Chapter 5 - Drown in His Blood

Faye

I woke up at 2:30 a.m. with the voice already in my head.

Not gradually. Not the slow drift up from sleep where you're still half-somewhere-else. One second I was out, and the next I was staring at the ceiling with my pulse hammering and the words already mid-sentence, like they'd been going the whole time I was unconscious.

"Find me. In the fog city. At St. Helis."

Clearer than it had ever been. Not the muffled, underwater version from the past year — this was right there, right behind my eyes, like whoever was speaking had their mouth pressed directly against the inside of my skull.

I pressed the back of my hand against my sternum and waited for my heartbeat to slow down. It didn't, really.

This is why you're here, I reminded myself. This is exactly why.

I'd been eighteen for less than a week when the dreams started — three days after my grandmother's funeral, to be exact. At first just images — fog so thick it had weight, the curved glass of a massive dome, trees with branches that bent the wrong way. No sound. No context. Just the feeling of being pulled somewhere I hadn't agreed to go.

Then the voice came in.

I spent three months convincing myself it was grief. Stress. My grandmother had been a private woman — silver-haired, sharp-eyed, the kind of person who answered questions with other questions and watched you like she was calculating something you weren't supposed to know about. She never talked about family. Never explained why she'd taken me in at five years old after my parents died, or why she'd sometimes looked at me with that expression I could never quite name.

After she was gone, I started looking. Library first, then the basement, then the attic. Two full days before I found it — a flat wooden case wedged behind a broken wardrobe, no label, no lock.

The star chart was inside.

Old metal, dark with age, one edge broken away. Constellation markings across the surface, most worn past legibility. But the center was clear — a glass dome ringed with carved vines, the exact symbol I'd been seeing every night for three months.

When my fingers touched it, it lit up. A faint pulse of warmth, brief and certain.

The inscription on the back read: When the blood awakens, the path of fate begins.

After that, the dreams sharpened. The voice got louder, more insistent, until it finally gave me a name — St. Helis. Six months of applications and waiting and telling myself I wasn't losing my mind. A full year after my grandmother died, I was nineteen and standing on a campus I'd crossed an ocean to reach.

The voice still hadn't stopped.

I pulled the chart from the nightstand drawer. Emily was dead asleep across the room, one arm over her face, the corner of her mouth curved up — dreaming about somebody, no question.

The center symbol caught the dim light. That same glass dome. The same thing the department head had told me to stay away from, in a voice with teeth behind it.

Fuck her, I will not listen.

I slipped out without making a sound.

3:00 a.m., and the campus was a different place entirely.

Fog thicker than it had any right to be, sitting low against the ground, swallowing the path lights from the knees down. I kept to the edge of the walkway, no phone light, moving toward the coordinates I'd mapped during the afternoon tour.

The chart was warm in my pocket. My wrist throbbed once — faint, rhythmic, like a second heartbeat syncing up with something I couldn't see.

Just hold on, I thought. I'm almost there.

The fence around the restricted zone was a joke. Rusted iron, sections leaning at bad angles, three gaps without even trying. Beyond it, trees started immediately — dense, lightless, branches at angles that didn't match the wind. Dozens of bats hung motionless from the upper limbs. Not sleeping. Waiting.

Fresh boot prints near the widest gap — large, deep tread, edges still sharp. The white building sat at the tree line: three stories, every window boarded, walls thick with ivy. Second-floor boards on the left window showed fresh pry marks, wood pale where the nails had pulled free.

The air smelled wrong. Blood underneath something sweet and floral that had no business being out here. It settled at the back of my throat and stayed.

The chart pulsed hard. I pulled it out — the center symbol glowing steady now, lit from within.

We're close.

I followed the outer wall, one hand on the ivy, moving slow. The sounds reached me before I cleared the corner — something wet and muffled, half-sob and half-something I didn't have a word for, underneath breathing that was too fast and too shallow to be voluntary.

I looked through the gap in the ivy.

Through the gap in the ivy, maybe ten feet away, a woman was bound to a tree with her feet off the ground. White fabric, torn at the collar and hanging loose from one shoulder — a nun's habit, or what was left of one, the front panel ripped open and the hem shredded at the knees.

The exposed skin of her throat and collarbone caught the faint ambient light, pale and deliberate in a way that looked less like a complexion and more like something preserved.

I moved closer, keeping the ivy between us.

The low knot, now half-undone, dark strands falling across her face. The particular set of her shoulders even bound and suspended like this, still carrying the architectural rigidity of someone who'd spent years making other people feel small.

Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

The department head. The same woman who'd told me to stand up straight and called me a juice box under her breath and waved me out of her office like I was something she'd already forgotten.

Someone was standing in front of her. A girl, her back to me — champagne-gold hair loose down her shoulders, posture easy and unhurried, like she had all the time in the world. She was holding something, moving slowly, but the ivy blocked the angle and I couldn't make out what she was doing.

Then she shifted — stepping slightly to the left to reload the brush from the jar in her other hand — and her profile came into view.

I recognized her immediately. The soft line of her jaw. The small, pleasant curve of her mouth. The same face that had smiled at me across the quad that afternoon like helping a lost freshman was genuinely the best part of her day.

Savienne.

I stood completely still for a second, my brain running the comparison twice because it refused to accept the result. The girl who'd linked her arm through mine and steered me toward the dining hall. The girl every person on campus seemed to light up around. Standing here at three in the morning in the middle of a restricted zone, doing — this — with the same calm she'd use to recommend a coffee order.

Savienne stood in front of her, completely unhurried, a wide-bristled brush in one hand and a small jar in the other.

Honey. The smell hit me before I fully processed what I was seeing — dense, cloying, sweet enough to make my back teeth ache, layered over the faint metallic trace that had been following me since the fence.

Savienne dipped the brush and dragged it slowly across the department head's collarbone. One long, deliberate stroke.

"Tell me what you are," Savienne said. Soft. Almost gentle.

"I'm — " The department head's breath caught. "I'm yours. Only — yours—"

"Good girl."

Savienne set the brush down and raised her free hand. The slap landed clean across the department head's cheek — not hard enough to bruise, just enough to snap her head to one side.

The department head gasped. Then made a sound that wasn't pain at all.

"Again— " she breathed. "Please— again—"

Savienne tilted her head, studying the flush spreading across that pale cheek with the detached interest of someone observing a reaction they'd already predicted. She picked the brush back up.

"You don't get to ask," she said pleasantly, and drew another slow stripe of honey down the side of the department head's throat. "You get to receive."

"Yes— yes, I— " A shuddering exhale. "Master, please— enjoy me—"