Hope
At twelve-fifty in the afternoon, the sunlight pouring through the terrace doors of the Monteleone penthouse had shifted all the way across the white hotel sheets to warm my bare shoulders.
I woke up to the slow, steady beat of Stiles's heart beneath my cheek and the light, rhythmic scratch of a ballpoint pen against hotel stationery.
Opening my eyes, I tilted my head up from his chest. Stiles had three pillows propped behind his bare shoulders, my auburn hair tangled across his left arm, and a leather-bound room service menu balanced on his knee while he scribbled notes in the margin with a stolen Monteleone pen.
"What are you writing?" I murmured, my voice still husky with sleep as I slid my palm across the warm, smooth skin of his ribs—where the massive reservoir of forty siphoned dark artifacts from the Glapion crypt had finally settled into a deep, purring hum that warmed my fingertips on contact.
Stiles looked down at me, his whiskey-brown eyes crinkling at the corners as a wide, crooked grin spread across his face.
"Strategic seating chart for your mom's lunch," he said seriously, tapping the pen against the paper. "Look, if I sit next to Elijah again, he's gonna spend forty-five minutes staring at my forks like I'm committing a war crime against table manners. If I sit next to Klaus, we're gonna end up arguing about who killed more guys in the crypt this morning—which was definitely me, by the way, eight to one if you count the granite door pancake as a double. So I figure I sit between you and Freya, because Freya appreciates my siphon work and you look great in the mornings."
He leaned down and kissed me—warm, unhurried, and tasting faintly of mint toothpaste, which meant he'd already snuck into the bathroom and come back to bed just so I wouldn't wake up alone.
I smiled against his mouth, stretching lazily beneath the sheet before glancing at the brass alarm clock on the nightstand.
12:54 PM.
"We have six minutes before one o'clock," I pointed out, resting my chin on my hand against his chest. "And my dad threatened to take the brakes off your Jeep if we were late."
"First of all, jokes on Klaus, the emergency brake on a 1980 CJ-5 is already mostly decorative," Stiles said cheerfully, tossing the room service menu onto the floor and catching me around the waist to roll me onto my back in the tangled sheets. "Second, we live six blocks from your house and I run faster than a commuter train. Six minutes is practically an eternity. That's four minutes to get dressed, ninety seconds to walk down Royal Street like we own the zip code, and thirty seconds left over right now for this."
He dipped his head and kissed the hollow of my throat—right over the smooth, unmarked skin where his fangs had been an hour ago—making my breath catch and a bright ripple of golden magic spark between our skin before he grinned, hopped off the mattress, and tossed me my jeans from the armchair.
By the time we stepped out of the marble lobby of the Hotel Monteleone onto Royal Street three minutes later, the afternoon heat was in full swing.
It was the first time we had walked down the center of the French Quarter together in broad daylight since the siege at Lafayette Cemetery and the dawn raid on the Glapion vault.
Before we had even covered half a block toward St. Peter, I realized the entire atmosphere of the Quarter had changed overnight.
To the human tourists strolling past in sun hats with cameras around their necks, it was just another bright Louisiana afternoon.
To every supernatural creature within ten blocks, the sidewalk we were walking on might as well have been lined with live landmines.
Up on the second-floor iron gallery of an apothecary shop on the corner, two witches from the St. Anne coven who had spent the last six months glaring down at Marcel's patrols took one look at Stiles walking down the bricks in a clean burgundy henley and dark jeans with his fingers laced through mine. Both witches went pale, dropped their eyes to their boots, and backed silently inside through the shuttered doors, pulling the latches closed behind them.
Half a block farther down, outside the antique shop where Stiles had bought my red paint two days ago, three of Marcel's senior nightwalkers were standing in the shade of the awning. When we passed, none of them flashed fangs or postured the way they usually did when a Mikaelson walked down the street alone. All three of them stepped off the curb into the street to clear the sidewalk and inclined their heads in silent, unmistakable deference until we were thirty yards past.
