"Mages hunted you?" Like they hunted her father.

"Who told you that?" Paul's tone was dark, and she realized that he was referring to her thoughts of her father.

"Rush did," Mer said carefully, trying to avoid thinking about him too much.

"Did he try to turn you against your own kind?" Paul's voice was spiteful, and she blanked her mind. Thinking about kittens, rainbows, anything but what she couldn't let Paul find out. The man narrowed his eyes, noticing.

"Forget it. I will continue." Paul shrugged her off, and she was happy to have something else to focus on. "Mages hunting us was no great threat. We could read their minds and see their attacks, as we had gathered as many as we could into our minds. What hunted us to extinction were the vampires."

Wonderful, and here she thought this couldn't get any more awkward.

"Why did the vampires hunt you? Could you read their minds too?"

"No. We are well known in the underworld as vampire killers." Mer felt pain as she imagined Paul attacking Rush, just like she didn't want... didn't want... someone else to attack Rush. Who was it? "That why there are so few of us left. Our voices paralyze vampires and our touch breaks spells. We are anti-magic in a world full of it. Everyone's enemy and stealers of knowledge, we are no one and yet everyone at once." Paul paused for an awkward moment, eyeing her in a manner she wasn't used to. "Mer, about Remus Shade."

Mer didn't know if she wanted to have this conversation right now. It was hard for her.

"The Aurions can't fight for you back because you are a sacrifice, but I have no such restrictions. When you walked in the other day with dark energy surrounding you, I had been prepared to kill him."

Paul paused as she imagined how that likely would have gone. Poorly, very poorly.

"You don't understand our power. I could have easily killed him alone. It's only when we are outnumbered that we perish." That thought wasn't any better than imagining Paul die at Rush's hands. "I had intended to protect you, but when he appeared at your side out of thin air, you smiled at him... The feelings in your mind were flustered, confused, and nervous. They were not what I had expected from a sacrifice given to the Shades.

"There was a nervous fear about you, yes, but it wasn't terror or desperation. It was clear he hadn't harmed you, but when I heard about how you had injured him from your aunt, I thought you were dead. Then I saw you at my door, looking in wistfully, and still, there was no fear, no plea for help. Had you asked me just once, I would have freed you, but you don't seem to be unhappy, not as I would expect from a mage captive of a vampire." Paul was silent, and she let out a slow breath.

"I know I'm supposed to be dead, twice over I think, five if we're counting on Rush's terms, but I'm not. Being with him is strange, terrifying at times, I suppose, but really, Rush has been kind to me."

"Kind." Caelan scoffed. "I can smell the blood on your neck, even if you have it bandaged and covered by that turtleneck."

That surprised Paul, and he tensed up. Apparently, a Nothing didn't have the heightened senses of a lycanthrope, and she had yet to think about it around Paul.

Nope. Not thinking about it. The World Series was coming up. How about them Yankees. Certainly there had to be better things for Paul to focus on than her, weren't there? It's not like she followed baseball or anything, but the super bowl was after the New Year. She and some of the guys at the school had gotten together last year, and it had been a dumb blast. They had all been nerds and not interested in getting her pants, at least not visibly readily. They had yelled at the screen, and she still didn't know which teams had been playing but it had been fun–

"Stop it, Meredith," Paul snapped at her, and she flinched back from his hostility. "You really want to hide from me the way that beast sank its fangs into you?"

For a brief moment, it was impossible for a flash of him pinning her shackled to the bed and squeezing off her breath with his fangs to not graze her mind. Paul's expression softened immediately, and then his hands shook as his eyes widened.

"That– That wasn't even what I was trying to hide anyway." Mer crossed her arms, annoyed, and looked away from him. "You can't blame Rush for that. I blew his arm to pieces and shoved enough light energy into him to melt him from the inside out. It was take my blood or die."

"Blood doesn't release magic, Meredith. Death does," Paul said coldly.

She closed her mouth, annoyed that she was finding it harder and harder to walk out of this probing. Should she really tell him? Rush told her to trust no one and that everyone would be a danger to her life and freedom. Was that true of even Paul? Would he want to possess her?

"You're afraid of me." Paul realized with her thoughts, and she found the floor with her eyes. "Mer, I've never hurt you. You trusted me as a child to go off alone with me, and you're in my home now. Why do you think I'd hurt you? Something Remus Shade said to you, clearly... but I would never harm you. I am appalled by even the thought of letting harm come to you."

That seemed to be the case but still... What about her father?

"Your father?" Paul was silent a moment. "Meredith, are you saying you use dark magic as well?" There was heavy silence as she found the ground.

"That's a poor fate for a girl," Caelan said, looking to her, but she looked away from him.

