The rain over Mayfair fell not in drops, but in a fine, persistent mist that clung to the windowpanes like regret. Inside the hushed gloom of Valerius & Son, Antiquities, the dust motes danced in the solitary beam of a green-shaded desk lamp, their eternal waltz the only movement in the room.
Alaric Valerius sat perfectly still, a statue carved from old silver and older sorrow. Before him lay a 15th-century Venetian dagger, its ivory hilt whispering of poisonings in moonlit canals. He should have been cataloguing it, tracing its provenance through bloodlines and betrayal. Instead, his gaze was fixed on nothing, listening to the city's heartbeat the distant rumble of the Underground, the sigh of tires on wet tarmac, the pulse of six million lives from which he was eternally removed.
A fly, bold against the winter evening, buzzed against the glass. With a speed that blurred the air, Alaric's hand snapped out, catching it. He felt the frantic, microscopic heartbeat against his palm, a frantic percussion of pure, uncomplicated life. For a long moment, he held it, the predator's instinct coiled in his stillness. Then, he opened his fingers. The insect zipped away, disoriented, into the shadows of a bookshelf crammed with grimoires that whispered in dead languages.
One hundred and forty-seven years in this city, he thought. A caretaker of dead things, in a neighborhood of the living rich.
His curse was not vampirism that was merely a facet, a biological condition. His true curse was memory. He remembered the taste of Dacian wine, the smell of pine forests that once covered the Carpathians, the face of a woman whose name now felt like ash on his tongue. He remembered the moment he became this. Not a triumphant transformation, but a violent, shattering wrongness under a starless sky. He was a Progenitor, one of the five originals and his existence was a footnote the others preferred forgotten. While Lucian ruled the East from opulent terror in Budapest, and Valeria wove her webs in Venice's palazzos, Alaric tended his shop. An exile by choice, a king of dust and silence.
The bell above the door jangled, a sound like broken laughter.
Kael filled the doorway, the damp night air swirling in with him. He carried the scent of cold stone, diesel, and the faint, wild musk of the Highlands. His presence was a contained storm, broad shoulders threatening the seams of his waxed cotton jacket, dark hair flecked with rain, eyes the colour of a winter loch. A werewolf of the Black Isle packs, bound to Alaric not by blood, but by a debt older than the United Kingdom.
"Evening, boss," Kael grunted, shedding his coat onto a Roman bust. "Quiet?"
"The dead are always quiet, Kael. It's the living who are the problem." Alaric's voice was smooth, accented with the ghost of languages lost to time. "Prague?"
Kael's expression tightened. "The Council's seasonal ball is next week. Cassia's faction is pushing for a motion on territorial expansion into the Benelux. Silas is abstaining, as usual. Lucian sent a gift a set of iron nails from some medieval torture device. Charming as ever."
Alaric's lip curled. The European Supernatural Council, holding court in the hidden chambers beneath Prague's astronomical clock. A parliament of predators debating borders over blood wine. He wanted no part of it. Their politics were a gilded cage, their wars theatre for immortal egos. His war was internal, fought every dawn against the urge to remember too much.
"And the other matter?" Alaric asked, turning the dagger so its blade caught the light.
Kael moved with a predator's grace to the back of the shop, returning with a small, reinforced case. "Delivery from Edinburgh. Came via a nervous-looking courier with witch-mark tattoos. Said it was 'for the old one in London.' No return address. Felt itchy."
Alaric placed a pale hand on the case's lid. A faint vibration, a silent hum of potent magic, seeped into his bones. It was not a pleasant sensation. It was the prickling awareness of a power that predated even him. Progenitor magic.
"Did you open it?"
"Do I look suicidal?" Kael snorted, leaning against a display of cursed Etruscan mirrors. "My job's security, not archaeology. It's your mysterious, potentially lethal mail."
With deliberate care, Alaric released the latches. Inside, nestled on frayed velvet, was a book. It was smaller than he expected, its binding not leather but something darker, tougher, etched with symbols that seemed to writhe under his gaze. They were not Latin, nor Greek, nor any crude Germanic rune. They were older. They were the angular, stark script of the Dacian tribes, thought lost to the Roman conquest.
His breath stilled. A fist of ice clenched around a heart that hadn't beaten in a millennium.
He knew this book. He had last seen it in a fire, in a mountain fortress, clutched in the hands of its maker a witch with eyes like a storm and a betrayal that had carved the first and deepest scar on his soul.
"What is it?" Kael asked, his casual tone gone, replaced by the low rumble of a wolf sensing danger.
"A ghost," Alaric whispered, his fingers hovering an inch above the cover. He dared not touch it. The magic within pulsed, a dormant heart waiting for a key. "A very old, very angry ghost."
As if on cue, the symbols on the cover flared with a sickly, phosphorescent green light. The air in the shop grew thick and cold, pressing down on them. The dust stopped dancing. From the shelves, a low chorus of whispers awoke the trapped echoes in the other artifacts, stirring in recognition of their elder.
A slip of parchment fluttered from between the pages. Alaric caught it. The message was brief, written in a elegant, modern hand that belied its ominous content.
'He knows you have it. He is coming for what was ours. The Nemeton stirs.'
There was no signature. Only a small, pressed flower a sprig of bell heather, purple as a bruise. Scottish.
"Kael," Alaric said, his voice cutting through the gathering static of ancient power. "Lock the doors. The black iron locks. Then contact your pack. Tell them the exile is over."