough and now she had the ring too?”

“I’m not her,” Dany immediately protests, at the same time Missandei and Jon echo, “She’s not her.” Jon and her best friend share looks but Missandei is the first one to turn away, a clear disapproving frown on her face. It’s no surprise to Dany why her friend is acting standoffish—Missandei had not wanted to come to the Stark manor again in the first place.

“Witches are guardians of nature, and the keepers of the balance,” her friend had told her when Dany first asked. “You have to understand that vampires are creatures that defy the laws of nature. I’ll protect you as much as I can—but whatever they want, whatever reason they’re here in Starfall, I can’t be a part of it.”

But then Dany had told her about Daario’s ring.

And so Missandei had arrived at Dany’s rented loft in her little powder blue sedan, a worried glower perched as precariously on her face as her glasses were on the bridge of her nose. Dany doesn’t think her closest friend in the world is nervous but her discomfort about being in the Starks’ house again is evident.

(She makes a note that she is going to have to drop by Missandei’s after this with pizza and a bottle of wine.)

“Did he ever tell you where he got it from?” Robb asks, pausing momentarily in his pacing, rubbing at the reddish stubble along his chin. “Was it an heirloom or did he purchase it somewhere or…?”

“No.” Dany shakes her head, a pang of guilt shooting through her. “He never said.”

It’s not that she never asked. When Daario had proposed in front of the red door, sweet tea on her tongue and the scent of spring rain and wet earth enveloping her, she had been utterly charmed by the engraved silver band he had placed on her ring finger. She had teased him, telling him that it must have cost half his salary. Daario had only laughed and told her not to worry about it because nothing he ever found would be able to match his love for her. She’d smiled at the time, because that was what she was supposed to do—marry Daario, settle down, have a family, live her whole life and then be buried within the town borders. But even then, she’d been uncertain. Even then she had known she was supposed to do something more with her life than settle.

“Why’d you break up with him anyway?” Rickon abruptly asks. “That’s why you left, right? Because— ow! Arya! Why’d you pinch me!”

His older sister’s expression does not shift. Instead, she focuses that strangely intense, placid gaze on Dany. “You don’t have to answer that. Rickon’s been stuck at fifteen for a thousand years. He’s a bit of an ass.”

Dany senses Missandei’s expression shift with a grimace, as though she is biting her tongue to refrain from speaking. So Dany elects not to answer the impertinent question, instead turning to look back at Robb. “I gave it back to him before I left. I don’t know if he kept it or returned it. Do you think that’s why someone killed him? Because they thought he had the ring?”

The siblings share looks. It is Sansa who responds.

“No one else but us should want the ring.” She spins her own silver band on her right hand, a disconcerted light in her pale eyes. “Even if they know about the comets, no one else should even know about the ring.”

The unanswered question sits in the air like a curse. This is the one thing that Dany has never quite been able to get an answer for from Jon, let alone any of the others. She knows what they are looking for. She knows that this is why they’re in town. But she still has no idea why the ring is important. She can hazard a guess but somehow, she thinks she won’t be anything except extraordinarily wrong. It seems gauche to ask now but considering that she’s already given her word to Jon that she’d help them, it feels odd to not know the exact reason why she’s helping.

So she sits back in the couch, folding her arms across her chest. She first meets Sansa’s gaze and then lets her eyes travel over to Rickon and Arya, then to Robb, and finally she looks up to meet Jon’s distracted look.

“You all have told me that you’re in town for this ring. Now tell me why you need it.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees one of Arya’s dark brows lift a fraction, as though taken aback by the no-nonsense tone in Dany’s voice. Even Rickon looks a little startled, staring at Dany with a flare of unsettled recognition in his eyes. Sansa herself goes still before she turns away, icy frustration and disquiet in her eyes. Robb looks torn and Jon averts his gaze away from Dany.

It can’t have been because of her question, can it? They owe her that much of answer at least. She has given her word. This is a matter of trust. She shifts uncomfortably but. But before she can say anything, Missandei, still sitting on the edge of the couch, looks from one startled face to the next before she sighs.

“It’s a binding amulet, isn’t it?”

The vampires wordlessly look at one another but it is Robb who nods warily. But Dany only watches Jon curiously as his cousin says, “Aye. It belonged to someone we used to know.”

“And what spell, exactly, is it binding?”

Dany knows that Missandei has already expressed her doubts that she is nowhere near as strong as the Starks think her to be simply because she is the so-called Starfall witch but she cannot help but hide a smile at the cool, no-nonsense tone her friend has, and the confidence that she is exuding. It is far more than Dany can say for herself. She has been drawn into this supernatural world and she has agreed to help this family because it seems like the right thing to do—but truth be told, despite her pact with Jon, there is still so much of their world she doesn’t know about or understand.

“An old spell,” Jon finally admits and Dany does not miss the way Robb gives him a warning look. But if Jon also notices it, he gives no indication—instead, Dany does realize he is drumming his fingers against his thigh in that strange gesture she has seen from him so often now. A nervous tic…but why? “But not a dangerous one.”

“If we’re looking for the ring,” Dany interrupts before Missandei can outright refuse to help, “Missy has to know what you’re planning to use it for. You have to understand why she’d be so reluctant to help you otherwise.”

Rickon snorts.

“We’re not trying to break anything, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re purely on a ‘do not break anything’ clause this century.” Then he shrugs. “But mostly, we’re looking for it because it belonged to the girl Jon was gonna marry. This is the closest we’ve gotten to it in several centuries.”

The words go through the room like a whiplash. Jon goes rigid on the couch next to her. Arya scowls and shoves Rickon so hard that he falls off the couch with a shout and a thud. Sansa leans back against the wall with an exasperated, annoyed sigh, closing her eyes. Robb gives Jon a concerned look but turns away at the last moment, his gaze drifting to the cold, empty fireplace.

And Dany…

Dany isn’t sure what she’s feeling.

(Well, she might be, but she'll be damned if she actually acknowledges it.)

She remembers seeing the facsimile of her old engagement ring in the journal, though it had not been nearly identical enough for her to recognize it at first. It wasn’t until Jon had described it a moment later that the memories of a spring day and a young man promising her the world had come back to her. She recalls the stricken look on Jon’s face when she had recited that tiny inscription to him. There has always been a sadness and a darkness to him that she has never been able to place—could it be he still longs for someone who died such a long time ago?

And why does the thought of the dead girl sting so much?

“So,” Dany ventures cautiously, “it was also her engagement ring?” But at that, Robb immediately shakes his head.

“No. It just belonged to her. At some point, a witch used that ring to bind a spell. We want it back because…” He trails off. “Honestly, it’s a long story. Can you just trust us when we say no harm will come to anyone if we find it?” Missandei’s deepening frown reveals her thoughts on the matter and Dany is about to argue in favor of more information. Is it so hard to give them that much information?

But Jon suddenly mutters something about needing some air and then he is up and gone from the couch, his dark grey gaze more distant and lost in memory than Dany is sure she has ever seen it. She watches him go, feeling surprise rise in her throat but unable to express itself in any words to make him stop.

“You’re such a wanker,” Arya mutters at the youngest Stark who is still sprawled on the floor. He blinks up at her, as though completely baffled by this sudden shift in mood in the room. His sister rolls her eyes. “If I have to explain it to you after all this time, you’re never going to get it.”

“I get it!” Rickon protests, sitting up. “It’s just…it’s been a while since everything.”

“What was that all about?” Dany finds herself asking, though she is not sure she wants an answer. Robb shakes his head, letting out a breath.

“Nothing.”

But of course it’s something—Dany isn’t stupid. She gets to her feet. Missandei glances up at her, a warning look in her eyes, but Dany can only shake her head. There is a part of her that still screams that this is not something she should be getting involved in, that the further she sinks down into this association with this clearly dangerous family, the more she is going to regret it. She has seen what they can do. She has seen what has become of Margaery and even though she has not seen any of the Starks in their true form, something buzzes beneath her skin in warning, that whisper of apprehension before one dives into the abyss.

No one stops her as she heads out in the same direction Jon disappeared in. She does not quite know where she is going but hopes that perhaps she’ll just stumble across this one vampire that she has somehow unwittingly formed a connection with.

After a few minutes, she finds him on the back porch of the manor. The manor itself is ostentatiously large and obviously a product of another century. Her sneakers scuff along hardwood floors, her shadow draping across paneled walls and arched ceilings. There are gigantic oil paintings and intricately designed porcelain vases and faded Essosi rugs littered throughout the entire house. By the time she pushes open the double doors leading out onto the wide back porch, it feels like she is emerging out of a museum, every ancient story of the world hounding her heels.

Jon sits on the back store of the porch, watching as a pair of wolf-like dogs bound across the vast lawn, darting back and forth out of the grove of thick evergreens that snuggly wrap around the southern wing of the house. Dany hesitates for a moment, though she knows that he probably already knows she’s there. Then she sits next to him, mimicking his posture.

“That was dramatic.”

Jon lets out a huff of a laugh, shaking his head. “Aye, it was. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m starting to understand that teenage boys are teenage boys no matter how many centuries they have under their belt.” She half-turns to him. “I wanted to apologize to you though. I shouldn’t have pushed about the ring. I didn’t know what it meant to you.” Jon shakes his head.

“I would have told you but it seemed like bad timing.” He shrugs, though it is not nearly as nonchalant as Dany thinks he hopes it looks. “I didn’t want you to think I was comparing your loss with mine.”

Dany thinks about that for a moment, recalling Jon’s words from that night when they first met.

I think what you’re feeling is very human, to be honest. Grief is…complicated.

The most you can do is survive it.

Is that what you’ve been doing, Dany wonders. Surviving it?

Something about that thought is terribly sad. There is no living in simply surviving something. For as long as the cousins have been around, Dany wonders who this woman had been if her shadow is cast so long and so dreadful over the centuries. There is still far too much of the Starks’ past that is hidden in shadow but how much must it hurt for all of them to have no ties to this world, to watch everyone you’ve ever known or loved be snatched away by the passing of the years?

There is answer to all of her questions in this line of thought. She knows there is. But she doesn’t think she wants to pull on that string. If she does, she thinks she will be buried beneath an avalanche of tragedy and sorrow.

Instead, she nods her head towards the wolves that she thinks have no chance in hell as ever passing for mere dogs. “Which one of them is yours?”

To her surprise, Jon’s dour expression lightens slightly at her question. He gives a sharp whistle. Neither of the two wolves turns to look at him. However, there is a silent, sudden flash of white fur and Dany stares in surprise as a pure white specter of a beast darts out of the woods toward them, as quiet as the grave. The wolf’s eyes glow as red as embers in the afternoon sunlight and it is watching Dany with an expression that is unnervingly intelligent.

“Dany, this is Ghost.” An appropriate name, Dany thinks, recalling Arya mentioning that name the night of the fair. “Ghost, Dany.”

Dany believes if she wanted to, she might actually be able to ride the damned thing like a horse. She smiles, slightly overwhelmed by the size of the wolf. But the beast only nudges her knee with his nose before sprawling out beneath the porch, panting silently in the summer heat. His white fur nearly glows in the sun. She thinks, with an inward smile, that none of her cats would appreciate seeing this wolf within one hundred feet of her loft.

“Can’t believe you all put in the time to adopt and train wolves,” she says. She is mildly impressed. But Jon only shakes his head and laughs.

“Our direwolves have been with us as long as we’ve been vampires,” he explains. When Dany only looks at him in confusion, Jon absently rubs the back of his neck. “They don’t exist anymore—they died out over the centuries thanks to superstition and persecution—but before any of this happened, we were all wargs. The direwolves just…came along with us when we turned.”

Dany has heard of wargs, in the same way she has heard of dragons and witches and wights. She gives Jon a long, appraising look. Then she notes dryly, “I guess that did help sell the werewolf thing.” He snorts. Ghost looks back at them both with that sharp look in his red gaze and Dany once again has to curse every single decision that has led her to be a part of this insane world.

But when she turns to say something, she finds Jon giving her a look that she cannot decipher. She has never been good at reading any of the expressions on his face and this one is no different. The look swallows up her words and she finds herself speechless for several seconds. She might congratulate him on the feat later—she always has something to say.

When she does finally manage to find her voice, the words that come out are meant to be chiding.

(She doesn’t think she quite succeeds.)

“You know,” she starts, turning away so she doesn’t have to meet that intense grey gaze, “I’ve told you all about the worries and the fears I’ve had since moving back to Starfall. I know you have centuries’ worth of the same but I hope you know that you can tell them to me. It might help to have a mortal perspective on things. I'm trusting that you'll be honest with me. Now you need to keep trusting me, Jon. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not running away. And what kind of friend would I be if I wasn’t willing to listen to what's on your mind?”

She can almost taste Jon’s hesitation in the muggy summer air.

“Would you call us friends?”

She has no idea what she wants to call them. The memory of wanting to kiss him that night of the fair comes back to her, but she doesn’t know him, not truly. He is impossible to read beyond that nervous tic of his. She can decipher the kind of man he is perhaps—but not his story. That mystery is centuries too long, the past too much of a blood-soaked enigma, and she thinks if she unravels it, it will break her heart. The only thing she is certain of here is death and that cannot bode well for either of them.

“I don’t know what we are,” Dany admits. “But it’d be selfish of me to never listen to you when you need it—because I think there is a part of you, however much you try to hide it, that believes you don't deserve any kindness.”

She doesn’t know why she says that but the moment the words leave her lips, she knows them to be true. And when she dares to look back at Jon, it is to see something shift in his expression, something haunted and cobwebbed and grief-stricken, and he turns away before she can see the rest of that crumbling, ancient guilt within him. She feels unmoored by this revelation, even more so because it is true, and she opens her mouth to…apologize? To convince him he can trust her?

But whatever she is about to say is shattered as the back doors swing open and Sansa walks out. Immediately, Dany notices out of the corner of her eye that one of the wolves, brown and white and terribly elegant compared to its energetic black brother, starts to trot eagerly toward the door, its blue eyes bright in the afternoon sun upon seeing its mistress.

“Bran thinks he might have found a lead,” Sansa says as she kneels down on the porch to greet the wolf. “It looks like there’s a professor at the Citadel in Oldtown who might be able to point us in the right direction.”

The moment between Dany and Jon is broken. Dany might curse Sansa’s timing, but she knows that this ring is currently paramount to getting all of the vampires out of Starfall and ensuring that Ashara and Vis and everyone she has grown up with, no matter how irritating, stay safe. She looks back at Jon and is surprised to see him rubbing at his face with both hands.

“You said the Citadel?” Sansa nods. “Seven bloody hells.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Dany asks, especially as a slow smirk slides onto Sansa’s face. “Who’s the professor?” Jon only groans and Sansa laughs softly. The redhead shakes her head at Dany’s increasingly confused expression.

“You’ll like her…if she doesn’t try to kill Jon when she sees him.”

It is a several-hour drive west through the Red Mountains toward Oldtown. Dany has frequently visited the city that sits on the Whispering Sound like many of those who live in Starfall—after all, Oldtown is the nearest large city to Starfall, home to the Citadel and the closest major airport hub. She cannot count how many times she and Missandei and Margaery had driven along the western road in those days before Dany had fled north to King’s Landing and farther north still to Winterfell.

Still, all those trips had taken place during the day. The western mountain road sits in near total darkness at night, meant to be driven with one’s high beams on to illuminate the roller coaster-like crests and dips of the road. There is also the black abyss of the cliffsides that drop off beyond the barrier fencing and the occasional wandering mountain cattle that meander lazily through the night, unconcerned with the heart attacks they cause in drivers at their sudden appearance in the beam of a car's highlights.

Even though Dany is not behind the wheel this time, the speed at which Jon races through the mountain pass in his obscenely large truck keeps her heart alternating between lodging in her throat or dropping into the pit of her belly. She is not sure if this is fear or exhilaration she feels—surely vampires can’t predict when a solitary cow is going to be around the next blind curve—but the entire drive makes her want to squeeze her eyes shut until the first beams of dawn start to dance over the jagged black range.

During the entire drive, Arya chats about everything and nothing, frequently flipping between the radio channels to distract herself. If anyone asks Dany later, she won’t be able to say for sure exactly what the girl talked about. The conversation dips and weaves as dizzyingly as the road and Dany only has the faintest impression that Arya talks to fill the silence so her cousin won’t have to.

Or so Dany won’t fill it with her own questions.

Even hours later, Dany is still not sure how she was chosen for this last-minute road trip to Oldtown. It had been clear that the professor in Oldtown is someone from Jon’s past which is why he’s here and Arya had then volunteered to ride shotgun on the way there to provide company. But somewhere between Missandei refusing to go and Jon walking them both out to her car, she found that somehow she had been included in the group that needed to travel to the Citadel.

Rewinding the conversation in her head now, Dany still isn’t sure how she ended up in the backseat of a vampire’s truck, wondering if it was even worth it to catch an hour or two of sleep or stay awake to panic over one of those cows Jon might inevitably hit.

More than once on the drive, Jon’s eyes break from the road to meet hers in the rearview mirror. She doesn’t know what to make of this, other than the fact that it sends something molten through her belly. She does want to ask him so many questions about this damned ring. She knows that if she asks him, he will tell her everything she wants to know. They at least have that understanding between them, even more so now that she has told him he can trust her with his innermost concerns and not just the secrets he shares with his family.

But would Arya as easily trust her as Jon had?

He will at least tell you if he is about to lie to you. I can count on that much at least.

She must eventually doze off because the next thing she knows, she is waking up to late morning sunlight and the red brick buildings of Oldtown’s world-famous campus and the Hightower. At some point, Jon had let the windows down and the salty scent of the Whispering Sound makes Dany wish for a gallon or three of coffee.

They park on the northeast end of the campus, away from the dorms and closer to the small knots of buildings designating the history wing of the Citadel. Dany wonders if either Jon or Arya will be annoyed with her if she walks off to find a cheap little coffee shack.

“You think she’s still here?” Arya asks as she climbs down out of the car. “I would’ve thought she’d head further north in the summer. It is disgusting down here.”

“There’s no reason for her not to be,” her cousin replies, even as he helps Dany out of the backseat with far more courtesy than she is used to. She gives him a somewhat bemused smile, ignoring the urge to shudder at the contact of her hand in his, before glancing around at the campus. The summer holiday has emptied the grounds of students, but since it still sits adjacent to the city center and holds several city parks, there is still a bustle at this hour of the morning.

Ashara always wondered why Dany hadn’t gone to the Citadel for uni—it was, of course, so much closer than King’s Landing, the country’s capital flung so far north. But for Dany, it had still been too close to Starfall, still too close for her when she might be tempted to go back, to forget her foolhardy plans to accomplish something with her life beyond the town borders. Seeing the campus now only brings back all those conversations and all of that panicked feeling of being trapped.

She lets out a long slow breath and Jon asks, “Are you alright?”

“Yes.” She shakes her head to clear it. “I just need a coffee. Your insane driving shredded my nerves. I felt like we were about to go over a cliff every time you took a turn at a hundred kilometers per hour.”

On the other side of the truck, she hears Arya let out a snort of laughter. Jon shoots his cousin a look but she only glances back at him, wide-eyed and innocent. “What? I was merely agreeing with your girlfriend that coffee would be nice. And that you don’t know how to drive worth a damn.”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Dany protests immediately, yesterday’s conversation rolling in over her like a tidal wave, while Jon only lets out a pained, “Arya…”

But Arya only holds up her hands in a playful mea culpa gesture. Dany is not so sure she is that sorry, even though the girl’s words are painfully incorrect—the words are like an addendum to Rickon’s own careless statement yesterday. It is a very sibling thing to do, Dany has to allow, thinking that Viserys would undoubtedly do the same to her.

She can’t think about it though. And to keep from dwelling on those words (and to keep from thinking about why she has an absurd disappointed feeling sitting in the pit of her chest), she pulls her phone out of her purse and pulls up the information that Missandei had sent to her after checking in with Bran. Maybe coffee will have to wait until after they discover this mysterious contact of Jon’s.

She regrets that decision when it takes them the better part of ninety minutes to find out what hall they need to be in.

The actual building is far emptier than the outside campus, even with the summer classes taking place. It is strange to walk halls filled with the ghost of the spring term, the haunted echoes of running sneakers against linoleum, shouts and laughter that have vanished until autumn arrives. Arya and Jon walk alongside her, Arya buried beneath her oversized sweatshirt and Jon in his leather jacket and Dany in between, wondering how the hell neither of them is sweltering in the summer heat. In her lace camisole and cutoff shorts, she feels as though she might just spontaneously combust from just walking next to the two vampires.

“Here we are,” Arya notes, coming to a stop at a door marked “122”, hands planted on her hips. Dany is pulling her pale hair back into a ponytail and frowns as she looks through the door’s window. There is no light in the room. She quickly glances down at the message from Missandei to confirm that they are in the right spot before she reaches for the door handle. It twists open, despite apparently being empty and abandoned for the summer.

Strange.

“Are you sure it’s this room?” Arya asks as she follows Dany inside. Jon closes the door behind them. There are only slivers of sunlight beaming from behind shuttered blinds, illuminating the classroom and its rows of tables and chairs in faint sunlight. “Maybe we should have found her personal office.”

“She wouldn’t have a personal office,” Jon says off-handedly. “She has a lot of opinions about them. Namely that they're like the coffins she's been avoiding.”

Dany lets out a laugh, unable to help herself. She heads over to a bookshelf on the far wall, peering over the ramshackle collection of books that range in topic from Asshai’i history to microbiology to a rather inflated-looking book about Northern mythology. Curiosity getting the better of her, she runs her finger along the ancient spines of one of the books—the title has long since faded along with the original color of the book.

She begins to tip it off the shelf when she hears the sound of a door creaking open behind her.

Several things happen at once.

Before she can turn around, she hears the sharp twang of something getting launched into the air. Arya lets out a curse and there is the muffled crash of something heavy and solid hitting something equally solid and far less yielding. Another door crashes open. Dany finally manages to turn and the only thing she sees is a flash of something moving too fast for her to comprehend and then Jon is on the floor with a fucking quarrel, an arrow that was aimed at her, sticking out of his chest.

Dany looks up from Jon to see the business end of a crossbow pointed at her.

“I’m not in the mood to deal with more vampires today,” the person holding the crossbow says. He is a man of an age with her, with dark eyes and skin the color of teak. He uses the end of the crossbow to gesture at the door. “Please leave.”

“I’m not—” Dany begins before the absurdity of her situation catches up with her surprise. She glowers at the young man. “You shot him.”

“Yes. I did. That was the point.”

And then, to her confusion and rising ire, a laugh bubbles up from behind a rather dented-looking storage cabinet. Arya is rising to her feet just beyond a pair of desks but isn’t the one laughing—instead, she is helping a woman, the one who has clearly found hilarity in the situation, stand. The woman is not particularly tall, looks to be the same age as Dany herself, and her riot of fiery curls is pinned up to the top of her head.

“Can’t be too certain nowadays,” the young woman says. Arya rolls her eyes.

“You really need a better way of saying hello.”

Dany has certainly missed some major piece of information here and she only eyes the crossbow-wielding man warily as the young woman jogs from around the tables, Arya at her heels. The young woman playfully jostles the man in the ribs and he lowers the crossbow just slightly, finally taking a look at the person he just shot. Dany watches as surprise flickers across his face—and watches too as it is quickly followed up by an annoyed grimace.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” the young man says flatly as he finally lowers his crossbow to his side. 

“So are you,” grouses Jon from the floor. He starts to pull out the quarrel but hisses in pain, his hand dropping back to the floor. The redhead who has moved to stand next to him prods him with the toe of her boot, a playful smirk on her elfin features. He glares up at her. “Last time I saw you, you put an arrow in me that time too.”

“You deserved it both times, you ass. Stop trying to kill my witches.”

Dany meanwhile thinks this is the dumbest, most ridiculous situation she has ever walked into. The redhead must finally see the growing irritation on her face because she winks at her, offering her a hand to shake. As Arya goes to help her cousin on the floor of the classroom, Dany reluctantly shakes the nameless young woman's hand. Her eyes are the intense blue of a tropical storm, and it is enough of a clue, along with her getting body slammed by Arya into a cabinet without breaking every bone in her body, for Dany to realize what exactly the other woman is.

“I’m Ygritte,” the newly arrived vampire says. She waves her hand in the general direction of the young man, who looks less than pleased with any of them. “That trigger-happy arse is my own personal magical headache, Grey.”

“You could have told me you were expecting company,” Grey replies, placing the crossbow on a nearby table after securing the lock. “Your last few visitors deserved wooden stakes through the heart.”

Dany frowns in confusion. She glances down at Arya, who has managed to single-handedly pull the bolt out of her cousin’s chest with a painful-sounding crunch. “I thought wooden stakes don’t work on vampires.” Ygritte snorts, perching on the edge of one of the tables. She kicks her sneakered feet back and forth as Jon stumbles to his knees with a groan.

“A wooden stake can’t kill an Original,” Ygritte drawls, though she looks at Dany with sudden interest. “Does its job just fine for the rest of us.”

But Jon is still looking over at Grey, a confused wrinkle between his brows. “But you’re not one of us. Since when do witches live as long as you do?”

Grey only glowers at him.

Dany takes it that there is something like bad blood here between Jon and this dark-eyed young man, an animosity that Ygritte seems amused by. Arya meanwhile has wandered over to the crossbow to examine it with restrained enthusiasm. “Nice model. Did you modify the stock? I haven’t seen one that looks like that.” Grey gives Arya a suspicious side-eye, seemingly wanting to ignore her, but Arya looks genuinely curious. Dany watches as he relents just slightly.

While the pair chat weapons, Jon absently rubs his hand over his chest where moments ago, a bolt had pierced him nearly straight through. Dany sees that there is blood—a red so dark, it is nearly black—but that he seems none the worst for the wear. However, he is giving Ygritte an incredibly unimpressed look. “Might be nice to see you if I didn’t always end up with an arrow in my chest or leg.”

“Might be nice to see you if you weren’t so insufferable.” Ygritte turns her gaze onto Dany. “You brought a human though. That’s new. What’s your name, love?”

“Bran texted you why we’re here, didn’t he?” Jon interjects before Dany can answer. She shoots him a look, but he ignores it. Ygritte nods and it is only then that it sinks in for Dany that this young woman is the professor that they are looking for. She quickly taps down on her surprise but something in her expression or the change of her heartbeat must give her away because Ygritte looks at her again, a brow raised in question. But Jon once again interferes. “Have you seen the ring?”

“Seen it? Please.” Ygritte rolls her eyes before walking over to the bookcase behind Dany. She peruses the titles on the shelves for a moment before she picks out one book that looks one turned page away from falling apart and tosses it in Jon’s direction. It flies through the air, hurtled like a bullet, but he manages to catch it with one hand. “No one’s seen that fucking thing for at least six hundred years.”

“Someone in Starfall had it. Used it as an engagement ring.”

“Well, I mean other than that.” Ygritte shrugs. “Do you want to know where he got it?”

“Was it an heirloom?” From the quick shake of his head Jon gives her, Dany thinks that might have been the wrong question to ask but she doesn’t care. For this, it is important for her to know why Daario had paid to have that ring with his life. “The man who had it…he didn’t have any family in Starfall.”

“Oookay, but who are you?” Ygritte asks again, propping a shoulder against one of the shelves of the bookcase. She looks Dany up and down, as though considering. “Jon, I’m not sure she’s really your type. Is she a groupie? You hanging around to get sired to him, love? Believe me, it’s not worth it. Only the Starks have those fancy rings that let them walk around in the daylight. The rest of us get to do things the old-fashioned way since they won’t say what witch loves them like that.”

Sired? That sounds less than pleasant. Dany shakes her head. “I’m just helping them out.”

“Right.” Ygritte sounds unconvinced. She gives Dany another long look. “What was your name again?”

“Ygritte,” Jon interrupts and the two women glance back in his direction. His eyes are down in the book though, a thoughtful knot between his brows. “This is a grimoire. Where’d you find a grimoire?”

“I told you,” Ygritte says, nodding her head toward Grey. “I’ve got my own personal magical headache over there. The red comet just left and its dark sister will be here in a few weeks. Seems like a good time to be friends with a witch before the rest of the supernatural community can lose its collective fucking mind.”

Jon frowns at that. “But not every vampire is you. Why are the rest of them coming to Starfall?” Ygritte snorts, peeling away from the bookcase. She gives Dany one more curious look before she sidles behind Jon, resting her chin on his shoulder as she looks down at the book in his hands.

“Couldn’t tell you,” she says cheerfully. “About thirty years ago, some rumors got started out in Braavos about how the red comet and its dark sister showing up nearly back-to-back was the first time it will have happened since the Originals were born. Maybe someone thought it meant more than it did. It’s always the fucking witches who know the most about this. Hence, my witch. Hence, why you're an idiot.”

Something about Ygritte’s words—and her comment from earlier—throws Dany off. She looks from the redhead to Jon before it suddenly hits her. She doesn’t think that Ygritte knows that Jon and Arya are part of the family of original vampires. She doesn’t know what to make of that or this relationship between Jon and Ygritte but something about it seems…off.

Jon must see the quizzical look in Dany’s eyes. He heads off her clear question with a shake of his head, “We’re a little older than Ygritte. And she loves reminding us of it all the time.”

It’s an answer but not the right answer. How much older is a little older? How old is Ygritte? Does she want to know?

“I’m old enough to make sure I don’t run in the wrong circles,” Ygritte says, swatting at Jon’s arm. “You’d think the Starks never picked up a book in their life from the way they always come sniffing around asking me for answers.”

“You keep a better ear to the ground than we do,” Jon replies. "So much for not running in the wrong circles."

Dany thinks about that. She can guess why the Starks keep a low profile in both the human world and the supernatural one, especially if they are the first vampires—the Originals, as Ygritte had emphasized. That does beg the question of how in the world they’d turned in the first place if no one came before them. Dany thinks that it could have only been something magical and Jon had mentioned something to do with them being wargs—is that it?

She doesn’t think so. She thinks that a lot of what is happening around her doesn’t add up.

She peels away from the two of them so that Jon can ask his questions of Ygritte without something in her expression shifting to give away the game. If that was the plan the whole time, then she’s not sure why they bothered to bring her along. She’s not about to kid herself and say it was for her company.

Dany quickly tells Arya that she is going to go find a coffee somewhere around the corner and that she’ll be back in a few. Arya nods absently before she immediately starts grilling Grey on his aiming technique, scoffing and shaking her head when the witch tries to explain the magical properties of the crossbow. Dany glances back at Jon and Ygritte, wondering why something itches just under her skin upon seeing how close they are standing, before she heads out into the hall.

What even am I to these people? Dany begins heading down the hall, shaking her head. A ring, my name…why is any of that important to them? If I could be any less important, if I could make myself disappear to keep my family and my friends safe…

Now that's a strange thought. Dany has always wanted to make a difference in the world, no matter how small. It is odd now to contemplate a world where she might just vanish—perhaps that would make the real difference because it would keep all of these vampires from mistaking her with someone who shares her name and who died long ago.

She really should ask one of them about Daenerys Targaryen—the other Daenerys Targaryen. Waymar had thought she was that Daenerys, hadn’t he? But she’d known Waymar for years. He was her age. There is no way he could ever have known about a young woman who had once known the Starks centuries ago, which means there is someone else out there who must have known her. How many other original vampires are there?

Dany hesitates then, her steps slowing to a halt.

Jon had told her how vampires were made. What if…what if all vampires came from the Starks? They may present as a quiet, somewhat awkward family—but they are still predators. Even if they had changed over the centuries, what if all the vampires in the world came from these six cousins? If that’s the case, then what does their collective interest in her truly mean?

I’m overthinking it. It’s magic and mythology and pure utter rot. At the very least, I trust Jon.

But she thinks back to another night, another porch, another conversation.

Have you lied to me?

Of course I have.

Gods.

So lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t see the man around the blind corner she turns and ends up running smack into him.

“Dammit,” she curses, reeling backward. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

Her words die on her tongue as she looks up.

What...?

“Don’t scream,” the man warns and before she can step back more than two steps, before she can draw in enough breath to yell, there is a hand muffling her shout of panic and there is something sharp pricking her neck and before her thoughts can catch up with her instincts, the world goes grey and fuzzy and burned at the edges.

And then it is all gone.

In the blackest hour of the night, the world itself baying with sound and light that he should not be able to hear or see, a hot gush of blood fills his mouth, sticky and cloying on his tongue as he feeds.

The blood slips thick and coppery-sweet down his throat like crimson honey, the girl in his arms weakly fighting back as she whimpers in pain. He can feel the blood coat his lips and his teeth, can taste it sluicing down the pale slope of her neck, mixed with the tears as she cries and begs for her life. He hears her. He can’t help but hear her. His own hands are shaking from fatigue, but he is still stronger than her, stronger than anyone, a ghost with the strength of a demon.

His stomach churns with vile acid and sweetness.

This hunger will drive him mad. It already has multiple times in the past two hundred and thirteen years. He might go for days and weeks without feeding, his insides desiccating and turning rotten, burning and screaming and lusting for blood. Dagger and rope, winter and crushed bone—none of it ends his misery. None of it ends this torturous living. He always wakes again, whole and ravenous, and then some poor warm body breaks beneath his hands to sate his hunger.

You had a duty, a voice curls around his thoughts like a wisp of smoke like it always. You made a promise to her. You are damned. You are damned. You are damned.

No, he thinks furiously. No, I never promised. I never swore. She…

His head spins. The body drops to the ground, dead.

He stares at the girl for a long moment. Her blue eyes stare emptily up at the fathomless sky, the side of her neck black with the blood oozing from the vicious tears into her delicate pale skin. He staggers back against the wall, knowing he should run. Braavos will sleep for only a few hours more. They will find him. They will try to kill him. And he will, once again, try to die.

But they won’t. And he won’t.

The canals call to him. He can hear everything, just as he can see everything. It is as though the smoke and blood that snuffed out his life so long ago burned away the scales in front of his eyes and drowned the drums that had once muted his hearing. His skin feels as though it is on fire. Would that he remain trapped in some dark, lifeless place, to let the hunger eventually turn him into dust and memory. He should not be here. He should not.

There is a noise behind him. Too silent. Too swift. His head is pounding. He turns…and stops, confusion and shock ricocheting through them.

No.

No.

A girl stands above the crumpled body in the alley. She is a small thing—pale with a cherubic face and thick dark brows and a mouth dropped open in a perfect circle. She is dressed in dark colors—cloak and jerkin and trousers, her heeled boots silent against the damp path of the alley. Her eyes are the frosted moss-grey of the Braavosi canals and they are fixed on him as though the girl has seen an apparition.

But he too is seeing a ghost. He stumbles back.

“No,” he chokes out. Even in his bouts of madness before, he has never seen them. They are long dead. They had lived their lives as they were supposed to, certainly. Sixty, seventy, eighty years—it doesn’t matter. He has enough regrets from his past to haunt his dreams. He does not need anything else new to appear. “You’re not here. You're not. You can't be.”

The girl only continues to stare. He wants to run, though he knows he cannot outrun the onset of madness that has gripped him in the past. His back collides with the far wall. He should run. He closes his eyes. The blood has gone sweetly sour on his tongue. He is shivering badly.

Then he hears the girl say, her voice near hushed in a disbelieving whisper, “...Jon?”

It is a crack in the world.

He hasn’t heard his name in almost two hundred years.

He opens his eyes. She is still there. She is still staring at him.

And then he blinks and suddenly she is standing right in front of him, staring up at him in shock and wonder and heartbreak. His non-existent breath leaves him in a whoosh. He feels trapped, caged and confused. She reaches up to touch the blood on his lips. He watches as black veins spiral out from those eyes he has known since they were all children, watches as the whites of her eyes turn red with hunger and blood. She looks up at him, even as the roar comes back to his head—the impossible anger, the doubt, the hurt, the denial.

Forever, the queen with hair the color of moonlight had whispered into his ear so long ago. Around them, fire and blood. We will have forever. I promise.

A full body shudder heaves through him at the memory, at the mistake and all of the ruin and destruction that had come from it, and then the girl in front of him is the little girl he has always known again.

“Jon,” whispers Arya. “We thought…"

“‘We?’” he chokes. His throat is full of sand.

“Us. All of us. Robb and Bran and Sansa and Rickon and…” Her voice breaks. Her face shatters. “We thought you…gods, Jon, we thought…”

But whatever she might have said is immediately muffled as she throws herself into his arms, burying her sobs into his shoulder. For a moment, his body does not know how to react to this, too used to two hundred years of violence being his only form of intimacy. Two hundred years with this hunger for blood sitting within him like a fire. Two hundred years of being alone with this damnation following after him like a shadow.

His breath leaves him in a spasm of grief and then he is clinging to the girl he has always called little sister, dropping to his knees and pulling her along with him, hanging tightly to this one single thread of a life that has been blown to chaff. She’s here. She’s alive. She’s not alive.

She’s like him.

Dear gods.

What has Daenerys done?

Chapter Text

All around her, there is fire.

It is a strange fire—both crimson and emerald flames lick at her skin, viciously clawing at her to blacken her lungs, to choke the life out of her. She stumbles back, trying to turn away from the inferno, but it is everywhere. Every red-bricked building, every slopped terrace, every high walkway—all of it is consumed with malignant black smoke, the toxic tendrils curling upwards toward a night sky turned molten in the wavering heat. It is too hot. It is too hot and the city is burning. She can hear people screaming.

She recognizes none of it and she stumbles to her knees, the scorched, shattered ground scraping away skin, leaving her palms and knees bloody and burned. She coughs and gags, her eyes watering from the acidic smoke stinging her eyes. None of this is familiar. She recognizes none of this.

She is lost.

She is dying.

She is…

Through the thunder of crumbling buildings and the roaring flames, she hears the faint twang of a guitar, the strands of an old song she used to hear on the radio all the time. It crackles through the air, drenched with memories of moonlight and mountain roads. Her skin will melt from her bones and her sinew will crack and splinter beneath this heat but the song will stay. It is in her head and it is drumming through her mind. Her tongue feels like sandpaper against the roof of her mouth. She wants to scream but she has no breath to.

Someone, she thinks desperately, looking up, looking around, looking for help. Someone, please. Please.

And then she sees someone standing just beyond the wall of fire.

The person’s back is turned from her but she can see that it is a woman, her hair nearly the same white-hot hue as the heart of the flames. Fire swirls up her arms and laps at her fingers and encircles her neck like a noose. She is staring at the shadowy figure, the woman embraced by the flames, and she cannot understand how the woman does not burn. She cannot understand how she too is not screaming as death rakes through her.

And then, as if the woman can hear her thoughts, she turns.

The heat is gone. All of it rushes away in a suffocating blow that leaves her gaping for air.

In its place, there is only the cold.

The woman stares at her for a long, long time. Her eyes are the color of the fading day. Her long pale hair, interwoven in a maze of intricate braids, is pulled away from her face to illuminate the blank, staring expression. The woman is beautiful. The woman is dangerous. She is smiling, though the light in her eyes is one of pure madness. Her lips glimmer black and wet in the heat.

“Daenerys,” the woman says quietly, and then she is kneeling next to her, her fingers raking through her melting skin like wax. Nails scrape bone and charred muscle and she wants to scream and scream and scream. In the brilliant, destructive light of the flames, she can see the blackness around her mouth so much closer.

Blood.

It is blood.

“It will kill you,” the woman who looks like her says, fangs gleaming. “All of this will ruin you as it ruined me. But better you die than I.”

Then, fangs bared, the woman with her face lunges…

Dany opens her eyes to a night sky brimming with gold.

She sits up groggily, feeling gravel and other detritus bite into the sensitive palms of her hands and the fleshly side of her left thigh—wherever she is, she had been half-curled up on her side and now her hair and her clothes are full of warm chaff. Her limbs feel as though she is swimming pudding and it takes a few moments of blinting to get a better idea of where she is at, though the logical conclusion makes no sense. As she painfully rolls into an unsteady crouch and then slowly rises to stand, she wonders exactly what in all seven hells she’s gotten into now.

She is atop a building—she can see that much. A purple summer evening has already draped across Oldtown and much of the city is lit below like a garden of lightning bugs. Her sneakers crunch against the rooftop as she cautiously approaches the low parapet that encircles the roof’s perimeter. She can see the lights of the boats out in the Whispering Sound. There are brighter lights still along the coast from the dozens of buildings and traffic lights and a swam of cars far below.

Dany continues to look around. The sprawl of the campus grounds extends to the south several stories below and if she looks behind her, she can see the coiling tail of the Honeywine extending away from the Sound and the city, spiraling off into the shadows of the north. A golden glow spreads just beneath her feet on the building she is perched on but she realizes that she is certain that, in storm or times of national mourning or political crisis, the golden glow would turn a vibrant shade of emerald green.

Because there is only one building in Oldtown that has this sort of view.

The Hightower, Dany thinks, backing away from the edge of the rooftop, unnerved. They brought me to the top of the Hightower.

But did they leave her up here alone?

Absently, she rubs at the side of her neck, still sore from whatever sedative they injected her with. She then brushes the last bits of gravel from her camisole and her arms, grimacing as she takes stock of the situation. The door to the rooftop is in the middle of the roof, a single circular cap atop the cylinder that is the Hightower. Can she leave? Was the only purpose of this to separate her from Jon and the others?

She takes a step toward the door…but a voice interrupts her.

“Miss Dayne.” Dany spins to see a man—the same man from before—stepping from around the rooftop entrance. He is a plain-looking man, dressed in plainer-looking clothes. In fact, his appearance is so forgettable that Dany is immediately wary. She takes a step back as the man makes a vague gesture. “Please have a seat.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“She would prefer if you were comfortable.”

She who, Dany wonders, feeling her age-old stubbornness and ire rise into her chest. There is nothing on the roof she can use as a weapon that she can see. The man is blocking her only escape. Should she play along? Buy time? Will Jon even know where she’s at? How many hours has she been missing?

All of those thoughts spin through her mind as she sharply retorts, “She might’ve thought about that before knocking me out to kidnap me.” She doubts her method of diplomacy works well in the supernatural world. It had somewhat worked on Jon and his cousins but she suspects they hold themselves to different standards than someone who would drug her in broad daylight. “Where is she?”

“She is coming.” The man turns away. “I was only told to bring you here. She wants to speak to you.”

“Speak to me about what?”

The man smiles and it is only then that Dany sees the blankness in his dark eyes. It is like there is a cloud across his vision. Even his smile had seemed a thing of mummery. She takes another step back, her eyes darting momentarily for the door again. She should run. She should at least try.

To her surprise, the man steps away from the door. Dany feels adrenaline spike through her blood and she flinches away from the man as he walks past her.

“My job is done. I’ve done what she asked,” he says with a nod, as though Dany had never asked a question. She watches as he continues to walk away from her. Confusion swirls through her but it is quickly replaced by dread.

“Wait, no—!”

But the man has already stepped up over the parapet.

And then he is gone.

Dany’s horrified gasp is caught in her throat, though her hands fly to her mouth in shock. Somewhere far below where she stands, she hears the distant, muffled sound of a soft body hitting the unforgiving pavement, followed by the screams of passersby. The ice that had started to trickle down her spine suddenly splinters through the muggy summer air. It is like the winds of winter have wrapped around Dany’s skin like a cloak. She takes an unconscious shaky step backward, away from the edge of the roof, and then she is turning and running for the door, vision suddenly sharp with alarm and fear.

She has seen the effects of compulsion before but nothing like this.

Nothing like this.

Dany reaches the door, her breath ragged and sharp in her throat, and she swings it open—

—only to reveal a pale woman standing on the other side.

“I can’t compel you, can I?” the dark-haired woman says as Dany wrenches herself backward. She stares as the woman gently and unhurriedly shuts the door behind her. She is a small thing, perhaps only a scant inch or so taller than Dany herself, and darkly clad. Her long black shearling coat might not have been out of place in the far northern regions of Westeros but here in Oldtown, it looks disgustingly hot. Eyes the color of quicksilver land on Dany and the woman’s pretty face splits into a smile. “Lovely necklace, by the way. I assume it’s the work of the Starfall witch?”

Dany ignores the questions. “Who are you?”

“Don’t concern yourself with that.” The woman places her hands in the pockets of her coat, her smile a facsimile of kindness. “But I mean you no harm. Let’s just say that you and I have aligned goals. I can be a very helpful ally or a very, very troublesome enemy. I’ll let you decide which one you’d rather want me to be.”

“You kidnapped me. And you compelled that man to kill himself.”

“I borrowed you for a while.” The woman shrugs. “I’m positive Jon wouldn’t have let me within a league of you if he knew I was here. As for Meryn, no one will miss him. If anything, the world is a better place now that he’s no longer in it. Unlike some people, I clean up the messes that I make. I can’t say the same for most people like me.”

Like me. Dany doesn’t need to say it to confirm it. The woman’s coat and her eyes, such a startling shade of a storm, are answer enough.

This woman is a vampire.

And she knows the Starks. She knows Jon.

Dany quickly tries to gauge what the best way out of this situation is. She has seen the way Jon and the rest of the Starks move. She can’t outrun a vampire, not with their speed. And she suspects that despite the woman’s words, she’d drain her dry if Dany presented to be anything except a problem and a nuisance. She has, after all, already shown her treachery by kidnapping her, drugging her, and then compelling a man to fall to his death. This is a nightmare. This is nothing but a nightmare.

But if Dany is one thing, it is a quick learner.

“Whatever you want from me, I don’t know it,” she ventures cautiously. “The Starks haven’t told me anything. And whoever you think I am, I’m not her.”

“I know. You’re the doppelgänger.”

Doppelgänger.

Something about the word sets a thousand alarms off in Dany’s head. It has been sitting, unspoken, on the edge of every interaction she has had with this world of vampires and witches, sorcery and spells. She has left it alone for the most part, her mind distracted with more pressing concerns. There has been the attack at the gala and Margaery’s transition, the revelation of what the Starks actually are, Daario’s murder, Waymar’s attempt on her life, and all of it atop the mundane confusion that is the normal life she shed once she stepped back into Starfall’s borders.

This is a story that is already half-finished, a story where people have mistaken her for one of the characters who has long since been removed from the plot.

“What,” Dany asks, a sliver of ice scraping down her spine, “do you mean by doppelgänger?”

The woman laughs.

“Ah, so they haven’t told you that, have they?” At Dany’s furrowed brow, the woman shakes her head, a ghost of a smile still on her lips. “Unfortunately for you but very fortunately for them, you are very important to everything that’s about to happen, love. Nature does love a loophole and you’re it—the mortal shadow of the original. The Starks have been waiting almost a thousand years for you. It is probably inevitable that nature would only give this to them once the red comet and its dark sister returned. Your very blood is tied to the curse that they’ve been living with for centuries.”

First, it was that damned ring. Now it’s her actual blood. Dany feels her lips press into a thin, unimpressed line. She dislikes everything about this the more and more she finds out. And what reason does she have to trust anything out of this woman’s mouth anyway? “Fantastic. Now that you’ve delivered your message to unnerve me, you can let me go.”

“I planned to.” Dany must look surprised because the woman laughs again. “I told you that I meant you no harm and I am always true to my word. Honor is something that you might call old-fashioned but when you’ve lived as long as I have, then you realize how rare and precious it is.”

“Again, you might understand why I don’t believe you.” Her eyes skitter to the door. “Will you let me go back to my friends now?”

The silver in the woman’s eyes is almost distracting. Dany wonders if the woman is trying to compel her despite knowing that she wears Missandei’s vervain amulet around her neck. Her hand flinches up toward her neck but she manages to restrain herself at the last minute. She will not let this woman think she is scared of her. She will not be intimidated by this world and its magic.

“In a moment,” the woman responds, slipping one hand out of her coat. She is holding a cellphone but she doesn’t immediately raise it to use it. Instead, she looks almost thoughtful. “I want you to listen to me very carefully, Miss Dayne, because I’ll only say this once: go home. Go home and forget about everything you have learned these past few weeks. I want you to forget about Jon and the others. They are none of your concern. What they are planning is none of your concern. They are not your friends. At the end of the day, they are monsters above all. Even if they hadn’t once been, the centuries turned them into that.”

Memories seep in through the cracks of the words. She remembers Margaery’s tear-streaked face, her bloodshot eyes filled with confusion, her mouth black and wet with Dany’s blood. She remembers the way Sansa had buried her hands in the ruff of her wolf, a rare, genuine smile on the redhead’s face. She remembers Arya’s incessant chatter on their drive to Oldtown. She remembers Bran’s concern and Rickon’s laughter and Robb’s geniality the night Ashara had invited this wayward family over for dinner.

And she remembers the way Jon had protected her the night of the gala and in the cemetery, the way he has genuinely apologized for everything happening. She recalls sitting with him in his truck after a funeral and the nervous tic of his fingers drumming against the steering wheel, looking more like a normal young man than the centuries-old vampire he truly was. He has sought her out. He has trusted her with secrets that might damn him and his family because he thinks she is a good person.

Monsters, she thinks, recalling Missandei’s reluctance to help the family. Are they? Are they really?

But they are a family with secrets. Dany knows that much. She knows that for every truth they reveal to her, there are a hundred more that they cannot—will not—say. Is that trust? Is that monstrous? If so, then everyone is a monster, including Dany herself. There are walls she has put in place for her own protection, for her own wellbeing. How can she blame the Starks, who have so much to lose for doing the same?

Nothing haunts more than a curse or a mistake centuries old, Arya had said.

What mistake? What curse?

“I can’t do that,” Dany finally says. “Even if I wanted to…I can’t. I won’t do that to them.” The woman sighs.

“Well,” she says, looking genuinely regretful as she raises her phone to type something onto the screen, “it seems as though you are only a doppelgänger in appearance only. I doubt the Daenerys I knew would have been so generous.”

The words take Dany aback. “Wait. You—"

“Everything we do, Miss Dayne, we do for the people we love. Even the monsters of the world protect their own, even if it is to protect them from themselves. In that, I don’t think either of us is quite that different. If this was another time, if this was another life, perhaps I might have wished you a different sort of happiness.” But Dany can only narrow her eyes in confusion as the woman holds the phone up. Those quicksilver eyes never leave Dany’s as she says, “That thing we spoke of? Do it.”

She then reaches into her other pocket, pulling out Dany’s phone. She holds it out, almost as though she is daring Dany to take it.

“I think you’ll want to get home soon, Miss Dayne. I’m sorry that we couldn’t come to an understanding.” When Dany warily retrieves her phone, that smile again appears on the woman’s face. “Starfall is bloated with secrets and I would have rather you stayed out of this mess. Just because you’re the doppelgänger doesn’t mean you needed to be involved. But because you have insisted on this ill-advised friendship with the Starks, I will take it to mean you are comfortable with putting yourself in the crosshairs of this world. When it begins to rain blood on your sleepy little town, you’ll remember that I did try to warn you.”

Dany’s phone buzzes. She looks down. She frowns when she sees that the call is from Vis. There are no missed calls from Jon or Arya but why should there be—it’s not like she has ever seen either of them with a phone. She sends her brother to voicemail, thinking that this night cannot get any stranger as she places her phone in the back pocket of her shorts.

But when Dany looks up, the nameless woman is gone.

She looks around in confusion but there is no sign of her anywhere on the roof. The violet of the evening has faded into the light-polluted blue of the night. Far below, she can hear the sound of sirens pulling up to the Hightower’s perimeter.

And then her phone buzzes again.

And again.

And again.

You’ll want to get home soon, Miss Dayne.

Something like poison crawls down Dany’s throat. She hurriedly retrieves her phone from her pocket, already rushing toward the door.

DANY

DANY CALL ME

IT’S ASHARA

Ashara.

No.

No.

When it begins to rain blood on your sleepy little town, you’ll remember…

I did try to warn you.

She runs.

Braavos burns gold in the setting sun.

In the garden of one of the handful of manses along the canals, music drifts through the evening. Amongst the lilacs and sage and trellises of roses and wisterias, flute and pipe and fiddle create a merry, effervescent mood. A canopy is settled over some of the garden, leaving lords and ladies in shadows as others mingle out in the waning light of day. Wine flows into expensive goblets, silk shimmers in the autumn air, and everyone ignores the young man who quietly slips out of the party.

All except for one person.

She follows him into the manse proper, her slippered feet silent on the marble floors. To anyone else, she would practically be a ghost. But to her brothers and sister and certainly not to him.

“Jon.”

He turns at her voice with a sigh. He would have rather avoided speaking to anyone at length this evening but his family seems to always know when he is in one of his moods. His cousin stands across from him, beautiful and statuesque, garbed in blue and green silks that set her red hair aflame. He suspects that many a young man has sought to lure her away into shadowy alcoves or canopied beds. His cousin will feast well tonight.

“You’re missing the party.”

“So are you.” Sansa approaches him, her smile half-hearted. She reaches for him, tilting his chin toward her. “You’re content here, aren’t you? We never would have stayed otherwise. Please don’t do this to yourself.”

It has been nearly eighty years since Arya found him in those back alleys of Braavos, his hunger burning through him like a fire. It has been nearly eighty years since he discovered that everything that Daenerys had longed for, everything that she had ever wanted, had seeped into the blood of his cousins. The woman he had once loved had wanted the world, had wanted nothing but unending time and him. But instead…

The years roll into one another but he cannot forget. His memory cements itself into his bones and every recollection is clear and detailed and he cannot shake any of it. It is a terrible thing to remember it all, to never forget anything, to have every moment crystalize onto his soul to carry around forever.

“She’ll know something,” Jon argues quietly, stepping away from Sansa’s touch. But his cousin shakes her head.

“A dead end. Another false promise.” She looks angry with them, though he can only guess why. He thinks he deserves more than their anger. He deserves their hatred and their mistrust and their loathing—all of it he deserves for the mistakes he has made, for the promises he never kept. “Stay here with us. I will not lie for you. It is just another night. Give us this, please.”

“I have to try.”

“We cannot trust a witch. You should know this better than anyone.”

“Sansa…”

She looks as though she wants to slap him. But instead, she only turns her face away. “This is a fool’s hope, Jon.”

“Aye. I know.” Sansa’s face crumples slightly at his words. Jon shakes his head. “But I owe it to you all to undo everything that’s been done. Let me do this. I don’t have anything else except this chance.”

He will not beg her. He cannot say the words. But he sees Sansa’s pale eyes soften. She looks as though as she wants to say more but she doesn’t. Instead, she only gently touches his hand, a soft gesture and promise of “be safe”, and then she has turned in a whirlwind of silken skirts, the darkness of the manse swallowing her up, the whisper of blood calling to her from the lush garden just beyond these walls.

He stands in the shadows for a moment longer. He has never told them, though he thinks they’ve already suspected—his bloodthirst is not like theirs. They’d received the very edges of the blood magic that had burned through him, that had engraved immortality into his soul. They had received forever and they had received the hunger.

But Jon is both Stark and Targaryen and everything that Daenerys ever wanted is in him twofold.

He will do anything he can to make this right with his cousins, the family that never asked for any of this, but more than that, he just wants this voracious hunger in him to die, to consume itself, to shatter.

He finds the witch in another smaller manse. Unlike the one he just left, this one is quieter, darker, abandoned by all except its ghosts. There is little that frightens him of the mortal world, though the supernatural world is one of its own unexpected dangers. He pauses at a door, testing it. He presses a hand against the doorframe and tries to push through the open air beyond.

He can’t.

“You’re here,” he calls into the darkness. A moment later, a woman sweeps out of the shadows of the manse, a candleholder in her hands. The tiny flame flickers across her pale face, turning her dark hair molten. She smiles at him, though it is the secretive smile of witches that Jon has learned long ago to mistrust. “May I come in?”

“I make it a habit to not consult with nature’s abominations,” the witch says, her grey-blue eyes shimmering with her enigmatic smile. But her tone softens a little as she continues, “But the spirits have whispered the story to me. They pity you, Jon Snow, and all that you’ve done in the name of what is good and honorable. Why do you come to me this night? The witching hour will not grant you what you are looking for.”

Of course she already knows why he is here. The witches always seem to know him better than he knows himself. He cannot ask her for the one thing he wants most. But… “You don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Redemption,” comes the witch’s reply. “There is little I can do to help you there. Your past is laden with blood and the corpses of those you’ve killed. What happened was not your fault but everything that happened since is. Why should I help you in any way? Do you know how many dead things your family has unleashed onto this world?”

He cannot say. He does not want to know. None of them had known the true extent of what they were when they’d all awoken from death. They hadn’t known how much life and death literally flowed in their bloods, how they could sire others to be exactly like them. Perhaps if they’d known. Perhaps if Daenerys had truly known the price of what she was asking for…

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Jon finally says quietly. “Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon…they didn’t ask for this. If you can’t help me, help them.”

The witch stares at him for a long silent moment. He can feel the judgment on him. If he even listens closely, he might be able to hear the spirits whispering of all the things he has done wrong, all the blood he has shed, all of the harm he has irrevocably done.

Then the witch reaches her empty hand out toward him. In her palm sits the ring he had left her with his first request so many weeks ago.

“I think,” she says, her voice full of pity, “that you are a good man, Jon Snow, and you will suffer more than you should for longer than I would wish on anyone. But I cannot undo what has been done by those more powerful than I.”

But something in his expression must stop her because she shakes her head. “I can lessen the pain though. And so, I think, can you.” She gestures at him to take the ring, which he reluctantly does. “I can unbind you all from the night. Wear that ring and the daylight is yours once again. I will do the same for your family. But I grant this to you under the promise that you will create no more creatures like yourself. The spirits will whisper and we will remember.”

Jon doesn’t know what to say. He can only shake his head speechless. Is this worth the price? Is any of this worth the price?

When the witch turns to leave him at her doorstep, his voice finally breaks through the stranglehold of his doubt.

“When you said I could lessen the pain…” He trails off. The witch looks back at him and then she shakes her head.

“You have the ability to do so, Jon Snow. But being the creature you are now heightened all the good and bad within you. It did the same for your cousins. What is good is better and what is bad is worse.” She smiles again, but there is a shade of sadness to it now. “If you turn off your humanity, you will be everything that you feared to be. It is your guilt and your honor that drives you now. You may suffer greatly from your pain but it is the only thing that keeps you human.”

It is an answer to a question he never knew to ask. There is a part of him that may have known this, that may have seen it in the people his cousins have become. But the idea that all of this hurt, all of this suffering, is the only thing that keeps him the same, keeps him from becoming the true monster he fears he truly is…

“I just want to forget,” he finally says, though he doesn’t expect an answer.

He almost flinches back when the witch reaches past the threshold of her door to gently cup his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” Kinvara murmurs, eyes as bright as silver moonlight. “That is the one thing I will never do for you. You must remember. You must remember it all. That is the price—and the curse—of immortality.”

No one pays any attention to Dany when she bursts from the Hightower. The night is aglow with the riotous flashing lights of police cars and firetrucks, even a lone ambulance whose presence will prove to be useless. Beyond the gathered crowd and the crime scene tape, Dany can almost imagine the mangled body of the nameless man who’d been compelled to fall, blood and gore scattered across the pavement, bones shattered, gristle everywhere. The woman is nowhere to be seen.

But none of that matters. None of that matters because she is on the phone with Vis and there is another nightmare unfolding too many miles away on the other side of the mountain pass.

“I don’t know what happened,” her brother tells her breathlessly, even as she hears paramedics and sirens in the background. “I was coming into the house and I just heard Ashara start screaming. There was blood all over the kitchen. They’re saying she may have walked into one of the knives. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Is she okay? Where are you? Vis, is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” her older brother says. She can hear the frustration and the waning shock in his voice and why is she so far away? Why is she here in Oldtown instead of with her family? “She’ll be in surgery. Gods, Dany. How the hell does this happen?”

But Dany thinks she knows. She thinks she knows and she wants to be sick. She remembers the woman pulling out her phone, remembers her telling the person on the other line to “do it”. And she remembers the blank fog in the nameless man’s eyes in the moment before he stepped over the parapet of the highest building in Oldtown.

Ashara.

Vis.

You’ll remember that I did try to warn you.

Dear gods, what has she done?

It takes Dany an hour to find Jon and the others and, in the end, it is Grey who technically finds her. She is racing back toward the campus, a roaring buzz of panic in her head, when she blindly collides into something solid and unyielding, damn near dropping and shattering her phone in the process.

But Jon is already holding her steady, already staring down at her in concern and relief.

“Dany? Are you alright?”

It takes her a moment to adjust to her surroundings. She’d only been racing in the direction of the campus, barely paying any attention to the streetlights or people she passed or traffic. How she managed to make it here without getting hit by a car is a feat in itself but all she can recall is the swirling thoughts in her head and the image of Ashara bleeding out on the kitchen floor, her violet eyes wide with pain and confusion. How could someone—anyone—have that kind of power over people? To compel them to harm themselves, to compel them to kill themselves?

She looks past Jon’s shoulder and sees Arya, Grey, and Ygritte standing just behind him. Ygritte plants her fists on her hips and gives Grey a crooked smile. “Looks like your locating spell worked. How come you can never find my keys?”

“I’ve told you a hundred times—it doesn’t work on inanimate objects.”

“Dany,” Jon says her name again, breaking through the fog of adrenaline in her head. “What happened? Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I have to get home,” Dany manages to blurt out. She shakes her head wildly, trying to clear her thoughts. It barely works. “She compelled Ashara to hurt herself and I’m too far away. That man jumped from the building and Vis called me and she said that she tried to warn me and—”

“Hold on.” Jon’s voice is a reassuring burr through the hazy darkness that seems determined to overwhelm her. But a quick glance up at his expression and he seems completely baffled. “What happened to Ashara? Who told you this?”

“I don’t know.” She tries to rake her hand through her hair, though she’s stopped by the ponytail her hair is still pulled into. She almost rips the hair band out in frustration but she just gestures helplessly with her phone instead. “I have to get home, Jon. I have to get to Ashara.” He stares at her silently for a moment more (and for a brief second, she thinks his eyes might almost be the same unnatural shade of quicksilver as the woman’s) before he nods, keeping a steadying hand on her arm. He looks back at the other three.

“Right, we can do that. Ygritte…”

The woman shrugs. “I’ll text you once I find anything else. Go get your damned monster of a truck.” She looks over at Grey. “You should probably head out with them. If they’re about to be up to their fucking necks in magic, their witch is going to need your help.”

Grey frowns, giving the redheaded vampire a sidelong look but Ygritte only shakes his head. The frown only deepens but the young man says nothing more.

The next several minutes pass in a blur, Dany’s attention mostly focused on her texts to Vis. She wants to call him back again, to assure him that she’s on her way home. But as the adrenaline fades away, it is replaced by the lingering, numbing guilt. This is her fault. She knows that no matter what anyone will say to brush everything aside, none of this would have happened if she was anyone except who she is. The woman had called her the doppelgänger. Everyone keeps mistaking her for a woman named Daenerys Targaryen who has been dead and buried for centuries.

What does it mean? What does any of this mean? And exactly what is the truth of that woman’s relationship to the Starks and Daario’s ring and a curse?

Dany is not one to sit back passively and let terrible things happen to the people she loves. It is why she stayed in Starfall even after the world as she knew it irrevocably changed. And she has promised to help the Starks, this strange, sad family of people cursed to live forever and lust after blood, with whatever they need. She has promised to keep her family safe and she has promised to help people she has barely known for a month and she is starting to think that these things cannot be anything except mutually exclusive.

When Jon pulls up, she hears Grey say he’ll follow them shortly. She watches, numb with all that the night has revealed, as Arya clambers into the front seat and Jon climbs out of the driver’s seat to help her into the back.

“One thing,” Ygritte says before Jon closes the door. She is looking at Dany again with renewed interest. Jon pauses, glancing over at the woman. She crosses her arms, eyes skittering from Dany to Jon and then back to Dany again. “He called you Dany. Your full name’s Daenerys, isn’t it?”

I know. You’re the doppelgänger.

When neither Dany nor Jon answers, Ygritte lets out a blistering string of curses, though whether it is directed at her or Jon, Dany can’t say. But Ygritte points her finger accusingly at Jon. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Jon is quiet for a moment and then he shuts the car door.

“So do I.”

Silence descends into the car and stays that way long after they pass the city borders into the mountains. Even Arya doesn’t attempt to fill the silence with chatter this time around. The knots in Dany’s stomach have nothing to do with the speed at which Jon is driving. Now they are entirely made from the worry and horror of what awaits her when she gets home, boiled in the guilt that her thoughts keep circling back to.

The logical part of her mind struggles to work past the emotional turmoil. She knows that she is the doppelgänger. The woman had said something about how Dany’s very existence is the way nature finds a loophole. Everyone keeps mistaking her for another woman named Daenerys Targaryen, a woman that Jon had said died a very long time ago. The Starks need a ring that happens to be her old engagement ring, a ring Daario was undoubtedly killed over.

A doppelgänger. A seal. A curse.

There is an answer here, Dany is sure of it. But every time she thinks that answer might be within her grasp, it slips through her hands like water through a sieve. All she can think of is the black empty look in the man’s eyes before he plummeted to his death. All she can imagine is Ashara gasping in pain on the floor of her kitchen, compelled by some nameless woman to harm herself if Dany didn’t comply to stay away from the Starks.

She doesn’t get it and she’s not sure she wants to understand.

But there is something she is almost certain of, something that she just needs the Starks to trust her enough to admit.

“Jon,” she says into the heavy silence that has choked the car. “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”

She sees Arya shoot her cousin a warning look. There must be something in her voice that necessitates that warning but Dany does not care. Ashara is already hurt because of the things she has involved herself in. Is Vis next? Missandei? Will they hurt Margaery more? Threaten her family? How far does this woman’s reach extend? What if everyone she has ever known or loved is at risk? Can she risk it with half-truths and promises given simply because Jon called her a good person?

She’s not sure. She doesn’t think so.

After a long, drawn-out moment, Jon finally says, “I might not.” He meets her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry too. Dany closes her eyes.

“Daenerys Targaryen…” she begins and even though her eyes are closed, she can almost imagine Jon flinching at the name. “The woman said I was her doppelgänger.”

Nature does love a loophole and you’re it—the mortal shadow of the original.

Dany now realizes that she had heard the woman incorrectly. In her confusion, she had not realized or understood the importance of the title. She had not remembered her dream.

A doppelgänger.

The mortal shadow of the original.

The mortal shadow of the Original.

“Daenerys…she was the first vampire, wasn’t she? She was the first Original.”

Neither Jon nor Arya says a word. It is answer enough. Dany doesn’t know if she wants to scream or cry. Her nails dig into her palms and she lets out a long slow breath. This is the price she has paid to help the Starks. But it feels like something is shattered here. That this truth, that this sliver of their past, hides an avalanche of other secrets that they are keeping from her.

“What happened to her?”

The unspoken question: is the same going to happen to me?

But to her surprise, Jon answers her.

“I told you the truth, Dany.” His voice is very quiet. “She died a long time ago.”

“How do you know?” When he doesn’t respond, she bristles, her anger finally catching up to her in her exhaustion. “How do you know? Dammit, my mum is in the hospital because a vampire compelled her to stab herself in the stomach with a knife! How am I supposed to trust any of you? How am I supposed to keep my family and my friends safe when you keep secrets like this? Is that what trust is worth to you? Their lives? You all have been immortal for so long that you don’t realize the rest of us don’t get that luxury. The rest of us don’t get second chances. If we die, we die. What kind of person do you think I am to let the people I love be collateral damage? I won’t do it. Not for you, not for anyone.”

Maybe the woman was right. Maybe she should just absolve herself of everything the Starks want to pull her into. They’re already damned—it’s not like anything she’ll do will save them anyway.

“Dany…”

But she lets out a disgusted scoff, turning away in her seat and glaring out into the blackness beyond the window and the starry night sky that follows them home. She thinks she sees Arya give her older cousin a look out of the corner of her eye but she doesn’t turn. She doens’t care. She has had a shit night and she cannot keep bending, cannot keep allowing the Starks all of this leeway with her life.

But then she hears Jon say, “I know Daenerys is dead because she died in my arms.”

The words do not make any sense at first. They splash against her ears like water. She frowns. “I don’t…I don’t understand. You’re immortal. You said nothing can hurt you all.”

“Half the lore’s wrong. I didn’t say all of it was.”

“We can die,” Arya adds, giving her cousin a worried look. But then she looks back at Dany with an expression of warning. There is something here to this story that Dany is not supposed to know, something that is far more personal than anything she might be able to grasp. “And she did. She’s gone. She’s not coming back.”

Jon is refusing to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror now. And Dany can only recall the things he’d said that night on the porch when he had returned her necklace, when he had been kind to her when there had been no need to be kind.

Very passionate, very driven, often kind. When she told you she could change the world, you’d believe her. But she was also…complicated. Her temper could blind her to her own faults. And she could be cruel because of it.

I just want you to know that I understand that your friendship with me is based on your friendship with her.

But mostly, we’re looking for it because it belonged to the girl Jon was gonna marry.

…oh.

It falls into place quietly, almost gently, and she almost curses herself for not realizing it sooner.

“She was the one you were going to marry,” Dany murmurs quietly, remembering that black, centuries-old grief that sat with the darkness of his grey eyes like a ghost. When Jon doesn’t answer right away, his hands only clenching around the steering wheel, she knows that she is right, that somewhere, hundreds of years ago, a woman who had looked just like her may have promised Jon a love that lasted forever…and now she is gone and Dany is here and there is that unspoken something that hangs between her and Jon now.

Gods, she had wanted to kiss him.

She buries her palms into her eyes, feeling the headache that twinges at the edge of her vision threaten to overwhelm her. She hates all of this. She hates all of this and she can do nothing to fix it. How does she make this right? How does she get the quiet, normal life that she had once run away from back?

It is a long drive back to Starfall.

Ashara is getting out of surgery by the time Dany arrives at Starfall General Hospital.

“I’m sorry it’s been such a shit month,” Jaime Lannister says as Dany peeks into the room where Ashara is resting. “And I’m sorry Cersei’s been making it worse. I’ll talk to her.”

Her adoptive mum looks paler than usual with heavy dark shadows beneath her eyes. But other than that and the IV that is taped to her wrist, she looks nowhere near the nightmare that Dany had conjured up on the drive back from Oldtown. Dany feels almost faint with relief and she grabs at the door frame for support. She is already physically and emotionally exhausted (Vis had taken one look at her face, said she looked like shit, and wandered off to find her some “equally shitty tasting coffee” from a vending machine) and seeing her mum safe and sound nearly finishes her off. She gives Jaime a shaky smile. “Thank you.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Cersei’s always been difficult.” He nods at Ashara. “By the way, tell her to be a little more careful around kitchen equipment when she wakes up. I’d hate for the only person in town to brew a decent cup of coffee to be on bed rest for too long.”

“I’m sure you’re not the only one in town who thinks so.”

Jaime flashes her a brief smile.

“There’s no one like me in town.” He gives her a friendly clap on the shoulder. “I think Tyrion will be around later. Give him any updates and let me know if you need any help. Again, I’m really sorry that all of this is happening.”

As Jaime walks off, Dany continues staring at Ashara on the bed, her arms wrapped around her middle in a tiny effort to console herself, to convince herself that everything is okay. She doesn’t quite succeed. She’s not quite sure she’ll ever be able to truly believe that everything is okay, not anymore, not after her choices have led everyone down this hole of terror and uncertainty.

Dany reaches up to touch the vervain necklace at her breastbone. She wishes she could undo it all. She wishes she could go back in time and never choose to leave Winterfell. The Starks never would have known her. Everything with the comet would have come to pass. Margaery would still be human. Maybe Waymar and Lancel would still be alive.

She rubs at her face. What the hell is she supposed to do now?

“Here.” She glances up to see her older brother handing her a styrofoam cup of coffee. “You look like you’ve been dragged down the old roads out west.”

“Thanks, Vis.” She takes a single, cautious sip of the coffee. It tastes disgusting. “I’m glad you were with her.” Vis shrugs, though he gives her a very suspicious narrow-eyed look. She is glad that he hasn’t asked why the hell she was out in Oldtown anyway, though she doubts she’ll be able to avoid the conversation for long. If Vis is anything, he is annoyingly persistent. She’ll have to figure out some lie once she gets some sleep.

“I told Myrcella I’d call her once Ashara got out of surgery.” He gestures with his phone. “I’ll be right back.”

Dany watches him go before she finally manages to dredge up enough courage to walk into the room. After everything that’s happened, she doesn’t trust herself to move closer to the bed. Instead, she sits in one of the ugly upholstered chairs off to the side. The hospital room is far colder than it was outside and Dany is already regretting her strapless top and shorts. She stares at the sleeping woman in the bed and draws her knees up to her chest, balancing her coffee in the crook between her belly and her thighs.

I’m sorry, Dany thinks. This shouldn’t have happened to you. I said I would protect you and Vis, and now look at everything. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

There is a knock on the door.

Dany turns to see Missandei standing in the door. She barely has enough energy to pull up a grateful smile as her best friend sits next to her, wrapping her in a warm side hug. It does not quite shake off the chill that has settled into her bones but it is enough to calm her slowly spiraling thoughts. She sinks into her friend’s embrace and Missandei keeps her arms loosely draped around Dany’s shoulders.

“I should have been here,” Dany says quietly. Missandei though gently hushes her.

“None of that,” she says. “You were doing what you’ve always done—being a good person. I may not like the Starks but I know what they see in you. Don’t you ever doubt that you’re anything less than someone with a good heart.”

Dany shakes her head. “If I was such a good person, then I never would have chosen them over the safety of my family.”

“I’ll give them vervain too,” Missandei assures her. “We’ll protect them. I promise.”

Promises. Dany feels as if her world has become filled with promises she can’t keep. And all of it is because of another young woman, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, a woman that she still knows nothing about, a woman who has dictated the trajectory of Dany’s own life.

A mortal shadow.

I think you have a good heart.

Dany closes her eyes.

I promise.

I’m sorry.

Down the hall, Viserys Dayne leans against the wall next to the coffee vending machine, absently rolling a few coins between his fingers.

On his phone screen, Myrcella Baratheon is chattering away about how relieved she is that Ashara is okay and how she’ll be over first thing in the morning with flowers and is Dany okay and if not she’ll also make a casserole she’ll drop by Ashara’s house after her shift at the coffee shop and is Viserys paying any attention to what she’s saying?

Viserys blinks drowsily. “What was that?”

“Ugh. You’re the worst. I’ll drop some stuff over after my shift tomorrow.” Robert Baratheon’s only daughter sticks her tongue out at him. “Give my love to Dany, you bastard.”

“Right. Sure.”

But Myrcella is already rolling her eyes and a moment later, the call has ended.

Viserys stands there for a few moments longer, staring at the blank phone screen before he shakes his head. He peels away from the wall. He had checked in on his little sister of course. He doesn’t understand why the hell she was hours away in Oldtown in the first place but at least at his first call, she’d returned as soon as she had been able. Her car had still been at Ashara’s though and he knows that he saw Missandei in town while Dany was gone.

He has an idea, though he’s not sure if he wants to confront her about it now. Dany’s always kept her secrets, even (especially) from him. But Vis isn’t blind nor is he stupid. There is something strange going on around town and he is sure it is in some way connected with the new family in town. It doesn't make sense that Dany would be in Oldtown when Ashara was hurt.

It was an accident, Viserys tells himself, even though he knows what he saw. He shouldn’t have seen it. He still doesn’t understand.

Ashara’s phone had rung. She had picked up. A strange look had glossed over violet eyes. Vis, peering up from the kitchen island, gave her a quizzical look.

And then his adoptive mum had grabbed a chef’s knife from the knife block and plunged it into her belly.

He hadn’t told the cops that, of course. He had even lied to Dany on the phone. When he grabbed Ashara’s phone to find out who the hell had called her, the number on the other end had been disconnected. It was a dead end and now here he is in this depressing hospital, not knowing why he’s here in the first place because Ashara never, ever would have done something like this.

But he can’t shake that look he saw in her eyes either. What does it mean? And what the hell is Dany hiding?

With an irritable hiss, Viserys shoves his phone into his pocket. The plastic clinks up against something else within the recesses of his pocket and he sighs miserably, fishing out the solid little item. He frowns down at it as the fluorescent light of the hallway glints off the silver. This is another thing he needs to ask Dany about, though something else has stilled his tongue. After all, he still can’t fucking figure out why the hell Daario would send this to him anyway.

And he doesn’t know why but he thinks if he asks Dany, it is going to open a door to answers he doesn’t want to know.

“What a fucking mess.”

Shaking his head, he shoves his little sister’s old engagement ring into his other pocket. Then he heads back down the hall to Ashara’s room.

Gods, he needs some halfway decent coffee.

Chapter Text

0. To you:

I have made the choice to start writing this all down. It is not for me, since I cannot forget anything anymore—every memory I have ever had, every memory I had thought I’d forgotten, sits within me now. It is not a curse so much as a branding and a reminder, here now, of the things I have lost and the things I still want. But I write this down for you, for when this journal will be found, when the story has come undone again.

When I woke, she was there with me to tell me all that had taken pla

She told me that I was something immortal now, that the blood in my veins was impervious to disease and death as mortals know it. It has been a few hundred years now but I still remember her words. Here is the thing about these people: they will tell you lies and you will believe them because what else can you do except listen and survive?

This city is filled with bodies that no one will miss. The hunger sits within me like a fire. What else can I do except feed? There are no rules to this game. But I will make them all the same and I will understand it. There are others, after all, others like me. But they do not understand and they do not know.

Tomorrow I travel East. At the very least, it will be something new for me. But Varys tells me that what I need was last seen in the eastern mountains. One would think it would be simple to find the ring of the infamous dragon whore but the witches do love their secrets.

Dany puts down the journal with a frown. She has already spent most of the morning flipping through the journal, noting the sketches that fill up many of the pages. She has handled the battered diary as delicately as she has been able, though she feels as though she should handle it with all the care of a historian, with gloves and in a temperature-controlled room. Paging through the journal earlier, she had been disappointed to see that there were no dates on any of the entries and she still has not been able to gauge who the journal belonged (belongs?) to.

She looks at the next few pages. The first illustration in the book is the ring that she now knows is (was) her engagement ring. Now, there are rough sketches of mountains and forests, horses and livestock, liveried men and noble women with smudged watercolor faces. None of it is familiar, though she supposes the mountains could be the Vale. It has been years since she’s traveled there though.

She runs a hand through her pale hair, glancing out her car window to the driveway that circles up to the Stark manor. She has not yet been able to work up the nerve to actually drive past the gates and the surrounding hedges toward the house. She doesn’t even know if any of the Starks are at home. But she’s still here, still waiting.

She feels like a fool.

These past several days have been a strange blur. Ashara came home from the hospital under strict instructions to take it easy while her stomach wound heals (a task much easier said than done, considering Ashara). Dany, not knowing if the woman from the roof compelled Ashara at work or at the house, had felt anxiety sit in her chest like a slowly tightening knot over those first few days, wondering if all of her protection was for naught when the vampire from the roof might have already been invited inside their house. Vis has been acting strangely too, around both Ashara and Dany, which has left Dany wondering if the nameless vampire has also compelled her brother to do something equally as dangerous to send a message to her.

To place a salve over some of her consistent worry, Missandei had kept her promise, delivering a questionably flavored tea blend containing vervain the same afternoon Ashara came home (“it’s healthy,” Dany had feebly explained when Ashara’s mouth puckered at the taste). Vis had been easy enough too, especially after his complaining when Dany had received her necklace—Missandei had simply given him a bracelet and told him not to do anything stupid to test if it worked.