"Huh," Stiles said, glancing back over his shoulder through his sunglasses at the three vampires waiting by the curb before looking down at me. "Did you see that? Nobody threw a hex-bag at my shoes, nobody called me an abomination, and that guy in the linen shirt literally stepped into a puddle so I wouldn't have to move over. Is this what being Quarter royalty feels like? Because I gotta be honest, it's a little quiet."
"Word travels fast when you eat forty dark objects through a solid granite door and clear a vault with my dad in twelve seconds," I said, amused as I bumped my shoulder against his arm. "Half the covens probably think if they sneeze too loudly while you're walking by, you'll siphon their lungs out."
"Only if they don't cover their mouths," Stiles replied mildly, as we turned up the steps toward the wrought-iron archway of the compound at 1:03 PM. "Okay, moment of truth. Klaus said Freya tuned the bug-zapper on the front door so it wouldn't try to fry me. Ten bucks says she left a little static in the threshold just to mess with my hair."
He didn't slow down as we reached the open iron gates of the Abattoir. Instead of holding his palm out to drain the boundary spell the way he had on his first night in town, Stiles kept my hand tucked in his left and strolled straight across the stone threshold into the courtyard.
The ancient boundary wards woven into the archway gave a soft, golden chime—like crystal glasses clinking together—and parted smoothly around his shoulders without a single spark of defensive magic.
Inside the courtyard, the long cedar table had been moved into the shade beneath the gallery arches, laid out with platters of grilled Gulf shrimp, warm crusty bread, roasted peppers, and pitchers of iced tea.
Freya stood near the sideboard pouring white wine, Hayley was setting down a wooden salad bowl, and Elijah stood near the fountain reading the morning edition of the *Times-Picayune*.
At the top of the iron staircase leading down from the second-floor study, my father appeared right on cue—carrying an unopened, dust-caked bottle of 1920 Macallan by the neck in his right hand.
***
Stiles
"One-oh-three!" I called up to Klaus as he walked down the iron steps into the courtyard, holding up three fingers on my free hand. "Three minutes late, which in California traffic is technically twelve minutes early. Also, Freya, huge fan of what you did with the front door ward—very welcoming, felt like walking through a warm dryer sheet."
Freya set the wine bottle down on the table, a reluctant smile tugging at the corner of her mouth despite the dark circles still faint beneath her eyes from cataloguing the remaining St. Louis artifacts all morning. "I keyed the boundary rune to the resonance signature between you and Hope," she said. "As long as she hasn't thrown you out of the Quarter, the house recognizes you as an invited guest."
"Hear that, Klaus?" I said brightly, pulling out a chair in the shade for Hope before dropping into the seat right next to her and propping my elbow on the cedar table. "The house officially likes me. Pretty soon the ferns are gonna start leaning toward me when I walk in."
Klaus stopped across the table from me and set the bottle of 1920 Macallan down on the wood with a heavy *thud*.
"The house tolerates you because my sister prefers not to rebuild the front archway every time you visit," Klaus said smoothly, though as he pulled the cork from the ninety-year-old bottle with his thumb and poured two generous measures into crystal tumblers, there was none of the murderous tension that had hung over dinner the night before. He slid one glass across the wood to my hand and lifted his own. "Marcel informed me twenty minutes ago that the last four witches associated with Sabine's coven boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta at dawn. The Quarter has not been this quiet since 1919."
"Atlanta's nice," I said, picking up the glass and clinking it lightly against Klaus's tumbler before taking a sip. The scotch went down like liquid velvet and oak smoke. "Whoa. Okay, yeah, that's way better than the stuff in the hotel minibar. I take back at least thirty percent of the jokes I made about your interior decorating."
"A staggering concession," Elijah murmured from the end of the table, folding his newspaper neatly in half and taking his seat. "Though if the covens have indeed departed for Georgia, it leaves only the matter of the three Ninth Ward elders still residing beneath our carriage house."