"It's not..." Mer was having a hard time trusting right now. The mages and the vampires had hunted her father. But it wasn't the same for her. As it was, she wasn't going to go mad according to Rush. If she had to choose someone to trust though, Paul would be it. "I can use dark and light magic."

After saying it, the look that passed over Paul's face made her wonder if she wouldn't be calling Rush to come save her any second now. It was a mixed look of disbelief and then a piercing heavy gaze.

"Why do you always think Remus will help you?" Paul asked, changing the subject, and she frowned at him. "Can you not see that whatever you think he cares for you is a façade? You're an anomaly, a curiosity, something a proud magic using vampire house would enjoy for a time. When he's bored of you, he'll kill you. I don't even know why he lets you out of his sight. How did you convince him to let you go?"

"I didn't convince him. Rush said if I'm more comfortable here while he sleeps then he doesn't mind. It's not like there is much for me to do in his castle."

Paul sighed. "You still don't realize how odd that is? A normal vampire keeping a mage as a prisoner would have you shackled to a dungeon wall while they slept, not allow you to run around."

Paul was right, she knew, but she had blown up the last pair of shackles Rush had put on her.

"You blew them up?" Paul's voice was startled and then silent. "Hell, why has Remus Shade hesitated in killing you? I've never heard of a mage escaping shackles without the key, and your aunt said you touched him and ruptured his arm. There is literally not one single reason you should be alive. You're dangerous."

"Thanks," Mer said, glaring at him, and he shook his head.

"I mean from Remus Shade's perspective."

"Yeah, he knows."

"Is he infatuated with you or something?"

"Definitely not. I think he's called me a cobra more than once, likes to keep me at least a few feet away, and indicated he often resists urges to kill me. Plus, I've been having nightmares and waking him up all day, so he's kind of angry with me and actually prefers me out of his castle while he sleeps, so he can sleep at all."

"You make it all sound so mundane." Paul was right. It was mundane to her. Strange, but it was her home now and interacting with Rush was becoming more predictable. "You do at least understand that you are a liability to the mages, and a weapon for vampires."

"Yes." Doomed to be hunted down by her own kind or used by their enemies. There wasn't much of a place for her.

"Caelan and my own sentiments as well. There isn't much place for Nothings in this world, nor is there a place for any mage who can wield dark magic, let alone that and light magic. Ah, Mer, I wish I could say there was any way this could have been avoided, but it's almost better you weren't reachable by the mages when you discovered this. They'd have locked you in some dark cell, but I'm not sure if that isn't better than being played around with by a hundred-year-old vampire."

"My options aren't really good, so I'm focusing on learning magic," Mer said, and Paul raised an eyebrow.

"And Remus is letting you?"

"More like facilitating."

Paul narrowed his eyes at her.

"It's not what you think. Rush is concerned for me too."

"Concerned you'll turn on him."

"He just thinks I'm going to accidentally kill him."

Paul laughed.

"It's not funny. When I shoved all that light energy into his body on accident I effectively did kill him. If I hadn't healed him then I'd be dead..." Mer trailed off as both Caelan and Paul focused way too hard on her.

Maybe she was not supposed to have said that.

"You healed a vampire..." Paul said, covering his mouth with his hand. "Mer, will you do me a favor."

A favor?

"Yes, I'd like to speak with Remus, and don't tell him I'm a Nothing. I want to get a read on what he really wants from you. I won't harm him." Paul snapped the last bit, silencing her bubbling fears. "Something strange is working here and I want you safe over anything else. I don't care if you can heal vampires or blow up unbreakable shackles, or that you even might be able to surpass your father. All I want is you safe."

"Why?" While she knew Paul cared about her, he himself was a leader of his people though they were few enough. Who was she to him?

"Well, I've kept to myself mostly, because I know how fragile you are about otherworldly things. Every time a vampire was within miles, you were at my café shaking."

Was that what she had been responding to?

"Back a few decades, when there were dozens of us left and not single digits, some of us sold ourselves for safety."

Sold? Like slavery?

"Yes. Vampires would never take us, so a lot of my brethren sold themselves to the mages. They infiltrated other human establishments and killed vampires at their behest. My kind were considered great weapons, but most of us perished in the line of duty.

"My father sold himself to the mages." Paul sounded deeply bitter. "They used him and abandoned him when they would have had to lose mages to save him. When my father never came home, I was left alone at a very young age, and I didn't know what to do. Sometimes, I wandered about in the city, and eventually I was starving, afraid, and waiting to die.