Still, as Dany folds the journal into her bag, she wonders how the hell the entire town can be protected. Do they give everyone vervain? Do they tell Jaime and the rest of the officers that vampires are in town? Ashara could have died and Dany can’t shake the image of a blank-eyed Meryn Trant stepping over the edge of a roof to plummet to his death. How does one fight mind compulsion that overrides a person’s basic instinct of self-preservation?

She doesn’t know. Even worse, she’s not sure if she can trust the Starks to tell her the truth.

I'm trusting that you'll be honest with me. Now you need to keep trusting me, Jon. I'm not going anywhere.

I'm not running away.

Goddammit.

And so Dany finds herself pulling up the winding drive to their front door anyway, killing the engine with a deep breath. She thinks she has to try, at least, to find some sort of answer, some sort of agreement that will get the Starks and all of the danger that comes with them out of this town. As she walks up to the front door, her sneakers crunching in the gravel, she wishes she had a better solution.

Of course, it is just her luck that Sansa Stark is the one who answers the door.

The tall redhead seems surprised to see her. She does not open the door enough to let Dany in but watches her with something akin to caution and mistrust swimming along with the uncertainty in her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see Jon. Is he here?”

“Yes.”

But Sansa still does not move. Dany shifts from one foot to the other, even as that ice-pale gaze stays on her.

“Where is he?”

“Around. Why are you here? You shouldn’t be here.”

“The only reason I shouldn’t be here is because I don’t have time for this,” Dany replies with more than a little heat. “But I need to speak to Jon.”

“If you’re only going to yell at him for not telling you about Daenerys…”

She could. She is well within her rights to. She had some time ago realized that she resembled the other Daenerys Targaryen in some way, though the idea of being a complete doppelgänger (a mortal shadow, she reminds herself, shuddering) had been foreign. To find out that Jon had been in love with the other girl, that he planned to marry her, that she was the first Original, the first vampire, has left her tossing and turning in her bed at night, unable to sort out the tangle of emotions left behind from these revelations. She is angry and hurt and confused and she wants—needs—answers.

But she won’t tell Sansa any of that.

“I only want to talk to him,” Dany replies with steel in her voice. “After everything that’s happened, he owes me that at least.”

Sansa takes in a breath as if prepared to argue. But then she shakes her head with a scoff.

“He’s at his place around the back of the main house.” As Dany turns to leave though, the redheaded vampire calls her name and Dany halts, turning back to meet the glacial stare. Sansa warns, “Whatever you think you know, whatever you think he did, you don’t know the whole story. There is a reason he never told you more about her. Remember that before you decide to blame him for all that has happened. He already blames himself for far too much.”

The door closes and Dany is left standing there, frustration burning in the pit of her chest.

As she follows the winding gravel path back toward the guesthouse behind the main property, Dany wonders exactly what other secrets about that first Daenerys Targaryen the family is hiding. If she is the first vampire and the first Original, it stands to reason that either she turned at the same time as Jon and his cousins or she was the one who turned them. Ygritte had mentioned that it is extraordinarily difficult to kill an Original. But if that’s the case, how did the other Daenerys die? And when exactly did she die?

The two-story guesthouse is the same turn-of-the-century design as the main manor, all brick masonry and half-timber framing and a steeply sloped grey-tiled roof. She might almost call it quaint, though she recalls her first thought when she heard that Jon had his own place on the property—that this is the perfect place to kill someone with no one the wiser.

Of course, it is the thought in the forefront of her mind when she knocks on the door—

“Dany?”

—which is why she nearly has a heart attack when Jon’s voice comes from behind her.

She spins, hand on her chest and heart somewhere in the stratosphere, nearly dropping her bag as she does so. Jon is approaching her from the gravel path, damn near silent as the grave. Ghost is at his side, peering up at her with crimson eyes that are far more intelligent than she is certain she is comfortable with. She tears her eyes away to look over at Jon and sees that he is looking at her with mild confusion in those dark grey eyes of his, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. His dark curls are unbound for once and tousled from the warm summer wind. He pauses several feet away from the door though, an expression of hesitation crossing his face.

Trying to bring her heart level back down from jackhammer speeds, Dany simply explains, “I wanted to talk to you.”

The wariness does not leave Jon’s face. But still, he nods. “Okay. Okay, sure.”

But even as he takes a step toward the door, she holds up a hand to stop him. When he meets her eyes, she realizes that this may be the most vulnerable his expression has ever been. She has always wondered about her inability to gauge his thoughts, this young-looking man who seemingly guarded all of his thoughts and emotions so carefully. It makes her wonder too about Sansa’s words about blame, and her own too from that conversation before the road trip to Oldtown.

Because I think there is a part of you, however much you try to hide it, that believes you don't deserve any kindness.

“Before I go in there with you, I need to know: are you going to be honest with me this time?” When Jon doesn’t answer right away, Dany continues, her voice sharp with exasperation. “I cannot do this with any of you. I have asked repeatedly for you to tell me the truth. I understand why you’re holding secrets back—you can’t have lived this long without having many of them—but you have to understand how much I have to lose if you keep telling me lies or half-truths or not telling me anything at all. This is my home. These are my friends and my family. Ashara and Margaery have already been hurt because of this. Lancel is dead. This isn’t a game to me. It isn’t just your family at risk.”

Jon is quiet for a very, very long moment, utterly and inhumanly still.

Then, “I want to be honest with you, Dany. I do.”

“Then why can’t you?”

He looks torn.

Dany does not know what to do with this. She has opened herself up to Jon. She has agreed to keep their most damning secret an actual secret. Now all of it has come back to haunt her, every sharp edge bloodied with regret. She lets out a frustrated, disappointed sigh before stepping off the porch. She had not counted on this confrontation, not really. And she cannot even begin to fathom the chasm of hurt that has opened up in her chest.

“Listen,” she begins quietly but stops when Jon shakes his head.

“No. You’re right.” He runs a hand through his dark hair, his dark grey eyes troubled. “This isn’t…I know I’ve apologized. I’ll keep apologizing if that’s what it takes. But I literally can’t tell you some of what you want to know.”

Dany can’t help herself—she scoffs. “Is that another excuse?”

Yet Jon shakes his head again.

“No. Dany, I physically can’t tell you.”

The words take a moment to clarify in her mind. And when they do, a dozen questions spring up in their place—and then almost immediately, the answer. She thinks of Margaery’s amnesia and she thinks of Meryn Trant and she thinks of Ashara and suddenly it is too much. It is too perplexing.

“You can’t…because you’re compelled not to.” She stares at him. “By whom?”

But even before Jon speaks, Dany realizes she already knows the answer.

“By Daenerys, I’m sure.” He grimaces. “The other Daenerys.”

“You don’t know? And I thought she was dead.”

“She is.”

This doesn’t make any sense. Dany shakes her head, holding up her hand to stop him from explaining anything more. She doesn’t know the rules of how compulsion works. Hell, she still isn’t entirely sure what Originals can and cannot do compared to normal vampires (and honestly, is this where she’s at in her life where she is thinking that there’s such a thing as a normal vampire?). She chews on her bottom lip in thought, feeling the insatiable need for answers rise within her like a breath. She meets Jon’s eyes again.

“Can you tell as much as you can without telling me…” whatever it is you’re compelled not to say, “…everything else?”

Jon pauses and then he nods. It’s not entirely the answer Dany is looking for, but it’s something.

The inside of the guesthouse is a surprise. While the main house seems to be a dark, foreboding ode to a previous century, the guesthouse is filled with natural light and the décor seems as though it was made on the modern end of the turn of the century. Dany glances around the open-concept first floor, noting the furniture and decorations and thinking that she is sure she has seen the siblings to some pieces in her rented flat across town.

“This is…not what I was expecting. Have you been updating your place since you all have been back in town?”

“Not really.” Ghost trots past both Jon and Dany to curl up in front of the unlit fireplace, placing his head on his huge front paws and going to sleep. Jon walks into the kitchen, calling back over his shoulder, “Did you want something to drink?” Dany gives him a look.

“If you’re suggesting a blood bag…”

As she sits down on the edge of the couch, she hears Jon laugh.

“More like water or whiskey.”

“I feel like whiskey is probably the better choice after the nonsense you all have put me through,” Dany says beneath her breath, knowing full well that Jon, with his vampiric abilities, can hear her. It’s confirmed when she hears him sigh in acknowledgment but she is not going to apologize for it—she thinks she is more than justified in her annoyance.

A moment later, Jon returns with two glasses of whiskey, one of which he hands to her. Dany sips cautiously (in case she finds herself knocked out by some unknown sedative for the second time in less than two weeks) but instead she pauses at the rich, complex notes that sit on her tongue. She immediately throws a scowl at him.

“You updated all of your furniture but I’m sure this whiskey is over a century old.” Jon shrugs.

“One of the few perks of immortality.”

Dany can’t help but smile at that. “One of the few? I’d think there’d be more.”

The whiskey burns pleasantly down her throat but she is determined not to get tipsy while she is here with this strangely compelling man. She balances the glass on her knee, turning in Jon’s direction. She notices that with his free hand, he is tapping his fingers against his thigh in that nervous gesture she has become so familiar with. Something about the tic and the way his gaze seems distant and unsure ties something in her heart into knots.

She starts, “Jon…”

“You should understand,” Jon interrupts quietly, “that I know you’re not her.”

Dany is not entirely sure if she should be reassured by those words or not. She scrapes her tongue along her front teeth, relying on the pain to keep her grounded.

“You love her. Even after all this time, you still love her.”

But to her surprise, Jon shakes his head.

“I loved who she was, not the person she became in the end.”

But she was also complicated. Her temper could blind her to her own faults.

And she could be cruel because of it.

Dany hesitates. “A vampire?”

“No.” Jon takes a pull of his whiskey. There is no mistaking the hurt in his grey eyes now. “Some monsters can be very, very human.”

Even after she’d broken up with Daario, Dany had never thought ill of him, had never believed him to be anything except the wrong person for her. And yes, she could have been more kind in the way she broke off their engagement. She could have been a little more gentle. But she had never wanted to hurt him. She had never wanted him to suffer, though it seems that he did regardless simply because of who she is.

She leans against the arm of the couch, looking down at her whiskey. These are matters of the heart. Missandei and Margaery have reminded her frequently how incredibly protective she can be about her own heart, her own emotions. She is willing to risk everything to protect the people she loves and her word means something genuine to her. How can she begin to parse the depths of what Jon is telling her? How does she begin to understand the complexities of a relationship that is centuries gone and buried?

“You said once she was remarkable,” Dany notes quietly. She does not say it but there is a part of her that wants to be assured that this person who shares her name had been a good person, that there had been some redeeming quality about her to make Jon love her in the first place. She does not know why but she needs to hear it from him.

Jon nods.

“She was,” he replies. “And I would have forgiven her the world but…”

He trails off into silence. Dany waits but when the silence stretches on for too long, she bumps her knee against his.

“But?”

Jon lets a long, slow breath and surges to his feet, clearly agitated despite how closed off his expression is. She can see the beginnings of a storm in his eyes but he still turns away from her. Ghost looks up from his spot by the dark, cold fireplace, scarlet eyes watching his master with something Dany might call concern.

She says nothing though, wishing for she doesn’t know what, as she watches Jon pace, his grip on his glass almost white-knuckled. Knowing the strength he has as a vampire, she is surprised he hasn’t broken the glass into a thousand shards yet.

“Before everything happened, before she got her witch to seal the spell, she told me that only death could pay for life,” Jon murmurs, closing his eyes. “And the cost…the cost of that…”

No.

There is something here that Dany cannot know, something that she shouldn’t know. She wants to tell him to stop, to tell him that this is a truth that needs to remain hidden from her.

Yet…

“Do you know,” Jon asks her, voice oddly flat, “how many deaths equal forever?”

Dany had been about to raise her glass to her lips, to steady her nerves against the inevitable fall of the guillotine, but her hand freezes midway between her lap and her mouth.

That is not what she was expecting and yet somehow it is exactly what she was expecting. The other Daenerys Targaryen is still an enigma to her, still a mirrored shadow caught up in the maelstrom of the past. But there has been something about this larger-than-life woman, something in the words not spoken, the careful words that the Starks have uttered about her, that makes the revelation both corroborative and shocking.

How many deaths equal forever?

It is innumerable. Countless.

An unspeakable horror.

As her head reels, as she struggles to comprehend the magnitude of what Jon has said, he continues, each word barbed with remorse and guilt, “An entire city burned to seal that spell and at the end of it all, she was dead anyway. I’ve spent the past one thousand ninety-three years trying to find a way to undo what she had done.” Jon rubs his face tiredly. “This is the closest we’ve come. In eight weeks, we need to have that ring or everything I’ve led them through is for nothing.”

“You blame yourself,” Dany murmurs and she taste the truth of the words on her tongue. She settles her glass on the coffee table, shaking her head in disbelief. “You blame yourself for all of this, don’t you? Because what happened with this…spell or whatever went wrong because of it—it changed your cousins too. And you think none of this would have happened if…what, Jon? It sounds like there was nothing you could have done.”

“Aye, but I should have tried anyway.”

A thousand years of guilt. A thousand years of a graveyard filled with if only and what if. A thousand years of remembering that someone you once loved so long ago so well had committed an atrocity so great, it had all but erased her name from the history books.

Grief is complicated.

The most you can do is survive it.

It infuriates her and it breaks her heart.

She stands then, not entirely sure what to do with herself at first, before crossing over to Jon. And then she reaches out to tilt his face toward her, feeling annoyance and frustration and sorrow and anger scald the tip of her tongue. His expression is still guarded, his grey eyes shadowed.

After studying him for a long moment, fingers electrified from where they touch cool skin, Dany says, with no little exasperation in her voice, “I am telling you this with all the wisdom I have picked up in the past twenty-four years of my life, which may seem very little in comparison but is still true: our greatest weakness is the part of the past we don’t let go of. You can regret the things that happened. You can mourn the things you’ve lost. You can hate the person you were at a moment when you should have been someone different. But in the end, you have to let it all go. You have to turn away from the wreckage and look forward. You have to be ready to embrace the good things so that when they do come to you—and they will—you will be ready to embrace them and remember why any life is worth living.”

She knows she has asked Jon to be truthful with her but there is pain here that she is not sure she can bear, a thousand years worth of it. She asks quietly, “And if I help you, if I help you find this ring that binds this spell, if Missy helps undo it…what happens then?”

Jon has been completely still beneath her touch up until now. He draws in a breath, brow furrowed. “We either die or we become human again. None of us know for sure.”

“And you’re willing to risk either outcome?”

This time Jon reaches up and gently takes Dany’s hand in his, lowering it away from his face as he meets her eyes quietly. He doesn’t need to say the answer. She already knows.

What comes after all of this survival?

A risk, a chance, an end—and perhaps damnation. Can she accept that? Can she really agree to be part of something that might be entirely fatal to these people she’s come to know? And what happens to all the sired vampires that have turned throughout the centuries? What happens to them? What happens to Margaery?

Dany drops her hand out of his grasp. The vampire on the roof had said to stay out of this. She had warned her that nothing good would come from her involvement. Is this what she meant? Did that vampire know something about the binary consequences of what the Starks wanted to do?

There is no answer to that, none that she has ready access to. And if she does go down the path of wondering how her involvement will damn them all, she will be as damned as Jon is living in the mire of decisions that have been made long ago, chained to the past to things that cannot be helped. She turns to sit back on the couch, reaching for her whiskey, needing the alcohol again to blunt the edges of all of this truth, all of this potential for pain.

I’m the doppelgänger, whatever the hell that means in the end. I can’t just…let this happen to them. There has to be something I can do.

But she doesn’t say that aloud. Aloud she only says, the exasperation dissolving on her tongue to leave her tone dry and brittle, “Well, shit.”

Jon sits next to her. “You did ask.”

“And you should have told me that was a remarkably poor decision,” Dany grouses over the rim of her whiskey glass. She lets the whiskey burn on her tongue for a moment, letting the silence marinate between the two of them before she adds on softly, “I’m not going to help you kill Margaery, Jon. If that’s what it turns out undoing the curse will do, I won’t do it. And I’ll do everything in my power to stop you.”

Even if it kills me.

And I won’t help kill you. I can’t.

But Jon nods.

“You’re a good person, Dany,” he says. “I’d expect nothing less of you.”

“But until then…?”

“Until then, we need to find the ring anyway.” Jon leans back on the couch, canting his head back to look up at the ceiling. “We only have eight weeks left before the next comet arrives. We need to find more information, and soon.”

Dany peers at him thoughtfully for a long moment. She will have nightmares tonight certainly. There will be no rest in the darkness for her now that she has uncovered this part of the Starks’ story. There is still so much she wants to know, still so many questions she has—but she doesn’t have the heart to ask them right now. A young woman’s ghost sits between them, and all of her follies and the tragedy of her cruelty.

So instead she asks offhandedly, “Well, what’s the quickest way to gather intel from the largest amount of people at one time?” Jon looks over at her and the meaning of her words must immediately sink in because a cloud crosses his face.

“…no. Absolutely not.”

“Yes,” Dany replies with a small smile. She sits back in the couch now too, raising her glass in a joking toast. “I hope you can play the charming host, Jon Snow, because it’s about time you and your cousins threw a housewarming party.”

The carriage pulls up to the manor long after the sun goes down.

Trailed by his younger cousin, Jon steps down from the porch, the flickering torches of the streetlamps casting mercurial phantom lights in the silver puddles left behind from the earlier thunderstorm. The coachman nods his head respectfully at them from atop his perch—to any unsuspecting passersby, Jon and Bran look like nothing more than two wealthy gentlemen stepping out for a night at the theater in brocade waistcoats and black tie and tails.

But when the footman holds the carriage door open for them, Jon can smell the scent of perfume and blood beyond the door.

A woman sits in the decadent recesses of the carriage, looking as prim and proper as Jon knows she’s not, her pale face painted with the undulating shadows of the night. She is dressed in corset and cape, wine-red and velvet, her wild golden-red hair pinned up in a fashionable updo beneath a jauntily tilted hat. While her smile is friendly when it is aimed at Bran, she scowls at Jon as he follows in after his cousin.

“If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve bought wine.”

“It’s good to see you, Ygritte,” Bran says, polite as always, stretching his long legs out in front of him as the carriage rolls forward on the cobblestoned streets of King’s Landing. Shifting on the cushioned bench, Ygritte nods towards the decanter of blood sitting on the tiny table opposite the door.

“Be my guest.”

For nearly three hundred years, they’ve dealt with Ygritte, though neither Jon nor any of his cousins have been able to determine whose sireline she’s a part of—the consensus for these past thirty-two years has been Arya’s. It does not help that she is one of the very few who knows that the Starks are the Originals, though it has nothing to do with any effort on their part. For some reason, Ygritte has seemed to make it her life’s mission to get Jon to smile or, god forbid, laugh.

As Bran reaches for the decanter, Jon removes his top hat and turns to look out the window, unable to hide a grimace. He hears Ygritte scoff, her posh accent dropping the moment the sound of hooves against cobblestone drowns out her voice to the coachman.

“I would’ve thought you’d be less miserable this century. You really are the most depressing vampire I’ve ever met, Jon Snow.”

“Aye,” Jon agrees, running his hand through his short dark curls before removing the spectacles he doesn’t need. “And that’s why you put up with me.”

Ygritte throws a glove at him.

The manor tonight is one of countless Jon and his cousins have visited over the centuries, though, as Bran points out when they enter in through the guarded doors, more and more people are becoming wary of the monsters of the night as of late. As the oldest of their lot, Jon, Robb, and Sansa have been keeping an eye on things but the rumors of dark, ravenous things stalking the city have unsettled them, they who have long since learned to compel away evidence of their existence.

So tonight is a night of reconnaissance. Robb’s compulsion abilities, while far and above more potent than a normal vampire’s, are still too sloppy compared to the rest of his family. Although the stealthiest, Arya had scoffed at the notion of corset and perfume and is somewhere here now mingling with the servants instead. Sansa had thought to go but she had removed herself from consideration upon being reminded of the tendency of the lords to not speak of things of importance in front of highborn ladies. And all of the cousins had agreed that sending Rickon would be a mistake they would all regret (Rickon had disagreed but no one cared what Rickon thought).

And so, much to their chagrin, Jon and Bran had been volunteered for the soiree.

“I’ll find you shortly,” Jon quietly says to his cousin, and the taller vampire nods apprehensively. As Bran immediately finds himself surrounded by flirtatious young women (the part Bran gets to play tonight, despite his protests, is the young worldly bachelor who has returned to the capital after making his fortune in the Far East), Jon escorts Ygritte toward the rest of the gossiping lords and ladies in the ballroom. It reeks of sweat and red wine, though the humans have tried to hide it between a copious amount of perfume and flowers. Odors have never been this strong before to his extremely sensitive sense of smell at any of the soirees he’s attended and he might just gag.

Ygritte cocks an eyebrow at him as she absconds a flute of golden wine from a passing server. Jon grimaces at the scent of the wine. “You going to be miserable all night, Jon Snow?”

“I can think of places I’d rather be.”

“Sulking in a dark corner somewhere probably,” Ygritte mutters before plastering a smile on her face as they are approached by a cache of lords congratulating them on their impending nuptials and surely it is a fine match and it is to be a spring wedding certainly and so on and so forth. After centuries, the lies are easy to tell now.

The bloodthirst within him though is still a burning fire that it seems can never be quenched.

An hour or so later, most of the conversation has been nothing but trifling mortal gossip which, while amusing, does not answer the question of who in the world has been sourcing these rumors. The capital is one of the largest cities in the world so he suspects that there are more than a few vampires here who have decided to call this place home. The Starks are at least protected by the false legends and mythology they have created about themselves. Other vampires are not.

Ygritte gives one of the lords a simpering smile as he walks away before she turns toward Jon, looking murderous.

“Alright,” she seethes. “I might understand why you hate mingling. I am bored out of my mind.” She looks up at his face and then frowns at his expression. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” he says tightly, though he feels as though his nerves have been stretched raw and bleeding on the marble floor. There is something in the air that is clawing at him, something that has pulled his instincts taut to feed on any of the warm bodies around him. He has always kept a tight grip on his bloodlust, having already been driven mad by its intensity multiple times in those centuries when he thought he was the only one alive like him after Daenerys’s fall. The fact that something is shredding that control now worries him.

When Ygritte scoffs in disbelief, he presses, “Do you smell that?”

His companion pauses, holding her glass up to her mouth as she sniffs at the air. “All I smell is this shitty wine and this even shittier perfume I stole. Why?”

But the more Jon thinks about it now, the more he feels on edge, his heightened senses scraping his thoughts raw. He is about to say something more when a richly dressed bearded man steps up to them. A golden watch glitters from his waistcoat and his pale eyes glitter with interest behind a monocle. Jon recognizes him as their host, and frowns—he’d been doing his best to avoid the man.

“I hope you both are enjoying the evening. I heard congratulations are in order for your recent engagement.”

As much as Jon could stake Robb for spreading this rumor, it has been annoyingly helpful tonight. He manages a half-hearted smile while Ygritte immediately falls into the role she has to play, gushing about the plans for a spring wedding at the old castle in Riverrun, how it will be the highlight of the season, and how she is absolutely thrilled to be returning north once the hubbub is all said and done since the heat here in the south disagrees with her. Jon can’t follow half of what she’s saying and is pretty sure Ygritte has made up half of it on the spot.

The monocled man smiles blandly. “Delightful, I’m sure.” He turns to Jon. “A moment, my lord?”

“Of course.” Jon kisses Ygritte on the cheek, ignoring the glint in her eye that tells him she is going to have far too much amusement later teasing him about playing the role of dutiful beau, before he walks off with their host. His buzzing instincts are like pinpricks of needles against his skin now. Casually, he says, “A fine turnout, my lord.”

“Yes, well…” the man says, waving his hand nonchalantly. He fixes Jon with a look. “I saw you and your sister this morning on the green. I wanted to say my hellos and my congratulations then but I thought it would be better if I waited. I am glad you and your brother were able to make it. How are your cousins doing? I’d hope to see at least Mr. Stark and Miss Sansa here tonight.”

It is another deception, another lie, though more amusing than most—Arya and Bran, with their dark hair so similar to his, have pretended to be his younger siblings more often than not over the centuries. It is one of a handful of stories they tell as they move changeless in a world that is always shifting, always growing, always moving on. Jon suspects one day it will be much harder to vanish from people’s memories. Gods even know what they are going to do if and when that time comes.

“I’ll tell them they were missed,” Jon says, not offering an explanation for their absence. The host nods thoughtfully.

“You are aware, my lord,” the older man says in a hushed whisper, leading Jon over to a quiet alcove, “of the troubles that have been plaguing the capital for the past several months, aren’t you?”

Jon frowns, even as the host takes two glasses off the tray a passing server is carrying. “I’ve heard rumors.”

“Rumors that are unfortunately true. But the high lords have formed a private council to deal with it.” The host hands one of the glasses to him. “After tonight, we would count on you and Mr. Stark to join us. We will no longer tolerate such demons to live within the confines of our city where they might prey upon our wives and children. We will pull them out, root and stem. I have made arrangements tonight to begin the first step in eliminating them.”

Jon looks around the room. Ygritte is not far, though from the grim set of her jaw behind the flute of wine she holds, he knows she has heard the host. Just beyond her and a little ways away, he sees Bran too, still surrounded by a flock of young women and young bachelors hoping to take advantage of the situation. Bran almost meets his eyes but keeps his dark gaze roaming across the ballroom. He has heard too. The same is likely true of Arya, from wherever shadowed recess she has managed to obscure herself in.

Are there any more vampires here? Have they heard what the humans are planning?

“It seems a dangerous proposition,” Jon finally replies, affecting the countenance of a wary but bored aristocrat. This act, such an anathema of his true disposition, always rankles him. “How exactly are you going to manage it?”

The host smiles.

“With a toast.”

It is only then that Jon realizes that the thing that has set him on edge, the scent that has lingered beneath the cloying smell of blood and body odor, smoke and cologne and wine, is the faintest, floral scent of the one thing that can cripple both a sired vampire and an Original.

Vervain, Jon thinks in alarm, adrenaline already racing through his veins though his outward expression doesn’t shift. He offers the host a grim, acknowledging smile and can only watch as the man excuses himself and walks off, calling for quiet amongst his gathered guests. Beneath his breath, as he steps out of the alcove, he says, “Ygritte. Bran. Don’t drink the wine. They’ve laced it with vervain.”

“Those rank bastards,” Ygritte mutters.

“What do we do?” Bran asks, his voice fainter through the crowd, though Jon can still hear him. “And who told them about vervain?”

Who indeed? Jon scans the room, even as Ygritte finds her way back to his side, looping an arm through his and looking as though she is tempted to shove the whole glass flute down the host’s throat. There are likely vampires here, though all of them will undoubtedly be younger, their abilities not quite honed to the strength they would be in a few more decades. “I don’t know.”

“Arya?”

There is no response.

“Friends,” their host says, his voice carrying over the sudden hush in the room. Jon looks around at the faces of the gathered guests. There are not enough warm heartbeats for the number of people here. He can feel their pulses against his skin as though they are all standing right next to them. But in their midst are those whose hearts have long-stopped beating blood of their own, guests descending from Jon or any of his cousins’ sirelines just like Ygritte. “I thank you for gathering here tonight. It is good to see friends we have known for years and friends we have made so recently. There is nothing more dear to us than those in whose confidence we have the utmost trust. For any who might seek to sow chaos and discord, they will find that nothing can destroy these bonds of companionship.”

“I am going to rip his head off,” growls Ygritte and Jon squeezes her arm in warning.

“So I propose a toast, my friends,” the host says. “To old friends and new! To our future that will be filled with prosperity and safety! And to life!”

And out of the corner of his eye, in the back of the room, Jon sees a flash of dark hair and quicksilver eyes.

“To life!” comes the chorus of dozens of voices.

There is a flicker of lamplight, a mirage of memory. He goes still. The light shimmers. He blinks and the ghost is gone.

And then the screaming begins.

113. cont., eve

Many of the vampires were taken that night. Hightower must be so proud of “his” plan. They were all young, as I assumed they would be—still too giddy with their newly gifted and entirely undeserved immortality and too bold by half. The mortals knew enough to weaken them and then they carted them off to be imprisoned beneath the Red Keep. They will lie in the black cells for centuries, forgotten and desiccating.

It is a strange thing to starve and still live. I have seen famine over the years, though it affects me little. But desiccation is a vicious variation of starvation when inflicted on an immortal being. Your heart wants to beat and perhaps that is the thing that makes us human after all but there is no blood in your veins. Your very body is parched of life. Everything within you turns to stone.

And you feel every moment of it, every second, forever.

It is perhaps not how they would have liked to spend eternity but it can’t be helped. If one is foolish enough to fall into such a trap, then they wouldn’t have survived the decades anyway. Eventually, their pride and their arrogance and their youthful stupidity would have ended them.

There are worse things in the world regardless.

I will spend the winter in Dorne. The Council tells me they will build a new town in the West, one that is empty of vampires and the supernatural creatures they fear. I want to find out more.

If it is the place I think they will build, this will be interesting.

Chapter Text

x. cont. Winterfell has changed since the days I was last here.

Like most of the country, it too is caught in the swell of technological progress, though it is laughably lagging behind its sister cities to the south. But it will one day shake off the shackles of its mystical past. I suppose in one or two hundred years it will be altogether unrecognizable, as I am, as we all are

I met a young man named Theon Greyjoy while here. He works with the college and they are digging up the ruins of the old castle, the one that the city itself is named after. They will find the entrance to the crypts. I’m sure it will be the discovery of a lifetime for them to find the stone statues of the old kings and lords of winter.

What I’m interested in though is what is buried in the crypts.

The great weirwood tree burned hundreds of years ago. But I know the ashes are buried down there. The humans won’t know the significance of those ashes.

But I will. I do.

 

 

“You’re awfully quiet back there.”

Dany, who has been watching the old familiar roads pass by from the backseat of Margaery’s ostentatious luxury truck, looks up to see her friend watching her from the rearview mirror. Missandei has also turned from where she sits in the front passenger seat and Dany can see the concerned look at her from the rainbow of lights on the car’s dashboard and passing streetlamps. Dany manages to dredge up a faint, unconcerned smile from somewhere, though her mind feels a million miles away.

“Just thinking.”

She has spent all morning and most of the afternoon at the Stark manor with Missandei, Myrcella, and a commandeered Gendry to help with the day portion of the housewarming. While Myrcella had been eager to have an insider’s perspective of the mysterious Stark manor, Gendry had been less than enthused to be roped in on his day off from the bar, and he and Arya had spent a good chunk of Dany’s time at the manor arguing. It was such a normal thing to see in all the abnormal things that filled her life now that she might have almost forgotten that the housewarming-slash-open house is a reconnaissance event for a family of vampires to break a curse that might just kill them all.

Her conversation with Jon from a few days ago still weighs heavily on her mind. For all the terrible things that being the original Daenerys Targaryen’s doppelgänger and being associated with the Starks has brought her, she still cannot reconcile herself to the fact that this plan may result in their deaths.

If she finds the ring that seals this curse before they do, she might just drive east to drop it into the Blackwater.

But she has to get through tonight first. Tonight is the capstone of the open house. She’d returned to her rented flat after a day of giving curious town residents tours of the manor, not entirely sure if she wanted to attend the evening section at all. But Missandei and Margaery, having also been pulled in on the plan by Dany and Robb respectively, had shown up not two hours later with garment bags and boxes of makeup.

“It’s your fault really,” Missandei had gently chided as she swiped a powder brush over Dany’s face. “You’re the one who told them that the town loves excuses to be fancy.”

I didn’t think they’d take me seriously, Dany thinks now, propping her chin again on her fist. But of course the Starks had shrugged at her suggestion. Of course they wouldn’t have the excuse of not having formal outfits in their extensive wardrobes. And of course they’d have the funds to pull off a miracle and redecorate an entire wing of their manor for a ball.

So now here she is instead of wrapped up in a blanket at home with her cats and a nice cuppa, trying to make her way through that mysterious journal, its author still unknown to her.

“Do you think anyone found out anything?” Margaery asks, turning her attention back to the road. “Did anyone text you, Dany? Robb hasn’t told me anything.”

Dany almost remarks on Margaery’s peculiar relationship with the eldest Stark sibling but bites her tongue. She shakes her head instead. “No. I don’t think anyone’s come with anything except gossip, which could be fine if that gossip led us to Daario’s ring. But it just seems to be the usual trivial nonsense.”

“It’d be easier to just compel people, wouldn’t it?”

“No,” Missandei immediately interrupts. “I’m telling you just as I told the Starks—we are doing this the old-fashioned way or I’m out.”

“Well, we wouldn’t need to do it at all if you and Grey could just use a tracking spell.”

“I’ve told you—it doesn’t work like that.” Missandei shakes her head, exasperated. “And unless you know someone who works for the medical examiner or can seduce Jaime Lannister into letting you sort through the evidence, I don’t think it’s ever going to work like that.”

Dany says nothing. She knows that no one blames her for this (because how could she have known that any of this would happen?) but she still feels guilty over the fact that she had kept nothing of Daario’s when their relationship ended years ago. She had given everything back and what she hadn’t, she had thrown away. She had basically erased the presence of the man from her life and now because of it, they cannot find the damned ring at the center of all this supernatural bullshit.

Margaery sighs. “I’m not sure why we’re going through the trouble of this anyway. It’s their problem.”

“Well, the thing about them being here in Starfall is that it makes it our problem too,” Missandei says, though Dany can hear the wary note in her voice. “This isn’t going away anytime soon just because we want it to.”

“The Starks are going to protect themselves first at the end of all this. That’s what they’ve done for a thousand some years. That’s all they know to do. If everything about this goes wrong, I doubt they’ll protect us to the extent that we’ve been helping them.” Margaery shrugs, swiping at her perfectly coiled hair, her rings glittering in the ambient light of the truck dashboard. “I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”

“Me neither but what choice do we have?”

Dany continues to say nothing. She wishes she had told her friends the possible consequences of finding the ring and breaking the curse before tonight. But they’d all been so busy that it had been next to impossible. And how does she tell Margaery that what she’s helping with might mean her death, even if Dany has already told Jon she’d refuse to help any further if that turns out to be the case?

Tomorrow, Dany tells herself. I’ll tell them everything tomorrow.

But it still makes her feel terrible to hold this secret now.

The winding drive to the front of the Stark manor is choked with cars—and valets? Dany watches with vague, unsettled interest as Margaery slowly pulls her car up to the front and Tommen Baratheon eagerly waves at them from where he is acting as a valet tonight. Margaery rolls down her window, raising one eyebrow.

“Tommen, does your mum know you’re here?”

“Of course,” the young man says with rosy-cheeked enthusiasm. “But the Starks are paying me a lot just to park cars. I wasn’t going to turn that down. It was a lot of money.”

“Perks of being an immortal vampire, I suppose,” Dany murmurs as she unbuckles her seatbelt. “Compounding interest rates.”

Trying not to get lost in that thought, she steps out of the truck, her heels crunching in the gravel of the drive as she gathers her skirts in her hands. The night is balmy, as so many summer nights are here in Starfall, and she thinks her choice of attire, while absolutely ridiculous, is completely fitting for a ball with a family of vampires who have been around since the time that balls were en vogue. The dress, with its intricate lace top and its layers upon layers of frothy tulle, is a rich plum hue that feels suitably gothic. Only the backless design and plunging neckline keep her from feeling as though she needs a pair of opera gloves or binoculars.

Margaery and Missandei join her at the steps that lead up to the manor—Margaery a vision in ice blue satin and Misssandei looking statuesque and stunning in emerald-green chiffon so dark it is nearly black. There are not many people out here on the stairs chatting but Dany can already sense the heat and the crowd coming from within the manor. She slows as she approaches the door, suddenly apprehensive.

When Missandei gives her a look, Dany shakes her head. “Last time we went to one of these…”

“I promise not to almost kill you tonight,” Margaery replies with some exasperation in her voice as they enter the foyer. She leans forward so that only Dany and Missandei can hear her. “They’ve hidden the blood well. As far as anyone knows, these are just the children of some Founders who’ve refurbished their family’s old manor. Robb says they’ve made parts of the house inaccessible by saying that they’re still under renovation.”

“I’m sure our nosy neighbors will listen to that,” Dany observes with a scoff. She had pointed out the flaw in this plan earlier to them but the cousins had seemed unconcerned. Considering Rickon’s wickedly cheerful assurance that absolutely nothing is going to go wrong at the ball, Dany feels a black pit of uncertainty settle within her at what can possibly be Jon and the others’ backup plan if it involves Rickon.

“Well, just do your best.” Margaery shrugs as they follow the general direction of the crowd toward the back of the house. “If we’re very fortunate, perhaps this evening won’t end in a bloodbath. If it doesn’t though, Grandmother will be incredibly disappointed. She’s been hoping Tywin Lannister keels over into a ditch for the past several years.”

The Lannisters. Dany had almost forgotten, even with coming across Tommen. She grimaces. Missandei must notice her sudden shift in mood because she reaches out and squeezes her hand.

Their arrival in the actual ballroom of the manor almost—not quite, but almost—sweeps away thoughts of Cersei and her snide rumors. Dany has been in this house plenty of times now, untangling the centuries-old mystery that is the Starks. But somehow, despite even giving tours of the manor earlier today, she’d not once stumbled across the actual ballroom. She wonders now if that had been on purpose and whether it was impossible to simply discover this room—considering its size and its old-school glamour, it feels like something meant to be led to by the very vampires who call this place home, immortal guides to times long since past.

She steps out onto the hardwood floor, glancing up at the miniature chandeliers that drip crystal over the heads of the milling crowd below. The rest of the house is filled with such dark colors it is strange to step into a place that seems to be adorned with light. Even the gallery of windows against the far wall seems to be brimming with a fey lantern light from out in the Starks’ immense backyard. She wonders if the direwolves are stalking the grounds away from the guests—she can’t imagine that their presence would be anything except frightening.

Music plays from somewhere for the dancing couples at the center of the ballroom, though Dany can’t see the source of it. She releases her skirts, letting the rush of tulle sweep against the floor. She glances around the room and sees that Missandei and Margaery are doing the same. She only pauses momentarily when a waiter passes with a tray brimming with flutes of sparkling Arbor gold. Though Dany declines a drink at the moment, both Margaery and Missandei take the proffered wine.

“Anyone see our hosts?” Margaery asks as she raises her own flute to her lips. She then pauses in surprise, glancing down at the wine in her hand. “I know this vintage. It is obscenely expensive. If either of you ever teases me again about trying to seduce Robb Stark, you’ll understand that I have my priorities straight.”

But Dany is only half-paying attention—she has caught sight of Jon.

The dark-haired vampire is clear on the other side of the room, a walking shadow in his all-black tuxedo. He stands next to Robb, the cousins looking dashing, if not at all related, in their expensive, sharply-tailored tuxes. The two also look as though they are deep in conversation, their eyes scanning the crowd. Dany doesn’t see the others but she also realizes, as Jon meets her eyes from across the room, that she isn’t looking very hard. As always, she cannot decipher the expression on his face. But she sees Robb follow Jon’s gaze before he murmurs something to Jon that causes his cousin to shake his head.

“I’ll be right back,” she tells Missandei and Margaery, ignoring Margaery’s snort and Missandei’s frown of disapproval as she starts to head in Jon’s direction.

But a ball, especially one of this size, is for gossip and conversations, and Dany isn’t more than a few steps away from her friends when Tyrion Lannister steps into her path.

“Miss Dayne,” the small man says, toasting toward her with his own tumbler of brown liquor. He squints up at her before gesturing to a nearby waiter, plucking a flute of shimmering Arbor gold off the platter to hand to her. “If you’re not dancing, then forgoing a glass of ostentatiously expensive alcohol seems a poor decision. I understand why you become fast friends with the Starks.”

Dany takes the glass of wine from Tyrion but does not immediately sip it. She has not spoken to him since that night at the cemetery. She has started to become a little more comfortable with the idea that compulsion is just something vampires can do, but she still finds herself unnerved by the implications of what is basically mind control, that without vervain she might be as susceptible to it as anyone else in this town.

She thinks of Ashara and her stomach twists.

Tyrion must take her silence as offense because he adds, with no little dry humor, “Look at it this way—another family vying for influence in this town with their wealth doesn’t make my father happy. And anything that doesn’t make my father happy is alright in my book.”

Dany does manage to draw up a smile at that.

“Heaven forbid someone oust Tywin Lannister’s influence on this town.”

“Oh, he’ll try to dissuade them from doing so but we both know my father’s tactics.” Tyrion takes a sip of his wine, shaking his head. “Do you happen to know what in the world these Starks have invested in to throw money around like this? My history is a bit rusty when it comes to families of Founders who aren’t the Lannisters but I admittedly can’t recall if the previous Starks were this wealthy.”

“You just have to get in early with the right company nowadays, don’t you?” Dany asks, mind racing for an answer that makes sense here. A thousand years of investments and accrued interest are sure to build up but Dany has no idea what story the Starks are telling people to avoid anyone actively looking into their finances (and how laughably unfeasible they are).

Tyrion nods thoughtfully. “Perhaps. But what exactly do they do? I love to keep up on the current trend irritating my father but I must admit—finding anything about these Starks is next to impossible.”

Dany recalls what Jon had said about Bran having eyes everywhere, undoubtedly to scrub electronic traces of their existence from the internet. Perhaps it was more feasible centuries ago, when people lived and died in relative anonymity. In this day and age, she can’t even imagine the lengths one must go through to ensure that people don’t realize immortal creatures live amongst them. How does one disappear while still living a life? How do you hide all traces of yourself in a world that is becoming more and more digital, more and more complex?

“If I was that rich, I probably wouldn’t want to share my secrets either,” Dany finally responds for lack of a better thing to say. “You’ll have to ask them if you want investment tips.”

Tyrion hums.

“Maybe. But I have a feeling that the Starks hold their secrets close.”

The words cause Dany to look at Tyrion sharply. She has to remind herself that Sansa had compelled Tyrion to forget everything he saw in the cemetery that night, including seeing her. As far as she has been told, Sansa is the most skilled at compulsion, her ability subtle and iron-clad as compared to, say, Robb’s sloppier method. Tyrion should not even have an inkling of a notion about the Starks’ true nature.

Yet something about that shrewd look in his eyes…

“I think,” Dany says cautiously, “that secrets are secrets for a reason.”

“I’d imagine so, Miss Dayne. Heaven forbid someone gets a hold of the wrong one though. I do enjoy a good fracas every now and then but even I have my limits.” He glances up at her. “But if you do find out what the Starks are investing in, I’d love to know.”

“Cannabis.” Both Dany and Tyrion turn to see Sansa Stark walking up to them, looking as elegant and ethereal and classical as always in a dress the same shimmering color as Dany’s flute of sparkling wine. Her paprika-hued hair cascades over one shoulder in gentle waves as she plucks a glass of wine from a passing waiter, her ice-blue eyes coolly surveying the room. “You’d imagine why we don’t advertise it here in Starfall.”

Dany is not sure if Sansa is kidding or not but Tyrion cocks one eyebrow. “Is there a lot of money in that?” Sansa shrugs.

“About as much as the adult entertainment industry. But we don’t talk about that either.”

Dany is positive Sansa is joking but is silently impressed by the vampire’s poker face because it has clearly tripped Tyrion up. His brow scrunches in vague confusion.

“Ah. I…see.”

Sansa raises her flute in a mock toast before she turns to Dany. “May I borrow you for a moment? If it’s not too much of an intrusion…?”

Tyrion shakes his head. “By all means. God forbid I step into a conversation regarding cannabis and porn.”

“You heard, didn’t you?” Dany says, as soon as Tyrion is out of earshot. She shouldn’t be surprised, not with so many people here. To confirm her suspicions, Sansa lifts her flute to her lips and nods imperceptibly as she takes a long sip, her pale eyes drifting over to where the small man is meandering through the perimeter of the crowd. Dany frowns. “Do you think he remembers?”

“I compelled him.”

“Is there any way to break a compulsion?” Dany can’t help it—she can’t quite shake the feeling that she had been holding two different conversations with Tyrion about the implications and power of secrets. If he does remember, what does that mean?

“Yes.” Sansa shrugs. “If I’d told him to remember, which I didn’t.”

Maybe he had vervain, Dany thinks, though she is not sure why Tyrion would have it in the first place. No one in Starfall should know anything about vampires. She is just being paranoid, her nerves still shredded after everything that happened with Ashara and her own role as the doppelgänger. Ashara knows everyone’s secret here in Starfall and surely her adoptive mum would have said something about people’s (previously) nonsensical beliefs in the supernatural and improbable.

“Did you come over here then to make sure I didn’t tell him?” Dany asks. She knows that Sansa does not care for her, that at the most she is only tolerating her for Jon’s sake. But she does wonder if the redheaded vampire at least trusts her to keep this most dangerous secret to herself. The fact that Sansa hasn’t compelled Dany (that she knows of) should be proof of that.

Sansa grimaces. “Jon trusts you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Silence falls between the two. Dany may not particularly be fond of Sansa Stark either, but she is part of the package of cousins that Dany has decided to protect by keeping her mouth shut. She loathes the idea that this same understanding doesn’t work both ways. She should at least be able to receive the benefit of the doubt but it seems every time that Sansa might open up to her, she just as quickly shutters away the sapling of affection.

Finally, Sansa sighs.

“Jon trusts you and that’s enough for me, whether you believe it or not.” She lets her glacial gaze sweep over the crowd in nonchalant disinterest. But Dany thinks that despite the outward appearance of cool indifference, there is a part of Sansa that cares desperately and painfully. It is impossible to comprehend, though she thinks she is more certain when the eldest Stark daughter says, “But in the end, I will choose to protect my family, even if that means I need to protect them from themselves.”

“Did you do that with Daenerys?”

Sansa’s eyes cut over to her, sharp as glass. For a moment, Dany thinks she might almost see the faint hint of something vampiric in Sansa’s expression but it is gone before it can make an impression. The taller girl says, “No. Everything with Daenerys came before.”

But I should have, Dany hears unspoken in Sansa’s tone. I should have done and said something and then none of this would have happened.

It makes Dany wonder how much of the long-dead queen Sansa sees in her.

She does not get to think about it for long though because there is abruptly a warm presence at her elbow.

“I hope my brother bothered you less than my sister probably would,” Jaime Lannister says jovially as she turns to him. “They both wish they could be as charming as I am.”

It is strange to see the sheriff in formal wear, though Dany is sure they have frequented the same small-town parties together in the past. While the tall man is as handsome as his sister is beautiful, Dany cannot help but notice the faint strain of exhaustion around the edges of his eyes. Ashara had not mentioned any rumors from the coffee shop before her incident and Myrcella hasn’t imparted any additional gossip since—but Dany knows.

Lancel. Waymar. Daario. It must be adding up to something, though clearly the real answer is too impossible to believe. But Jaime Lannister is not stupid. He must know there is some sort of connection to these disappearances and deaths.

Still, Dany manages a smile. After all, one of her duties tonight was to find out more from Jaime about what the sheriff’s department has in their possession that belongs to Daario. They needed something of his that might link to the ring for Missandei and Grey to track down (and not for the first time, Dany once again curses herself for cutting herself off so completely from the past, so completely from the man she had once thought she’d loved enough to marry).

“Is that your way of asking me to dance?”

Jaime laughs and then nods as Sansa.

“As long as Miss Stark doesn’t take offense.” He winks at both of them. “Especially since Podrick has been working up the nerve to ask her to dance for the past thirty minutes.”

Dany has the satisfaction of seeing surprise flicker across Sansa’s face. She recalls the rookie officer from Ashara’s dinner party weeks ago and the way he had looked as though he had fallen head over heels in infatuation with the willowy redhead. She has the feeling that someone like Sansa Stark might eat someone like Podrick Payne for breakfast (both literally and figuratively) but she sincerely hopes that the young man manages to dredge up the courage to ask her to dance, if only to see Sansa herself flustered with having to be socially courteous.

“I’ll let him know you’re available,” Jaime notes dryly, reading the surprise on Sansa’s face as a clear invitation to mortify her. Then, with Dany’s arm hooked onto his elbow, he leads her out onto the dance floor with a wry laugh. Once there, he smirks down at her. “That might be a cruel thing to do to Pod. Should I have tried with the younger sister?”

Dany thinks about that and then shakes her head. Arya may have been the more approachable of the two sisters but something between her and Pod doesn’t make sense in her head.

“You must like them well enough to do that to him,” Dany observes thoughtfully as they dance. Tyrion obviously has his suspicions—and she has her own suspicions about that—but she is not entirely sure what his older brother thinks of the newly arrived family of Founders. “The Starks, I mean. Tyrion told me your father isn’t overly fond of them.”

“My father is a difficult man to please and doesn’t trust anyone not on the town council,” Jaime agrees with a shrug. “In forty-some years, I can count on one hand the things he’s been happy with. I doubt even his children are on that list.”

But clearly the sheriff does not want to spend the evening speaking about his notoriously cold father because he immediately asks, “How is Ashara doing? I was hoping she was feeling well enough to attend tonight. She never misses an opportunity to be a social butterfly.”

“Still on the mend. Vis and Olenna are with her tonight so she doesn’t feel completely shut in.” It is true though that Ashara had been rather put out about not being able to attend the open house, though even her mum had admitted that she still hadn’t physically recovered from her accident. While Dany thinks that her brother and the Tyrell matriarch are a terrible combination when it comes to company, she also realizes that Ashara will be able to handle the two astringent personalities well enough. “You could always drop by with some gossip for her if you’re feeling that badly for her.”

They pause just briefly on the outskirts of the dance floor for Jaime to tell Podrick Payne that he should go ask Sansa to dance, leaving the young man flustered and blushing before Jaime sweeps Dany away again. She takes the moment to quickly scan the room. She sees (with an internal self-satisfied smirk) Margaery dancing with Robb. Missandei and Grey are still off to the side, enraptured in whatever conversation they are having. She also notices with some surprise that Arya is over by the makeshift bar at the far end of the ballroom, decked out in sparkling black and gold and playfully conversing (or arguing, it’s hard to tell from this distance) with Gendry, who looks horribly uncomfortable in his dark green suit.

She doesn’t see Rickon though and she’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. And she doesn’t see Jon anymore either, which makes disappointment curdle in her chest. She knows that she saw him earlier today but she wants to speak to him again, about nothing and everything and it honestly makes no sense.

She quietly buries her disappointment deep within her and turns back to Jaime. She realizes that she won’t exactly be able to dance with him forever and if she can’t speak with Jon at the moment, she really needs some information from Jaime beyond this idle chatter.

So she says, “There is something I wanted to ask you about.”

The ever-present twinkle in Jaime’s eyes dims suddenly behind a cool cloud of professional blankness. “Seems like a bad time to ask about anything, especially about ongoing investigations.”

Of course he knows what she wants to ask about. After all, what other topic might she bring up? She offers him a strained smile and continues, “I was engaged to him for a time, sheriff. I can’t help but be curious about everything that happened.” When Jaime only shakes his head, she decides that perhaps leaning into some truth might sway him a little more. She bites her lip, trying to look contrite. “You know when I left, I wanted a blank slate. I wanted to be a completely different person. When I ended things with him, I gave everything back. I didn’t want anything left to remind me of what could have been, to make me always wonder if I made the right choice.”

“You never did do things by halves.” Jaime shrugs. “Tyrion’s always liked that about you. But if you’re asking what I think you’re asking, I can’t help you.”

Dany frowns. “Why not?”

“Because I can be a heartless bastard sometimes, despite what Cersei thinks.” But Jaime’s crooked smile tells her the words are only half said in jest. He confirms it when he adds, “But mostly because I can’t break protocol even for someone like you, Miss Dayne. I may be willing to break a lot of rules around Starfall when it comes to my job but not in this. The badge means something to me and I intend to make sure I live up to the law.”

It is not surprising. Jaime has always had his own peculiar code of conduct—sometimes it overlaps with the norm, sometimes it doesn’t. Dany racks her brain for some way to skirt around the sheriff’s chaotic sense of morals. She has known the man forever. He has his twin’s same cavalier approach to life, that the rules often don’t apply to him. But he can also be as clever and sharp as his younger brother. And there is of course that odd moral code within him.

After a long thoughtful pause, she peers up at him. Then she says, “I’ve never known you to ascribe to both the spirit and the letter of the law. Which one takes precedence when it comes to the past and grief and saying goodbye?”

There is a flash of surprise in those green eyes. Then Jaime chuckles lowly, shaking his head as he releases her waist. “You’ve got me there.” He thinks for a moment and then nods, as if agreeing to some unspoken argument in his mind. “Come down by the station tomorrow. I can’t guarantee that what I can give will be a lot but I might be able to bend some rules for you.”

Dany smiles, sincerely grateful. “Thank you, Jaime. I really do appreciate it.”

Jaime snorts.

“Right. Just don’t tell Brienne. She’ll have my hide.”

The next hour swims by. As often as she tries to get back to the perimeter of the room to speak with Missandei or Margaery or Jon or any of the Stark siblings, another person asks to dance with her. She is sure that somewhere in this room, Cersei is watching her and internally seething, undoubtedly stirring up rumors with Taena Merryweather about her promiscuity. She tries not to let it distract her or worry her too much as she dances with what feels like every available male specimen in the ballroom.

Dany does have to laugh though when, while exchanging partners, she finds herself paired up with Rickon Stark. The youngest of the Stark siblings is taller than she is—everyone is taller than she is except for Arya Stark—and even her sky-high heels do little to make up the inches. His hair is still a riotous mess of coppery curls but he seems to have at least tried to look presentable in a tux.

“I didn’t think you danced.”

“I dance!” Rickon protests, twirling her dramatically in a move that is certainly uncalled for in the type of slow dance they’re doing. His boyish face is lit up with a grin and for a moment, Dany might almost believe he is an actual teenager rather than a creature centuries and centuries old. “I think the music Sansa has picked out is bloody awful but it’s not like you can live forever without picking some things up. You should have seen the secret balls and cotillions and masquerades we hosted back in the day. Everyone loves a good imperial party, even if by midnight most of them are plotting a revolution and the rest of them are shit-faced and horny.”

There is a lot of information in that rush of words and Dany is not sure she even wants to begin to decipher it. Still, she decides to humor him. “And were you old enough to plot a revolution?”

Rickon grins as if he is in on a joke that Dany can only guess at.

“Most decades, I still get to be the youngest. Sometimes Arya and Bran and I switch places. But I can be fifteen or twenty-five. Depends on the mood.”

Dany personally does not like the idea of Rickon having the full rein of a twenty-five-year-old and she realizes why most decades he remains the youngest. She doubts any of his siblings or his cousin like the idea either. “It must be exhausting, always trying to keep up with what age you’re pretending to be.”

Rickon shrugs. “Could be worse. Could have Bran’s whole thing.”

“How did…” She stops and shakes her head. “Don’t vampires heal from all injuries?”

“Yup.”

“But Bran’s in that wheelchair.”

“Yeah. He is.” Rickon gives her a long, quizzical look. “I thought Jon told you everything.”

Jon can’t remember everything, Dany thinks to herself. Do his siblings know about the compulsion keeping his memories locked away? Surely they must—she doubts that anyone can live hundreds of years around the same group of people without them knowing every secret a person has ever harbored about themselves. She sighs. “Suppose it’s something else I’ll have to ask him about.”

The young-looking vampire’s wickedly cheerful grin returns.

“While you’re at it, ask him why he hasn’t kissed you yet. I’m tired of losing bets to Arya.”

Wait.

What?

The words take her aback and she can feel heat rise into her cheeks. She hopes none of the others, with their supernatural hearing, have heard what Rickon just said. Her pride would not let her suffer the embarrassment and gods, she cannot even begin to imagine how she might meet Jon’s eyes if he had heard.

Cheeks enflamed with a deepening blush, she quickly hisses, “Your cousin doesn’t want to kiss me. And you shouldn’t bet on it like he does. Isn’t everything we’re doing because of another Daenerys?”

Rickon snorts as he leads her back to the perimeter of the dance floor.

“Yeah. She was cool but then she became such a magnificent bitch. Took the piss right out of all the fun we used to have when she pulled this whole immortality shit. If you ask me—which no one ever does—I personally think he needs a better Daenerys...and oh look, here you are—a much better Daenerys.”

Dany has never really gotten the Stark siblings’ opinions on the other girl, the original vampire, who once shared her name. Most of what she knows she has learned through Jon. But he had once loved the other Daenerys. He would have married her if everything hadn’t gone wrong, if Daenerys hadn’t committed an act of horror so terrible that it resulted in her death and immortality in the soul of the man she had loved and his family. Undoubtedly, the Stark siblings knew of Daenerys to realize that she and Dany were nearly identical but their opinions on her seemed oddly restrained.

They must all hate her, Dany thinks, though none of them has ever said as much. Rickon’s words are the first she has heard that have been more than just an acknowledgment that the queen had existed. She wonders if they keep their thoughts to themselves out of respect for Jon’s feelings for the woman he used to love. It is an odd kindness, considering the chaos she had wrought on their lives, but an understandable one.

“I’m his friend,” Dany finally replies quietly. “I’m you all’s friend too. Nothing more.”

Rickon doesn’t look entirely convinced of that. But before he can say anything, a peculiar look crosses his face and his expression lights up with a smile.

“Jon!”

Dany wants the ground to open up and consume her.

Briefly closing her eyes to gather herself, she turns to see the grey-eyed vampire standing just behind her, giving Rickon a look of familial exasperation. Rickon must be used to receiving this look because his grin only widens. “Where’d you disappear to? I’ve had to be the social one and dance with all the pretty girls.”

“What a pity,” Jon notes flatly, looking as though he is using most of his composure not to roll his eyes. He gives Dany an apologetic look. “I didn’t realize Mace Tyrell talked so much. He says he knows more about the history of this house and Starfall than anyone else in town. Except for maybe Missandei.”

Dany blinks. “Does he? Did you learn anything?”

“I learned that the history classes here in town are terrible.”

Behind her, Rickon cackles. Even Dany has to smile at that.

But all three of them look up as another song—a waltz of some sort—starts. After making another comment about Sansa’s choice of music, Rickon quickly makes an excuse about finding something to eat (“I meant like a crostini!” he clarifies at Dany’s stricken look) as several couples once again make their way to the dance floor. Dany debates finding somewhere to sit down for the first time in an hour but finds herself pausing when Jon holds out a hand. She blinks at it for a moment before looking at him. He has that familiar, faint smile on his face that she has grown so used to and she realizes that she doesn’t want to sit down after all.

She takes his hand.

“He dances,” Dany remarks with a raised eyebrow as Jon places a hand on the small of her back (she ignores the shiver that thrills through her at the touch of his palm against her bare skin). “How extraordinary. I recall someone complaining a few days ago about the need for a show in the first place. Have you seen him around?”

He laughs quietly as he sweeps her out onto the dance floor, the murmur of her gown against the floor like the rushing sound of rain against glass.

“Don’t tell Robb. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

His grip is warm and steady as he leads her in a dance that she can only vaguely recall learning years and years ago when she was involved in Starfall’s pageantry circuit. The layers and layers of plum tulle swish around them like an effervescent mist, lending an elegance to the waltz that Dany is not entirely sure she feels. She should trip. She should fall. Her mind is suddenly entirely elsewhere, unable to concentrate even on the faintest strands of music.

Because the moment she steps into Jon’s embrace, it feels like coming home.

The warm feeling has completely blindsided her. She has never felt anything like that in her life. Not with Daario, not when she returned to Starfall after all of these years, not even when she reunited with Missandei and Margaery. It feels as though her heart has been waiting her entire life for a perfect place to call its own and has not found it until now, until tonight. Jon Snow pulled her into an embrace for a waltz and just like that, it is as though everything within her that has been searching for something has been found.

“Were you able to find out something from Jaime?” Jon’s voice breaks through the fog of her thoughts. She nods slowly.

“I’m supposed to go down to the station tomorrow,” she answers, trying to quell the shakiness that the sheer certainty of belonging has unleashed within her. “I might not be able to find the ring but I should be able to find something that will let Missy and Grey track it down. What about you? Did you learn anything at all from Mace?”

Jon lets out a disappointed huff of a laugh.

“No, but I think his mother might be worth talking to. The others and I have tried to avoid her because we’re not sure if she’d remember our faces.” He shrugs. “She was only a little girl when we were last here but she still might recall something.”

“What about the others?”

“Arya’s probably gotten at least ten people’s life stories out of them tonight. Bran and Robb too. Sansa’s goal is to make sure the wine keeps flowing to keep everyone’s mouths running.” He tilts his head to the side, briefly chewing on his bottom lip in thought (and Dany tries very hard not to be distracted by it). “She was speaking with Tywin Lannister when I last passed her. It’s…helpful, probably, to get on his good side. I’ve been hearing some things about the control he has over his town.”

Dany recalls Tyrion and Jaime’s words earlier. Undoubtedly, even Cersei might have some reservations about her father—if she recalls correctly, Tywin Lannister had been responsible for arranging the marriage between his only daughter and the long-deceased Robert Baratheon. By all accounts, it had been a loveless marriage, though at least Myrcella and Tommen are the sweetest, most altruistic teenagers Dany has ever met. They must’ve gotten it from their father because god knows neither adjective describes Cersei.

“He might make a better ally than enemy,” Dany admits. “Jaime said he doesn’t trust anyone not on the town council. Maybe you or Robb should join.”

But Jon frowns.

“The town council?”

“A bunch of people who desperately need to have some modicum of power and control over others.” Dany feels her lips twist in a mockery of a smile. “Small towns seem to be rife with them. You can hardly turn around without one of the council members telling you every rule in the town charter that you may have broken or disrespected. They are obnoxious with it.”

“No, that’s not it…” Jon trails off, a distracted look in his grey gaze. Somehow he manages to keep pace with the swirling beat of the song. “I don’t think the Council is exactly what you’re thinking of. We thought they’d dissolved it when they assumed they’d run all the vampires out of town several decades ago.”

That is news to her. There are the usual ghost stories that come from a town like this, but Dany has never heard of any lore specifically surrounding vampires. Everything she knows—or thought she knew—about vampires came entirely from general cultural touchpoints. Not once has that lore ever been localized. She keeps her eyes on Jon’s expression as she ventures, “There’s another council, you mean.”

He nods. “Aye. I think so.” He looks thoughtful. “They might have it restricted to Founders.”

That makes sense. The regular town council allows for members to join as long as they have put down roots in Starfall for at least ten years. But when it comes to seniority, no one beats the families of Founders who’d settled into this area nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. They had rebuilt the skeleton of an older town into the one that Dany was raised in, a quaint little piece of the south just east of the Red Mountains below the high roads leading out to the great cities of Westeros.

“Well,” Dany says with a small smile, “good thing we have a newly returned family of Founders right here.”

That low chuckle of his settles somewhere between her heart and the pit of her stomach.

“Right. Maybe. It could give us—”

But he abruptly stops, going so still that Dany herself jerks to a halt. Other couples continue to mill around them, lost in their own conversations, the murmur of gossip and laughter cascading through the one-two-three beat of the music. Dany looks up into Jon’s face, surprised—and she goes nearly as still when sees the silver brimming in his grey eyes.

“Jon?” she whispers. “Are you…”

“Does everyone smell that?” a familiar voice murmurs and Dany turns to see Margaery and Robb are next to them. Robb still holds Margaery in a close embrace, his arm wrapped around her waist, but both are looking out over the crowd quickly and quietly and as subtly as possible, pretending as though they’ve stopped to nonchalantly chat with friends.

Robb nods, looking distraught. “Blood.” Jon closes his eyes.

“A lot of it. There is…” He swallows thickly. “There is a lot of blood.”

Dany, of course, cannot smell anything. But she can see the way the tension runs through all three vampires standing next to her. She peers past Jon’s shoulder to see Sansa, her face a carefully blank mask from where she is still speaking to Tywin Lannister. Over on the opposite side of the room, Arya has paused in her on-again-off-again arguments with Gendry. She and Rickon are both standing tense and still on the outskirts of the dance floor. Dany cannot see Bran but surely he is also grim with this sudden wave of bloodlust ricocheting through the vampires.

“Whatever you do,” Robb says, his voice still low, “don’t attract attention to yourself. Bran, can you find out what’s going on?”

And Dany sees the siblings, spread out on opposite sides of the room, give small, nearly imperceptible nods of their heads. So they can hear each other.

But Margaery is looking at Jon warily. “Are you okay?”

“Too much to drink,” Robb notes in a louder voice, giving Dany a pointed look. She understands immediately. If they stand here much longer conversing, that will be as bad at getting everyone’s attention as running off at that supernatural speed. In a lower whisper, Robb says, his voice alarmed, “Are you set at your place?”

“I’m…” But Jon trails off, his expression pained. Dany watches as he squeezes his eyes shut again and she reaches for him, trying to steady him, trying to anchor him away from the bloodthirst that has dug into him. He breathes out harshly. “Someone’s watching. There’s too much blood. Someone knows.”

“Bran,” Robb hisses more urgently. There must be another side of the conversation that Dany must not hear because the eldest of the Stark siblings abruptly nods his head sharply. “Right. Dany, can you…?”

“We were planning on ducking out early anyway,” Dany says with a smile that feels too strained to be genuine. She doubts she fools anyone in the surrounding crowd who might look at her. She gives Jon another concerned look before she nods at Robb and Margaery. “Marg can give me a call if you all need anything else. I’ll make sure he sleeps it off. Tell Missy.”

Margaery hesitates, clearly uncertain about sending Dany off by her lonesome with a struggling vampire. But the latter instruction clears the worry from her eyes. She and Robb move off to avoid colliding with more couples and Dany tries not to sprint from the dance floor, wishing that she knew what the hell was going on. Was there an accident on the grounds? What if one of the direwolves had gotten hold of a guest? Why was Jon reacting so much worse to the smell of blood than any of the others?

The hall just outside of the ballroom is empty and blessedly cool compared to the warmth within the other room. Dany gives Jon another worried look.

“Are you…?”

But before she can finish her sentence, before she can even blink, he is gone.

It takes a moment for her mind to process the sudden emptiness at her side, the deep violet skirts of her dress rustling at the sudden movement from the vanished vampire. Alarm rushes through her. She looks around quickly, mind churning, trying to figure out what direction he has gone in. She does not have time to second guess herself. She does not have time to panic. Someone or something is bleeding profusely on the ground. Jon said someone is watching to see who might react. The smell of the blood has sent his precipitous control reeling. And he has disappeared—

There.

Dany hears a door down the hall click shut. It isn’t much—hell, it could be one of those goddamned guests wandering about in rooms they shouldn’t be in—but it’s all she has. She can’t wait for Missandei. Gathering her skirts in her hands, she runs.

Despite her familiarity with the manor, it still seems half a labyrinth tonight—it is all twisting shadows and strange shapes, fire flickering off walls and the distant rumble of conversation that echoes through the old walls, whispering secrets that seem to chase after her the way she chases after Jon. She damn near trips half a dozen times when the heel of her stiletto catches on the edge of a rug, when her skirts fall to impede her path, when she rounds a corner too quickly and her ankle twists beneath the sudden shift in her center of gravity.

But she doesn’t stop. Even if she knows that the Stark siblings will undoubtedly find Jon faster, she does not stop running.

Until…

She comes to a halt, nearly colliding with a small side table that is propped up against the wall. The side hall must lead to one of the manor’s side entrances. A bejeweled lamp casts a warm golden glow on the two occupants crouched at the end of the hallway near the door. Dany hesitates. She realizes that they are too far from the ballroom. None of the vampires should have been able to smell blood all the way from there. This hall is clear on the other side of the property.

Jon crouches down next to the woman, his hand hesitantly wavering over her still form. The woman’s arm is black and wet with blood, and her evening gown, once a lovely mint green shade, is sodden with gore. But something about this is wrong. Dany steps into the hall…and gasps.

The woman…it is Alerie Hightower.

It is Margaery’s mum.

“Jon,” Dany whispers, steeling herself as she walks closer to him. It is as though he doesn’t hear her. She places a hand on his shoulder. “Jon.”

He turns to look at her.

She almost doesn’t recognize him.

The face that stares back at her belongs to a demon. She has seen this in Margaery before, and in Waymar. Blood has drowned the whites of his eyes so that she can only see a glint of quicksilver against the crimson. Black veins splinter over pale skin like a domino mask, cracking his features like stone, like marble. His lips are pulled back in a snarl, and she sees the fangs, sharp and pale and unnatural, glimmering in the dim light of the hall.

But there is no blood around his mouth. He has not fed. He has not…

“Jon,” Dany says again, shoving her fear to the side. She is not sure if bravery or sheer blind stupidity takes hold of her, but she kneels next to Jon, just barely avoiding the puddle of blood on the ground. She lifts her hand, hesitates, curses her recklessness, and gently places a hand on his arm. “Jon, it’s me. It’s me. Don’t hurt her.”

She can feel him shudder beneath her touch as though her touch is like a branding iron that has seared something deep within him. He closes his eyes, hands balling into fists on his lap. His jaw clenches and unclenches as he lets out one harsh breath after another, and something goes taut within her to see him like this. She realizes that she has slowed her breathing to match his—even though she realizes he doesn’t need to breathe, she hopes that it will be enough to calm him down.

“It’s alright,” she says. “It’s fine. It’s going to be okay.”

But Jon shakes his head, swallowing hard. He lifts an unsteady wrist to his mouth. Dany hears the sound of flesh being punctured and is suddenly thrown back into a memory, a recollection of the night of the fundraising gala. She is staring at it from the other side now, and she watches as Jon presses his torn wrist to Alerie’s mouth.

Not enough to turn her, Dany thinks. Just enough to save her…just like he saved me.

“Fuck,” she hears Jon whisper weakly a moment later. He falls back, almost straight into her arms. Dany looks over at the mayor's wife, panic strangling her voice, turning her words to smoke on her tongue, but she sees, with a bitterly cold wave of relief, the woman’s chest rising and falling—shallowly, but she is alive. She feels Jon shudder again beneath her touch.

Someone’s watching.

She wraps her arms around his shoulders, holding him closer to her, almost as if she is holding him back from the ravenous darkness that threatens to engulf him. Coldness latches onto her heart as she stares at the bloodied body of her friend’s mum.

Someone knows.

The garden boulevard is teeming with activity that morning as an eclectic subset of the city’s citizens try to find some respite from the surprising heat of the late spring day. Ladies have foregone their fabulously decorated picture hats for lacy parasols and their gentlemanly companions have replaced their woolen bowlers with tweed caps. Giant oaks and willows provide some shade along with paved paths and many a family and pairs of young couples have settled off the path on blankets for hastily planned picnics.

The three of them walk down one of the twisting paths of the boulevard, the (apparently) young woman’s parasol twirling against the oppressing glare of the sun, though none of them seem to notice the heat. They approach the large white building at the eastern end of the park, an observatory built in the classical style within the last century by the Citadel.

Of course, no one could ever guess that these three people seemingly in the height of their youth were in the crowd when the observatory first opened all those decades ago.

Once inside, the young-looking woman in a frothy lingerie dress takes a sidelong look at one of her male companions before she shakes her head, lowering her parasol.

“I understand the need for subterfuge these days, Jon, but do I absolutely hate that mustache on you.”

Jon shrugs, removing his cap and running a hand through his dark hair, a gesture he has not quite managed to shake even after centuries. “Arya always says it looks fine.”

“And Arya has always lied,” a clean-shaven Robb says, playfully hitting his cousin with his walking stick. He looks every inch the monied aristocrat in his cream suit and coat, his red curls properly coiffed. “You should know by now that she and Rickon are having a laugh about it somewhere.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time what’s fashionably acceptable changes again.”

For centuries, they haven’t needed to be too particular about their appearances—oil paintings and charcoal drawings from the artists they’ve known over the years can only replicate their likenesses so much. While their accumulated wealth is inevitable considering how long they’ve lived, anonymity is what allows them to move silently through the world. But the advent of photography, which Bran has theorized is only going to get better (or worse, depending on which side of immortality you are on), has made them more cautious. Frequently moving and changing their names and their appearances might only get them so far in the future.

As Jon frowns, Sansa, her auburn tresses now darkened to a rich chestnut hue and swept up into a fashionable updo beneath a small hat brimming with lace and flowers, glances around the foyer of the observatory. Though it sits on the overlapping grounds of the Citadel and the park, its cool shadows a potential relief to those outside, there is no one within the structure.

At least, there is no one that most people might be able to hear.

Robb leans against his walking stick, looking down at the tiny silver pocket watch hanging from his waistcoat. “Do either of you feel like being patient today?”

He says it as though it is for the benefit of all three of them but Jon knows what he means. Of all the Starks, Jon’s rein on his thirst is the most tightly controlled—not out of talent but necessity. If he allows it, his thirst would overwhelm him, his desire for blood damn near insatiable. It is only through decades and decades of practice that he has even a modicum of control over it.

And yet…

“No,” he finally replies, glancing up at the domed enamel skylight soaring high overhead. “I’ll speak to her. Wait here.”

Robb and Sansa share a look but in the end, they both nod.

Unnatural speed is one of the things that took some getting used to in those years and decades and centuries after everything had gone wrong. He is the fastest in his family—though Bran might best him if his younger cousin ever put his mind to it—and it only takes seconds to find her.

The young woman is standing next to a desk in one of the highest rooms of the observatory, dressed in a shirtwaist and dark skirt, her dark hair pinned up in a style like Sansa’s. A broad smile crosses her face when she sees him, her blue eyes wild with a manic energy that he is already and unfortunately familiar with. She hoists herself up onto the edge of the desk, her booted feet swinging almost childishly back and forth.

“I have vervain,” Myranda chirps girlishly, kicking the heels of her boots against the legs of the table. “You can’t hurt me, love.”

“Aye, I can’t. But I’m not looking to hurt you.” Jon closes the door behind him slightly, leaving it open just enough for him to hear Robb and Sansa if need be. “I’d like an answer.”

The girl’s grin becomes a shade wider and wilder.

“Oh,” she drawls, hand on her chest. “Is that what you want from me now? This is such a different story from a few months ago. Is that usually how you vampires play your games? Is it fear that drives you, Jon Snow? Fear of someone like me? Gods forbid you actually want something more. A kiss and a fuck and then you are gone, gone, gone.”

“An ill-advised tryst,” Jon corrects, shaking his head. He absently spins the daylight ring Kinvara had given to him and his cousins so many centuries ago, the only thing that has kept much suspicion of their true nature off them. Other vampires, sired by gods know who in that aftermath when the Starks were trying to figure out the extent of their newfound condition, don’t have the same luxury. Even worse, they do not have the Starks’ sense of self-preservation either. They run through the world with their desires and their bloodlust and their heightened emotions.

And so many times, he is no better.

Not for the first time nor the last, Jon wonders if Daenerys had truly known what hell she was unleashing on the world so long ago.

Myranda scoffs, crossing her arms. “And now you want to know who told me. What if I didn’t tell you? Are you going to kill me? Well, you can’t. Ramsay will know. And he’ll have the constables at your little manor in a matter of hours. He does not like when men or monsters play with his girls.” She winks at him. “But if you do want to play, I do love to scream. You remember that, don’t you?”

A very ill-advised tryst, just as Robb had warned. Jon grimaces.

“I want to know what you know about the comet.”

That must take her aback because Myranda blinks, hesitating. He can see her desire to hurt him with her words clash with her insatiable need to chat about astronomy. She worries at her bottom lip for a moment before she jumps off the edge of the desk, giving him a wary look.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Curiosity.” He gestures around the room at the shelves and shelves of books, the papers littered across every surface. Somewhere in this observatory, in a much grander room, there is the much-renowned telescope gifted to the observatory by the Citadel. For all that Jon and his cousins have cast uncertain looks at the rapid development of technology, the telescope may be the one thing he considers a saving grace. It might be the one thing that could end this centuries-long nightmare. “You don’t live as long as I have without being curious.”

Myranda eyes him. “It’s nothing new. The comet’s old. And its orbital period is long too. One hundred and ninety-seven years.” She makes a face. “Well, it’s long for some of us. I suppose you’ll be fortunate enough to see it yet again and again.”

But Jon waves off the aside comment. Instead he asks, “And the other one?”

From the way Myranda’s face goes deliberately and carefully blank, he knows that someone has told her about the other comet. He watches as she smiles. “What other one?”

“Myranda…” he begins but she only laughs, walking toward him. She presses one accusatory finger into his chest.

“What are you trying to do, Jon Snow?” she asks, blue eyes sharp and wicked and cruel—but her pupils are fat and dark with desire. He almost scowls. “You know Ygritte wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t visited her first asking all your silly questions. I bet you’re looking for the Originals, aren’t you? Trying to get in their good graces by finding out all about the red comet’s dark sister. Well, la-dee-da, you won’t find out from me. Perhaps if you’d been more of a gentleman all those months back but here we are.”

There is something wrong with this.

He turns his head back toward the door. He cannot hear Robb or Sansa on the floor below. He sees Myranda take a step back and when he turns back to her, he sees that she is holding a penknife up to the side of her neck. The blade presses into white skin—not with enough pressure to break the delicate flesh but enough to cause him to stop and narrow his eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory,” Myranda replies gaily, smiling brightly. “If you turn me, I’ll answer all your questions. I’ll tell you what I know about the dark sister. I’ll tell you who’s hunting you. I’ll tell you about the Originals and everything you want to know. You think I don’t know? You’re wrong. You’re wrong and I’ll show you. Just turn me and this will be fine.”

The vervain is in her pocket. Jon can smell it. He shakes his head.

“No.”

Myranda pouts.

“Please? For old times’ sake?”

Before, Myranda had not been like this. Before, Myranda had been a shy but brilliant young astronomer, one of Ramsay’s girls who worked in the famous observatory here in Oldtown. He cannot say what happened in between the last time he was here, when loneliness and anger and guilt had driven him into her arms and her bed. He has been so selective about which parts of his humanity he keeps on—but the part that would allow himself to open himself up the way he had once done with Daenerys…

He is not sure if there is anything left there at all, not anymore.

“The dark sister is coming back,” he confirms, watching as Myranda’s eyes widen as she realizes her mistake. “When?”

“You can’t compel me!”

“I’m not compelling you.” He reaches forward, lightning-quick, to grab her wrist and draw her hand away from her neck. Myranda gasps in surprise—and no little pain. She tries to fight back but it is useless against his superior, supernatural strength. Quietly, he lowers her hand, stepping into her space. Once before, he might have kissed her. Once before, he might have made a mistake. “I’m asking you. When does the dark sister come back?”

“I’ll tell Ramsay! I’ll tell Ramsay what you are!”

“Myranda.” His voice drops. He can feel his thirst slide through his veins, can feel the blood drown the whites of his eyes. From the fear that starts to seep like a toxin into her expression, he knows that the black veins have already started to spiral out from his eyes. “Tell me.”

Did I make you like this, he wonders. Is this my fault?

But Myranda has gone pale with terror.

“One hundred and eight years,” she whispers, trembling. “It’ll be one hundred and eight years.”

In the grand scheme of things, that is not enough time. The red comet will return and so will its dark sister—the first time since…since…

Forever, a voice from his memory whispers. We will have forever. I promise.

