Duvessa 🥀
The tedium of it all was the most offensive part.
I had existed through the rise and fall of empires, witnessed the birth of art forms, and tasted the blood of poets and kings. Now, I was being subjected to a symphony of the mundane: the squeak of cheap sneakers on linoleum, the cloying scent of warm blood and cheap perfume, and the cacophony of meaningless chatter. Forks High School was a special kind of hell, a purgatory of beige and boredom. My mothers had insisted. "A semblance of normalcy, Duvessa. It will be good for you."
Normalcy. A quaint concept.
I unfolded myself from the Jaguar, the damp, earthy air a welcome change from the car's sterile environment. The mortal children stopped their chirping, their eyes wide. It was always the same. Awe, fear, lust. Predictable, tiresome reactions. I was a panther released into a pen of sparrows, and they knew it on a primal level. I swept my gaze over them, dismissing them as little more than scenery.
And then, I saw her.
It was not her appearance, though she was a pleasing composition of shadow and sorrow. The dark clothes, the heavy books, the defiant set of her shoulders. No, it was something else entirely. In a world of faint, flickering life-lights, she was a beacon of profound and beautiful darkness. A flicker of true shadow in a world of washed-out grey.
The moment our eyes met, it happened.
For a vampire, the scent of a human's blood is a call. For most, it is simply noise. But once in a millennium, a vampire may find their La Tua Cantante—the Singer. A human whose blood sings to them, a siren's call so potent it can drive them to madness. I had always considered the notion overly romantic, a weakness of my less-disciplined cousins.
But this was not that.
My vampiric half, the cold, thirsty thing that lived in my core, certainly stirred. The scent that bloomed in my mind—winter graves and forgotten poetry and a deep, aching loneliness—was intoxicating. But the Unseelie fae in my veins, the royal blood of the Gloaming Court, did not hear a song of sustenance. It heard a resonance. A harmony. It recognized the strange, morbid frequency of her soul as a kindred spirit.
This was not just a meal. This was a melody. My Singer. After all this time.
The thirst was there, a sharp, pleasant ache behind my teeth, but it was not a mindless frenzy. It was a connoisseur's appreciation. The Unseelie in me had no desire to drain her dry and discard the vessel. It wanted to study her, to understand the fascinating paradox of her existence. It wanted to play.
The school bell was a mercy, for her. It broke the connection, and I watched her, frozen on her wall, a book forgotten in her lap. The frantic, living drumbeat of her heart was the most exquisite sound I had heard in a century. I allowed myself a moment to savor it before turning toward the administrative building, a place that smelled overwhelmingly of stale coffee and anxiety.
The woman in the office, a Mrs. Cope according to the nameplate, flinched when I approached the counter. Her own heart gave a nervous little flutter, a common reaction. I offered her a placid, empty smile.
"Duvessa Ingram," I said, my voice a low murmur. "My schedule?"
She fumbled with a stack of papers, her eyes darting between my face and the file in her hands. "Ah, yes, of course. Welcome to Forks High." She slid the paper across the counter as if she were afraid to get any closer.
I glanced at the schedule. First period: Geometry with Mr. Hamlin. The tediousness was so thick it was almost amusing.
Geometry class was a masterclass in tedium. Mr. Hamlin, a man with a perpetually earnest expression and a truly unfortunate mustache, was droning on about axioms and postulates. He pointed a wooden stick at a diagram of a triangle on the projector screen, its angles and sides labeled with stark, white letters. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. It was a child's drawing of a world I knew had no such certainties.
I sat in the back, a statue of polite indifference. To my senses, the room was a cacophony of biological noise: the slow, rhythmic pumping of thirty-some hearts, the scent of hormones and half-digested breakfasts, the faint, electrical buzz of synapses firing with dull, uninspired thoughts. These creatures, these breathing sacks of blood, were so loud in their existence. They knew nothing of the true apex predator sitting among them, a creature for whom their entire logical framework was simply a fragile construct to be shattered.
Mr. Hamlin gestured toward the diagram. "An axiom is a statement that is taken to be true," he explained, his voice full of passion for his subject. "It's a starting point, a foundation upon which we build undeniable proofs..."
I thought of my own foundations. The ancient, blood-soaked earth, the chaos of the Unseelie courts, the beautiful, undeniable proof of a still-warm heart. The teacher's words were a pale, flimsy sketch of a terrifying reality.
The bell finally rang, releasing me from the sterile room. I moved through the hallway, the students parting before me like minnows fleeing a pike. History class. The schedule had been a bore to memorize, but now it held a certain promise.
The closer I came, the more I could feel the delightful push-and-pull of her emotions. Her terror was a sharp, spicy scent, but beneath it, laced through it, was a dark, thrilling curiosity. She was not a frightened rabbit. She was a creature of the shadow, staring into a deeper darkness and finding it beautiful. A delightful little masochist. This would be far more amusing than I had anticipated.