I paused halfway through stacking four grilled shrimp onto my plate, glancing across the table at Elijah and Hayley.
"Wait, those three old guys Hope blasted into the pillars at Lafayette Cemetery last night?" I asked. "You still have them locked up downstairs? I thought they already spilled their guts about the Glapion bomb before midnight."
"They did," Hayley said, sitting down opposite Hope and pouring herself a glass of iced tea. "Which is why Marcel asked what we wanted to do with them this morning. Normally, handing three elders back to the Regent council under a blood-oath would keep the peace with the Ninth Ward families. Except—"
"Except about an hour ago," Freya cut in quietly, leaning forward on her elbows as her eyes fixed on the faint crimson-gold glow beneath the skin of my forearms, "the eldest of the three—Bastien—managed to slip one of his thumbs out of the vervain iron by breaking his own joint. He didn't try to escape the cell. He used his own blood on the dungeon floor to scratch a sympathetic beacon rune before Elijah snapped his wrist."
Beside me, Hope set her fork down on her plate, her brow furrowing. "A beacon rune? Who was he trying to signal if Sabine's coven and Celestine's circle are all dead or on a bus to Georgia?"
"Not a coven," Klaus said, his voice dropping into a low, thoughtful register as he looked across the table at me. "He wasn't signaling anyone in New Orleans. He was attempting to broadcast the magical signature of the Glapion vault detonation outward along the continental ley lines."
I chewed my shrimp, swallowed, and blinked once at the four of them.
"Okay, translate that into English for a guy who got a C-minus in freshman earth science," I said, pointing my fork at Freya. "What does broadcasting along a ley line do?"
"When you siphoned forty dark objects at the exact moment they detonated at dawn," Freya explained, tapping her fingers against the cedar table, "and Hope anchored your core with her tribrid blood, the two of you created a magical singularity inside that crypt. Inside the cemetery walls, the granite muffled the signature so only New Orleans felt it. If Bastien had finished carving that beacon rune in the carriage house and linked it to the ash on his clothes from last night, it would have sent a flare across every major ley line in North America announcing exactly what two creatures are standing in this city."
For a second, the courtyard was quiet except for the breeze rustling the banana leaves overhead.
I thought about that—about a giant magical billboard lighting up across six state lines all the way back to northern California, or drawing every paranoid ancient witch and supernatural purist between here and Maine straight to Hope's front door just when we'd finally gotten the neighborhood cleaned up.
"Did the rune go off?" I asked calmly, picking up my napkin to wipe my fingers.
"No," Elijah said, taking a sip of his wine. "I heard his heartbeat accelerate from the parlor and interrupted his artistic endeavor before the final stroke of the circle was closed. All three of them are currently bound in triple-forged vervain chains in the lower cell."
"However," Klaus added, leaning back in his chair and regarding me with a dark, knowing glint in his golden eyes, "as long as those three elders draw breath with the memory of what they witnessed at Lafayette Cemetery—and with the residue of the plague censer in their lungs—they remain a liability to my daughter's privacy. Handing them back to the Ninth Ward is out of the question."
I looked around the table: at Hayley calmly eating her salad, at Freya pouring another glass of wine, at Elijah smoothing his cuffs, and at Klaus watching me over the rim of his 1920 Macallan.
Back in Beacon Hills, if we had three prisoners locked in a basement who knew a secret that could get us all hunted down, Scott would have spent six hours pacing around the animal clinic trying to invent a magical amnesia spell that didn't exist, my dad would have insisted on county jail cells that couldn't hold a wet paper bag, and when the prisoners inevitably broke out and killed twelve bystanders, everybody would have stared at their shoes and wondered how it happened.
Here, the entire family had just waited until lunch so I could eat my shrimp first.
I looked over at Hope.
She met my gaze without a flicker of hesitation, her blue eyes clear and steady in the warm afternoon shade. "Bastien was the one who threw the hex-salt at my face on the tomb steps last night," she said evenly, picking up her glass of iced tea. "And the other two helped Celestine light the censer that tried to melt my lungs."