Damn you, he thinks, even after all this time. Damn you.

“Thank you,” he says, lowering Myranda’s wrist. Her eyes are still wide and roving as he reaches up to gently cup her cheek in his hand. “And I’m sorry.”

Confusion sparks in Myranda’s eyes—but it is already too late.

He lunges.

It is only after she has been sitting in the room for some time that Dany realizes that there is no way to tell time in here.

She sits on the couch, her bare feet tucked beneath her as she listens to the music from the record player, the tulle layers of her dress spilling over the cushions onto the floor like a bubbling plum wine. Shadows dance across the walls from the flames in the fireplace but there are no clocks adorning the walls or the tables. Her purse is on a chair by the door, her phone with it. A glance at the kitchen reveals appliances that blink damningly at noon or midnight, never once adjusted by the owner of this place. Time is revealed by the scratching notes floating up from the vinyl record, only in the rising and setting of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon beyond the walls and windows of this place. The occupant does not age and there are no clocks to bear witness to this time capsule of a life.

She sighs, rubbing at her eyes. Whatever time it might be, she feels drained.

Jon returns a moment later with two glasses of brandy.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he apologizes as he hands one of the glasses to her which she gratefully accepts. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” It’s a feeble answer and they both know it. “It’s just been a night.”

She watches as he sits across from her on the other end of the couch, absently pulling at the tie around his neck, his grey gaze far off as he watches the fire. She wants to assure him that no apology is needed, that it is painfully obvious now that they are no longer the main players in this game in town. They’d known someone was pulling strings somewhere. But for them to have been in the manor tonight…

But she doesn’t know how to say that without sounding accusatory. She drinks her brandy instead.

Bran had been the one to find them earlier, the wheelchair-bound vampire quickly cobbling together a likely story about dark hallways, renovations, and shattered glass. The ambulance had arrived minutes later and the party had eventually waned to an end, with most of the guests leaving content if confused, no one quite having the full story about what happened.

Missandei and Grey had been unable to find exactly who in the world had attacked Alerie but the promise of Dany speaking with Jaime on the morrow at least had their hopes up. Meanwhile, Margaery had gone home with her father and her brother; Dany cannot quite shake the look in her friend’s eye when she discovered whose blood she had been smelling. Dany wants to call her to make sure everything is alright, to check on Alerie’s condition, but she doubts that Margaery wants to hear from any of them at the moment. Perhaps Robb might have a better chance of getting through to her.

“I can see why you hate parties,” Dany finally says laconically, raising her glass in a weary toast. Jon looks back at her, clearly a bit surprised by the levity in her voice, before he laughs, shaking his head in defeat. He clinks his own glass against hers before taking a pull. Dany sips some of the spicy amber liquid before she continues, “But in all seriousness, Jon—we found out something. It’s not all a loss. What happened with Margaery’s mum…no one could have predicted that.”

But Jon is giving her a blank, unreadable look now and she knows that somehow she’s misspoken. She does not tear her eyes away from him though, meeting his gaze straight on, daring him to speak what is on his mind. She knows what he is thinking. And she almost thinks she knows what he is afraid of. She will not back down from this though.

She has promised.

It is Jon who looks away first.

“I almost lost control tonight.”

“But you didn’t. No, don’t argue with me,” she says sharply when Jon looks as if he is about to do just that. “You didn’t. I don’t know how you can show that level of restraint around blood but you still did. I think that’s remarkable. And I think that tells more about the man you are inside than the monster you keep believing you must be.”

When Jon doesn’t reply, uncertainty clear in his expression, Dany reaches out to gently squeeze his hand.

“You always tell me that you think I’m a good person, that I have a good heart. Have you ever thought that someone might think the same of you?” When he looks back at her, she gives him what she hopes is a reassuring smile. “You’re doing all of this for your family because of the guilt you feel. But I think it’s not just the guilt. I know it’s because you love them. And anyone capable of that kind of love, of that kind of self-sacrifice, is extraordinary. This part of you will not be part of you forever and even if it is, it doesn’t define who you are. The man who saved Alerie’s life, who saved my life all those weeks ago—that’s who you are. Stop trying to deny that.”

Jon says nothing for a very long time, the only sound in the room the crackling of the fire in the hearth. Dany wishes she might be able to convince him of this. But she knows from experience how deeply the gouges of self-doubt can run. She has only had hers for twenty-four years. She cannot imagine lifetimes and lifetimes’ worth of it.

What comes after all of this survival?

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

“But,” she says, as the tension runs deeper and sharper than she intended, finishing off the last few mouthfuls of her brandy, “I won’t forgive you for interrupting our dance. I bought this outrageously expensive dress specifically for this party. And while it looks lovely to run in, I can assure you that it’s not—I almost broke my neck five times tonight chasing after you.”

Jon stares at her. And then with a blink, his face cracks with humor as he hangs his head with a self-conscious laugh. He places his empty glass of brandy on the table before gently taking hers as well. As she watches him with some confusion, he gets to his feet and then holds out his hand.

“Come on.” She blinks at him.

“What? Where?”

“Like you said, we didn’t finish our dance.” He shrugs one shoulder, still waiting patiently for her to take his proffered hand. “It’d be a shame to waste that outrageously expensive dress you almost broke your neck in.”

She gapes at him for a few seconds…

…and then she feels her own smirk slide across her face when he smiles. She takes his hand.

“Are you teasing me, Jon Snow?”

“Probably.”

Dany lets him draw her out from around the coffee table, the swish of her skirts muffled against the multiple rugs on the floor. In the golden glow of the fire, the deep violet of her dress appears almost black. In the golden glow of the fire, the dark grey of his eyes seems nearly silver.

She smiles as he grasps her right hand with his left and pulls her into a warm embrace, his other hand ghosting gently across the sensitive bare skin of her back. She leans into him, hand on his shoulder, the scent of pine and soap and spice entangling her.

This is different from before. In the ballroom there had been the quiet murmur of conversation, the press of bodies, the knowledge that everything they were doing was part of the supernatural mystery they were embroiled in. Here in this room, it is so much more different. Here, all she hears is music. Here, all she sees and knows is him.

She feels at peace. She feels safe.

Once again, she has found a place that feels strangely like home.

They rock to the imperceptible sway of the music coming from the record player, some song that Dany thinks she should know but she cannot place the strands for the life of her. She closes her eyes, letting her body move to a rhythm that feels intimately familiar, as though she has done this a thousand times before. She wishes it were true. She wishes she could wipe the whole world away and that Jon was just a boy and she was just a girl and none of the terrible things mattered. That only they mattered.

I want us to be okay. I want all of this to be okay.

But as the days pass, she wonders if it is too much to hope for.

A dream, she thinks, resting her head against his. A lovely dream but a dream nonetheless.

They stay like this for some time, one song descending into the strands of another. They do not talk, letting the music and the sounds of the fire fill the silence that sits comfortably between them like a cherished secret. Dany thinks that she’ll have to leave soon. Tomorrow, they will start over again. Tomorrow, reality will come crashing back in. This is only a moment. This is not forever.

Yet when Jon swings her out in a gentle twirl, she does not stop the sweeping wave that pulls her back into his embrace and straight into a kiss.

For a moment, they are both caught in the stillness and suddenness of it, still echoing the pantomime of a slow dance. Her breath has left her in a gust of—surprise? No, that can’t be. Nothing is surprising about this at all. They have been orbiting around each other for weeks now, all unspoken words and furtive glances and the gentle ghost of touches that mean nothing and everything. She may have thought his kiss to be cold, that the metallic tang of blood might soak his tongue. But there is only heat and the spice of the brandy and a hunger that she had not expected but that thrills her nonetheless.

The intimacy of the kiss has started to drip into the promise of the dance. She feels his callused hand press roughly into the small of her back, drawing her closer into the solid warmth of his body. She knows he is strong enough to shatter her spine with a touch but she also knows that he would never even think it. She slips her right hand out of his and reaches up to gently cup his face, her fingers gliding along the sandpaper scratch of his short beard.

No blood, she thinks as she wraps her arm around his shoulders to cling to him, plunging her tongue into his mouth to taste the remnants of alcohol there. No blood, no pain.

She can feel Jon’s hand lace through her snow-blonde hair, fingertips grazing along her scalp. Shivers trickle through her, a moan seesawing along her tongue. She presses herself deeper into the kiss—hungry, starving, chasing after something she cannot name but that she hopes she can find in his arms. Already, her heart is pounding and her head is spinning. Her world has narrowed to the strange warmth of his body and the taste of him on her tongue and the whisper of desire that is electrifying her blood. She lets out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a groan, the desperate honey-sweet need for him and the molten heat of the kiss already starting to pool low in her belly.

She wants this, she realizes dimly. For all that she has been avoiding this, she has wanted it for too long.

And she wants him.

But Jon is first and foremost a vampire and if she lets herself be devoured by this passion, he will be the one who sets the terms. Dany hears a near-feral growl low in his throat and there is a moment of weightlessness, the world a blur of dancing fire and black shadows around her. And then her back is up against something solid, the fireplace off to her side, its shadowy waltz against the walls of this small place called home chaotic in the rush of heat and blood that obliterates the world. She gasps and then lets out a frustrated moan as he hitches her up against the wall, his kiss ravenous against her lips, against her jaw, against the slender line of her neck, each brush of his mouth against her sensitive skin sending a dangerous thrill through her.

But…

But…

There is a pause here. She can feel the scrape of his teeth against the rapidly beating pulse sitting in the hollow of her throat. She can feel his breath as he hesitates there, as though lingering on the edge of the chasm of temptation. He might sink his teeth into her now, hot blood running down his jaw as he fed deeply, and she doesn’t know what she’d do if he did. Her breath is in her throat as she waits, acerbic anticipation clawing through her—

Yes.

No.

Please.

But it doesn’t come to pass. Instead, she feels the warm, wet slide of his tongue against her pulse before he is kissing her there too and it is sending electrical signals into her brain, scorching every other thought in her mind to ash. He has wrapped an arm around her waist now and she scrambles for purchase along the wall, one hand on his shoulder for balance, the other desperately trying to find something else to hold onto. Her skirts, rucked up to her hips, rustle and cascade about them like a waterfall, the wall cold and unyielding against her bare back.

And when his hand ghosts along the bare skin of her thigh, Dany nearly groans in frustration. There is too much fabric. There is too much fabric and it is in the way and she grinds against him, echoing what she'd do if all of these layers were gone, wanton and desperate and wild, as she seeks relief from all that is building within her. She whimpers and whines as he continues to press hot, needy kisses against every tingling plane of skin laid bare before him, her thoughts spellbound with a want that has consumed her.

“Please,” she murmurs, her words broken, nothing now to any of this except what her body is craving. “Jon. Please. I need…god.”

It is pure nonsense but she thinks it is all she is capable of saying in the heat that has enflamed her mind and her heart and her whole body. It is a plea and a warning and a siren’s call and he swallows his name on her tongue with another searing kiss. It is sweet. It is too sweet and it is everything.

They are both going to plummet over the edge of this abyss, she realizes. Even as she begins to push his jacket off and she feels him start to undo the straps along the back of her dress, she knows they are going to fall.

She doesn’t care.

But she should.

And she knows this.

They both stop at nearly the same moment, chests heaving, blood rushing. Dany is half-curled into him, still pressed up against the wall, hands still on his shoulders to maintain some modicum of balance. She hears Jon let out an uneasy sigh against the slope of her shoulder, feels teeth and tongue and lips against her skin. She shudders, letting out a feeble moan.

“We should…” Jon starts to say, words a low buzz into the heart of her.

And Dany finishes his thought, however unwanted that it is.

“Stop. We should stop.”

She does not want to. God, does she not want to. She wants to claw at his shirt, to find his bedroom somewhere in this quiet space, to have him rutting and coming inside of her with her name on his tongue like a prayer and a curse. She wants to touch him, to taste him, to fuck him and be worshipped by him until she is half-drowning from decadent pleasure.

But she can’t. They can’t.

Not here. Not now. Not in the wake of this vulnerable, blood-soaked evening.

And maybe not ever.

“I’m sorry,” she hears him say, the collapsed, strained whisper so quietly spoken that it is nearly buried beneath the rotting, brittle corpse of the past. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Dany replies, closing her eyes. Her heart is in her throat. Fire is flooding her veins. “Don’t…don’t say that. Don’t apologize.”

It is her fault too after all.

Because she should have known.

She should have remembered.

I’m not her, she thinks, as he puts her back onto unsteady feet. And she’s not me.

And she never will be.

Somewhere else, a phone rings. After two rings, the other line clicks.

“I hope you’re calling me to tell me it worked.”

The woman with the quicksilver eyes sits back in her chair, absently twirling a pencil in her hand.

“As much as can be expected. They aren’t stupid.” There is a snort on the other end of the line but she ignores it. “The witches will figure it out sooner, you know. You have a plan ‘B’ for that too, I assume?”

“A plan ‘B’? Please. You know how the alphabet works.” There is a thoughtful pause. “And Jon…?”

The woman with the quicksilver eyes glances out the window. The pencil in her hand snaps in two.

“With the doppelgänger nearby, he reacted worse than I would have thought. She’s already gotten under his skin. But he’s alive, so to speak.”

“Yes, I’d like for him to remain that way—him and the doppelgänger. That’s the only way this is going to work. But the other Starks…well, you’ll do your job with them. We both want the same thing, after all.”

No, the woman with the quicksilver eyes thinks. We don’t. “Of course.”

“Wonderful.”

The line goes dead.

The woman stares at the phone for a long moment. Then she looks at her companion sitting across from her. He is watching her as he has always watched her and for a moment, she wonders if the centuries have been all that bad. But this is not her decision to make. It so rarely has been.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” her companion says, though she suspects he already knows what she’ll ask. They’ve known each other for too long. They’ve lived for too long and now…and now…

It doesn’t matter. She sighs.

“The journal—you gave it to the doppelgänger, didn’t you?”

Her companion says nothing but she knows him. His silence is answer enough.

She closes her eyes.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

In the late morning heat, the cool shadows of the grand and immense porch and the overwhelming scent of gardenias and azaleas envelop Dany. Shivering despite the sticky summer heat, her finger hovers uncertainly over the doorbell of the Tyrell mansion, unable to quite dispel the sense of foreboding that has draped across her like some terrible cloak.

It has been a few days since the Starks’ housewarming ball. While the small town had been more or less pleased with the actual ball, rumors and questions about Alerie Hightower and the horrible misfortune she’d suffered in a dark, closed-off hallway of the Stark manor had quickly replaced their insatiable and intrusive prying. To come within weeks of Daario’s death and Lancel’s disappearance and Ashara’s own lesser-known accident has tongues wagging incessantly…and nervously. Most people are willing to turn a blind eye to the events—unfortunate coincidences, they say, helped along by the official story and the assurance from the sheriff’s office that none of the events are connected. But others are beginning to murmur and doubt despite it all.

Dany runs a hand through her pale hair. The murmurs are not enough to worry her—no one is actually mentioning vampires or anything—but she recalls the mysterious vampire’s warning from atop the Hightower in Oldtown.

When it begins to rain blood on your sleepy little town, you’ll remember that I did try to warn you

She lowers her hand away from the doorbell. She should have spoken to Missandei and Margaery sooner. Why did she wait? Waiting has proved to be a disastrous decision. Sure, she might not have been able to prevent what happened to Margaery’s mum but perhaps she may have been able to at least give her friends some warning about the threat she received. It isn’t fair that she is holding all of these shards of a shattered puzzle in her hand, refusing to share them with her friends under the guise of protecting them all. Hasn’t she accused the Starks of doing the same?

The thought of the Starks causes her to take in a shaky breath. Since Alerie’s attack had happened at their housewarming, they’re caught up in the sheriff’s investigation, though when she came across Arya by happenstance outside the Starfall Bar & Grill, the youngest Stark sister mentioned that there is nothing tying anything back to the Starks.

“We’ve been playing this game for a long time,” the youngest Stark sister said with a shrug. The notion still disturbs Dany. Perhaps, in the face of centuries of life, the mortality of the citizens of Starfall does not quite strike the Starks as something to be concerned with. They’ve been invulnerable for so long that perhaps it simply does not compute that the people they are around now are susceptible to injury and death and torment. She doesn’t think it’s true—everything about her interactions with the family tells her it can’t be true—yet she cannot silence her doubts.

And then there’s Jon.

Heat flushes through her at the memory of their kiss in the guesthouse. She can’t shake the recollection of him hitching her up against the wall, kissing her as though he has been desperate to taste her for years. The same hedonistic desire had flashed through her veins too and if they hadn’t stopped when they did, she is sure the night would have ended far differently than it did—twisted sheets and tangled limbs and gasped names on the verge of release.

Yet she also remembers the hunger in his eyes when they found Alerie. She remembers the way his lips had curled back into a snarl, the way black veins had cracked across pale skin, the way crimson had blooded the whites of his eyes. He had the look of a demon in that moment, surrounded by the shadows of the hall. It had been shocking, even frightening, to see him like that.

Still, Dany is not sure if it had been enough to knock sense into her. Apparently, all of her years of careful self-preservation have been knocked to the wayside by a pretty face and an unfortunately good heart.

We’re not even together, she thinks to herself, remembering the girl who shares her name and her face, the girl whose heart had once belonged to Jon. The long-dead queen is a shadow of a ghost who reaches out through the centuries, her very death intertwined into the immortal lives of the Starks. How can she escape that? We can’t be together. It’s not right.

Taking in a breath to give herself some much-needed courage, she raises her hand again to ring the doorbell…

…only for the door to swing open before she can, revealing Robb Stark.

The eldest of the Stark siblings stands in the doorframe, giving her a curious look. He is dressed again in this season-inappropriate leather jacket, though Dany has long since stopped trying to gauge how the vampires regulate their body temperature. Jon’s skin had been cool beneath her fingertips when she’d embraced him that night but it did not have the icy chill of death and his mouth had been hot against hers as he…—but she shoves the image back into the dark recesses of her mind before it can continue.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, hitching her purse higher up on her shoulder. “Is Margaery here?” Robb shakes his head.

“She’s at the hospital with her mum.” He opens the door a little more and gestures for her to come in. “Most of the family is there.”

It stings that Dany had to find out from Missandei that Margaery’s older brothers Willas and Garlan had driven down from Highgarden once they’d heard of Alerie’s attack…or accident, as the story throughout town goes. A renovated part of the house, a shattered plane of glass, too much alcohol that had been flowing freely at the ball—perhaps it is an uncanny incident but it is the story that most everyone believes.

“But you’re here,” Dany notices as she steps into the richly decorated front foyer. Robb closes the door behind her, shaking his head. She frowns at him. “Did you come to see Margaery?”

“I did,” he confirms. “Her grandmother is here. I wasn’t quite able to talk my way out of sitting down and talking with her. But I heard you at the front door and mentioned it. She told me to go see who it was.”

Dany’s frown only deepens. Jon had told her that he and his cousins had deliberately been trying to avoid Olenna Tyrell, unsure of how much a child could remember of the family that had once lived in the Stark manor. The fact that Robb’s face isn’t stricken with grim reluctance makes her wonder if Olenna remembers anything—or if Robb has decided to simply compel away her memories. The latter option unsettles her, as the thought of mind manipulation always does.

She follows Robb through the immense, luxurious halls of the Tyrell manor. Bouquets of white roses and bloody marigolds and blushing peonies spill out of ornate vases littered throughout the house, each flower arrangement more elaborate than the last. The Tyrells are known for their green thumbs, though Dany has always suspected that the floral displays throughout the house are more thanks to the Tyrell matriarch than anyone else.

They emerge onto the shaded deck of the mansion, vines and other bits of greenery turning the sunlight into a patchwork quilt in the wooden lattice arched overhead. Giant planters exploding with gardenias stalk the perimeter of the deck, and, right in the middle and daintily sipping a glass of sweet tea, is Olenna Tyrell. The grand dame of Starfall sees them approaching from out of the mansion and lifts one eyebrow.

“Well, don’t stand there all day staring—I’ve had enough of that in my youth,” she tuts, placing her glass down on the wrought iron table. Atop the frosted glass plane, there are dessert plates with remnants of some sort of cake. But Dany barely has time to pinpoint what it is before Olenna is already bullying Robb. “It is also quite rude to keep eating this delicious cake in front of our guest without offering her some. Be a gentleman, Mr. Stark, and fetch this young lady her own slice. Do you like hummingbird cake, my dear? Well, even if you don’t, you’ll like this one. No, no—don’t argue with me. I’m old and I’m right. And Mr. Stark, if you ever stop dawdling, bring the girl something to drink too. Do you expect her to eat her cake dry?”

There is something inherently amusing about this old woman chastising a much more ancient vampire—but Robb seems to take it all in stride. He murmurs a brief apology to Olenna and gives Dany a brief and playfully exasperated look before he vanishes back inside the house. Dany watches him go before she hears the dainty scrape of a fork against a plate.

“Please sit down, my dear,” Olenna commands as she slices into her cake. “I am getting rather exhausted watching you linger there.”

Dany is not quite able to hide her smile as she sits. “It’s good to see you, ma’am.”

“Oh, it’s never good to see me.” The snort that comes from the older woman seems at odds with her elegant appearance. She seems half a memory of a bygone era of cinema in her linen blouse, wide-brimmed sun hat, and glamorous sunglasses, everything touched by the glimmer of dainty jewelry at her ears, throat, and fingers. Dany thinks that everyone assumes Olenna to be a sweet, harmless grandmother at first glance—and then the woman opens her mouth. “But I appreciate the thought. You didn’t bring a casserole, did you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, good. Half the town has brought over casseroles because not a single person in this town has any sort of imagination beyond peas and hash browns. Who decided that casseroles are an appropriate meal when families have to deal with tragic nonsense? You know what makes people even sadder than a death in their family or a terrible accident? Casseroles.” She takes a bite of her cake, chewing thoughtfully before adding, “Cersei Lannister doesn’t have the good sense the gods gave a paper clip but at least that sweet girl of hers has a talent for sugar.”

Dany is inclined to agree with most of what Olenna has just said but decides it would be polite, especially since she is positive Robb can hear everything, to not comment. Margaery has been one of her closest friends for years—she had more or less grown up hearing the barbed tongue of the Tyrell matriarch constantly. She is sure Robb has received more than a dose of it this afternoon.

A moment later, Robb returns with a plate of hummingbird cake and a glass of sweet tea for Dany. While Dany might normally turn down so much sweetness in one sitting, she knows that refusal to eat or drink is nothing short of high treason in Olenna Tyrell’s eyes. So she tucks into the cake, admitting to herself after a moment that Olenna is right—the cake is good.

“I was telling Mr. Stark that Alerie should be home within a few days,” Olenna says as Robb retakes his seat. “Such a shame that your housewarming ended on such an awful note. I’ve heard it was lovely until my daughter-in-law decided to explore parts of your house that she shouldn’t have. I swear, I knew my oaf of a son would rub off on her eventually.”

“We should have closed off the parts of the house still under renovation better,” Robb says, looking contrite. If Dany didn’t know the truth, she would have thought his words and his guilt sincere. She supposes they technically are but the source of the guilt is misplaced. She knows that there is a fondness between Margaery and Robb so Robb’s guilt most likely stems from that. It explains why he’s here too (and probably why Olenna is taking pity on him—the older woman may be advanced in years but obtuse she is not).

Dany takes another sip of her tea as Olenna turns her sharp gaze to Robb, peering at him from behind her sunglasses.

“You can’t save people from their own curiosity,” she says irritably. “I’m far more concerned with the fact that it’s just another thing that will tie my granddaughter down to this town. And don’t give me that look, Mr. Stark—you and your family are indulging your own curiosity by revisiting Starfall and doing your due diligence by refurbishing your family manor. But people like you don’t stay in small towns. It’s the cities and world travel for you young people. Dany here knows all about that. I wish I could convince Margaery of the same. Loras is hopeless but Margaery seems intent on staying here in Starfall for no reason except to irritate me.”

Dany personally thinks that unleashing Margaery on the world is something that the world might regret but doesn’t say so aloud. With immortality infused into her blood, she thinks that Margaery will have no choice but to leave Starfall. This small town will not be a place where she will settle down and live a long life. Within a few years, when people notice that she has seemingly stopped aging, she won’t be able to avoid all of the questions that come with it. The town will age and she will not—and to live she cannot stay.

That must be how it is every handful of decades with them, Dany thinks, glancing over at Robb, who is asking his own questions about Olenna’s past. She has never asked where the Starks are from. There is something vaguely northern about Jon and Robb’s accents but less so with the others. Maybe after centuries, they all just picked up little vocal quirks from all the places they’ve lived and all the time periods they’ve lived in—no one wonders why it’s impossible to spot. Either way, she wonders if their home has long since disappeared into the annals of history, if the place they came from has been consumed by dust and rot.

She’d ask Jon but…

We should stop.

Gods.

She wants him. It is stupid to want him and yet she still does. She likes his kindness and his selflessness, his mild smile and his self-deprecating sense of humor. And yes, there is an air of danger about him that she finds attractive, despite scolding herself on how stupid it is to even want that. She is no stranger to risks—the past several years of her life are proof of that—but when it comes to relationships, the only thing that she has done that might even be considered strange is breaking off her engagement to Daario. She has been engaged. She has been on dozens of first and second and third dates. She has had plenty of perfectly fine if utterly unremarkable sex with plenty of perfectly fine if utterly unremarkable men in King’s Landing and Winterfell.

So why does she suddenly want to throw herself headlong into a vampire’s arms?

It is the most illogical thing in the world—yet there is a part of her, a part of her that feels like a memory that she can’t place, that says that this is right, that this is what she has always been looking for. Stepping into Jon’s arms the night of the housewarming ball had felt like stepping into a place she never knew she longed to be.

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

Absurd.

“Personally, I think you need to throw another party to rid everyone’s minds of the last one,” Olenna is suggesting when Dany hones back in on the conversation. “Besides, Ashara and I weren’t able to attend the last one. You’ll find that both of us are far more interesting than most of the boring folks in this town.”

“I’ll talk to my family,” Robb relents with a faint smile. He rises to his feet, picking up his empty plate and glass to take back inside. “But I should be going. It was a pleasure meeting you, ma’am.”

“You as well, Mr. Stark. And I’m sure Margaery will appreciate spending more time with you as well if you throw another shindig.” Dany watches as Robb’s smile turns a little more self-conscious. In that, she sees shades of his cousin. He looks as though he is going to demur but Olenna is already reaching for her glass of sweet tea, completely unbothered by Robb’s comfort levels, “There aren’t that many young bucks around this town that I approve of. Boring, unambitious things, the lot of them. You at least seem to have your head on straight. And you look fit enough to know your way around a woman’s body—and if you don’t, I will hear it from Margaery and be incredibly disappointed. And don’t go to one of those websites you young men are always looking at. There’s a lot of grunting and thrusting and not nearly enough finesse.”

Dany wishes she could take a picture of Robb’s face.

A few moments later, it is just her and Olenna Tyrell on the deck, Dany’s slice of cake still half-eaten in front of her. Olenna fusses with her sun hat for a moment before removing her sunglasses, looking rather miffed at the lack of male bodies around to carry her empty plate back to the kitchen. She peers at Dany thoughtfully in silence for several moments, even as Dany takes another bite of her cake.

“Between us girls, you’d think someone who has lived as long as he has would be a little less easy to embarrass. Vampires are a prickly lot.”

Dany nearly chokes.

Somehow she manages to keep her face neutral, even as the sweet mouthful turns to stone on her tongue. She swallows hard, reaching for her glass of sweet tea just to keep from answering right away. Olenna rolls her eyes.

“Calm down, dear. If you think I’m about to go blathering to everyone that there’s an immortal family of vampires in town, you don’t know me nearly as well as you think. Now swallow that piece of cake before you choke on it.”

Dany swallows, though she hardly tastes it. Should she try to play dumb? She thinks Olenna will see right through her if she does and be incredibly insulted. But still, she has promised to keep the Starks’ secret safe. It seems hardly the thing to do to go spilling all the truths on the table like an upended glass of sweet tea just because Olenna has initiated the conversation. So she says nothing.

Olenna continues to watch her, sitting back in her chair and propping her chin along long, elegant fingers. When she smiles, the expression carries a fraction of humor and an entire dynasty's worth of exasperation. She says airily, “You young people always assume everything interesting only happens in your lifetime. Starfall has seen vampires once; it stands to reason that it would eventually see vampires again. And you and my granddaughter have gone and gotten yourselves tangled up in their mess.”

Dany hesitates. She knows Olenna had grown up in the Arbor but that she’d visited Starfall frequently as a child, decades and decades ago. How long had the Starks lived in Starfall before they’d abandoned the manor? How long did their time in the town overlap with Olenna’s frequent visits? How much can a child truly remember? Dany thinks that Jon and the others have avoided Olenna out of an abundance of caution and yet…

Finally, Dany manages to find her voice.

“How did you know?” Olenna lets out an unladylike snort.

“My granddaughter started acting very peculiar several weeks ago. My muttonhead of a son didn’t notice and Loras, sweet boy that he is, can be as dense as a sock. Alerie simply thought you and she were having a spat.” Olenna waves her hand carelessly. “But while I am old, dear, I am neither deaf nor blind. If you knew vampires once lived here in Starfall and your granddaughter started trying to find clever ways to get herself invited into the house she grew up in, you’d notice.” Dany thinks about that for a moment—and then she notices the grim tension around Olenna’s mouth.

Oh.

“You haven’t asked her what happened.”

“Of course I haven’t.”

“But you’re telling me.”

“You are not my granddaughter.” Olenna sounds irritable now. Before Dany can try to comprehend the heat in her words, the old woman is tapping her fingers against her chin again. “As I said, vampires have been here before. I must assume that there is a reason why they are here again. As far as I can tell, those Starks seem unlikely to be the ones who turned poor Margaery into one of them so I suppose I can’t hold a grudge. I do recall them being very kind to me when I was a little girl—especially that sad one that you seem to be taken with. Mr. Snow, was it?”

Margaery told her, Dany thinks at first and then quickly smothers the thought, recalling that Olenna had visited Ashara the night of the housewarming ball. And Ashara is a notorious gossip. She feels her expression go flat with an annoyed grimace as she lays her fork across her plate of uneaten cake.

“My mum told you, didn’t she?”

“Well, Ashara is a clever woman but I doubt she knew the vampire part,” Olenna tsks. When Dany gives her an alarmed look, unsettled by the choice of words, the older woman only takes another casual sip of her tea, letting out a hum of annoyance. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about me telling anyone about vampires. They will all think I’ve lost my mind even though I’m sharper than most of them combined. My god, the fools in this town grow exponentially each and every year.”

Before Olenna descends into another scathing commentary about the mental capacity of Starfall’s citizens, Dany quickly interrupts. “Do you know why they left last time?”

“My dear, I was merely a child at the time.” Olenna sounds rather perplexed at the question, though Dany sees that there is a sharp glimmer of thoughtful memory in her pale eyes. “Someone died a little before they left though. A lovely young woman. I remember several of the young men around town thought of punishing her with marriage proposals. She was far too clever for that though! I thought perhaps she may have had a little affair with Mr. Snow but…”

Another one. Dany cannot quite hide the flare of silly consternation within her. It is ridiculous to be hurt by this when she has only ever kissed him and even that, she is not sure if Jon was seeing her or if he was seeing the girl who looked like her.

You should understand that I know you’re not her.

We should stop.

She is going to give herself a headache.

“How did she die?” Olenna sniffs.

“Probably the same way everyone died back then. Radium poisoning or some such nonsense. The men in charge of such things were not very good at much beyond making money. And unfortunately, you cannot buy common sense. Now are you going to finish that cake? It is rude to be offered dessert and just sit there asking questions about people long since dead instead.”

Dany offers Olenna a small smile but her mind is already spinning.

A dead young woman. A sudden departure.

Secrets.

“What was her name?”

It will mean nothing in the long run to Dany but for some reason, she wants to know. If anything, it will settle a string of curiosity within her that has been plucked tightly by Olenna’s story. Olenna looks thoughtful for a moment, dredging up a memory that she clearly has not given any particular notice to in decades.

“Val, I believe it was. Yes, that was her name. Val.”

A snowstorm rages outside and a bloody war embroils western Essos yet the band plays on.

Sparkling gold wine flows in expensive crystal flutes while a haze of cigarette smoke lingers like a fog in the air, saxophone and trumpet and snare drum mixing like a lurid cocktail with voices raised in laughter and witty, drunken conversation. Young women in dresses that glitter with beads and sequins flitter from one table to the next, brazen red smiles on their rouged faces. Men tip their trilbys and boaters, coolly comfortable in their pastel three-pieces as they, without a care in the world, chat with feigned interest in the terrible war going on overseas, even as they swallow back another glass of whiskey or rum or denial.

Jon watches them all though he does not see them, not truly. Several men and women have already edged close to the table, coy flirtation on their lips and eager lust in their eyes as they eyed one or two or several of the occupants sitting there. And every time, they would be gently shooed away with a smile, a murmur, and a whisper of compulsion.

As the sixth young man has been politely turned away, Jon reaches for his glass of brandy as a voice on his right scoffs, “If one more person looks to whisk Sansa off into the night to fuck her blind, I’m going to vomit.”

Sitting off to his left, Sansa scoffs over the rim of her glass, her mulberry-stained lips turned downward into a frown.

“I am so glad you’ve remained as strange and annoying as you were last time I saw you ten years ago,” comes the retort. Sansa’s red hair is a frosty shade of ice-blond this decade and delicately pinned up in dramatic movie star waves, a stark complement to the black dress she wears with all of its glittering fringes. As has been the case for centuries, Jon knows that it is Sansa’s aloof caution and unearthly beauty that draws the eyes of men. But his cousin is stubbornly loyal to the rare loves she has courted over their immortal lifetime—this time, her loyalty is affixed to one Harry Hardying, a young poet from the Vale.

On his other side sits another young-looking woman who laughs loudly and unashamedly, her dark hair fringed and styled into fashionable finger waves. An equal number of men and women have approached her and while Arya is far less discriminating with her heart, she seems entirely unimpressed with the crowd here tonight.

Reason enough for that, Jon supposes as he sits back to let his cousins bicker. Ever since Myranda, he hasn’t let himself indulge, no matter how black or despondent his moods become. Robb had thought that as equally a piss-poor decision as his tryst with Myranda and still frequently tells him so but Jon has never been able to shake that Myranda’s madness was his fault.

After all, he has already been on the other side of that equation once before.

“Just say you’ve missed me, sister,” Arya chirps playfully before conspiratorially nudging Jon in the ribs. She lifts her own glass to her mouth, sniffing at the viscous crimson liquid within before slugging back a mouthful, her daylight ring glinting off the glittering jewels and golden lights of the club. “Remember when these storms used to come down to Winterfell when we were children and Father would let us play hide-the-treasure in the godswood? And we’d always somehow end up in the crypts instead?”

Jon smiles at the memory despite his mood.

“Aye, I remember.” Sansa snorts, polishing off her glass of wine while an observant waiter comes over to pop the cork on the chilled bottle sitting in a bucket next to their table. Sansa casually holds out her flute as he dutifully refills the glass with stars in his eyes.

“I remember Jon being covered in flour that one time, pretending to be a ghost,” Sansa points out with a shake of her head. “Scared me half to death.”

Arya grins wickedly, winking at Jon. “I socked him good for that though.”

They don’t often talk of their childhood here in Winterfell too often. Even coming back to the city it has become is hard, their old home long since buried with time and memory. In recent decades, the city college unearthed the ruins of the castle but all of them had been reluctant to return to the place they’d once known, to be reminded of the ghosts that haunt the battered and burned walls of their former home. It had only been when the crypts were discovered that Jon, Rickon, and Arya had returned there, intent on retrieving the ashes of the great weirwood they had long ago buried in Ned Stark’s tomb.

But the ashes had already been gone, ostensibly into some college’s dusty antiquity vault, and their father’s carved statue had been hauled off to a museum in the riverlands. “Northern burial statue of an unknown king,” the golden plaque in the museum read. Robb had been furious for years.

Sitting here in a club now in the nightlife district of Winterfell’s bustling downtown feels strange. This is no longer the Winterfell that any of them remember. It makes it both incredibly easy and horribly difficult to reconcile the past with the present, to be surrounded by these children with their alcohol and their nonchalant lusts and to recall a different time, a different way. It is enough to almost give Jon a headache and he reaches for his glass of brandy again.

A young woman approaching the table stops him though.

Jon watches her. Her honey-blond hair is cut in a fierce, severe bob, held in place by a feathered headband. Ash and flame glow from the end of her cigarette holder that she dangles haphazardly from two fingers, smoke seeping from between her lips like a secret. Her ivory dress is fringe and sequins and silk, shimmering with the light every which way she turns, strings of pearls looped carelessly around her neck. And her red smile and the glimmer in her snow-grey eyes, faint as both are, are knowing.

She leans forward over the table, her eyes never leaving Jon’s.

“Buy me a drink.”

It is not a request.

He hears Arya snort and out of the corner of his eye, he sees her raise her glass to her lips to hide her smirk. To his other side, Sansa only frowns, though she seems unconcerned. They all know what his answer will be. Ever since Myranda, they’ve known what his answer will be for nearly thirty years now.

So when he gestures for Arya to move, he is not at all surprised to see the confusion on her face.

“Jon?”

He slides out of the booth, downing the last of his brandy before leaving the glass on the table. Sansa’s frown has deepened and even Arya is hesitating. But he says, “When Rickon comes back, tell him to actually tip the waiter this time. Don’t wait for me.”

“You’re such a terrible liar,” the woman says as they approach the bar. Jon orders two glasses of the strongest whiskey they have, ignoring the way the bartender is damn near salivating at the blonde at his elbow. Already, he can feel the eyes of half a dozen young women, drunk and wild with lust and freedom, watching him the way the bartender is watching his companion. When he hands her a drink, she reaches for it—and the bartender jumps back as though shocked. She turns back to Jon, lifting her glass to her lips. “How many drinks to get you out of here?”

Jon shakes his head, a grim smile on his face as he slaps down far more money than the drinks are worth on the counter.

“None. Let’s go.”

The woman retrieves her fur wrap at the door and Jon doffs his hat and coat and after a few minutes, they are out in the alley adjoining the bar’s side entrance, fat snowflakes drifting down from a turgid sky to rest on their shoulders. He can hear the sound of the band even from beyond the brick wall of the club’s facade. Out on the street, he hears car horns blaring and the sound of tires splashing through the wet, snow-sodden pavement. Conversations drift in and out of the cacophony. He ignores all of it.

The woman taps at her cigarette holder; ashes descend onto the slush. Her grey eyes study him for a moment before she takes a long drag of the cigarette. When she breathes out, the smoke curls away like the frozen mist of his breath.

“I’m being hunted,” the woman says. “So I’m calling in a favor.”

He frowns.

“Hunted? By whom?”

The woman doesn’t answer right away. More cigarette smoke seeps from her mouth as she lets her gaze drift down the street. The cold winds outside have added high color to her pale cheeks and she looks a damn sight in her outfit. But he does not miss the way her body is taut with tension. Despite her carefree words earlier, he knows that she is worried.

Finally she replies, “I suspect someone who figured out that I’m the Starfall witch. It seems I can cast every spell except one that renders me invisible to a hunter’s eyes.” She shakes her head, letting her cigarette smolder and turn to ash in the cold. “I suppose the war isn’t doing us any favors. Some of your kind are feasting over there in the bloodshed and nature is in a riot trying to balance itself.”

“How did someone find out you’re the Starfall witch? You’ve always lived here in the North.”

The woman’s eyes crinkle at the edges with a humorless smile.

“Probably the same way I found out about you, Jon Snow. A kiss and a smile and a spell.”

She reaches out to wrap her free hand around his tie, drawing him closer. He can almost taste the nicotine on her lips. To anyone passing by, it looks like they are merely two lovers, caught in a moment of flirtation, the heartbeat before a kiss. He had kissed her once—and only once—before he knew what she was. Their history is one of checks and balances, of promises made and promises kept, and now she is here to retrieve a debt he owes her from years past when her spells had helped Rickon and Bran escape a mob.

“I don’t want to die,” she murmurs, voice low enough that only he can hear. She lets out a bitter laugh. “Wish they’d turn their eyes to all of those sired vampires running around in Essos. But the Starfall witch always dies young. The Hunters make sure of it. I’ve tried to hide from everyone that might know me but they still find me anyway. I don’t want to keep running, Jon.”

Jon sighs, leaning forward and pressing his forehead against the woman’s. “Has Ygritte found out what they want?” The witch shrugs.

“The Hunters are nearly as elusive as the Originals are,” she says, giving him a grim smile. “But it’s only the Starfall witch they want. You know why. You know what happened where Starfall now sits.”

Of course he does. He can never forget.

“What else?” The woman hesitates. He immediately senses her reluctance and pulls away slightly, narrowing his eyes at her. “What else?”

“I’ve only heard whispers, Jon.”

“I’ll take whispers.”

The woman sighs miserably. She pushes against his chest and he takes the hint, taking a step away from her. She looks down at her cold cigarette, brow knotted in thought, as though she is deciding whether or not she wants him to pull on this string. He will not compel her. He rarely compels anyone but there is something in her eyes, something in the uncertain set of her mouth…

“There’s something happening,” the witch says after a long tense moment. “The Hunters have killed the Starfall witch for centuries now. But something about it feels different this time. I can’t tell you what. I can sense the spirits whispering but they don’t tell me anything when I ask. I think they’re either too busy or they’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you.”

“No.” Jon sighs. “No, you wouldn’t.”

The woman looks as though she is going to argue.

She doesn’t get a chance to.

There is a breath of a step, the near-silent cocking of a pistol against the roar of traffic just beyond, and Jon is already spinning, his arm around her waist, as the brick next to the witch’s head explodes from the gunshot just down the alley. The woman in his arms sucks in a sharp breath as splintered shards of brick slice her pale cheek, too stunned to scream, and he is forcing her to the ground, out of sight and out of the eye line of the shooter who is loping toward them at a normal, mortal pace, his trilby askew and frosted with snowflakes in the nights. As the man gets closer, Jon sees the fog in his eyes.

Compulsion, is the only thought that goes through Jon’s head. He feels the impact of a bullet strike his chest and then his arm, the shooter’s aim unwavering as he approaches. The bullets are slugs—and not wooden. These shots are not meant for him.

Still, they catch him off balance and he staggers back into a trash can, blackish-red blood seeping from the wounds. They hurt because of fucking course they do but they are not fatal. If the man is surprised that he doesn’t immediately crumple, he doesn’t show it though. He is only a few paces away and he is already wildly searching for the witch. His eyes land on her. Jon is moving, reaching for the garbage lid that has been knocked askew, prepared to decapitate the man where he stands. But the man raises his gun, finger on the trigger.

Shit.

But there is a sudden, cold flash of pale hair and paler skin and then Sansa appears behind the shooter like a wraith of winter, her face a mask of vampiric fury as she grabs the man by the collar of his coat and tosses the man backward with careless, supernatural ease. Jon hears something crack as the man’s body collides with the solid, unmoving wall. He crumples to the filthy alley street with a groan as Jon and Sansa share looks, saying nothing. In a blink, Sansa is on the man, fangs bared, the whites of her eyes drenched with blood.

It is only then that Jon sees the other man. He has stopped a few paces away, his finger hovering over the trigger of his own gun with hesitance. Jon scowls at him and then with a sharp snap of his wrist lets the lid of the garbage can fly.

The man falls—first his torso, entrails severed and splatterd, and then the legs fold, collapsing at a broken angle.

The entire alley fills with the scent of warm blood.

He closes his eyes, feeling that voracious, ever-present thirst grab at him. It has not slackened over the centuries and his control over it, iron-clad but gossamer-thin, is the only thing that keeps that insatiable desire for blood from turning him into the monster he once was. He grapples with it and shoves it back down, turning instead to Sansa who is shoving the first man back onto the ground with something akin to disgust on her features. Her lips are wet and crimson.

“I haven’t seen this type of compulsion before,” she says, shaking a handkerchief out of her purse to dab at her mouth. “It was well done.”

That is high praise from Sansa, considering her skill at compulsion. And it is also unnerving because there is no one as good at compulsion as Sansa.

“Believe me now?” the witch says from behind him, rising shakily to her feet. Jon has to give it to her—despite the grey pallor to her face and the trembling in her hands, the woman is holding herself together remarkably well. “The Hunters aren’t going to stop, Jon.”

He frowns. Then he turns to Sansa. “Is Arya still inside?”

“She’s making sure the perimeter is clear.” Sansa daintily places her blood-soaked handkerchief back into her purse, not a hair out of place. She briefly swipes her tongue over her upper lip and then turns her glacial gaze over to the witch. “So. A Starfall witch. I should have known. Jon, this is an obsession.”

The witch narrows her eyes. But before she can argue, Jon holds up a hand to stop her. He looks between her and his cousin before letting out a long breath. “She says the Hunters are after her. The best place for her to be is the last place they’ll expect her to be because it’s too obvious.” He looks back at the woman and gives her a grim look. “I can’t protect you the way you want me to, Val. But I can maybe give you some extra years you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

What else can he promise someone mortal? What else can he promise anyone who breaks so easily? He has made these promises in the past and all of them have come to dust.

The witch—Val—meets his eyes and then sharply nods.

“Aye, I suppose that’s all I need,” she says, fishing to relight her cigarette. There are shadows in her spring-grey eyes. “You save my life and maybe I’ll tell you what the spirits are saying. That sounds fair enough.”

But Sansa shoots Jon a look. She reaches out to grab him, pulling him to the side as the witch inhales smoke and winter cold. His cousin’s eyes are full of warning…and sorrow.

“Jon, don’t do this.” Her voice is low and though her eyes are pale as ice, her tone is warm with sympathy and grief. She cups his face in her hands. “You have to stop doing this. It’s been centuries. We’ve long made our peace with that. Leave this buried. Leave this be.”

He knows this. He has known this for so long…yet she is right.

It is an obsession.

Forever. We will have forever. I promise.

But it is all he has.

It is all he can do.

Twilight has purpled the sky and emptied it of clouds beyond the living room windows of Dany’s rented flat.

She sits curled up on the couch, her legs draped in a fleece blanket she found shoved in the recesses of a closet. Scented candles flicker from half a dozen different nooks around the living room, throwing pale gold shadows onto the walls—it’s not dark enough to really need them yet but the smell of orange blossoms and coconuts almost reminds her of sunnier summers that didn’t have the shadow of the gothic draped over them. Drogon and Viserion have curled themselves into one giant furry ball atop the blanket while she thinks Rhaegal is still under the couch somewhere like some sort of gremlin.

She’s been home for some time now and she knows that she should eventually pop open her laptop to check on her work email. But instead, as she sips from her mug of tea with one hand, she slowly flips through the pages of the perplexing ancient journal with the other.

Reading the diary is still difficult. Even without dates noting each entry, Dany knows that it has covered centuries so far but she still cannot tell who the author can possibly be. There is still no name, no point of reference, no mentions of a past that might allow her to untangle the writer’s identity. She knows she shouldn’t expect to know some random vampire but the fact that the diary ended up in her hands at all feels significant.

Or perhaps, she thinks with a twisted smile, turning a page, someone just wants you to think you’re more important than you are. Ever since finding out that she is the doppelgänger, a title with far more weight than meaning to Dany, it feels like everything that has happened to her so far hinges on the fact that she shares a face with the original vampire. She sincerely hopes that reincarnation isn’t in the cards here—what a goddamned headache that would be.

xx. cont. eve. the whole thing was a waste of time. I made him forget again.

She wonders what poor human keeps getting walloped with compulsion. There is no name so she supposes the unlucky bastard died decades (or centuries) ago without realizing his memories were a sham.

Astapor has its own stories, though I’ve heard of the vampire myths they tell. How interesting it is to see how deep the legend goes. There is nothing here for me but a feast.

Still, it’s probably smart to bring the journal to the Starks. None of the names within the pages of the diary mean anything to her but perhaps they might recognize them. Maybe it might even point them in the right direction of her old engagement ring and the whole puzzle that is.

Right.

There are a handful of loose pages of sketches and it takes Dany a moment to realize that some of the buildings in the drawings she recognizes, though not as they are now. There is the classical colonnade base of the Hightower, long before the tower was built atop it. There is the famous palatial dome of the Braavosi Grand Library, skeletal in its infancy but bearing hints of the decadent luxury that would eventually paint its golden curves. There are sketches of statues of famous historical figures and sketches of wooden bridges that have long since evolved into steel wonders.

Dany grazes her fingers across a half-finished sketch of the Wall in the North. Apparently, it had once been hundreds of feet high, diving the realm from the North and the Frostfangs. The Wall of her lifetime is far smaller and, if the historical record is true, is far less impenetrable—she has driven on the roads through the strange glacier-like bulwark while heading farther north for ski trips with friends.

When was this? Jon and the others must remember this.

She feels a pang of something bitter twist in her chest at the thought of Jon and she quickly turns the page…and immediately stops when she sees the name of her hometown written in a lazy scrawl.

The witch hunts continue, though certainly not to the extent or fervor with which they captured Westeros and Essos a handful of centuries ago. Thousands of grimoires have burned along with their owners. As the decades pass into memory, so does the history of spells. The spirits of nature keep trying to resurrect the power in Starfall witch after Starfall witch and I’m certain that come the return of the twin comets—

Dany leans forward in interest. Jon and his cousins had called Missandei the Starfall witch. So had the vampire on the roof. But Missandei has admitted that she doesn’t know what that means—even her mum and Nonna had admitted to not knowing the title. In that, Dany knows that her best friend is telling the truth. But clearly, there is something important about this particular witch, this particular magic in Starfall.

But something about what she has just read makes goosepimples whisper down her arms.

…come the return of the twin comets, they’ll have imbued some new witch with all the magic of the accumulated centuries.

How much magic is that? How much power does Missandei truly hold? Witch hunts aren’t a thing anymore but could something supernatural in the world still try to find Missandei the way so many vampires seem to know of the doppelgänger?

She keeps reading.

I’ll continue to observe the progress, though I think the next few decades will be quiet. So many pieces have been moved into place. Ygritte is an asset. She keeps her ear to the ground far better than most vampires. If anyone knows where the final grimoire will be, it will be her. I will pay her a visit in a few years.

Dany stops.

Ygritte.

She remembers the red-haired vampire from the Citadel. Jon had believed her to be a reliable and valuable source of information. She frowns, sitting back on the couch and absently petting the top of Drogon’s head as she gazes thoughtfully down at the diary. The diary…it can’t belong to Jon, can it? It had arrived on Ashara’s door before he picked her up for the carnival and he has promised to be honest with her (at least for the things that he can remember). And the diary entries don’t sound like him…but that doesn’t mean anything. A mere handful of years can change the way people speak, decades and centuries even more so.

She thinks about the diary entries she has read. At the beginning, there had been anger in the entries. Loss. Frustration. Bitterness. But as the diary progressed, a more thoughtful tone had taken over. She knows that Jon has been working on reversing the immortality spell—it stands to reason that when he first woke up as a vampire, he would have been furious with that other Daenerys. The fury would have settled over the years too.

She runs her thumb along the leatherbound edges of the diary. Can the diary be his? Is this all that he can’t remember? But it mentions Ygritte too and clearly Jon knows her.

Her fingers itch for her phone, but she knows it would be pointless—it's not like she carries Jon's number, even after all this time. And what exactly would she say to him once she called him? Would she accuse him of telling her more lies? Or would she demand he kiss her again? Her traitorous hormones clearly aren’t functioning on the same wavelength as the logical part of her mind.

The war in Essos has turned into a feeding frenzy for the hundreds of sired vampires alive in the world. Already, rumors are spreading across the bloody battlefields of creatures that walk the night and feast on blood. On our journey to White Harbor a few months ago, he told me that it has become an epidemic and that they have had their hands full with hunting the hundreds of younger vampires still blinded by their ill-gained immortality. There will be an easier way to deal with that in the future. Blood for blood, life for life—

Thudthudthud.

A sudden series of loud knocks on her front door nearly sends the book—and Dany’s heart—flying across the room. Drogon and Viserion look up at the sudden noise, Drogon letting out a hiss of irritation. Dany glances down at her phone. She has no missed calls or texts. No one is coming over. Maybe it’s one of her neighbors?

Yet something in the back of her mind tells her that it’s not.

I really need to ask one of them how that whole invitation thing works on rented flats, Dany thinks as she hesitantly rises to her feet. The cats don’t seem to be freaking out—aren’t cats usually good detectors for the supernatural or is that one of those stupid lore things that’s going to get her killed. Trying to keep her voice steady, she calls, “Who is it?”

“Open the damned door, Dany,” comes the muffled reply. Dany lets out a sigh of relief and then immediately makes a face. She stalks over to the door and flings it open to reveal Viserys, standing in the hall and already scowling. She rolls her eyes as she steps aside to allow him in. “This would be easier if you just stayed at Ashara’s. Why don’t you just break your lease agreement and move in? How many months do you have left anyway? Being halfway across town while she’s recovering isn’t doing anyone any favors.”

Vis has never minced his words but Dany finds she has little patience for it tonight. She turns to shut the door as her brother flings himself into an armchair. “As far as I’ve been told, Ashara’s doing fine with just you there. And she told me not to uproot myself just to help her. If you need me at home, there are better ways to go about asking.” She spins back to face him…only to stop dead in her tracks when she sees that Vis is holding a very, very familiar-looking ring box.

And sitting nestled in the red velvet is her old engagement ring.

Daenerys’s ring.

No. How does he…but why did Daario…he didn’t say…he shouldn’t have…

Dozens of questions and scenarios fly through her head and all of them die on her tongue as she stares at her brother in stunned silence. His brows knit over lilac eyes, a look of exasperated annoyance clear on his face. He places the ring box down on the coffee table.

“Do you know why Daario sent that to me?”

“He…what?”

After the attack on Margaery’s mum, Dany had not dared to push her luck by visiting the station to take Jaime up on his offer. She’d only hoped that the offer would still be on the table once the chaos of the incident had settled down. But she had never imagined that the ring would be anywhere except in police custody or still buried somewhere within Daario’s apartment halfway across town. Hell, she’d even entertained the possibility that he may have sold it in the wake of her running off to King’s Landing.

Now, to have Vis here, with the damned ring that she has been looking for right in front of her, confirming that Daario had never gotten rid of it and in fact had sent it to her brother, is almost too much.

He kept it. Why would he keep it?

But she remembers.

Marry me. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

She wants to cry.

“When?” she finally manages to ask, surprised by how shattered her voice sounds. Vis seems taken aback by the ragged shards of grief in her voice, grief that Dany had been so sure had been buried beneath the ground, and he blinks uncertainly. His expression softens, the combativeness dimming from the pale lavender of his eyes.

“Months ago,” Vis answers. He looks uncertain now. “You didn’t know.”

Dany can only shake her head.

Daario hadn’t sent the ring to her. But he had clearly been trying to get it away from him. Why would he send to Vis? Did Daario know what the ring truly was? Had he died knowing how cursed it was?

“Dany?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just…” She needs to sit down but the sofa seems so far. The floor is closer and she is not sure if her slow collapse onto the carpet is voluntary or not. “He sent it to you. Why didn’t you say anything? Was there a note? He never said why?”

Now it’s Vis’s turn to shake his head.

“No. I just got the box in the mail. There wasn’t a note or anything.” He looks over at the open ring box, a look of apprehension crossing his face. With a flick of his hand, he closes the box with a sharp click. She can already see the suspicions and calculations racing through his pale eyes as he examines the closed velvet box. She watches as he lets out a long slow breath, his mouth already twisting with frustration. “Dany, what’s going on?”

She should lie. She needs to lie. “Vis—”

“Something’s happening here in Starfall, Dany,” her older brother grouses impatiently, his gaze cutting toward her. “I’m not blind. Something dangerous is going on. First Daario ends up dead, then Ashara stabs herself with a knife for some reason I still can’t explain, and now Alerie is also in the hospital. You don’t think there’s something a little strange about that? For all of that to happen in just a few weeks?”

What can she say? What can she possibly say to her brother right now that will make any of this make sense? Vampires and doppelgängers and witches and all the dark, terrible things of the world, the things that live in the shadows, the things of legend and horror and blood…

It will kill you, the spectre of the other Daenerys Targaryen said in her dream. All of this will ruin you as it ruined me.

But better you die than I.

She has accused Jon and the Starks of keeping secrets. She has told them that only the truth will protect her. Is she not a hypocrite if she refuses to tell Vis and Ashara all that is happening under the guise of keeping them safe? How can she keep them safe if they don’t know the sheer scale of the things that are quietly and slowly descending on Starfall? If either of them gets hurt again—or worse—she’ll never be able to forgive herself, that she had sat by with her mouth stuffed full of secrets and lies while the darkness dragged them both under.

It is not your secret to tell, a voice chides her.

“You won’t believe me,” she finally says quietly. “Everything that’s happening…it’s not believable.”

Vis scowls at her.

“Try me.”

Dany stares at her older brother. And she thinks of Daario’s ruined corpse that she saw in her nightmares. She thinks of Ashara lying grey and unmoving in a hospital bed. She thinks of Margaery’s red eyes wild with hunger and she thinks of the man who stepped over Hightower’s parapet and she thinks of Waymar and Alerie and Lancel.

They have to trust me, she thinks. As I trust them.

As I trust him.

And so she tells him.

Chapter Text

“How did he take it?”

The wooden boards of the living room creak beneath Dany’s weight as she rubs at her face. Most of the houses here in Starfall are at least half a century old. Missandei, the only member of her family still in Starfall, lives in one of the oldest neighborhoods in town, a street that residents charmingly call the Rainbow Road due to its pastel-colored, one-story shotgun houses. On the far end of the row, Missandei’s little lavender house with its canary yellow door and chipped shutters sits with its wisterias and hydrangeas overflowing from her miniscule porch railing. Despite the cheerful-looking nature of the street, it is also rumored to be one of the most haunted streets in the country. At night, she might almost believe it.

(Missandei has told Dany that she doesn’t sense any more ghosts than usual on this road and Dany still hasn’t worked up the nerve to ask exactly what constitutes a usual amount of ghosts.)

“About as well as can be expected—I am pretty sure he still thinks I’ve gone mad,” Dany sighs, shaking her head at the small smile on Missandei’s face. She sits, cross-legged and exhausted, next to her friend on the colorful threadbare rug that takes up most of the narrow living room but she tries not to let any of her fatigue seep into her voice. “Do you think I was wrong?”

Missandei falls silent at that. Dany isn’t sure if that is an answer onto itself. She watches as her friend absently pages through the grimoire borrowed from Ygritte, her friend’s face lit by the distressing number of candles flickering throughout the long and cluttered living room. Dany’s old engagement ring sits in its velvet box next to the book.

Dany had texted Missandei soon after Vis had left, telling her that her brother had been holding Daario’s ring the whole time. Missandei had instructed her friend to visit her immediately and so Dany had arrived a few minutes ago, bearing the ring and the mysterious journal. Missandei has put on a pot of tea to help caffeinate them through what is clearly going to be an all-nighter.

Finally, Missandei looks up from the grimoire, using the hair tie around her wrist to secure her thick coils into a high bun. She is frowning now as she picks up the ring box. She flips it open and studies the small silver band nestled within. Dany tries and almost succeeds in quelling the pain that flares up at seeing the ring.

Marry me. I love you. Be with me. Marry me.

I can’t.

What if he hadn’t kept the ring? What if she had never left? Would he still be alive? She has no way of knowing. She hadn’t loved him enough to keep the ring and she hadn’t loved him enough to stay. She’ll never know what could have been because that path is shrouded in an answer her heart would never have let her find out.

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

Is this it? Is this everything that she was looking for?

“I think honesty is the best policy here,” Missandei says into the silence, taking the ring out of the box to examine it more fully. “He already knew that something strange had happened with Ashara. I suppose the real question is if you think he is going to go to Jaime with what he knows.”

“He won’t.”

“Dany, are you sure?”

Is she? She had tried to hedge how much she’d told Vis last night, knowing his tendency to dramatically overreact to the slightest inconvenience. But her brother had been uncharacteristically quiet, staring at her intensely as she explained Daario’s murder and the strange goings-on around town. There’d been no good way to skirt around the fact that the world of the supernatural has sunk its claws into the very depths of Starfall and though she’d tried to protect the extent of the Starks’ involvement, Vis, irritating as he may be, was not stupid and called her out on it.

Dany toys with the frayed edge of a throw blanket, chewing the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. Finally, she says, “He’s my brother. I can’t have something happen to him the way things happened to Ashara and Daario or Alerie. If he doesn’t know enough, it might get him killed.” Missandei only hums, flipping another page in the book. Dany rakes her fingers through her pale hair. “You think I should have one of them compel him to forget.”

“If you trust him, then I trust him,” Missandei replies quietly, looking up to meet Dany’s eyes, tucking the ring into her palm. “But the Starks might not see it the same way as you do. You’re protecting your brother. But they don’t tell their secret to anyone. The reason I know is because I’m the Starfall witch. The reason you know is because of Jon.”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure I would have been able to avoid any of this, if that’s what you’re saying. I’m the doppelgänger of the first Daenerys. Maybe it’s inevitable that I was pulled into this, that we were all pulled into this.”

Nature does love a loophole and you’re it—the mortal shadow of the Original.

As the words of the silver-eyed vampire come back to mind, Dany shivers. She is not one to believe in fate or destiny or any nonsense like that. She has chosen her path out of her own free will, has made decisions that best fit her hopes and her dreams and the calling of her heart. It feels strange now to think that perhaps some of what she is has a preordained role in the universe. She is still not quite sure what that role is but she hopes that maybe it’s to be more than a shadow.

She watches as Missandei lays one slim finger down on the browned, water-logged pages of the grimoire. The entire grimoire is written in the dead language of High Valyrian, the root tongue of several Essosi languages that Dany has learned throughout school and her travels. She’s never learned High Valyrian though—it is the language of history professors and modern linguists and she is neither. Missandei, however, is perusing the text with vague interest, her nose wrinkled. Dany asks, “Anything interesting? Since we’re all pulled into this?”

“Well, this grimoire is certainly older than your journal,” Missandei murmurs with a grim note in her voice. “Even if they’re both in a sorry state.”

“Does it have the immortality spell in it?”

“I’m not sure.” Missandei bites her lower lip, adjusting her glasses as she leans forward to peer at the words written in the grimoire in nearly-faded ink. Dany thinks it might help to turn on some light other than a bunch of candles but Missandei had hushed her when she suggested it earlier. “There could be a translation error here. High Valyrian started to get extensively bastardized about seven hundred years ago into its language variants. And since I don’t know when or where this grimoire was written, some words can mean half a dozen different things. What it does say…I’m not hopeful, Dany. Grimoires are already rare and this might be one of the oldest. If I even mispronounce a word incorrectly, a spell not working might be the least of our worries.”

Dany reaches up to toy with the amulet that still hangs around her neck, the little charm that is filled with enough vervain to keep her from being compelled by any vampire. She remembers the trip to Oldtown. “Ygritte mentioned that the grimoire was Grey’s. Can he help?” Missandei looks up at her, a wrinkle knotting between her brows.

“I was going to call him in the morning but…” Missandei looks confused. “Ygritte said the grimoire was his? Grey said it was hers, that she only contacted him to maybe help translate it.”

Now it’s Dany’s turn to be baffled.

He said it was hers?

She clearly remembers Jon asking where in the world Ygritte had found one of the world’s rare grimoires and Ygritte replying that with all the rumors of the comets flying around, she’d gotten herself hold of a witch. As she replays the conversation in her head, a conversation where she had also assumed that Ygritte didn’t know that the Starks were the Originals, she is starting to wonder if everything the redheaded vampire had said had all been purposely duplicitous. Considering what the journal has said about her…

Suspicion floats around in the back of her mind as she retrieves said journal from the couch, her fingertips skittering across the leatherbound cover.

“I think Ygritte knows something she didn’t tell Grey.” She flips through the pages until she finds the entry she is looking for. She hands the journal over to Missandei, pointing to the passage. “Whoever wrote this journal said that Ygritte is an asset because she is one of the few people to know where the final grimoire would be.”

Missandei reads the words in silence before looking up at Dany. “Do you know who wrote this?”

“I’ve been trying to figure it out since the night of the school carnival.” Dany watches as her friend pages through the journal beyond the entry that mentions Ygritte. “The only thing I know for sure is that whoever wrote it is a vampire. There aren’t any dates in here but judging by some of the entries, I think the journal covers at least seven hundred years of events. I haven’t finished it yet though. I tried paging through to see if the writer knows the Starks but…”

“Or is a Stark,” adds Missandei pointedly, lifting her glasses to act as a headband. Dany makes a face at her which Missandei promptly ignores. She closes the journal and puts it on the floor, placing the ring on top of the open grimoire. When Dany opens her mouth to defend the family of vampires she has come to know, Missandei gently shushes her. “One moment. I’m not going to get far enough with this ring or this grimoire without some help. I need to ask someone if they know what I should be looking for.”

“Grey?”

“Not quite.” She reaches for Dany’s hands then, clasping them in her own, and Dany feels a spark of something shoot through her, as though Missandei herself is a beacon of static electricity. But there is something strange about the shock that simmers down her spine. She looks around at the flickering candles, suddenly wondering if this has to do with some spell Missandei had been planning to attempt the moment Dany had called her to tell her about the ring. Missandei must read her thoughts because she looks up and smiles. “No ghosts unless I ask for them to come in. It’s a good time to do it too. It’s the witching hour.”

Dany has no idea what that means and says so. Missandei only laughs, a sweet and warm sound, swiping a reassuring thumb over Dany’s knuckles. “Trust me.”

“Of course I trust you, Missy, but…”

But the words die on her tongue as Missandei closes her eyes and then begins murmuring words in a language Dany has never heard before.

“Māzīs. Māzītīs. Jaehossi uēpossi arlȳssī, ynot, aderī.”

The vowels and consonants shift around Dany like a strange lullaby, carried on the flickering shadows of the room, and the hair on the back of her neck stands up. She warily eyes the dancing flames that surround them, each one a pinprick of light against the encroaching darkness outside. Goosepimples run down her arms. There is something enchanting about the spell that Missandei is casting now but the words that rush over her feel wrong somehow. She is lulled by the chanted spell as though it is little more than a song but it also sinks into her like a thousand tiny mouths gnawing into her skin with bloody fangs.

She feels half a stranger to this.

“Māzīs. Ynot. Māzītīs. Rāpirī. Rāpirī. Rāpirī. Kesīr drējī jiōrilaks.”

The flames flicker. The darkness heaves.

“Rāpirī. Rāpirī.”

If she closes her eyes, she might think there is another person here in this room. She might think she hears someone breathing right next to her.

She might feel a cold spectral touch graze her cheek.

There’s no one here, she tells herself, casting her eyes around the room. There’s no one here but us. No ghosts. No spirits. Nothing.

Yet she can feel eyes on her all the same.

Her friend’s hands are like a vice around her fingers, and she can see when the first candle goes out. Then the second. And the third. A cold chill sneaks its way up Dany’s spine as she twists her neck around to see candles fluttering out into grey smoke and darkness behind her too. She continues to watch as all the candles go cold and dark…except one. It is the one sitting on the coffee table across from them. The lone light in the room seems to darken every shadow, burning brightly against the cold that is infusing Dany’s skin. Can’t Missandei feel it? Can’t she sense that the candles have gone out?

Daenerys, she thinks she hears a voice murmur, warm breath brushing her ear, and she damn near jumps out of her skin. Daenerys Targaryen. Daughter of death. Slayer of lies. Bride of fire.

Is this the magic of the Starfall witch? Or is it something more ominous, much darker?

“Missy,” Dany hisses, feeling a flutter of fear alight within her chest. She can see no one except her best friend but the room feels crowded with swarming bodies, unseen and silent in the macabre shadows of the room, their skeletal visages dancing before her eyes, gleefully waiting. If that last candle goes out… “Missy, I think—”

Missandei abruptly sucks in a breath, her eyes flying open. Immediately, all of the candles flare back to life, dousing the room in an inviting golden glow. The chill vanishes and so does the oppressing sense of someone leaning over Dany, cavernous hollows watching her in the darkness. Missandei releases Dany’s hands and glances around the room, a look of disappointment on her face as she lowers her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose.

“It didn’t work.”

“It didn’t?” Dany is positive there had been something in the room with them. “Does it usually work?”

“Sometimes,” Missandei admits, picking up the ring from the grimoire and closing the giant book. She reaches over to her side before handing the journal back to Dany with an apologetic smile. “I heard voices but there were too many of them whispering. I couldn’t make any of them out. I’ll have to try again with Grey—maybe having another witch as a channeling agent might work better. I’m sorry that I made you come all the way over here tonight.”

But when Missandei tries to hand back the ring and the ring box, Dany only shakes her head.

“It’s better if you keep it. I’m sure you’ll be better able to conceal it than I would, unless I buried it in one of the cats’ litter boxes.” Missandei laughs but withdraws her hand anyway, jamming the ring box into her sweatshirt pocket. Dany watches as the box disappears into Missandei’s shirt, feeling oddly forlorn. Perhaps that is why she asks, “All of this magic…do you feel as though you’ve been given more power because you’re the Starfall witch?”

Missandei unfurls her long legs and rises to her feet, walking around the living room to flip a few lamps on and to blow out the myriad of candles nestled on various shelves. As she does so, she says, “I feel like I need to walk on a balance beam of being very cautious with my magic and indulging in it. My mum and my nonna only practice a little so most of what I learned is…”

She trails off, her gaze almost distracted. Dany waits for her to finish her sentence but she doesn’t. Instead, Missandei nods at the journal in Dany’s hands.

“I think the journal and the grimoire together are probably going to be important.”

“I think so too.” Dany feels the grimace twist her lips as she glances down at the journal, flipping through the pages of elegant handwriting and pencil sketches. “I wish I knew who gave it to me though. It would be a start.” Missandei gives her a long look.

“You could ask Jon.”

Dany’s mouth snaps shut.

She has not spoken to Jon in days, not since the night of the housewarming ball. How can she? If her embarrassment over what had almost happened that night wouldn’t drown her, surely his apologies would do her in. It does not help that her memory keeps reliving that kiss over and over again and she has spent the past several nights tossing and turning in her bed, much to her cats’ displeasure, as she tries to shake the memory of a phantom body folded into hers loose. Maybe it’s a good thing that she’s spending the night over at Missandei’s.

As the silence lingers on, Dany risks looking up at her best friend and sees her giving her a strange look. Then a different light passes over Missandei’s face and she lets out a disappointed breath.

“Oh, Dany. Tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t,” she insists more strongly when Missandei only makes a sound of disbelief. “I only kissed him.” And yes, she certainly wanted to do more than kiss him and if they both hadn’t stopped when they did, there is a chance she would have slept with him. But she doesn’t tell Missandei that.

“Dany…” Missandei lifts her glasses to tuck them in her hair again and to rub at her eyes. “I want you to know that I say this as someone who loves you dearly: you need to stay away from them. You need to stay away from him. I understand that we’re doing all of this to break the immortality spell and that they seem like good people because of it. But you have to understand that they are still vampires and you are still a human. They’ve been predators longer than they were mortal. No matter how they look, under the right circumstances, they will hurt you because it’s in their nature to. We still don’t know who turned Margaery or Waymar.”

They’re not monsters, Dany thinks to herself. She thinks of Robb, so kindly chivalrous. She thinks of Arya’s playfulness and Bran’s shy gentleness and Sansa’s protective reserve and Rickon’s exuberant enthusiasm. And she thinks of Jon doing everything in his power for centuries to reverse this curse on his family, to bring mortality back into their lives. She thinks of the blame and self-recrimination he wears like a shield, the reminder that all of this came about because of a person he once loved, long dead and gone.

“I trust them,” Dany says eventually. Before Missandei can protest, she continues, “I know why you don’t and I understand it. And maybe there is a part of me that will end up regretting all of this but there is a larger part of me that tells me that I’m safe with them.

And anyone capable of that kind of love, of that kind of self-sacrifice, is extraordinary. This part of you will not be part of you forever and even if it is, it doesn’t define who you are.

The man who saved Alerie’s life, who saved my life all those weeks ago—that’s who you are.

“Besides,” Dany adds with a small, teasing smile, “I can’t ask him about the journal if I’m avoiding him, now can I?” But Missandei still doesn’t look certain.

“They’ll look out for each other first. That’s what they’ve been doing for a thousand years and that’s what they’ll keep doing if I can’t undo this spell and both of us are long gone.” Missandei’s own smile is gentle and sad. “Even Jon.”

Dany knows she’s right. Humans must come and go from the Starks’ lives so frequently that they can’t afford to attach themselves to anyone. She doesn’t know what that sort of eternal churning grief might do to a person, especially creatures that can’t forget anything that happens to them. The Starks don’t seem to embrace their immortality so much as deal with it. The whole thing is a curse and she understands why Jon is intent on freeing his cousins from the bonds of it…even at the risk of killing them all.

“I just want to keep everyone safe,” Dany admits, closing the journal slowly. She must sound so miserable that Missandei sits back down on the floor next to her and wraps her in a hug, tucking her chin atop Dany’s shoulder as she squeezes.

“Of all of us,” her friend reminds her, “we should be the ones keeping you safe. Grey and I are witches. Margaery and the Starks are vampires. Even if you’re the doppelgänger, you’re still human, Dany. We should be protecting you, especially with the supernatural world bent on finding you.” Dany shrugs.

“It’s only been Waymar and the vampire from Oldtown.”

But to her surprise, Missandei shakes her head, pulling away from the hug, though she keeps Dany’s hands clasped in hers.

“The reason no other vampires have come back to Starfall is because I put a protection spell around you. The vampires are here but unless they already know about you, they can’t smell the doppelgänger blood in you.”

This is news to Dany. She blinks. “You did what? When? Missy, if I’d known…”

And it is such a weird thing regardless. Other than tonight, she has never actually seen Missandei perform any spells or do any magic. Her gifts are quiet, unobtrusive things. Is this what it means to be the Starfall witch? Dany still has no idea what that’s supposed to mean and she’s not entirely sure that Missandei does either. If the journal is true and the Starfall witch also has a target on their back…

But Missandei shrugs, looking rather nonchalant and embarrassed about the whole thing.

“After your trip to Oldtown and everything that happened with Ashara. I was trying to figure out a way to conceal the whole town but Grey says that sort of power is beyond even the Starfall witch.”

Dany studies her friend for a very long time. She still looks like the Missandei whom Dany has known for years, the girl she made friends with in nursery school when her family had abruptly moved to Starfall from Naath and the studious young woman who had stayed behind once her family had left. But it is only then that Dany realizes her friend looks tired. It’s not in the way one might expect—it’s not dark circles beneath her eyes or strain lines around her mouth or hair and clothing rumpled and disheveled. Yet there is an aspect of Missandei that seems…less than. Diminished. Dimmer.

How many spells is she maintaining, Dany wonders. Is it just the one around me or are there more? How much energy did this one take? She squeezes her friend’s hands, unable to stop the concern that she knows permeates her expression.

“Missandei…are you okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Missandei replies with a smile before getting to her feet again, pulling Dany up with her. “I think we both just need to get some sleep. I can pull out the sofa bed in the library.”

Dany thinks of the tiny, coffin-like library with its bookshelves crammed full of books and knickknacks from Missandei’s travels and remembers the feeling of malevolent eyes on her in the darkness. She thinks too of the bigger bedroom back in her rented flat, sparse and bright, her bed undoubtedly occupied by three peacefully sleeping cats. “I think I’ll just head home. It’ll be dawn soon anyway.”

But as she drives back home, the streets of Starfall deserted at this hour of the night, Dany cannot help but to feel as though she has missed something of great significance. She is sure the formless darkness had whispered something to her, accusations as sweet as honey but filled with the black promise of death. She wonders what she might have seen if all the candles had gone dark, if the ghosts had been given leave to truly reach out to her and wrap their wraithlike fingers around her throat.

Daenerys Targaryen. Daughter of death. Slayer of lies.

Bride of fire.

What can that possibly mean? And did the ghosts mean for her to receive that message? Or did they mean it for a young woman long dead, her shadow reaching through the centuries to chain Dany down with her mistakes, her lies, and her atrocities?

She looks over at the journal in the passenger seat of the car.

I’ll talk to him, she tells herself forcefully. In a few days, I’ll ask him about what he knows. And then we’ll figure everything out and all of this will be over.

Yet there is a part of her that wonders.

And there is a part of her that isn’t so sure anything will be that easy ever again.

The famous automaton clock in the capital’s Union Station rings in the hour with several authoritarian yet whimsical chimes.

Jon watches as the gilded sigils spin out from around the grand clock face, their dance well-learned over the decades after Bran had helped in its construction. The significance is a thousand years removed from relevance yet the sigils waltz all the same, every hour on the hour, a reminder of the past if anyone with passing interest dared to look up. Falcon and sun, lion and stag, trout and rose and kraken. Near the bottom prowls a silver direwolf. Above even the sun soars a golden dragon.

A few people pass him in their rush to get to their trains—men in drab-colored suits and wide neckties and fedoras, women in swing skirts and broad-shouldered jackets, halo hats perched atop perfectly coiffed hair. Many nod their heads politely at his service uniform. Many more give him a respectful, “thank you for your service, Captain” upon seeing the rank insignias on his lapel before they continue on their way. The air smells of diesel fuel and grease, cinnamon and coffee and cigarette smoke, and over the hum of the crowd, he can hear the distant thunder of the trains that are constantly arriving and departing from the station. Truth be told, the entire Union Station is a roar to his sensitive hearing and he blocks out most of it.

He has had centuries of practice after all.

Eventually, he manages to pull his eyes away from the clock to glance down at his ticket. He is on the four o’clock heading out west in less than forty-five minutes. He would have flown in one of those newer commercial airliners that they keep churning out, but beyond the charred battlefields where he has unfortunately garnered a reputation as an ace pilot, he has little desire to be in the air.

He tucks his cap beneath his arm, ignoring the looks that a few young women are giving him from across the main hall. He has pegged them as nurses, judging from the whispered conversations, and he has also heard them debating which of the three of them is going to approach him. Single men on leave are not rare here in the capital but single men of high rank are. Jon thinks he’ll solve their argument by simply waiting down by the gate for his train and hoping that his companion will—

“Sorry I’m late!”

Jon turns to see a figure sprinting through the crowds towards him, the young-looking vampire’s coppery-brown hair somewhat tamed into a respectable pompadour. He is still shrugging his jacket on as he reaches Jon, a bright smile on his boyish features as he drops his battered suitcase down on the ground. Jon can’t help but give him a small, exasperated smile in return.

“Aye, but you’re always late, Rickon.”

His youngest cousin snorts as he hurriedly adjusts his jacket. Jon knows not to ask if Rickon is late because he was off feeding somewhere. Over the past two decades, the topic has become a point of contention between the two. Rickon doesn’t revel in hurting humans—there will always be too much of Eddard Stark in all of them for that—but Jon knows he gets frustrated at Jon’s draconian-like control over his own thirst. Jon has never judged the others on how easily they can feed without losing control but it has been a very, very long millennium.

“Right. Of course.” Rickon’s grin becomes a shade more smug as he snatches up his suitcase. “Captain.” Jon groans as they begin walking toward the gate. Behind him, he can hear the trio of nurses express their disappointment.

