SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 695: Nocthar Sight

Alfons did not answer at once.Selendra had said it as though the sentence should answer everything on its own. As though waiting days in his room, speaking of privacy, and standing this easily inside an enemy house were ordinary things a person did. They were not. Outside the particular sickness of the Eight Great Families, none of it was.

He studied her from near the door, one hand near the handle. Some habits were hard to kill. Others were simply sensible.

"And what is it you need to tell me?" he asked.

The pale light behind her brought her crimson eyes up bright, close to wet with color. Nocthar eyes carried that quality, lovely in the way a blade is lovely under candlelight. A man could admire the shine. He also knew enough not to test the edge.

"Before that," she said, "I need to explain something to you. Otherwise you will misread the rest."

Alfons did not move from the door. "Then explain."

"My class." She let the two words rest a breath. "Blood Oracle."

He had heard the name, only in the thin way heirs heard things about one another. Rumor. A few words traded at Councils. The scraps servants pass along when they think no one who counts is near enough to listen. A rare class, they said. Nocthar blood, oracle sight, half prophecy and half political problem waiting to happen. He had never given it much thought. The night, it appeared, intended to charge him for that.

"Blood Oracle," he repeated, keeping his voice level. "And I am meant to take your word for what it does."

"You are meant to understand it," she said, "because without that, you will mistake why I came." She folded her hands in front of her. "My class lets me perceive what is tied to a person's mana. Marks. Abnormalities. Traces left on a status that the owner never meant to show. I do not read everything. I do not open a person like a ledger and turn the pages. I catch fragments."

"Fragments," he said.

"Pieces. Impressions. The echo of a thing more than the thing itself. A title that should not exist. A class bent out of true. A bloodline that does not match the face wearing it." Her gaze held on him, steady and unhurried. "Mana keeps more memory than people give it credit for."

Alfons kept his arms loose at his sides, though every part of him had gone watchful. An heir who could read the truth under another house's skin was not a guest. She was a risk that walked and spoke and stood by his window as if someone had invited it.

"You can read a person's status," he said.

"Part of it. Not always, and never the whole."

"That is not a comfort."

"It was not offered as one."

He let that sit. At least she did not dress it up. "That is the first half. Give me the second."

"Blood."

The word entered the room and stayed, unwelcome and unhurried, like something that knew it would not be asked to leave.

His jaw tightened. He did not bother hiding the distaste. "Blood. With your family it always is."

"It is not for effect," Selendra said. "It is bloodline, biology, and class doing one thing together. Through blood, what I see grows clearer. I do not see one fixed future. I see possibilities. Branches."

"Branches," he said.

"A person can walk down many roads before he commits to one. I catch glimpses of where a road might end. Most of those ends never arrive. A great many fall apart the instant the person chooses differently than the vision assumed."

He did not care for any of it. He disliked prophecy on principle, and he had his reasons. It turned otherwise sensible people into fools. They bent the knee to it, or they fought so hard to outrun it that they sprinted straight into the thing they feared. Either way the prophet walked out looking wise, which he found close to insulting. He kept the opinion behind his teeth, since voicing it would only hand her a reason to prove him wrong.

He looked at her where she stood by the window.

Everything she had explained led to one place. Her class did not open the future for free, and patience was not enough to make a vision clear. Blood made it clear. Blood taken from the person and swallowed.

A vampire who needed that to see the road ahead did not wait several days inside an enemy house just for the view.

"Say it without circling around it," Alfons said. "Are you here for mine?"

Selendra shook her head once. "No. I did not come to your house for your blood."

It was not the answer he had braced for.

His wariness tightened instead of easing, because a vampire turning down the obvious prize usually meant she had come for something worse.

"No," he said slowly.

"No."

He held her gaze. The cold light, the warded room, the distance she had kept between them on purpose, none of it felt idle anymore. A house did not send an oracle heir across an enemy threshold the same week that house started dragging old secrets out of locked rooms.

"So why are you here, Selendra?" he asked. "What did you come to tell me?"

The last trace of ease left her face. Whatever she carried, she was done circling it.

"I needed you to understand my class first," she said, "because what I came to tell you is not a rumor, and it is not a guess. Once you hear it, you will not be able to forget it."

Alfons's fingers curled once at his side. The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago, as if the walls had leaned in to listen with him. For the first time since entering, he wished she had come for blood instead.

"Say it."

Selendra looked straight at him.

"I had a vision," she said. "And you were in it."