I smiled—warm and genuine for her, and razor-sharp when I stood up from my chair and tossed my napkin onto the table beside my plate.
"Keep my shrimp warm, I'll be back in three minutes," I said cheerfully, rolling my shirtsleeves up one more turn over my forearms. "Klaus, want to show me where the carriage house key is, or are we kicking another door off the hinges?"
"If you kick the doors off my carriage house after I just gave you a glass of ninety-year-old scotch," Klaus murmured, rising smoothly from the head of the table to walk beside me toward the rear colonnade of the courtyard, "we shall have words."
***
Klaus
The cellar beneath the old brick carriage house at the back of the compound smelled of damp river clay, rusted iron, and vervain.
Klaus unlocked the heavy oak-and-iron door at the bottom of the stone stairs—grateful, for once, that Stiles had refrained from putting his sneaker through the seventeenth-century ironwork—and stepped into the dim, lantern-lit vault.
Sitting against the far limestone wall, wrapped from neck to ankle in heavy iron chains soaked in concentrated vervain water and witch-hazel, were Bastien and the two remaining Ninth Ward elders from Lafayette Cemetery. Bastien's left thumb was still bent at an unnatural angle from where Elijah had crushed it against the flagstones an hour earlier, dark dried blood smearing the stone floor beside his knee where he had tried to scratch the ley-line beacon rune.
When the three elders looked up and saw Klaus Mikaelson step into the cell followed immediately by Stiles—who was strolling down the steps with his hands in his jeans pockets, looking as relaxed as if he were touring a wine cellar—all three men pressed their backs hard against the damp limestone.
"Look at this place," Stiles said, glancing up at the vaulted brick ceiling and the iron wall sconces before nudging the half-finished blood rune on the floor with the toe of his Converse sneaker. "Very classic dungeon vibe. Ten out of ten on the masonry, though honestly, Bastien, your penmanship on this rune is terrible. Looks like a drunk spider fell in an inkwell."
Bastien spat blood onto the straw at his boots, his pale eyes glaring up at both of us with fanatical hatred. "Kill us and our blood will cry out to the ancestral plane, Mikaelson! The covens will feel three elders die behind your walls—"
"Oh, buddy, they won't feel a thing," Stiles interrupted, crouching lazily on his heels three feet in front of the chained elders while Klaus leaned one shoulder against the stone doorframe behind him, watching silently. "See, that's the cool thing about being a siphoner. When a normal vampire snaps a witch's neck, all that leftover magic in your blood bursts out into the air like a flare gun and tells your buddies in the cemetery that you croaked."
Stiles reached out with both hands, resting two fingers lightly against Bastien's forehead and his other palm against the iron chain linking the three men together.
"When *I* do it," Stiles continued conversationally, his eyes shifting into glowing crimson-gold in the dim lantern light as the siphon opened beneath his skin, "I drink the magic right out of your nervous system before your heart even stops. No flare, no ghostly voicemail to the ancestors, just three quiet old guys who went to sleep and never woke up."
The three elders stiffened at once, gasping in unison as a stream of pale blue-white witch magic pulled straight out of their temples and down the iron links of their chains into Stiles's palms.
Klaus watched closely from the doorway. There was no torture in it, no drawn-out theatrical cruelty of the sort Klaus himself had indulged in across ten centuries whenever an enemy threatened his family. To Stiles, these three men weren't rivals worthy of a speech or a vendetta; they were simply noise that had tried to interrupt his afternoon with Hope.
Within four seconds, the last flicker of ancestral witchcraft drained out of the three elders' veins into Stiles's wrists, leaving them slumped, gray-faced, and magically hollow against the stone wall.
Then Stiles stood up, blurred once across the width of the cell—three sharp, instantaneous cracks of cervical bone echoing off the damp brick in less than half a second—and stepped back onto the dry flagstones before the three bodies had even finished slumping sideways in their chains.