“Don’t start.”

“The point of the war was to get lost in it.” His cousin playfully buries an arm into his ribs, laughing when Jon only grimaces. “You just had to be honorable and noble and all of that rubbish and get yourself promoted to captain. A flying ace, was it? Well done, cuz. Bran is going to strangle you.”

Jon doesn’t doubt it. Despite his attempts to melt anonymously into the war, the sheer amount of carnage on the ground meant that the skies were his only relief. Something about being above the fracas and chaos and the clouds of destruction that roamed over the continent had been freeing. Death had still followed him into the sky, of course, but it had been an abstract thing there in the clouds of sunset and sunrise and black of night. He had wandered through the charred fields of war in the aftermath of air battles, his thirst oddly subdued by the crumbling corpses of the broken and the damned. In the air, it hardly seemed to be anything at all. His problems and the curse that has followed him for over a thousand years all seemed incredibly small when he was in the air, the freedom that came from the vast emptiness of the sky his only companion.

Yet it has also made him reckless—and recklessness that soldiers survive in a war can be painted as heroism. Despite his efforts to fade into anonymity, he’d never been able to leave his fellow pilots behind enemy lines. And though death followed him like a scorned lover, he could never embrace it fully. The war had been both a salve to every existential question he’d ever pondered and a bane.

The train traveling west to Starfall and Oldtown is completely full, just as he and the others had planned some weeks back. Rickon settles himself just behind Jon in the first-class coach car they’ve selected, pretending to read a book (Jon sneaks a look and sees that his cousin has nabbed yet another horror mystery from his favorite novelist). Jon himself sits across from a stately-looking gentleman, his greying golden hair and mustache gelled, his loafers gleaming with a mirror-like shine. The older man looks up, swiftly taking into account Jon’s service uniform and his rank insignia.

It takes him a moment longer to recognize Jon’s face.

“Mr. Stark!” The man beams. “Or is that Captain Stark now, I see? Congratulations! You’re made of that old Starfall gumption and bravery, I’d think. And so young too! It’s always good to know that our boys are making names for themselves out in the war. Headed home to find a wife while on leave then?”

“It’s still Jon, Mr. Lannister.” He ignores the question put to him and shakes Gerold Lannister’s hand before removing his hat and placing it on his lap. He knows Rickon is listening (he hopes). “What brings you out to King’s Landing?”

“Business as usual.” Gerold smiles, looking rather pleased with himself. The man had always been a nefarious businessman. The old gods even know how much he is profiteering from this war. “Did you know Tytos and Tion recently were married before heading off the to the eastern front? Perhaps you came across one of them. Where were you stationed? Surely they still allow military men and airmen to mingle. We all have to be on the same side against those Volantenes. You might have come across them in Braavos.”

He hadn’t and even if he had seen Gerold Lannister’s sons, he would have done his best to avoid them. He offers the man a wan smile. “Perhaps when I go back.”

The conversation continues, though it is incredibly one-sided—an old soldier talking to a younger one. Jon knows that Gerold doesn’t remember him from his youth—he’d been sporting a beard several decades ago, a look far different from his current clean-shaven one that makes him appear of age with Rickon. While Sansa, Rickon, and Robb frequently change their hair color to avoid detection over the decades, especially since the advent of photography, Jon, Arya, and Bran’s hair has always been too dark to take to any other color well. Arya still somehow manages to fade in and out memory with a skill that borders on near metamorphosis, Jon has found that facial hair completely rewrites his image in people’s memory, and Bran…well, Bran has always been clever enough to find different ways to disappear into the centuries.

As Rickon gets up to make his way down the aisle, cheerfully chatting with the people surrounding them, Jon glances out the window at the passing countryside. So much of Westeros has changed over the centuries and yet so much of it has remained the same. Even now, even after all this time, it feels odd to be a static, unmoving point in the flow of time, to watch lifetimes be birthed and expand and turn to dust beneath their own mortality. Sometimes he wonders if this is the life Daenerys had truly wanted, this unending reminder of the futility of so many things. She had wanted to remake the world but immortality brings with it the chains of remembrance—to live is to vanish, to turn into a shadow, lest the world that cannot live on turns suspicious eyes onto you.

Forever. We will have forever. I promise.

He closes his eyes.

Damn you, he thinks as Rickon passes him back to his seat, job done. He turns to Gerold as the conversation continues to meander. “I should ask—how’s the Council been faring? None of my siblings have been in Starfall to let me know. And the telegram…it’s not the best for what the Council does.”

Gerold’s eyes gleam. He looks around to make sure no one is listening before lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—the man has always been shrewd in his dealings with the Council. It’s unnecessary though—Rickon has already compelled everyone in the car to turn their attention away.

“We found the witch,” he says simply. “Her and the few vampires that managed to sneak into town.”

Jon knows this already. Robb had sent him a message from Lannisport. It is the only thing that keeps his immediate rage from strangling him. He manages to school his expression into one of surprised curiosity. “How did you manage that? Who was it?”

Here, Gerold does have the grace to grimace. He looks at Jon apologetically.

“I know you were fond of the old spinster, but it was Val.” He must mistake the spasm of grief across Jon’s face as shock because he adds, “I think we saved you from a lot of heartache there, son. For all we know, she was controlling your mind to force the friendship and keep our eyes off her. But she couldn’t hide forever. Not when she consorted with dark things of the devil and those demons.”

Jon knows he hadn’t promised Val forever—it was impossible. He’d been able to give her twenty-two years, longer than most Starfall witches usually have. But he still feels something twist in his heart. He should never have left. He forces himself to say, “Val? You’re sure?” Gerold nods.

“Before she died, she let us know how to find any more vampires. It didn’t save her, of course, but now we know how to prepare if any of those bloodsucking monsters comes back into town.”

“And how did she die?”

“Jon…” he hears Rickon warn over the commotion of the train engines and human conversations with the car. His cousin’s voice is low enough not to be heard by anyone else—unless that someone else has supernatural hearing. “Don’t ask that. You know.”

He does know. When he received the message from Robb, telling of an accidental house fire that had killed a widowed homeowner and the handful of young boarders she’d taken in, he’d known, even without his cousin spelling it out, that the fire had not been accidental. Val always had a strong sense of self-preservation—but the existence of vampires in Starfall threatened her own safety and it was only by keeping an eye on them that she might have made sure she could stay alive.

And it still hadn’t been enough.

“A locked door and gasoline. Fire purifies, my boy, and the sooner we rid Starfall of those dark stains, the better.” He pats Jon on the knee. “Don’t mourn her. She was no friend of yours, not in the end.”

Except Val had been his friend and she’d come to him for protection. To die like this…

“Can’t believe I’m saying this,” Rickon mutters, breaking through Jon’s growing disgust and fury, “but you’re not here to rip his spine out through his throat. Ask him the question, Jon. Our stop’s coming up.”

Right.

The question. And the heart of the matter.

“Starfall’s better off without the lot of them,” Jon says, imbuing his voice with casual annoyance. “I can’t believe they managed to be under our noses for all these years. I bet they used the fact that we all were distracted by the war. How did you find out what they were? I never would have thought it of Val.”

“A well-placed tip,” Gerold huffs, sitting back in his chair. He too looks disgusted with the circumstances. “Someone with a far keener eye than any of us.”

“I’ll have to congratulate him for keeping my family safe. Is it anyone I know?”

There. He sees it in Gerold’s eyes as he frowns. There is a strange fog, a haze of memory. The older man then chuckles, shaking his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve gone and forgotten his name. Don’t get old, young man. The game changes almost overni—”

“Who told you about Val? Who told you about the vampires?” Jon asks again, letting the Reach accent drop out of his voice as he meets Gerold’s eyes. He knows there is an unnatural sheen of silver, bright as moonglow, in his own eyes now, the compulsion searing through his words like a blaze. He sees Gerold’s pupils expand and contract as the words sink into his mind, unbinding his tongue and his memory with a mere question.

Jon has never been as good as Sansa with compulsion, mostly because he has never taken the time to refine it. But with Daenerys long dead, he is still the oldest vampire in the world, his cousins following along in the days after the capital had burned. Once he actually puts his mind to it, the only other vampires in the world who match him in strength and skill are his cousins. And even then, if he ever loses himself to his bloodlust, if he ever revels in the ever-present demonic thirst that burns through him day and night, there would be no one like him.

He would be the true nightmare, a sower and reaper of death, and there is no coming back from that.

He watches as Gerold’s face goes slack, expressionless.

“A man. A man told me.”

“What was his name?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Pale. I don’t know. It was dark. He spoke from the shadows.” Gerold blinks. Jon senses him fighting back against the compulsion but it is little use. Rickon may have been late because of a quick nip but Jon also knows that his younger cousin has already slipped the man’s wallet containing the vervain out of his pocket, centuries-worth of pickpocketing skill put to good use. “I didn’t see his face clearly. He told me…”

Gerold trails off, almost confused. A teardrop of blood appears beneath his aquiline nose. Jon ignores it. “He told you what, Mr. Lannister?”

“He told me…” Gerold shakes his head, his nose running bloody onto his immaculate lapels. “He told me he was a hunter. He said that you’d ask. He told me don’t look for him, that he will find you when the time comes.”

A hunter.

A Hunter.

Jon remembers the Hightower party from nearly eighty years ago. He remembers other strange incidents throughout the centuries, the feeling of being followed, the feeling of being watched. And of course, he remembers Val's fears from two decades ago, her knowing that her life would be cut short if one of the Hunters found her. But every time he turned, even with his vampiric reflexes, there had been no one there. He had attributed it to his paranoia, to the longevity of the years and to his own reflexive instincts to live. The Hunters have never gone after vampires after all—right?

“A hunter?” Rickon asks with a scoff. “Since when did nature decide to throw hunters at vampires? I thought they were only after Val.”

“I think they’ve always been following us,” Jon replies with a frown.

“For how long?”

A good question, Jon thinks. An even better one is: why come forward now with Val’s death? The twin comets will arrive in a few more decades. Does that have anything to do with it? Why would a Hunter kill the Starfall witch and a half score of random vampires? Do they know what happened in Starfall a millennia ago?

As the conductor announces the approaching stop, he reaches out to grasp Gerold Lannister’s hand, his head spinning with questions. But it still does not stop him from squeezing the man’s hand hard enough to feel the delicate bones shatter beneath his grip. The man opens his mouth to let out a roar of pain but Jon meets his eyes squarely.

“Don’t scream. Don’t say a word. You shattered your hand reaching for your luggage because your nose started to bleed and you needed the aspirin in your suitcase. You don’t remember talking to anyone on the train. There was no one there. As far as you know, Jon Stark died in the war. You never saw me. You don’t recognize me. If we meet again, you won’t know me. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” Rickon, suddenly standing behind him, hands Jon the wallet. He gives it back to Gerold as the train slows. Then, in an accent more suitable to the stormlands, he says, “You dropped this, sir.”

A few minutes later, he and Rickon are on the train platform in Tumbleton, lost in the crowd waiting for trains headed to all corners of the country. They step into the main hall of the station, far less grandiose than the one in King’s Landing, with Rickon kneeling to briefly pop open his suitcase on a bench. Inside is a folio full of documents—papers and passports with names that don’t belong to them but will serve nonetheless.

“Are we still going to meet the others in Starfall?” Rickon asks as Jon pockets his new passport and hands Rickon his old one. Jon nods.

“But that’s it. It’s too risky to stay there longer. We need to clear out of the manor.” He shakes his head, still wondering exactly what the nameless, faceless hunter wants from him. Is it the same hunter over the centuries? Impossible. Only vampires live as long as they do. There are no other immortal creatures in the world. Daenerys’s witch had made sure of that. He notices Rickon making a face at him. “What?”

“Nothing.” Rickon shrugs. “We’ll clear out. It’s just…”

“It's just…what, Rickon?”

“How come I never get to break anyone’s hand? You all never let me do anything fun.”

xx. Starfall is such an unobtrusive little town at the edge of the world.

They really did think they founded a haven free of magic and the supernatural. If only they knew what happened here so long ago, they might have reconsidered. And they never did wonder why Nature seems so intent on drawing us all to this one spot, over and over again. There is no haven, no sanctuary. The ground is soaked with blood centuries old.

A woman named Val was the latest of the Starfall witches to meet a grisly end. One would think that nature might equip these witches with a better sense of self-preservation. Perhaps one of them might actually die from old age.

We’ll see what witch nature will choose when the twin comets come. Ygritte suspects that this will be the thing to fix everything that went wrong when the first spell was cast. But like the first, the spell will need a witch and it will need blood. She seems far less certain about whose blood. She says from her occult research, it most likely has to be an Original’s blood. But which Original is far less clear.

It’s a question of semantics, of course. But I’ll let her figure that out.

The setting sun has turned the late afternoon a crimson gold, bathing the entirety of Starfall in a gilded blanket of liquid light.

Dany stands out on the tiny balcony of her rented flat, looking out over the town she grew up in. A crow caws off in the distance as a handful of cars pass down the street beneath the thick canopy of oaks and maples that line the residential neighborhoods. The air is thick the smell of baked asphalt and blooming azaleas, a cloak of humidity clinging to her skin like the blue sundress she is wearing. Already, she can see the brief flicker of lightning bugs in the bushes far below, dancing in and out of a spiderweb of branches. The wooden boards of the balcony are almost uncomfortably warm beneath her bare feet and she closes her eyes, letting the rare stiff breeze lift her pale hair away from her face.

The balcony is barely big enough for a chair, a bistro table, and a hanging flower box. Dany does not have a green thumb to save her life and had asked the flat owner if she could actually plant some catnip for her cats instead. Sam had agreed and Dany’s three babies now eagerly wait for their treat each and every morning before she sits outside with a cup of tea.

She knows if she looks behind her, she will see all three of her cats sprawled out on the floor of her flat, directly in the path of the waning sunlight. She smiles to herself. Some days, in the quiet that is all of this, she might think that her life isn’t some supernatural horror show. Some days, it still feels like she is living a normal life, returned home for the summer to collect her thoughts, before the realities of autumn sink in.

It is a nice dream.

After a moment, she lets out a sigh before turning and stepping back into the living room of her flat. It has been several days since she has done much other than work remotely for her team up in Winterfell and visit Ashara to make sure her adoptive mum’s recovery is still going well. Her conversations with Vis are stilted, though she is sure he hasn’t spilled the Starks’ secret to anyone else. She still has not been able to get a hold of Margaery. Missandei and Grey are still trying their best to work through the grimoire’s translation.

Dany knows that they are running low on time to figure everything out. It feels as though there are a thousand cogs in this machine that is rolling like a dying beast toward their deadline—but there is nothing she can do to help it along.

Her eyes fall on the journal that sits on the coffee table in the living room. Some days she feels like the answer is right there in the pages of the journal, in between the penciled sketches and the meandering thoughts of someone whose identity Dany still cannot figure out. She is almost positive that it isn’t one of the Starks and the only other vampire she knows is Margaery. There is Waymar, of course, but he’s dead, his corpse burned to ash in the cemetery. And there is the vampire from Oldtown, the one from the roof of the Citadel who had warned her to remove herself from whatever the Starks are planning.

What am I doing, Dany thinks, not for the first time. Can she really make any kind of difference in this supernatural puzzle that has entangled them all? What does it matter that she’s the doppelgänger? It seems to be more of a problem for Jon than with anything and…

Dany breathes in deeply, briefly reaching up to touch the tiny locket sitting above her breastbone. She can’t think of this right now. Nothing makes sense anymore and the world feels as though it is perilously close to tumbling at her feet. She walks over to a small bookshelf, pulls out a bottle of whiskey she had bought specifically for these disastrous and frustrating moments, and takes it into the kitchen to pour herself a glass.

A knock on her door stops her.

She pauses, glancing down at her phone. No one has texted her saying they were coming over. She still doesn’t know if the whole invitation thing works for vampires in rented spaces. She hesitates in the kitchen for a moment longer before she pads over to the front door, peering out through the peephole to see if she needs to barricade herself in her bedroom and call for—

Oh.

No.

A shiver works its way down her spine and she closes her eyes, taking in a breath to steel herself against the tidal wave of emotion that threatens to consume her. Then, quietly, almost uncertainly, she opens the door, giving the person standing just beyond a flicker of her lips that one day aspires to be a smile.

“Hi.”

“Hey,” Jon replies in that brusque accent of his. He looks as unsettled as she does, his hands jammed in the pockets of his leather jacket. Half of his dark curls are pulled away from his handsome face, a face that currently wears an expression of apprehension. Those grey eyes watch her warily but with such intensity, Dany can feel goosepimples prickle down her arms. “I didn’t mean— were you busy?”

“I was about to finish off a bottle of cheap whiskey,” answers Dany drolly after a bare moment to collect herself, “and watch some terrible history documentaries on the internet. I might have even allowed all three of those beasts over my shoulder to sleep under my covers tonight. As you can see, my life is very thrilling when I’m not in the middle of a gothic horror novel.”

The words spill out of her, sharp with false annoyance, and she is rewarded with a small smile and a gentle laugh from Jon.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” he says. “I just…I haven’t seen you in a few days. I wanted to make sure you were alright. What with…everything.”

Dany stares at him silently for a long moment, her tongue useless in her mouth.

Everything.

Everything is so much. Everything is this damned journal and Missandei and what happened in Oldtown and the balls and the galas and the world of the supernatural colliding into a world she has always known. Everything is her job and her friends still in Winterfell. Everything is the fact that she wears the face of a dead woman who is the reason why all of this is happening in the first place. Everything is all the secrets this tiny little town can hold, secrets that are impossibly human and anything but.

Everything is him. Everything is that kiss.

“I think,” she says dryly, “that we don’t have enough time in the world to talk about whether I’m alright.” Jon smiles a bit at that.

“I think I can understand that.”

There is something about his voice—there is always something about his voice—and Dany wants to shake all of her worries out of her head. But she can’t. Not quite yet. She stands in the door, guarding this last place left in the world that still belongs solely to her, that has not yet been embroiled in this new world she has discovered. She wants too many things. She wants nothing. It is impossible to figure out.

But the silence must be too telling, too damning and pregnant with meaning, because Jon leans back slightly, rocking away from her. The affected breath he takes hits her like a blow.

“Listen, Dany,” Jon begins with a shake of his head. “I wanted to apologize for what happened that night. It wasn’t fair to you. None of this is fair to you. I shouldn’t have—”

“No.”

The word cuts through the air like a dagger. It takes Dany a surprised moment to realize that the word has come from her lips, that she is the one who interrupted him. She watches as confusion crosses his face but she realizes that she won’t—that she can’t—allow it. There is too much that feels out of her control. But this? This she can control. This she can question and this she can receive an answer to.

Meeting his eyes over the chasm of the unspoken that settles between them, she continues softly but with iron woven through her words, “It’s not your choice. You don’t get to decide for me if what happened was right or wrong. I was there too. And I wanted it.”

I still want it.

I still want you.

“Dany…”

“But I need to know.” She doesn’t want to hear it but she also needs him to say it. She doesn’t want to pretend that this is anything except real. You promised to be honest with me. “What do you see when you see me? Truthfully?”

Who do you see?

Jon looks at her silently for a long moment, utterly still in that way only he and his cousins can be. Stubbornly, she meets his gaze even though she knows he can probably hear her heart racing, beating like a war drum in her chest. She won’t back away from this, no matter the answer. Her pride deserves that much at least.

Am I just a ghost to you?

Don’t lie to me.

Please.

“I see…” He pauses and Dany wants to scream. But then he smiles, that same quiet smile she has come to love despite everything. He does not take her question as an invitation but he still leans toward her, as though drawn to her even through the invisible barrier of protective magic that separates them. “I’m not a wordsmith. Even after a thousand years, that’s not who I am. But when I see you, I see someone who’s stubborn and driven and recklessly brave and too bloody kind for her own good. Someone who does good because it’s the right thing to do and who doesn’t expect anything from it.”

Her breath is in her throat. She can hear the drum of her heartbeat, drowning everything except his words.

“I see you, Dany. It’s always been you.”

This is it. This is what she has wanted to hear ever since that terrible night when she’d learned that she is the doppelgänger, the shadow of someone who has left an indelible mark on the world. She has carved out a life for herself, a life free of all of this, and that is who she is. She is part of all of this but that is not who she is. She is still herself. She is still Dany. She is only Dany. And she only wanted him to know that he sees that, that he realizes this fundamental truth, that he sees her truly and understands her without reservation.

And now…

Now.

Now.

“I wondered…” she begins, her pulse flickering like a candle in her throat, but the words are lost to her. It is all she can do to breathe.

It is all she can do to finally lean forward past the threshold that might as well be a chasm and to finally, truly, desperately kiss him.

The memory of that first kiss comes flooding back into her mind, sending heat fluttering through her veins, sharp and intense and dizzying. There is ash and fire on his tongue, empty of the spice of the brandy from that cursed night, but there is a sharp metallic bite of something else. She knows what it is. She knows that of all of the decisions she has made, of all the things Missandei has warned her about, this may be the one with the worst consequences. But when he lifts a hand to thread through her snow-pale locks and cup the back of her head, drawing her closer to him, she finds she doesn’t care. The consequences will be damned.

She has chosen to fall and before she hits the ground, she thinks she might fly.

She lets out a small little gasp as he nips at her lower lip, trying not to violently shiver from the thrill of his body pressing against hers, cool and hard. It is so strange how someone so reserved, so still, can kiss her and embrace her as though he has been possessed. Or maybe that’s just how vampires are. She can’t think about it too much.

It feels like death itself to break away from that lush mouth. The sandpaper-like scratch of his stubble grazes her cheek as she leans up into him and murmurs, “Stay.”

He pulls away from her slightly then, his grey eyes shot through with that impossible silver, the pupils black and large with an unreadable and unknowable emotion. She feels his hand lope loosely around her neck, feels his thumb brush along her jaw. His shaky breath is warm against the tip of her nose.

And when he captures her mouth against his again, there is no reserve in it.

The brilliantly gold light of the sunset follows them to her bedroom and onto her bed but a part of her feels as though she is still slowly dancing with him in the timeless recess of his home on that wine-blue night. A part of her still feels the heat of the flames awash against her bare arms. There is fire here in this room too and it paints amber shadows across Jon’s face when she goes to kiss him again, her legs tangled in his as he lays her out on the bed, the thin blue fabric of her sundress bunched up around her hips.

Fire, she thinks with some confusion, haste making her fingers clumsy as she pulls Jon toward her, clawing at his shirt, wanting and needing his skin against hers. Yet Jon seems content with a maddeningly intense patience—how can he not when he has centuries within him compared to her twenty-four years? He takes one of her hands in his and presses it firmly into the pillow next to her head, kissing her slowly, deeply. It is enough and it is not nearly enough—the weight of his body atop hers is going to drive her mad. She uses her free hand to undo his hair tie so that she can drag her fingers through his curls and scrape her nails along his scalp.

Yet when he slides down to press a kiss along her jaw and down the lines of her throat, she thinks it’s not so bad after all. She briefly closes her eyes, a breathy moan escaping from her as his lips follow the cold chain of the locket, kissing its usual place above her breastbone, above her heart. She only forces her eyes open to stare in blind wonder at the ceiling, a bare heartbeat before Jon hooks his fingers into the straps of her sundress and pulls it down.

“Jon…” she begins—to stop him? To encourage him? She doesn’t know—but the words become strangled in her throat, dying sullenly on her lips, the moment his teeth and tongue latch onto one taut pink nipple, fingers deftly pinching and toying with the other. The sensitive peak vanishes between his lips and Dany can only think of blood and beasts before she turns her face into the pillow, trying to stifle her moans. It is pain and sharp pleasure all at once and all it is doing is sending heat to flood between her legs.

So when he pulls away to nuzzle at her neck again—and she knows how easily she might be devoured, how swiftly blood could be spilled upon this bed—she has to strain to hear him through the thunder in her head.

“Tell me what you want, Dany.” She turns her head to look at him. The golden shadows of the sun have turned his hair into obsidian. Against it, the silver sheen in his eyes is practically enchanting, and she reaches up to drag her fingertips down his cheek. There is something ravenous and desperate in his gaze. She thought she might have been the only one between them who is standing on the precipice but he looks ready to fall as much as she does.

She presses her free hand to his chest, pushing him back slightly so she can sit up and wrangle herself out of her dress. He watches her, eyes bright with moonlight and amusement, and by the time she untangles her hair from her dress and throws it in the general direction of a chair, his vampiric speed already has her flat on her back again. She lets out a breathless chuckle, a warm buzz tickling through her as he kisses his way down her sternum and the soft slope of her belly. Her eyes close again and she bites her bottom lip as he pushes her thighs apart to spread her open. When his teeth playfully sink into her inner thigh and the smell of her desire reaches her, she thinks she might come right there.

When the flat of his tongue presses against the aching nub of her clit through her thin underwear, she almost falls apart right then.

It is all a bit of a hedonistic blur after that, the only coherent thought that manages to make its way through the fog of lust that has drowned her being: of course he’s good at this. She hears herself making a noise that sounds wanton and desperate, a sound between a wail and a gasp, her hips rolling up towards his mouth, towards the thrust of his fingers inside her, chasing after anything that will make her burst into flame. She tries to close her legs, to keep herself centered on the growing heat within her, but he is stronger than she could ever possibly hope to be. She has no choice but to let him literally devour her, tongue and lips and fingers and oh god.

When his fingers curl just right inside of her and a kiss collides deep into the heart of her, she can’t help the cry that flies from her lips as her orgasm crests over her and shatters her. Black dots swim behind her eyes as she arches away from the bed, every muscle wanting and needing to contract around him, to freeze this moment, to have this forever.

As the pleasure recedes, she finds herself panting, desperate for air, desperate for any reminder that she is still alive and that this is very much real. She blinks her eyes open to see Jon kneeling back between her legs, watching her with something that she might almost call smug affection. She manages to dredge up a scowl. Her entire core throbs with barely sated need.

“You didn’t let me tell you what I want.” His smile turns a little crooked; at least he has the decency to look somewhat chastised, though she doubts her words have had any effect on him. The shadows are longer in the room now, painting him in shades of black and white. 

“Sorry,” he says in a deadpan, not sounding sorry at all. The light glints off the silver of his daylight ring, his singular bond to a facsimile of a mortal life. “I assumed.”

Though it feels like Dany’s limbs are about to melt straight off the bed, she is tempted to throw her pillow at him. But she only frowns thoughtfully, letting her gaze momentarily drift to the ceiling before she sits up to kiss him again. She can taste herself on his lips, wet heat that is both tart and sweet, and it causes warmth to sink low into her belly, quickly reminding her that there is still something more she needs, something more she wants. Her hands graze his chest, feeling him tense beneath her fingertips, and she feels a wicked smirk slip into her kiss. She adventures lower, fiddling with the zipper of his jeans, tracing her fingers along the waistband, and then—

“Stop assuming,” she murmurs with a laugh in her voice when Jon curses, his head bowing forward onto her shoulder as her fingers wrap around the thickness of his cock. She has neither the desire nor the curiosity to wonder about vampiric biology when it comes to a decent fuck but this is all good enough. She cradles the back of his neck with her free hand, stroking him into another shudder with the other. She nips at his ear, reveling in the sharp groan she is rewarded with. “I want all of this. I want all of you.”

None of the ghosts. None of the lies. There isn’t room here for those we’ve lost.

As they fall back onto the bed again, her fingers tangle with his against the pillow, the entirety of him a welcoming embrace that quickly sends lust boiling through her blood again. She cranes her neck forward to pepper her own kisses onto his shoulder, onto his jaw, against his mouth, sensing the rumble of a groan and a gasp beneath her lips. She feels him go still above her and she pauses, lifting her eyes to meet his.

He is looking down at her as if she is some sort of puzzle he has not quite been able to figure out, though nothing can hide the black desire in his eyes, a want that has nothing to do with the girl who shares her name and everything to do with the person she is.

Only her.

It sends something hot and wild spiraling through her. She reaches up to grab him, to claim his mouth in hunger, to bite at his lower lip with a desperation she isn’t sure she has ever felt. She sighs into his mouth, panting as though she has just run a marathon, as Jon’s touch brands a line of fire down her side. Wet heat continues to soak between her legs, a growing slickness infused with the fire that is burning inside and outside of her. She can feel his cock pressing into her lower belly and she needs…she wants…

He is at her neck, his teeth scoring a line down her throat, his mouth hungrily sucking at where her pulse is beating wildly. She arches into it, feeling reckless and wild and mad with desire. When his hand reaches up to pinch and pull at the aching peak of one of her nipples again, she almost screams with pleasure.

“Gods,” she chokes out through a gasp, her thoughts broken, nothing now to any of this except what her body is craving. “Jon. Please. Don't stop. That feels…god. God.”

But he pauses. He pauses and he pulls away from her. There is an expression on his face that she cannot read. She is not sure she is willing to try.

“Dany.” Jon’s voice sounds gravelly and uncertain. He shakes his head, as though trying to clear his thoughts. If he pulls away, she might just hit him. “Are you…”

Right.

If he finishes that sentence, she will kill him.

She wraps her hand around the nape of his neck, fingers locking around thick black curls, and she draws him down into a kiss again. She can still taste her desire. She can still taste blood.

“I want this,” she breathes into his ear because she is not sure she can string together a much more coherent sentence than that. And to make her point, she throws her arms around his neck and sinks her teeth into the flexing muscle of his shoulder, her nails digging into the cool flesh of his back. If it is pain he responds to, then so be it.

It must be everything he needs to hear though because something flashes bright and hot in his eyes. He surges forward, hungry mouth against hers as if he is trying to swallow the very breath out of her, their tongues tangled together. His hand hooks under her knee and she does not even have a moment to think, does not have a moment to do anything except let out a long, belly-deep groan as she feels him thrust suddenly and deeply into her, filling her in one smooth motion.

For a second, there is stillness. The bright shimmer of sunset has quieted into the grey-violet warmth of a summer evening and in the shadows, Dany can see Jon’s eyes damn near glowing as he looks down at her, pausing, waiting for the rest to come crashing over them, and it sends her heart racing.

Gods.

Then she is slamming up into him again, teeth and tongue and lips and heat, and he is rutting into her with slow, measured thrusts that nonetheless send something scorching through to her brain. Her teeth score along his bottom lip and she tastes blood—strangely sweet, strangely metallic—on her tongue. She claws at him, even as she desperately chases the remnants of the kiss with an almost reckless fervor. His cock feels fucking delicious inside of her and she can’t help but to break away from his mouth to let out a long wordless cry, grunting and panting with each thrust of his hips into hers.

He is moving faster now and she buries her face into the crook of his neck, her nails digging furrows into his skin. He has looked at her like she was something precious, something that he has searched for and finally found, and it is doing strange things to her body, stranger things to her heart. She is lost in the sound of them working towards that lightning, her name a breath in her ear. She hooks her arms around him and holds on for dear life.

The thunderous orgasm that breaks over her this time is longer and deeper, ripping through her with such intensity that she is sure the entire room will be nothing but ash and dust when she comes down from the high. Her heartbeat booms so loudly in her ears that she is not sure if the scream of pleasure has been torn out of her throat or is entirely in her head.

I want this. I want you.

It takes a minute or two to come back to herself, every nerve in her body seared into a wonderful tingling numbness. When she does start to become aware of her surroundings, she realizes Jon is resting his forehead against hers, brushing her hair out of her face before he leans down to lazily and gently brush his lips against hers. She shudders in the aftershocks of pleasure as he pulls himself out of her, slick and wet with the mingled remnants of her desire and his cum.

“That was…” she starts to say but her tongue feels clumsy and leaden in her mouth and she finds that she really doesn’t have any adequate words to describe what the hell just happened. Jon laughs quietly.

“Aye. That was.”

Dany knows that doing this has probably opened up a box of chaos, problems that she certainly doesn’t need in her life with everything else going on. But as her eyes drift close, a strangely peaceful lull drifting over her like a cloud, she thinks that she doesn’t entirely mind facing whatever hell is over the horizon. She’s chosen this and she has never backed away from a fight.

Her dreams are murky and strange that night though, even as she is curled up in the protective embrace of Jon’s arms. She thinks she sees a forest full of white trees dripping blood. She feels ghostly fingers trail along her spine and her arm—a warning, a promise. Winter whispers through her hair, bringing with it the dust and ashes of the centuries. She tastes it on her tongue. In the distance, the horizon glows red. Not with the ambient glow of the city or the promise of the sunrise.

The horizon burns with fire.

I want you to get everything you’re looking for.

The voice is in the shadows. It surrounds her. It beckons her. It warns her.

And it sounds like Jon.

1xx. I will see you again.

I promise.

Chapter Text

The smell of smoke lingers in the air.

The night is quiet and warm and humid against her bare skin and the sky is empty of everything except a splatter of a million stars—and still she can taste ash on her tongue, can still feel the memory of a roaring fire scorching the back of her neck. She turns in a slow circle, the hum of distant music, a song she used to know, waltzing around her in a whisper of whimsy. Ash and smoke and soot ghost across her thoughts and if she squints into the night, she might see a flash of red-gold sparks, the shadow of a ravenous flame.

In the near distance is the old playground in the park that leads out to the old high road. The swings creak lazily and ominously in the darkness, but she isn’t afraid. This is a place that she knows. She passed it so often when she was younger, still reeling from the deaths of her parents and still being bounced around from foster home to foster home until Ashara stepped in to adopt her and Vis.

Her fingers brush the cold chain of one of the swings. She saw dozens of autumns and springs from this swing set, when loneliness and grief and confusion had been a frequent companion of hers. Missandei’s arrival to Starfall had helped soothe the first but nothing could quite shatter the sorrow.

She sits on a swing now, feeling as though she is floating over the void of night. Leaves rustle, murmuring that nature must have a balance and gathering in piles around the metallic poles that are shoved deeply into the ground. It does not occur to her that this playground has long since been torn down, replaced years and years ago with brighter colors and safe, soft plastics. Her fingers wrap around the chain. It is as cold as ice.

Time moves slowly in this world between worlds. The stars shine icy and bright and hard in the sky. The smell of smoke continues to drift around her like a grey phantom. There is a part of her that feels lost, even as that song comes crawling over the black grass and through the piles of dead leaves. Why does she feel lost? There is desperation in her that makes no sense. She has everything in the world she might possibly want. It is all here. Everything is all here.

She thinks there is someone in the swing next to her.

She turns but there is nothing there except a formless shadow. The chain creaks. The wind whispers that nature must have a balance. The toes of her sneakers scuff the ground.

“Do you come here by yourself often?”

She feels a smile on her lips.

“It’s Starfall. Nothing bad ever happens here.” She pauses, twisting the empty place on her finger where her engagement ring should be. She has taken it off. Why has she taken it off? “Nothing ever happens here at all.”

“Sometimes the most we can hope for is nothing.”

She closes her eyes, kicking her feet forward and letting herself lean far back on the swing, her pale hair cascading down toward the wood chips. Her hair had been so long once. Her mum had always loved weaving her hair into a crown of braids when she was little. She’d cut it soon after…soon after…

“I want more than nothing. Is that selfish?” She feels like she might fly away. Ash scrapes along her tongue. “I want to…there’s so much that I want to…”

What does she want? Does she even know? Is there nothing except an aimless wandering in her heart?

The stars gleam.

They say, “Nature must have a balance.”

“I think,” murmurs that voice again, quieter, softer, “you want what everyone wants.”

She hears herself laugh.

“And what is that, mysterious stranger?”

She doesn’t hear the answer.

With a slow, groggy blink, Dany wakes to the soft beams of pale dawn cascading through her curtains, sending morning shadows dancing across rumpled sheets. She hadn’t closed the window all the way last night and so a cool morning breeze has drifted into the room, bringing with it the chirping sounds of half a dozen wood thrushes peppering the air. She glances at the clock on her nightstand—it is barely half past seven.

The details of the dream quickly blur into watercolor, faded and insubstantial. No matter how hard she tries to pull it back to memory, it drifts and seeps through her fingertips. The only thing she can recall is the taste of soot on her lips and the breeze of a Starfall night around her. There is little more than that.

She squirms in frustration, intent on burrowing further beneath the sheets with a groan, but a strong arm draped across her waist stills her. Even after so long without really sharing her bed with anyone, it only takes half a heartbeat for her to remember who is there with her and exactly how he got there in the first place and all that happened multiple times last night.

Right.

Missy is going to kill her.

Dany knows that her best friend doesn’t want her to get more involved in this vampire drama than is absolutely necessary. She understands that concern. But after those first few encounters, Dany has never quite been able to convince herself that the Starks truly mean her any harm. They have their secrets, of course—a family that has lived so long can’t help but to have its secrets—but she thinks the Starks are mostly true to their word. Despite all the danger that it might bring her, she only wants to help them.

Are you just saying that because you’ve slept with him, she can almost hear Missy saying in her thoughts, her friend’s voice gentle but disappointed. Are you saying that because you let yourself develop feelings for him?

She doesn’t love him, no. That is too far and she really hasn’t known him long enough to fool herself into thinking that. But she deeply cares for him, far more than she knows is smart. And when she’d invited him into her flat last night, when she’d kissed him for that second time and pulled him into her bed, she hadn’t been thinking about the consequences. When he admitted that he saw her for her and not as the ghost of a long-dead queen, the only thing she’d wanted was to kiss him, to touch him, to gasp and writhe in mind-numbing pleasure beneath his solid strength.

The memory of it all comes back in the sated soreness between her legs, the aching tenderness at the tips of her breasts, the soft bruises scattered along her skin. Neither one of them had been gentle with the other, though she supposes that Jon most likely had to keep his supernatural strength in check. And it had been…good. More than good, actually. If her best friend wouldn’t lock her in a room for the foreseeable future, she might have gushed about it to Missy.

I wanted it, she thinks absently, skimming her fingers across her lips, the ghostly pantomime of a kiss. I wanted him.

There’s no use in denying it. It’s not as though some madness has gripped her the further down into the murky supernatural world she goes. There is just something about Jon, something that feels so achingly familiar that it bothers her that she can’t put a finger on it.

You want…

You want…

Dany sighs, letting the train of thought go before she shifts beneath the sheets, turning to face Jon. He is still sleeping, arm loose around her waist, so she can examine him quietly in the pale whispering light of the morning. Long dark lashes shadow his cheekbones. His chest rises and falls evenly and she recalls Missandei’s words about the way vampire bodies function, that they more or less worked like human bodies as long as they kept up a healthy diet of blood. She’d tasted it on Jon’s tongue last night and wonders briefly about it. His body had felt real and human enough last night, responding to her wandering touch and the devouring hunger of her lips.

She peers at his face. She has always assumed that Jon is around her age, but there is a strange and ineffable quality of agelessness about all the Starks. She knows Bran and Rickon had been seventeen and fifteen respectively when they’d become vampires but even she can see how they can pass for a wide range of ages. And she has no real point of reference for the others.

Regardless, they couldn’t have been much past the prime of their lives. For all the things that Dany wants, she is certain that immortality is not one of them. There are things she wants to do with her life, things that will make a difference to at least one person in the world, but to cling to that for centuries? And even though the idea of settling in this little town with a simple and traditional life had not appealed to her with Daario, she thinks that one day she wouldn’t mind…

She watches as Jon’s brow wrinkles a bit, as though her swirling thoughts have brushed up against his dreams and stirred him to wakefulness. She smiles as his eyes slowly open.

“Good morning. I didn’t realize vampires were such heavy sleepers.” Jon blinks at her and then lets out a dry laugh, his arm tightening around her waist to draw her closer. His breath is warm against her lips and she tries not to shiver, electric sparks dancing from her cheek down to her breasts and the muted heat between her legs. She wonders if he can hear the way her heart is stuttering. God, she hopes not—that would frankly be embarrassing.

“You should see Sansa after a decade of progressive legal reforms,” he says jokingly, his voice thick and gravelly from sleep. But his expression quickly sobers, the grey in his eyes a distant and dark thunderstorm. “Last night was…” He trails off when Dany sits up on her elbow. She gives him a playfully stern look.

“Well, I had an absolutely marvelous time which I hope I made abundantly clear multiple times last night.” She raises one challenging brow, her fingertips dancing down his chest. “You have a wildly talented mouth, Jon Snow, so I hope the next thing that comes out of it isn’t something that will make me want to murder you.”

Her words do the trick—the grim and hesitant look in his eyes vanishes, replaced instead by his usual quiet smile.

“Can’t promise anything.” He reaches up to gently brush some of her pale hair behind her ear, his touch lingering against her skin. She curls into him, legs entangled with his, enough so that if she wants to, she might kiss him. She can feel his cock, already half-hard, pressing into her belly and she tries not to let it distract her as she meets that grey gaze.

“I do have two questions for you though.”

“Oh?” The apprehension doesn’t quite return but she sees the threat of it at the corners of that lovely mouth of his. She nods somberly.

“Yes, and don’t you dare lie to me.” When the frown starts to appear on Jon’s face though, Dany feels her own lips tilt upwards in a smile. “First: exactly how old are you? Without the whole…vampire thing? You’re not actually an immortal teenager, are you?”

Jon looks momentarily startled by the question but then he lets out a huff of a laugh, closing his eyes and collapsing back against his pillow, pulling her so that she’s half-draped across his chest.

“I would’ve been twenty-five,” he says after a moment, nose briefly scrunched in thought. He opens his eyes, smiling at her. His dark curls are like the remnants of night against the pastel rays of dawn shimmering across his face. “In a few weeks after…well, after.”

“Ah. So you’re my age.” Jon snorts.

“Give or take a thousand years.”

“We could have gone to uni together.” She figures that at least uni would have been a tad more interesting then. And if she could come back to her flat every night to his embrace and that wicked tongue of his, she probably would have enjoyed it far more than she did. She continues to spiral her fingers along his chest. “How many times have you been to college?”

“Is that your second question?”

“No. I take it back. Tell me later.” This time, she sits up a little. Despite her cavalier tone, she can’t quite hide the vulnerability behind her next question, a question that probably should have been asked last night between any of their bouts of (hot, frantic, rough) sex. She skirts around her nervousness, eyes drifting to the invisible whorls she is drawing on his skin. “Missy said vampires’ bodies still function like how normal human bodies do. She said all she needed was a healthy consumption of blood.”

Jon doesn’t seem to know where this line of thought is headed. He frowns. “She has the truth of it.”

“Okay.” Dany grimaces. There really is no delicate way to put this. “We didn’t use protection last night.”

It is only then that realization breaks over Jon’s face. Then his expression softens in understanding. The brewing consternation dims into a soft smile as he shakes his head. “You’re fine. None of us…we can’t have children.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” There must be a lingering look of doubt in Dany’s eyes because Jon laughs again, that soft chuckle that makes her want to capture the sound against her lips. “You need to stop reading all those vampire books. Pretty sure we made up half the myths while drunk. The garlic thing I know is entirely Arya’s idea.”

Dany can’t help it—she finally grins too. “Holy water? Mirrors? Bats? Did you all just have a brainstorming session one night over alcohol?”

“It was a boring decade.”

She rolls her eyes before finally leaning forward to kiss him, too tempted by the glimmer of dawn in his eyes, silver and gold, moonlight and sunlight. The taste of blood has faded with the night so now it is only heat and salt she tastes on his tongue. She lets out an appreciative sigh as she feels Jon’s hand cradle her jaw, a thumb gently caressing her cheek as he kisses her deeply, desperately. The sheets feel like pinpricks against her skin as heat begins to coil within her belly and yes, now she is certain Jon can hear the staccato beat of her heart in her chest.

She lets out a soft moan as the hand not gently stroking her cheek presses firmly into her hip, a mix of lingering soreness and promised pleasure making her almost dizzy with want. His teeth score along her bottom lip and she wonders how much he longs for the blood flowing through her veins, how much control he is exerting not to let his thirst take over. With a kiss, he might kill her—but the idea of him latching onto her neck, sharp pain ricocheting through her even as his tongue lapped up hot blood, sends a surprising sharp thrill of need through her. That image should not nearly be as erotic as it is but it leaves her panting into the kiss, her heart racing.

Jon starts to shift beneath her, to turn her onto her back she knows, to fuck her thoroughly until she comes with a curse and his name on her lips. But she doesn’t let him get that far; instead, she throws her leg over his hips to straddle him, breaking away from his mouth to pepper kisses down his throat. It’d be easy to reach behind her, to guide him inside of her and take him like this (and god, she almost does just to see the expression on his face).

But instead, she kisses her way down to his chest, tongue trailing a wet line, keeping her eyes focused on his. There is something burning and almost feral in that dark grey mist, something that is almost a desperate hunger. The idea he feels that for her makes something dark and delicious and warm curl in her stomach (not in her heart, it can’t be her heart).

Eyes still on his, she lets a wicked, playful smile slip onto her face as her fingers wrap around the velvet heat of his cock, tracing a vein. She only lets her gaze momentarily drop as she circles her tongue around the head, tasting the saltiness of the pearly drop there, trying not to laugh in satisfaction when she hears a sharp intake of breath above her. She can feel Jon tense beneath her touch as she keeps one hand on his hip. She has no hope of truly keeping him still but she looks up one more time regardless, peering at him from beneath her lashes, before her lips slip over the length of him.

She knows she had done this at some point last night, though the darkness of her bedroom had turned everything into a dance of blue shadow. It is wildly different in the light of the morning—she can both feel and see the tension in Jon’s body, the way he looks as though he wants to surge forward and consume her. She takes him further into her mouth, hollowing out her cheeks, trying not to laugh at the weightlessness dropping through her. Even to her own ears, the wet sounds of her mouth around his cock as she bobs her head slowly is patently salacious—and she loves what it is clearly doing to him.

“Dany…” Her name sounds like half a curse, half a prayer on his lips. She feels his hand in her hair, strangely gentle despite his hidden supernatural strength, and something about his touch burns through her like wildfire.

As she lifts her head, her teeth catch on the ridge of the head and a sharp hiss splits the silence between them. She pauses, looking up at him, tongue gently swirling over the heated flesh in her mouth. With his eyes squeezed closed, he mutters something in a language that she has never heard before. She lets out a satisfied if curious hum before pulling off him with a lewd-sounding pop, another curse from him splitting the air.

“Do you want me to answer that?” she asks with amusement in her voice, stroking him slowly as she watches those beautiful grey eyes open to give her a slightly dazed look. His mouth screws up in thought before he reaches for her, dragging her up his body to crush his lips against hers, to slip his tongue into her mouth. She laughs again and pulls away just slightly after a moment or three to murmur, “What was that? I’ve never heard that language.”

“The old Common Tongue,” Jon answers roughly as she straddles him and playfully nips at his throat and his ear, her locket chain hanging from her neck to pool against his chest. She feels his fingers drum down her spine, almost in rhythm to the heated thudding of her heart, before his hand splays on her lower back. A lingering kiss against her shoulder causes her to let out a soft sibilant gasp. “No one speaks it anymore.”

Dany slows, thinking back on the words that had rolled so easily off his tongue. They hadn’t had the rolling consonants or liquid vowels of the Essosi languages she knows but with Jon’s accent, there’d been something warm and comforting about the ancient words. They were like the crackle of a roaring fire in the middle of a cold winter night, the welcoming embrace of a loved one returning from a long journey…

…the first kiss of a dazzling and passionate affair.

When he captures her mouth again, the boiling heat that has furled tightly in her core threatens to overwhelm her and sends a needy greed roaring through her chest. She buries a moan on his tongue as he grips her hips tightly and rocks hard into her wet heat, plunging inside her completely and sending stars dancing in front of her eyes. She breaks the kiss then, though she doesn’t move far, her forehead resting against his as she pants against his mouth with every sharp and rapid thrust, every brush of his hand, every movement that sends a crushing weight through her heart.

Words scatter through her mind, even though pure nonsense spills from her mouth.

All that you want…

Everything you want…

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It doesn’t take long for them both to shatter—his hand twisted in her hair, a sharp jerk of her hips against his, and then she is folding into him, shuddering, letting heat and electricity ricochet through her, letting his quiet moan reverberate through the whole of her. She is breathing too hard, her skin aflame, her hair a mess, and Missy is absolutely going to murder her.

To be fair, Dany thinks blearily as sweet aftershocks shiver through her, she hadn’t counted on the fact that having sex with a vampire was going to feel this fucking good.

“I need coffee,” she mumbles against Jon’s skin, hearing him chuckle. “And a donut. And a shower. Maybe not in that order.”

He hums into her shoulder, tightening his arms around her in a brief embrace.

“Shower’s yours. I’ll make coffee.”

Fuck.

She might just kiss him again.

Miraculously, she doesn’t (though peeling herself off and away from him is a lot harder than she might have thought). She somehow manages to drag herself into the bathroom to take a long shower that should probably be much colder to drag her hormones back under control. If she’d been smart—and the past several hours have really made it clear that she’s not—she would have pulled him into this shower with her.

Sometime later, Dany pads into the living room, her hair still dark and damp and hanging loose around her shoulders from her shower. She’s only thrown on an old oversized college hoodie, figuring that she’ll figure out a real outfit later on. The smell of coffee mingles with the scent of an early southern morning—Jon has opened the screen door to the minuscule balcony and all three cats are sitting out in the pale sunlight, overseeing their domain. While they are otherwise distracted, she quickly refills their food and water bowls, hoping that they won’t be too annoyed with her for being too thoroughly distracted this morning to feed them promptly at six.

“You might be their new favorite person,” Dany notes with a small smile as she joins Jon on the couch. “I’m not sure they’ll ever forgive me for forgetting to feed them.” Jon smiles too, shaking his head as he hands her a cup of coffee. He’s dressed in the jeans and black tee he wore yesterday, dark curls haphazardly fingercombed. He looks attractively rumpled and she does her damnedest not to stare at him, distracting herself with a sip of the coffee. “Where’s your coffee?”

“Never been a fan. And don’t be too worried about your cats,” he adds when she makes a face at him. “I don’t think they like me much for taking up their sleeping space.”

“Well, just inform them you didn’t get much sleep so there’s no need to be jealous. And don’t think I didn’t you trying to change the subject. How are you not a fan of coffee?” As she speaks, her eyes drift over to the coffee table where the journal still sits, abandoned and forgotten from the moment she’d invited Jon into her flat.

The mirth and the teasing both die on her tongue as the sober reality of the world comes crashing back in.

She reaches for the journal, balancing her mug of coffee on her knee. The leather is still worn and supple beneath her fingertips and the journal itself has started to gently bulk up from the number of sticky notes she’s placed inside of it. The news that Daario had sent her old engagement ring to Vis, the archaic spells Missy had cast the previous night to understand the binding enchantment around the ring, and Jon’s subsequent visit have all thoroughly distracted her from making more headway with the book. They don’t have too much time left before the second comet arrives and she can’t help but feel there is some answer hidden within the pages of the journal. But she’s yet to decipher it—the events that the author, the mysterious and nameless vampire, is referring to are beyond her knowledge.

Dany settles back on the couch, the journal in her lap. She can feel Jon’s curious gaze on her but she wonders exactly where to start. To her surprise, he breaks the silence first.

“Still writing in that?”

It takes her a moment to understand the question.

“Oh. No. Not really.” She can’t believe she’d forgotten that the journal first arrived the night of the school fair and that she’d accidentally brought it along on their…well, not a date. Despite not knowing its contents, Jon has seen the damned thing before—which means there will be no lying when it comes to revealing exactly how long she’s had this. She sighs. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

A question appears in his eyes but to his credit, he doesn’t voice it. Instead, he only nods.

Well. First things first, she supposes. “Daario sent my engagement ring to Vis before he died.” When Jon’s eyebrows shoot upwards in surprise, she hurries on, “I didn’t know. Vis just told me the night before last. After he dropped it off, I took it straight over to Missy’s.”

“And?” Jon’s voice is quiet and calm, his dark grey eyes impossible to read. Dany purses her lips.

“She tried to do a spell to get an idea of what she’s working with but I don’t think it worked.” She remembers ghosts or spirits or something calling her name in the flickering darkness of Missy’s living room. Daughter of death. Slayer of lies. Bride of fire. She shrugs to hide the shiver of that disturbing memory, running her thumbnail along the journal cover’s soft, battered edge. “She still has the ring. She said she was going to try to work with Grey to figure out the best way to undo the curse. I wouldn’t have told Vis anything, but you have to understand—he’s my brother. I trust him as you trust your cousins. And he knew something strange had happened to Ashara already.”

Jon doesn’t say a word for a very long moment, his face an utter mask that she can’t hope to read. Then, voice hushed and tight, he points out, “That wasn’t your secret to tell, Dany.”

“I know.”

“We don’t tell people about us for a reason. If he lets anyone else know…”

It is so close to Missy’s warning that Dany almost winces. But then she feels irritation spark within her—she knows how dangerous this secret is. She knows what’s at risk by telling Vis. But gods, information might be just what he needs to protect himself. Missy has said she put a protection spell around Dany but Dany can’t expect her friend to exhaust herself by putting spells around everyone Dany knows and loves. The journal has already mentioned how powerful the Starfall witch, whatever that title means, might be if nature decides to imbue her with generations’ worth of magic.

“I don’t understand how you’d think I wouldn’t do everything I thought was right to protect the people I care about,” she retorts, surprised by how quickly this conversation has soured. She feels her spine go ramrod straight, her nails sinking into the soft cover of the journal. “I’ve told you that before. Nothing has changed. If I thought telling him might keep him safe, why can’t you trust that I know my brother well enough to know he’ll keep this secret?”

“I don’t know your brother.”

“But you know me.”

The silence falls between them like a hammer. Dany hates how rarely she is truly able to read Jon’s expression. Last night, she thought he’d opened up to her. If she loses his trust now, if he shuts down even more, withdrawing behind that steel wall a thousand years old, it is on her for expecting more from him. After all, how can one survive hundreds of lifetimes without removing their heart from the equation?

A vampire is no saint, she thinks bitterly, wanting to shove the journal at him and demand that he leave. And everyone is the same after all.

But to her surprise, Jon pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a long, aggrieved breath.

“That’s not…” he begins before his words apparently get tangled on his tongue. He grimaces before dropping his hand back between his knees, turning to face her with apology and wariness in his dark gaze. “That’s not what I meant, Dany. Of course I trust you. If you say your brother won’t tell—”

If he is about to say more though, she’ll never know. He goes still as stone, head snapping in the direction of the door. A moment later comes the knock.

“It’s probably Missy,” Dany says, and though normally she’d be pleased to see her friend, the idea of her arriving early enough to catch the aftermath of what is looking to be a one-night stand makes her stomach flip. She gets to her feet, tossing the journal back on the coffee table, and walks over to the door, glancing through the peephole.

Oh.

Shit.

“It’s not—” Jon starts to say but Dany’s already opened the door, figuring that she doesn’t really have the option not to. She sighs, glancing at her visitor and desperately thankful that her damned hoodie covers the fact that she’s not wearing shorts.

“Detective.”

“Miss Dayne,” Tyrion Lannister greets. Upon hearing the front door open, Drogon has come over to investigate, sniffing curiously at the small man’s shoes. Tyrion scratches behind the cat’s ears as he looks up at Dany, giving her a small smile. “Apologies for bothering you this early in the morning. Jaime was telling me that you’d managed to talk him into coming down to the station a while back. I’ve never quite seen Brienne be so annoyed with him and she’s usually annoyed with him eight days out of the week. As it stands, I figured I’d save you the trouble of hearing them bicker and come here myself…”

He trails off, gaze drifting past her into her flat. She sees several emotions flicker through his eyes—surprise, suspicion, amusement, resignation—before he drags his eyes back up to her, finally seeming to take her state of dress (or rather undress) into consideration. Flatly, he asks, “Am I interrupting something? Please tell me I’m interrupting something.”

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business,” Dany responds, hoping and praying that Sansa’s compulsion has held, “but you’re interrupting coffee.”

Tyrion says nothing for a moment, his eyes dark with skepticism. He takes one more look past her before he glances down both ends of the hallway, as though searching for something at either end. He drops his voice then, his brow wrinkled in exasperation, “I think we need to talk, Miss Dayne.”

“Maybe another time…”

“No, I think now is a very good time.” Tyrion grimaces. “Especially since you’re cavorting with vampires and my brother, for all intents and purposes, is not stupid.”

Ah.

So this is going to be Dany’s morning.

She opens her mouth, ready to tell a lie, but she feels a presence at her elbow and she turns to see Jon standing right behind her. He is frowning down at Tyrion, his eyes narrowed in thought, and she is not entirely sure if he is about to decapitate the other man or compel him into forgetting whatever Sansa has overlooked. But Jon lets out a long breath, frustration briefly flickering across his face.

“The cemetery?” Tyrion nods and Dany looks at Jon askance. He shakes his head at her unasked question but is otherwise inhumanly still as he watches Tyrion as though deciding what to do with him. “Vervain. In the cemetery, I wouldn’t have been able to…”

He trails off and Dany unconsciously reaches for the chain at her throat, the locket that Missy has filled with the same herb to protect her from a vampire’s compulsion. If Tyrion has it, does it mean that the Council that Jon mentioned a few weeks back knows? Olenna knows that that Starks are vampires but she’d said it is because she is the only one old enough in Starfall to remember them when they’d last lived here.

How many other people know? The fact that a mob hasn’t descended on the manor should be reassuring but…

“I hope the fact that I haven’t told anyone else about that incident in the cemetery warrants at least a few minutes’ conversation,” says Tyrion dryly, his gaze traveling from Dany to Jon. “And let’s be honest with one another—I am far too small and far too human to be much of a physical threat to you at the moment. We can all agree that’s enough for me to remain honest.”

“Is it?” Jon’s tone is unamused. Tyrion sighs.

“My sense of self-preservation may be skewed sometimes but let’s just say I like my head and my heart intact.” He raises an eyebrow. “Now…might I come in?”

The only other alternative is to slam the door in his face and Dany doubts that such an action will do much good. She leans back into Jon to signal for him to allow Tyrion into her flat.

Neither Rhaegal nor Viserion seems at all bothered by the latest addition into the flat at the early hour as their brother rejoins them out on the balcony and Dany can only hope it will stay peaceful enough to not warrant three cats yowling in alarm. As Tyrion sits in the armchair, Dany mutters a quick excuse to go change into some goddamned shorts and scoops up her coffee and the journal—heaven knows she doesn’t want either man perusing it now. Making a beeline to the bedroom after one warning look at Jon, she hopes that he doesn’t decide that Tyrion is more trouble than he’s worth and that Tyrion doesn’t run his infamous mouth.

Back in the relative safety and quiet of the bedroom, Dany places the journal and the coffee onto the nightstand before pressing her palms into her eyes and sinking down onto the mattress. She thinks that considering her luck ever since she arrived back in Starfall, Tyrion knowing about the Starks is something inevitable. On one hand, if anyone else had to know, she supposes that she’d rather it be Tyrion than, say, his father. But on the other hand, finding out that this closely kept secret is not so closely kept after all makes a knot of guilt tangle in her chest. To come almost immediately after telling Jon that she’d revealed their secret to Vis…

She chews on her bottom lip. She doesn’t regret telling Vis. He needed to know. She hopes that once he manages to work it all out in his head, they’ll be able to chat more about all of this nonsense: the ring, Daario’s murder, the Starks, and her being a doppelgänger. In a perfect world, she’d tell Ashara but—

Her phone vibrates on the nightstand.

Dany shoots it a look, taking a glance at the photo that has popped on the screen. She winces before reaching for the phone.

“Hi.”

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t be awake,” Margaery says on the other end of the line, sounding only faintly annoyed. “I tried calling you last night. Grandmother said you and Robb visited the house a few days ago.”

Dany glances down at her phone and sure enough, she has a missed call from Margaery, a couple of missed texts from Missandei, and several more from her friends up in Winterfell. She sighs as she glances at the time stamps, knowing that she had been thoroughly distracted by a blissful haze of sex for most of the night. She scrapes her fingers through her mostly dried hair before she flips the phone to speaker mode to free up her hands as she gets dressed.

“I’m sorry I missed you. How’ve you been holding up with your mum?”

“Do you want me to say I’m chuffed that some mysterious vampire almost killed her?” Dany winces at the sharp edge in Margaery’s tone. She imagines her friend sitting out on the grand old balcony of the Tyrell mansion, drinking coffee and surrounded by all sorts of blooming flora as the sun continues its lazy ascent into the sky. It is a tradition Dany knows Margaery shares with her mum and grandmother, though clearly neither one of them is around. But before she can apologize again, her friend sighs. “Listen, Missy was rather tart with me about giving you the silent treatment. And though I am annoyed with you, I know none of this is your fault. As much as I am loath to admit it, I don’t think I can even truly blame the Starks. It’s just convenient to.”

Dany doesn’t quite know what to say to any of that. She hesitates before asking, “You spoke with Missy?”

“A few days ago.”

Why hadn’t Missandei said anything when Dany had been over her house with the ring? As she slips off her sweatshirt and replaces it with a white camisole, she wonders if this is a fair payment for her own hoarding of secrets from her friends, secrets that she swore she would tell them as soon as she got the chance…and then never did. It feels like the balancing of a hundred scales—how much might have been salvaged if she had only been a little more truthful with Missandei and Margaery before the Starks’ housewarming? She should have told them about the ring, about what spell it was binding, about the possible consequences Jon is willing to face to undo the curse of vampirism from the world.

She feels selfish for saying nothing. What has it accomplished? Even if she has promised to do everything in her power not to be complicit in the unbinding if it involves everyone’s deaths, shouldn’t she also give Margaery the same choice? Shouldn’t she tell Missandei the stakes?

Guilt hounds at her.

“You were right to be angry with me,” Dany says. “I haven’t been…I could be a better friend. I know that. You deserve that—both you and Missy. And I think we really need to talk. There are some things you should know.”

“Mmm, that doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Margaery notes dryly as Tyrion barks out a short, dry laugh from the living room. Her friend pauses. “Was that Tyrion Lannister?”

“Yes.” Dany grabs a pair of cutoff shorts from a drawer, somewhat annoyed by the poor timing of the laugh. “Apparently, for as skilled as Sansa is with compulsion, vervain is stronger yet. He remembers everything from the cemetery. I don’t know how he knows about vervain and I don’t know what that means about the Council.” Dany can almost see Margaery tapping her manicured nails against her phone case as she pursed her lips in thought.

“I suppose our luck had to run out eventually,” she muses. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Did he bring someone else with him? Is Jaime there? We might be in a bit more trouble if the sheriff is there. Are you getting arrested? Do I need to call my grandmother?”

“Jaime’s not here,” Dany says, rolling her eyes. The secret about Olenna knowing what Margaery has become is one that she debates revealing, though she doubts the old woman will appreciate it. She continues, “And while I think you should talk to your grandmother, you don’t need to call her about this.”

“Well, who else is there with you then? Or is Tyrion laughing at his own jokes?”

Dany mentally curses. “No one.”

“No one?”

“No one.”

Unfortunately for Dany, she has decided to be friends with the nosiest and the most disgustingly clever people in the entire world. It only takes a beat or two of calculations for Margaery to figure out who in the world Dany would deny being in her flat at this hour and she hears her friend take in a sharp little gasp as she realizes.

“…no! Dany, you didn’t!”

“There’s no one here, Marg.”

“You did!”

“Marg.”

“So that’s why you didn’t pick up last night—too busy shagging an immortal vampire. God, don’t I pick the best times to call?” Margaery hums thoughtfully, ignoring Dany’s spluttering attempts to shut her up and turn off speaker mode in case Jon can hear her phone call. “Was it good? I bet it was good. All that stamina and pent-up longing he’s been looking at you with had to get put to use somewhere. You’re blushing, aren’t you…wait, no. You’re probably seething because I guessed correctly. Good grief, I don’t want to hear a single word about Robb after this.”

“Marg, if you don’t—”

“I don’t care how good the sex was though—I’m pretty sure that’s still called necrophilia, Dany.”

Dany is going to stake Margaery herself.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to it,” Margaery chirps, sounding entirely too pleased with herself considering what a sour note the conversation started out on. “Tell me when you confess to Missy what you did. I want to be there when she murders you.”

The line goes dead.

Dany stares at the flashing image on the screen for a moment before it fades. She knows that Margaery was only teasing her but something about the conversation has left her feeling uncertain and unsettled. A few months ago, none of them would have been in this situation in the first place. Margaery had still been human. Missandei had not yet begun to bear the magical weight of the Starfall witch. So many other people had still been alive and unharmed, including Daario. The most pressing concern in Dany’s life had been the idea of returning to Starfall, lost and confused about her place in the world after leaving her hometown years ago, wondering what in the world she was supposed to do and who in the world she was supposed to be. The arrival of the Starks has completely changed the trajectory of all their lives.

For the better? Dany wonders, gently touching the locket at her throat. She is at the fulcrum of whatever is going to happen and she is certain that she doesn’t want to be. But the other option is to turn her back on all of this.

And she is certain she can’t do that either.

She reenters the living room as she ties her hair up into a high bun. The tableau in front of her is mostly a relief. Jon is leaning against the far wall, arms crossed, expression pensive and distracted, but still calm. She is not sure who poured it but Tyrion is drinking from a mug of coffee, his own eyes alert and cautious despite his relaxed posture in the armchair. Drogon has sauntered into the middle of the living room between the two men and has sprawled out on the floor, belly open for rubs if anyone dares, completely oblivious to the tension.

Jon meets her eyes when she steps back into the room and she wonders how much of the conversation he had overheard with his supernatural hearing. She hopes he had been too busy talking to Tyrion.

“Does Jaime know anything?” she asks as she sits down on the couch. Tyrion shakes his head.

“I was just telling Jon about that.” He wraps both hands around his mug, frowning as he quickly glances over at said vampire leaning against the wall. “My father has been told that vampires have returned to Starfall and he has informed the Council, superstitious lot that they are. Personally, I think they’re too inept to pose much of a threat to you all—and fortunately for you, Jaime thinks it’s mostly hogwash but the circumstances around Mr. Naharis’s death and some other people’s disappearances have caused him to be more skeptical. But even more fortunately for you, I like Miss Dayne well enough to make sure suspicion doesn’t fall on your family, Mr. Snow.”

“Good to hear,” Jon retorts wryly.

“I’ll consider it a favor owed.”

“But why do it in the first place?” Dany asks. She is not sure she would consider Tyrion a close friend but she has known him all of her life. Despite all of her complaints about the suffocating nature of small towns, the one good thing about them is that people did tend to protect their own against outsiders. It is just strange since the outsiders in this instance would be the Starks. “And how did you know about vervain?”

Tyrion’s smile twists.

“A story for another time, perhaps,” he says casually with a wave of his hand. “The last thing anyone wants is to hear my tragedy of a mummer’s tale.”

It is only then that Dany recalls that Tyrion had left Starfall once too. She’d been a child at the time and wholly uninterested in the small-town politics that the older folks of Starfall indulged in. She’d only known that Tywin Lannister’s youngest son had absconded to somewhere beyond the reach of his overbearing father, returning a few years later with a dark and bitter light in his eyes and a penchant for the bottle that he had not had before he left. She has never asked him where he went and no one has ever told her and it is of course the one time in her life that removing herself from the gossip that swirls about town has come back to bite her in the ass.

It is clearly not enough for Jon though. “What do you want?”

“Many things,” Tyrion replies with a shrug. “But nothing from you, believe it or not. You’ll just have to trust that I’m fond enough of Miss Dayne and have no interest in seeing the streets of Starfall turn into a bloodbath.”

Dany shoots Jon a look. His dark grey eyes are narrowed and she wonders if he is contemplating just risking the suspicion that might fall on him if he removes Tyrion from the equation. She quickly says, “I know him, Jon. I believe he’ll keep his word.” Still, she slides Tyrion a pointed look. “Though I’d like to remind him that this is an entire family whose bad side you might not want to get on.”

“Oh, I am quite aware.” Tyrion leaps down from the armchair. “I may have been indulging in more wine than usual to forget but seeing someone’s heart ripped out of their chest in front of you does tend to leave an impression. If you don’t trust my word, then at least trust the fact that I have no desire to see my clever brains splattered against a wall.”

That, Dany can believe. She looks back at Jon, who doesn’t seem as convinced, but finally the dark-haired vampire nods his assent. She is sure that conversation with his family is going to be thrilling later on.

“You said that your father’s been warning the Council about vampires,” she ventures. “The Council only trusts their own. Would they trust the Starks as Founders?”

“They might,” Tyrion allows after a few seconds. He gives Jon an aside glance. “But the Council meets at the original Lannister mansion. My vampire lore is not quite as up-to-date as it could be but I’d imagine you’d need an invitation from my father to get in. Since that is liable to cause him to raise his suspicions, I’d suggest you don’t do that.”

He has a point. And despite this conversation, Dany knows that Jon doubts if Tyrion will ever fully tell them everything happening in the Council meetings. They need someone to go they can trust, someone who knows the Starks’ secret, and someone who is part of a family of Founders…

Someone who has been away from the town for years and is currently on the top of Cersei Lannister’s shit list.

Well, fuck.

Sitting on the hood of his car, Jon watches as the sun hunkers low on the western horizon, melting golden into the wine-blue sea like dripping candle wax. The midsummer evening breeze carries with it the sound of seagulls and the roar of the surf far below the low cliff overlooking the beach. The smell of salt and seaweed and the smoke of a half-dozen bonfires burning to the far north hangs in the air, drifting farther and farther south as the day wanes into the night.

Other cars infrequently pass behind him on the motorway, weaving along the cliffside road at precariously high speeds. After some time, one of the cars slows, funk music blaring from the 8-track, tires crunching along the gravel of the wide shoulder and coming to a stop next to his own car. A door opens and slams shut. A moment later, someone is climbing up onto the hood to sit next to him.

Silence passes between the two of them for several minutes before the newcomer passes him a flask, a mood ring glittering off her left hand. He takes the flask and drinks and the blood that slips onto his tongue tastes of the warm endless sea and something sharply intoxicating. He sighs before handing the flask back to his companion.

“It tastes different,” he observes.

“Witch on coke. She’s in the trunk, sleeping off her high.” His cousin shrugs and he turns to look at her. Arya’s dark hair is all fringe and shaggy layers, hanging loose above her graphic tee and military jacket. The flare of her bell-bottoms almost engulfs her scuffed sneakers and he sees that she has scribbled all sorts of nonsensical notes over the denim in permanent marker (he thinks that somewhere Sansa is quietly seething in irritation). She takes a pull from the flask. “Still human though. By the way, I hate the mustache and I hate the tracksuit.”

“Visit Robb if you want someone fashionable,” Jon replies, turning his gaze back out onto the white-capped surf. They pass the flask between the two of them a few more times before he finally finds it in him to ask. “How’s Sansa doing?”

“You could call her, you know.” When Jon only shakes his head, Arya sighs, looking mildly tempted to shove him off the edge of the cliff. “She doesn’t blame you, Jon. She knew exactly what would happen when she fell in love with Harry all those decades ago. We always know we can’t keep the people we choose. We’ve done this song-and-dance more times than we can count. You brooding over it every time it happens doesn’t help matters.”

Jon snorts. “Prefer if I go on a bender?”

“It’d be more entertaining,” Arya grumbles, though he sees that she is not quite able to hide her smile. “You should come with me to Essos though. It’ll just be for a few decades. It might get your mind off all the bullshit over here.”

Jon rubs his face, pushing his aviators up into his dark hair. He remembers the last time he had gone on a bender—a decade after the second war, Bran had discovered some history professor at one of the minor Westerosi universities digging into the end of the Targaryen dynasty. Bran (and Robb and Sansa) had warned Jon about doing anything more drastic than compelling the man into forgetting all of his research. Jon had heeded their warnings…and then promptly disappeared for five years to burn and bury every single memory the man’s research had uncovered.

He rocks back against the windshield of his car to stare up at the darkening sky—already, the brightest of stars are starting to appear. He says, “It’s getting harder to keep this up.”

“Wish we could tell that to some of the younger vampires.” Arya leans back next to him, crossing her ankle over her knee and bopping her foot to some tune that Jon can’t hope to hear. She glances down at the slim daylight ring that sits next to the mood ring on her right hand. “How many more decades?”

“A little less than four.” Arya grimaces.

“You should tell the others. I promised not to say anything but they should know…” When Jon doesn’t immediately respond, he feels Arya glaring at him. “Do you really think they’d be mad at you about this? We’re all going to be in Starfall when those comets come, Jon. They should know what you’re planning.”

Jon raises an eyebrow at her. “Will it change anything?”

“I’d be less annoyed with you, to be honest.” She knocks his sunglasses back down onto the bridge of his nose with a flick of her finger. “We’ve lost too many people. If you want to be upset with yourself about something, be upset about that. We’ve loved and we’ve lost but we’ve always had each other. You’ve always had me. Now and forever, remember? What you’re planning…it’s not worth it.”

Isn’t it, Jon wonders, looking up at the sky through the darkened lens of the sunglasses. Everything that he has been able to piece together over a thousand years tells him that there is a reason this longevity is a curse, why immortality is unnatural. Despite all of this time, he has only started to gauge the pieces he needs to undo it. As they get closer to the return of the first comet, more and more of the pieces fall into place, as though nature too is eager to undo the mistake Daenerys cast into the world a thousand years ago.

To soothe Arya’s worries though, he points out, “It probably won’t work. I have shit luck.”

“I’m just tired of keeping secrets.”

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Arya lets out a huff and he knows that’s as close to an answer as he’s getting. “Listen, give me some time. I’ll figure out something.”

“We have less than forty years and you are a shitty liar.” She gives him a friendly punch on the arm before she sits up and takes another pull from her flash. When she hands it out expectantly to him, he gives her a half-hearted smile before he also straightens and takes it from her. “And I love you, Jon, I do—but the thing with your memory isn’t helping. There’s nothing of the spell you remember?”

Jon doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he slides off the hood of the car before making his way over to the trunk of Arya’s. Gravel crunches behind him from where Arya follows. With a twist of his wrist, he pops open the lock on the trunk and flips it open.

Curled up within is a dark-haired young woman in a sequined jumpsuit, her lipstick smudged and her eyeliner smeared across her big dark eyes. She looks wan and thin and the sudden dark gold rays of sunlight cause her to blink owlishly up at him. Congealed blood marks her pale neck. Jon cannot even begin to guess how many other drugs and how much alcohol is floating around in her bloodstream. He shoots his cousin a look.

“A bender?” he asks. Arya plants her fists on her hips at her side, rolling her eyes.

“Disco.”

He has to laugh quietly at that.

The girl unfurls herself from the expanse of the trunk. She looks from Jon to Arya and back again before licking her lips uncertainly.

“Are you the Devil?”

Jon remembers the raven bearing a false message from Bran. He remembers going farther south than he ever dared to go as Rhaegar Targaryen’s son. He remembers a city glowing with green fire and the smell of burned flesh and the sound of thousands of people screaming. He remembers smoke and he remembers her, beautiful and bright-eyed and dangerous.

He remembers a kiss and he remembers pain and he remembers blood, hot and gushing, on his tongue…

…and then nothing. His next memory is of being miles away from the city, in the dark and the cold and the ash, the night screaming at him and shadowy fires still licking at his throat. And Daenerys was…she was…

Forever. We will have forever.

I promise.

Jon smiles grimly.

“Depends on who you ask.”

And he is unsure which side of the lie the truth hides behind anymore.

In her little house on the Rainbow Road, Missandei pages through Ygritte’s grimoire, twirling the cursed ring in her hand as she tries to make sense of the words in front of her.

It has taken more hours than she is willing to admit and she has burned through more candles than is probably necessary. However, the element of fire strengthens her magic—air is too fickle, running water cuts magic off, and she simply doesn’t want to be bothered with the mess of digging up a bunch of dirt from her backyard. As it stands, the room is almost uncomfortably warm and she can feel her skin prickle with perspiration—she has lost track of the number of spells she has cast today to speak with the spirits about finding the source of the original immortality spell.

As she turns another page, a glass of water appears in front of her. She looks up to see Grey standing next to the couch, a concerned frown on his face.

“You should take a break.”

“I know,” Missandei admits, reaching for the water. She takes a sip, pleased by how delightfully cool the water feels on her parched throat. “I was hoping to have more of an answer by now though.”

“The spirits have always been fickle.” Grey shrugs. He has been her magical anchor and channel for the more difficult spells today and it is the only reason she has not collapsed in exhaustion yet. “Nature even more so.”

Missandei knows this. Her awakening as the Starfall witch has only come within the past few years and though her mum and her nonna practiced some witchcraft, their magic hailed from systems constructed on Naath. The power of the Starfall witch is entirely different and as far as Missandei knows, there has been no Starfall witch for almost seventy years. From her research, it seems that they only appear once a century, born all over the world but always drawn to Starfall by dark and ancient magic.

But that is all she knows and trying to find out more about her own magical heritage has been nothing but a headache.

“Nature could be a little more helpful,” Missandei says with a shake of her head as she turns another page. She has the feeling that she is on the right track to cobble together a Valyrian spell to unbind the immortality curse but if she makes even the slightest error… “Vampires are an abomination of nature. You’d think it would be more willing to help set the balance back in order.”

Grey shakes his head, sitting down on the couch next to her. He is a rather taciturn young man who hasn’t revealed much of his past to Missandei. The only thing she knows about him is his apparent longevity and his begrudging relationship with an Oldtown vampire named Ygritte.

“That’s not always the case,” Grey corrects. He looks down at his own hands. “Nature plays by its own rules.”

That is true, isn’t it? There is still so much about how the first spell went down that boggles her mind. Things live and things die—that is how they should be. Nature finds its loopholes, of course, but from her perspective, it is difficult to see what contingency plan was put into place to keep vampires in check beyond binding them to the moon. Even then, just like another witch has clearly done with the Starks, she was able to create a daylight ring for Margaery to allow her to move around in the daylight.

There is always a balance, she thinks. So what is the balance here? What is the counterweight to undo the spell?

She drags a finger down one of the ancient pages of the grimoire. A query to the spirits after Dany had left had only left her neck-deep in blood rituals. She does not doubt that something of blood was involved in the original spell—but whether it was part of the binding enchantment or simply the thing that tied the Starks and the Targaryens together, she’s not as sure. Hell, she is still trying to figure out how the spell bound two completely different bloodlines together if Dany is correct and Daenerys Targaryen was the first vampire.

Missandei slips off her glasses and sticks them into the cloud of curls atop her head before rubbing at her eyes. She murmurs, “I’ve never done a blood ritual before. But clearly that’s what the original spell was.” Grey nods.

“Stands to reason.”

The answer is right in front of her. She knows it. The spirits cannot directly tell her the answer—not unless she wants to pass over to the other side and start cross-examining ghosts and spirits centuries old. If she is lucky and the doorway between the spirit world and the waking world doesn’t close on her the moment she gets there, she might very well seek out the original Daenerys Targaryen and demand an answer.

A blood ritual. Missandei’s brow furrows. Staring at the ceiling, she quietly says aloud, “It doesn’t matter what part blood played in sealing the spell. But it tied the Targaryens and the Starks together.”

What is she missing? More importantly, who is she missing? Does Dany not have the whole truth? Daenerys Targaryen and the Stark cousins are all clearly connected but how? The only thing that makes any sense in her head is that the spell was cast simultaneously on both Daenerys and Jon, which would link him to his cousins but…

And it doesn’t matter anyway, Missandei thinks. Without the original Daenerys and with nothing left from the original spell except the ring, I can’t figure out a way to do this without wrecking the spell. She can’t even begin to contemplate the consequences of ruining a spell that contains such intricate and archaic magic.