"Another child found me in an alleyway and took pity on me. He fed me and hid me away in his home. We played together and I lived just behind his wall in a hidden room. The boy was saturated in dark magic, so I thought he was a dark creature, and I, being a Nothing, was undetectable by anyone else. I lived that way for years while my kind were exterminated unbeknownst to me.

"Around my teen years, the boy had grown well tired of stuffing me back into his wall. He said it was time I moved out, and I thought he meant to abandon me. Terrified, I struck out to kill him, but he just brushed me away with unbelievably powerful dark magic. Laying there on the floor, I expected it to be my last moments. 'I just meant you should share my room with me. You're a jumpy Nothing, aren't you?' He laughed at me, and I was confused. This boy had known I was a Nothing all along and had not harmed me, had never asked anything from me, merely hid me.

"After a while, I realized who I was staying with was your father. Darc was a master mage and though I expected him to start asking things of me, he never did. Well... he did, but not what I expected. When I wouldn't stop asking him if he didn't want something from me, he threw coffee beans at me and demanded I make him something to drink.

"It was pretty bad, and Darc looked like he was going to die the first time I made him something. I barely understood a coffee maker as it was, let alone how to make coffee from actual beans. That was all he ever asked of me though, that I make him something to drink.

"So I set out on my own while he was busy hunting and managed to start a coffee shop with another Nothing. There was a room in the back the Nothing told me I could stay in, and one day I ended up falling asleep there.

"When I didn't return home, I found out Darc had gone everywhere looking for me. Finding me at the coffee shop, he had been so flustered and breathing so heavily, I could tell he'd been running around for hours. Then he walked up to the counter, took one heavy look at me, and said, 'Do you know how long I've been waiting for my coffee?' Nothing about how I hadn't returned to him or how I had started working with another Nothing unbeknownst to him. Darc just wanted his coffee.

"I spent the rest of my life at his side, but I did move out and get my own place. Unfortunately, Darc had a horrible habit of ending up in my room, sleeping half on me, so it wasn't like I'd really moved out. Your father and I were best friends for my entire life.

"When he started to do erratic things and scare the mages, I could tell he was worried that he'd frighten me as well. It got so bad that he didn't come in for his coffee anymore, so I spent all day looking for him as he had for me. Finding him at home in your room, he was looking at you, dark magic permeating it heavily. When he saw me, his normally blue eyes had turned to black and he smiled, twisting in an inhuman way.

"'What do you want, Nothing?' Darc said to me, not using my name as he'd become accustomed to. Everyone around him had already abandoned him, and his wife in the other room had let me in, but she was terrified for you and terrified of him. So what else was I to say? 'I didn't give you your coffee yet. I know how you get without it.' When I smiled at him, the dark energy around him lessened, pulling back into his body, and he broke down.

"Watching your father fall onto his knees on the floor in tears was hard, but I was there for him, holding him when his wife would no longer. I spent the rest of his days with him. Darc wasn't allowed to hunt anymore, and they often attempted to kill him, but he just brushed them off and instead rolled around my house, occasionally going out and scaring the children.

"I think that terrified your aunt the most, when he just showed up during the beginner mage courses and scared the hell out of them. My god, did he make those kids cry. Then he just collapsed into waterfalls of laughter with me and got kicked out of the facility.

"When your father laughed, the darkness lessened, and, yes, it was changing him. While inevitable, I feel like if everyone had not abandoned him, it would not have consumed him so quickly. The last thing I remember seeing on your father's face was a smile, and he had laughed at me, pressing my face against his. They had finally mortally wounded him and he was waiting to die in some forest. The last thing he begged me do was to make sure I didn't forget to make his coffee every day, because he was going to want it, even if I just poured it on his grave."

Mer was speechless as Paul found her eyes with his. "That is why I care for you. You're sort of my responsibility. I have to make you coffee every day." Paul smiled at her, and tears fell from her eyes. Not even once had Paul mentioned he'd known her father, but they had been the closest friends, and Paul watched out for her, as he had stayed by her father's side. "I have something for you." Paul stood, walking over to the bookshelf, and he pulled out an old book, handing it to her. "Some of these are hard, so start with the easy ones. The hard ones can kill you."

Opening it, Mer realized it was a book of spells. On each page there was a handwritten title and then description of each symbol and how to use it. It was all handwritten. Page after page, she flipped through it and then looked back up to Paul.

"You father's spell book. He used the common ones but also made his own, ones that could only be used by a mage who could use dark magic. I don't see anyone else getting particular use out of it, aside from you. Please take it. Learn magic, but if you ever need me, please call me.

"I am a Nothing, and we are blood-bonded. If you call my name in your mind, no matter how far, I will hear you and I can appear at your side because a nothing is everywhere and nowhere. Let me protect you, as I once protected your father till the end."

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