Not a single drop of blood had spilled on his shirt. Not a single ripple of death-magic had escaped the cellar walls.
Stiles dusted his palms together once, turned back toward Klaus at the doorway, and flashed an easy grin.
"See? Quieter than a library," Stiles said, walking past Klaus up the stone stairs toward the sunlight of the courtyard. "We can tell Marcel's guys to toss them in the river tonight after dark, or brick up the door—whatever your usual housekeeping protocol is. Come on, my shrimp's getting cold and Hayley looked like she made peach cobbler."
Klaus followed him up into the warm afternoon air, pulling the carriage house door shut and turning the heavy iron key in the lock.
For the first time in his long, blood-soaked life, Niklaus Mikaelson looked at the boy walking ahead of him into the dining courtyard—watching the way Hope's face lit up the instant Stiles reappeared through the colonnade and slid right back into his chair beside her—and realized that if he himself were ever locked in a coffin again, there was at least one creature on this earth ruthless enough to keep the wolves from his daughter's door.
***
Hope
By four o'clock that afternoon, the heat in the Quarter had climbed high enough that the stone courtyard felt like a bread oven, and my mom had announced she was driving out to the Bayou before dusk to check on the Crescent packs and drop off medical supplies at Mary's cabin.
"Come with me for an hour," Hayley had said to me while clearing the lunch dishes, before her eyes shifted—only slightly warily now—toward Stiles, who was currently sitting on the edge of the courtyard fountain balancing Elijah's silver butter knife tip-down on the end of his index finger. "Both of you. Jackson and Ansel's old scouts have had lookouts posted along the levee road since Lafayette Cemetery lit up last night. If the packs see for themselves that the guy who healed Tommy in the distillery isn't hunting wolves in the swamp, half the tension on the river vanishes before the full moon next week."
"Swamp field trip!" Stiles had agreed immediately, tossing the butter knife back onto the silver tray without dropping it. "Count me in. Wait—do we take my Jeep or your SUV? Actually, we're taking the Jeep, taking the roof off in ninety-degree weather is the whole point of owning a roll bar."
Which was how, forty minutes later, the blue 1980 CJ-5 went rumbling across the narrow wooden plank bridge into the Crescent encampment deep in the Bayou, fifty yards behind my mother's black SUV.
Towering cypress trees draped in thick curtains of gray Spanish moss rose out of the sluggish green water on either side of the dirt track, filtering the late-afternoon sunlight into shafts of dusty gold. Wooden cabins and canvas pavilions sat raised on cedar stilts along the water's edge, connected by rope bridges and plank walkways where dozens of Crescent pack members stopped repairing fishing nets and chopping firewood to stare as the blue Jeep rolled to a halt in the central clearing.
Every single wolf in the clearing caught Stiles's scent the second he turned off the ignition.
Even to normal werewolves who didn't understand witchcraft, the smell rolling off Stiles was enough to make the hair on the back of a wolf's neck stand straight up: apex alpha wolf, ancient Original vampire, ozone, and the unmistakable, solar warmth of my tribrid blood braided straight into his skin.
Around the clearing, six of the bigger pack enforcers stepped instinctively off the porches of the cabins, their jaws tight and eyes flashing wary amber as Stiles swung his legs out over the side of the doorless Jeep and hopped down onto the packed dirt in his Converse sneakers.
"Nobody panic, I'm here with management," Stiles called out cheerfully, hooking his sunglasses into the collar of his burgundy henley and reaching back to offer me a hand as I stepped down off the running board beside him.
My mom walked back from her SUV to stand with us, while Jackson Kenner—tall, broad-shouldered in a faded flannel shirt, with a hunting knife strapped to his belt—came down the steps of the main porch and stopped ten feet away.
"Hayley. Hope," Jackson said, nodding to the two of us before his gaze locked squarely on Stiles. Jackson didn't posture the way the nightwalkers in the Quarter had, though his shoulders stayed squared as he sized up the stranger holding Hope's hand. "So you're Stiles."