“It should be easier than this, shouldn’t it?” asks Missandei, sitting back on the couch. Grey gives her a quizzical look. “I’m the Starfall witch. This should come naturally to me.”

Grey’s brow knits in thought and he is silent for a very long moment. Finally, he says, his words careful and slow, “Nature is giving you power. You are not the first Starfall witch. You are not the one who cast the spell. But you are connected to whoever it was. The answer will come in time.”

If that’s the case, then she has certainly been asking the wrong question of the spirits. It is not Daenerys Targaryen she should be looking for. It is that first witch. But Missandei is not entirely sure she wants to speak to someone with such a disregard for the balance of nature, someone who indulged in such black and dangerous magic that she unleashed a disease on the world: creatures who lurk in the night, who feast on the flowing blood of the living, whose unnatural lives collect the dust and ashes of the passing centuries.

I’m connected to her. But I’m not her. I won’t ever be—

Her doorbell rings.

Sighing miserably, she places the grimoire on the coffee table. As she rises to her feet, she tells Grey, “We should order some food. We’re not getting anything done tonight if I don’t get something to eat.” He blinks at her and then his face splits into a rare almost shy smile. Missandei thinks it is a wonderfully attractive look on him. She crosses over to the door, opens it…and blinks.

“Sheriff?”

Jaime Lannister stands on her porch, looking tired and grim and very much like he wants to be anywhere else except here. Behind him stands Brienne who also looks uncomfortable but resolute.

“Evening, Missandei,” Jaime says quietly. His gaze momentarily drifts past her shoulder to Grey before landing back on her. “We were hoping you would come down to the station with us and answer some questions we have about an impending investigation. There are some…discrepancies we have in an open case that we hoped you could clarify for us.”

Missandei shifts, suddenly uncertain. “I…I’m sorry? What case?” Jaime takes in a long breath through his nose, shaking his head.

“I would prefer to discuss that down at the station.” He grimaces. “And I’d rather not have this turn into a scene.”

“I don’t understand. Am I under arrest?’

“You are being questioned, miss,” Brienne explains without explaining anything and Missandei can only stare, stunned. She looks back at Grey, who has risen to his feet as well, giving her a perplexed look. She turns back to the sheriff and the officer on her porch.

“Questioned about what? I think I deserve that answer before I go with you.”

Jaime and Brienne share looks. Finally Jaime rubs at his face before taking a step out of the way, allowing Brienne to walk past him. A streetlamp glitters off metal and Missandei feels the confusion turn bitter and cold in the pit of her stomach, even as she hears Grey let out a sound of protest behind her.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to talk elsewhere,” Jaime says grimly as the handcuffs snap shut around Missandei’s wrists. He glances over his shoulder briefly and for the first time, Missandei catches sight of the tall elderly gentleman in a business suit standing on the sidewalk, his cold grey-green eyes so much unlike his son’s. The pieces of the puzzle fall around her but none of them make sense. None of them fit.

No…

“I’m sorry, Missy, but you are under arrest…for conspiracy to commit murder.”

Chapter Text

At the Citadel in Oldtown, the campus halls and classrooms are entirely deserted except for one.

In the classroom for mythology and occult studies, an antique jeweled lamp casts a warm buttery glow across a paper-strewn desk, paperweights glittering like small black jewels across the flat top, dozens of scrawled notes whispering of ancient things and lost memories. The small pool of light spills across the floor, leaving the far corners of the room in dim and flickering shadow. Atop a battered coaster and next to a resin bookmark brimming with pressed flowers, a mug sits filled with something viscous and crimson before a hand reaches out to pick it up. The redhead lounging in the equally battered chair at the desk, sneakered feet propped up atop the papers, brings it to her lips, unbothered by the metallic warm blood that coats her tongue.

Another summer night, another year, another decade. Ever since the Citadel got over its sexist hiring and enrollment practices at the turn of the previous century, she returns every few decades or so—long enough so that her former colleagues or classmates have been shuttered off to asylums or retirement homes, whichever is en vogue at the moment. It mostly allows her to live in anonymity, but being at the center of western knowledge also has its perks. Knowledge and whispers seem to converge here in Oldtown and it has been enough to keep well aware of the happenings in the supernatural world she’s a part of.

Her phone lights up with a text message. She ignores it, turning a page in the book she is reading, already knowing who is bothering her at this hour. One of her students she carried on an affair with this past semester considers himself in love. She thinks it has more to do with the fact that she gives amazing blowjobs (a couple of centuries will teach a girl a thing or two) but he’s getting annoying. She’ll have to compel some new memories into him at this rate.

A tongue flickers out to catch the remnant of a drop of blood on her lips. She remembers once chatting with Jon about her lackadaisical approach to compulsion. Staying alive usually means she can’t pick and choose who she’ll compel—one missed opportunity might be a mistake.

She thinks her friend can stand to be a little more carefree in using his abilities though. She has fed with him a few times, black veins cracking around their red eyes, mouths sodden and crimson with blood, and she has admired his mercurial strength and speed, the same strength and speed he shares with his cousins (but still…different somehow). And too she has seen the casual ease with which he compels humans, but she’s never been quite able to talk him out of the quiet guilt that accompanies it. For as long as she has been his friend, there’s so much of his past that is utterly cloaked in shadow. She knows he can be a hardass sometimes but gods, his humanity will be the death of him.

The death of all of us, she thinks, turning a page in her book. She’s not stupid. Jon’s appearance here with Arya and that girl a few weeks ago had been no coincidence. She’d couched her words in ambivalence, knowing that while Grey knows the Starks are the Original vampires, she had no clue if the girl did. To find out her name is also Daenerys Targaryen though…

Her eyes flicker over to her bookcase. The area where the grimoire once sat gapes ominously. Finding the damned thing had been no easy feat—witchhunts throughout the centuries had burned the grimoires along with their owners. The fact that one of the oldest had survived at all is a miracle…but Ygritte believes in neither miracles nor coincidences. Keeping the grimoire hidden in plain sight was a survival mechanism but she knows—she knows—that forces beyond her understanding kept that grimoire in one piece through the centuries.

When Jon had come around asking about Daenerys’s ring, it had only confirmed her suspicions. She’d given away her leverage and her witch and it wasn’t…it wasn’t…

Unbidden, she lifts her eyes to her phone screen.

2:59:57.

2:59:58.

2:59:59.

Another night, another year, another decade.

Then, beyond the walls of the Citadel, Ygritte hears three sonorous chimes from the Hightower. Her grip tightens on the book as a chill runs down her spine. She wills herself to relax. She is not afraid. She has been around for too long. Nothing should scare her. Not the Hightower, not the night, not the things that the night brings…

But she knows what the three chimes mean.

With a nonchalance she does not quite feel, she sips more blood from her coffee mug, still warm from the custodian who had walked past her door earlier, and she tries to focus on the book she is reading. She reaches for the bookmark next to the coaster, the sprig of flowers within obscuring the words on the page. There are days when she wishes she hadn’t seen Grey to Starfall with the Starks, days when she wishes she hadn’t given away the grimoire, her only leverage against darker and more vicious creatures that hide in the shadows of the night.

But witches can have other uses, she thinks as a whisper of wind catches her attention. She lifts her eyes to the door and raises an eyebrow at the slim shadow standing within the doorframe. Despite her nonchalance, a thread of uncertainty slips its way through her unbeating heart and she toys nervously with the bookmark as she closes her book, marking her place with a finger.

“What do you need?”

“You know what I need,” the shadow says. “You sent Grey to Starfall with the grimoire.”

“Aye. As you told me.”

Ygritte had wanted to tell Jon. Despite the older vampire’s tendency to hold everyone except his family at arm’s length, she still considers him her friend. Yet when he had come to Oldtown with his cousin and that doppelgänger, something had twisted in her mind, rusty and cobwebbed memories, and had clamped down her tongue. She knows what that means. She has lived too long to not know what that means.

It’s a compulsion.

“Have you spoken to him since?”

Here, Ygritte cannot help but snort. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

The shadow is silent for a long, long moment. Beyond the light of the lamp, Ygritte thinks she can almost see the pale moonglow in their eyes. Then the person steps forward, tossing something in Ygritte’s direction. It lands on her desk with a small thud. It is a small cellphone, an old model with a sliding keyboard. She reaches for it warily, already knowing that there are chains to the request that is about to be asked of her.

“The Starfall witch needs to be stronger. She needs another anchor.”

“Grey is—”

“Not enough.” The person glances at the bookshelf next to Ygritte’s desk, at the dozens of books she has collected throughout the centuries concealed behind modern covers to hide their antiquity. A pale finger grazes against the spines of the books before stopping at the hollow space where the grimoire once sat. “Do you think Nature will stand idly by when the second comet returns? No, Nature requires a balance. It always has. But the Starfall witch is too young and she’s too inexperienced—if she attempts the spell as is…”

“And what do you want me to do about it?” Ygritte asks, unable to keep the sharpness out of her voice. “I’m a vampire, not a witch.” The shadow turns to her, a faint smile on their face.

“You’re better connected than most. I want you to find another witch suicidal or vainglorious enough to attempt the spell and send them to Starfall. Find ten if need be. Twenty. But they need to be there once the second comet arrives. And they need to be capable and they need to distract the wolves.”

No one is going to Starfall, Ygritte thinks sourly. The rumors spreading through the supernatural world have reached a fever pitch—everyone with even an inkling of knowledge knows that something powerful is convening in Starfall. Already, vampires are starting to make their way east to the small town. Any witch with even a modicum of self-preservation will stay far away from Starfall, leaving the abominations of Nature to their own brand of chaos. She is not sure she could find anyone willing to not only travel there but to be a part of some esoteric black magic that will inevitably kill them.

“The Starks will know,” Ygritte finally says, leaning back in her chair.

“You won’t tell them.” The person’s eyes flash in the darkness and Ygritte feels a chill go down her spine. The person’s eyes are almost glowing. “Will you, Ygritte?”

He’s my friend. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Not like this.

But she still says, “Aye. I won’t.” She pauses and then adds, the words cutting her tongue open, “I know someone. A witch from the old city. It’s not ten witches but he’s…he’s capable.”

“Good.” The person nods at the phone. “Call him. I want this over and done.”

And then, as quickly as they had arrived, they are gone.

Ygritte lets out a sharp and uneasy breath, eyeing the suddenly empty doorway for a very long time before she slips the bookmark she’s been holding in her hand back onto the table. Her visitor had not noticed her holding it and for that she’s thankful. Ygritte has not lived all of these centuries without being horribly cautious around the people she is acquainted with. Jon may think her bold and reckless sometimes—and perhaps compared to him and his cousins, she is—but at the end of the day, she is a survivor and she is not stupid. She learns.

She glances at the desk calendar buried beneath the books and papers on her desk. How much longer until the second comet arrives? How many more weeks?

Too few. Too fucking few.

“Shit,” she curses under her breath, grabbing the phone off the table and shoving it into the battered messenger bag beneath her desk. No one ever tells you that immortality fucks with your sense of time, that everything passes too quickly and too slowly all at once. Staying alive means being cognizant of those changes. Staying alive means being smarter than the people she has stolen knowledge from. Befriending the Starks—befriending Jon—had not been part of the deal.

But then again, neither had Daenerys Targaryen’s doppelgänger.

Fuck.

She wishes Daario Naharis had never visited the Citadel all those months ago.

Ygritte grabs her bag and slings it over her shoulder. Her car’s windows are tinted enough that the daylight won’t burn her. If she leaves now, she can be in Starfall before the next morning. She owes Jon this much at least.

A few minutes later, the classroom is dark and empty.

The bookmark with its pressed vervain lies abandoned on the desk.

“Jaime Lannister, have you lost your godforsaken mind?”

The police station with its adjoining clock tower is one of the oldest buildings in town—it had been Starfall’s first sept before being converted by the sheriff some sixty or seventy years ago when the septon declared that the Seven needed a much bigger building to be worshipped in. Beacons of golden fluorescent light peep out into the darkest hour of the night while inside those same lights shimmer off the tiles of the lobby and the mahogany desks behind the reception area. The scent of stale coffee, printer ink, and discount air freshener has seeped into the wood-paneled walls and the linoleum floor that warps and shifts beneath Dany’s sneakers. The station is quiet at this hour of the night, save for murmured conversations amongst the handful of deputies still at work.

Well.

It probably had been quiet—but then Ashara Dayne had arrived.

Dany watches as her adoptive mum lays into Jaime in increasingly incredulous and furious tones, ignoring the slack-jawed looks from the younger deputies around the office who have never seen their much-admired sheriff chastised so scathingly before. One could even be forgiven for forgetting that Ashara had been hospitalized with a terrible stomach injury a few weeks ago. Jaime, for his part, is taking the anger in stride. Dany suspects that if Tyrion had not called her soon after Grey told her what happened, Jaime’s younger brother would also be the target of Ashara’s annoyance.

After Tyrion had left her apartment, assuring her he would speak with his father about getting her an invitation to a Council meeting, she’d tried to salvage her earlier annoyance with Jon. But while he had apologized for getting angry with her for telling Viserys the Starks’ secret, he’d still excused himself not long after Tyrion left. It had not exactly been what Dany expected after finally having sex with him and she’d spent the rest of the day trying to get lost in her work, too bothered by Jon’s withdrawal to care that she was on sabbatical.

Then Grey had called her.

There is something strangely satisfying about watching the beautiful and usually cheerful Ashara Dayne berate Jaime Lannister with a blistering tongue and flaring temper in front of the entire sheriff’s office. Even Tyrion looks impressed with some of Ashara’s more colorful epithets as he approaches the bench Dany sits on, handing her a cup of coffee that smells nowhere near as good as the coffee Ashara makes at her café.

“Sorry about all this,” Tyrion says. His brow crinkles as he glances over at his older brother and Ashara, though Dany can hear the sincerity in his voice. “I would have talked him out of it if I knew. I suspect my father has something to do with this.”

Of course he does—Tywin Lannister is utterly incapable of not overreaching his influence in small-town politics. Flatly she says, “Would you have done something? If your father is truly behind this?”

“Contrary to popular belief, when they say a Lannister pays his debts, they don’t mean that I pay my father’s, miserly as he is,” Tyrion replies with a resigned shake of his head. He looks back at her. “Will you come with me?”

“Why?” Dany is not feeling particularly talkative or kind at this hour. Her best friend is locked up based on absolutely ludicrous charges and she knows that the Lannisters have fabricated some defaming story against her that will hardly be disputed in such a small town. Even if Tyrion had called her to let her know what had happened, who’s to say he doesn’t have some part in it? As much as she cannot quite convince herself that he is lying, she wonders if he’d only come to her flat earlier to distract her with his knowledge while his brother prepared charges against Missandei.

Tyrion must read the mistrust on her face because his own expression is pained. “As much as I deserve your suspicion, I should hope our earlier conversation would lend me some goodwill.” When Dany doesn’t budge, Tyrion sighs and quietly adds, “Please, Miss Dayne.”

There is a pleading note in his voice and it is so unlike Tyrion Lannister that Dany finds herself relenting. She glances over at where Ashara is still yelling at Jaime and she wonders if Grey is still pacing anxiously outside as he had been when she arrived. With a stiff nod and a grimace, she leaves the coffee on the little table next to the bench—the last thing she wants is cheap, burnt-tasting coffee on her tongue when she accuses Tyrion of trying to trick her.

Yet whatever she may have said dies a swift death on her lips as Tyrion ushers her into his office a few moments later and she catches sight of a very familiar person sitting in a chair across from Tyrion’s desk.

“Jon told you,” Dany says, more confirmation than question, her tone devoid of surprise.

And Sansa Stark shrugs, not at all flustered by Dany’s appearance—undoubtedly, her unnatural hearing warned her of their approach. Despite the muggy heat outside, she wears her fashionable jean jacket over a long flowery tunic and leggings, her ballet flats doing little, Dany knows, to take away from her height. The eldest Stark daughter watches her coolly from her seat, only the faintest flicker of a frown in her eyes as Tyrion gestures for Dany to sit in the remaining chair.

“Of course he told us,” Sansa finally says as Tyrion walks over to the other side of the desk. “We don’t keep secrets from each other.”

Does that mean Jon told his cousins that he’d slept with her? Or does it merely mean that he told them that Sansa’s compulsion on Tyrion hadn’t worked and the youngest Lannister is very much aware that the Starks are vampires? She hopes that it is only the latter—she doesn’t think that Jon is likely to share everything they did last night and she really doesn’t think she has the patience to be on the receiving of Sansa’s disapproval if he did. She glances back over at Tyrion, who has steepled his fingers to press them against his lips. “Well?”

“Well,” Tyrion echoes with a shrug. His gaze briefly skates over to Sansa before he looks back at Dany. “I told Miss Stark the same thing I’ve told you, Dany—I really have no intention nor any desire to bring the wrath of several vampires down on my head. It is a rather clever head if I do say so myself, and I prefer it to remain in one piece. You’re just going to have to trust that your secret is safe with me.”

His mouth twists as he adds, “But if anyone asks why I’m suddenly so interested in you all, I’ll just say I wanted to invest in cannabis.”

Dany sees Sans shift imperceptibly—a warning. She has long since pegged Sansa as the most cautious and mistrusting of the Starks so it is no wonder that she has taken it upon herself to come down to the police station to deal with Tyrion. Dany briefly wonders if she’d been planning on simply trying to compel away Tyrion’s memories again or if she’d been intent on finding a more permanent solution to the problem. Stumbling upon Missandei’s arrest and Ashara’s subsequent fury had surely not been planned by anyone, Tyrion included. The argument currently being waged in the front lobby between Ashara and Jaime may have actually saved Tyrion’s memory or even his life.

“How did you know about vervain?” Sansa asks pointedly. “Who else in town knows about us?”

Dany decides that this would be a bad time to mention that Olenna Tyrell knows. She presses her lips into a grim line as Tyrion dryly responds, “More than you originally thought but less than what you currently think.” When Sansa’s eyes only narrow further, Tyrion clears his throat. “I told Miss Dayne the same thing I’m telling you now: my father somehow knows that vampires have returned to Starfall. I’m sure you’re aware of Starfall’s history with the supernatural and this town’s…intolerance of such things.”

Undoubtedly more than any of us really know. Dany thinks back to the journal still sitting on her coffee table back in her rental. It is a piece of knowledge she no longer wants to carry by herself yet somehow it seems that every chance she has to tell someone about it is snatched away by some other concurrent crisis. Whoever wrote the journal seems at least aware of the comets and the history of this town and the witch who carries its name through the ages. The question is who was it?

“The Council is keeping things very hushed up,” Tyrion is saying, shaking his head. “I don’t know who told him and I don’t know how much he knows beyond that, though the fact that the Stark manor hasn’t been burned down yet leads me to believe he doesn’t know you’re the vampires.”

If it’s Tywin Lannister though, no one will know until the manor is on fire, Dany thinks. Aloud she only says, “But your brother’s accusing Missandei of something she couldn’t possibly be involved in. You don’t think that’s suspicious?” Tyrion holds up his hands.

“What’s suspicious is that in the past couple of months, Mr. Naharis’s body was found on the high road, Waymar Royce and my cousin Lancel have gone missing without a trace, and someone told my father that vampires are returning to Starfall.” Tyrion looks from Dany to Sansa and then back again. “I’m willing to help you all keep this quiet but even I can’t perform miracles.”

“But who told you about vampires?” Sansa presses with an impatient wave of her hand. It is the same question Dany had asked him yesterday morning. “Who told you about vervain?”

Tyrion falls silent at that, rapping his fingers along the edge of the desk as his gaze wanders over to the darkened window along the wall. There is nothing sentimental within the office, Dany notices—no framed photos, no awards, no cluttered knickknacks. The cheap but sturdy and low bookshelves that line the walls however overflow with books: books about law and history, memoirs and biographies, tomes of philosophy and collections of poetry and mass market paperbacks. Dany has always known the detective to be a voracious reader and suspects that the collection here in his office probably is incomparable to his private collection at home. Maybe one of these books holds the answer? Jon has always told her not to believe all the vampire myths she reads in novels but there must be some overlap in truth, right?

Tyrion must catch her looking at his books because his smile turns wry. He had told her that the person who gave him the vervain was part of a story for another day. Clearly, it must not yet be that day because he says, “Someone I used to know told me.” There are those shadows in his eyes now as he looks over at Sansa. “Fortunately for your family, she died a long time ago.”

Dany frowns. That part he hadn’t mentioned earlier, only that his tale has aspects of a tragedy. She asks, “Was she…?”

“You can ask, Miss Dayne, but this is a part of my past that I’d still rather not share.” He shrugs at the twin looks of annoyance from both Dany and Sansa, nonchalant. “Just know that she is the one who first gave me vervain and told me it would protect me from things that go bump in the night. I wish she’d been speaking more metaphorically. Seeing someone’s heart ripped out of their chest right in front of you is not a way I would recommend spending your evening.”

The mystery, she knows, doesn’t earn Tyrion any favors with the Starks, not with them so incredibly cautious about their true nature. She doesn’t blame them for their reluctance to trust anyone but she does now wonder who this mysterious woman was who had known about vampires and warned Tyrion about them and given him vervain to protect him from vampiric compulsion. As far as Dany sees, Tyrion doesn’t wear any jewelry that would have vervain within it. Had the woman been human? Another vampire? What was her relationship to Tyrion and why is he now so reluctant to talk about her?

As expected, Sansa does not look at all convinced by this argument and Dany knows it is up to her to convince the redhead to not swipe Tyrion’s head from off his shoulders with one manicured hand. She turns to the vampire. “I trust that he won’t say anything. And Jon trusts him too.” She shoots Tyrion a pointed look. “But if he is lying and I find out he’s involved with what’s happened to Missy, I will rain fire down on him first.”

Tyrion lets out a dry chuckle.

“I appreciate your faith in me, Miss Dayne.”

Dany only half-hears it though. Something in her words has caused Sansa to go still as a statue. Without warning, she abruptly rises to her feet, her paprika-red hair cascading down her back in a waterfall of obscene color. She does not say goodbye to either Tyrion or Dany but simply turns on her heel and leaves the room, the tail ends of her thin scarf flying behind her. It is such a sudden departure that Dany only has a heartbeat to collect herself before she hurriedly tells Tyrion, “I’ll talk to her” and follows after the tall vampire, leaving a clearly baffled Tyrion behind.

“Sansa!”

Even without her vampiric speed, Sansa’s long legs eat up the linoleum floor and she is already nearly halfway down the darkened hall. She stops at the sound of Dany’s voice, though she doesn’t turn back around. The idea of actually running after Sansa Stark is a little more than Dany can stomach so she simply walks up to her instead. “What was that all about?”

Sansa’s pale gaze is cold and aloof and distant but she averts her eyes to search for her keys in her purse. “You said Jon trusts Tyrion.” Dany doubts that this is what made Sansa shoot out of Tyrion’s office like her hair was on fire but she decides to play along, even if she is exasperated.

“He does. Is that a problem?”

Sansa is quiet for a very long time, keys clutched tightly in her hand, lips pursed as though there is something bitter scouring her tongue. Then she says flatly, “I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you. But if history is repeating itself then I imagine Jon’s half in love with you already.”

Of course. It always comes back to that with Sansa, doesn’t it? She wishes the eldest Stark daughter would take the same ambivalent view of her relationship with Jon as her siblings. This fluctuating suspicion is maddening.

“Jon’s not in love with me. He’s not even halfway in love with me.” To be fair, Dany doesn’t truly know how to describe this thing between her and the dark-haired vampire…but it certainly isn’t love. It seems to be more of an infatuation deeply mired with respect—and sure, the sex was mind-blowing and Dany is certainly ruined for any other men she’ll sleep with in the future but that’s all there is to it. Once the last comet comes and goes, life will return to how it always has been, regardless of the outcome of this ridiculous and dangerous summer. She has a life outside of Starfall and that life will resume once she returns to Winterfell in a few months. She continues, “But he does love you and your siblings and I don’t think he’d blindly trust Tyrion if he thought it would put you all in any sort of danger.”

That causes Sansa to pause. She looks frustrated and Dany has to assume that the redheaded vampire’s ire has more to do with Dany’s existence than with any of their current problems. She tries not to let her own annoyance slip into her voice as she says, “At your housewarming, you told me it was enough for you that Jon trusts me.” When Sansa doesn’t answer, Dany adds, “I feel as though your problem lies more with Jon than with me or Tyrion. Whether you believe it or not, we are trying to help you.”

“By telling your brother about us?” comes the sharp retort. Before Dany can argue, she finds that glacial stare leveled at her, unnervingly and supernaturally blue in the dark recesses of the hall. She doesn’t often think of the Starks as truly dangerous—they look far too human for her to be wary all the time around them—but there is something in Sansa’s icy expression that is nothing short of wolfish. A small part of her mind betrays her by quivering and whimpering in brazen terror in the face of that predatory glare. “My family’s safety depended on you keeping a secret. You’ve already told your brother. Who else are you going to tell?”

“First of all, he’s my brother—I think you of all people would understand that I’d do anything to keep him safe,” Dany replies. Even if there is a part of her that is instinctively fearful of this creature that Sansa Stark is, she is not going to back down from this utterly inane and unreasonable argument. Instead, she crosses her arms, defiant. “And if you spoke to Jon, you know the reason I told Vis was because Daario gave him my engagement ring.”

“You shouldn’t have told him. It wasn’t your secret to tell.”

“But his life is mine to protect!” Dany can feel her temper fraying at the edges. “You want to protect your family? Well, I want to protect the only family I have too. Vis already knew that something was wrong and I wasn’t going to lie to him about Daario. I couldn’t. It’s bad enough that I have to keep lying to Ashara.”

What can she even say to Ashara? She trusts that Viserys won’t tell their adoptive mum anything, that they both want to protect her from knowing about this world. The fact that Vis even knows terrifies her, just because her brother can be reckless and foolhardy even at the best of times. He might not tell anyone what he knows but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to interject himself into the worst situations. She can only hope that the knowledge she gave him makes it clear that these are not normal circumstances, that they are dealing with dark and dangerous things of the night.

But Sansa doesn’t look convinced by her anger. Dany manages to clench her teeth around a vicious curse before she pointedly asks, “Is it me you really have the problem with? Or is it Jon having anything to do with me because of who I look like?”

The taller girl’s silence is an answer unto itself.

She doesn’t trust Jon, Dany thinks, a shred of confused doubt working its way through the simmering ire in her mind. But she said…no, it can’t be because of what happened with Daenerys. There’s something she’s not saying. I know it.

Before she has a chance to question her though, footsteps echo down the hall, preceding Jaime Lannister by a mere few seconds. The hour of night (late enough to now be considered early) and being at the brunt of Ashara’s fury (a rare but exhausting experience) have left him looking wan and tense, though those grey-green eyes reveal very little in terms of inner thoughts as he catches Dany’s disgruntled gaze. He may have been heading toward his brother’s office but his gait slows the moment he catches sight of the two young women.

“Ah, Miss Dayne. Miss Stark.” He nods at Dany. “I’d been hoping to have a word with you before you left.”

Sansa seemingly takes that as her cue to leave. She bids them both a cool farewell and then she is sweeping past Jaime toward the exit, leaving Dany with a dozen questions and far fewer answers. Sansa’s temperament toward her changes like the wind and it is impossible to keep up with her constantly fluctuating trust and suspicion. She might have been able to appreciate the other woman’s stubborn insistence on protecting her family but her deep-seated ire, unable to be shaken even after all of these weeks, makes Dany grit her teeth in annoyance. She will not bend over backward just to convince Sansa Stark that she is someone the girl can trust.

She turns her annoyance onto Jaime. “What do you want, sheriff?” Jaime holds his hands up defensively, clearly hearing the sharp irritation in her voice.

“Well, first of all, I wanted to apologize about Missy,” he says in that familiar soft-spoken voice of his. Dany gives him an incredulous look.

“You arrested my best friend. You’re going to have to do more than just apologize.” When Jaime only grimaces, Dany stares him down, not really caring about the fact that Jaime is the sheriff or that she is a civilian who hasn’t lived in this damned town for years. “I don’t care that the rules are different here. I don’t care that your father has always had some sort of chokehold over this town’s policies. Missy didn’t do anything worth getting arrested over and I know you know it. So don’t stand here and apologize to me over something that never should have happened in the first place just because your father whispered some lies in your ear and you chose to believe them.”

Jaime doesn’t look chagrined—in fact, his face is carefully blank, as Dany guessed it might be the moment she mentioned Tywin Lannister—but he does tiredly rub at his eyes.

“Yes, Ashara made that point very clear for about fifteen minutes straight.” He shakes his head. “If it’s any consolation, right after my brother pulled you off to the side, I had Brienne release Missandei. Ashara called me a few more names and then said she was taking her back home. There won’t be any charges against her.”

Relief seeps through Dany but it is not enough to douse her anger. “Just because we live in Starfall doesn’t mean the rule of law changes.”

“The rule of law changes because we’re in Starfall.” Jaime rests his hands on his hips but he doesn’t look particularly keen to argue with her. Instead, he lets out a sigh and says, “You haven’t been here, Dany. Just because you left doesn’t mean everything was going to change once you got back. My father still has far more influence in this town than you’d think; worse still, he has influence outside of this town who can make my job extremely difficult when I don’t act on his…suggestions.”

Dany gets on with almost everyone in Starfall but she has never had the highest opinion of Tywin Lannister. The man’s reach and influence rival the Tyrells simply because the Lannisters are the richest of the Founders. Dany hates how this has always allowed Tywin to direct the way the town is run in some way or another, far more so than the collective influence of the Founders altogether.

Would he use that influence to force Jaime’s hand, Dany wonders, before immediately answering her own question. The power that comes from a legacy is the most important thing to the Lannister patriarch—if he had to blackmail law enforcement to do it, he would.

Still, she can’t think of why he’d want Missandei arrested. “So he told you to arrest someone who was clearly innocent and you agreed so you wouldn’t have to do more paperwork.”

“You’re smarter than that, Miss Dayne,” Jaime replies flatly, his expression unamused. “But we can pretend it was simply paperwork if you want.”

“Then why—“

“Arresting Missy—and you’ll find we had enough probable cause to do so, my father is not a fool—distracts my father from looking further into Daario Naharis’s case.”

Dany’s blood runs cold.

Does it all come back to that then? Daario’s murder and her old engagement ring and a dozen other things set into motion before she had even stepped foot back into this small town—all of it is connected, somehow, to her or to Daenerys or to what this town used to be. Is that what Jaime means? Has he put together enough clues to realize that there is more to Daario’s death than a carjacking gone wrong?

But she doesn’t know how to ask without drawing more light on things that remain in the shadows so she simply says, “This was wrong, sheriff—and you know it.”

“Yes, I suspect Brienne and my brother will have some choice words for me once you all leave,” Jaime admits, his half-hearted smile twisting. “They have you swear so many oaths when becoming an officer of the law. You have to be loyal to the law you swore to uphold and loyal to the people you swore to protect and loyal to your family you swore to defend and loyal to the truth you swore to uphold. You’ll quickly find that only in a perfect world do all those line up and you may be forced to choose where your allegiance lies. You’ll have to understand that sometimes your convictions can become…conflicted.”

When Dany only frowns at him, perplexed, Jaime laughs, though there is no mirth in it. He reaches into his breast pocket and removes a tiny folded piece of paper, handing it to her. Dany hesitates for only a moment before taking it from him but she doesn’t open it quite yet. For all she knows, it’s her arrest warrant.

“Even after everything that happened with Alerie, I remember what I told you the night of the Starks’ housewarming,” Jaime says. “I still can’t break protocol for you so this is entirely off the record. But consider this an apology for everything that happened with Missy tonight.”

He gives her a small smile that doesn’t reach his eyes before he starts to walk past her, clearly heading toward Tyrion’s office. Before he can get far though, Dany manages to find her voice. “Jaime!” He turns. She looks down at the paper in her hand and then back up at him. “You said you had to do this to appease your father, that otherwise he’d use his influence to make your job harder. Why would he do that? Why would you agree to bring Missy into this in the first place? What do you know about Daario that you don’t want your father to know?”

Jaime’s mossy gaze is carefully neutral. He peers at her for a long and silent moment before he gives her a courteous nod.

“Have a good night, Miss Dayne.”

When he has vanished into Tyrion’s office, the lock clicking down the hall like a gunshot, Dany looks down at the scrap of paper in her hands. Starfall is a town with hundreds and hundreds of secrets, even without the presence of the supernatural lurking within its very veins. After all, it is one of the reasons why Dany had fled a handful of years ago—in a town where everyone knows everyone and everything, secrets and rumors and whispers are simply a way of life.

But this is something she doesn’t know. Jaime must know something about what really happened to Daario—the medical examiner would have told him about any discrepancies in the unusual state of the decomposing body—and for some reason, it is something he does not want his father to know. Is Jaime part of the Council that Jon had mentioned? Dany has no idea. If he’s not, it’s understandable that he simply wants to keep a homicide investigation under wraps. If he is though and he is not telling his father about a potential victim of a vampire…

I need to get into one of those meetings, Dany realizes as she unfolds the piece of paper. Regardless of Sansa’s suspicions or Missandei’s concern or the strained state of her relationship with Jon, this may be the one thing she can do to make sure that everyone she cares about stays safe. I need to know what the Council knows and what they’re planning to do.

The paper is a map of the old high road leading up to the Red Mountains. Dany almost curses at the uselessness of this “gift” before she realizes that there is writing on the printout, a scrawl that she recognizes as Tyrion’s. She squints down at the paper and sees that there are notes as to where Daario’s car was found as opposed to where his body was discovered. The car had been left along the road’s shoulder but his body had been found nearly a quarter of a mile into the woods, just off the hiker’s path. At first, she thinks that one of the many hikers on the trail had come across the body…until she reads one of the crawled notes on the page.

“‘Buried,’” she murmurs, finger tracing Tyrion’s scrawl. A buried body obviously means at least one other person was involved in a person’s death. And if that’s the case, then Jaime has known since the beginning that foul play is a likely culprit, despite the careful rumor around town that it had been nothing more than an accident.

Dany’s mind races. Jaime has given this to her as some sort of consolation—perhaps he thinks she’ll go to the site to say her last respects to a man she’d once been engaged to. The problem is that she knows too much. And if a vampire is truly the one who murdered Daario, then does that mean the vampire had attacked Daario in his car before dragging his body into the woods? But why would a passing vampire care enough to bury evidence? It doesn’t make sense…

Unless he willingly got out of the car, Dany thinks. The hiker’s path is well-known to Starfall residents. Even in the dark, it is easy enough to follow. If someone other than the Starks knew that Daario had the ring, if Daario had been concerned enough to send it to Viserys instead for safekeeping…

The answer strikes her like a blow.

He was meeting someone. He was meeting the person who killed him.

The thought sends her reeling. If Daario had known the significance of the ring and he had known the person who would kill him, does that mean he would have been aware of the vampires? Had he known about her connection to the woman who had created vampires in the first place? Dany’s thoughts are spiraling and it is all she can do to not reach into her purse and immediately dial Missandei’s number. But her phone is still somehow in her hands and she stares blankly at the empty screen for a long moment before shaking her head hard. It’s almost two in the morning. She can’t call Missandei, not after everything her friend has gone through tonight. And she doesn’t want to call Jon.

This is stupid, she tells herself, even as she hurries out of the police station and toward her car. The night is still sticky warm against the bare skin of her arms and legs, the dark sky bloated and ominous with the promise of a morning storm. It is nearly dead silent on the streets of Starfall; a few confused crickets still chirp, the streetlamps drone on in a low buzz, and a stiff breeze rustles the branches of Starfall’s famous great oaks—but there are no cars on the road. Shop windows are dark. Everyone is asleep. Go home. Deal with this after you get some sleep and talk with Missy.

But she doesn’t.

Darkness almost swallows the road beyond the glow of Starfall’s streets. Moonlight may have illuminated her way any other night but the low and bloated clouds obscure even the barest hints of silver. Out here past the town limits and the houses and shops that skirt along the edge of the border, the rolling black hills of Dornish farmland take over, sporadically lit by streetlamps that get farther and farther apart until they vanish completely. They reappear along the road that leads out east toward one of Westeros’s main highways but the roads leading up into the mountains are cloaked in darkness.

Just northwest of Starfall, the old road veers off to the mountain road that Dany last took with Jon and Arya some weeks back. But she’s familiar with both roads and her little coupe though has survived several northern winters so far—she has driven the old high road countless times as a teenager and so she is not too worried about the winding road leading up into the woods. Even though it has been some years since she has personally driven it, she is still as familiar with the road as she is with breathing.

Still, as the high beams douse the road and the looming trees and a random possum in brilliant light, Dany curses her impulsiveness. What exactly does she hope to find out here? What in the world is so important that she couldn’t have waited until it was daytime and until she could bring someone with her?

Yet something is telling her she must be here, that she has been waiting to know where she must be for months now, and now that she finally knows…

Madness.

Dany pulls off to the side of the road just past mile marker six, the tires of her car crunching in the gravel of the shoulder. The shoulder here is wider than the rest of the road to accommodate the cars of campers and hikers trekking up the path through the woods. She feels some relief that there are two other cars with Dornish plates already parked here, undoubtedly some campers who’ve come down from Highgarden. Her high beams blaze into the woods just ahead of her, though they scarcely penetrate the darkness.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Dany murmurs to herself even as she kills the engine. This is where Daario died. This is where Daario was killed, by the very things that Missandei and the Starks say are probably after her. She might be the doppelgänger, whatever that means, but is she actually willing to test the limits of Missandei’s protection spell?

She stares out into the darkness for a moment longer.

Don’t get involved in this. Turn around. Go home. You don’t need to see this.

Dany reaches for the door handle…and nearly jumps when a car comes flying up over the hill behind her, speeding by her on the road. She catches a brief glimpse of westerland plates before the car is too far down the road for her to see. Her heart hammers in her throat and she almost wants to laugh at how skittish she is. Folks from the westerlands make the wrong turn off the mountain road all the time. She’d seen it often enough as a teenager to not be bothered by this. What’s wrong with her?

Annoyed with herself, she steps out of the car, flicking the flashlight on her phone on. She won’t stay long. Whatever mad desire within her that has driven her out here in the first place will inevitably send her back to her car in a few minutes. Then she’ll call Missandei in a few hours and her friend will gently berate her. It will be fine.

Dany follows the hiker’s path up through the woods, the sound of her footfalls swallowed up by dirt and fallen pine needles and moss. No one ever really notices how dark it gets beyond the welcoming light of civilization. Even though she knows that there are cabins situated further along the hiker’s path, the night has enveloped everything. The only things to accompany her are the sound of her own breathing, the rustle of the leafy canopy far overhead, and a distant owl, its call echoing through the trees.

She’s gone along this path a hundred times—sometimes even with Daario when he’d manage to convince her to go camping with him—but something about it is different tonight. Something about it is familiar in a way she can’t put her finger on. She walks a few minutes more before she stops, turning.

Around her, nothing.

The entire forest has gone quiet.

Something is buzzing against her skin, the lightning before the thunder. It’s familiar, as if someone is ghosting their fingers down her arm. She does not feel as though she is being watched so much as she is being lured toward something. She should…this isn’t…

A branch snaps behind her.

“So it is you.”

There is no time to react.

Dany whirls, stumbling backward, a gasp caught in her throat. She is not prepared to see the familiar face behind her, blinking owlishly at her in the shadows and stark light of her phone. She is not at all prepared for the ground to slide, to collapse, to give way beneath her feet. She doesn’t even have time to take a breath to scream before there is a rush, the world spinning, and then a fall—down, down, down into darkness.

And then…nothing.

The overwhelming metallic scent of blood blisters through the other odors of the dock: damp wood and salt, the churning sea and mold and rot. The dock workers, weather-worn and exhausted, have been compelled, their eyes blind to the activities around them, only listening to the faint strands of hip-hop music thumping through a distant boombox. A rainstorm has splattered silver puddles along pavement and dock, turning the fog of the morning into an optical illusion.

And somewhere out on the docks, a crimson-eyed wolf, silent and massive, stalks amongst the shadows of the great towers of stacked crates.

“You know this is a trap,” Robb says, his posture too relaxed for the fury that Jon knows is searing through him, the same anger that has settled into Jon. His cousin has his hands stuffed in his letterman jacket, his auburn hair curtained and lightened to a dirty blond this decade. But even the harmless jock appearance is shattered by the murderous, boiling rage in his blue eyes.

The humans had taken Bran. They’d taken their little brother.

From the mottled shadows swirling about their feet, Jon hears Grey Wind let out a growl nearly indistinguishable from his master’s. But a sharp whistle from Robb sends the wolf fleeing back out into the grey mists towards his brother. A solitary howl pierces through the early morning. It has been a while since they’ve all hunted together.

“I know,” Jon replies, silently slipping through a door. In his flannel and acid wash jeans, his dark curls loose and long for the first time in thirty-some years, Jon knows he and Robb are almost like night and day in appearance. He lets his eyes adjust to the shadows of the warehouse, though it doesn’t take long. It has been well over a thousand years since he’s had these heightened senses. Nothing in the dark can be hidden from him or any of his cousins.

Not anymore.

“Robb…” he starts but his cousin is already moving past him towards the body sprawled limply on the ground. Jon can smell blood in the air. He can feel eyes on them. He bites back his own anger that threatens to blind him, skirting his eyes away from Bran’s bloodied body.

Bran had stumbled across the auction some months back. The supernatural artifacts being traded on the black market—amulets and talismans, vampire blood with its healing properties, some of the few grimoires that hadn’t been burned over the centuries—were not that interesting.

No, it was the claim that someone had the ash of Winterfell’s heart tree that had alarmed them.

They’re waiting. Jon makes sure to keep some distance from Robb and Bran—if what Ygritte said was true, then whoever took Bran has no idea about him, nor his potential role in this black market auction. But even though he moves no closer, he can see that Bran’s jeans and oversized polo are riddled with bullet holes, deep crimson blood soaking into denim and cotton. Wooden or metallic bullets make no difference—as the Originals, they can shrug off most gunshots. But if they’d been starving Bran of blood…if the wooden bullets were drenched in vervain before they shot him…

Or if the auction item actually is the ash from the weirwood, Jon thinks, even as Robb shakes his younger brother awake. In the decades since the crypts beneath the old castle in Winterfell had been excavated, only in the past two years have they finally been able to track down the ashes of the heart tree. Whatever spell Daenerys had gambled with centuries ago had drawn in the green magic of the old gods, of the Starks. Now the old weirwood of their childhood is one of two things that can truly hurt Jon and the only thing that can kill his cousins. Kinvara had confirmed it after gifting them their daylight rings ages ago. They’d burned the tree and buried the ashes in the crypts with Eddard Stark’s bones.

In hindsight, they should have thrown them into the fucking ocean.

Jon’s thoughts are broken by the sound of approaching footsteps behind him. He does not turn, lest two of them clock that his hearing is supernatural. The third man he is less concerned about, though he imagines that they’ll all be on the receiving end of a disapproving frown once this is over.

“You must be the walking blood bag for the baby vampire,” a nasal voice says. Jon still doesn’t turn but he hears the sound of a shotgun being cocked. He smells no fear in the man’s blood, though the stench of sweat and cheap cologne is pungent enough to overwhelm it if he could. The unseen man’s voice is sharp with disgust. “Fucking punks. Turn around like a good lad. I’ll put a hole in your skull and make this far less painful than death by vampire.”

Robb remains crouched by a dazed Bran, trying to get his brother to sit up. But Bran is too injured and too weak to do much more than slump against Robb, his face a rictus of lingering pain. Through the cavernous silence of the warehouse, he hears Robb quietly reassuring Bran.

“Breathe. You’re alright. I’m here. You’re safe.”

They’d hurt his little cousin.

But there is nothing Jon can do from here and so, swallowing back his anger, he takes in a breath and turns.

The man behind him holds his shotgun with easy confidence, his pale features sharp and vaguely familiar. Though he keeps the barrel trained on Bran and Robb, he gives a sharp gesture with the barrel, his lips twisted downward in annoyance.

“Would’ve liked the whole set of them,” the not-quite stranger mutters, eyes darting past Jon as if he is merely an afterthought. “He said there were more.”

It is a welcome distraction from the furor raging in his chest but Jon frowns.

He.

He.

The lead buyer’s identity has shifted as often as the waning and waxing of the moon. First a woman, now a man. Despite Bran’s hacking skills, the buyer is hidden behind proxy after proxy, disappearing into the shadows at a moment’s turn. All they’ve been able to figure out over the past two years is that there are at least half a dozen witches and thrice as many vampires involved—as well as the bulk of Westeros’s military and technological might.

Jon glances over at the man’s first companion, a ruddy-looking sod who does reek of fear and nervousness. He tries to hide it behind a wavering bravado, his rifle held stiffly in sweat-slicked hands—but Jon has met too many men like him over the centuries. He knows the man will break at the first hint of things going wrong.

And so Jon shifts his weight from one foot to the other—not enough to be threatening but enough to draw the second man’s attention. He sees a bead of sweat slip down the back of his neck.

“Nice enough payout with two though,” the nervous man babbles. He grins at Jon to cover it up, not catching the way Jon’s breath stills in his chest. “Haven’t come across vampires this old in a while. Bet you didn’t know what you had, did you? Bet you’re compelled to high heaven, you poor fuck. D’you even know how much their blood will fetch? With the ash too…gods, I fucking want out of this godforsaken hellhole. Bet he’ll pay handsomely for it, won’t he? The ash and the vampires, the whole gambit. We can fucking vanish and be done with it.”

Jon sees Robb’s eyes burn cold. He heard it too.

They hurt Bran.

They would have killed Bran.

The first man’s face twists in an irritated snarl. The second man is talking too much, just as Jon thought he would.

“Shoot him,” the nasal-voiced man says before prowling forward, seemingly taking advantage of Robb’s distraction. He must be speaking to the third man who until now has been hovering quietly back near the rows of crates. “Get this over with so we can collect and get the fuck out of here.”

Karl, Jon thinks, the black haze scorching his veins. That’s the man’s name.

The second man, coward that he might be, must sense something is wrong. Even though he has been approaching Robb and Bran warily, rifle at the ready, his steps suddenly falter. The gun in his hand trembles. He turns around, his face colorless with tension.

But Jon is already on the first man.

The bloodlust and fury crash over him like a rogue wave. The second man opens his mouth to scream and he tries to pull the trigger of his gun but he is too slow, too human. Jon slams into the man named Karl, an inhuman growl bubbling up through his throat, hearing and feeling the man’s bones crack and shatter beneath the tremendous supernatural force of the blow. He doesn’t register it. There is flesh against his tongue, stale and tangy with sweat and pain and terror, and when he latches onto the man’s neck, when his fangs pierce the ruddy skin, there is only the hot gush of blood and viscera filling his mouth.

He doesn’t care.

Because here is the thing about immortality: you lose as much as you gain. You grow up with the world and all its knowledge and you move through the centuries like a ghost moves through walls. Your life becomes a mausoleum of memories. The world forgets who you were and it reminds you that what you are must always change because only in the shadows is there survival. The only thing that remains constant, the only thing that ties you to who you were and what you are and everything about you that made you you in the before and the after…

The only thing that matters after all this time is your family.

And with the ash in their possession, the men could have hurt Bran. They could have killed him. A thousand years, gone, in the shadow of greed and cruelty.

Dimly, Jon is aware of a gunshot ringing through the echoes of the warehouse. Karl has stopped screaming—the pulse of blood against his tongue tells him the man isn’t dead but likely will be soon—and the shotgun has clattered to the floor. A brief glance over at the second man reveals him slumping to his knees, a perfectly round hole in the middle of his forehead. The third man is grimacing as he lowers his pistol. Jon drops the dying man to the floor. Blood splatters and pools across the grey cement.

His head rings.

“A gun?” he hears Robb ask. “No magic?”

“Shouldn’t rely on magic for everything,” the third man replies. He is middle aged, his craggy features stern and cautious, wary of the situation in front of him. He drops the pistol to the floor and then kicks it in Jon’s direction. It skids into the gathering pool of crimson beneath the man who no longer has a throat. “I’m not a fighter, as it turns out.”

The blood is like fire on his tongue. There is thunder inside his skull.

“Can you stand?” Robb’s voice is laced with concern as he loops his younger brother’s arm around his shoulder. The boy nods, though he leans heavily on his brother for support, legs shaking from weakness and hunger.

But Jon is watching the third man. He can hear his heartbeat, a sonorous boom that drowns out almost everything else. He can see the pulse of the carotid artery, the vein tempting and lurid against pale skin. There is still blood on his lips and on his tongue. There is still rage and fear and the promise of loss within him. Bran and Arya and Robb and Sansa and Rickon are all that he has left. Everything else is gone. Everyone else is gone.

“Jon?” His name sounds far off. “Jon, are you—"

Forever.

We will have forever.

It has been a thousand years.

And it will be a thousand more.

I promise.

“Jon!”

He sees red.

Dany awakens to the taste of grit on her tongue and damp earth pressing into her skin.

She blinks a few times but the wavering darkness does not vanish—she was not out of it long enough for the blackness of night to brighten into a watercolor morning. It takes a moment or two longer to make out shadows against unfamiliar shadows, to get used to the smell of wet earth and pine that envelops her. Wherever she is, she has landed on her back, and though her limbs throb with the dull ache of a fall, a brief wriggling of her extremities reveals no sharp pain that would come from broken or sprained bones. The nightly whispers of the forest seem hollow somewhat and, strangely enough, above her.

I fell, she remembers dimly. She looks around for her phone, hoping the flashlight is still on, but she cannot see the telltale glow in the gloom. Her fingers skitter along rock and cold soil and pine needles but she touches nothing man-made. She lets out a curse before sitting up with a groan. The back of her head feels wet; a brief touch reveals several leaves have tangled themselves into her pale hair and she can only hope that the wetness comes from the leaves and that she doesn’t have some nasty cut at risk of becoming infected.

Shit.

She really should have gone home.

She rocks forward, prepared to climb unsteadily to her feet when a bright light in front of her face damn well near blinds her.

“Oh, you’re awake. That’s good. You hurt?”

It’s the strangely northern accent that throttles her back to the moment before all of this and it is only then that Dany remembers why she fell in the first place. She presses her lips into a thin line and turns her head.

“Is that my phone? Can I have it back?”

Ygritte, red hair still bright in its high bun despite the darkness around them, shrugs but does not immediately hand the phone back over. Instead, she glances down at it, a contemplative look in those intense blue eyes. In her boots, cutoff shorts, band tee, and oversized flannel, she looks as though she had simply been out for a hike before coming across Dany. For some reason, that puts Dany on edge.

“You don’t have any signal. Doesn’t matter though. I can get you out of here. I was just waiting for you to be less unconscious.” In the glow of her phone screen, Ygritte’s smile is sharp and not quite friendly and Dany has to remind herself that this vampire is a friend of Jon’s, not hers. A locket containing vervain is not going to do much good if Ygritte decides she’s thirsty. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the fucking night anyway? You’d better be glad I recognized that hair.”

“I could ask the same of you,” Dany retorts, rising to her feet with a wince. “What are you doing in Starfall?”

“Can’t I visit a friend?” When Dany’s frown only deepens, Ygritte rolls her eyes. “I came to see Jon. I have something I need to tell him that I would prefer to tell him in person. Fortunately for you, I took a wrong turn down the high road and saw you go traipsing off into the woods. Good thing too—I don’t think I would’ve found this place if you hadn’t fallen into it.”

Dany remembers the car that passed her on the road. That explains one thing but Ygritte’s words open up another question. She glances around at the shadows that cling to the earthen walls of this underground cavern, briefly wondering how many spiders have likely made their den in the cold and damp soil.

“You know this place?” Ygritte shrugs again before handing over the phone.

“Take a look behind you. Don’t give me that look,” Ygritte adds with a snort. “I had a perfectly fine blood bag on the way here. I’m not going to eat you. Besides, Jon would stake me himself if I did.”

Dany loftily chooses to not think too much about what Ygritte is implying with that comment. With a grimace, she turns around instead, shining the flashlight of her phone on…

A wall?

No.

A door.

The slab of tilted stone, mottled green and black with lichen and soil, is half-swallowed by the earth, warped and broken and surrounded by an arc of smaller stones. Engraved into the face of the stone and eroded by age and rainwater is some sort of symbol, too faint for Dany to make out. As she watches, a centipede skitters across the stone, vanishing into the wavering shadows of the soil behind it.

“Old towns have a rich history,” Ygritte says from behind her. Dany turns to see that the vampire has silently crept up to her, though her eyes are focused on the door. There is something almost feverish in the deep blue as she gazes at the old broken stone. “Starfall more than most. The thing about Westeros is nothing is really all that new, even this little town on the edge of nowhere. See this symbol?”

She steps closer before reaching out a hand to run her fingers along the faded carving. Dany raises the flashlight a little higher, squinting through the dimness. “What is it?”

“Something that the Starks—and especially Jon—will want to know about,” Ygritte murmurs. A mercurial grin flashes across her face, though Dany doesn’t think it’s particularly friendly. “Come on. It’ll be dawn soon and unlike our friends, I don’t have a pretty little daylight ring to keep my arse from burning in the sun.”

Dany has already gotten used to the speed and strength of vampires in her time spent with Jon and his cousins and, to a lesser extent, Margaery. But she still is not quite prepared for Ygritte to wrap an arm like steel around her waist and jump clear from the hole they have found themselves in. The forest is still black as pitch when her sneakers touch the ground and Dany feels as though she may have left her stomach back down in the pit but Ygritte is looking around thoughtfully.

“Are you following me back to Jon’s?”

Dany is about to say no, that she wants nothing more than to go to her own apartment and take a hot shower and go the fuck to sleep. The promise of her own bed and perhaps a cup of whiskey-infused coffee later on sounds fantastic to her aching bones and overwhelmed mind. It does not help to think that barely more than twenty-four hours ago, Jon was in that same bed with her and this day hadn’t completely gone to shit yet…

But she hesitates. Instead, she looks over at Ygritte and plainly asks, “Did you know I was the doppelgänger? Is that why you were angry at Jon?”

If the question takes Ygritte back, she doesn’t show it. Instead, the redheaded vampire gives Dany a long look, eyes narrowed as though she is trying to figure out which lie will sound best. Eventually, she simply clucks her tongue and makes a show of rolling her eyes, fists planted on her hips.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.” Ygritte only snorts and Dany feels a brief flare of her temper scorch hot within her chest. The journal’s entries mentioning Ygritte give her enough reason to be wary of the young woman. “Bran pointed Jon in your direction when he wanted to know about m— Daario’s ring. And Jon clearly trusts you enough to tell him something he might not know. You had the grimoire. You knew about the comets. What do you know about me? About what I am?”

“I know that I’ve kept myself to myself for too long to get involved with this shit but here we are.” Ygritte jerks her head in what Dany hopes is the general direction of their cars. “Now are you coming or not?”

Shit.

Despite his aversion to it, Jon had better have a goddamned coffee maker.

The sky has lightened to a stormy grey by the time they manage to make it to the Stark estate, the clouds heavier and more foreboding than they had been when Dany left the police station. In the distance, thunder booms and rattles about in clouds that briefly illuminate with lightning. There is no rain yet but Dany knows that they will be in for one hell of a summer thunderstorm this morning—she can smell the promise of it heavy in the air.

Only a few of the lights in the main manor house are lit at this hour and the guesthouse itself is doused in darkness. Gravel crunches beneath the tires of Dany’s car as she rolls to a stop, Ygritte’s car just behind her. When she steps out of the car, the cool morning humidity sticking to her like a second skin, Dany is abruptly aware of how much of a mess she must look. She has gotten no sleep, supernatural drama and secrets are piling up around her as though a gravedigger is filling her grave, and, to add insult to injury, she has fallen into a dark and damp hole in the woods, streaking her skin and her clothes with soil and muddy rainwater.

It’s why she can’t entirely fault the expression on Jon’s face when he opens the door to both of them.

“Dany? Ygritte?” He looks from one of them to the next, clearly perplexed, though his eyes land on Dany, concern brimming through the stormy grey. “What happened? What are you doing here?”

“Lovely to see you as always, Jon Snow,” Ygritte replies before brushing past him to enter into the house. Over Jon’s shoulder, Dany can see Ghost laid out by the crackling fireplace. The direwolf lifts his head upon seeing the two guests at the door but does not move away from the hearth, seemingly content with the lack of a threat. Ygritte calls, “Where’s your supply? Saving your girlfriend is tiring work and I figured sipping from her was a no-go.”

“‘Saving…’” Jon echoes before looking back at Dany, alarmed. He reaches up to cradle her face with one hand. “What happened? Are you alright?”

Dany expects that the gesture is more reflexive than anything—yet the touch is like a brand against her skin, sending molten heat cascading through her. She closes her eyes for a moment, leaning into the touch, wishing that she might be able to forget about the rest of the strange world that has come attached to Jon. She wishes she could forget the shadows that follow after the Stark family, centuries of blood and secrets that have intertwined with her own life, and pretend that he is just a normal man and she is a normal woman and their relationship does not seem to hinge on things not spoken and things already written.

Don’t be silly, she chides herself, opening her eyes. “I’m fine.” Jon doesn’t look convinced though and Dany is too tired to even begin explaining to him all that has happened tonight. “Did Sansa tell you about Missy?”

Jon nods before leading Dany into the house, his hand on the small of her back. She tries not to shiver.

“She did, but…” He trails off and when she looks back at him, she can see a shadow in those eyes. “Tyrion—”

“—didn’t know,” Dany finishes. “He called me as soon as he found out. And the sheriff…I think he was trying to do the right thing, in his own way. Jaime has always had a peculiar sense of morals.”

“You talked to them both?”

“It’s been a very long night.”

Jon doesn’t look too terribly convinced by Dany’s words, but Ygritte has already flopped down on the couch and is giving them both an impatient look. Her speed has allowed her to quickly peruse the cabinets and she pours herself two fingers of whiskey from a decanter, tsking all the while.

“I was on my way into town to see when I came across her.” Ygritte lifts her glass to her lips, cocking a brow. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

“Other than Dany, you mean?” Jon gestures for her to sit, but Dany shakes her head—she is absolutely filthy and Ashara has drilled too much southern hospitality and manners into her head to sully Jon’s furniture. Instead, she hovers just behind the couch, wishing that this night might finally be over and she can get some rest somewhere.

“Other than that.” Ygritte smirks, but even Dany can see the brimming excitement in her eyes. “I’ve heard rumors over the centuries but I was never sure. And since the new settlement hadn’t found it, I assumed that the rumors were only that—a bunch of wankers making shit up because they weren’t there. I ran down so many rabbit holes looking for—”

“Ygritte.”

“I finally saw it, Jon. I saw the three-headed dragon.”

The words mean nothing to Dany. The only dragons she knows about are the ones her mum used to tell her about to ward off nightmares and childish fears of the dark. She remembers the way Ygritte had gently touched the engraving on the underground stone though, almost reverently, something like understanding and a voracious need for closure in her eyes. Is the three-headed dragon some connection to vampires? Why would it be in Starfall?

Old towns have their history. Starfall more than most.

Dany turns to look at Jon for the answer, but she hesitates at the look on his face. His expression is grave, shuttered. Does he know what it means?

“Where did you see it?” he says, his voice so low and so flat that Dany feels a chill run up her spine. There is dangerous knowledge here, she realizes. Whatever she has stumbled across, whatever madness took hold of her and led her into the woods tonight—there is sorcery in it. Something ancient, something powerful…and there is a thread in Jon’s voice that tells her that she shouldn’t know more.

“Off the high road,” Ygritte replies, throwing back her drink. She pauses and then adds, her eyes briefly flickering toward Dany, “Where they found Daario Naharis’s body, if I’ve been nosy enough and my facts are straight.”

“What does the three-headed dragon mean?” Dany asks plaintively. She looks at Jon, then to Ygritte, and then back again. This is not something she thinks she can stand to remain in the dark about. If it is somehow connected to Daario’s death, then it is clearly something to do with vampires and Daenerys’s ring and her. “Jon?”

But it is Ygritte who answers.

“The Targaryen family sigil.” She makes a face at Jon. “The three-headed dragon was theirs as much as the direwolf belongs to the Starks and both belong to Jon, even though he wants to be sad and stubborn about it. You can actually still see the old House sigils on the clock at Union Station. I think Bran helped design it. You can find photos of it on the internet if you want.”

That…doesn’t make any damned sense. Jon isn’t a Targaryen. He might not have shared the same last reason as his cousins but that’s not unheard of, if his mum had married a Snow. Also, one of the first points of contention in their relationship is that he had never married the original Daenerys, even though he had wanted to. Nothing is connecting him to the Targaryens except centuries of regret and the loss of what may have been if their world hadn’t quite literally burned.

“Okay, but why is it here?” Dany asks, figuring that Ygritte was probably speaking out of turn anyway. Jon’s past is a mystery enough without adding more questions to it. She’ll figure it out later. “Is it going to be important with this second comet coming?”

But Jon is shaking his head. When he speaks, his voice is rough and quiet with fatigue.

“Ygritte, why did you come down from the Citadel?”

Dany sees the teasing light in Ygritte’s eyes dim at the sober note in Jon’s voice. The smile on the redhead’s face twists as she reaches for the decanter that she had placed on the coffee table. Silently, she pours herself another several mouthfuls of whiskey. Jon waits patiently and Dany has no choice but to do the same. There is something tense in the dark-haired vampire’s posture that tells her she is missing something and that when she finds out what it is, she is not going to love it.

“To warn you. You know that more vampires are going to come to Starfall as the comet gets closer. But you don’t know what else is coming.” When Jon shakes his head, Ygritte purses her lips. “All those vampires in one place, following after a rumor of what kind of magic the second comet will bring. That’s an opportunity, Jon. And they’ve done this before.”

Ygritte leaves her words hanging but Dany’s mind is elsewhere. Missandei had put a spell around her to protect her from being observed by the silent influx of vampires in Starfall—vampires Dany still has not seen nor heard of—but that leaves far too many people unprotected. If something worse is coming…if something far more dangerous is threatening her town and her family and her friends…

Jon lets out a slow breath. “Hunters, you mean.”

“Aye. Hunters.” Ygritte leans back against the arm of the couch. “Grey will help your witch but you’re going to need more help. You have the ring, you have the doppelgänger, you have the witch and the witch’s little cookbook, and now you know where the sigil is. You need to be prepared to act quickly the moment that comet arrives.”

Hunters. Dany gives Jon a look. “Are you being hunted?” Jon’s smile twists.

“Don’t sound surprised.”

“Nature loves a balance,” notes Ygritte glibly, looking utterly annoyed by the whole prospect. “Daenerys created vampires with the Starfall witch. Nature created Hunters who kill vampires and Starfall witches. I’m sure Nature thinks it’s being poetic but I think it’s being rather a petty bitch. Though I guess that since Daenerys was a raging bitch, it all equals out.”

But Dany doesn’t entirely hear Ygritte’s last words. All she can think about is the journal, still sitting back in her apartment, its author still frustratingly unknown to her. But whoever wrote the journal had been familiar with Ygritte. And everything that she is saying now is an echo of what Dany has already read and not quite understood in the journal…until now.

Ygritte is an asset. She keeps her ear to the ground far better than most vampires. If anyone knows where the final grimoire will be, it will be her.

Missandei has her suspicions.

Ygritte suspects that this will be the thing to fix everything that went wrong when the first spell was cast. But like the first, the spell will need a witch and it will need blood. She seems far less certain about whose blood. She says from her occult research, it most likely has to be an Original’s blood.

But Dany has hers too.

“Did you know these…hunters would follow you here?” Jon’s expression is troubled and he looks away—but it is enough of an answer for her. She fights back anger and hurt, knowing that she too still withholds a secret from him. As calmly as she can, she murmurs, “You said you’d tell me as much of the truth as you could, Jon.”

“I did.”

“Then why wouldn’t you tell me this?”

“Oh.” Both Jon and Dany turn to Ygritte who is making a face. She climbs to her feet. “This is relationship drama and I did not drive down here for that. I’ll leave you both to your little spat. I am going over to the main house and finding some decent vodka and blood since you’re a terrible host, Jon Snow. God, why do I even call you a friend when you’re this terrible at hospitality? Over a thousand years under your belt and you still know nothing.”

She rounds the couch to give Jon a quick peck on the cheek and an accompanying punch on the arm before she is out the door, slamming it behind her.

In the darkest hour before the stormy dawn, Dany hears thunder.

Before she can finally tell Jon about this damned journal and then demand to know why he is still keeping secrets from her, Jon steps away from her. He gives her a long look, those grey eyes full of so many shadows that Dany can only begin to guess at, before quietly saying, “I’m sorry, Dany.”

Dany stares at him for several silent moments. Then she shakes her head. Truth be told, after everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours, she is not sure she wants to argue. She wants to sleep. Yet…

“Is everyone going to be safe here?”

Jon is silent. Then he shakes his head, looking grim. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

Perhaps this is why he keeps secrets. Perhaps this is why their whole relationship feels as though a tiny breath of wind will shatter it. They sit on a precipice of passion and danger, a world of shadows and magic and terrible things. Dany recalls what Jaime had told her only a couple of hours ago, that he did something terrible to prevent something even worse from unfolding. Is that what Jon and his cousins are doing? She knows they are back in Starfall to undo this spell, that the presence of the second comet and its potential for unleashing devastating magic will bring all sorts of horrible things to this small town. But maybe there are other consequences that the Starks hold at bay because even they’re not sure how things will play out.

Ignorance is bliss, after all.

The silence stretches between them. Finally, Dany sighs, running her hand through her hair, still damp from her fall. “I should get home before it starts to rain. I need a shower and I need to sleep.” Jon frowns.

“Have you slept at all tonight?” Dany feels something spasm across her face that she thinks might one day hope to be a smile.

“I told you—it’s been a long day.”

As if to punctuate her words, light flashes outside. Moments later, a peal of thunder rolls over the house. There is no steady drum of rain yet and, tired as she is, Dany knows she is going to have to drive fast unless she is willing to risk driving in a torrential storm while functioning on zero hours of sleep. Heaven knows that the cats are going to be fussy with her for being gone all night, especially after being exiled from her room the night before due to having Jon in her bed.

She starts to turn toward the door but Jon’s voice stops her. She glances back at him. His brow is furrowed. “You can use my shower and sleep here for a few hours.” When Dany opens her mouth to protest, he cuts her off with a shake of his head. “It won’t get light outside for another hour and it’ll start raining before that. You might as well get some rest here since I don’t have any coffee.”

Dany blinks at him—and then despite herself, she lets out an exhausted little laugh. “A thousand years and you never learned how to like coffee.”

Still, the promise of a hot shower and a bed being more immediate is tempting, especially as another wave of thunder shudders over the house. Dany casts a brief look at one of the windows—there is nothing but darkness beyond it, the glass reflecting the golden light of the fireplace. She remembers another night here. She remembers a dance and a kiss and the weight of ghosts between them.

She can’t think about it.

“Okay,” she agrees. “But only because I’ve already become personally acquainted with one ditch today and that’s enough for some time.”

She thinks Jon almost smiles at that.

Dany expects the second floor of the guesthouse to be much like the first; she has to keep surprise off her face when she walks through the door at the top of the stairs and realizes that it’s not. Weeks ago, her first impression of the downstairs area had been that for all of its contemporary light-drenched décor, there’d been something oddly bland about it—a strange timeless anonymity that is fitting for a man who has not aged in a thousand years. Even the main manor, with its dark and gothic opulence, brims with character. The first floor of the guesthouse is barely a whisper in comparison.

The same cannot be said of the second floor. Heavy wooden bookshelves warped with age stand scattered along the walls, overflowing with books and folios and trinkets, some of which Dany thinks would be a museum curator’s dream come true. Several shadeless lamps cast a bare but warm glow across the bed with its rumpled grey duvet and the mismatched rugs strewn across the hardwood floor. A twin to the fireplace on the main floor sits cold and dark, though a rug strewn with white fur indicates that Ghost frequently finds his way in front of this one too. This entire room vibrates with a life lived, mementos collected through the centuries from places and people long gone.

She feels Jon’s eyes on her as she pauses in front of the fireplace. Atop the mantel sits a sword sheathed in a scabbard, the leather cool and supple beneath her fingertips. She frowns at the well-worn grip and the wolf-headed pommel, a pair of eyes shimmering a deep and dark red in the carving. She says nothing, though she looks at Jon with a raised eyebrow. A faint smile briefly crosses Jon’s face.

“It’s real.”

“Have you…” Dany pauses. Then she shakes her head. “Of course you’ve used it. You were a soldier then?”

“I’ve been a soldier, aye.” Jon moves away from the door towards one of the closets, ostensibly to find her something to wear after she gets out of the shower. “But no, that sword is from before I turned. I used to be a brother of the Night’s Watch. The Lord Commander gifted me that sword after I saved his life.”

There is so much of Jon’s life from before he was turned that remains a mystery to Dany. It is true of all the Starks, honestly. This little insight into the past is intriguing. She knows that the Night’s Watch used to serve at the Wall centuries ago when the Wall had been truly a sight to behold and before the order itself had been dissolved. How did someone who served in the Watch catch the eye of the realm’s queen? Dany perhaps isn’t that well-versed in how marriage alliances worked a thousand years ago, but she knows enough to realize matches were made out of strategy, not love.

“You must have been quite the charmer to catch the eye of the queen,” she calls, a teasing note in her voice. Jon lets out a small laugh.

“I’m not sure ‘charming’ would be the right word for it,” he admits, emerging from the closet with a handful of clothes. She suspects she’ll drown in them but it is still preferable than traipsing around in her dirt-covered tank top and shorts. “More like obstinate and infuriating. Robb was raised to be the courteous one.”

Thinking about the other man’s genteel manners, she’s not surprised. “Oh?”

“He was Lord Eddard’s eldest son. All the responsibilities and pageantry that came with it—that was all his.”

Oh. Margaery is going to love that. She smiles.

“And you? Were you the rebellious lord then?”

Jon laughs again. It is a quiet sound, almost sad.

“It’s complicated.” Yet he doesn’t elaborate as he hands over a tee and a pair of sweatpants.

Dany wants to ask him more questions, to find out more about his life from before. What had it been like back then? What were his parents like? Before everything with Daenerys tore down everything he knew, what had been his hopes and his dreams, the promise of a life he might have lived? She only knows that he and his cousins had been wargs, but anything else has been left to the dark annals of cobwebbed history. If she asked, would it be too painful for him to tell him? Or has he long since made his peace with the things he can no longer get back?

She crosses into the bathroom, flipping on the light switch—and immediately grimaces at the reflection revealed in the mirror above the sink. Even as the scent of soap and pine wraps around her, she cannot help but wince—her hair is in shambles, her pale skin tattooed with streaks of dirt, and her tank and her shorts are filthy. She sighs, placing the clothes on the counter.

“Do you need anything else?” Jon asks from behind her. A glimpse up at the mirror reveals him hovering uncertainly in the door. She peers at him for a long moment before she shakes her head, feeling her earlier anger completely drain away.

She is dead tired if she is being honest with herself. It is more than physical weariness. She is simply emotionally and mentally spent from everything that has happened in these past several hours. She doubts it will get any better as the comet approaches. But today has been too long and she is tired of stories and secrets…including the ones she has inadvertently been holding. She chews on the inside of her cheek as Jon starts to close the door.

Of course I trust you.

A pang of guilt flashes through her.

“The journal at my apartment,” Dany finds herself saying, wrapping her arms around her middle as a shiver works its way down her spine. “It isn’t mine. Ashara found it on her porch that night of the carnival. I don’t know who but someone purposefully left it to me. And there are things written in the journal that…”

She stops. It’s been so long since the carnival. Will Jon accuse her of being a hypocrite?

Well, I am, aren’t I, she thinks. She looks down at the sink. “Whoever wrote the journal has been alive for centuries. They know about Ygritte. They know about the spell. Missy thought one of you was the journal’s owner, but now that you’ve mentioned the hunters…I don’t know, Jon. I can’t explain it. But someone wanted me to know something by leaving that journal. And when you add in the woman who compelled Ashara, when you think about what happened to Waymar and Margaery…someone out there is also invested in this spell. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they want from me or from any of us. And that scares me.”

It is not the first time she has spoken her fear aloud but the reality of the truth and the threat and all of it is crushing. How can any of them live like this? A moment is too long, but centuries’ worth of looking over your shoulder?

But Jon says nothing so she plunges on.

“Everyone I know and love is in danger if what everyone believes is true is true,” she tells him quietly. “I can’t find that. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to protect everyone. I can’t lose them.”

“I know.”

“I can’t—”

“Dany.” There is something in Jon’s voice. She looks back at him to find him watching her intensely, those haunting grey eyes pierced through with concern and…regret? “I know. I’ll do everything I can to make sure that everyone in this town is safe. We all will. You have my word.”

A tense quiet hangs between them, brittle with apprehension. Dany doesn’t know how to feel about any of this. She wants to protect the people she loves and she is starting to find it too difficult to remove Jon and the rest of his family, even Sansa, from that equation. If all of this goes wrong, if there are shadows that hunt even the monsters in the dark… “You’re not scared?”

“I’d be damned stupid if I wasn’t.”

Dany feels her brow wrinkle. She runs her hands down her arms to soothe away the goosepimples before she turns to the shower, fussing with the valve until the sound of running water from the showerhead fills the silence. She hovers there for a moment, uncertain. There is a part of her that wonders, not for the first time, how he can bear any of this. She looks back over her shoulder.

“Does it ever go away?”

Her question is hushed, almost impossible to hear over the shower, but she knows he’ll have heard her anyway. Jon watches her for a long moment. Then he shakes his head.

“No.”

She was afraid of that. She sucks in a breath to steady herself. There is no running from any of this. That choice—her choice—was made a long time ago.

“Okay. Okay, we’ll deal with it then.” She sees a frown cross Jon’s face and she thinks he might be prepared to argue, to tell her that this is not technically her fight. But the woman atop the Hightower had said the same thing once and Dany already knows where she stands. She gives Jon a half-hearted smile. “What kind of person am I if I’m not willing to do everything in my power to keep the people I love safe? If you’re making that promise, then so am I.”

Dany has the pleasure of seeing surprise spark through Jon’s eyes. She is not entirely sure if she should be offended by the idea that he thought she might run at the first (or third or tenth) sign of trouble and she opens her mouth to berate him for his judgment.

She doesn’t get the chance to.

One moment, Jon is in the doorway, that bright astonishment in his eyes being consumed by something ravenous. The next moment, he is crowding her against the wall next to the shower, one hand cradling her neck, his thumb pressing her jaw upwards. She opens her mouth to suck in a startled breath and a heartbeat later, his lips are against her, tongue plundering her mouth and tripping her into silence.

Yesterday or a thousand years ago, it had been she who had stepped forward first. In the dance that was no dance, they’d both moved at the same time, coming together after the molten longing between them had finally spilled over into touch and taste and want. There seems to be always the give and take here, the push and the pull—and her heart beats wildly in her chest at the taste of him on her tongue once again, at the feel of his body, cool and strong, against hers.

She clutches his shoulders, letting out a small whimper that she might call embarrassing if the blood in her head wasn’t pounding like the thunder outside. Already the heat from the shower is starting to fill the room with steam and she can feel it wrapping around her like a cloak. It is nothing compared to the heat pooling low in her stomach though and so she ignores it for now, lost in the devouring kiss.

Dany lifts one hand to comb her fingers through those thick dark curls, her nails scraping along Jon’s scalp. She is rewarded with a breathy groan against her mouth, a sharp nip against her lower lip. She can feel taut and corded muscle flex beneath the fingertips of her other hand and she remembers how it felt last night to have that sinewy strength entangled in the sheets of her bed. Every nip of his teeth and every consuming swipe of his tongue feels like sheer bliss.

Despite her earlier exhaustion, every part of her now feels as though it is burning.

Still, she is very much aware of her bedraggled state. Even as Jon plants kisses along her jaw and down her neck and into the sensitive hollow of her throat, she manages to string together enough of a coherent thought to gasp, “I’m a mess, Jon. I need to—oh my god—I really need this, ah, shower…”

“You need to sleep,” she hears him say, his soft brogue buried in the tingling skin of her shoulder along with a kiss.

“That too.” She thinks the storm has started. She at least will sleep well. The thought of curling up in Jon’s bed doesn’t hurt the fantasy either. Feeling a little playful in that strange delirious place that comes with fatigue, she presses up to her tiptoes, leaning in to gently nuzzle his ear. She can feel him shudder beneath her touch and tries to hide a smile. “Be a gentleman about that, won’t you?”

She expects him to laugh. She expects him to give her another hungry kiss that makes her dizzy with want before stepping away and leaving her to her shower.

But when he pulls back and she can see the thin ring of silver around his blown pupils, she realizes that she has greatly miscalculated how much he wants her. The thought almost takes her breath away and she can only blink up at him, lips swollen and mind dazed, the heat of the shower crowding out most thoughts that have nothing to do with him.

Fuck it.

Dany grabs the edge of her shirt and pulls it up and over her head, tugging her bra along with it. Her sneakers and her shorts take a little bit more finesse (and god, she thinks she is going to have to dump everything in the spin cycle at least twice) but she eventually manages to kick them clear to the other side of the bathroom. She doesn’t give Jon the same courtesy. Instead, tangling her hand into the front of his shirt, she drags him backward into the shower stall with her.

After the miserable night she’s had, the hot water hits her skin like a salve, and Dany lets out a pleased hum as the fire inside her body finally seems to match the heat outside of it. She leans up to meet Jon in another open-mouthed kiss, thrilled at the taste of blood and alcohol on his tongue. There could be worse ways to end a night, she supposes.

Under the spray of the showerhead, Jon’s black shirt quickly becomes sodden, though he doesn’t seem to mind as he pushes her up against the shower wall. The tiles are cold against her back and she shivers.

“Jon…” she murmurs, not sure if she is going to protest or purr. The soaked cotton of his shirt chafes against her sensitive nipples, sending signals of need and want straight to her core, and she starts to throw her arms around his shoulders for leverage. To her surprise though, Jon catches her wrists in his hands and lowers them between them. Blinking water out of her eyes, she looks up at him in confusion.

Jon peers down at her, his expression contorted with an emotion she can’t quite name. She’s never been able to read Jon well, and this is another one of those times she finds herself floundering. Rather than try to sort out the mess of emotions running through her head, feelings she definitely does not want to decipher with no sleep and her blood boiling, she wrenches one hand out of his grasp. And as she kisses him again, she sinks one hand past the waistband of his sweatpants to wrap her fingers around the hard thickness of his cock.

His answering moan rattles through her head like an esoteric curse.

Dany knows her smile is wicked, even as tongues and teeth and lips clash in a hungry kiss that is starting to border on frenzied. She suspects that at this rate, she is not going to really be able to clean up, but she finds that she’s not too concerned with that. She strokes him gently but firmly, thumb flickering over the leaking head, and lets the water wash over her and soothe away the throbbing aches in her limbs. From the sharp little jerks of his hips into her hand, she thinks he might just appreciate her not giving a damn about his clothes.