I settled into the chair, creating a bubble of absolute stillness around us. Then, the gambit. I had plucked the small moon charm from the air as it fell from her bag in the hallway, a simple trick of speed. Now, I placed it on the desk between us.
"You dropped this."
Her reaction was perfect. The hitch in her breath, the trembling of her fingers, the way she stared at my hand as if it were a venomous snake. She was both terrified and mesmerized.
As her fingers neared mine, I decided to add a bit of stagecraft. My gift, the reason they called me Night's Sovereign, was not merely about the grand, sweeping darkness. It was about the subtle, intimate shadows. I reached out with my will, not to the sky, but to the room itself. I pulled at the ambient shadows, drawing the dim light from the corners of the classroom and weaving it around our two desks. The grey morning light outside the window seemed to dim, the space around us deepening into a pocket of twilight, isolating us from the rest of the room. My own private stage.
Her eyes widened slightly as the light shifted, though she likely couldn't comprehend what she was seeing. She felt it, though. The change in atmosphere. The deepening intimacy of the moment.
I let a small, knowing smile touch my lips and turned the full force of my attention on her. Her pulse leaped, a frantic, beautiful rhythm.
"Don't be afraid," I murmured, savoring the exquisite, perfect lie. "I don't bite."
A beautiful lie. The first of many. The game had just begun.
Her reaction was everything I could have hoped for. A deer caught in the luminous glare of an oncoming predator, too mesmerized by the beauty of its own doom to flee. Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. Her eyes, the color of a stormy sea, were wide with a perfect, exquisite blend of terror and fascination. But the true symphony was the frantic, wild beating of her heart. It was a frantic drum against the dull, plodding rhythm of the other humans in the room, a song composed just for me.
I gave the silver charm a delicate nudge with the tip of my index finger, sliding it across the polished wood until it rested just at the edge of her desk. My own hand remained, a pale and patient predator, inches from hers.
"It's yours, isn't it?" I asked, my voice a low murmur meant only for her. "The moon."
She flinched as if I had struck her. Her gaze darted from the charm to my face and back again. She still hadn't taken it. Good.
I leaned in slightly, a fractional shift that nonetheless breached the comfortable boundary of mortal personal space. The pocket of twilight I had woven around us seemed to deepen, the scent of her—that intoxicating blend of old books, winter air, and a deep, resonant sorrow—thickening around me. I could smell the ozone tang of her fear. It was delicious.
"Your heart is quite loud, Maeve," I whispered, letting her name fall from my lips for the first time. I had, of course, learned it the moment I decided she was interesting. "I can hear it from here."
That did it. A sharp, shuddering breath escaped her, and her hand shot out, snatching the charm from the desk. Her fingers, clumsy with haste, brushed against mine.
A jolt.
For her, I felt the gasp of her breath and the frantic spike of her pulse. It was the shock of touching something impossibly cold, a piece of the grave itself.
For me, it was the opposite. The brief contact was a spark of impossible warmth, a flicker of life so potent and vibrant it was like touching a live wire. The song of her blood intensified for a nanosecond, a full orchestral crescendo that echoed in the hollow chambers of my being. The thirst, cool and manageable a moment ago, sharpened with a pleasant, insistent ache.
She recoiled her hand as if burned, clutching the small silver moon in her fist.
At the front of the room, Mr. Varner cleared his throat, blissfully unaware of the silent, violent drama unfolding in the back row. "Alright, class. Today, we'll be starting our unit on the Spanish Inquisition."
I had to suppress a smile. How quaint. Mortals and their clumsy, brutish attempts at darkness. They wrote histories about men in robes, torturing confessions out of farmers and midwives, thinking they understood the nature of fear. They had no idea what true monsters walked among them, sitting politely in their classrooms.
Mr. Varner droned on about heresy and political consolidation, but I heard none of it. My attention was entirely fixed on the girl beside me. She was staring straight ahead at the whiteboard, her posture rigid, but I could feel the frantic energy pouring off her. She was acutely, painfully aware of every millimeter of space between us. She could feel my stillness, my cold, my focus.
This was so much better than a simple hunt. The fear was the appetizer, but the dawning recognition in her eyes, the unwilling curiosity, the part of her that leaned into the fall instead of pulling away—that was the main course. She wasn't just prey. She was a participant. A perfect, beautiful masochist who had been waiting her entire life for a monster worthy of her attention.
The bell shrieked, signaling the end of the period. Maeve jumped in her seat, the sound finally breaking her trance. She began shoving her notebook into her satchel with frantic, jerky movements, desperate to escape.