"In the flesh," Stiles said easily, giving a friendly two-finger wave with his free hand. "Nice spot you guys have out here. Very scenic, great shade from the trees, though the mosquito situation has gotta be wild around August."
Before Jackson could answer, the screen door of the cabin to the left banged open, and Tommy—the seventeen-year-old Crescent wolf Sabine's witches had pinned to the boiler room slab down in the Bywater two nights ago—hurried down the wooden steps with his older brother and mother right behind him.
Both of Tommy's wrists were completely healed under his rolled-up sleeves, not even a scar left where the consecrated iron spikes had been driven through the bone.
"That's him," Tommy said, stopping beside Jackson and looking at Stiles with wide, grateful eyes that had zero fear left in them. "Mr. Stilinski—I didn't get a chance to say it at the docks before I ran, but if you hadn't pulled those iron nails out and given me your blood after you killed Sabine, I never would've made it back to the river."
Stiles froze for half a second, looking genuinely horrified as thirty werewolves around the clearing softened their stances at once and Tommy's mother pressed a hand to her chest.
"Whoa, hey, kid, keep your voice down!" Stiles stage-whispered, waving both hands at Tommy as if he were trying to put out a fire while I bit my lip to keep from laughing out loud. "First of all, 'Mr. Stilinski' is my dad, and we are currently not on speaking terms. Second, I told you back at the warehouse not to go spreading rumors that I'm doing community service! I was only in that building to turn Sabine and her friends into boiler-room wallpaper because they tried to hex Hope—healing your wrists was strictly so I wouldn't have to step over you on the way out!"
Tommy actually grinned, completely unbothered by the disclaimer. "Still saved my life, man."
Stiles groaned, turning toward me and Hayley with an expression of deep betrayal. "See? This is why I usually don't leave witnesses. You pull three iron nails out of one teenager and suddenly everybody thinks you're a Boy Scout."
Beside us, Hayley actually laughed—the first real, unguarded laugh I had heard from my mother since the night Stiles walked into our compound gates.
Jackson's shoulders relaxed completely, a slow smile breaking across his rugged face as he stepped forward and held a hand out to Stiles. "Boy Scout or not, anyone who takes out Celestine's circle and brings one of ours home in one piece is welcome at our fire, Stiles. Just don't bite anybody in the bayou unless they draw on you first."
"Fair rule, easy to remember," Stiles said, shaking Jackson's hand firmly before sliding his arm right back around my waist.
***
Stiles
We stayed out in the Bayou for about an hour while Hayley talked pack business with Jackson on the main porch and somebody's grandmother insisted on handing me a mason jar of homemade blackberry shine that was roughly ninety-eight proof and tasted like purple jet fuel.
"Seriously, you guys drink this on purpose?" I asked Hope as we walked down the quiet wooden dock extending out over the dark, cypress-ringed lagoon at the edge of the camp, carrying the mason jar in one hand while the late-afternoon sun turned the water between the lily pads into sheets of copper and gold. "I'm literally unkillable and I think that first sip just took two years off my liver."
"Give it here, lightweight," Hope teased, taking the mason jar out of my hand as we reached the end of the weathered cedar dock behind a curtain of hanging Spanish moss where nobody from the cabins could see us. She took a small sip, her eyes watering for half a second before she coughed softly and handed it right back. "Okay, maybe eighty-five proof."
"Told you," I grinned, setting the jar down on top of a wooden mooring post and leaning back against the dock railing, pulling her between my knees as she looked out over the still water.
Out here, away from the brick walls and iron balconies of the French Quarter, the air smelled completely different—warm cypress needles, wet earth, wild honeysuckle, and the deep, clean silence of the swamp before dusk.
Hope rested her hands on my waist, her fingers hooking lightly into the belt loops of my jeans as she looked up at me in the dappled gold light filtering through the moss.