“Dany…” she hears him start to say but the rest of it is drowned by the titanic and deafening boom of thunder somewhere over their heads. The entire house shakes with it. It cascades through her like a shockwave and she lets out an involuntary gasp, head tilted back, spine arched.

Then she sees a flash of grey, of famished silver, and there are hands on her hips and the world filled with heat and fog is spinning, spinning, spinning, and there is an arm banded around her belly, holding her still, holding her close. She has a moment to blink, to gasp, and then to choke on Jon’s name as he pushes his pants low on his hips and thrusts into her aching cunt, filling her completely in one swift, sure movement.

A deep-seated groan claws up her throat and her head lolls back against his shoulder. She can feel teeth sink gently into her skin, followed by another kiss, followed by another breath. Scalding hot water continues to run down her front in a myriad of silvery rivulets, even as she heaves for air. A sibilant hiss slithers between her teeth as Jon holds her steady with one arm before slinking a hand between her legs. She damn near jumps out of her skin as callused fingers find her clit.

“There,” she breathes, closing her eyes, her world nothing but rampant sensation. There is fire in her blood and heat in her mouth and steel surrounding her on all sides. She can feel Jon’s teeth skim along her neck and gods, she wants more. She is desperate. She is wild with lust. “Yes. Jon. Don’t stop. Please.”

She is begging. She doesn’t care. It really has been a very shitty day.

Her back arches further as Jon murmurs quiet words in that old tongue of his, inscribing a tome of ancient words and curses into her skin with his lips and tongue. There is the soft slap of skin against wet skin as his hips meet her backside and every vibration of the slide of him within her, slick and smooth and numbingly perfect, makes her want to sob in pleasure.

Outside the storm begins to howl and a moment later, her orgasm consumes her.

Dany lets out a strangled cry as the storm within her crashes and boils over, lightning rocketing away from her core through the rest of her body. Even as the pleasure pummels her body, even as the water goes lukewarm in contrast to the flames scorching her blood, Jon does not stop kissing her, does not stop touching her. It is too much and it is not enough and even as she is beginning to catch her breath, when she hears him curse, when she feels the pulse of his release within her, it is enough to send a second quieter orgasm through her as his fingers still on her suddenly too-sensitive clit.

The fatigue comes rushing back with a vengeance as the heat and the pleasure recede. She lets out a shaky moan when she feels him slip out of her, realizing dimly that it is only his arm around her that keeps her from turning into a well-fucked puddle on the floor of the shower stall. Her limbs feel utterly useless.

“Shit,” she murmurs, eyes fluttering shut. “You can’t keep doing this to me, Jon Snow.”

She hears Jon laugh, the sound vibrating through her like an embrace.

“Didn’t realize it was my fault this time.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

To Jon’s credit though, he does manage to finish washing her up before shutting off the shower and wrapping her in a towel. If her skin wasn’t still vibrating with the aftermath of their fuck in the shower, Dany might have just thrown him on the bed and ridden him desperately until they were both numb and sated beyond anything useful. She does feel as if she should apologize for utterly wrecking his clothes, which cling to him like a second skin, but she can barely keep her eyes open by the time Jon manages to get her into his bed.

She does, however, dredge up enough energy to glare at him.

“I told you. I’m not going anywhere. Stop trying to get rid of me.”

Jon looks taken aback for a moment. But then his eyes crease at the edges with a smile.

“I don’t think I could even if I wanted to.” The kiss he places on her forehead is surprisingly chaste, gentle. “Get some rest, Dany.”

She is too tired to argue with him or to do anything except feel a strange warm contentment settle into a place far too close to her heart for her to be comfortable with. But she is too exhausted for that. And she is too exhausted to notice her phone. She doesn’t notice the notifications or the missed calls from Missandei or Grey. By the time the text message notification pops up on her screen, she is already asleep.

Dany. Please call me.

The grimoire is gone.

Beyond Moat Cailin, the storm comes down in a fury.

It would be easy to ride hard for Winterfell. He’d be there in a matter of days. He could send a raven to Robb and Sansa and Rickon, let them know what is going on. Together, they could figure out how best to deal with this threat to the south. In Winterfell, he’d have the strength of the northern army with him. Here at Moat Cailin, it is just him, the cursed son of the dragon prince and the wolf maid.

He grips the missive in his hand. The message had come an hour ago from the capital, the maester had said, fear lining his ancient face. It had been signed by Bran, the little cousin he had left behind to pursue his dreams of knighthood.

The little brother he had left behind in a viper’s nest.

Come quickly, the message begged. The queen’s life is in danger. And if the conspirators found out he knew, Bran’s life would also be forfeit.

He shouldn’t go south again. He can’t go any farther south than he already has, though the argument seems feeble now in the face of the message. The realm knows him as the long-vanished prince’s son. Staying north of the Neck meant he wasn’t a threat to Daenerys’s claim to the throne. Staying north meant the realm wouldn’t tear itself asunder in another civil war.

But if all that is for naught…if Daenerys’s life is still threatened…

He can’t leave her. He can’t leave Bran.

“Tell the stablehands to ready my horse,” Jon tells the maester. “I leave at first light.”

He can’t go south.

He must go south.

And he will be damned when he does.

I forgot: have I told you about your part in this, Daenerys Targaryen?

I suppose by the time you read this, the witch will have figured it all out. The Starks were never going to tell you. I doubt that they even realized the significance of it. But the thing you must know is this: all of the great spells of immortality start with a single one. It echoes through the centuries: a wish and a promise and the words of a family that will not and can never burn.

Fire and blood, little girl.

To burn the world again, the magic needs fire and blood.

Chapter Text

The sky burns.

He pulls his horse up short, tasting the acidic tang of smoke and charred flesh drifting by on the southerly wind. The inferno claws at the sky, dragging the corpse of the dying city behind it, ripping into his lungs, choking and suffocating every horrified curse on his lips. There is a roar against the Blackwater—it is the violent, killing roar of ships breaking, of men screaming, of towers crumbling down into ruin.

And the flames, green and red and bright as damnation, continue to scorch a sky turned molten with ash.

“My lord,” one of the northmen says. Against the din, his voice sounds distant. “There’s nothing to be done here. If Lord Brandon is still inside the city, we’ll never find him.”

He sees that. Teeming around the walls of the city are the survivors, swarming past them toward the clean and cold night air, the elusive promise of safety. The crowds are full of soot-stained and broken smallfolk, coughing and gasping and crying, and the haggard and beaten gold cloaks, trying desperately to restore order. There is nothing but dark chaos and the churning maw of the fire, even as soldiers try to evacuate the scant few hundred out of a thousand. Around him, he hears the choked gasps, the whispers, the sobs.The sea is on fire. The sky rages.

And above it all sits the Red Keep, a black shadow illuminated by a thousand fires.

“...Jon?”

He turns just in time to see someone approaching him on horseback. The horse is wild-eyed, whickering nervously at the overpowering stench of smoke and burning corpses and stumbling bodies pressing against its flank. Atop the horse, the older man’s face is bloodied and streaked with ash, his white cloak tattered and turned black with soot. He looks tired, haunted. But despite the gore and smoke stains, Jon recognizes him and feels something cold shatter in his chest.

Ser Barristan Selmy is the Lord Commander of Daenerys’s queensguard. Why is he here along the walls of the city? Why is he not with Daenerys? And where is Daenerys?

The old knight’s face twists in a grimace. Jon looks around at the handful of men who have accompanied him down from Moat Cailin. They continue to stare at the blind and wretched bodies around them with dread and barely restrained horror, but they snap their attention to him when he clears his throat. “See where you can help the City Guard with the smallfolk.”

The moment they are alone, Jon turns back to the knight, trying to quell the fear clamoring in his head. “Ser Barristan…where’s the queen? Where’s Bran?”

“Lord Brandon…?” Ser Barristan echoes, confusion marring his brow. “What are you talking about? Jon, what are you doing this far south? You shouldn’t be here. Take your men and ride back north at once. There is nothing more to be done here. The reckoning will come soon enough. The city is lost.”

Ser Barristan is one of Daenerys’s closest advisors. Surely he must know…? “Someone was threatening the queen. What do you know of it? Are they responsible for this?” When the old knight only shakes his head, lips pressed into a grimacing line, Jon grabs the reins of the other man’s horse, forcing him to turn to meet Jon’s eyes. “Ser Barristan, what’s happened here? I received a raven from the capital—from Bran—saying that someone was threatening to kill the queen. Please tell me if they’re…if…”

The knight stares at him for a long, long moment. Then he watches as horror and realization transform the other man’s face. He reels back, though not far. In the glow of the inferno, his pale blue eyes glow with a hellish light.

“She must’ve known it was the only way you’d come south,” Ser Barristan mutters. “She must’ve known…the witch would have convinced her of it.”

“What are you—”

“Jon.” Ser Barristan’s voice is like steel—it cuts through the horror, through flesh, through sinew. “Leave. There is nothing for you here. Go back to Winterfell. Your cousin left weeks ago. The queen sent him away.”

It makes no sense. Bran couldn’t have left weeks ago.

Unless…

A raven. A message.

A lie.

“Where is she?”

“The castle. I left her in the castle. But Jon—”

He won’t make it. He knows this. The Red Keep is too far. The roads are choked with bodies and debris. Already his chest heaves with smoke, with pain. There is no chance he will make it.

But he has to try.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?”

Dany glances in her mirror as she slides her earrings on. Behind her, she sees Jon sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her with pensive concern in his dark eyes as he twists his daylight ring in circles. He is not nearly as dressed up as she is, clad only in jeans and a fitted tee, his curls half-pulled away from his face. It is better than the pacing (prowling, she amends, recalling the predatory grace in his movements) he’d been doing earlier, but only marginally. She gives him a small smile before moving to the dresser to grab a handful of bobby pins from a little cache at the top.

“Do we really have a choice?” she asks as she starts to pin her silver-gold hair up into a braided crown; it is certainly too hot and muggy this evening to wear it down. Even the lacy white dress she wears, which she still has not entirely zipped up all the way, will cling to her skin by the end of the night. “Besides, I’m the only one who can do this. Cersei may not like me but everyone in this town has known me since I was a little girl and that includes whoever is on the Council.”

“After what happened to Missandei…”

“This is the safest thing I can do, Jon,” Dany replies gently, placing another hairpin into her braids. “There won’t be anything supernatural at this Council meeting. Just a bunch of Founders hopefully talking about vampires. I might at least be able to find out where Tywin took the grimoire.”

Jon frowns. He must know what she’s right because he doesn’t argue with her—but the look of deep-seated concern doesn’t vanish from his expression.

The message from Missandei had been disturbing and Dany recalls the wave of guilt that had rushed over it when she had finally read it a few days ago. She’d been distracted the morning after Missandei’s arrest—she had only read the message after waking up to find Jon’s hand between her thighs and his lips brushing her shoulder, her sleepy laughter and playful chiding giving way to gasps and desperate desire. Finding out the grimoire had been stolen almost immediately after had been like being doused in ice water.

They’d all concluded that Tywin is involved in the grimoire’s theft. The timing is too suspicious for anything else. Dany had figured that he must have entered Missandei’s house after Jaime and Brienne had brought her down to the police station. Considering all that Jaime and Tyrion told her, she believes that they are none the wiser as to the details of their father’s subterfuge. Jaime had said he’d arrested Missandei so that his father wouldn’t look further into Daario’s murder. Tyrion, while knowing about the existence of vampires, seemed just as surprised as anyone that Missandei had been arrested.

Still, no one is exactly pleased with the sudden turn of events and it makes Dany’s invitation to the Council even more important. The grimoire and the ring are all at the center of whatever is going to happen here in Starfall in a little over a month—they need the spellbook back.

Dany frowns at her reflection in the mirror, reaching up to gently touch the locket filled with vervain that hangs above her breastbone. Tyrion has vervain and she knows that both he and Olenna know about the Starks, but Dany is loath to think what Tywin has been telling the Council. Will they have vervain too? How did he find out about vampires in the first place? Does he know about the Starks? It’s all horribly frustrating.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jon rise to his feet before approaching her. She smiles at him in the reflection, burying her own concerns for the time being.

“You’re being awfully worried about some ordinary humans.”

“Humans can be just as dangerous as vampires,” Jon replies as he finishes zipping up her dress, his touch skimming along the vertebrae of her spine. Dany smoothes out the lacy planes of the dress, never breaking her gaze away from his face as she does so. She can feel his hands lingering on her skin, cool and promising, sending a quiet thrill through her. “More so, at times.”

She laughs quietly at that, turning to face him. She knows she cannot wipe away his fears so easily—his concern for the people he cares about is one of the many things she likes about him. She lets him cradle her face in his hands, closing her eyes against the gentle touch as she says, “I’ve been fighting battles against ordinary humans longer than I’ve known you, Jon Snow. You’re just going to have to trust that I unfortunately know my way around the people in this town.”

Dany hears the faint amusement in his voice again when he echoes, “‘Unfortunately…?’”

“Mmhm. If I can survive small-town gossip, I can survive anything.” She tastes the teasing note in her voice. “Are you going to tell me that lords and ladies don’t gossip? I would have thought that was all you had time for…unless, of course, you were too busy hosting banquets and hunting stag.”

“You’re not going to let us live that down, are you?”

“Never,” she answers and kisses him.

Margaery’s reaction had been absolutely priceless when she’d told her that the Starks used to be lords and ladies. It almost made up for the incessant and lewd teasing she’d been subject to, with Margaery’s cat-like smile growing wider and wider as Dany grew more flustered, trying to avoid answering her friend’s questions about a vampire’s sexual stamina and prowess (“you’re a vampire now—find out yourself!” she had finally snapped as Margaery laughed). If everything else didn’t feel like a horror show—whispered danger and secrets seeping into the ancient ground of Starfall—it might have almost felt like old times.

Dany lets her tongue dance along Jon’s for a moment longer, letting herself melt into his embrace for a heartbeat in time before she pulls away. Still nestled in his arms, she says, “I do think this might be enough excitement for me to last a lifetime. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“Practice,” Jon replies. He presses a kiss to the top of her head and then says, without any sort of preamble, “You have company.” Dany blinks.

“I have—?” There is a knock on her door and she hears her mouth shut with an audible snap. She levels an unimpressed look at Jon as he pulls away with a small smile. “Oh, very funny. Well done. Do you happen to know who my surprise guest is? Do I need to get a baseball bat or a stake?”

When Jon only shakes his head with a soft laugh, Dany rolls her eyes before emerging from her bedroom and crossing over to her front door. Of the three cats, only Rhaegal is anywhere in sight and he lifts his head lazily to peer at the door before yawning dramatically. As she reaches the door, the grey-blue cat leaps down from the couch before sauntering over to his food bowl, clearly unbothered by whoever is on the other side of the door.

“Well, aren’t you useless,” she mutters. She takes a quick glimpse through the peephole…and groans. Unlocking the door, she swings it open and glares at the person on the other side. “You’re not coming with me.”

“I don’t think you get to make that choice,” her older brother snaps, voice strident with annoyance, shouldering past her into her flat. He wears dark jeans, a dark grey dress shirt, and a suit jacket, his silvery-pale hair pulled into a low tail—though not terribly different from his usual clothing choices, it is still indicative of his intentions. “You told me that you’re hanging out with vampires and now you’re about to go into a secret Council meeting with the fucking Lannisters and you want me to just…what? Sit back and forget everything you told me? Right, that sounds like a fantastic idea, Dany. Good job! Maybe next time don’t tell me that you’re getting yourself involved with what sounds like a murder, especially after what happened to Ashara. Gods, are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“I am so sorry,” Missandei says as she follows in after Vis, her tone contrite, her expression somber with an apologetic grimace. She looks far less put-together than Vis in her tunic and shorts, her curls swept up into a messy bun. She removes her glasses to rub her eyes. “I didn’t think he’d actually come.”

Behind them both, Vis snorts.

“Right. You tell me my baby sister has a death wish and I’m supposed to sit at home and eat biscuits.” Missandei sighs.

“I didn’t tell him you had a death wish.”

“Might as well have.”

“Vis, you’re not coming to the Council meeting with me,” Dany says, stopping her brother’s tirade before he can start again. She has no idea what Missandei told him, but she supposes that there is nothing to be done about it now. There is a part of her that is quietly touched that Viserys has reacted so strongly to the idea of her venturing into the literal lion’s den alone—but considering that this is Viserys, his reaction always comes with a side of dramatic nonsense. “You hate small-town politics more than I do and you were never interested in anything to do with the Founders. So what exactly did you even plan to do at this meeting?”

“Make sure you don’t do anything stupid,” Vis retorts. He pauses and then scowls. “More stupid.”

If Dany thought it might actually make a dent in his skull, she’d throw her purse at him.

“Dany has vervain and she has my spells around her,” Missandei explains to Vis, who has taken to pacing in the kitchen. “Nothing is going to happen to her. She’s safer at the Council meeting than she is wandering about in the woods by herself at night.”

Missandei doesn’t direct the comment to Dany, but she can sense the intended scolding behind it anyway. Of course, on top of telling Margaery the things she’d already guessed, she had to come clean with Missandei regarding everything that had happened after Dany had left her house a few days ago. Sleeping with Jon, the conversations with Tyrion and Jaime, her ill-advised trek to the place where Daario was murdered—she told Missandei all of it and had watched her friend’s face cloud both in concern and disapproval. Dany still isn’t sure what Missandei is more upset about—wandering up the hiker’s path in the middle of the night by herself or having sex with a vampire. She strongly suspects it’s the latter.

Despite Missandei’s words though, Viserys doesn’t look convinced. His face pinches in annoyance, his mouth twisting against an oncoming argument, when Jon’s voice interrupts them.

“Missandei’s right. That meeting is one of the safer places Dany can be.” When everyone turns to look at him, Jon is leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. He still doesn’t look too happy with the circumstances, but Dany knows that he will respect her decision to go even if he disagrees with it. He lets out a long breath and says quietly, “I don’t like it but I trust her. She needs to go.”

“Why does it have to be her?” Viserys asks, pale eyes narrowed. “Why can’t it be one of you? You’re the ones who can’t be killed.”

“The meeting is at the Lannister mansion,” Dany explains, briefly meeting Jon’s gaze. Something had flashed in his eyes at the mention of him or his siblings being killed and she stores it away to examine later. “It’s only for the Founders and the Starks can’t get in without an invitation. Neither can Margaery. I’m the only one who can do this.”

“You…and me. We’re both Targaryens.”

Why did the gods curse her with such a rock-headed brother? “No.”

“Dany, I swear to god—”

“You should go,” Jon says, halting the looming argument despite not raising his voice. He has peeled himself away from the door to approach the group. Missandei is giving him a pensive look but Dany is sure her own eyes are filled with annoyance and hurt—she wants to demand where his trust from a mere few seconds ago vanished to. Jon ignores both of them, frowning instead at Viserys. “Might be helpful to have a second set of eyes there.”

“He’s not wrong,” Missandei agrees softly, and Dany shoots her a look. Her best friend shakes her head, sitting down on the bench by the front door. Behind her glasses, the dark-haired young woman’s eyes brim with worry. “I know you can take care of yourself, Dany. But you and Cersei Lannister have been feuding for as long as anyone can remember. She is going to be watching you like a hawk the moment you step into the mansion, needling you the entire time. Even if you manage to learn where the grimoire is, you won’t be able to do anything about it. But Vis will. Tell me I’m wrong and we’ll send you on your way as is.”

She’s not wrong—Cersei is a damned nuisance. Dany lets out a breath, trying to rein in her temper at being so thoroughly outmaneuvered. “It does feel like I’m not getting much of a choice in the matter.”

“Maybe you’ll think twice next time before you start hanging out with witches and vampires,” Viserys mutters, glowering at Jon, who only shifts his gaze away to focus on Dany. She knows she cannot kiss him goodbye with both her best friend and her older brother here—gods only know what they’re thinking with him already being in her rented loft. She knows she’ll receive gentle chiding from Missandei later about the dangers of being with Jon. Vis won’t have any such tact.

As she ushers everyone out of her apartment and into the hall, Jon turns back to her as she locks the door. Despite their audience (or perhaps because of their inevitable knowledge), he leans in close to murmur, “Call me if you find anything or if you need help. Ghost, Grey Wind, and Shaggy will be outside, but I want you to be safe.”

“I’m still rather pissed with you,” Dany says flatly, though despite her irritation with him (three direwolves, honestly), she can feel a smile tugging at the edge of her mouth. “Sending me to spend an evening with my brother and Cersei. I’m almost willing to give the grimoire up as lost rather than waste my night with them.”

Jon chuckles, though the tense light in his eyes doesn’t quite fade.

“Remind me that I’m in your debt then.”

The ride to the Lannister mansion is quiet. Dany supposes her brother is too busy being irritated in the passenger seat to contribute to a conversation and she herself is distracted with what in the world she is going to discover at this Council meeting. Ashara is a Dayne and while the Daynes had been respected citizens of Starfall until they’d all moved on to bigger cities, they still had not been Founders. Dany and Viserys’s connection to the Founders comes through their long-deceased parents—thin as it is, it still seems to count for something.

As they drive through the rose-gold twilight, Dany wonders, not for the first time, if her parents had been part of these Council meetings before they’d been killed in the car accident. Her mum had loved history so it might have seemed inevitable that she would drift to the Council—but it had been Dany’s father who’d carried the Targaryen name. She recalls more of her mother than her father, but she is not certain he would have been so involved with something like the Council. She remembers he had been a quiet man, keeping mostly to himself, though he’d been utterly devoted to his wife and children.

It makes her sad to think about it.

The Lannister mansion sits on the opposite side of Starfall as the Tyrell mansion, twin architectural works of art that bracket the town. While the grounds of the Tyrell mansion overflow with perfumed flora that threatens to consume the entire house, the Lannister mansion is rife with leonine motifs everywhere she looks. From the pair of stone lions at the front gate to the winged grotesques that perch atop the turrets, the Lannisters sigil that they obnoxiously put everywhere is inescapable. With the setting sun framing the house in gold, Dany almost wants to roll her eyes.

By the time she pulls into the drive, it looks like she and Vis might be the last few to arrive. As she switches off the engine and climbs out of her car, she calls to her brother, “Do you think you can go this whole evening without getting suspiciously angry about vampires?” Vis makes a face at her.

“You’re the last person who should be warning anyone about talking to vampires,” he grumbles, following her up the winding path toward the front door. “When you end up getting knocked up with a demon vampire baby, don’t ask me to take care of it.”

Now Dany understands why Jon tells her to stop reading those damned vampire books.

To her relief, it is Jeyne Arryn who greets them at the door, her smile wild and welcoming as she presses glasses of Arbor gold into both of their hands. In the study just beyond the hall, Dany can hear the low murmur of voices she recognizes, including Cersei’s clipped and haughty tones and Oberyn Martell’s veiled insults about the wine vintage. She manages to dredge up a smile, pointedly giving Vis a look to do the same.

“Good to see you, Jeyne,” Dany tells the dark-haired woman, who gives her a conspiratorial smile. “I was worried that Cersei might have answered the door.”

“Oh, the dowager empress can’t be bothered,” replies Jeyne as she gives Dany a one-armed hug, winking at Vis. “She’s in the study ruling over her court while I’ve been banished to servitude. Quite honestly, it simply means I can sneak more of this wine without Tywin Lannister calling me a lush.”

Though she is a bit of a busybody, Dany has always liked Jeyne Arryn. Her incessant nosiness is understandable—as a local TV reporter and the heiress to the Arryn media family, there is something incredibly unpretentious and plainspoken about her. Like Ashara, she had also been a close friend of her mother’s from school—another one of the close-knit group of cheerleaders who had once been the social darlings of Starfall.

As they start to move down the hall toward the study, Dany lowers her voice to ask, “Who else is here? Mum was the one who loved history but I don’t know anyone on the Founders’ Council.” Jeyne waves her hand.

“Oh, the usuals. So many people have moved out of our little town that it’s hardly much more than a gossiping session.” She rolls her eyes. “Or, as of late, campfire horror stories.”

“Wonderful,” Vis mutters beneath his breath. Somehow Dany refrains from burying her elbow into his side.

The Lannister study is just as opulent and ostentatious as the rest of the mansion, every inch of the room a display of the family’s wealth and decorated with Tywin’s eye for masculine egotism. Mahogany furniture is upholstered in plush crimson. The hardwood floors creak and groan with age beneath her step, the sharp gunshot-like echo of her sandaled heel quickly becoming smothered by silk rugs that (of course) display dozens upon dozens of lions. Golden light spills through the room, reflecting off golden mirror frames and golden lion bookends and golden vases.

In the study are faces she recognizes, many who have turned to the door in curiosity. There is Cersei and Tywin and Tyrion, of course. Jaime will be working late hours at the police station and most likely never had any intention of ever joining the Council in the first place. She is not sure whether to count that in their favor or not.

As she follows Vis and Jeyne farther into the room, she eyes the other two occupants. Oberyn Martell had once been drinking buddies with Daario and she knows he has a long-standing feud with the Lannisters, for some aggrieved reason that she is certain no one remembers. Olenna is there too, the only representative of the Tyrells and already looking quite bored with the evening’s guests. Still, she smiles pleasantly enough at Dany, raising her teacup in a silent greeting.

“I didn’t realize we let anyone in these meetings,” Cersei says dismissively, casting a disparaging look over at Dany. In her eyes, Vis must not even exist. “Why don’t we just invite the whole town? I’m sure they would be thrilled to know what we discuss here.”

“Last I checked,” Oberyn drawls from where he is lingering over by a bookshelf, “their parents were still Targaryens, were they not? A kind woman’s generosity and a new last name does not change what is in their blood.”

Cersei scowls.

“Warm welcome, isn’t it?” Vis grumbles into her ear and Dany quickly shushes him Jeyne meanwhile sidesteps them both to approach the rolling bar cart, abandoning her wine glass to instead pour herself two fingers of brandy. Dany does not miss the way Tywin lifts his attention away from the latter he is reading at his desk to give Jeyne an icy glare of disapproval. Jeyne seems utterly unruffled by it as she takes her drink and lowers herself onto an ottoman over by the overstuffed armchair Olenna is sitting in.

Dany is used to these dramatics—Starfall would not exist without them—but she has to remind herself that the knowledge and influence that the Council holds is dangerous. The Founders have always had an unchallenged hold over the small town their families established nearly a century and a half ago. The triple dynasty—the Tyrells in politics, the Arryns in media, and the Lannisters in law and order—are the families who never once left the town. Younger generations of Tullys and Greyjoys and Baratheons tended to relocate farther north (she suspects Tommen and Myrcella will eventually follow after their older brother and do the same), leaving only distant cousins in town. The Starks had left to hide the fact that they didn’t age. The Targaryens’ influence had died with Dany’s parents in the car accident and with Dany and Vis eventually taking on the Dayne surname.

But the secrets and memories engraved into the bones of a small town are unparalleled. There is no forgetting what came before and the people who were the pillars of this town’s existence, the people who were the blood and sinew that made up the beating heart of Starfall. Dany will always have a place here because of it, whether she likes it or not.

The first part of the meeting is dreary. There are fundraisers to be considered for the high school and town hall, planning committees for autumn festivals to be created, infrastructure along the old eastern bridge that needs to be looked at again, dammit. All of it seems numbingly administrative in scope—certainly nothing secretive enough that might not be discussed with the town council as a whole—and Dany finds she has little to contribute to most of the conversation. Vis seems to be enjoying himself…or rather, enjoying arguing with Jeyne and Oberyn.

As the hour hand on the clock slowly starts to move towards ten, Dany wonders if they’re deliberately not talking about vampires simply because she and Vis are here. Even Tyrion seems more engaged with this discussion about fiscal planning for the upcoming year than she had been led to believe. She might almost curse herself for her naivete. Of course they wouldn’t discuss those secrets now. Dany and Vis are not their parents.

So it is a surprise when Oberyn goes to pour himself a drink and says, “So, Tywin—are we discussing this vampire threat of yours or not?”

“You’ve picked an auspicious day to join us,” Jeyne tells Dany and Vis with a laugh. Dany supposes the startled look on her face is genuine enough, though the reason for it is much different than what Jeyne is likely supposing. “You all were far too young when your parents died for them to have told you anything about Starfall’s history.”

Vis makes a disgruntled sound and Dany can only think, please don’t say anything that makes me regret bringing you. Trying not to shoot her older brother a withering glare, she ventures, “Ashara’s always told me that Mum loved history. But…vampires?”

Dany can see Tyrion wrestling with himself on the other side of the room, clearly trying to gauge whether he repeats everything he has told her so far or lets someone else fill in the blanks. Considering how much Tyrion loves to hear himself talk, she suspects that the decision is killing him. Tywin does not seem inclined to fill the void with answers. Cersei is only smirking at her over the rim of her wine glass. Jeyne looks sympathetic, Oberyn nonchalant.

It is Olenna who decides to fill the silence.

“Everyone who founded this town was a paranoid lunatic with far too much time on their hands and a penchant for grave robbing and washing their faces with arsenic,” the older woman grouses, waving the hand not holding her teacup in annoyance. “Which makes the fact that they were right about vampires even more annoying. They were as dumb as the dirt that they claimed to have discovered but they did manage, however accidentally, to find out that there were unnatural creatures living amongst us. Personally, considering all of the other ridiculous things they put in the manifest, I’m more inclined to believe someone told them.”

Vis scoffs again and Dany thinks he does not have to do much acting to project his disbelief. “Vampires. Really.” Jeyne smiles.

“Why do you think Starfall was founded? The Founders were running from something. Why not monsters?”

Dany remembers her ill-advised journey through the woods several days ago, and the three-headed dragon engraved on a door buried beneath the ground. Starfall is built on the ruins of an old town that had laid astride a long-since dried-up and forgotten distributary of the Torentine. She has very little idea of what Starfall used to be before the Founders built their safe haven atop the bones of a forgotten memory, but Jeyne’s words make her pause. She wonders: why here?

“Is this some sort of trick?” Vis asks, eyes narrowed. He looks petulant as he levels his gaze at Cersei. “Are we not officially in the Council unless you all have had your laugh about feeding us a vampire story?”

“Do you honestly think we’d come up with something so elaborate to trick you?” A look of disdain passes across Cersei’s face. “Something more simple for a mind like yours would have sufficed.”

Dany pinches Vis’s thigh hard the moment she sees rage bloom across his face. He turns his scowl onto her and she gives him a sharp shake of her head. Fighting with Cersei is not what they are here for.

“Can a single one of these meetings pass by without an asinine remark from your daughter, Tywin?” Olenna interrupts, turning toward the patriarch of the Lannister family who has not yet deigned to give anyone his attention. She looks annoyed. “Surely even you must tire of all her incessant chirping.”

“I tire of most of the Council’s bickering,” Tywin replies, still momentarily focused on his letter. But Dany watches as he draws in a breath and caps his fountain pen before returning it to its (gold) stand. He lifts his eyes then as he sits back in his chair, giving all of the occupants in the room a look of cool condescension. “You will leave the brandy alone for the rest of the evening, Ms. Arryn—your wife will likely prefer you to return home without slurring half your words. As for you, Mr. Martell, your leisurely indiscretions have no place in a Council meeting. Leave your ribald tales elsewhere. And no, I will not hear of what has displeased you this evening, Olenna Tyrell. We have neither the time nor the resources to indulge your grievances.”

No one seems particularly fazed by Tywin’s stony dismissal, though Dany notices that Jeyne places her empty glass on a wine table and Oberyn crosses his arms, his lips thinning in muted irritation. Olenna only harrumphs.

But then she notices that Tywin has turned his attention to her and Vis, that icy stare implacable and unreadable.

Dany has never liked Tywin Lannister. He is cold and proud, a man unaccustomed to humor, generosity, or joy. His influence over the town is matched only by Olenna’s and they have been warring with each other over more and more control for as long as Dany can remember. Perhaps at one time, when his wife was still alive, he had been a far more pleasant man. But she has never known that side of him. She has only known the glacial-eyed, scornful man he is now.

“Your mother,” Tywin begins, “was an integral part of these meetings. In the years since the accident, no one has quite had an eye for historical detail like she did. I thought to assume one of her children would have inherited that trait.”

“That’s more Vis’s thing than mine,” Dany tells him, glancing aside at her brother, who still looks miffed at Cersei’s earlier insult. But something about Tywin’s intense stare and the confused knot on Tyrion’s brow gives her pause. She isn’t sure what to make of this. “But Ashara’s told me about Mum’s love of history. Did she…?”

“Know about vampires?” Tywin finishes with a raised eyebrow. Dany nods, ignoring Tyrion’s warning look and Cersei’s exasperated huff of annoyance. Tywin drums his fingers against the table. “Your mother is the one who collected all of the Founders’ journals and records, looking for proof of something she thought was unnatural about Starfall’s origins. As far as I was concerned, our families believed in nothing except nonsense, but Shiera thought differently.”

There is a roar in Dany’s head.

Ashara has never told her any of this. Dany’s memories of her mum are faint and distant—she’d been a child the night her parents’ car had spun out over the old eastern bridge, plunging into the river below. Surely Ashara must have known her mother was part of the Council…right?

From the look on Vis’s face, he is just as taken aback as she is, all traces of his previous ire gone. Cersei is once again wearing that haughty expression as she sips from her wine glass and Dany has the strangest feeling of being unmoored.

Her mum had known about vampires. How much had her mum known? Had she known about the Starfall witch too? Had she known her daughter was the doppelgänger? The questions burn through her, searching for answers the way fire searches for fuel.

And she knows—she knows—that her shock is absolutely the wrong reaction to have. She can see it in Tywin’s eyes. She tries to bury her shock, tries to dim it into a cautious doubt. Cautiously she says, “Our mum believed in vampires.” She tries to inflect some traces of hurt and disbelief into her voice. She’s not sure she’s entirely successful.

“Your father did too,” Oberyn supplies, utterly unaware of how unhelpful he is being. “Though it was to a much lesser extent. The town’s history was mostly your mother’s obsession.”

It is too much information. It is too much. Dany cannot think straight. She wants to bolt out of this room. She was supposed to find out about the grimoire, not this. Not this.

“Too many people have gone missing,” Jeyne says, though her voice seems far off. “Waymar, Lancel, Jhiqui, Olyvar, Bernadette. Too many hikers are showing up in the woods with their bodies drained of blood. It is honestly a wonder that Jaime has managed to keep all of this so quiet. I can run a thousand more stories about animal attacks, but people are going to get suspicious.”

“Vervain in the water supply should choke out most of the vampires,” suggests Oberyn.

“Yes, poisoning our water is sure to go over splendidly.” Olenna sounds unimpressed. “You’d best to make sure your deputies are ready with wooden bullets. If we taint the water, any vampires in Starfall will know that we know about them. Perhaps I am rather cynical about it but I don’t exactly care for the prospect of letting creatures that prey on us know that we figured out their secret.”

The conversation flows and ebbs around her. At some point, Tywin excuses himself, leaving the rest of the Founders to argue amongst themselves on the best way forward to protect their town. But Dany barely hears it.

Missing people. Bodies in the woods—the same woods she had been in a few nights ago. She should know about this. She is closer to the situation than anyone in this room. The Starks had said they would do what they could to keep this town and everyone she knows and loves safe while they searched for their spell. But they hadn’t told her about this. They must have known and they hadn’t told her.

Jon hadn’t told her.

I’ll do everything I can to make sure that everyone in this town is safe. We all will.

You have my word.

He had promised her…and he had lied.

Again.

And Dany can feel her heart start to crumble.

Outside the mansion, the young woman sits on the stone balustrade as Tywin Lannister steps out onto the garden terrace. His gait slows and he momentarily glances back over his shoulder.

“How…?”

“Never mind that,” she replies. She smiles, knowing but not unkindly. “You should remember me now. We’ve met several times over the decades.”

There is something in her eyes like moonlight. It flashes and flickers and something in his mind unlatches. A look of muted surprise crosses his face, but he hides it well. This is a man who is not given to moments of shock. His life is a carefully constructed labyrinth of rules and constructs, power and ploys. The impossible that has started to trickle into Starfall is nothing more than an inconvenience that needs to be taken care of.

Yet…

“I need a distraction,” the woman says, stepping to him. The night paints her in shadow as she reaches for his hand and presses something into it. “Something rather dramatic.”

He looks down.

It is a lighter.

“No.”

She smiles.

“Oh. That is funny. You were under the impression this was a choice.” She rests a hand on his shoulder. At this distance, he can smell violets and brimstone. “This is a game, Tywin. It’s always been a game. You should know this better than anyone. You have ruled this town with an iron fist for years now, but do you honestly think you’re the only person who knows how the game works? You told me once that a lion does not concern himself with the opinions of sheep. What do you think you are in my game?”

Tywin’s jaw clenches in fury. “You wouldn’t.”

“I won’t. You will.” She leans up to brush a mocking kiss on his cheek, laughing lowly as he recoils at her touch. When she pulls away, that same moonlight dances in her eyes, blossoming and unfurling like damnation. The chains rattle through his mind. The words slip away from his tongue. His grip tightens around the lighter. “You have always done your duty. Do it now. For me.”

You have always done your duty.

For me.

A memory unfurls in his mind like parchment, from decades and decades ago. It is dark and cracked from the years, tasting of blood and smelling of violets and brimstone. This same woman in front of him now sits in a black cab, peering up at him beneath the veil of her black pillbox hat as he opens the door for her. Her lips, red as blood, split into a smile as she takes his proffered hand.

Her touch had been as cold as death.

The hum of the night turns into a roar.

No.

Inside the mansion, Dany sits outside the study on a bench, her head canted back against the wall as she tries to draw her thoughts into some semblance of order. Yet despite her best efforts, every time she thinks she has managed to wrangle them together, the revelations of the past hour come back to shatter them again, sending every logical thought flying until there is nothing left behind but the stark truth.

Her mother had known about vampires. The Starks have not only been keeping secrets from her, but they have been actively lying to her. Jon has been lying to her.

The shock and the broken-hearted hurt have both transformed entirely into a wordless fury.

But she can’t show that to anyone in there. As far as everyone except Tyrion and Olenna know, this is her first time hearing about vampires. She should think that they are all insane, that she is utterly shocked that her beloved and dearly departed mother had been a part of this nonsense and had willingly indulged in it. She should not be thinking about the dark-haired vampire she has grown feelings for, nor of his family that have manipulated her and lied to her at every turn. And she had let them because she thought they deserved the help. Gods, how they must have laughed at her. It makes her sick with rage to think about it.

The door to the study opens. A moment later, Tyrion hauls himself up onto the bench next to her and silently hands her an extra glass of some amber liquid that smells like turpentine. She does not even think about it—she lifts the glass to her lips and knocks it back in one swallow. It tastes vile but it immediately sets her blood ablaze. Good. She wants to drown her hurt and her mortification with alcohol.

“I’m sorry,” Tyrion said. “I didn’t think that was what we were going to talk about tonight.”

“Did you know?” Dany bites out. “About the people who’d gone missing? The bodies in the woods?”

“If it helps, I don’t think the Starks have done any of that.” When Dany only levels a glare at him, Tyrion sighs. “I knew some of it. Those who have gone missing are public information, but it simply doesn’t sound like they’ve gone missing. People leave town for all sorts of reasons. The reason Jaime is suspicious is because of the nature surrounding their abrupt departure. Jobs and families not given notice, personal items left at their houses, that sort of thing.”

Dany’s head hurts. She should have gone back to Winterfell weeks ago.

“As for the bodies in the woods…” Tyrion sighs. “The case is still active and that information is still confidential.”

“Are you telling me bureaucracy stopped you from telling me about it?”

“I’m still a detective. You’re still a civilian. The whole…vampire thing doesn’t change any of that.” He shrugs. “Even the Council shouldn’t know, but there is very little my brother doesn’t tell our father. I still have no idea who convinced my father that vampires were real in the first place.”

I’ve never known you to ascribe to both the spirit and the letter of the law.

You’ll have to understand that sometimes your convictions can become…conflicted.

Goddamned Lannisters.

Dany doesn’t know what to believe anymore. It seems that the very foundation of her faith has been torn up by the roots. She should have listened to Missandei about all of this. Hell, even that vampire from Oldtown had warned her about getting involved.

They are not your friends. At the end of the day, they are monsters above all.

When it begins to rain blood on your sleepy little town, you’ll remember…

…I did try to warn you.

Now here she is, sitting in the middle of a tangled supernatural plot, having dragged both her best friend and her brother into it…and for what? Even if the Starks aren’t the ones hurting people around the town or hiding bodies, she thinks they are far too smart not to know about it. Did they think if they didn’t tell her she’d…what? Be more inclined to help them? Oh, her heart is so big, she’ll want to help? Such a sad and tragic family, fighting so hard against their nature to do the right fucking thing?

It is infuriating.

Yet she realizes she can’t back out of this now. Daario’s death—Daario’s murder—keeps her tied to this. It doesn’t matter if Jon holds a facsimile of affection for her. She has gotten Missandei involved. Vis too. Margaery is one of them and maybe they’d lied about who turned her too. Ashara had been compelled by the Oldtown vampire to seriously injure herself. All around her is death. All around her is the threat of blood and darkness, enough to swallow her hometown whole.

It is all her fault.

She wants to scream.

The murky spiral of regret and rage is interrupted only by the sound of a door closing somewhere else within the enormous house. Tyrion looks up and sighs. “That is probably my father. We should get back to the meeting.” He gives her knee a comforting pat but Dany doesn’t feel comforted at all. She wants to do nothing more than swipe a glass of the whiskey and vanish back into her rented flat, letting her horror and her anger and her hurt bury her beneath a cloud for several days.

But even as the thoughts continue to choke her, even the black rage threatens to consume her, everything is pushed to an abrupt halt as Dany’s phone rings. She damn near drops her glass in surprise before she fumbles for the phone, irritated enough by the disruption to accept the call before she even has the chance to look at the number. “Yes?”

“Leave the house.”

It is a man’s voice. It is entirely unfamiliar. Dany frowns. “What? Who is this? What are you talking about?”

“You need to listen to me. You are in danger. You need to tell your friends and leave that house now.”

But even as she begins to stand, prepared to argue with whoever this goddamned stranger is, Tyrion pauses. He is sniffing at the air, a look of confusion on his face. The alcohol has not been enough to muddle her shame but it has stoked her ire. With an edge in her voice, she demands, “What is it?”

“Do you smell that?”

Dany narrows her eyes at the small man. She opens her mouth to tell him that his attempts at distraction are falling flat…until she catches a whiff of something that floats over the smell of wood fibers and cashmere. She hesitates. Her mind can’t be playing tricks on her. It must be her imagination and her memory tricking her but is the smell getting…stronger?

“You need to go,” the unknown man on the phone says. “You need to run.”

The line goes dead.

“That’s gas,” Tyrion murmurs. “That’s—”

Oh.

Oh.

Fuck.

“So all of the grimoires have been destroyed?”

Missandei sits out on the patio of the Starfall Bar & Grill with Grey and Ygritte. The bar’s air conditioning is on the fritz again and many of the patrons have flocked outside in a futile attempt to stave off the churning heat within the bar itself. But the late summer humidity still clings stubbornly to the evening, the wet heat thick enough to drown in, steaming down Missandei’s neck like a moist breath. The outdoor lamps, surrounded by clouds of mayflies, buzz and flicker against the bronze-dimmed blue evening while the voices of bluegrass crooners boil through the speakers and the sultry twilight, listlessly waltzing around bar patrons peppered with perspiration. Colorful cans of ice-cold beer, dripping with condensation, litter rickety patio tables next to plates of nachos that wilt uneaten.

Despite the heat however, Ygritte still wears a heavy long-sleeved flannel shirt. She shows no signs of any discomfort with the heat. Missandei might be more annoyed if she wasn’t consumed with worry about Dany, halfway across town at the Council meeting, protected by spells Missandei is not entirely sure will hold. She tries not to remind everyone that she is relatively new to this whole witch thing—there is enough stress on everyone with the approaching comet as it is—but she knows they put more faith in her abilities than she does.

Ygritte shrugs at Missandei’s question, knocking back her gin and tonic.

“Yes and no. Witch hunts burned hundreds of grimoires throughout the centuries, along with their witches. But obviously, you can’t destroy every grimoire, just like you can’t kill every witch. Some escaped. Some hid.” The redheaded vampire pauses as their waitress drops off another round of drinks, watching her go before continuing. “The grimoire you have—sorry, had—is one of the oldest ones I’ve ever seen. Since it probably has the original immortality spell in it, I’d say it belonged to the witch who cast the spell.”

“‘Probably,’” Missandei echoes faintly. She cannot even begin to gauge the power that had been necessary to create the immortality spell, nor the gall that had possessed the first witch to cast it in the first place. To harness the power of not one but two comets, to defile the very laws of Nature…it is unfathomable to think about. “There are twenty vampires in Starfall now, not counting you or the Starks. More arrive by the day. If this all goes wrong, everyone here in Starfall is in danger.”

“Well, as long as you protect the doppelgänger and find the fucking spell, there’s nothing to worry about,” Ygritte says, as though it is that simple. “But the doppelgänger seems to find trouble as much as Jon does. To be honest, I don’t envy you the job.”

Grey frowns. “She will have help.”

“She needs more help than just you, Grey,” replies Ygritte. When Missandei gives her an uncertain look, Ygritte only smiles. “You do. You’re the Starfall witch but you’re still too inexperienced. You need another anchor or what you’re attempting to do will kill you and several other people in the process.”

Missandei doesn’t like this. She can see by the tension in Grey’s shoulders that he doesn’t either. In the past few weeks, she has come to trust him. She does not trust Ygritte. A few days ago, Dany had confided her suspicions about the redhead, telling Missandei about her mentions within the journal whose author still remains a mystery. Ygritte knows more than she’s letting on, but to what purpose? She is apparently someone Jon considers a friend, but that means nothing to Missandei—she trusts none of the vampires, not in the implicit way Dany does.

The thought carries with it the weight of her frustration with and worry for Dany. The other young woman has been her best friend since they were children, more of a sister than anything. She has been the voice of reason to Dany’s temper, the steady and solid earth to the pale-haired woman’s fire. Dany demands, Missandei questions. They are perfectly balanced and there are times when Missandei thinks she knows Dany’s heart almost as well as she knows her own.

Which is why it terrifies her how quickly her best friend is falling for Jon Snow.

When Missandei had met up with Dany and Margaery a few days ago, it had been Margaery who revealed that Dany had slept with Jon. Dany had tried to reassure Missandei that everything was fine, that it certainly didn’t mean she was in love with the dark-haired vampire but Missandei is still not so sure. She sees the way Jon looks at her friend. She doesn’t want to define it. She is scared of what it’ll mean when she does.

Missandei has never quite trusted the Starks. There is too much of their story that does not add up, things they omit from conversations that become glaring in hindsight. Dany says that it is because Jon was compelled by the original Daenerys and that she suspects his cousins don’t say more out of respect, but something about the story does not make sense. Too, despite searching for the immortality spell, no one has quite told her exactly what happened the first time around. It makes her feel as though they’re all being used.

She reaches for her water, frowning. Still, there is no point in finding the immortality spell for any other reason except to break it. What else could it possibly be used for? The Starks are cursed with immortality and an insatiable thirst for blood, inadvertently siring others with the same affliction. Breaking the immortality curse will bind them all once again to mortality’s constraints…or it will kill them. Is that something they want? Is that something Ygritte wants? Is that why she’s helping them?

It makes no sense.

“So what do you think?” Missandei looks up, startled to find Ygritte staring at her as though waiting for an answer. She quickly looks at Grey for any indication of the question she is supposed to have an opinion on, but his expression is dark with frustration. Ygritte rolls her eyes. “I know another witch who can help. I’ve called him. He’ll be in Starfall within a week.”

“Another…?”

“He’s older. He knows what he’s doing. You’ll have his experience and Grey’s strength and your own…whatever as the Starfall witch. I’m sure between the three of you, you can figure out the spell.” She jumps to her feet then, stretching wide enough to reveal the flat planes of a pale, pale stomach. “Come on. We should probably head back to the manor. I’m sure your doppelgänger friend is going to have so much to tell us.”

There’s no time to protest the addition of yet another witch, but Missandei does trust other witches more than she trusts vampires. Witches, save for that first nameless witch who had caused all of this trouble centuries ago, are at least guardians of Nature. She can trust them to do their part in settling the unsettled balance that exists because of vampires.

She gets to her feet, letting the evening wrap around her like a wet cloak. Grey gives her a worried look and she tries to give him a reassuring smile. It will be fine. She has to hope for the best, doesn’t she? This will be over and done with soon enough.

No, a voice on the wind whispers, sending a chill down Missandei’s spine. She looks around, goosepimples scattering down her arms. The presence is still there, cold and ominous and powerful. It is only beginning.

Pinpricks of magic trickle through her.

Who…?

In the distance, there is a muffled boom.

"What was that?"

Sansa looks out the window. Beyond the line of trees that surround the Stark manor, she can see a fiery glow on the western horizon. The noise had been titanic to their vampiric hearing, enough to cause Bran to drop his phone and for her to break the glass of blood she'd been drinking from. She sniffs at the air.

Smoke.

She looks back at her younger brother. He hovers just behind her, his gaze focused past her on the tumultuous glow beyond the black line of trees. He meets her eyes.

"Was that...?"

Sansa grimaces. She does not like this at all. She knows exactly in what direction that explosion had come from. And she has a sinking feeling about what that means.

Shit.

Fire.

Everywhere he turns, there is fire and smoke. He has passed gates where burning and charred bodies are piled high. More corpses litter the streets far below the great castle. Death has clawed its way into his throat, choking him, and he is not sure where in the labyrinth he is now. He is lost. The city is lost. The city burns. And so will he—too far south, too far away from home. The knight’s words scatter when he tries to recall them.

A dry hacking cough nearly sends him to his knees. There is only so much he might have done. Even if he couldn’t find her, others had survived the initial cataclysm. Around the city, there had been dozens. The living people he has found, red-eyed and screaming and terrified, he has sent back the way he came, instructing them to follow his path. It is not enough. Hundreds are dead. Thousands. The city burns. What has she done?

“You came.”

He knows that voice. He does not understand. She stands there like a ghost, pale as the moonlight and just as elusive. She crosses the ash-strewn steps towards him, smoke drifting behind her like a pair of wings. He feels her hand on his cheek.

“Your Grace…”

“You brave, foolish man,” she scolds, almost playfully, uncaring of the smoke and fire and death that surround them. It is in his head. It is in his blood. “But I knew you would come. I’ve always known. I told them…this is how it always should have been. You should have been by my side from the start.”

No.

This isn’t…she’s not…

“The city…everyone here…”

“I know,” she tells him softly. Her eyes are so bright, but it is the darkness around her that threatens to overtake him. “The sacrifices I have made…you’ll understand.”

He doesn’t understand.

He can’t.

“Daenerys…" In the smoke and fire and red ash, agIn the smoke and fire and red ash, magic scalding crimson and agonizing on his skin, there is only one question that chars his tongue with blistering heat. “What have you done?”

She does not answer right away. Her pale eyes glow in the suffocating light of a thousand and one fires, the apocalyptic chaos that she has lit the match to…for what? What is this all for? He grabs her wrist, even as his horror and anger choke him.

“Daenerys, what have you done?”

She looks up at him. Her smile is like a scythe through his heart.

“Forever,” she murmurs, lips brushing his. He can taste blood on her tongue. The fire licks at his thoughts, at his heart, scorching his blood to ash. “We will have forever. I promise.”

Behind her, he sees another woman. Her eyes are red, red, red, and when she meets his gaze, she smiles. The ruby at her throat burns. It is all he can see. It is flame. It is the sun. It is death.

He does not see Daenerys lift the dagger out of the sheath at his hip.

He does not see the flash of steel.

He does not see…

He does not…

He—

The phone goes to voicemail again.

This is Dany. I’m sorry I missed your call. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Missandei wants to cry.

The explosion is all over the news. The famed Lannister mansion, an ode to ostentatious wealth, has gone up in flames, the explosion violent enough to ricochet through the entire western part of town, shattering windows and setting off dozens of car alarms. The inferno has turned the western horizon into a horrible molten red, bright enough that Missandei can see it even from the Stark manor. The fire department, along with the sheriff’s office, has roped off a vast perimeter around the burning ruins of the previously immense mansion, shooing all stunned townsfolk back into town; no matter how much Missandei had pleaded with Podrick and the other officers, no one had let her pass.

There is no word yet on the cause of the explosion, the news reporter, one of the Arryn cousins, has said. The entire fire department is on the scene to douse the flames. No one has spoken to anyone in the sheriff’s department and no one will know the likely cause of the fire for some days yet, though the reporter has something about a possible gas leak. There is no word yet if anyone had been inside the mansion at the time of the explosion.

A meeting of the Founders would have been held in secret. But Missandei knows that, other than Dany and Vis, Tyrion would have been in the mansion, as well as Cersei. An Arryn and a Martell would have been there too. Margaery had called, her voice toneless from shock, that her grandmother had gone to the Lannister mansion. Had they all been inside when the fire had ripped through stone and foundation, tearing it asunder?

A gas leak, Missandei thinks desperately, continuing to pace as she tries sending Dany a text message instead. She is praying useless prayers and hoping against hope that her phone will vibrate, that Dany will answer her texts and her calls, and tell her that she is alright, that she has survived fire and death and is currently with Ashara, safe and sound. You can smell a gas leak. It’s a warning. Maybe she’s alright. Maybe she left her phone inside.

“I can’t get a hold of Jon,” Ygritte grouses. She sits on the couch of the manor’s living room, irritation turning her blue eyes livid. “None of the other Starks either. You’d think at least one of them would know to keep their phone on them. God, what a fucking mess. What an absolute fucking mess.”

The door to the manor had been unlocked when they arrived, which either meant the Starks always left it unlocked or they had left in a hurry and forgotten to lock it. Both reasons make her anxious and only having Ygritte here with her puts her more on edge.

Grey has gone back to Missandei’s house to retrieve her personal spellbook—trying to track Dany down might be difficult but there must be something she can do to make sure her best friend is alive. And if the grimoire had been inside the Lannister mansion at the time of the explosion, there is no chance that it is still in one piece. The pages had been dry and brittle with age when Missandei handled them—a fire like this would have reduced the book to ash.

Dany herself might have been too.

No, Missandei argues with herself, clutching her phone, feeling a tightness start to strangle her breath. She’s safe. She has to be.

And where the hell are any of the Starks?

“I can’t believe this shit.” Ygritte slips her phone into one of the massive pockets of her flannel. “Someone really is out here trying to kill the doppelgänger and they actually might have succeeded this time.”

“Dany’s not dead.”

“Well, I hope for all of our sakes she’s not.” Ygritte closes her eyes leans back against the couch. “After all these centuries, there’s only been one doppelgänger. She can’t die now, not after all this time. We need—"

The doorbell rings.

Missandei turns, surprised. Even Ygritte lifts her head, a confused frown on her face. They wait expectantly, knowing the door is unlocked.

But the door does not swing open.

“Jon?” Ygritte murmurs, though she does not sound entirely convinced. Missandei slowly walks over to the door, phone still clutched in her hand. She pulls the door open, just as the spirits brush up against her thoughts.

Her best friend is standing on the porch.

Missandei feels her heart shudder in her chest. Wordlessly, she takes a step forward to pull the other young woman into a fierce, desperate embrace, but Dany holds up her hand to stop her. She looks lost, perhaps a little shellshocked, her eyes desperately searching Missandei’s face as though she is looking for an answer. Her hair is half-up in a crown of braids, the rest of it spilling over her shoulders like liquid moonlight as though it has come undone in a rush. Beneath her black jacket, she shivers from…shock? Has she walked over here from the mansion?

“God, Dany,” Missandei breathes, submerged in sheer relief, fighting the urge to crowd Dany in with a tight hug. “I was so worried. What happened? Are you hurt? Where’s Vis?”

Dany stares at her blankly for a moment and then she shakes her head.

“Gas leak. We got out just in time.” She leans against the doorframe, wavering, before she slips through. Exhaustion seems to wash over her at that moment as her heeled black boots strike against the hardwood floors. Moonlight scatters in behind her dark-clothed form, spilling across the floor. “Vis is with Ashara. I had to…I had to come here. I had to see Jon. I have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

Magic pricks at her skin.

Wrong. Wrong. WrongwrongdangerdangerdangerwrongrunrunrunrunrunRUN.

“Someone was there,” Dany says, shaking her head. “Somewhat was there at the mansion. Someone who wanted us dead. Someone who wants me dead.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Missandei sees Ygritte stand. She turns to the vampire. Her eyes are wide. She looks pale. She looks terrified.

“No.”

WrongwrongdangerdangerdangerwrongrunrunrunrunrunRUN.

The spirits scream.

And then Missandei’s world explodes in pain and everything goes black.

“You look miserable.”

Arya glowers at Gendry as she gracefully and silently hefts herself up onto the barstool. The Starfall Bar & Grill is busy at this hour, with more people than normal gathered around the television to watch the news report about the explosion at the Lannister mansion. The stifling and sodden heat of the evening has swarmed into the enclosed space, the fans doing little more than blowing warm air over the tables as folks drain ice-cold drinks in an attempt to cool down. Over the sharp scents of whiskey and tequila and rin, she can smell the cloyingly sweet odor of sweat and cologne.

She shrugs out of her jacket, knowing that the longer she wears it in this heat, the more questioning looks she’ll get. “I’m in a mood. Surprise me with whatever’s on tap.”

“Are you even old enough to drink?”

“I’m old enough to sleep with you but now you’re asking if I’m old enough to have a pint?”

Gendry’s cheeks turn a bright pink that has nothing to do with the heat and his eyes briefly dart over to the other patrons to see if they’ve heard. Luckily for him, they’re all too engrossed with the unfolding disaster at the Lannister mansion or their own conversations to have paid Arya any heed. Once he realizes that no one is the wiser about his extracurricular activities, he leans forward and gives Arya a sour look.

“You can’t just be saying that stuff aloud. You’ve got a big mouth.”

“You liked it well enough, judging from the noises you made,” Arya replies, unable to stop herself from giving him a cheeky grin. When the flush across his face only darkens, she rolls her eyes. “Gods, just give me a damned beer already, you stupid.”

By the time Gendry returns with her beer, she has already turned her attention to the reporter on the television. She has long since learned how to tune out the cacophony of other voices to focus in on a singular sound, a handy talent when her supernatural hearing picks up every faint sound within a several-mile radius. In the past, it might have been enough to drive her mad. The centuries have taught her differently.

She knows that Dany had gone to the Council meeting tonight and that the meeting had taken place in the Lannister mansion. While the reporter posits that the explosion is likely due to a gas leak, Arya thinks that the timing is too suspicious. The heads of the Founders all in one place at the same time? That is not an accident—that is an opportunity. The only thing she can’t figure out is why. Was it their knowledge about the vampires? Had someone other than the Starks decided to eliminate a potential threat before it could become bigger? And if so, who? More and more vampires are arriving in Starfall by the day—Arya can sense them. But she knows they are all young vampires, drawn by the impending magical energy that is gathering around Starfall. Would they even have known about the Founders?

Arya takes a swig of her beer. She has tried to get a hold of Jon, but either his phone is dead or he has forgotten it somewhere—he has not picked up in a few hours. She hopes for his sake that Dany is alright. She likes the young woman. She is everything, Arya thinks, that Daenerys should have been, so long ago. But thinking like that is dangerous. Arya doesn’t think her brother sees a ghost in the girl, but still…

Sansa doesn’t like it, of course. Jon has not outright told his cousins about his blossoming relationship with the doppelgänger—but he has always been a shitty liar. Sansa had told her and Robb that she thinks Jon’s decision to get involved with the human is a foolish and ill-fated decision. Arya thinks the same, especially considering what the spell will need to unbind it. Arya still hopes to find another way but as they get closer and closer to the arrival of the comet, there is no denying that one of the things that powered the original spell was blood.

Jon knows this. Arya has known it for a long time too. She is sure that the others don’t. She is sure that even after forty years, he has not told them.

We’ve loved and we’ve lost but we’ve always had each other. You’ve always had me. Now and forever, remember?

What you’re planning…it’s not worth it.

“Now and forever,” she murmurs, glancing down at the daylight ring on her hand. Jon’s humanity will be the death of him. And it will break her heart.

Behind her, there is a whisper of coldness.

“I’ll take a whiskey.”

And at the sound of the voice, everything goes completely still and silent in Arya’s head.

As Gendry nods and wipes his forehead and reaches for a rocks glass and as the chaos of conversation turns into a muted, garbled roar, listless and meandering, and as the evening heat, thick as molasses and hot as sin, crawls through the bar and along sweat-damp skin and over the crooning, gravelly vocals of some Lowcountry guitarist, turning the night molten, Arya feels a chill spiral around the base of her spine.

It can’t be.

It can’t be her.

She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead.

Slowly, as though caught in a dream, she turns to the person who stands at her left elbow. A woman, as pale and frigidly pretty as the glaciers to the far north, leans against the bar, her mouth coyly tilted upwards in a smile. She reaches for her whiskey, raising it to her lips as she watches Arya with a knowing look in her eyes.

Eyes that are the same quicksilver hue as Jon’s.

“It’s good to see you, little wolf,” Lyanna Stark murmurs, winter and eternity and loss all wrapped around words that creak with the weight of the years. “Do you happen to know where I might find my son?”

Jon walks away from an inferno into a nightmare.

Ghost’s senses had been the first to alert him that something was wrong. Grey Wind and Shaggy had done the same with Robb and Rickon. Poison had drifted through the air, curling around the Lannister mansion like a serpent. It had been the only warning, the only whisper that something was about to go terribly wrong.

But by the time they got to the mansion, it was already in flames.

The sight of the flames, the thought that Dany might be somewhere within the splintered ruins of the mansion, had almost cracked something open within him. Centuries and centuries of horror had come surging against the locks he had placed around the few memories of the beginning that he did have and it had only been Robb, sensing the impending break in his cousin, who had stepped in front of him. There had been solid hands on his shoulders turning him away from the blaze and forcing him to meet his cousin’s blue eyes that glowed like embers in the inferno.

“This isn’t then,” Robb had said, driving him away from the flames. “This isn’t then, Jon. You’re not there. Jon. You’re not there. You’re here with me. It’s over. It’s done. We’re here. You’re not there.”

Fire. Blood. A dagger in his heart.

Then nothing.

And now…

Robb had promised to stay around the Lannister mansion to find out more about the explosion. If Dany had gotten away, then the plan always would have been to return to the manor, and that, Robb said fiercely, is where Jon needs to be. He hadn't agreed, had wanted to stay there at the ruins of the Lannister mansion to search for Dany, but Robb wouldn't hear of it. Rickon had vanished soon after to find the others.

The manor is as silent as the grave, sound and shadow swallowed up in the time-worn halls that suddenly tighten an ominous noose around the neck of comfortable familiarity. There is a coldness to the air now that speaks of dead things, and worse. The rich scent of the roses atop the table almost—but not quite—disguises the sharp, metallic odor of blood soaking through the still darkness.

He pauses, fingers brushing against the solid mahogany of the hallway console table, before the nightmare surges into reality and he rushes forward to kneel next to the body on the floor.

Missandei is crumpled on the rug, a dark bruise already starting to form at her temple. Blood trickles down from a bite mark on her neck—not fatal, not yet. He lifts his wrist to his mouth, tearing open the skin with his fangs, before pressing the wound against Missandei’s lips. She won’t care for having vampire blood in her system, but the alternative is to let her bleed out on the floor. He won’t let her die. He likes the witch.

And he won’t let Dany lose her best friend.

She does not wake up immediately but he sees the puncture wound slowly start to knit itself together, dark crimson still staining the side of her neck and soaking into the expensive rug on the floor. He lets a moment of the bloodthirst wash through him before he quickly tamps it down. Carefully and cautiously, he lowers Missandei’s head back to the floor. Her ragged breaths and her heartbeat, faint and sluggish, are reassuring but…

Someone is still here. Someone is still inside the manor.

And he doesn’t think it is one of his cousins.

Taking one last look at Missandei, he stands and then silently begins to approach the living room that seems to glow with the muted golden light of a thousand lamps.

He stops, his unbeating heart lurching.

There is…this is…

Ygritte is sprawled on the couch, blue eyes staring blankly at the ceiling overhead, her face a rictus of shock and pain. Her pale skin has mottled to a lifeless grey, thick black veins spreading like fractured glass across her face and down her neck and slithering down her arms. She does not turn to look at him when he enters. There is no teasing remark on her lips, no coy or sarcastic laughter bubbling up from her throat.

Because there, protruding from her chest—from her heart—is a wooden stake.

No.

No.

No.

A small whisper of wind is his only warning.

Something fast and solid and cold slams into him like a speeding truck, knocking the breath he doesn’t need out of him in a blow that would have shattered the bones of any normal person. Even so, when he slams into the coffee table in the living room with the crystalline sound of shattering glass and snapping wood, it still hurts like a bitch. The momentum sends him crashing into the couch, end tables tipping over, lamps falling onto rugs with dull thuds. The world spins at a dizzying angle—dancing black shadows and shards of glass biting into his skin and the blue paintings on the wall, tilted askew and splattered with crimson.

Before he can regain his bearings, his assailant is on him like a jackal and he can feel something sharp and icy press against his throat. He goes still, blinking up at the woman. In the golden darkness of the living room, in the sudden stillness of the crash and the roar and the wave of death and destruction, the rolling light of a fallen lamp briefly illuminates her face.

A very familiar face.

He falters, confusion momentarily dulling his senses, already broken up by the grief and shock at seeing Ygritte’s corpse on the couch.

“Dany?” he chokes, even as his thoughts struggle to catch up. Why can’t he move? Why can’t he…? “You’re—”

No.

That’s not right.

She’s not right.

She straddles him now with the knife still held to his throat, her pale hair shining like gold-tinted moonlight, half-twisted up in its familiar labyrinthine crown of braids. Her lavender-blue eyes, glowing with a voracious hunger, meet his. The part of his mind that isn’t reeling from every terrible blow that has hounded him this evening realizes that beneath the expensive cropped jacket and the form-fitting leather pants, there are very, very feminine curves that he remembers—

She lifts the knife—no, his dagger, centuries gone, seven bloody hells—away from his throat. Her lips, stained with Missandei’s blood, tilt upwards into an achingly intimate smile, amusement turning her eyes into amethysts. Black veins crack around her eyes like a broken mirror, blood drowning the sclera, and everything about her is a lie, everything about her is a nightmare, and he knows, he knows, he knows exactly how fucked he is.

Because this is not Dany.

This is...

This is...

"Hello, Jon," Queen Daenerys Targaryen murmurs and he can hear displeasure and amusement weave through her voice like smoke through flame. She cradles his face in her hands, leaning down as though to kiss him. Her lips brush against his skin, cold and bloody and fucking damned. "Goodbye, Jon."

And then she snaps his neck.

Chapter Text

While Dany doesn’t usually end her nights with someone attempting to blow her up, this is still probably the least outlandish thing that has happened to her over the past couple of months.

She sits on the rear step of an ambulance as she watches the burning wreckage of the Lannister mansion just ahead of her, the bright flames smearing the night sky with a dull crimson. A shock blanket is draped over her shoulders, though she’s not sure she needs it. The oxygen mask is helpful, though the paramedic seemed satisfied with her breathing earlier, leaving a gigantic bottle of water at her side while he moved to tend to a grumbling Viserys. While Dany’s cough is faint, her eyes still sting from the smoke, and a few wisps of snow-blond hair curl around her face from where the ends had been singed by falling embers. Still, other than a few scrapes and bruises, Dany stumbled out of the inferno more or less unscathed.

It's difficult to gauge how much time passed between the mysterious caller’s warning and the floor violently bucking beneath her feet as fire exploded through the house. It had been enough time to warn the others but not enough time to completely clear the house before it had been engulfed in flames. A couple of ambulances have already sped off from the scene toward the hospital, though she’s not sure which of the Council members are in them. She does hear Olenna snappishly fussing at a paramedic in a nearby ambulance, declaring herself perfectly fine, she has been around on the godforsaken planet long enough to know if she is hurt, where in the world did this young woman get her medical training, the back alley of an Essosi brothel? If Dany wasn’t so frazzled, she’d almost smile.

Instead, her good humor is as wrecked as the mansion.

Gods, Dany thinks as another wing goes crumbling down with a roar, sending up a cloud of flame and smoke. If the grimoire had been in the mansion, it is undoubtedly a pile of ash now, and about as useful as the molten slag that is her phone, buried somewhere within the burning rumble.

The police have already taped off the perimeter around the house, leaving the firefighters trying to control the blaze. A crowd of curious onlookers and a handful of local reporters hover just beyond the tape, watching the ruin in macabre fascination. Dany is sure she saw a grim-faced Jaime in the smoking night, though she is not sure what in the world she could have possibly said to him at the moment. She hasn’t seen any of his family since she’d been dragged to her feet and ushered over to a waiting ambulance to receive care.

The second comet appears in a few more weeks, Dany thinks numbly, even as the paramedic gently encourages her to raise the oxygen mask back up to her mouth. And now the grimoire is probably gone. People are probably dead. Jon’s been lying to me. Mum and Dad knew about the vampires.

It’s all shit. It’s all gone to shit.

“Seven hells, you’re okay!” Dany looks up at the sound of the familiar voice and barely has a chance to drop her oxygen mask before her adoptive mum engulfs her in a fierce, crushing hug. Just beyond the woman’s shoulder, she can see Podrick Payne standing with a grimace on his face. “I saw the news and I knew you and Vis had come here and I was so scared. I couldn’t get either of you and your phones and I just assumed…gods, I was so scared.”

“Mum, I’m fine,” Dany manages to find breath to say. “We’re fine. We’re fine.”

She is not sure Ashara actually hears her over the ruckus because the older woman pulls away to cradle Dany’s face in her hands. Dany sees her violet eyes glowing with tears, her face pale with sickening relief. Ashara looks over Dany’s shoulder at Vis, who is still getting treated for the nasty cut at his temple.

“Are you both hurt? What happened? How did you get out?”

“Having a grand time of things,” Vis mutters as Dany quickly reassures her, “Mum, we’re okay. Just a few scratches and bruises. Tyrion smelled the gas leak before the explosion.”

A gas leak will be the story, she knows. Another accident in a summer of accidents and disappearances. She can’t tell Ashara or the police about the mysterious stranger who had called her phone to warn her of the impending explosion. In the first place, Dany has no idea who possibly could have known about the leak and the possibility of an open flame unless they were the ones who’d planned to kill them all. Secondly, it would lead to too many questions—she needs to contact Missandei first to figure out this puzzle.

For Ashara though, this can be nothing more than an accident, nothing more than bad luck and bad timing. She hates the necessity of the lie, but she tells it anyway and hopes that Vis can get over his annoyance long enough to do the same.

“Do you know who’s been taken to the hospital?” Dany asks though she is not sure she wants to hear the answer. Ashara starts to shake her head when a voice behind her answers in her stead.

“Oberyn and Cersei,” Rickon Stark says, sidling past Podrick who lets out a yelp of protest. It is easy to see why—at Rickon’s side prowls a black behemoth of a direwolf, its green eyes burning with intelligence as it looks around at the gathered knot of people. Rickon’s hand is casually buried in the wolf’s ruff, unbothered by the fact that the dog’s shoulder comes up nearly to his hip. The paramedic only spares the newcomers a quick frown before turning back to Vis. Podrick is not so easily dissuaded. The dark-haired young man starts to tell Rickon that he can’t be here, that the area beyond the roped-off barricade is for family only.

But then Rickon turns to the officer with a crooked smile and Dany sees how bright his grey-blue eyes are—a trick of the light to anyone else but she knows better. Dany knows exactly what is happening as Rickon casually tells Podrick, “I’m good here, mate. You can go see what the others need from you now.”

As Podrick, with a bit of a glazed look in his eyes, walks away, Rickon turns his attention to Ashara but stops when Dany levels a look at him that could melt glass. He makes a face at her but Dany doesn’t let her expression shift—he is not about to compel Ashara to leave right in front of her, not after the hell that this night has been. After a moment, the young-looking vampire relents with a roll of his eyes.

“Anyway,” he continues as though he hadn’t just been prepared to force Ashara to leave, “the ambulances that left took Oberyn and Cersei to the local hospital. Sounds like they were pretty banged up by the explosion. You two were pretty fortunate, all things considered. Once the reporters realize you aren’t going to be hooked up to ventilators, they’ll be asking you all sorts of questions.”

Dany wonders if it is a warning. With his free hand jammed in the pocket of his oversized sweatshirt and his copper curls turned a flaming bronze in the burning night, Rickon looks like a typical teenager who probably shouldn’t be out this late. But before Dany had arrived at the mansion, Jon had told her that Ghost, Shaggy, and Grey Wind would be prowling the perimeter of the mansion, undoubtedly with their masters not far behind. For a brief moment, she wonders if Jon and Robb are somewhere out here too, using their own powers of compulsion to slip past the police tape.

After everything though, she’s not sure if she wants Jon to be here. She’s not sure if she wants any of them to be here.

Too many people have gone missing.

Too many hikers are showing up in the woods with their bodies drained of blood.

The town’s history was mostly your mother’s obsession.

She has many memories of her mum tucking her into bed, a gentle hand on her as she smoothed back Dany’s silver-gold hair, fanciful stories on the tip of her tongue. She remembers that sometimes her father would lean against the doorframe, wiping at his glasses with the edge of his shirt, a smile on his face as his wife recounted stories that Dany cannot remember now. She does know that they’d been tales of history, gently softened for a child’s ears, details molded from sharp edges to smooth curves. Had her mum ever told her about vampires this way? Had her father?

Our families believed in nothing except nonsense…

…but Shiera thought differently.

Through the haze of her thoughts, Dany can hear Ashara gently speaking with an irritable Vis. It sounds like the paramedic is telling him that he’s getting an overnight hospital stay for observation, news that Vis takes with protests and a scathing query about why doesn’t Dany have to stay at a hospital too. Dany feels Ashara press a relieved kiss to the top of her head, the scent of lavender and chamomile washing over her.

“Be happy that your little sister is alright, Vis,” Ashara chides. Dany doesn’t miss the way Rickon’s grin turns lopsided and knowing. He doesn’t say anything else but his posture is clearly one of impatience. The black wolf at his side has not even sat down, his green eyes watching Dany sharply.

Shit, Dany thinks. She slides the shock blanket off her shoulders. “Ashara, are you going with Vis to the hospital?” Ashara frowns as Dany places the oxygen mask on the bench inside the ambulance.

“Of course. What are you—?”

“I’ll drive your car back to the house,” Dany offers, plaintively and silently gesturing at her ragged appearance. Her skin and the white dress she’d worn to the Council meeting are both smudged with ash and dirt and her hair itself is in disarray, braids frayed and curling. Although a shower is really the last thing on Dany’s mind, she thinks it’s enough of a convenient excuse to step off to the side to demand some much-needed answers from Rickon about his family’s bullshit and lies. She tries to smile but she suspects it’s not much more than a pained grimace. “One of us has to stay out of the hospital. You and Vis are competing with each other now.”

It has been weeks since the Oldtown vampire had compelled Ashara to nearly kill herself but Dany has not forgotten. Ashara gives her a wan smile before kissing her on the temple.

“Are you sure you’re alright to drive?”

Before Dany can say anything, Rickon answers for her.

“Don’t worry, Ms. Dayne. I’ll make sure she doesn’t wrap your car around a tree. In fact, why don’t I drive Dany home and drop off the car? It’s been a long night for everyone and Jon would kick my arse if something else happened to his girlfriend and I didn’t do anything to help.”

“Do you have your license?” Ashara asks warily, clearly too blindsided by relief to catch that Rickon has called Dany Jon’s girlfriend. Vis makes some strangled noise near the back of the ambulance that has the paramedic asking him if he’s alright. Dany wants to glare at her brother but settles for shooting a suspicious scowl at Rickon—despite looking very much like a teenager amid a gangly growth spurt, she knows immortality means he has probably been driving since the first automobile came off the assembly line a century ago. The shit-eating grin on his face only confirms it, but he nods eagerly at Ashara’s question anyway.

“Of course! I’m a great driver!”

Never mind. She is definitely going to die.

A few minutes later, a protesting Vis is bundled up in the ambulance, Ashara at his side, and soon the vehicle is rumbling off the Lannister grounds, its emergency lights dark. Behind them, the mansion still roars in its death throes as viciously as the lions that the Lannisters had taken as their family motif, lions that burn a molten red in the chaotic flames. Dany stares back at the burning ruin, thinking how she’d been in the midst of it not an hour before, and she quietly shudders at the memory of the world collapsing around her.

“So…” Rickon drawls, stuffing his hands in his sweatshirt pocket. Shaggy has finally sat down at his side and is now watching the firefighters attempt to subdue the fire with a curious tilt of his massive head. His master, the boy-vampire, gives Dany a bright smile. “Find out anything fun before everything went boom?”

With those words, Dany’s mood quickly sours.

“I found out that you and your family have been lying to me for weeks,” she says, her voice threaded with ice. The sense of betrayal, looming and ghostly and immense, might very well shatter her bones if she lets it. “Bodies up along the high road, people missing from out of town—were you all ever going to tell me or were you just going to keep stringing me along because I promised to help you? Is that all you wanted from me? Was I just a means to an end for this stupid spell of yours?” Rickon blinks.

“Uh…”

“Unbelievable,” Dany mutters beneath her breath as she spins on her heel. Ashara had told her where she parked past the perimeter and now the only thing she wants to do is drive to Ashara’s house, wash the smoke and grime off her skin, and bury herself beneath a dozen quilts. The black oblivion of sleep will be so much better than this.

Yet she doesn’t get far before Rickon grabs her arm. His pull is gentle for a vampire but it still almost causes Dany to stumble to her knees. She turns to glare at the youngest Stark, unaffected by the confused frown on his face.

“We haven’t been lying to you,” Rickon protests. At Dany’s scoff, he makes a face at her. “I swear! Yeah, we knew about what was happening on the high road and people disappearing. But if we’d told you, the witch would have started trying to put more spells in place to protect this town and to protect you.”

“And you didn’t want to lose the one person who could undo this spell, is that it?”

“Jon didn’t want you to lose your best friend!” At Dany’s stunned silence, Rickon releases his grip on her arm, shaking his head. “Missandei’s the Starfall witch but she’s not invincible. She’s still new. She could die trying to juggle all these spells.”

“Missy is—”

“You don’t even…do you know how many centuries Jon has been trying to undo this shit for us? That he’s willing to fuck it all up for you? Besides, most of the ‘people’ who’ve been disappearing are vampires, Dany. We’ve been trying to clear them out because they’ve been feeding on the humans here. But rumors keep spreading and they keep arriving. We’re good, but we’re not, like, fortune tellers.” Dany frowns.

“And the people along the high road?”

“People at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Rickon shrugs. “We did try, but we can’t track every bloody vampire in town and we’re shit out of luck if they’re not even in town in the first place.”

That is…worrisome. Dany hesitates. “How many vampires are in Starfall, Rickon?”

“A lot.”

“Rickon.”

“I’m serious!” Rickon scrunches up his nose. “I don’t know how many exactly, but there are new vampires arriving by the day. Starfall’s just big enough to hide them. You wouldn’t have ever noticed.”