I rose slowly, a fluid motion of unfolding grace. As she scrambled to her feet, I leaned close to her ear one last time, my voice a silken thread in the sudden chaos of the classroom.
"That was a lovely song, Maeve," I murmured. "I look forward to the next verse."
I didn't wait for a reply. I turned and walked away, leaving her in the echoing silence of my wake, her own frantic heartbeat my parting gift. The game was afoot, and I had already won the opening gambit.
I moved through the throng of students, a shark gliding through a school of fish. They parted for me, their primitive instincts sensing the predator in their midst even if their conscious minds couldn't name it. The lingering echo of Maeve's frantic pulse was a sweet, fading music in my senses, a promise of future symphonies.
My third-period class was AP French. A laughable requirement, given that I had personally debated philosophy with Voltaire, but it was a convenient place to converge with my cousins.
They were already there when I entered, an island of impossible perfection in the drab classroom. Rosalie sat near the window, the grey light catching the planes of her face, making her look like a grieving angel carved from marble. Emmett, beside her, was a relaxed mountain of muscle, a lazy, confident grin on his face as he idly spun a pen in his powerful fingers.
And then there was Edward.
He sat slightly apart, his posture tense, his brow furrowed in his typical brooding fashion. His golden, topaz eyes—the mark of Carlisle's noble, tedious experiment in self-denial—snapped to mine the moment I crossed the threshold. I felt the familiar, faint pressure of his attempt to read my mind. It was always a struggle for him. My mind was not a human book to be read, but an ancient, layered labyrinth, half vampire stillness and half Unseelie chaos. He could only ever catch glimpses, echoes, and feelings from the surface.
Today, the surface was shimmering with the thrill of the hunt.
I took the empty seat behind him, the picture of serene grace. The human teacher, Madame Dubois, gave me a nervous smile and continued her lesson on the subjunctive mood.
You found someone, Edward's thought came, not as a voice, but as a clear, sharp intrusion into my consciousness. It was laced with a familiar, weary caution.
I didn't bother to turn, keeping my eyes on the teacher as if I were a diligent student. I simply let a wave of my own satisfaction wash over the surface of my thoughts, a mental broadcast just for him. I projected the image of Maeve's wide, terrified eyes, the sound of her heart hammering against her ribs, the intoxicating scent of her fear and fascination.
I felt him flinch. Duvessa. No. The thought was sharp, a command. You know what that means. You know the danger.
Rosalie glanced back, her perfect face unreadable, but I caught the flicker of interest in her golden eyes. Emmett, bless his simple heart, just grinned at me in the reflection of the window. "Someone's in a good mood," he murmured, his voice a low rumble that was still too quiet for human ears to decipher.
She is La Tua Cantante, Edward insisted, his mental voice tight with a strain I remembered all too well from his own pathetic drama years ago. Carine and Esme were devastated when Carlisle let him go his separate ways for a while. All to feed on murders and rapists. You have to stay away from her. It's the only way.
This was the fundamental difference between us. For my "cousins", steeped in Carlisle's doctrine of repentance, the very concept of a La Tua Cantante was a horror story. A boogeyman. A test of control so severe it bordered on impossible, a walking temptation that could shatter their carefully constructed peace and expose them all. It was a weakness to be avoided, a danger to be fled from on sight.
I, on the other hand, saw a gift. A rare and beautiful delicacy presented by fate itself.
You would starve yourself out of fear, cousin, I thought back, my mental tone laced with a cool, predatory amusement. I prefer to savor my meal.
The tension in Edward's shoulders became so pronounced he looked like he was carved from stone. This isn't a game. You don't know what it's like. Carlisle has told us the stories. It's a madness, an obsession. You could lose control. You could kill her.
I am not like you, I replied, letting a hint of the ancient, Unseelie coldness bleed into the thought. My control was not born of a desperate struggle against my nature, but from a perfect, harmonious union with it. The thirst is a tool, not a master. And besides... I let the memory of Maeve's fingers brushing mine, the spark of her own dark curiosity, color my thoughts. ...I think she wants to be devoured.
A small, almost imperceptible smirk touched Rosalie's lips. She, more than any of them, understood the resentment of holding back, of pretending to be something less than what you are. She appreciated a predator that was not ashamed of its nature.
Edward fell silent, his mind a vortex of frustration and righteous fear. He was powerless to stop me, and he knew it. I was not his to command. I was royalty of a court far older and darker than his noble sire's conscience, and I would not be bound by their self-imposed chains.
I cut the telepathic connection between my cousins and I and leaned back in my chair, the teacher's voice fading into a meaningless drone. The game was so much more delicious now. It was not just about teasing the fascinating little mortal. It was about challenging the very foundation of my cousins' fragile existence, reminding them what a true monster looked like. And I was very much looking forward to the next lesson.