"You know my mom actually likes you now, right?" she said softly. "Back on the porch, when you were complaining about Tommy ruining your reputation, she looked at Jackson and said you were less trouble than Uncle Kol."
"That is a terrifyingly low bar, from what I've heard about your Uncle Kol, and I accept the compliment anyway," I said, sliding my hands up her back under the light denim jacket she'd thrown on over her tank top, feeling the sun-warmed heat of her skin through the thin cotton. "What about you? Having buyer's remorse yet now that I'm not the mysterious public enemy number one kicking down your front gates?"
Hope tilted her head, her blue eyes warming with that fierce, steady light that had hooked me from the first second she threw fire at me from the compound balcony.
"You just snapped three Ninth Ward elders' necks between lunch and dessert without getting dust on your shoes, Stiles," she murmured, sliding her arms up around my shoulders. "I don't think you're in any danger of going soft."
"Good," I whispered, leaning down to brush my nose against the side of her neck, inhaling the scent of cedarwood, rain, and warm honey that drove the wolf and the vampire inside my chest completely crazy every time I got within two feet of her. "Because back in Beacon Hills, when everybody looked at me and saw a monster, the worst part wasn't that they were scared of me. It was that I spent two weeks wondering if they were right—if waking up like this meant I was gonna spend the rest of eternity alone in the dark because anything I touched would break."
I lifted my head just enough to look straight into her eyes, letting every ounce of what I felt sit plain and unhidden on my face.
"Then I came here and found you," I said softly, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw. "You don't break, you don't flinch, and when I'm holding onto you, even the loud, crazy parts in my head go quiet. I love you, Hope. Like, completely, ridiculously, set-the-whole-state-on-fire-for-you love you. Just so we're clear."
For a heartbeat, Hope's breath caught in her throat.
Her eyes—already bright in the golden swamp light—flared pure, radiant werewolf gold around the blue as the resonance loop between our chests surged so warm and bright that the water beneath the wooden planks of the dock rippled in soft concentric circles.
She didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second.
"I love you too, Stiles," she whispered, her fingers tightening in the hair at the back of my neck as she pulled my mouth down to hers. "From the night you sat on that roof with me and didn't ask me to be anything other than what I am."
I kissed her hard and slow under the shadow of the cypress trees, lifting her up to sit on the wide cedar railing of the dock so she was level with my chest while her legs wrapped around my hips.
Out here in the middle of the Bayou, with the sun sinking low and red behind the treeline and the warm hum of cicadas starting up in the branches overhead, the hunger rose between us again—not frantic like the first time on the Pontalba roof, and not explosive like the aftermath of the cemetery vault, but deep, steady, and intoxicating.
Hope broke the kiss with a soft gasp against my lips, tilting her head back against the curtain of Spanish moss behind the railing and pulling the collar of her tank top slightly aside with two fingers to bare the curve of her shoulder and throat.
"You haven't fed since this morning at the hotel," she breathed, her pulse fluttering hot and fast beneath the golden light on her skin. "And we still have a twenty-minute drive back to the Quarter."
My fangs slid down immediately, a low, appreciative rumble vibrating in my chest as my hands gripped her waist through the open edges of her jacket. "Your mom is literally sixty yards away on that cabin porch."
"Then be quiet," Hope whispered, a wicked, breathless smile curving her lips as her nails dug into my shoulders.
I didn't need a second invitation.
I buried my face against the warm hollow where her neck met her shoulder, muffled her sharp intake of breath against my palm, and sank my fangs deep into her vein.
The first hot, honey-sweet rush of her blood across my tongue sent a jolt of pure lightning straight down my spine. With my siphon open across my fingers resting at the nape of her neck, I drew the bright, wild warmth of her tribrid blood into my chest and pushed a slow, rolling tide of golden heat right back through her skin—magnifying every heartbeat, every breath, and every brush of our hands until she was trembling in my arms on the dock railing, her face buried against my neck to keep any sound from carrying across the water.
Four slow, deep swallows until our magic was singing in a single unbroken chord between our ribs.