She doesn’t like that. If the Starks can’t keep up with the vampires arriving in town, if they are trying to clear out the vampires while keeping their own nature a secret against prying eyes, how long until the danger starts to crawl toward people she knows? How long until one of the victims with their throat ripped open is someone she knows…again? She is still no closer to knowing who killed Daario or the motives of the Oldtown vampire who’d compelled Ashara to stab herself. It feels like the walls are closing in on her as the second comet draws nearer, threatening to flood Starfall in blood and gore.

And how can she be sure that what Rickon tells her now is the truth? It is his word against what she has learned at the Council meeting, the revelation that her mum and dad had been far closer to the vampire threat than she ever might have guessed.

It feels like she is losing control as she falls deeper and deeper into the hidden mysteries of Starfall, the blood magic engraved into its bones. How much longer until she realizes that she can’t keep doing this, that her affection for Jon can’t hold the weight of a thousand lies and half-truths and terrible history?

But I promised him too, Dany thinks as Rickon’s phone starts to ring. Even after everything, I promised him.

“Hey!” Rickon greets into the phone, a moment before his brows shoot up toward his hairline. His gaze darts briefly over to Dany. “Nah, I’ve got her with me. She’s a little pissed but otherwise okay. Where are you? Do you have your…oh, okay. Your choice, bro. Should I find you then? Has Robb found you guys…oh. Okay. Okay, yeah. We’ll meet you there. Yeah, yeah. No worri— shut up, my driving is fine.”

“Is that Jon?” Dany asks, unable to quite smother the feeling of wanting to be sure he’s near. She’s still not sure if she’s pissed at him for trying to protect her by leaving her in the dark about what is happening around Starfall. “Let me talk to him.”

“It’s Bran,” Rickon tells her, briefly sticking his tongue out at her. “‘S’not my fault your phone got blown up…yeah, I’m still here. I’m gonna find Robb and then we’ll head back to the manor. I’ll see if I can get a hold of Arya…cool, cool. See you then.”

The moment Rickon hangs up, Dany crosses her arms, giving him a long, mistrustful look. A thunderous roar behind her and the brief flare of light against Rickon’s face tells her that another section of the mansion has collapsed. For all of the subterfuge and lies and everything she’s been through, the grimoire is now nothing more than ashes.

“Where do you think you’re taking me?”

“Back to the manor.”

“No. I’m going home.”

“Ugh, Dany,” Rickon grouses, rolling his eyes. “Can you be pissed at us and your boyfriend in the morning? We kinda need to get shit straightened out tonight first.”

Dany, already in a piss-poor mood and not really inclined to deal with the Starks and their vampiric bullshit tonight, opens her mouth to tell Rickon where he can stick his straightened-out shit for the remainder of this really fucking awful night. But before she can say anything—

“Dany!” Margaery Tyrell, her bouncing bronze ponytail turned into a torch in the glowing night, sweeps in at her side, looking as coolly glamorous as always, if a little tense around the edges. She pulls her friend into a tight hug that almost crushes Dany’s lungs—as a still relatively new vampire, she does not quite know her strength as well as Rickon. “Grandmother said you got out but she was too busy fussing at the paramedic to tell me if you were hurt. You aren’t hurt, right? Where’s Vis?”

“Glad you’re alright,” Robb says as Margaery releases a gasping Dany and she belatedly notices that another direwolf, grey and golden-eyed, sits by his master’s side. “The direwolves sensed something was wrong right before the mansion blew.”

“So it was just a gas leak.” Dany feels a strange sense of disappointment. Despite the catastrophic consequences, it is an oddly normal turn of events. A gas leak, an open flame—after the avalanche of supernatural events these past couple of months, it is distressingly ordinary, if no less deadly. If it weren’t for the phone call… “Everyone got out?”

She doesn’t miss the way Rickon, Margaery, and Robb share a look. Her heart drops as Robb places a hand atop Grey Wind’s head. “There were two body bags. I couldn’t get closer to ask who they were.”

Cersei, Oberyn, and Vis are heading to the hospital. Olenna, still loudly complaining about the paramedics’ credentials nearby, has escaped the inferno relatively unscathed. That leaves Tyrion, Tywin, and Jeyne unaccounted for. She had lost track of Tyrion when they had reached the study to warn the others, moments before the walls had imploded around her. Had she seen him as they fought their way outside? Had she seen Jeyne? She can’t remember, her memories filled instead with flame and smoke.

A premature wave of grief threatens to choke her. Even if this had merely been an accident, there is already the promise of loss in the sticky night air, warm and suffocating with fire and death. Tyrion and Jeyne had been, if not close friends, people she liked. What if one or both of them had been killed in the explosion?

“I know you’re pissed at us,” Rickon says, “but can you be pissed at us at the manor? Pretty please? Jon should be there.” Dany feels her expression turn stony. Margaery must catch the ice that floods Dany’s eyes because she gently loops her arm through her friend’s, pulling her close in a facsimile of an embrace.

“Dany. Please.”

What does it matter? What does any of this matter? The grimoire is gone. More people are dead. Starfall is filled with vampires hunting people she has known and loved for years.

Yet even as the night continues to burn, even as exhaustion threatens to topple her, she thinks of her promise. She thinks of all the terrible things still to come. And she thinks of Jon’s gentle smile, his cool touch grazing her cheek.

“Okay,” she says, the words sounding choked even to her own ears. “Okay, let’s go.”

Several moments later, they are speeding down the road to the Stark manor, the burning wreckage fading to a dull orange glow on the horizon. Margaery has (forcefully) chosen to drive and beneath the low hum of the tires speeding along pavement, the muted love song of some rockabilly crooner drifts through Ashara’s car. It is so close to some of Dany’s old memories, memories untainted by the horrors her world has become filled with. How many times had she and Margaery and Missandei taken road trips during the summer, letting the summer night and the stars lead them on? It seems like a life that no longer belongs to her.

The rural roads of the outer edge of Starfall eventually give way to the long oak tree tunnel that winds toward the Stark manor. Wooden fences and a star-splattered sky beyond the thick canopy of leaves and spiderwebbed branches pass by in a blur. Though the windows are down to let in the roar of rushing air and a symphony of crickets, frigid air blasts from the vents, blowing Dany’s snow-blonde hair away from her face.

“Alright, what’s going on?”

Dany still feels as though her skin has been scorched by the flames that consumed the Lannister mansion and neither the air conditioner nor the night air buffeting the car cools her. Margaery seems unbothered by it, though her pale rose cardigan is still inappropriate for the Dornish summer night. Dany wishes that she might be as collected as her friend in the moment but it still feels as though she is swallowing back a tidal wave of rage.

After a long moment, she drags her eyes away from the taillights just ahead of them to frown at Margaery’s question. “What?”

“You heard me,” Margaery replies, momentarily swatting at her. “I get that a house basically fell on you, but you’re too tense and distracted for it to just be that. After everything else that’s happened this summer, I’d think you’d be a lot more game to drop some gossip about this Council meeting.”

“I’m tired, Margaery,” Dany replies, turning away again to watch the trees fly by in the car’s buttery-white headlamps. “Like you said, it’s been a night.”

“Right.” Margaery doesn’t sound convinced. “Did you find out anything interesting? What about the grimoire?”

“Burned, unless it was never in the mansion in the first place.” Dany notices Margaery’s grimace out of the corner of her eye but doesn’t remark on it. She hates to think that she doesn’t know where Margaery’s loyalties lie anymore, not with her being a vampire and getting closer and closer to Robb. She’s also pretty sure that makes her a hypocrite, considering her deepening relationship with Jon. She continues, “Other than that…”

“Okay, so the grimoire is dust.” Margaery sounds disappointed but thoughtful. “Do you think Missy could still do the spell without it?”

“She said the grimoire was written in High Valyrian. Missy’s good with languages but she couldn’t magically know a language that’s been dead for centuries.” Dany remembers Missandei’s worries about mispronouncing or mistranslating the spell, remembers her caution that anything short of perfection might have far more dire results than any of them knew. She doesn’t doubt her friend’s competency, but she does wonder if such a thing would have been worth it. “We’ll find another way.”

“Do you think so? What else did you learn?”

Despite the question, the confession about her parents remains stubbornly lodged in her throat. She hadn’t been able to warn Vis about telling Ashara about their parents and can only hope he realizes that is information he needs to keep secret. Of all the people in her life, she knows Vis will understand the shock of this revelation the most—he’s been drawn into this supernatural nonsense too, entirely because of her. It is all her fault.

“Nothing,” she finally lies, throat tight with guilt. “At least, nothing worthwhile.”

“Okay,” Margaery says slowly as she follows Robb’s car up the circular drive toward the front door. A Jeep is already parked up front and Dany sees a flash of long red hair from the driver’s seat—Sansa. Bran must be on the passenger side. “I think you’re lying but I won’t press the issue. But if you want to talk later, I am still here you know. Just because I’m a vampire doesn’t mean I stopped being your friend, Dany.”

“I know.” She does know. She just wishes things weren’t so complicated. “It’s just…it’s been a long night.”

A long night with no end in sight. She can still smell the smoke in her hair, on her clothes, clinging to her skin. She really does want nothing more than to go home and go to sleep and shut out everything about this wretched night.

However, outside of the car, she notices that none of the Starks have moved toward the front door of their house. As Dany and Margaery walk up to the small cluster of siblings, she sees that Bran has rolled down the window on the passenger side of the car and is speaking to his brothers and sister in low tones. When he sees them approach, he shakes his head before nodding to the front door.

“I’ll be in shortly.” He gives Rickon a flat look, which the younger vampire returns with an incorrigible grin. “I’m going to take a look at the police scanner for more information. It’ll take me a while to deal with my chair anyway.”

"I need to call the hospital about my grandmother," Margaery whispers to Dany, gesturing to her phone. "I'll be right in."

Dany nods absently and notices that the lights are on in the manor, a warm glow from beyond thick drapes that bleeds into the blue-dark night. Gravel crunches beneath her heeled sandals as she looks across the sprawling wings of the manor. She cannot smell anything in the humid night air except the sweet scent of old jasmine and the faint whiff of smoke from the burning Lannister mansion several miles away. Considering how her night has been going, she fully expects the entire ancient manor to go up in flames the moment she steps up onto the porch.

Instead, a different sort of trepidation goes down her spine as Robb reaches for the front door with his keys…and swings it open instead.

“We locked it when we left,” Sansa murmurs. The tall redhead turns to her older brother. “Didn’t you tell Jon to come back here? What with the fire?”

“I did,” Robb says, his gaze momentarily skittering toward Dany. “Has anyone been able to get a hold of him? Or Arya? They should still have their phones on them.”

But Dany ignores him and that strange look he has given her. Her phone is buried and melted somewhere in the ruins of the Lannister mansion and it’s not like she has been in a hurry to call Jon after everything she has learned tonight. Instead, her gaze travels past Robb’s shoulder into the dim recesses of the hallway just beyond as the door continues to swing open. It is all familiar, with the old and plush rugs and the parlor off to the right and…and…

There is a roar in her head as they all see it at the same time.

Missandei.

“No,” Dany hears herself breathe, exhaustion forgotten, before she is running past Robb and the threshold to the manor to kneel next to her best friend’s sprawled body. A small pool of blood gathers around Missandei’s head, a dark bruise forming at her temple. Her neck is sticky with blood but Dany can’t see any signs of a bite mark. Swallowing back dread and panic, she places her hand on the other young woman’s cheek, lightly tapping it, praying and hoping and oh god oh god please please please. “Missy! Missy, wake up!”

A long terrible moment passes, the edge of the abyss and the terrible things below. And then to her relief, her friend’s brow wrinkles slightly before she blearily blinks her eyes open.

“…Dany?”

“Oh my god,” Dany whispers before leaning down to wrap her friend in a hug, unbothered by the blood that stains her white dress. “Missy, what happened?”

“Dany, you’re…how did you…?”

“Jon!”

Dany lifts her head away from the embrace, helping a shaky Missandei sit up. But she also glances farther down the hall toward the entrance to the parlor, just in time to see Sansa vanish into the room with Robb on her heels. She notices that the light coming from the room seems…off. The feeling of cold uneasiness does not disappear from where it is still tightly coiled in her heart and she turns back to Missandei.

“Can you stand?” Missandei nods and with some difficulty, Dany helps her friend rise unsteadily to her feet. “What happened? Did Ygritte do this?”

Missandei shakes her head and Rickon, who is standing at the entrance to the parlor, grimaces. He says, his voice empty of its usual buoyant humor, “I don’t think Ygritte is going to be doing anything ever again.”

What does that mean, Dany wonders as she helps her friend toward the living room and the promise of a couch to sit down on. But when she reaches Rickon, the roar in her head returns as she takes in the disastrous scene before her, the ruin of the evening chasing after Dany like a voracious, all-consuming shadow.

The parlor is wrecked. Paintings on the wall are askew or have been knocked to the floor. End tables have been overturned. Jewel-toned lamps roll on their sides, illuminating the walls with strangely shifting shadows. There is a grey and mottled body slumped over the arm of one of the couches and it takes Dany a long moment to realize that the blue eyes that stare blindly and blankly at her from across the room belong to Ygritte. The jolt of shock that runs through her is barely enough to register the wooden stake protruding from her chest.

A wooden stake can’t kill an Original. Does its job just fine for the rest of us.

She is dead.

Her grip tightens around Missandei’s waist. Robb and Sansa kneel next to Jon’s prone body. He lies crumpled in the debris of the coffee table that had once been settled between the two couches. Splinters and shards of shattered glass litter the rug. There is no stake in his heart but he is also not moving. Robb is checking his cousin over and she sees his jaw clench before he rocks back on his haunches.

“Broken neck,” Robb mutters into the silence that has suffocated the room (and Dany truly wonders at the sort of life she is living now when that information is considered a relief, knowing that Jon is merely unconscious instead of severely injured). The vampire turns to look at Ygritte’s corpse, running a hand through his auburn curls. “What the hell happened here?”

“Did you see what happened?” Dany asks Missandei in a low whisper, trying to smother the desire to rush to Jon’s side to try waking him up. Missandei shakes her head, her face drawn and strained with exhaustion.

“No.” Her best friend wavers against Dany’s embrace, her eyes fixed on Jon and Ygritte. “Ygritte was here. Jon wasn’t. We came here after the explosion. I thought…your phone, you weren’t answering…and then you were at the door and you were fine. You told me Vis had gone home with Ashara, that someone wanted you dead. But then…”

“I am fine,” Dany starts to say, confused, but Missandei is already shaking her head.

“Something happened. The spirits were screaming at me and then…I don’t remember. It all fades.”

Dany’s mind races.

She does not believe in coincidences. Not anymore. She had briefly chalked the night’s earlier explosion as a mere accident. It is not unheard of for gas leaks and open flames to take out houses. By itself, it might have merely been a case of terrible timing. But with the knowledge of all that has been happening in town, the phone call she received, and now the attack on the Stark manor, with Ygritte, a living supernatural almanac, dead…

The noose is tightening. The noose is tightening and despite her being at the center of the storm, she can do nothing about it.

“What do you think?” Rickon asks over his shoulder and Dany sees that Bran is wheeling himself down the front hall. She hadn’t even heard him come through the front door. She watches as the dark-haired vampire passes by the blood-stained rug where Missandei had been a few minutes earlier and approaches them, pausing at the top of the stairs leading down into the parlor. He takes one look at the wrecked room and at Jon and Ygritte’s bodies before he pulls out his phone, tapping away at it in silence for several moments.

Finally, he curses beneath his breath in the same tongue she has heard Jon use on occasion.

“There’s a glitch in the cameras. There’s footage of Ygritte and Missandei entering the manor but then it cuts out.”

“Is there someone out there who can surprise an Original?” Dany asks, glancing back at Jon’s unmoving form. Despite her fury toward him just a few hours earlier, anxiety still wraps around her heart like a vice at seeing him like this. “Jon should have been able to sense if someone was trying to spring a trap, right?”

“An older vampire, maybe,” Sansa says, smoothing her cousin’s hair back. But the look she gives Dany is one of cold mistrust and barely concealed frustration. “But if he was distracted by something, then maybe even a human could have. His heart is all caught up with you and after tonight, he wouldn’t have been thinking clearly.” Dany stiffens.

“Are you saying what happened was my fault? That I actually wanted to almost get killed tonight?”

“That wasn’t your fault. But he’s distracted because of you.”

“He’s not distracted—”

“It’s not a secret that you’re sleeping together.”

Silence drops into the room like a stone. Robb gives Sansa a briefly chastising look before shaking his head. Rickon lets out a low whistle, shoving his hands into his pockets as he looks up at the darkened ceiling of the parlor. Bran shoots Dany an apologetic look, his face illuminated by his phone screen. But no one seems surprised. If anything, they are all reacting as if they’ve known about the affair for a very long time and simply didn’t want her to know that they knew.

Dany feels an angry and humiliated flush rise up her neck and into her cheeks. As if this fucking night couldn’t get any worse.

“What does it matter?” she asks Sansa curtly. “Jon’s feelings for me have nothing to do with what happened tonight.”

“Are you truly asking me that?” Sansa gracefully rises to her feet, her ice-blue eyes full of a glacial fury. “After everything you’ve learned about us, about him, you’re wondering why you—looking like you do—are a distraction for him. You must be the most blind and arrogant human I have met in these past one thousand years. You are more like her than you know.”

“Sansa, don’t,” Robb warns. “This isn’t Dany’s fault. She’s not Daenerys.”

“Ygritte is dead, Robb! What makes you think that whoever was behind that wouldn’t have also killed Jon?” She looks down at her older brother, her pale features rigid with an emotion that Dany can see that she is struggling to wrestle down. “We have been so cautious all of these years. What if it’s a Hunter? Too many people know about us here and it’s entirely because of her!”

“She’s the doppelgänger though,” argues Rickon. “She kinda has to know about us. Does it matter that she and Jon are sleeping together? It’s not gonna matter in the end anyway.”

What does that mean? Dany hears Missandei’s sharp intake of breath and she can feel the pounding in her head grow more intense. She closes her eyes, willing the screaming voice in her mind to go silent, to just stop, to let her breathe, to recenter herself. She is tired and she wants none of this but everything burns tonight. Flame and home, secrets and dignity—it is all turning to ash.

I don’t love him, she tells herself, even as she hears Jon start to come to with a muffled groan. He was—is—my friend. That is all there is to this. It will be over soon. It will be over soon and they will all be gone and everyone will be safe. I need them to be safe. I need—

“Well. This is quite a scene.”

The voice behind her is oddly familiar and when she turns to see a woman standing behind her in the hall, a grimacing Arya Stark and a quietly confused Margaery Tyrell behind her, it takes her a very long moment to realize why. She stares at the dark-haired woman with her quicksilver eyes and her black shearling coat, the knowing smile bringing back memories of cold blind terror and a man falling silently to his death.

Unlike some people, I clean up the messes that I make.

Impossible. This is impossible. “You.”

“Me,” the vampire agrees. But her gaze is on something beyond Dany’s shoulder and that smile on her beautiful and timeless features becomes a shade warmer, a fraction sadder. “I hope you realize that this is not how I wanted to see you again after all this time, my dearest. But I’m afraid it can’t be helped. The queen is rather dramatic with her timing, as you have found out. And it seems that she is less than pleased that you have decided to carry on an affair with a girl who shares her face.”

The woman’s words and her very presence are a shockwave through the room. Dany can sense it. It is cold electricity against her skin. She doesn’t understand the meaning of it, but she knows if she turns back around, she will see that the Starks are staring at the new arrival with the same startled and unsettled expression as the one on Arya’s face.

But from the demolished wreckage of the parlor, it is Jon’s strained and broken voice that breaks through the fog of her own shock.

“…Mother?”

Mother.

Mother.

The vampire who had delivered to Dany a warning of death and bloody retribution, who had watched a man walk to his death from atop the Hightower, who had compelled Ashara to stab herself in the stomach with a knife to do nothing more than prove a point of her influence to Dany…

…that same vampire is Jon’s mother.

Everything we do, Miss Dayne, we do for the people we love.

Even the monsters of the world protect their own, even if it is to protect them from themselves.

Oh.

Oh, fucking hell.

The door to the manse swings open, the night encircling the visitor in a blue-black cloak of star-spattered shadow. The woman standing beyond the threshold frowns.

“What do you want?”

“Who says I want anything?” When the witch frowns in disapproval, the visitor only smiles. She is dressed in rich silk brocades of an eastern noblewoman and though she wears a hooded cloak that obscures much of her face in shadow, she is very clearly Westerosi. She runs long, slim fingers along the doorframe and the runes deeply engraved on it, Valyrian words that have quickly formed the base of a dying language. How many centuries has it been since people even commonly spoke a bastard version of the language?

More and more still. Everything passes. Everything dies. Except… “Kinvara, you have known me for decades. What I want has never changed in all that time. It is the same as it was yesterday and it will be the same until your bones turn to dust. So indulge me for a moment.”

The witch, Kinvara, silently continues to study the visitor. Then, she shakes her head. “He was here a year ago.”

“How was he?” She tries not to let the desperate note weave through her curiosity. Even after all these centuries, when it comes to Jon, she cannot help the overwhelming fear that consumes her when she thinks of him. He is never far from her heart, even after all this time. “He and the others can walk in the daylight now because of you. How convenient for you that they are so loath to reveal their secrets even to other vampires.”

“It was a kindness done for him,” Kinvara replies testily, disapproval straining the edges of her mouth. “It has nothing to do with you.”

“My humanity—“

“Your humanity exists for him only,” Kinvara interrupts with one darkly raised brow. When the visitor doesn’t immediately respond to the observation, the witch gives her a pitying look. “The spirits whisper. There is the guilt that hounds you and will always hound you. Why do you think Nature turned to you for a balance?”

This time, she can’t bite back her fury. She snarls, “How is Nature any less vindictive than the spell that caused all of this in the first place? Nature creates a balance through damnation. It would make me a counterweight to everything Jon is.”

“Nature acts and reacts. Melisandre broke the rules of Nature with the immortality spell and so Nature reacted to balance out her foolishness.” Kinvara sighs. “What may have occurred is not your fault but it is your burden to bear.”

“Just as it is Jon’s?”

“Jon has a good heart,” the witch says softly. “Everything that could have made him cruel has instead made him compassionate. You know this. He will find a way to undo this spell, even if it kills him.”

There is a sharp pang in her chest at Kinvara’s words. She does know this. She has always known this. Ned had raised Jon, she thinks bitterly, because his mother, a foolish and starry-eyed girl who had run away with a prince rather than face the expectations of motherhood, had not. Ned’s honor lives on in him and she knows there is not a single part of him that he would not give to protect his family, especially after what he perceives as the greatest harm he enacted toward them—a love so deep that it would invoke blood magic to keep it eternal.

“I do not want him to die,” the visitor replies. “What can I do to keep him alive?”

“It is not in your power to keep him alive. You both received immortality. In him is the power to extend that curse to others. In you is the power to end it—it is your thirst, your hunger, the thing that drives you. Nature will have its balance.”

“I won’t. Not anymore. Tell me how to save him.”

“You will. You cannot help yourself.” Kinvara steps back into the silent shadows of the manse. “I cannot help you save him.”

She can feel her temper lick at her heart, feel her despair threaten to swallow her whole. She has lived with this for centuries now, ever since those dark days when an ancient and terrible magic soaked into the blood of the Starks and the Targaryens, and Nature, determined to preserve a balance, made sure the spell would have a failsafe. She knows that there must be a way to undo it—but until then, Nature has given part of the balancing scales to her.

And so she cannot see him. She will never be able to see him. Not until then.

“Do you think I won’t break the world open to keep him safe?” The visitor’s voice is quiet now. She reaches up to gently touch the amulet hanging from her neck. A stem blooming with a flower the color of the violet night is encased within the small oval glass. Kinvara’s eyes follow the movement of her hand, her expression shifting to one of wary caution. “Do you think we will let Nature dictate what we will do?”

She steps to the side…and in the night there is a sharp twang. A bolt blossoms from the middle of Kinvara’s chest. The witch has only a moment to look surprised before her legs fold beneath her and she collapses on the threshold of the manse, eyes staring blindly up at the night sky. She can feel the hum of protection around the manse sputter and die with its owner’s death, the magic seeping back into the earth, fickle and broken.

“Nothing?” a voice behind her asks. She does not look up. Instead, she kneels next to the witch’s corpse, watching in vague fascination as crimson blood begins to trickle across the stone. She reaches out to touch it, letting her fingers skim through the blood before she brings her fingertips up to her lips. The blood is still hot, still decadent with the magic that had flowed through the witch’s veins. She can feel her thirst surge forward, desperate.

“Nothing,” she finally echoes before rising and turning to the man standing behind her. He is wielding a crossbow that he slowly lowers as he approaches her. “I’m sure the magic will move on.” The man reaches out to run a thumb along her bottom lip.

“We’ll need to tell Daenerys.” She scoffs.

“In a few weeks. There is other business we need to take care of here first.” Still, she cannot stave off the weariness that clamors through her, even as she drags her bloodthirst back under control. She leans into the man’s waiting embrace, laying her head against his chest. “I don’t want this life for him.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she can hear him breathe into her hair. “Even if it takes centuries.”

“He’s our son, Rhaegar,” Lyanna Stark says. “We owe him that and more.”

“I know.”

Between them, the glass amulet containing the wolfsbane, the mark of the Hunter, is cold.

The door to the hospital room swings open.

“I’m fine,” Viserys begins, already feeling his frayed temper start to unravel more. Ashara has already left, shooed out by nurses who told her that Vis will be released in the morning and that they both need to get a good night’s sleep after what they’ve been through. The whole evening has left him feeling out of sorts and irritable. But he stops when he sees who is standing in the doorway. “Visiting hours are over.”

The young woman standing in the doorway, dressed all in form-fitting black and red, smiles at him. It looks…strange, for some reason. Her silver-gold hair, the same color as his, is half-pulled up into an intricate crown of braids, the other half cascading over her shoulders. They must have pumped him full of useless drugs, Vis thinks sourly, because he could have sworn that his sister had been dressed all in white tonight. He turns an annoyed glare to the drip he’s attached to. Fucking hospitals.

But when he turns to look back at the young woman, she is already standing by the side of his bed. He damn near jumps. “What the hell, Dany?” His sister smiles.

“You’re the older brother, aren’t you?” When Vis only scowls at the question, the smile widens. “My name is Daenerys. I was hoping you’d deliver a message to your little sister for me.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What message?”

His sister leans in…and only then does he see the sclera of her eyes drown in crimson, black veins spiraling out from her eyes like some horribly distorted mirror of the younger sister he has always known. He jolts back—but not far enough, not quick enough, not with the stranger’s sudden vice-like grip on his wrist.

“I have the grimoire.”

Then her wrist is against his mouth and there is something warm and metallic on his tongue and he tries to jerk away from the taste of blood—it must be blood, what the hell is going on, what the hell, what the hell—but then the woman, the vampire wearing his sister’s face, reaches forward, that same cruel and demonic smile still on her lips, and the world has become white and red and it is breaking and he can’t breathe and what the hell is going on and there is a crushing weight on his chest and he can’t breathe he can’t breathe and he claws at the air, trying, fighting, but it feels like he is drowning, and there is still blood on his lips and the crushing weight grows and grows and grows and…he can’t breathe…he can’t…he…

Before darkness floods through him, the last words echo through his head like the bell ringing at the end of the world.

I have the grimoire.

Chapter Text

The storm has quieted by the time the riders arrive at Winterfell, the stronghold’s familiar stone walls sitting black and immense and imposing against the night. In the storm’s place, the velvet sky is luminous with ice-bright stars. Moonglow rims the low, bloated storm clouds in silver. The hills and valleys of the north are blanketed by a brilliant white canopy, the snow along the kingsroad trodden down by the tiny caravan of wind-blistered riders that approach Winterfell now. Warm breath hangs like gossamer, pale and fleeting, as the snorting and fatigued horses pass below the main gate of the keep. A cream-and-brown direwolf races ahead of them, silent as a secret.

As they enter the inner courtyard and stablehands surround them to tend to the steeds, the youngest of the riders quickly dismounts his horse. He is the only one of the group wearing the grey and white of House Stark, an iron direwolf sigil pinned to his cloak—the others wear the red-and-black livery and the fearsome three-headed dragon of House Targaryen. The panting direwolf that has been trotting alongside them on the road approaches his master, the huge beast’s head coming to the tall youth’s hip the moment his booted feet touch the frozen ground.

Looking around the courtyard, the young man spots the people he is searching for and a relieved smile crosses his face. The ride north has been hounded by nightmares, of the unknown span of possibilities that drove him away from the capital in the first place. The queen had told him his siblings had sent an urgent request for his presence back home. With his family knowing that he would have just arrived in the capital, he could only surmise that something terrible at happened for them to call him back and for them not to tell him more details. Sick worry over the worst-case scenarios poisoned his dreams in the leagues separating the capital and Winterfell.

Now, he hurries toward where his eldest brother and sister are waiting for him, dozens of questions on the tip of his tongue…but he slows as he gets closer when he sees the twin looks of disconcerted surprise on their face. His smile becomes hesitant, confused.

They do not look as though they expected him.

Something is wrong, he suddenly thinks. He knows something must be wrong, but not in the way he has been expecting. Now that he has stopped to realize it, he knows that Summer, the direwolf at his side, can smell it in the air. There is a pungent scent of fear and uncertainty that hangs in the cold night.

“I received your message in the capital,” he finally says slowly, hoping for his siblings to dispel this tension. “I sent you all a raven at White Harbor. Did it not arrive?”

His oldest brother and sister share looks. It does not help.

Then Robb says, “No, we didn’t receive a raven. And we didn’t send you one either.” Still, a pleasant smile crosses his face, a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes—he recognizes it as the mummer’s mask that it is, a trick to fool anyone else watching. He pulls his little brother into a fierce hug. “It’s good to have you back home, Bran.”

When he pulls away, Sansa wraps him in a hug as well, though her eyes are still disquieted. She murmurs into his ear, “We must talk at once. Jon is not here, and we don’t know what’s happened.”

Not here? It seems innocuous enough, but Bran feels something like ice form in the pit of his belly. What does that mean that Jon is not here? He gives both of his siblings a wary, worried look but they only shake their heads, clearly reluctant to speak of it out in the open with dozens of listening ears. So he nods shakily, beginning to peel off his fur-lined gloves.

“It’s been a long ride,” he says courteously, though it feels as though his words might very well trip over his tongue. “I’m sure these men would appreciate a meal and a bed.” Robb nods in agreement, suddenly every inch the lord of Winterfell as he turns to the men who have accompanied Bran north from the capital, greeting them with warmth and candor.

It’s not until much later in the night, when the men of the Targaryen guard have been shown to their guest chambers and orders for food and hot baths have been directed to be sent to them, that Bran finds out what is going on.

“He never came back home,” Robb tells him quietly. The Stark brothers sit scattered about in Father’s old study, the fire in the hearth blazing brightly and warmly against the frozen night air that bristles beyond the walls of the castle. His oldest brother finishes lighting another tallow candle with the flame of another before he places both on the sturdy old desk, the flickering light turning his dark auburn hair into a molten crown. His expression is perturbed. “The maester at Moat Cailin sent us a raven, telling us that Jon had turned around upon receiving a message from the capital. A message from you.”

Bran blinks. He holds a cup of mulled wine in his hand but he has scarcely sipped it. His stomach is too tied up in knots. “I never sent a raven to Moat Cailin. Why would I do that?”

Rickon, who is sitting on the floor near the fireplace, runs his fingers through Shaggy’s ruff, his nose wrinkling with a frown. The youngest of the Stark siblings, his hair a riot of messy copper curls, looks as though he has likely been pulled from the dredges of sleep. However, his surliness had dissipated with that inevitable swiftness of youth once he’d been told that Bran’s arrival was the cause of his interrupted sleep.

“So you didn’t tell Jon that you or the queen were in danger?” When Bran only shakes his head, utterly baffled by the question, Robb’s frown only darkens.

At that moment, there is a quiet but firm knock on the door before it swings open to reveal Sansa. Behind her, to Bran’s surprise, is Arya. As far as he has known, his youngest sister should have been over in Braavos for another year. He is both thrilled to see her after so long—and utterly confused by her presence. As he leaps to his feet and crosses over to the door to embrace her, he hears Robb tell Sansa, “Bran says he didn’t send a raven to Jon.”

“Then I suppose that means he didn’t send one to Arya either,” Sansa murmurs, and Bran pulls away from his youngest sister in surprise. She gives him a grim smile.

“You didn’t, did you?” she asks.

“Why is everyone asking me that? I haven’t sent anything to anyone.” When his siblings only give him concerned frowns, Bran shakes his head. “Why would I tell Jon—or Arya—that the queen was in danger? Why would I tell him I was in danger? I was coming home because you all sent me a raven. I thought something terrible had happened here.”

“Nothing has happened here,” Rickon replies carefully, his usual surly mischievousness sobering. “In fact, it has been quite boring here until you rode up out of nowhere tonight.”

“And my message didn’t say you or the queen were in danger,” Arya clarifies before she perches on the edge of their father’s old desk. Unlike Sansa, she is not dressed in the garb of a lady of her station. Her dark hair, so much like his and Jon’s, is cut short at the shoulders and he sees what he thinks is a blade at her hip. “I only just arrived home a few days past. I received a raven about a month ago saying to return to Winterfell urgently. That someone threatened Jon and there might be war soon.”

This is not right. Bran knows it. He can feel it in his bones. Too many messages that none of them has sent. Too much conflicting information. It concerns him in a way that sends goosepimples racing down his arms.

“Where is Jon?” Bran asks, though he is starting to think that he doesn’t want to know the answer. His brothers and sisters trade grim looks and that is all that he needs to know. Fear pinpricks his skin, even in the heat of the room. “He went to the capital, didn’t he? When you said he turned around…he’s there. He’s in King’s Landing.”

It is unfathomable. Everyone in the realm knows that Jon is Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark’s son, the product of an illicit affair that had nearly torn the realm in two. He would have been the heir to the throne his father abandoned—if a throne had been left standing after the war. It had only been because Father promised to keep Jon north of the Neck, to give him a bastard’s name, to swear the North would never challenge the crown, that finally settled the warring realm, that had secured Daenerys’s claim to the throne.

But twenty-some years is a long time beneath the rule of a king gradually succumbing to madness. Men with long memories and short tempers had killed Father because of the oaths he swore so long ago to keep Jon away from the throne. Jon’s very presence in the south is an open declaration of rebellion in some people’s eyes. Even going to Darry on their slow trek south had been a terrible risk.

Of all his siblings, Bran is certain he is the only one who knows that Jon is in love with Daenerys, and she with him. But even a marriage between the two of them would not be able to soothe old festering wounds between the north and the south. Would Jon have risked it all to be with her?

He doesn’t think so—but he might have risked it if he thought for an instant that Bran was in danger.

“Have we heard anything from Jon?” Bran asks quietly, dismayed. Who would have sent a message in his name, bringing Arya home and sending Jon hurtling south?

“Nothing since Moat Cailin,” Robb says. His older brother leans against the desk, the weight of uncertainty hanging over all of their heads like a noose. “Someone is playing a game here, I think. Jon shouldn’t have gone south of the Neck. Arya shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here either, Bran.”

But he is here. It makes little sense.

“I think,” Sansa says after a long tense moment, placing a placating hand on her brother’s shoulder, “we will find no answers tonight. Someone has lured Jon south and wants the rest of us in Winterfell. Who even knows if the messages are from the same people? But I doubt we’ll discover the answers tonight, not at this hour. We should get some rest and speak more in the morning.”

“Do you think someone is trying to start a war?” The question only gives voice to what they are all thinking and Bran winces, giving Arya a look. To his surprise, her grey-blue gaze is already fixed on him, her expression unreadable. She continues, “It won’t take much.”

“We need to be careful how we react,” Robb tells them, shaking his head. “We don’t know enough. If Jon can get back north safely, then perhaps we’ll find out this is nothing more than a misunderstanding. If not…”

He trails off. The silence in the room is choking.

Robb’s words continue to echo through Bran’s mind as he walks back to his bedchamber. Every flickering shadow on the wall is a secret, every sputter of flames a whisper of danger. He cannot help the guilt that sits within him, even though he knows he never sent messages to Jon or to the rest of his family. Yet someone, using his name, seems intent on setting the realm aflame with the ghostly torch of the old war. What if Bran had stayed in the capital? What if he had sent his own raven back to Winterfell to confirm something was truly wrong?

Bran pauses at a window in the hall, a torch dancing merrily in its sconce next to it, sending amber shadows dancing across the melting silver shadows of moonlight. He bows his head with a sigh before saying, “You’re following me.”

Arya, quiet as a mouse, slips next to him, leaning against the cold stone of the sill, and crosses her arms. If he hadn’t stopped, he is sure he never would have noticed his sister trailing after him. He has no idea what she has learned across the Narrow Sea and now seems a particularly terrible time to ask.

Still, he waits patiently until Arya finally fixes him with a sidelong look. “You know something.”

Bran sighs. Of course she’d notice. “Not like that.”

“Like what then?” When Bran doesn’t immediately answer, Arya narrows her eyes. “What is going on in the capital, Bran? What aren’t you saying?”

“It’s not…” He trails off and shakes his head. Then, lowering his voice, he says quietly, “He loves her. And she loves him.”

Arya falls silent. Her eyes only widen slightly in surprise, so it is clearly information she was not privy to (how could she be, having been gone in Braavos for so long) but she absorbs it with a quiet seriousness that he had not expected. He watches her momentarily chew on her bottom lip, a leftover trait from childhood. She says, “Are you sure?”

Bran thinks of the looks Jon and the queen exchanged when they thought no one was looking. He thinks of the carefully constructed air of respectful distance that existed between them all during the queen’s visit to Winterfell and during the trip south. He thinks of the stolen kisses he’d seen through Summer’s eyes, of whispered desire that had made his cheeks burn.

“I’m sure.” When Arya’s brow only crinkles, he adds, “But he wouldn’t have risked it. He loves her but he wouldn’t have thrown the realm into war because of it. And Robb won’t call the banners until he knows for sure where Jon is.”

Arya frowns. “I can go south. I can find him.”

“Arya—”

“If I leave tomorrow and ride hard, I can be in the capital within a fortnight.” When Bran feels his face pinch in consternation, Arya puts a hand on his arm. For once, she looks very, very young. “He’s our brother, Bran. And I think…I think we both know who sent those messages if what you say is true. We can’t let him get hurt. We can’t let this happen.”

She’s right. He knows she’s right. Yet… “Robb will never agree to it.”

“What Robb doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Arya replies with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, though she quickly sobers. “We have no time to wait and see, Bran. I’ll go south. I’ll find him and bring him home.”

He wants to go with her. They might delay whatever trouble is brewing if he returns to the capital to say the message was a mistake. But he knows it is Arya’s tendency toward anonymity, her skill of being able to so easily melt in the shadows, that will stop this all from spiraling. He nods. “You’re right. But you have to be safe. You have to be careful. Jon may already be in the capital. We can’t…Father and Mother are already gone. I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

Arya’s smile is faint. “They’ll have to catch me first.”

If only we had more time, Bran thinks despairingly, glancing out the window. Somewhere beyond the walls of the castle, he hears the wolves howl. Perhaps we would keep the entire realm from falling to one of the seven hells. Perhaps we could find another way.

With Arya by his side, he turns away from the window. Behind him, the winter winds continue to blow black and cold through the walled fortress that is their home.

And arching overhead like an omen, a darkly golden comet, the dark sister to the red one, rends the sky in two.

It is nearly two in the morning.

Or so Dany thinks. Her phone is still buried beneath the smoldering ruins of the Lannister mansion on the opposite side of town, likely melted into slag. But she has spent too many nights this summer dealing with absurd and life-altering situations on the wrong side of midnight. The blackest hours of the night have almost become dear companions at this point, the fatigue weighing her bones down just as familiar. The sharp scents of pine and citrus and blood and the dusty odor of age wrap around her like a cloak, beckoning her to sleep.

But Dany feels too alert, buoyant from the shocks that have roiled through this evening to even be tempted to rest. Too much has happened. Too much might still happen. Her nerves feel as though they have been shredded into bloody strips.

She watches as the Oldtown vampire walks toward the liquor cabinet in the parlor, opening the door to remove a decanter and a snifter. Her coat has been tossed onto the couch and her black curls, so much like her son’s, cascade over pale shoulders bare from her turtleneck. She pours herself a healthy amount of liquor and then turns to face the others in the room.

“The Tyrells and the Lannisters would die if they knew the vintages you all had here,” the vampire says with such casualness that it feels almost surreal. She takes a sip of the brandy in her glass and smiles. “Though I suppose at least one Tyrell knows already. No accounting for Robb’s taste, of course.”

Robb isn’t present. He, Margaery, and Rickon have taken Ygritte’s grey and mottled corpse out back to burn it. But Missandei, who sits next to Dany on the hardwood stairs leading down into the parlor, stiffens at her side. Neither of them say anything. Dany is still trying to wrap her head around everything that she’s been told these past several minutes.

Learning that her parents had known of Starfall’s history with vampires had been bad enough. The explosion at the Lannister mansion, she had thought, would have been enough to cap the evening. For her to return to the Stark manor and find out that Ygritte was dead, that the person who had tried to kill Ashara weeks ago is Jon’s mother, and that the original vampire herself, the young woman who shares Dany’s face and name, is alive (figurately speaking) and well had been an overload of information.

The only person who looks to be going through a worse night than her is Jon.

The dark-haired vampire is sitting on the couch next to Arya, his head in his hands. Arya keeps shooting her aunt pointed looks of frustration that the other vampire shrugs off. Neither Sansa’s cold frowns nor Bran’s worried glances seem to affect her either.

“You all truly have grown up since the last time I saw you,” she says, as though this is nothing more than a normal family visit. She gives Bran a longer look than others and then smiles as though she knows some sort of secret. “You always were the clever one, weren’t you, Bran? Daenerys was always able to spot that sort of talent.”

“Lyanna…” Bran begins, looking pained. But she is already whirling around to face Dany with a smile on her face so much unlike her son’s that she has to assume he got his quiet, self-effacing smile from his unnamed father.

“I just realized we haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Lyanna. As you might have guessed, Jon is my son.”

Dany wants to throw something.

“This has been an exciting night, hasn’t it?” Lyanna continues, glancing around the parlor with false interest. “Far more exciting than I would have planned for, but Daenerys does love making an entran—”

“Why are you here?” Dany interrupts her. The Starks still seem as though they are trying to digest their aunt’s presence and Dany’s already notoriously short temper is frayed by everything that has happened tonight. “And not just here in this house. Why are you here in Starfall?” Lyanna hums thoughtfully before taking another sip of her brandy. She drums her fingernails along the glass, filling the silence with a staccato beat.

“Ah, there’s that famous Targaryen temper.” Lyanna smiles. “I saw a glimpse of it in Oldtown. No wonder Jon is so taken with you.”

She does not want to think about that right now. She does not want to think about what Daenerys’s sudden reappearance in Jon’s life means for them. She buries down the burning dread that threatens to claw its way into her already exhausted mind and says, “You’re avoiding my question.”

“So I am.” Lyanna laughs quietly before propping a hip against the back of one of the couches. She looks thoughtful, letting her gaze wander from Dany to her son and then back again. “You know, I did warn you all those weeks ago about getting involved with this family. I respect that Jon cares about you but it would have saved you quite a bit of heartache if you had simply stepped out of this nonsense while your involvement was still minimal.”

“You compelled Ashara to nearly kill herself!”

“Only after you decided to be stubborn about helping my son and my wayward nieces and nephews.” Lyanna’s smile is faint. “And she survived, didn’t she? If I wanted to make an impact, I would have had her cut her throat. Far more efficient. Hemorrhaging from the carotid artery usually means death within minutes. A stomach wound is a much slower death. Fortunately for you, your older brother isn’t as useless as he appears.”

“Dany…” Missandei’s voice is quiet with warning. But Dany thinks that it’s not like she needs to worry. What the hell is she going to do? She has no idea how to kill an Original. But gods help her, if she did, she wouldn’t care if this is Jon’s mother—she’d kill her.

“So you came here to warn me again?” Dany says slowly, her voice low and dangerous. “To threaten me?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Lyanna laughs. It is a strangely sweet sound and it only makes Dany shudder. She feels Missandei’s grip tighten on her arm. She hates this. She hates all of this. She wants to scream at the dark-haired vampire. She wants to drive a stake through her heart, just as had been done to Ygritte. But she can’t. She can do nothing of the sort because it will likely only end up with her as dead as Lyanna may have intended Ashara to be.

It is Jon’s voice that cuts through the rising tension though.

“You’ve been around all this time.” It is not a question and even though Jon’s northern brogue is flat, Dany can still hear the edges of hurt accusation in it. She turns to him and sees that his head is still in his hands, Arya seemingly doing all of his glaring for him. “You’ve been around for a thousand years and you never said anything. You never came to any of us, never let any of us know you were alive.”

His mother is quiet for a moment and when Dany looks back at her, she sees what she might almost call regret flicker briefly across Lyanna’s face. But it is gone too quickly to be sure and the woman lifts a shoulder in a nonchalant shrug.

“I wasn’t a part of your life for a long time before any of this happened. Ned and Catelyn raised you far better than I would have been able to.” But then she sighs, waving her hand negligently. “Besides, I haven’t stayed away exactly. I was following Nature’s directive to keep a balance.”

Dany notices Missandei stiffen at that. She gives her friend a puzzled look but Missandei only shakes her head, a perplexed light in her eyes. Dany knows that as Daenerys’s doppelgänger, her existence itself is Nature’s idea of a balance. She is not sure how Lyanna herself also fits that criteria. She wants to ask, but there is a larger part of her that wants nothing to do with this woman.

And when Lyanna glibly notes, “You all should thank me—the only reason you’re alive is because Daenerys never counted on me still being alive,” it is all Dany can do to not spit fire.

“You were alive all this time,” Jon says quietly. “You knew Daenerys was alive. And you never thought to tell me. You never thought once, in a thousand years, that I should know.”

“No. I didn’t.” Lyanna straightens. “I honestly didn’t see how it was relevant to the person you became. My god, you were so in love with her. You would have repeated the same mistakes your father and I made, plunged the whole realm into war because of one another. It is probably for the best you had a thousand years without her to think about that relationship.”

Her eyes skate over to Dany. “Though I suppose you’re not quite as over it as you thought.”

“God,” Arya mutters scathingly, shooting her aunt a look that might kill her if she wasn’t already dead. “Were you always such a bitch?”

“Oh, don’t look for redeeming qualities in me, little wolf. I don’t have any. Not anymore. Unlike some people, I understand the freedom that comes with turning off your humanity. You all are the ones who are still trying to be human, even after a thousand years. It’s pathetic, to be honest.” The dark-haired vampire finishes off her brandy before placing the glass on a nearby table. “But I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m sure Daenerys will tell you all about it once she’s done fuming. I only want the ring.”

Daenerys’s ring. Daario’s ring. Dany shares a look with Missandei and then the witch says, “Why?” Lyanna rolls her eyes.

“It doesn’t matter why. It just matters that Daenerys wants it and I am going to get it for her.”

Missandei still has the ring, Dany knows. But how much does Lyanna know? There is no one she could have possibly compelled to reveal the location. Daario had given it to Vis for some reason and then Vis had given it to her and then she had given it to Missandei. With all of Missandei’s spells, there surely isn’t a way for Lyanna to retrieve it now.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jon rise to his feet. His grey gaze, that shimmering quicksilver that she wants to curse herself for not recognizing in Lyanna’s eyes, is full of a winter storm, cold and raging and furious. But he says nothing more than, “You should leave.”

“Really?” An elegant dark brow lifts in vague amusement. “Weren’t you just saying how disappointed you were that I vanished from your life for centuries?”

“We don’t have the ring, Lyanna.” Sansa smoothly interrupts. Despite her anger toward Dany earlier, her voice is now diplomatically cool—but even Dany can see the disdain with which she looks at her aunt. “Even if we did, I doubt this conversation would encourage us to give it to you. It’s best that you leave now.”

Lyanna looks from one unfriendly face to another, that laughing amusement still causing her eyes to sparkle mischievously. She lets out that pretty laugh again before rolling her eyes and reaching for her coat. As she shrugs it on and ties it at the waist, she chides, “I would tell none of you to shoot the messenger, but I suppose centuries’ worth of resentment would do that to anyone.” She winks at Jon. “I suppose you get your melancholy from your father. I see the irony in the fact that you got your temper from me instead of him.”

She then heads toward the steps where Dany and Missandei are sitting and they both stand warily at her approach. The vampire gives Missandei a long appraising look before saying, “You’re not the first Starfall witch I’ve met and you certainly won’t be the last. It must be kismet that you’re best friends with the doppelgänger. I’m sure Daenerys loves the symmetry of that.”

Missandei goes still and Dany is about to tell Lyanna where she can shove her opinions when the vampire turns to her. There is something different in her eyes now, a voracious glow that speaks of warning and something else. Dany has always prided herself on being able to read expressions on other people’s faces, but that talent has slowly ebbed and waned in the presence of vampires hundreds and hundreds of years old, creatures used to hiding their emotions behind masks.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” Lyanna says with a conspiratorial half-smile. “Jon is very easy to love. He is very much like his father that way. I suppose it’s just that Targaryen charm.”

Wait.

What?

The smile on Lyanna’s face turns lopsided at whatever confused, thunderstruck expression has crossed Dany’s face. She says, “Just remember: I only want the ring. We’ll talk soon, I’m sure.”

Then she is out the front door and gone.

The silence left in Lyanna Stark’s wake is almost thunderous. Dany feels as though the ground beneath her feet is constantly shifting, that there is nothing steady to hold onto anymore. She would sit back down if she could. She would bury her head in her hands and pretend that this evening hadn’t happened. But it has and it seems as if the dawn will not come before every bit of her sanity has been chipped away.

There is a tiny part of her that almost wishes that she had stepped away from this mess as Lyanna had advised her to do all those weeks ago. How many long, sleepless nights has she had because she hasn’t? How many times has she had to doubt whether Jon and his cousins were being honest with her? It is too many times to count. Her friends and her family have been in danger constantly ever since she was born apparently, if her identity as the doppelgänger is to be believed. There is no escaping this.

Because of this inescapable fact though, the larger part of her doesn’t want to give Lyanna Stark the satisfaction of bending and breaking beneath the weight of all of these revelations, beneath the overwhelming burden of danger. So she takes in a long, slow breath before turning to Jon, fixing him with a calm stare.

One thing at a time. “You said you were going to marry Daenerys. Not that you did.”

Jon grimaces. “I didn’t marry her.”

“Lyanna said you’re a Targaryen.” Dany doesn’t miss the way the Stark siblings share looks. She ignores them, keeping her gaze fixed on Jon. “Well?”

Jon lowers himself back onto the couch. He looks tired. “My father was a Targaryen.” He seems to be weighing the rest of his answer before he continues, “Rhaegar. He was Daenerys’s older brother.”

Dany blinks.

There is…a lot to unpack there. There is a part of her that tells her that the Starks had come from a time when these sorts of marriages were not uncommon, but Dany decides she doesn’t want to think about it. With all of her other pressing problems, whether or not Jon had fallen in love with his aunt seems the least bit of her worries.

She does, however, connect some other dots and her unease deepens. “Daenerys was the queen. But she had an older brother. And you’re his son. Which makes you…?”

“Nothing,” Jon says firmly as Arya gives him a worried look. “I was nothing.”

Dany doesn’t think that’s true. In fact, she thinks that whatever Jon isn’t saying might have something to do with why any of this is happening in the first place. But she doesn’t push it. She doesn’t have the energy to. Once she gets some sleep, perhaps she will ask him exactly how inheritance rules worked in the past. Right now, all she can think about it is that the grimoire burned tonight and now Daenerys wants her ring back. If Daario had gone to all these lengths to hide it, then they are not giving it back to her.

Bran is over by the liquor cabinet and is in the middle of pouring multiple glasses with some amber-colored liquor. When she meets his eyes, he smiles grimly. “I thought everyone might need it. It’s been a night.”

What an understatement, Dany thinks.

When Robb and Rickon return to the parlor, smelling of gasoline and smoke, their siblings fill them in on what Lyanna had told them. Margaery makes a beeline straight to Dany and Missandei, pulling them both into separate hugs.

As they untangle, all three of them are sharing slightly overwhelmed looks, as the events of the evening start to press in on them. How have they managed to get entangled in such absurd supernatural drama? Margaery is a vampire now. Missandei is a witch. Dany is the doppelgänger, whatever the hell that still means in the scheme of things. Margaery just helped burn a body on the manor grounds. All around them is magic and murder and mayhem, a world so far removed from the small-town nonsense that they’d grown up with that it seems surreal.

Not seems, Dany amends. It is surreal. None of this is right. None of this is normal.

Yet even as the conversation ebbs and flows around her, Dany cannot help but glance over at Jon. For as angry as she was with him earlier this evening, she cannot help the pang of sympathy that goes through her now at seeing him sitting on the couch as his cousins talk around him. His storm-grey gaze is distant, his thoughts clearly a thousand miles away. In one night, he’d found out his mother was alive, along with his former lover, and one of his closest friends that he’d known for centuries had been killed. Whatever conversations they are having now, Jon is mentally not there.

After some time, she watches as he quietly excuses himself and then disappears somewhere down the hall toward the front door. His cousins trade looks, but no one makes a move to follow him, as if they have all concluded that whatever space Jon needs, it is not space they can intrude on. But remembering a scene very similar that had played out in this very room weeks ago, Dany finds that she doesn’t even hesitate to follow him.

Despite everything, despite her frustration and her hurt, she still goes.

And no one stops her.

She finds Jon standing out in the front drive, hands jammed into his jacket pockets, a distant expression on his handsome features. He looks lost. She pauses at the top of the stairs, letting a brief moment of uncertainty chain her into place, before she descends the few steps to walk up next to him.

“Jon.”

“I know.” He rubs wearily at his face. “I know.”

Does he? She doesn’t think so. “I’m sorry about Ygritte.”

She watches as his face spasms with pain, though he quickly hides it, drawing whatever grief and hurt he might be filling behind that mask of exhaustion. Quietly he says, “Daenerys killed her. I don’t know why but she did.”

What can she say to that? She can’t pull him into an embrace right now. A few hours ago, when all the ruin hadn’t yet waylaid them, she might have been able to. But her own head is filled with an emotional riot right now. She can’t offer him the comfort she might have, just as he can’t do the same for her.

So instead she places a hand on his arm, wishing that there was some bridge between them, something at all that would support the weight of his past and the weight of her mortality.

But there is nothing. There is only this.

She is about to say more when she hears gravel crunch just past the cars. She feels Jon go tense beneath her touch.

“I thought you left.”

“Oh, I did,” Lyanna says with a smile. In the ambient light of the night, painted in shades of black and white, she looks far more like the dangerous vampire Dany had met in Oldtown. “But I figured I wasn’t clear. I want the ring, Jon. Daenerys wants the ring. Whatever you have been planning all of these centuries, whatever answer you think you’ve found to undo the spell, Daenerys is one step ahead of you. Don’t try to outwit her.”

“You don’t get to make those decisions for me,” Jon says, anger simmering in his voice. But Lyanna only gives him a twisted version of what might have been a maternal smile before she looks past him to Dany. There is something in the vampire’s quicksilver eyes that makes a chill go down her spine. She straightens though and stares the woman down. It only seems to amuse her more.

“And Dany Dayne,” Lyanna remarks, almost conversational. “You are a spitfire, aren’t you? Unlike Daenerys, you would let yourself burn before any harm came to the people you loved. That will serve you well considering you’re the doppelgänger.”

“Leave my family and my friends alone.”

“Of course.” Lyanna drops her hands into her pockets, rocking back and forth on her heels. “But have you never wondered why Nature created a doppelgänger?”

She has. But she sure as hell doesn’t want to know why right now.

“Daenerys sealed the original spell with her mortal blood,” Lyanna explains, her expression thoughtful. “Of course, then she went and became immortal and something went terribly wrong in the actual casting of the spell. You might have to ask her what exactly went wrong—she undoubtedly will love to tell you.

“But Nature is still rather fickle that way. Mortal blood bound the spell…and so mortal blood has to unbind it. And since Daenerys herself isn’t an option, Nature was wise enough to create a shadow self. Someone with mortal blood who was the exact duplicate of the original.” A cool smile shatters Lyanna’s expression. “A doppelgänger.”

What? That’s not…that can’t be…

Yet.

“As I said,” Lyanna tells them both, “I only want the ring. Keeping you alive until it’s time to unseal the spell…well, that’s the job of the Starks, isn’t it?”

“Mother…” Jon’s voice is strangled. Lyanna laughs and then she winks at Dany.

“I told you not to get involved. At the end of the day, monsters are still monsters. Even my son.”

Then she turns and a moment later, there is nothing left of her except shadow and horror and the crushing silence of Dany’s fate.

Arya Stark awakens to a dagger protruding from her chest.

There is a silent moment of shock, of the muddy remnants of sleep confusing her as it what she is seeing, what she can’t be seeing. Then she scrambles upward in her bed, gasping in muted pain. Blood spills out over the furs of her bed, over her nightclothes, leaving her fingers wet and sticky and red. The dreams that had been plaguing her sleep—dreams of fire, of corpses, of blood and darkness—are blasted away by the dull, throbbing pain in her chest.

The dagger is over her heart.

The dagger is in her heart.

She is bleeding.

She is dying.

…is she dying?

She doesn’t think. Despite her training her Braavos, despite Syrio’s voice in her head telling her not to be a foolish girl, to keep the dagger in lest she bleed out—despite all of that, the panicked part of Arya’s mind, the part of her that sees a godsdamned dagger sticking out from her chest, yells at her to pull the dagger out. And so she does.

Blood arcs through the room, splattering against stone and shadow…and against the man who stares gaping at her from the side of her bed. She stares at him too, too stunned by his presence to do anything at first. His pale face is familiar in a half-dream sort of way and crimson droplets dot his face like a macabre spray of freckles.

Neither of them moves.

And then the man lunges for her, hands outstretched, reaching for her neck.

Arya’s mind is still trying to catch up to this bizarre and horrible chain of events, this nightmare unfolding in the dim shadows of her room, but her instincts have been honed well by Syrio Forel. She throws herself away from those grasping, crushing fingers, flipping the dagger in her hand so that the blade twists outward and upward. With only a silent exhale, she slashes out, slashes up, and then instead of grabbing for her neck, the nameless man is reaching for his. The angle was too awkward to sever the thicker tenders but her aim struck true regardless—blood spurts from between his fingers as he staggers backward, crashing into a bedside table, tipping over a chair.

The noise is horrendous.

Chest heaving, Arya clambers out of bed, the dagger still in her hand as she watches the man choke on his own blood, trying to stem the immense bleeding from the gaping wound at his neck. Even as the man dies though, she is quickly checking for her own wounds, to stop the bleeding in her own chest…except there is nothing. Her hands fumble and then pause, her mind still churning in panic.

She is not bleeding. There is no stab wound.

But.

She is so sure. The dagger had been in her heart. She’d seen it. She knows she had seen it.

I’m dreaming, she thinks. I must be dreaming.

This doesn’t feel like a dream.

She looks down at the unfamiliar dagger in her hand and then at the still body sprawled on her floor. He looks familiar. Why does he look familiar?

It takes her reeling mind—still recovering from the violent awakening and the attack—to draw up a memory from just a few hours ago. Bran had come home. With him had been an honorary guard sent by Queen Daenerys, men who had worn the red-and-black of House Targaryen. The men had seemed pleasant when Arya and Sansa had passed them in the halls on the way to Father’s old office.

But now one of those men lies dead in her room.

And she is holding his dagger.

Everything seems to slow.

Do you think someone is trying to start a war?

Ravens flying north. Ravens flying south. Ravens flying east. All bearing messages no one had sent, all bearing messages claiming falsehoods, messages that had brought all the Starks back to Winterfell. Messages that had sent Jon running south.

Arya is out of her room before she is even aware of it.

The first door she comes across is to Sansa’s bedchamber. She is only distantly aware that the torches have been gutted, that there is nothing except chill stone and shadow in the familiar halls of her childhood. Where is everyone? Where are Winterfell’s guards? She throws the door open, the dagger like a boulder in her hands. Her fingers feel clumsy. Her heart is racing. Her heart shouldn’t be racing.

In the dim light of Sansa’s bedchamber, she can hear her sister’s muffled voice. She sees a man on the bed, straddling her, a hand over her mouth. And she sees the glint of a dagger, steel shiny with blood, that he brings down over and over again on the flailing body beneath him.

Blood. She smells blood.

She doesn’t think.

One moment she is standing in the doorway frozen. The next she has thrown herself on the man’s back, yanking his head back by the hair, and dragging her stolen dagger across his throat. The man lets out a surprised, choked gurgle…and then he is tilting, tipping, falling, and he crashes to the floor with a clatter.

“Sansa!”

Her oldest sister stares at her, pale blue eyes round with shock. She is trembling violently. Her curtain of auburn hair is mussed from her furs and pillows, the front of her nightclothes sodden with blood and gore. But Sansa seems unaware of it. She is only staring blankly at Arya, her breaths coming in ragged, desperate heaves.

But there are no wounds on her chest either.

Arya knows what she has seen. She knows.

What in all seven hells is going on? And why can she smell the blood?

Blood.

Blood.

Her mouth waters.

What is happening?

In the south, in the crumbling ruins of a golden city, fire continues to claw at the sky.

And Jon opens his eyes.

Her phone rings. She presses the green button.

“Did you have to kill Ygritte?”

On the other end of the line, she can almost imagine Daenerys narrowing her eyes at being questioned.

“I wasn’t aware her life was negotiable. She’d outlived her usefulness.”

Lyanna sighs, watching the Stark manor from the end of the drive. She can see some figures emerging from the front of the house, climbing into cars parked in the front. One of them has hair the color of moonlight. She grimaces. There are more important things to argue than this. She tucks her free hand into her coat pocket.

“I told them you were looking for your ring.”

“And…?”

“Surprisingly, they don’t want to give it up. They’ve already lost the grimoire.”

“I have the grimoire.”

After all these years, Lyanna shouldn’t be surprised at that. Still, she cannot quite hide the accusation in her voice when she says, “There might have been a better way to going about getting it than blowing up the Lannister mansion.”

“It got rid of Tywin Lannister, didn’t it?” She can hear the raised eyebrow in Daenerys’s tone. “I need that ring, Lyanna. And once you get it, I’ll give you the thing you’ve been searching for all these years. I know you haven’t given up on it.”

If Lyanna’s heart could still beat, it would stop right now.

“You found the weirwood ash.”

There is a smile in Daenerys’s voice when she speaks again.

“I found it and I have it. It seems, Lyanna, we might both get what we want after all.”

Daario Naharis sits outside the Starfall Bar & Grill. His beer is half empty and there is already another empty mug on the table. Even though his phone is in his hands, the screen is black—he spins it aimlessly. His mind seems to be anywhere except here. She watches him for a long moment. Others pass by and ignore her.

Then silently she slips into the seat across from him. He looks up. She can see the shock in his handsome face—and the lingering hurt too.

“Dany? I thought…” He shakes his head, confused. “Why are you here?”

She smiles.

“I came back,” Daenerys Targaryen tells him, reaching for his hand. “I missed you.”

Chapter Text

Dany doesn’t often drink enough to wake up with a hangover and when she opens her eyes this morning, she remembers why.

The sun seems too bright, too piercing, and her head throbs in agony along with her half-muffled groan as she presses her face back into her pillow. The part of her mind that is alert and responsible reminds her that she has three cats to feed. The part of her mind that is still bleary and exhausted tells that other part of her mind to shut the hell up, that the cats will survive having their food delivered ten or thirty minutes late.

She quickly glances at her phone and then groans again—it is three hours past feeding time.

“Dammit,” Dany mutters, throwing an arm over her eyes. Her head continues to throb in agreement. She expects to hear some accusatory meows coming from beyond her closed bedroom door and waits in dread for her three babies to realize that their mum is mostly awake. It is only when she is greeted by silence, with nothing to accompany her dreadful state except a pounding headache, that Dany wonders if she has slept through the week and now her cats have actually starved to death.

Groaning, she pulls herself out of bed, grimacing as the searingly bright room spins, and drags herself over to the bedroom door. She throws it open and is greeted with…the smell of coffee.

“I was wondering if I was going to have to wake you up,” Missandei says from the kitchen where she is leaning against the oven. Her friend is dressed in the same tee and cutoff shorts from last night, her glasses pushed up into her dark coils, her expression tired but alert. She immediately pours another cup of coffee, sliding it across the counter toward Dany. “You had more to drink last night than I did.”

“Did I?” Dany asks, though her lingering headache seems to confirm it. She reaches gratefully for the mug of coffee as Missandei begins pulling eggs and bacon and bread out of the fridge and the pantry. As her friend begins preparing the simple breakfast, Dany catches sight of two empty bottles of wine sitting on the far end of the counter. She frowns and then closes her eyes. “That bad?”

Missandei grimaces at her answer.

“It was a long night.”

Gods.

What an understatement.

From the Council meeting to the fire to the aftermath at the Stark manor—despite her hangover and despite her desire to want everything to have been a dream, there is a clarity to the seriousness of the situation that sobers Dany immediately. Perhaps if her night hadn’t been capped with Jon’s mother—the Oldtown vampire, the one who had compelled Ashara to nearly kill herself—telling her that her life was forfeit, she wouldn’t have tried to drink herself into a stupor. Yet the words manage to seep through the pain of her headache, taunting her with the foolishness of her decision to get involved with Jon and the rest of the Starks in the first place.

Mortal blood bound the spell…and so mortal blood has to unbind it.

Keeping you alive until it’s time to unseal the spell…well, that’s the job of the Starks, isn’t it?

Shit.

All of her doubts from the night and all of its revelations come swarming forth. She has allowed herself to be lured into this world, by the idea that the Starks are inherently good people, cursed with immortality and bloodlust. There have been signs that have made her doubt before, but she has been swayed by the promise that they are not the demons of legend that she had casually believed in for so long, impossible creatures of the dark who fed on mortal blood and naivete. She has been fooled by Rickon’s boyish eagerness, by Robb’s gallantry, by Bran’s quiet reserve, by Arya’s mischievous stubbornness, by Sansa’s cool protectiveness.

She has been fooled by Jon’s kindness.

Yet there is a part of Dany that chides her for giving up on this family so soon, so easily. Should she really believe that Lyanna Stark, a woman that all the Starks viewed with anger and suspicion, a vampire that has already threatened Dany once, has her best interests at heart? For all she knows, Lyanna had only said those words to drive a wedge between her and her son and his cousins. Is she willing to risk that?

But why would she lie? Dany thinks, burying her head in her hands. What does she gain from this?

Nothing. There is nothing to gain from this. Yet these people are hundreds and hundreds of years old. They might be playing a game that Dany can only begin to guess at.

She is only aware that Missandei has placed a plate of food beneath her nose when a savory-sweet smell drifts upward. She blinks her eyes open to see a small plate laden with scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and a couple of slices of toast slathered with jam. Grease and carbs—the perfect solution to a hangover. Peering over the edge of her plate, she sees her best friend giving her a half-hearted smile.

“You should eat something before you continue down that spiral I know you’re already in,” Missandei chides gently. “And then we’ll talk.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything to talk about,” Dany murmurs, even as she picks up a piece of toast and gingerly starts to nibble it. “Every time I think things can’t get worse, it seems the universe is intent on proving me wrong. And now I probably get to be sacrificed in a blood ritual.”

“First of all, you’re not going to be sacrificed in a blood ritual,” Missandei assures her, pulling a bottle of ibuprofen out of a drawer. “Remember that I’m the witch they need to perform the unbinding and I’m not going to do it if it means your life. Secondly, we don’t know if Lyanna was telling the truth. It seems to me that she doesn’t have anyone’s interests at heart except her own. And as much as I understand why you were upset, we did leave before Jon or any of the Starks could explain their side of things. Now eat.”

Her friend shakes two aspirin out of the bottle and places it next to Dany’s plate. Reluctantly, Dany quickly swallows the aspirin, her head still feeling as though it is one breath away from imploding, before she begins to eat. A quick glance around the apartment finds that the cats, having (hopefully) been fed at their normal hour, are sprawled in various locations across the living room, asleep. At least their day is going markedly better than Dany’s.

She knows Missandei is right. She knows she is overreacting, in no small part to her hangover. But this supernatural world seems determined to break her spirit. Ever since she found out that she is the original Daenerys Targaryen’s doppelgänger, she has been left scrambling with dozens upon dozens of doubts. For her to now know that her life is nothing but a mere shadow, Nature’s attempt to rectify Daenerys’s grievous error from a thousand years ago…how can she not feel that everything she has ever done has been pointless?

And now everyone else has been dragged into this, Dany thinks despairingly. Ashara and Vis and Marg and Missy and Daario and everyone in this godsforsaken little town…

How is she supposed to protect anyone when they are all in danger simply because of what Dany is?

Yet when she looks up again and sees Missandei giving her another look, Dany sighs and tries to make a dent in her coffee and breakfast before she spills over, before the feeling of drowning beneath this looming wave of despair completely devastates her.

“I think,” Missandei finally continues as Dany eats, running a slender finger along the rim of her mug, “that there is a lot that we don’t know. Losing the grimoire and Ygritte didn’t help. But I do think that the Starks have been as honest with us as they can be. They’ve been trying to clear the town of other vampires. They’ve been trying to keep you safe—and no, I don’t think it’s because they just need you alive for the unbinding. I believe it’s because Jon honestly cares for you.”

Do you know how many centuries Jon has been trying to undo this shit for us? That he’s willing to fuck it all up for you?

Rickon’s words from hours ago ring through her head. Dany hates the fact that she is uncertain about this, that there is just enough doubt in what has been presented as the truth to make her second guess everything. “That doesn’t—”

“Have you seen how protective they are of each other?” Missandei interrupts softly. “They’re all that they’ve had for a thousand years. I think all of them would do anything to make sure the others stayed safe and happy. Judging from what the other Starks have said, it’s a rare thing for Jon to find any sort of happiness. Judging from what you’ve said, he blames himself for all of this happening in the first place. They’re protecting you because you make him happy.”

Dany frowns. She hasn’t thought of it like that. It doesn’t necessarily make her feel much better, especially considering that Daenerys has returned from the obscurity of the grave (or not? No one knows where the hell she has been for the past several centuries, save for Lyanna apparently). But she supposes that it is something to hold on to.

But if history is repeating itself then I imagine Jon’s half in love with you already.

He can’t be. More importantly, he shouldn’t be, especially not with his first love back in his life.

I’m his friend. Even if I did sleep with him, he cares about his family more than whatever this thing between us is. We’re friends. Friends care about each other. That’s it. That’s all it will ever be.

That’s all it can be.

Dany finishes her breakfast in silence as Missandei refills her mug of coffee. The witch says, “Before she…before Daenerys killed her, Ygritte said that she contacted another witch to come help us. Someone who might have a better grasp on the immensity of the spell, someone who I might be able to channel.”

“I thought you didn’t trust Ygritte.”

“I didn’t.” Missandei looks disconcerted as she shakes her head sadly. “Last evening changed a lot of things, Dany. I didn’t trust the Starks either. In some ways, I still don’t—except when it comes to you. They’re keeping secrets, yes, but I don’t think they’ll want to break the immortality curse at the cost of your life. Especially not Jon. Even if they did, he wouldn’t let them.”

Dany sighs. “And Daenerys?”

That question causes Missandei’s expression to twist. She looks down at her coffee, as though the answers are lurking beneath the surface of the black liquid. After a long tense moment, she finally says, “You’re not Daenerys. There are things she did that you would never do, things that I know would be impossible for you to even consider. She crossed a line when she burned a city to gain immortality. You would never do that. The Starks know that. Jon knows that.”

“But I look like her. I’m her doppelgänger. Nature wanted a balance so why shouldn’t I be like her in that way too?”

“Well, if you burn down Starfall, I’ll say I was wrong.” That gets a smile out of Dany, but Missandei quickly sobers. “But seriously, Dany. You’re the most selfless person I know. You stuck with this, even when I was telling you to be cautious. Even if it was just because you care for Jon, I know you never would have forgiven yourself if you didn’t do everything in your power to help the Starks. In your heart, you know that they’re good. As much as I think that they’re keeping secrets, even I believe that. The reason I’m doing all of this, the reason I can trust them at all, is because I believe you would sacrifice yourself if it meant keeping everyone you loved safe.”

And the thing is—Dany can’t argue against that. In a heartbeat, she would throw her life on the line if it meant that her friends and her family would be protected. Missandei is not wrong to be worried about that. She doubts even the Starks know the extent she would go through to keep them all safe.

Perhaps that’s the problem.

Dany leans heavily against the counter as Drogon, curious as to why his mum has not come over to pet him and fawn over him, sidles up to her and rubs up against her legs. She smiles and picks him up to kiss his nose. This is clearly not what Drogon meant when he decided he wanted adoration and he meows loudly in protest until Dany relents and puts him down.

As she watches her offended cat walk back to his napping spot, Dany murmurs, “At least Drogon is honest with me about what he wants.”

But then Missandei surprises her by asking, “If Jon told you he loved you, what would you do?” Dany blinks, taken aback.

“Excuse me?”

“He truly cares for you, Dany,” Missandei clarifies, her dark gaze kind but serious. “I can use more euphemisms if you’d like, but the way he looks at you…even if it had been curiosity about why you looked like Daenerys that had drawn him in, I think he fell in love with you along the way. And I also think he’s too cautious to admit it.”

Is he? Dany doesn’t know. Something has sparked within her at Missandei’s word, something that Dany doesn’t want to define, not now. But whatever it is, she thinks it is the reason why this sudden turn of events has hurt so much, why the idea of betrayal has cut so deep. She can’t say what it is. She won’t. That is a very dangerous path. If it’s just sex, if it’s just physical attraction—that is so much easier to handle than the possible damning consequences that would come with getting her heart involved.

She pushes those thoughts aside. It won’t solve any of their other problems. Right now, they need to think about the arrival of the second comet, the immortality spell, the destroyed grimoire, and the continuous presence of vampires less ethical than the Starks.

Right. Easy. Scraping her fingers through her pale hair, Dany decides to change the subject.

“Do we know who was killed in the gas leak?” Missandei pauses, looking almost as though she might accuse Dany of so blatantly avoiding the topic of Jon and the Starks, but seemingly decides against it at the last moment. Instead, she nods slowly.

“Tywin and Jeyne. It was all over the news this morning. Ashara called me to confirm it. Everyone else is in the hospital except for you, though I think they’ve already released Oberyn.”

The loss of Tywin Lannister doesn’t elicit any strong feelings of grief or sadness in Dany, though she doesn’t think anyone deserves such a violent death, even a man like Tywin. But hearing that Jeyne hasn’t made it either, that the inferno claimed her life, makes her heart shudder, especially knowing that Jeyne had been a close friend of Ashara’s like Dany’s mum had been. Her adoptive mum must be hurting with the news and Dany can feel her heart crack with empathetic sorrow.

A gas leak, Dany reminds herself. A gas leak and an open flame is normal. It is so painfully normal. Compared to the supernatural deaths that haunt the town, this accident is the one that should make the most sense. Yet it claws at her skin, the burning violence of it. She does not think she’ll shake the memory of thunder and flame and smoke for a very, very long time. If that unknown man hadn’t called to warn her about the impending explosion…

You are in danger.

Who could it have been? If the gas leak was an accident, who would have known in enough time to warn her?

“What about Tyrion?” Dany finally asks.

But before Missandei can even take in a breath to answer, there is a knock on the front door. The two friends both jump, startled as they share looks, especially when they hear what sounds like a dog’s whine from just beyond.

Jon? Missandei mouths but Dany shakes her head in ignorance. It’s not like she has a phone anymore for anyone to contact her, but as far as she knows, Ghost has never made a sound, not like the other direwolves in his pack. Dany cautiously walks toward the door and glances through the peephole. And blinks in surprise…and mild annoyance.

It’s too early for this. She unlocks the door and swings it open to reveal the youngest of the Stark daughters, her grey-and-white direwolf patiently sitting at her side.

“What are you doing here?”

“Checking to make sure you’re still in one piece,” Arya Stark says, looking her up and down. She makes no move to step into the apartment, the invisible barrier of the threshold keeping her in the hall. Still, she gives Dany a long appraising look. “You are in one piece, aren’t you?”

There are a thousand ways to answer that question and the aspirin still has not yet made a dent in Dany’s hangover. She only presses her lips into a thin line, trying to rein in a far more biting answer. “Yes.”

“Fantastic. We need to talk.”

“Do you mean that you need to lie?” Behind her, Dany can hear Missandei move out of the kitchen, feeling her friend’s warm presence at her back. Arya only makes a face at them both. “Or do I get to hear the truth today?”

“Sure. Whatever. Can I come in?” When Dany only frowns, Arya rolls her eyes. “Usually, I’d totally commend you for your caution. But considering the alternative is talking about vampires and magic and immortality spells out here in the hallway for all your neighbors to hear, I’d rather not. Nymeria is also very well-behaved. She won’t tear up your furniture or anything.”

It’s not technically her furniture but Dany doesn’t see the point in arguing. She glances behind her at Missandei, whose dark eyes are focused intently on Arya. But her friend only shakes her head, taking a step back.

“It’s your choice.”

Dany relents slightly. My choice…and my foolish heart. She turns back to Arya. “Alright. You can come in. Is it possible to take back an invitation?”

“Nature created the threshold spell,” Arya shrugs as she steps in, Nymeria at her heels, and Dany closes the door behind her. “It was meant to keep mortals safe from us in their own homes. The only time I’ve ever seen it not work is if the owner of the house changes. That cancels the previous invitation. Usually rented flats wouldn’t count, unless Nature has decided that they are a home.”

She nods at Drogon who is surveying the newcomers—especially Nymeria—with suspicion from the arm of the couch. “Pets help, especially cats for some reason.”

As if to disagree, Drogon lets out a disgruntled meow before he darts into the bedroom, flicking his tail in a final display of disgust. A glance around the living room reveals that Rhaegal and Viserion have already made their escape. Shaking her head, Dany closes the bedroom door so that the cats stay protected inside. She suspects within five minutes, they’ll have forgotten the massive direwolf sitting in the living room and will be yowling to be let out.

“I’m not going to stay long,” Arya continues, burying her hand in Nymeria’s ruff. The size of the direwolf compared to the rest of the flat is almost comical. “I just wanted to clear some things up after last night. I told Jon it might be best if one of us explains. Gods know he would spill his entire heart out to you—or as much as he can—and make this even worse.”

She remembers standing with Jon outside the mansion last night, his face a mask as he tried to bury his grief and his confusion. There had been her fury, her own longing for answers that simply wouldn’t come. She knows that if Jon had been on the other side of the door…well, she’s not entirely sure if she would have refused to let him in or if she would have kissed him.

What a damned mess.

“The bodies in the woods…” Missandei begins when Dany finds her own questions snarled in the maelstrom of her emotions. Arya wrinkles her nose.

“Shit timing, honestly,” she answers. “Bran’s been keeping track of the increase in missing people and so-called animal attacks in the Reach and Dorne. Most vampires prefer to keep a low profile—we’re predators but we’re not stupid. The older we are, the more cautious we tend to be because we can’t afford people to recognize us throughout the centuries. But that doesn’t apply to every vampire. Not sure if Jon ever told you but when you turn, what’s good in you becomes better and what’s bad becomes worse. You have those who like the hunt. You have those who were shitty humans and now they’re shitty vampires.”

Dany and Missandei exchange looks. “And how many of the latter,” Dany asks, not sure if she’s dreading the answer or not, “are in Starfall?”

“More than you know and less than you think.”

That answer is almost as useless as Rickon’s had been. Even Missandei looks frustrated by the response. Her friend flatly says, “I can’t adjust a spell based on that.”

“I know. It’s why we’ve been trying to clear out the vampires for you.” Arya gives them a lopsided smile. There is…something not quite right about that smile. It is something wicked and terrible and full of bloody secrets, something that reminds Dany that Arya is very much a demonic creature of the night. “Some of us are better hunters than the others. Sansa is fast and Robb and Rickon have sheer brute strength on their side. But Jon and I…well.”

She trails off, that unnerving and knowing smile never leaving her face. It makes Dany wonder exactly how many vampires and humans Arya has killed in her centuries-long lifetime. Dozens? Hundreds? More? The answer, regardless of what it is, is likely damning and terrifying.

And what of Jon? She remembers the hunger in his eyes the night they’d found Alerie at the housewarming ball—the wickedly sharp canines, the blood that turned his eyes nearly black, the protruding veins cracking along pale skin. She’s never seen any of the other Starks tempted with that bloodlust, but she wonders exactly how much she has been blind to.

“I can try to reinforce the protection spells,” Missandei is saying as Dany tunes back into the conversation. When Dany shoots her friend a look, Missandei shrugs and gives her an apologetic smile before returning to the kitchen to top off her mug of coffee. “I can find a way to make it stronger with Grey’s help so it won’t rely too much on me.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dany catches Arya shaking her head.

“And this is why we were trying to keep it quiet. Even with an anchoring spell, even channeling another witch, you’re going to spread yourself too thin. We need you at full strength when the second comet comes. And don’t give me that look.” Arya makes a face at both of them. “We know the doppelgänger is important or else Nature wouldn’t have created you. But believe it or not, we’re not desperate enough to break the curse to go off and slit your throat.”

“Thanks,” Dany notes dryly. But something about Arya’s words makes her curious. She lowers herself down onto the arm of the couch, reaching up to touch the locket of vervain Missandei had given her all those weeks ago. “There’s not a part of you that wants to be human again?”

“I was nineteen when I was killed and turned.” Arya’s smile is bitter. “I’ve been a vampire for much longer than I’ve been a human. I think I’m much better at pretending to be human than actually being human. What would I even do with a mortal life?”

Dany hesitates. Is it only Jon who truly wants to break the curse? She has only assumed that it is something that the rest of the Starks want too, or else why would they be neck-deep in all of the mystery and horrors arriving in Starfall? Perhaps immortality suits them all fine and it is only Jon’s guilt that presses him toward regaining a life they all have long since left behind.

But taking another look at Arya’s expression, Dany’s not so sure.

“You could live,” she finally answers quietly. “A life that doesn’t require running, a life that doesn’t need you to hide what you are—I think there is some good in an existence beyond the ephemeral, isn’t there?”

“Maybe,” Arya admits, chewing on her bottom lip. Then she shrugs with feigned casualness. “Maybe not.”

Behind her, Dany hears Missandei set the mug down on the counter. “Is it worth the price to figure out? Is it worth Dany’s life and the lives of all the people here in Starfall?”

And Dany watches as Arya’s face goes carefully blank—but there is no mistaking the sadness nor the regret lingering in her grey-blue eyes. She looks down at Nymeria and the direwolf looks up at her, butting her head into Arya’s hip as though in reassurance. Arya takes in a breath Dany knows she doesn’t need, an entirely human reaction, almost as if she is steeling herself.

“Jon figured it out ages ago. He told me, but I don’t think he ever told the others.”

“Jon?” Dany frowns. “I don’t understand. He figured what out?”

Arya grimaces.

“Everyone that the original immortality spell touched was a Stark or a Targaryen.” This time, the sadness in her eyes seeps down onto her lips, turning her smile desolate. “Why do you think Jon blames himself for all of this? It isn’t just because he loved Daenerys. It’s because he’s Lyanna and Rhaegar’s son. The immortality spell was blood magic—the most forbidden of Nature’s magic—and it’s his blood that connects all of us to the curse.”

You blame yourself for all of this, don’t you?

Because what happened with this…spell or whatever went wrong because of it—it changed your cousins too.

She had been so close all those weeks ago. She had pinpointed exactly what was wrong and it had never occurred to her the true reason of Jon’s guilt. She had only seen the ghostly echoes of a lost love in his eyes, the wreckage of a romance that haunted him for centuries.

Missandei steps out of the kitchen, her brow furrowed. “Daenerys didn’t know Lyanna was alive, did she? Or else you all would be dead, wouldn’t you?” Arya’s lips quirk up in a smile.

“Not exactly the family reunion anyone wanted.” But then she gestures and Nymeria clambers to all fours. “There’s a lot of what happened in the south that we still don’t know. Now that we know Daenerys is alive and that she likely compelled Jon’s memories away, we might find out. Until then, we’re going to keep going as if the plan hasn’t changed. Jon’s my brother. He’s always protected us. Whatever that means in the end, I’ll do it.”

“Break the curse you mean,” Dany clarifies warily as Arya walks to the door.

“Sure,” Arya replies with that chilling smile. She swings the door open. “But I’d settle for killing Daenerys.”

And then she is gone.

Jon is already in the hospital room when Tyrion wakes up.

He watches as the small man blearily looks around, eyes narrowing as he takes in his surroundings. He’s mildly impressed by how quickly the fog of confusion wears off, how sharp the light in Tyrion’s eyes becomes as the seconds tick by. A frown starts to appear on Tyrion’s face and he watches as the man fumbles around, clearly looking for the call button—but he stops as he finally turns his head and sees Jon leaning against the opposite wall. His eyes narrow.

“You’re not allowed to brood in my hospital room,” the detective mutters in annoyance, voice slightly hoarse from the amount of smoke he unwillingly inhaled. “There’s some sort of rule about that, I think. Brooding is only for the person who was admitted to the hospital. Everyone else has to do it in the hallway.”

Jon doesn’t smile.

Despite Tyrion’s lighthearted warning, his world still spins off-kilter from everything that has happened. It is a strange feeling—he has been alive for over a thousand years so very few things surprise him anymore. The last time he had been taken off guard was a few years ago, seeing a young woman on a swing beneath the moonlight, uncertainty and regret in her eyes…

Nothing ever happens here at all.

Sometimes the most we can hope for is nothing.

Yet Ygritte's death and the revelation that both his mum and his former lover are alive has shaken him to his core. Ygritte had been one of the very few people in his thrice-cursed life whom he could have called a friend. She had nagged him for decades over his brooding temperament and had been an invaluable source of information throughout the years. And she had been one of the rare people beyond his siblings who could make him, even reluctantly, smile. Her death is the insult to the injury of the rest. All he can see is his friend's grey and mottled corpse. All he can see is his mother, his eyes the same shade of stormy silver-grey as his own.

And all he can see is Daenerys, the woman he both loved and hated, crouching over him with her mouth glistening with Missandei’s blood, expression terribly fond and full of fire and fury.

It makes no sense. Everything in Jon’s memories tells him that both women should be dead…unless the memories are just as false as the ones he was compelled to forget. It would explain why the compulsion held after all of these centuries if Daenerys was the one who made him forget. Her death would have meant the return of his memories. He should have known she was alive all this time simply because he couldn’t remember.

He has never questioned it. Why has he never questioned it?

“Hallway,” Tyrion calls from his bed, brow furrowed in annoyance. This time, the edge of Jon’s mouth lifts. It is more grimace than a smile.

“Sorry.” He straightens. “Your brother was here an hour ago.”

“Jaime was…” Tyrion trails off, looking toward the door. He seems to be pulling his thoughts together. “The fire. I smelled gas. Did everyone…?” Jon shakes his head.

“No. I’m sorry. Your father was caught in the explosion. Jeyne Arryn died from the smoke.”

Jon watches as Tyrion absorbs the news, the smaller man’s expression momentarily twitching. He had not truly known Tywin Lannister, though he recalls a train trip decades and decades ago when Tywin’s grandfather had revealed the plot to murder Val. Judging from the rumors around town and his own brief encounters with the man, Jon doesn’t doubt that the same callous brutality had lived on in Gerold’s grandson. More rumors had said that that relationship between Tywin and Tyrion was fractious, but…

“I see,” Tyrion finally says. He narrows his eyes at Jon. “The fact that you’re here instead of him leads me to believe some of your…supernatural talents were involved in convincing my brother he had somewhere else to be.”

“No,” Jon admits. “Your brother’s working with the fire marshal. He’ll probably be back this evening. Your sister’s also here.”

“Last thing I need is whatever headache Cersei intends to give me.” Tyrion peers at Jon for a long moment before he settles back against the hospital pillows. The man has a detective’s eye—keen and far too knowing. Jon would talk to Dany, but…

Mortal blood bound the spell…and so mortal blood has to unbind it.

A memory of fire and death, of blood on his tongue and icy pain in his heart.

We will have forever.

I promise.

And then…nothing.

Jon has not yet been able to truly speak with Dany about what happened last night and with his mum making things far more complicated than they needed to be, he doubts she’ll want to talk to him for at least a few days. So instead he watches the calculations spin in Tyrion’s eyes.

“You think it’s something else.”

“Aye.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because Dany trusts you.”

“Some people might say that’s a terrible leap in logic. Also, perhaps you were unaware, but I was caught in that explosion. Once I’m released from the hospital, the only thing I want to do is go home and drink.”

Jon is quiet for a few seconds. Then he asks, “Consider this a favor.”

Tyrion arches a disbelieving eyebrow before scowling. He quickly takes one look at the door to ensure that no nurses or doctors are about to walk in (futile since Jon has already compelled the handful of hospital staff in this wing to ignore this room for ten minutes) before saying, “As much as the idea of having a vampire owe me something is very tempting, I’m not sure why you need me to look into this being more than it actually is. If it’s arson, the fire marshal will figure it out. If it's not...well, we’ll investigate, say it was accidental, and do everything we can to not blame it on grumpkins and snarks. Sound fair?”

It makes sense. This town is drenched in the supernatural and the only way chaos and fear don’t rule is because so many strange occurrences have been brushed off with a veneer of normalcy. Starfall had been built as a sanctuary against creatures like him—but Jon is old enough to know what Starfall once was. He has not yet followed up on Ygritte’s confirmation of the three-headed dragon but he knows what that means.

He knows.

“You’ll investigate because you’ll want to know,” Jon finally replies. “But I’m asking just in case you don’t.”

“Well, there’s two things I’m very good at: drinking and knowing things. But that’s still rather presumptive of you. Are you sure you won’t just rip my throat out if I don’t comply?” Jon can’t help it—he chuckles quietly.

“You think I would?”

Tyrion is silent. When Jon looks back over at him, the small man is studying him, as though trying to make up his mind about him. Jon waits patiently—something he has more than enough practice in—and eventually, Tyrion sighs. “No. I don’t. I have this feeling that you’re aggravatingly honorable. Gods. You make me feel like I’m failing at being a good person. Well done.”

Jon nods, though he seriously doubts Tyrion's words about him being good or honorable.

“I appreciate it.”

Out in the hall, the hospital bustles with the usual amount of midday activity. The scent of antiseptic hangs sharply in the air, far more potent to his vampiric senses. It almost—almost—blocks out the salt-sweet scent of blood that lingers in the air, the notes of it just ripe and tempting enough to make Jon’s mouth water with the promise of fresh blood. But he pulls his control tight on his thirst, wrangling it back like a wild beast, before he glances down at his phone.

Bran is still trying to track down where Daenerys and his mum might be. Rickon is on vampire reconnaissance duty and Sansa is on “make sure Rickon behaves” duty. Robb and Margaery have been waylaid by Margaery’s grandmother to help with some annual party of the Starfall Historical Society (apparently, almost being killed has not slowed Olenna Tyrell down in the least bit, as she continues to boss her family around from her hospital bed). It has been decades since Jon has had to keep up with Starfall’s plethora of balls, galas, fundraisers, parades, and festivals. He had to grimace when Robb texted him this event was happening a week before the arrival of the second comet.

At least, he hopes, the town will be distracted.

Arya has been quiet all day, which can either be a good or bad thing. He knows that he’ll find out shortly when she silently appears back at the manor, tight-lipped and evasive. He does have the sinking feeling that she might have gone to see Dany but he doesn’t think that Dany will have been in the mood to speak with any of them.

The look of hurt and betrayal in Dany’s eyes last night had cut Jon like a knife. He has tried to be as honest with Dany as he can, knowing that his locked-away memories would present a problem. But he has also kept things from her in an attempt to keep her safe. Perhaps it had been a long-dormant sense of noble chivalry, but it had backfired spectacularly with the arrival of his mother last night. It is his own damned fault for trying to keep the weight of the curse off of Dany. He knows that she deserves the truth and now Lyanna has twisted it into something that is a blatant lie.

He needs to make it right with her. But he is not sure if Dany has more leniency to give him, not after all of this.

So lost in his thoughts, Jon almost does not catch the flash of snow-blond hair just up at the end of the hall. It is only when he finally looks up that he sees her.

She is standing outside of a room, long pale hair tumbling in braids and glossy curls down her back. In the harsh fluorescent light of the hall, she is almost a walking shadow of blood in her black jeans, black boots, and lacy crimson top. Smiling, she nods her head in the direction of another hallway before she spins on her heel and vanishes.

Jon is already moving despite himself, pausing outside the door that she’d been standing next to. He glances inside, surprised to see Dany’s brother Viserys within. He is not hooked up to any monitors and seems to be asleep—but something uncertain drags its frozen claws down his spine. Quickly glancing down the hall again, Jon slips into the room.

Dany’s adoptive mum would have been here earlier, but she must have gone home to get some sleep. It hadn’t sounded like Viserys was as hurt as everyone else caught in the explosion last night so he will likely be released today. Yet…

The young man is breathing.

But that feeling of unease doesn’t fade. She wants him to see this. Why? What is she planning? What is she doing here? He throws one last glance at Viserys and then he hurries out the door and down the hall and through the exit doors she has disappeared through, stepping out into sunlight.

“He reminds me of Rhaegar a little bit, don’t you think?” a voice muses just outside of the exit doors. He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t need to turn. Heels click on the pavement and the scent of lilies and blood blooms through his head. “It seems we Targaryen women always have an older brother out there poorly protecting us. I should have killed him. It would have sent more of a message.”

“What did you do?” Jon says quietly. At his side, he feels a presence. If he turns, he will see her, as beautiful and dangerous and damned as when he had last seen her a thousand years ago. He can almost hear her smile, can almost see her lavender-blue eyes sparkle with self-satisfaction.

“I told you long ago,” Daenerys reminds him. “The innocence of other people can cripple you. I would have thought you’d have learned that after all these centuries.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“I didn’t, no.” Daenerys lets out a little sigh. “But he’ll wake up soon enough with the memory of someone who looks very much like his sister paralyzing him from the neck down.”

“You—”

“Don’t worry, Jon. I made sure to feed him some of my blood. You act as though I’m deliberately cruel.”

He can’t be hearing these words. She can’t possibly believe what she is saying. He turns on her and she is exactly as he remembers, exactly as the glimpse of a ghost he saw in the shadows of last night. The elegance of Targaryen royal livery has been lost to the cobwebbed annals of time, replaced instead with a fierce and dark modernity that wraps around her like a dangerous secret. She is just as breathtaking as he remembers, the dragon queen whom he had first met lifetimes and lifetimes ago beneath the frozen expanse of the Wall.

“Aye, maybe it’s because I haven’t forgotten what you did,” Jon says lowly. “I remember all those people, burned.”

“Can we not do this?” Daenerys reaches out to place a hand on his arm but Jon steps just out of her reach, recoiling almost as though she might actually burn him with her touch. She purses her lips in annoyance. “There is nothing more unattractive than a vampire who holds a grudge, Jon. What I did was necessary. I told you that then and I’m telling you that now. Nothing’s changed.”

“Everything’s changed.”

“Your choice of girlfriend begs to differ.” When Jon goes rigidly silent at that, Daenerys smiles again. She turns and begins to walk down to the sloping path that leads down into the hospital garden. From the top of the hill, Jon can see nurses and relatives pushing patients in wheelchairs. It is a quiet and peaceful scene and Daenerys is a shadow against it. He follows. “I’m actually rather flattered. Even after everything that happened between us, there is a part of you that still loved me enough to settle for a shadow of me.”

Jon thinks of Dany’s warmth and kindness, the fierce selflessness and determination that rang sharp against all of the trials that have built up around her over these past couple of months. doppelgänger or not, Jon can’t think of anyone more different from the person Daenerys has become.

“What do you want?”

“Would you believe me if I said I wanted you?” She glances back over her shoulder. “Despite what you did to me, I never stopped loving you.”

There are so many missing memories. Jon remembers the chaos of the capital burning. He remembers blood on his tongue and a dagger in his heart. Then, the cool darkness of a distant wood, the smell of damp earth beneath his fingers and a thirst so potent on his tongue that he might have howled in agony. He remembers the weight of Daenerys’s body in his arms, the coldness of death and a despair rising like a tidal wave within him.

But he can remember no more than that.

“You might not have,” Jon finally says, tone low and dangerous. “But I did. You need to leave.”

Daenerys stops. If she is surprised by his words, she doesn’t show it. Instead, her expression transforms into that same look of stubborn arrogance that he does remember very clearly. She crosses her arms, ready to defy him as she always had…and as he had always let her, when he had been fool enough to be blinded by her dangerous ambition. He had promised, long ago, to stay by her side and he has been damned for centuries because of it.

“We all want the same thing, Jon,” she tells him. “The ring, the grimoire, the doppelgänger, your blood—we can break this curse apart.”

“You want to break the curse?” His tone is incredulous. “After everything you did to cast it, you want to undo it?”

“I want many things,” Daenerys corrects. “Will you help me? You loved me once. I’m sure you will love me again.”

Jon doesn’t have to think twice. He still remembers the corpses in the city, the price of immortality that Daenerys had gladly paid, the price he had not been able to stop because he had been a blind fool.

He shakes his head.

“Never.”

The flash in Daenerys’s eyes is the only warning he gets.

Her hand lashes out at the bench next to them, shattering it with a single supernatural blow. Before he can step back, she has thrust the jagged end of the leg into his belly with a force that sends him staggering back. Pain explodes through like a fire as he doubles over, gasping and choking in shocked agony. Lilies and blood strangle him as Daenerys drives the makeshift stake further into his stomach.

"You think you hate me?" Daenerys whispers, as beautiful and dangerous and cold as she had been centuries ago when everything he thought he knew had crumbled around him like the burning wreckage of the city she destroyed. "That sounds like the beginning of a love story, Jon, not the end of one."

She rips the shattered leg out from his belly, splinters still buried deep in the cold black blood, splattering against the grass. He stumbles to his knees with a hiss.

“I want my ring back, Jon. You promised me once. You will promise me again.”

And though Jon surges to his feet, though the wound that would have killed a human is already healing, Daenerys has already vanished.

When Dany finally makes it to the Stark manor, it is Bran who answers the door.

“Sorry,” the second youngest of the Starks apologizes as he reverses his wheelchair to allow her to enter the house. He looks slightly disheveled, as though Dany has interrupted his sleep. When Dany explains that Missandei had received a message from Jon to tell her to meet him here, Bran drums his fingers along the arm of his wheelchair thoughtfully. “Right. Jon texted me and said he got caught up at the hospital. Have you been able to get a new phone yet? I can get you one if you need it.”

It is a generous offer. Considering Bran seems to be the most technologically savvy of his family and will likely get her something with more features than sense, it is tempting to say yes. But she shakes her head, following him down the hall to the parlor. “I’ll be fine. I can stop at the store after this. Where are the others?”

“Around town,” Bran says before maneuvering his chair the few steps down into the parlor, ignoring Dany’s concerned look. She knows she shouldn’t be worried—despite the obvious injury that has left him wheelchair-bound, he is still a vampire. A fall is likely to do little more harm than what has clearly already been done. Bran continues further into the room, saying, “Jon went to the hospital to talk to Tyrion. Sansa and Rickon are looking for the next wave of vampires that have arrived in town. Robb's with Margaery—I think her grandmother needed her for something—and Arya's looking for Lyanna. I think Missandei still has her spells around you so you’re invisible to any new vampires, but we still want to know what we’re dealing with.”

Dany glances around the parlor, silently unnerved by how much is different and how much is the same in the waning light of day. The darkness of night has retreated and the debris from Daenerys’s arrival has already been cleaned up. But perhaps that is why it bothers her: in her mind’s eye, she can still see Ygritte’s corpse sprawled on the couch. She can still see Jon lying in the shattered ruins of a coffee table. She can still smell death and decay and blood in the air.

A nightmare.

She lets her gaze fall onto the dust motes dancing through a shaft of pale afternoon sunlight before turning to Bran, startling when she sees his dark gaze already guiltily fixed on her. “What?”

“I shouldn’t have brought you in here,” Bran admits with a rueful smile. “That was dumb. Follow me.”

“It’s not…” Dany starts, but Bran has already wheeled his chair toward a long corridor at the other end of the parlor, one that she has followed Jon down before. “It’s not a problem, Bran. Truly. If anything, I’ve gotten more used to these things.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” comes the reply. When he glances back over his shoulder to make sure she’s following him, she sees a glimpse of sadness—and maybe regret?—in his dark eyes. “I don’t think anyone should get used to this kind of life, especially when you don’t have the same amount of time as we do. You shouldn’t have to worry that there are things out there that are going to hurt you.”

It is a sweet thought, Dany thinks, but it is far too late to wish about what should have been. She continues following him and even though he can’t see it, she lets a grim smile grace her lips. “Perhaps. But Nature might disagree with you.”

Bran shakes his head, stopping at a set of double doors in the middle of the hallway. Dany can’t recall if she’s passed this particular set of doors before but when Bran slides them open, she has to work to keep her jaw from dropping.

“Sorry for the mess,” Bran says as he gestures for her to enter the library. “We’ve been trying to clean it up ever since we all got back to Starfall.”

The library is not terribly immense—it is about the same size as the second floor of the guesthouse. But from floor to vaulted ceiling, every wall is lined with massive oak bookshelves, each sagging shelf crammed full with dozens of books sitting vertically and horizontally. Paperbacks, hardcovers, books with covers long since torn away—they sit scattered in towers on the hardwood floor and piled high in the overstuffed armchair and spilled haphazardly across the lone desk shoved up against the far wall between the two casement windows. Pencils lay forgotten atop an open book. Dany cannot even begin to count how many books she is looking at. Dozens, hundreds, a thousand, more.

And then she sneezes. The room is filled with dust.

“We’re not very good at throwing books out,” Bran admits, winding his chair through a path toward the desk. “Even with the advances in technology, books are the one thing that you can hold for centuries that no one thinks twice about.” Dany looks at a bookshelf off to her left and thinks she sees at least three first editions of classical novels that might fetch a very pretty penny.

“Right. Of course.” She frowns, noticing the thin layer of dust on some of the shelves. She runs her fingers along the warped wood, peering at the worn spines and faded titles of the books in front of her. “Did you all leave this here when you left Starfall all those years ago? Weren’t you afraid of someone breaking in and finding all this?”

“The ownership of the manor was in a trust,” Bran answers. He shoves some books off the armchair and they fall to the floor with muffled thuds. “All anyone knew was that the manor was private property and still owned by the Stark family who no longer lived in Starfall. We’re all dead so the threshold spell doesn’t work here—but regular human laws work just fine to keep non-supernatural lurkers out.”

With the armchair clear, Dany sits down in it and Bran reverses his chair so that he can face her properly. After her chat with Arya earlier, she is feeling a little less angry with the Starks, though of all the siblings, she expects Bran to be the most truthful with her. Rickon is too flippant, Sansa too cautious. Robb tells kind lies and Arya’s honesty comes with barbs. And Jon…

Jon is complicated.

“I’m guessing you spend the most time in this room,” Dany observes for lack of anything better to say. Bran laughs quietly.

“Aye,” he replies before holding up his phone. “I’ve always been better at keeping up with technology than the rest of my family. But sometimes books are just as helpful as the internet. Especially journals.”

Dany startles. Then she cautiously ventures, “Jon told you.”

“He mentioned it,” Bran confirms. He tilts his head to the side. “Books contain information. Journals contain lives. You can get into someone’s head by reading a journal. They’re like grimoires in that way. Unfortunately, they’re just as easily lost to time.”

“How many…?”

“Dozens.” Bran glances around at the shelves surrounding them. “Hundreds, probably. They’re not all here in Starfall. We have a lot of houses around the world.”

Dany thinks about that for a long moment. The journal that has been in her possession for weeks now has taunted her. She still has not finished it—the world quietly imploding around her has made that impossible—but she doesn’t think Bran is wrong. The mysterious journal is someone’s life, someone who has been around for centuries, someone who has at least met Ygritte, someone who knows about the immortality spell and the Starfall witch.

The only question is: who?

“Have you found any journals here in Starfall?” Dany asks, remembering Tywin’s words about her mother studying the Founders’ journals. The Starks said they hadn’t been to Starfall in decades—but what if one of them had and never told the others? What if one of them knew her mum, knew her research? Or maybe they needed to come back—Ygritte had been the vampire encyclopedia. What if the redhead had known her mum? It is too late to ask, too late to know.

“The Founders kept journals. Most of them are at City Hall and available to the public, so there's nothing in them beyond getting a normal glimpse of what life was like a century and a half ago. If there are journals with anything more esoteric though…” Bran shakes his head. “They’re behind closed doors and thresholds that we can’t get past. Not unless we compelled someone to do it for us.”

“I could do it.”

“No.”

Dany scowls.

“What do you mean ‘no’? Having those journals might be able to help us since we’ve lost the grimoire. You all can’t get into anyone’s home without an invitation. I can.”

“Not after last night,” argues Bran, unlocking his phone. He types something quickly onto the screen before he hands it over to Dany. She is not sure what she is looking at and gives Bran a quizzical look. The young-looking vampire looks grave. “That’s from the sheriff’s email. The news is still saying the explosion at the Lannister mansion was caused by a gas leak. The preliminary investigation is also saying a gas leak. But even if Jaime’s not on the Council, he knew about it. He thinks the fire might have been deliberate and has already asked fire investigators from the capital to come down. With Daario’s murder and all of the so-called animal attacks…it’s not good.”

A thousand thoughts fly through Dany’s mind. It is not surprising to learn that the fire might not have been an accident after all—with the supernatural crowding in around Dany, she’d been more shocked when everyone kept telling her it was merely a gas leak. The missing persons, the animal attacks in the woods, the final countdown to the arrival of the second comet—it is enough that even a normal person can’t continue to ignore it.

“Could Daenerys have done it?” Dany asks. Bran frowns thoughtfully, sitting back in his chair.

“The Council would be no friends to her, but I am pretty sure she wants you alive.” Still, he cards his fingers through dark hair so much like Arya’s, so much like Jon’s. “Daenerys is…I can’t account for her. I don’t know what she’s planning. I don’t know why she’s been quiet for all these years. I would have found her if I'd known she was alive. I know I would have.”

There is a thread of guilt in his voice and Dany lowers the phone. His unparalleled technological skills—clearly advanced enough to hack into Jaime’s personal email—have let him see things that his siblings can’t. He is their eyes into a world rapidly changing around them. For Daenerys and Lyanna to go unnoticed for decades, centuries, a thousand years…Dany realizes that he must feel as though he has failed his family.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” she says quietly. When Bran only shakes his head in disagreement, she presses her lips into a firm line. “It’s not, Bran. If someone doesn’t want to be found, if someone has just as many years to learn how to vanish as you’ve spent years learning how to find them—you can’t blame yourself for not seeing them.”

“I should have looked harder.”

“Looked harder for what? You didn’t even know either of them was alive until last night.” She reaches forward, phone in hand. He takes it from her. “You know now. You can do something now. You can’t let guilt drown you or else you’ll be too busy looking at what you could have done instead of what you can do.”

Bran’s answering smile is small.

“You sound pretty sure of that.”

“You might have noticed that your cousin has a tendency to brood. I mayhave said something similar to him once.”

This time, Bran’s smile and laugh are far more genuine.

She is about to ask him exactly what he thinks Daenerys and Lyanna are planning to do when there is a movement out of the corner of her eye. She turns in the direction of the window, wondering if a couple of raccoons have started to chase each other now that the last remnants of the sun have vanished—and barely has time to let out a shout of surprise as the window farthest away from where she and Bran sit implodes inward from a human-shaped projectile, shards of glittering glass spraying over the books.

Bran spins around in his chair as Dany jumps to her feet. Crouched in the remnants of the window are two people—a young man and a young woman, both dark-haired and dark-eyed and wholly unfamiliar. The girl’s gaze darts briefly toward Bran before she looks at Dany.

"Oh," she says. "You do look just like her."

And when she smiles, Dany can see her fangs.

Bran reacts before Dany can. Whirling in his wheelchair, he grabs a handful of the pencils from the top of the desk and then lobs them straight at the vampires before either of them can launch themselves at Dany. She watches, stunned only for a second, as the pencils, thrown at impossible speed and with devastating force, pierce through the nameless female vampire’s clothing and skin and muscle. The vampire howls in rage and pain, staggering back against the wall.

“Go!” Bran shouts at Dany right as the male vampire throws himself at him, knocking them both to the floor, and whatever invisible force has gripped her loosens. She turns and runs.

No threshold on the house, she thinks frantically as she bursts out of the room, her locket burning cold above her breastbone. Jon or any of the other Starks should be here soon…but soon is forever when vampires move as fast as they do. There’s no vervain in the house. She needs something wooden. She needs a fucking weapon.

She hears crashing behind her. She doesn’t turn.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” she curses beneath her breath, adrenaline pumping through her veins. Her heart is in her throat. The Stark manor is a maze, full of obstacles. She just needs a weapon. Something to buy her time. Something sharp, something heavy—anything.

Can she make it to the front door while Bran grapples with the vampire? She’s not sure. All the nameless vampire has to do is make her way out of Bran’s grasp. He can’t follow her, not crippled as he is. She has seconds.

And the hallway has never seemed so long.

Her sneakers scuff against the hardwood floor as she emerges from the hallway into the parlor, the massive room dim with the faint lavender-rose glow of early evening. Every piece of furniture in here is a shadow, boulders waiting to trip her up, walls possibly hiding more vampires than the one that has just come through the library. But up the stairs is the front hall and then the front door. She might at least get to her car, could at least start to drive away.

She doesn’t think about it. She makes a break for the stairs.

The vampire catches her at the door.

Dany’s fingers barely have time to ghost across the doorknob before something has grabbed her upper arm and has thrown her back down the front foyer with such force, Dany is sure she would have broken something if a console didn’t break her fall. The console shatters beneath her weight and Dany lets out a cry of pain as the broken frame leaves a deep gouge on her hand as she tries to break her fall. She lies there, momentarily stunned, her hand (and her head and her leg and her back) all throbbing with pain, trying to desperately grasp for awareness. She needs to get up. She needs to run.

But the vampire is already on her, the whites of her eyes gone black with blood, dark veins spiraling out from her eyes, fangs protruding.

She lunges—

—straight into the broken piece of table Dany has managed to raise at the last second.

The vampire stares dumbly down at the sharp piece of wood jutting out from her belly before her face twists in rage. It’s not enough time but Dany tries anyway, scrambling away from the vampire. Behind her, she hears the vampire growl in pain and rage. She’s moving too slowly. She’s moving too—

“You bitch.”

Then pain and panic explode through Dany, even as she tries to grapple for another piece of broken console, even as she tries to shove a splintered piece of wood through the vampire’s neck or throat or heart or anything. But oh god, oh god, it hurts. It hurts, and even as she struggles, she can feel the brutal stinging pain of the vampire latched to her carotid artery, can feel blood leaking, hot and sticky, down her neck, no no no…

“Dany!”

And…

Nothing.

The vampire is gone.

Dany blinks at the ceiling of the foyer. Her face is wet. There is a heavy weight on her legs, a strange cold metallic odor in the air. The body of the vampire twitches. It has no head. Why doesn’t it have a head? There is only the broken stump of a neck, gore and clotted blood and decaying black tissue spilling out onto Dany’s shirt. Death. And cold. It smells like cold death.

She blinks again.

She doesn’t understand. And her whole body feels like it is throbbing in pain. She takes in a pained breath, slower this time. Then she closes her eyes.

She should…she needs to…did Jon…?

“Dammit, I’m sorry,” someone mutters and then she feels a wrist against her mouth and something metallic on her tongue. Blood. It’s blood. She's tasted this before. Someone is giving her blood. Jon must finally be here. God, what a shitty several days this has been. Her head pounds.

The voice continues, “Can you sit up? Can you hear me?”

There is no longer cool skin against her lips. She keeps her eyes closed.

“I can hear you. My head hurts.”

“I’m sorry,” comes another apology and she feels a pair of strong arms lift her up. “That was a stupid idea.”

What are you talking about, Dany thinks as the person settles her on the couch in the parlor and she prays and hopes it is not the same one Ygritte's corpse had been on last night. It is at least far more comfortable than the shattered remnants of the foyer console. She groans and then opens her eyes. Stares. Closes her eyes. Opens them again.

“I don’t know if I can do anything about the headache. We don’t really have aspirin here. I’ll call one of the—”

“Bran.”

The dark-haired vampire pauses. Then he sighs in resignation as if he already knows the question she is about to ask. “Yes?”

“Where is your wheelchair?”

Bran Stark, crouching next to the couch with a concerned look on his face, furrows his brow...and then he stands. He is standing and he is shoving his hands into his jeans, looking altogether like a young man ready to be chastised, like the teenager he used to be too long ago. With an apologetic note in his voice, he says, “In the library. The other vampire tore one of the wheels off. He's dead too, but I’m going to have to fix it before I can use it again.”

Dany’s head hurts. Yet she manages to dredge up a glare. “You know what I mean. How are you able to walk?”

Bran hesitates. Then he offers her a small smile.

“Jon told you we change our appearances throughout the centuries, didn’t he?” When Dany nods, perplexed, Bran’s smile becomes a little more abashed. “Did you think that just meant dyeing our hair?”

Don’t vampires heal from all injuries?

You’d be surprised how many people you can fool by changing one thing about your appearance.

And who would ever think that an immortal creature known for its healing factors would be confined to a wheelchair?

Dany stares.

Distantly, she hears the front door open and when she looks up, Sansa and Robb are standing at the top stair into the parlor, staring in dumbfounded concern at the second round of wreckage in their house in less than twenty-four hours.

“Hi,” Bran says with false cheer, turning. “I can explain.”

And I, Dany thinks, collapsing back into the cushions of the couch, don’t want to.

But there is one thing that she knows she has to do. No one is going to like it, least of all her. But there is nothing else for it. This past day has proven it. The attacks, the death, the revelations of an unfolding conspiracy, and the looming arrival of the second comet—it is all quickly coming to a head and soon they will have no time at all.

Unlike Daenerys, you would let yourself burn before any harm came to the people you loved.

She would.

She will.

And she realizes that she needs to talk to Daenerys Targaryen—she can only hope that Bran is right and the queen who shares her face will not kill her after all.

Dammit.

Chapter Text

The blaringly hot midday sun has given way to a stormy afternoon, the thick sticky-sweet heat from earlier now trapped listless within the bar. Conversation still buzzes like mayflies in the air, the ceiling fans blessedly sending a warm breeze of ale-scented air over the heads of the patrons. The smells of grease and fried meat still hang heavily, though they are quickly being devoured by the rich scent of wet dirt and warm asphalt trickling in through the open doors. Already, the staccato beat of the rain is threading into the rhythm of bluegrass drifting from the speakers.

Jon slides into the empty booth across from an older man who looks up at him with one raised greying brow. It has been twenty-odd years since he has last seen the man, and though witches often age at a precipitously slow rate compared to non-magical mortals, the years that the man has weathered are clear on his face.

“I thought you might be here.”

“You can tell a lot about a town by their dives.” The man shrugs, absently gesturing at the rest of the bar with a maimed hand, his fingers shortened to the second knuckle from some misadventure Jon knows little about. “Besides, since it was Ygritte who called, I figured I could get a free beer or three out of you. You owe me.”

Jon’s returning smile is grim and self-effacing.

“It’s good to see you, Davos.”

Davos Seaworth is one of the handful of witches that Ygritte introduced him to within the past century, though the older man often grimaces at being called a witch (though he is equally dismissive of “warlock” and “wizard”). When he first met him almost forty years ago, Jon had liked the man’s salt-of-the-earth demeanor and dry humor. Jon has not seen him since Karl and Rast had kidnapped Bran, though he is not surprised that the man has kept his distance or why he says that Jon owes him multiple drinks.

Almost killing someone in a moment of unbridled bloodlust will do that.

He watches as Davos glances around the bar, clearly clocking the handful of vampires who are also in the bar with them (not as many as Jon might have thought, considering the increasing number of them arriving over the past several weeks, the magical lure of curiosity driving them to Dorne). There is a sudden strange pressure against his skin, the brittle sense of static brushing against his hearing, and then Davos turns back to him, nodding slightly in satisfaction. It is an unfamiliar spell, though Jon can guess the gist of it—a ward against listening supernatural ears.

“I tried calling Ygritte back. I haven’t heard from her after her call about helping the Starfall witch.” Grief, fresh and still dagger-sharp, slices through Jon, as potent as it will always be despite the centuries of enduring loss after loss. He can feel Davos’s watchful eyes on him and then he hears the man let out a breath and a soft curse. “Shit. I should have known something was wrong when she called. I’m sorry, lad. I know you and she were friends.”

Friends, Jon thinks bitterly. He had tried for centuries to keep anyone other than his family at arm’s length, yet Ygritte had somehow stubbornly found a way to leave a mark on him, always determined to get a rise and a smile out of him. Her assistance had always been appreciated and he should have left it at that, should never have involved her with more dangerous things. If he had only known the price of it all, if he had only tried…

“What happened?” Davos asks, his voice hushed despite his spell. “She was always so cautious.”

What a question. Jon himself is still getting his own head around it, even after several days. He sits back in the booth, jaw clenching.

We will have forever.

I promise.

“Daenerys happened.”

“Daenerys? Daenerys Targaryen?” When Jon only nods, Davos frowns. A moment later, he raises his hand to flag down one of the waitstaff, quickly ordering another beer for himself and one for Jon too. When the young woman heads back to the bar, Davos crosses his arms, brows lowering. “Last I checked, she’s supposed to be dead. I think Nature would have said something if she was still alive.”

“She’s not.”

And then he spends the next ten minutes explaining exactly how dead Daenerys is.

By the time the server comes back with a second round of drinks, Davos’s surprised expression has faded away into sober aggravation. He does not immediately reach for his mug of beer, rubbing at his chin with his non-maimed hand instead as he mulls over Jon’s words and their implication. Jon lets him stew in silence, letting his gaze sweep over the bar. There are vampires here, of course—the curious and the hungry, an absence of warmth and sound and breath, a cold dead smell in the air.

He closes his eyes.

It’s no surprise really that all of this has come spinning into a maelstrom here in Starfall. Before humans had decided to make this little town a safe haven, Dorne had been a refuge of a different sort centuries ago. The memory is still there, though he isn’t sure he can trust it much, now that he knows of Daenerys’s compulsion. If he lets himself, he can recall the damp smell of black earth, of rain and petrichor and decaying wood. He remembers a ghostly feminine touch grazing his cheek and blood on his lips, an incessant pounding in his head.

Jon…

Yet the compulsion refuses to fade completely and the images slip through his fingers.

When he opens his eyes, he finds Davos staring at him curiously. He sighs. “What?”

“How are you doing?”

The question takes Jon off-guard for a moment. It is a question no one truly asks him, not beyond his family or Ygritte. He has made sure over the centuries that no one could get close to care enough to ask him that question. The last time he saw Davos Seaworth, he had nearly ripped his throat out when he had let despair and rage fuel his bloodlust—only Robb’s quick intervention and a snapped neck had stopped him. That should have garnered him no goodwill from the man. Yet the question still hangs between them, as potent as the summer heat.

Cautiously, Jon says, “I’ll be better once the second comet is gone.”

Davos studies him for a long moment as though waiting for him to divulge more. But Jon is not known to be a miser with his words for nothing and eventually the man sighs, reaching for his beer. “Alright then. I won’t press you. You’ve always been a stubborn bastard. Shouldn’t’ve expected that to change in twenty years.”

“What else did Ygritte tell you?” Davos shrugs.

“She said the Starfall witch was going to need help undoing a massive spell,” he answers, his brow furrowing, the lines on his aged face deepening. “Of course, you vampires can’t say shit without being cryptic about it so I guessed that it had something to do with the comets and the immortality spell. You might not sense it but Starfall’s practically radioactive with magic these days. I don’t know what the witch is doing but it’s attracting a lot of attention all over Westeros. Anyone with any sense of self-preservation is staying the hell away.”

“Except vampires.”

“The only thing more curious than an immortal vampire is a cat,” Davos points out. “I suspect many of them expect the Originals to show up. Gods know that younger vampires will want to trip over themselves getting into the good graces of the first vampire family.”

Jon reaches for his beer then. “They won’t like what they find.”

Ygritte had known that the Starks are the Originals and, after that incident with Karl and Rast twenty years ago, Davos too had been pulled in on the supernatural world’s best-kept secret. After they’d managed to save Bran and Robb had snapped Jon’s neck to keep him from tearing open Davos’s throat, his cousin had briefly debated compelling Davos into forgetting what he knew and what he had seen. It had been Bran who convinced him otherwise and Davos has clearly valued that trust by never revealing the secret to anyone else.

“It’s been twenty-some years,” Davos says, “but did you ever find out the buyer from that auction?” Jon shakes his head.

“They vanished into the wind.” It is frustrating, of course. The closest they’d gotten to retrieving the ashes of Winterfell’s heart tree and his bloody temper had caused the thread to slip out of their hands. The one saving grace is that whoever had the ashes likely doesn’t know the true significance of what they have, beyond an ancient magical property. If the unbinding can be completed, then maybe it won’t be something any of them need to worry about anymore regardless.

We either die or we become human again. None of us know for sure.

What kind of person am I if I’m not willing to do everything in my power to keep the people I love safe?

Jon has not spoken with Dany since that terrible night. He knows that Arya went over her rental to speak with her and he knows she was at the manor when the attack came. But she’d left before he’d come back from the hospital after his encounter with Daenerys. Both Arya and Bran had suggested that Dany was not as furious with him as he thought she should be, but Jon still knows to keep his distance—any decision to speak with him again has to be her choice. He has already put her in an unenviable position with everything going on in Starfall.

He should have kept his promise to her from all those years ago.

Davos must sense a shift in his expression because when he looks back at the man, the witch is giving him a skeptical look.

“You’ve always been good at brooding but you’re taking it to extremes tonight. You sure you’re alright?” When Jon only shrugs, Davos snorts. “I may be getting old, lad, but I’m not senile. You’re still the most dangerous one in your family, especially when you let go of those restraints you have on yourself. I want to know if I need to get the fuck out of town before I get acquainted again with how much of a threat you are. I like my blood firmly inside my body.”

Jon can’t help it—he does laugh at that, though there is little humor in it. “Aye. I suppose that’s reasonable.” The remorse within him doesn’t fade, but he contemplates his words for a few seconds before he asks, “Did Ygritte tell you what was needed for the spell?”

“She knew most of it,” Davos shrugs. “Melisandre’s grimoire, a ring, the Starfall witch. But it’s blood magic and it needs a rare astronomical event on top of that. You’d imagine why most sane people are keeping their distance from this town.”

“Nature likes a balance.”

“Seems unequal to me if Daenerys is still alive.” Davos takes a long pull of his beer before he adds, “Is she in the mood to give back her immortality?”

I don’t know what she wants. I probably never did. “I don’t think so.”

“Then…?”

“Nature created a doppelgänger in her place. A mortal shadow.”

That clearly takes Davos by surprise. He places his mug back on the table and gives Jon a long assessing look. “A doppelgänger. And she lives here?” At Jon’s nod, he lets out a low whistle. “What’s her name?”

“Dany. Dany Dayne.”

Davos is silent for a long moment. Then he lets out an aggrieved sigh, rubbing at his face with his maimed hand. “Shit. You love her, don’t you?”

Jon snaps his head up, surprised by the bluntness in Davos’s tone. “What?”

“Don’t look at me like that. You’ve got practice with those masks of yours, but you’re shit at hiding your guilt.” Davos gives him an understanding look, his pale eyes surprisingly sad and warm. “You feel guilty about this girl, don’t you? You’re a good lad, bloodlust aside, and I don’t think you’d willingly sacrifice an innocent just to break this spell. But there’s something more to it this time, isn’t there? You love her and now you have to decide between her life and what you think is eternal damnation.”

When Jon only remains silent, still too stunned by Davos’s words, the old man shakes his head.

“You have a type, lad.”

Does he love Dany? He cares for her, surely. He deeply respects her—there are aspects of her that remind him of the ghost Daenerys used to be (or perhaps the woman that Daenerys never was, the woman he wanted her to be but had been so blinded by young foolish love). But he is not sure he has within him the capability of giving Dany the sort of love that she deserves, the sort of love that he wished for her to find. If anything, he has been selfish with her from the moment he saw her on those swings all those years ago.

Yet…

He has not felt anything like this before, not even with Daenerys. Even with his centuries-old guilt embedded in him like a rune, he has never felt this sort of warmth and happiness, this friendship that has rooted itself deep within him. Holding her had felt like discovering a home he is still not sure he had been looking for again, content for lifetimes with just keeping his family safe. Anything else, anything more…

What do you see when you see me? Truthfully?

He remembers her, masked and lovely, sitting outside the Tyrell mansion, her gaze distant and solemn. He remembers when she had come to sit by his side when they’d learned about the ring, when she learned about his loss. He remembers how fiercely protective she had become when she learned that her friends and family were in danger—and even though she has no powers, even though she has no strength beyond what is granted by mortality, he knows that she is willing to risk it all to keep the people she loves safe from harm.

And…he loves her.

He loves her and he has been fooling himself thinking that this won’t end in anything except tragedy again.

Shit.

Shit.

“It doesn’t matter.” Before Davos can argue though, Jon shoots him a scowl, letting that darkness that has eaten away at him for centuries settle into his gaze. He wants to claw it out of himself, rip it to shreds, but it seems as if he is damned to repeat his mistakes, always, always, always. “It’s not my choice. I promised her that when this is all over, she could go back to a normal life. There is no normal life with me in any ending of this story, Davos. Leave it be.”

Davos eyes him silently. There is something that Jon might almost call pity in his gaze.

He hates it.

“Alright,” Davos eventually says. “But I hope you know that you’re being a damned fool.”

“Most people wouldn’t tell that to the most dangerous vampire they know.” Davos laughs.

“What can I say? Clearly, I’m as much a damned fool as you are for being here in the first place.”

Jon smiles tiredly.

“That we can agree on.”

“Have I told you that this is a terrible idea?”

It is somewhere on the wrong side of midnight, though the overcast sky has hidden away the moon and the canopy of jeweled stars. The cemetery is as silent as its residents, the only sound the gentle warm breeze clawing its way through creaking branches and the quiet rustle of a thousand leaves. The smell of rain and petrichor is heavy in the air, the cloak of the storm draped over Starfall like a promise. Dany thinks if she closes her eyes, she might still smell Waymar’s blood in the air, cold and metallic and wrong, his black heart in Jon’s hand.

She watches as Missandei, cradling a flickering match, leans down to light another candle set up in a circle that provides almost all of the illumination in the cemetery. The dark golden glow sends strange shadows dancing across her friend’s honey-brown skin, her glasses perched precariously in her cloud of dark coils. If Edd Tollett happens across them at this hour, they’ll never hear the end of it.

“I know it’s a terrible idea.” Dany wraps her arms around her middle as Missandei lights the final candle before extinguishing the match with a shake of her hand. “But I think Daenerys will be more honest with me than she is with the Starks.” Missandei frowns, straightening.

“I don’t like that kind of gamble, Dany.” She looks at the circle of flame with a critical eye, unable to completely hide her apprehension. “Especially since Daenerys is the one who told you to meet her here. She couldn’t have just told you the truth over a phone call? I don’t know enough about what she can do to cast a truly protective spell over us.”

Dany sighs. She doesn’t like it either. But there is not much she can do after deciding that she needs to speak with the vampire who shares her name face-to-face.

The one thing that sets her nerves alight is the fact that Daenerys seems to have been aware that Dany would want to speak with her after her whirlwind arrival back into the Starks’ lives. She had met up with Margaery for a much-needed round of whiskey when Gendry had approached their table with a message. Margaery had been the first to clock that he had been compelled, especially when Gendry seemed to be able to tell that the pale-haired young woman who had swanned into the diner had not been Dany herself.

The message—an almost playful threat to have Gendry throw himself onto the open flame of the grill if Dany didn’t meet her—had sent horror spiraling down her spine, especially as Gendry had repeated the message with no fear and no sense of self-preservation in his tone. It was only the warning that Dany should arrive with no other vampires that had kept Margaery from telling Robb, who inevitably would tell Jon.

At least she said nothing about witches, Dany thinks, her head already ricocheting with how easily the threat had come to her double. She still knows too little about Daenerys herself beyond what the Starks have told her, but Ygritte’s corpse and Jon’s broken neck and the vicious bite mark against Missandei’s skin had been enough to convince her that the first Daenerys Targaryen is not someone she wants to cross in any way. She can very well believe that this woman would burn an entire city if she saw fit.

She hears Missandei murmur something in High Valyrian, the consonants like liquid on her tongue, and a moment later, the fire burns brighter, hotter, and the scent of rain, of a promising storm, becomes a little sharper in the air. If this was only a few months ago, Dany might think all of this was strange, but she knows enough about Missandei’s powers to know how much magic she is channeling from nature.

I should have told her to stay away, Dany thinks, unable to quell the worry rising within her. She trusts her best friend’s skill, yes, but she can’t help but be concerned about the sheer amount of magic her friend has been using. Missandei is not an endless well of power, Starfall witch or not, and if she ever pushes herself too hard, it might very well kill her. Worse, what if Nature, fickle as it is with the idea of a balance, punishes her for using the wrong kind of magic too often? It scares her.

“Don’t give me that look,” Missandei says, breaking through Dany’s thoughts. She only smiles when Dany startles and frowns. “You worry too loudly. You can’t be the only one willing to sacrifice things for your friends.”

“I should have told her to hang.”

“You wouldn’t have done that to Gendry,” Missandei reminds her softly. She grasps Dany’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. I don’t like the idea of meeting Daenerys but she won’t kill either of us. I know that much.”

Not now, at least, Dany thinks. But she still squeezes Missandei’s hand back, offering her a smile that she knows doesn’t reach her eyes. Gods, is this what their lives have become?

“Hello, Daenerys.”

Dany spins, even as Missandei’s grip tightens on her wrist. She hears her friend speak her name quietly in warning as her heartbeat pounds thunderously in her head as she looks at the figure who has appeared behind the ring of flame, cloaked in shadow and silent as sin. Dany stares unsettled at the face she sees in the mirror every day…but it is warped somehow. Twisted. Darker.

And when the vampire, with her long moonbeam curls and dawn-hued eyes, smiles and takes a step closer, it takes more willpower than Dany wants to admit to infuse steel into her spine, to not instinctively recoil.

“Actually…it’s Dany, isn’t it? I suppose that will make this much easier. It will get far too confusing if we’re both called Daenerys, won’t it?” That smile grows wider. “And what will poor Jon think?”

Dany has no illusions that whatever Jon feels toward Daenerys is complicated, but she wants to believe that he had been telling the truth when he said that his love for the queen has long since gone cold. She supposes that Daenerys’s willingness to burn thousands didn’t help matters. She takes a step forward, ignoring the bite of Missandei’s grip on her wrist.

“We need to talk.”

“Of course.” Daenerys’s pale eyes flicker over Dany’s shoulder. “Lovely to see you again, Missandei. It is a relief to know how quickly you learn from your past mistakes. You don’t know how incredibly disappointed I was by how easily I was able to fool you. Perhaps there is hope for you yet.”

Dany can sense Missandei stiffen behind her at the insult but she tries to catch her double’s eye, to draw her attention away from the magic, bristling and razor-edged, gathering behind her. The vampire seems confident to the point of arrogance and Dany needs to find out why. If she has been hiding for a thousand years, if she hasn’t even attempted to make contact with Jon or any of the Starks, it tells her that not all is as it appears. There must be something else at play here.

“Missandei is the Starfall witch,” Dany tells the former queen. “And I’m the doppelgänger. You want something from the both of us for this spell. What is it? Are you trying to undo it?”

Daenerys laughs quietly.

“You are asking the wrong questions,” she answers, crossing her arms. “Who is to say I didn’t come back simply for Jon? You don’t think he really has anything beyond superficial feelings for you, do you? After all these centuries, there’s a part of him that still loves me.”

“You’re too old to delude yourself into thinking that.” The words are out of her mouth before Dany can think twice about them. To her surprise though, Daenerys only cocks a challenging eyebrow at her over the flames.

“Oh, my shadow has a smart mouth on her.” Daenerys smiles again and there is a predatory gleam in it. “You are nothing more than a poor imitation of me. An unremarkable human girl living an unremarkable human life. Jon is nothing if not predictable and his standards have obviously atrophied over the past several hundred years. But he and I are meant to be together. He’s always known that, no matter how much he wants to deny it.”

But then she steps closer to the fire, the flames turning her pale eyes into shards of lavender ice. There is no amusement in it, no kindness. It is a scythe cutting through the air, and just as deadly, edges razor-tipped and bloody.

“But you see, he made a promise to me first. He swore an oath.” Something dangerous and wild glimmers in her eyes. “And I will raise all seven hells to make him keep it..”

“You’re doing all of this for Jon?” Dany asks, trying not to let herself rise to the bait. “You burned a city for him?”

“What have the Starks been telling you?” Daenerys rolls her eyes but she does not step closer, the fire and the magic encased within it warding her back. “To them, I was never anything except a monster. They hated me for years before I did anything to them, before they sought to blame me for things they instigated.”

Dany frowns, briefly glancing back at Missandei who shakes her head. What the hell is Daenerys talking about?

But the vampire must see the confusion in their eyes because she scoffs. “Oh, let me guess. They have painted themselves as the poor victims of the mad queen. I bet they told you that everything they did was to protect the North, to protect their family. They never told you the whole story.” When Dany says nothing, Daenerys only looks disgusted. “Of course they didn’t. You don’t live as long as they have without becoming cold and cruel. They’ll call me a monster without ever looking at the wolves in the mirror.”

She can’t hear this. Not now. The Starks already have to answer for a thousand things they have kept secret from her. For as much as she trusts the family, she knows that they have not always been honest with her. Whether that is for her own good or not, she is sick of it. But she refuses to allow Daenerys or Lyanna or anyone to continue to try deepening the chasm of mistrust between them.

“What do you want? In truth?”

Daenerys pauses, head tilting to the side as if completely unfazed by the fact that Dany has not tried to defend the Starks. If anything, that causes more alarms to go off in Dany’s head, that the queen seems so unbothered by it. She is playing games with immortal creatures, vampires who have long since cheated and gambled their way to survival. Outwitting them—outwitting her—seems like an impossible task. The board set up by an opponent will never fall in her favor.

“In truth?” Daenerys echoes. “I want my ring back.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter? It’s mine and I want it back.”

“Dany…” Missandei warns, but Dany ignores her. Instead, she steps closer to the perimeter of the ring. If she leans toward it, into it, she might be able to brush her fingers against Daenerys’s arm.

“Your ring sealed the spell,” Dany tells the vampire, watching her expression for any sort of flicker of truth. “If you want it back, it means you want to undo the immortality spell. You want to break the curse.”

“Strangely enough, it didn’t quite go as I expected a thousand years ago.” Daenerys shrugs, almost bored. “Witches and their spells. So many variables that you can get wrong. I wanted to restore my family’s dynasty, to guarantee that it would never fall again. Yet somehow…well, Nature can be quite a bitch when you try to break its rules.”

What does that mean?

Dany frowns, turning Daenerys’s words over in her head. She does not doubt that the vampire is being honest with her, but there is something she is not saying, a key to all of this that she is leaving out. If she truly just wanted to reverse the spell, she should be working with the Starks, shouldn’t she? Why cause all of this chaos if their goals are the same?

There is something else she wants, Dany realizes. Something that might have to do with Jon, but she’s not entirely sure of that. But there is something with the ring and the lost grimoire and Dany herself, something that she can’t quite see. She tries to jam the pieces of the puzzle together but her mind simply will not allow her to make the connection. To stall, she says instead, “I don’t have the ring. I can’t help you there.”

Daenerys only hums.

“No, but you know who does have it. After all, I’m sure Daario sent it to someone you know for safekeeping.”

Dany’s blood runs cold.

“You knew Daario?” she asks, her voice sounding choked and far away. Dimly, she is aware of Missandei taking a step closer to her, can feel her friend’s supportive hand on her shoulder as if that gentle touch will keep the world from crumbling away at her feet. She can only stare, the abyss waiting for her, as past the flow of a dozen candles, Daenerys only smiles knowingly.

“Of course I knew Daario. I’m the one who killed him after all.”

Be with me. Marry me.

No.

No.

No.

“In the end, he still loved you,” Daenerys tells her blithely, unaware of the piercing shriek in Dany’s head. “Not as much as he probably could have, but he did love you. For as bored as you were with him and this godsforsaken little town, he did do his best to try to protect you in the end. He even managed to trick me, I’ll give him that. I thought I had him fooled.”

Dany feels as though she is choking, as though she is drowning. Daenerys had been in Starfall. She had been in Starfall weeks before Dany herself had come home. How many people has she compelled? How many people has she tricked? Has she been setting the trap this entire time, laughing as Dany and the Starks muddled their way through finding the ring and the grimoire? Everything that has happened, all the horror, all the death…

When it begins to rain blood on your sleepy little town, you’ll remember that I did try to warn you.

Lyanna’s warning. Ygritte’s caution. Both women had worked with Daenerys and they had tried to warn her and now she…she…

“The second comet will be here in less than a month,” Daenerys tells her again through the roaring fog that has swallowed Dany whole. “You have until then to get me my ring. And if you don’t, I will string up bodies from here to King’s Landing, starting with your lovely mother Ashara.”

She takes a step closer but then the fire is burning too bright, too hot, and the scent of ozone becomes thick in the air, electricity bubbling around them like a silver inferno. A mildly impressed look crosses Daenerys’s face but it is quickly swallowed up by shadow and flame and the night. Dany stumbles back into Missandei’s arms, even as she finishes spitting out the spell that has wrapped around them like a chain. Beyond the silver flame and the dancing golden shadows of the night, she can hear Daenerys laugh at her.

“Tick tock, Dany. Give Jon all my love.”

Then with a breath of wind, she is gone.

Grey knows that she is here before he even opens the door to his rented flat.

Grimacing, he flicks on the lights but does not immediately look at the figure standing by the window on the far side of the room. Instead, he glances over at the kitchen counter and the open bottle of wine. Guilt crawls up his spine, but he has had a long time to regret deals made with the devil. Or rather deals made with…

“Daenerys,” he greets cautiously, placing his keys on the counter. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“You should have,” the former queen tells him, not bothering to glance his way. He sees the tumbler she holds in her hand—not exactly the right glass for her vintage, but clearly, she is toying with him for not pouring herself something harder. She swirls the contents of the glass absently, her gaze still focused on some tableau just beyond the window. “I am sure she contacted you after our little run-in in the cemetery. She is clever, I’ll give her that.”

Missandei had called him to tell him the aftermath of Dany’s, frankly, reckless plan to meet with Daenerys. From the little time that he has known the doppelgänger, he has to admire her willingness to put her life on the line to protect her friends and family. But he has known Daenerys for much longer and fails to see how any sort of meeting with her is anything except suicidal.

“She did.”

“Always one for words.” Daenerys lets out a delicate little snort before turning to him. “The witch is more powerful than Ygritte led me to believe. It seems as though Nature truly does want her to be the one to wield the magic for this spell. If she is as strong as Melisandre was…”

“She’s not,” Grey says immediately, unable to stop the words. “A spell of that magnitude will kill her if she attempts it without anchors.”

Daenerys tilts her head to the side, blinking slowly at Grey. Then he watches as a quiet knowing smile spreads across her beautiful face and he curses himself, already knowing that he has said too much, that he has played directly into her hand. He should know better. He knows Daenerys too well after working with Ygritte all these years. He should have feigned disinterest or a clinical sort of appreciation for Missandei’s powers. Instead…

“You care for her,” observes Daenerys, her smile only growing when Grey clinches his jaw. She lets out a small laugh as she sits on the arm of the chair closest to the window, lifting the tumbler to her lips. “Don’t look so dour, Grey. It’s not like you’re gelded. You might as well find something akin to love before the second comet arrives.”

Grey does not like this. He does not like the idea of betraying Missandei this way, even though none of what he does is malicious. Jon Snow had the right of it when they crossed paths in Ygritte’s classroom all those weeks ago—he should have died decades ago, casting old forbidden magic that should have killed him. But instead, Daenerys Targaryen had found him and offered him a deal.

And now…

“Don’t you worry,” Daenerys continues with a playful tilt to her lips. “You can continue helping the witch and that doppelgänger. When the time comes for it, you’ll do your part in helping undo this spell. If the witch lives, you can go off into your little happy ending with her. Does that sound fair?”

It isn’t fair. Not to Missandei, whose gentle kindness and sweet compassion he does not deserve. And certainly not to Dany, whom he is sure would sacrifice herself to save her friend.

Yet he buries it down. He has said too much already.

And Daenerys still holds the end of the chain that keeps him tethered to her.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “It’s fair.”

The first pale rays of dawn have spilled across the manor grounds by the time Dany pulls up to the guesthouse.

She has already dropped Missandei off at her house and though her friend asked her to stay over for the night after their meeting with Daenerys, Dany had shaken off the request. The confrontation with the vampire who shares her face has left her numb and struggling to understand the immensity of the horror facing her now within the next weeks. The only person she wants to see is the only person who might understand how she is feeling.

But even then, she can’t shake her trepidation. Despite her determination to not let Daenerys’s words seep through her like poison, she can already feel the doubts starting to claw at her skin. If everything she has done so far has been watched and calculated, if all of this has been for nothing…

The door is already swinging open as she climbs the stairs and when she looks up, Jon’s curious dark grey gaze almost shatters her. Before the question can be asked, she tells him, “I met with Daenerys.”

“Dany—“

“Missy was with me.” She can hear the flat tone in her voice. She tries to find some warmth or humor to infuse it with but finds that she can do nothing except stand there. “I was fine.”

Jon is quiet for a long moment. Then he says, “Alright.”

He obviously doesn’t believe her. She doesn’t have the energy to try to convince him otherwise.

“She’s…” Dany stops. She tries again. “I’m not her.”

“I know.”

“I can’t be her.”

“Dany, you…”

“I wanted to know,” she finally says, though the numbness is choking her. She wants to rail against it, wants to fight it, but the weight of the danger and the threats and the looming curse hanging over them all shackles her into place. She wraps her arms around herself, trying to keep herself tightly wound. “I had to know about what it would cost. This is…I know everyone here. This is where I grew up. This is where my parents are from. I had to know what price she was demanding, to know if there was a chance I could keep everyone safe.”

Jon still says nothing, watching her with those kind eyes that brew with the darkness of a grey storm. She knows he is allowing her this, that he is giving her the same breathing room that she gave him the night that Ygritte was killed and he found out his mum and Daenerys were both still alive. But there is the precipice there too—the abyss of uncertainty that sits between them now.

But you see, he made a promise to me first. He swore an oath.

“She wants you,” Dany finally says, nails digging into her skin as she looks away. “And I can’t be selfish with this.”

She can’t look back at him now. How does she explain this to him? She has to tell herself that she doesn’t want him, that she doesn’t love him. She can’t be that selfish. If it means that everyone that she loves, everyone that she knows and cares about, will survive this horrendous summer, what does her heart matter? If the curse unravels, it is still her blood that needs to be spilled—perhaps she can make sure that it is only her life that is forfeit. Even if the Starks find a way to save her, Daenerys has promised to rain fire and blood on her hometown if she dares fight back.

Dany takes in a breath, far more unsteady than she wants to admit, and refuses to cry. She will not feel sorry for herself. She will not mourn whatever this was between her and Jon. There are worse sacrifices in the world to be made.

“I care about you, Jon. But I can’t do this. I can’t risk my family.” She can’t look at him. “I will help you and the rest of your family as much as I can, but that’s it. I can’t…you have to understand…”

“Dany…”

“She killed Daario. She threatened to kill Ashara. She is going to burn this entire town to the ground if I don’t give her the ring.” She shakes her head, unable to stop the sharp taste of bile from rising in her throat. “I can’t do it, Jon. I can’t risk them. I won’t. I’m sorry. I know I promised, but I’m sorry. I’m—”

She is losing the thread. She is losing control and she can’t protect anyone, not really, not despite all of her promises. Daenerys has already drawn a line in the sand. She has already declared war on Dany before Dany even knew she existed. And the cost of all this, the threats and the sacrifices and every bloody nightmare hanging over her head like a noose…

Unbidden, a sob is wrenched loose from her and it feels like the earth tearing itself apart and she was so stupid for thinking that she might have been able to save anyone, that she might have been able to protect the people she loved. She is crying and it is all the shame and the guilt in the world crashing into her and then she is in his arms, her face pressed to his chest, and none of this is fair. She would throw herself into the fire for all of them, but now…now…

“I don’t want this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

But Jon only holds her tightly as the sun breaks over the horizon. Another day closer to the comet. Another day closer to the blood Lyanna had warned about turning the streets of Starfall crimson.

All because of her.

“Are you and your sister fighting?”

Viserys lowers the screen to his laptop and looks over the edge of it. Ashara is leaning against the other side of the counter, having paused in unloading the dishwasher to scrape her fingers through her silken black bob. He is not sure when he started to notice the strands of silver starting to weave through his adoptive mum’s hair, but he has become more keenly aware of them in the past few weeks. Perhaps it is because he’s older and (arguably) wiser now and he can have a deeper appreciation for the hard work and self-sacrifice it took for Ashara to adopt her best friend’s orphaned children.

Or perhaps it is because he has become frustratingly aware of the dark supernatural forces gathering in Starfall, forces that have already nearly killed her and Viserys both.

“We’re too old to fight,” he mutters.

“I still fight with Arthur all the time,” Ashara remarks glibly. She narrows those luminous lavender eyes at him as though she sees right past his grumbling exterior. “You have been acting very strangely ever since you came home from the hospital. And every time I call Dany and tell her to come over, you raise a fuss. You can’t possibly be angry with her for more or less escaping the fire unscathed.”

Viserys frowns. Smoke inhalation is honestly the least of his concerns.

But he does remember Dany—or at least a young woman who looks almost identical to her—arriving at the hospital long after visiting hours were over. He remembers her cascading silver-gold hair half-pinned up in intricate braids. He remembers the whites of her eyes flooding with blood, turning the lilac blue of her eyes hellish. He remembers the black veins spiraling out across her pale face, the smile that revealed elongated canines as she reached for his throat.

I have the grimoire.

He has tried to settle his confusion with the nonsensical story Dany has told him about everything that is happening in Starfall. He already had his suspicions that something peculiar was happening in their inconsequential little town—first Daario’s death, then Ashara stabbing herself in the belly, then Alerie’s accident that he knows was no accident, and now the explosion at the Lannister mansion. The girl who had come into his hospital room had looked like Dany, but he is certain his younger sister is not a vampire.

Right?

He’d love to get his hands around the neck of that boyfriend of hers though for dragging her (and Viserys by association) into this bullshit. Dany should have stayed with Daario if it meant that she wouldn't eventually be waylaid by a mysterious dark-haired vampire. Gods, how old even is the Stark family? He thinks there should be some sort of universal rule about immortal creatures falling for human girls under the age of twenty-five. He knows how those books go—everyone does.

Ridiculous.

Viserys is pulled out of his chaotic thoughts by a sigh. He looks up again to see Ashara giving him a disappointed look as she straightens. He at least manages to look guilty. “We’re not fighting. I’ll call her tomorrow morning.”

They’ll definitely be fighting during that call, he knows.

Ashara raises an eyebrow at him, but whatever she is about to say is interrupted by the doorbell ringing. She shakes her head before turning back to the remaining dishes in the dishwasher. “Answer that for me. If it’s someone else with a casserole, tell them to take it to Olenna Tyrell.” That manages to get a smirk out of Viserys. The grand dame of Starfall’s vendetta with anyone who gifts her a casserole is well known.

Viserys crosses into the front foyer just as the doorbell rings again. He wants to roll his eyes at their visitor’s impatience and settles for mumbling under his breath as he unlatches the lock, swings the door open…and pauses, frowning.

“Can I help you?”

The man on the other side of the door lifts one edge of his mouth in what might have been an apologetic smile. He is tall and pale-haired and oddly dressed for the balmy late summer weather—dark suit jacket, dark slacks, white dress shirt, all tailored and finely made. The visitor begins to absently adjust one of his cuff sleeves, a gesture that Viserys might have called nervous if it hadn’t been for the elegant and casual grace in the movement. A flash of silver catches the buzzing light from the patio lamp and Viserys sees a strangely ornate ring glint from the man’s hand.

“I know this is a rather unconventional visit,” the man says in a peculiar accent that Viserys can’t quite place. “But I was hoping to speak with you.”

Viserys’s frown deepens. He is truly not in the mood to deal with strangers, especially well-dressed strangers appearing at godsawful hours on Ashara’s porch.

“Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Dayne.” There is that strangely contrite smile again. “I actually wanted to discuss your sister. I’ve heard she’s gotten herself involved with some...let's say unnatural company lately.”

Wait.

What?

Viserys’s grip tightens on the doorknob and he takes a step away from the threshold. Dany has told him the gist of all the bullshit happening in Starfall, but his own instincts are suddenly blaring at him. At this rate, considering the company that his sister keeps, he wonders how prudent it would be to keep a shotgun—or a stake—by the front door.

“I wouldn’t know.” His eyes narrow as his voice drops so that Ashara can’t hear him over the clatter in the kitchen. “I know what the fuck you are. I won’t invite you in.”

The man’s eyes crinkle at the edges.

“A wise choice. And perhaps if this were any other time, I would commend you on your caution. However…”

…and then he steps past the threshold into the house, pushing the door further open.

“As it turns out,” the visitor continues absently, watching as Viserys takes several panicked steps backward, “I am not a vampire.”

Something strange and cold prickles along Viserys’s skin. In the kitchen, he can hear Ashara humming beneath her breath, and his eyes briefly skittering back to where she continues to work, oblivious to the stranger who now stands in the foyer like an omen. Despite the breath strangled in his throat, he manages to find words that stumble uncertainty past his lips.

“Who are you?” Viserys demands. “What the hell are you?”

The man tilts his head slightly to the side before he glances back at the still-open front door. He raises his hand carelessly and Viserys watches with sickening dread as the door abruptly slams on its own, the lock twisting in place from some unseen force. The stranger turns back to him, casually adjusting the lapels of his jacket as though whatever he had done had actually been strenuous.

“My name is Rhaegar,” the man tells him as darkness sobers the laughter glittering in eyes that Viserys realizes are nearly the same hue as his and Dany’s. “And I’m here to help.”

00x. I turned my humanity off long ago.

She warned me of the consequences of it, that I would live to regret that choice. But she did not know of the guilt that I have harbored long before I became an immortal creature, before I could compel people still gifted with mortality to do the terrible things that I could shy from in the shadows of the centuries, before this ever-present hunger drove me to hunt and hunt and hunt. Nature strives to keep a balance and, in doing so, resorts to cruelty. How else to explain the thing I have become? How else to explain as I am cursed to watch what HE becomes, to watch HIM suffer and be unable to help?

This is how it goes, as I have learned over the years. Long ago, Daenerys and Melisandre wove the immortality spell into our souls, making abominations of Nature in the process. Blood is what fed the spell, blood is what the creatures of the spell’s consequences crave. And they could procreate by feeding mortals their blood, by killing them with that cursed blood still in their system.

It was a cycle. Cruel and capricious and surely nothing of the immortality that Daenerys wanted.

But there must be a balance and so Nature created the Hunters, to curb the disease of immortality, of that demonic feeding that plagues the world of the living. Most Hunters are mortal and succumb to age and disease, war and strife.

Yet the Hunters who are immortal, the Hunters who share the blood of the Originals, have given chase throughout the centuries, watching and waiting until the time comes again to ruin the spell, to tear it asunder piece by piece…

Daenerys knows this, of course. She has always known this. She has kept us under lock and key. The shared strength of the immortality spell weighs on her, takes away from the true immortality that she wanted for herself and for Jon.

A cruel thing.

An impossible thing.

I cannot allow it. I owe him this much. After everything I couldn’t do, after everything I failed to do, I owe him the world.

She stops writing then, glancing over at the candle that flickers in the darkness of the room. Light shatters across the walls from the crystal goblet, blood staining the inside. She can still taste the cold metallic taste of it on her tongue, viscous and cloying. If she waves her hand over the flame, her skin will ignite like dried parchment—the corpse she should be, death swallowing her whole as it should have done centuries ago. She deserves nothing less.

She looks over the words of her journal, lips pressing into a thin line. A long time ago, longer than Nature can abide, she had held him in her arms and she thought her heart might burst open. But she’d been so young, so foolish, and her love for a child could not compete with the consuming love she had for a prince.

Selfish coward.

Something cracks within her and a moment later, she is ripping the pages out with a fury that she cannot quite calm. She would rip the whole journal to pieces if she could—it is a testament to her failings, to her horror, to everything she has witnessed over the centuries. None of this is her fault and yet still she suffers for it, Nature reminding her every day that she failed someone she never should have abandoned all those years ago.

Clenching her teeth, she holds up one of the torn sheets, peering at the handwriting with a twist in her heart.

I should have saved you then. I will find a way to save you now.

Somehow.

Then Lyanna Stark holds the paper to the candle and watches dispassionately as the edge begins to burn and blacken and crumble into ash.

The night is quiet and warm and humid against her bare skin and the sky is empty of everything except a splatter of a million stars.

Her sneakers scuff the dirt beneath the swing she sits on as she peers down at the ring that encircles her finger like a brand. It is undeniably a beautiful ring, engraved with a circlet of flame so intricate that she can’t help but marvel at it. Yet it feels as though it is burning her skin like an iron, weighing heavier and heavier on her as the days go by.

She shouldn’t have said yes.

Guiltily, she spins the ring about in a circle and then slowly removes it, staring at it and the tiny inscription engraved within.

A dragon is not a slave, she reads. She almost wants to scream.

“Daenerys?”

She looks up, nearly dropping her ring in surprise. A strange but handsome young man stands across from her, painted in the shadows of the night. There is a look of confusion and such unguarded loss in the question that it nearly takes her breath away. She swings to a slow stop, giving him an apologetic smile, hoping it will wash away the pain she sees in his eyes. Does she know him?

“Well…yes,” she answers, grimacing as he flinches at her answer. She slides her ring into her pocket as she continues, an almost chiding note in her voice, “But most people call me Dany.”

For a moment, she wonders how she might know this young man. Her name is terribly uncommon—her mum had made sure of that—but she doesn’t think she knows him from around Starfall. She watches with some surprise and relief as the young man blinks away his confusion, his shoulders relaxing as though he had been prepared for her to…what, exactly? Should anyone wear such a look of heartbreak on their face?

“Oh. I’m sorry. You just look so much like…” He trails off, an abashed expression crossing his face. She notes with some amusement that it is far too warm for the leather jacket he is wearing. He offers her a small apologetic smile. “I’m Jon.”

“Lovely to meet you, Jon,” she says with a laugh, shaking her head, glad to have some distraction from the self-doubt plaguing her. “I don’t come across strangers hanging out on playgrounds often.”

His returning smile makes something warm fizzle in the pit of her chest.

“You make it sound like you’re waiting for strangers to come up to you at playgrounds.” When she only laughs ruefully, he continues, “Do you come here by yourself often?”

She feels a smile continuing to tug at her lips.

“It’s Starfall. Nothing bad ever happens here.” She pauses, twisting the empty place on her finger where her engagement ring should be. “Nothing ever happens here at all.”

“Sometimes the most we can hope for is nothing.”

She closes her eyes, kicking her feet forward and letting herself lean far back on the swing, her pale hair cascading down toward the wood chips. Distantly, she is aware of Jon sitting on the empty swing next to her. She doesn’t mind. If anything, there is an aloof sadness about him that she thinks she might understand. After all, this strange loneliness has been sitting within her ever since she started contemplating the future and all that it might hold—Daario, a marriage, a life lived and buried within a hundred miles. It makes her chest ache to think of it.

“I want more than nothing. Is that selfish?” Why should she want more than this? Yet it feels as if she is trying to shove her very soul into a cage. “I want to…there’s so much that I want to…”

“I think,” Jon observes, rocking back and forth in the swing, those grey eyes fixed gently on her, “you want what everyone wants.”

She hears herself laugh again. She decides to indulge him.

“And what is that, mysterious stranger?”

He falls quiet, long enough for her to slow her swinging to a gentle rock to match his. He is watching her, but there is something different about him, something that makes her feel strangely seen, almost as though for the first time. She calls herself silly for thinking it, but there is something about this stranger, something that feels so familiar, so easy, as though she is falling into a peaceful sleep for the first time ever.

“You want to change the world, to make it better than how you found it. You want something that drives you, that challenges you, that makes you happy that you are alive.” He pauses and then adds quietly, “And you want a great love. Passion, an adventure, and maybe even a little danger.”

It’s true. It is everything within her that she can’t deny, everything that she has tried to rein in, to consume, to bury. But that desire, that want for something more, is greater than anything she might ever know. It is enough to be a purpose, a calling, a destiny. She wants to soar and love and do great things, the world at her fingertips. She wants so much more than what Starfall will ever be able to offer her.

And she knows it.

But she can’t tell this stranger that. She can’t let him know how easily he has seen into her soul. She kicks at the ground again, letting herself swing back.

“And what do you want, Jon?”

He hesitates. For a moment, a brief darkness spasms across his handsome face, so potent that it almost takes her breath away. But before she can question it, before she can offer words of apology, he reaches out to grasp the chain of the swing, to slow her. She has no choice but to stop, to turn to him.

And when he smiles again, that same sad smile as before, his eyes the color of quicksilver and the storm in moonlight, it is as though he knows all of her secrets…and will keep them for her forever.

“I want you to get everything you’re looking for, Dany.”

Everything.

Dany closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she is alone on the swings. She frowns. Had she been speaking to someone? The swing next to her rocks absently—the wind, perhaps.

It doesn't matter, she tells herself. She had clearly been lost in a daydream. She reaches into her pocket, her fingers brushing against the silver band nestled within.

Everything I'm looking for...

Something burns within her.

It almost sounds like a promise.