I licked the tiny puncture marks until the skin sealed smooth and flawless under my tongue, then rested my forehead against hers as we both caught our breath in the amber twilight of the swamp.
Up toward the cabins, sixty yards away through the cypress trees, the screen door of the main porch creaked open and Hayley's voice called out across the clearing:
"Hope! Stiles! If you want to beat the river fog back into the Quarter, we're heading out now!"
Hope let out a quiet, breathless laugh against my mouth, her eyes still glowing faint amber as she hopped lightly down off the dock railing onto the planks beside me, smoothing her hair back into place.
"Come on," she said, lacing her fingers tightly through mine and picking up the mason jar of blackberry shine from the mooring post with her other hand. "Before my mom comes down here and smells ozone on the water."
***
Hope
By the time we drove back across the Crescent City Connection into the French Quarter, night had fallen warm and purple over the rooftops, and the neon lights along Bourbon and Royal were glowing in the evening mist.
Instead of heading back to the Hotel Monteleone, Stiles parked the blue Jeep right in front of the compound gates—in the spot Marcel's nightwalkers now guarded better than the Mayor's limousine—and carried two take-out bags of crawfish étouffée up the courtyard stairs to my third-floor studio.
Downstairs in the parlor, we could hear Elijah playing a slow nocturne on the grand piano while Freya read on the sofa and my dad worked on a canvas of his own in the side gallery. Nobody came upstairs to check on us, nobody knocked on the door to remind us of the time, and Freya's wards hummed a quiet, protective harmony around the walls.
In the center of my studio, under the warm yellow light of the standing lamps and the open French doors leading out to the street-side balcony, stood the tall canvas I had started three nights ago with the tube of crimson cadmium paint Stiles had given me on Royal Street.
Stiles set the take-out bags on the low table beside my daybed and walked over to the easel, tilting his head as he looked at the finished painting for the first time.
It wasn't a landscape of Jackson Square or a gloomy portrait of the compound arches like the ones I usually painted when I was stuck inside.
Across the dark indigo background of the Pontalba rooftops and the three spires of the cathedral, I had painted a swirling, incandescent storm of crimson and gold wildfire rising into the night sky—two distinct currents of light braided together so tightly in the center of the canvas that the red and the gold became a single blaze.
Stiles stood quiet in front of the easel for a long moment, his hands tucked into his pockets, the joking grin softening into something warm and completely still as he traced the air an inch from the braided crimson-gold center with one finger.
"That's what it looks like to you?" he asked softly, turning his head to look at me as I stepped up beside him and leaned my shoulder against his arm. "When we open the loop?"
"Every single time," I said, looking from the canvas up into his whiskey-brown eyes. "Before you walked through those gates downstairs with your paper bag of beignets, everyone told me that having this much power meant eventually burning everything around me to ash. You're the first person who ever made it feel like light instead of a curse."
Stiles turned to face me fully, wrapping both arms around my waist and pulling me flush against his chest right in front of the easel, his heartbeat slow, heavy, and invincible against my palms.
"Yeah, well, turns out monsters make great nightlights when you put two of the right ones together," he murmured, his crooked grin returning as he leaned down until his lips brushed mine. "Also, just for the record, I am definitely keeping my key to the penthouse at the Monteleone for whenever your Uncle Elijah starts playing seventeenth-century harpsichord music after ten o'clock, because a guy has limits, Hope."
I laughed against his mouth, rising up on my toes to loop my arms around his neck as the warm night breeze drifted in off Royal Street, carrying the sound of a brass band starting up two blocks away—including a brand-new trombone player who hit every single note clean and bright in the dark.
Outside the open balcony doors, New Orleans stretched out beneath the moonlight: loud, dangerous, blood-soaked, and wide awake.
And as Stiles kissed me under the glow of the studio lamps, our magic humming together in a steady, unbreakable loop beneath our skin, neither of us cared about a single thing in the world except what was right here in our hands.