Before the release of our upcoming Western inspired queer fantasy, Blackblood, get to know the characters with this series of prequel chapters by Kree Sullivan.
Renn
Three Years Before the Blackblood Drives West.
After today, my eye color will never be the same.
It's far from the most important of the day’s consequences, but it's the only one that cycles through my mind as I stare out over Perishing's parapet. I could focus on how nice the weather is instead. Not too hot, decent cloud cover, a pine-scented breeze ruffling the tops of the trees a dozen feet below me. But I can’t stop imagining looking in the mirror and seeing a different person than before I drank the blood.
I'll forget my eyes soon enough as other duties occupy my mental space. Their color will change to black, and whatever they used to be will belong to the past. To a mother I never knew, maybe, or to a father who left the same eyes behind decades ago.
They’re not important, but they are a good distraction from the taste of mage blood in my mouth.
I don't know what I assumed it would taste like. Not human blood, certainly. But it does. The same warmth, the same coppery tang that lingers long after the blood itself is gone. The only difference is the weight of magic. It itches up my gums and all along the length of my throat, and it makes me feel like I could crumble the parapet wall with my bare hands.
Maybe I could. My fingers pick along the stone, trying to find a groove, when a shadow falls across me like a cloak.
“I thought I might find you here.”
The rumble of my father's voice makes me stand at sharp attention, my back so straight it makes the vertebrae ache. I'm no longer the snotty teen who lurks around Perishing hunting for scraps of attention. Now I'm the snotty teen with responsibilities. A proper Huntsman. Which means my father is no longer my father first—he's the Huntsmaster and my leader, and I'm at the absolute bottom of the pecking order.
“Sir,” I say, giving him a stiff nod by way of greeting. I wish I could get the taste of blood off my tongue. I'm afraid he can see it in my teeth.
He laughs, his hair, graying at the temples, shines under the cheerful afternoon sun. He's poised, but casual. Confident but gentle about it. The exact type of leader anyone should want to follow. And I have been following, my hands gripped onto his coattails since I could walk. Knowing I'll never really fill his shoes, even if that's all I've ever wanted.
He leans beside me on the parapet, and we stare out into the abyss where mountain turns to sand dune and the open sky takes over. Perishing is beautiful. The land, the keep. Its people are a little rough around the edges, but I try not to deal with them much—the mages because until today they weren't under my purview; the Huntsmen because I find them a little…rowdy for my tastes.
But my father is the master of it all. When he's there, mages and Huntsmen alike trip over themselves to fall in line. His presence must remind them of the good work we do, the honest work, of how we keep the Federation safe from mages. How we keep mages safe from themselves.
The bitter blood taste rolls across my tongue again, and I swallow it down.
“No need for formalities out here, Son,” he says. He shifts his shoulders, getting comfortable leaning on the wall. “When it's just you and me, we can be like always.” He glances at me from the side of his eye, then a moment later he pounces.
His arm wraps around my neck and shoulders, and my mind blanks. I received a certain level of training to become a Huntsman, but nothing can prepare a fresh-blooded recruit for an attack from the literal Huntsmaster. It doesn't help that while I'm closing in on my father's considerable height, I'm still a stringy sixteen and like a piece of paper compared to his massive frame. He used to say I'd grow into it, but there's something oddly terrifying about the idea of reaching his size. Too big to hide. Even when I want to.
He grabs my head and messes up my hair, which is already untidy from the recent hack job our resident barber did. “I dread the day you grapple me back,” my father says with a laugh before pushing me away. “I'm afraid you'll rip my arms off in stored-up retaliation.”
He claps his hands on my shoulders and stares at me. Not down, like he used to, but on equal footing, which makes my stomach churn. Our eyes meet, and I wonder if he can see the color of mine already coated with a thin sheen of black.
“I'm so proud of you,” he says.
Have I really done anything to be proud of? Yes, sixteen is the youngest anyone's ever drank the blood, but me being the one to do it isn't surprising or unexpected. It was scheduled. Everything I am was built for me by him. Renn Mason is just a reflection of his father, and a murky one at that.
But he beams at me, his black eyes somehow warm despite the void of their color. I want to be everything he says he's proud of. I want to earn the look in his eye.
He releases me, then turns back toward the door that leads into the heart of the building. “I have something for you,” he says. “Come with me.”
He steps into the skin of the Huntsmaster so easily—his shoulders as straight and strong as the parapet, his eyes cold and attentive as he holds the door open, watching like a hawk as I scoot past him. He wears his height in the same way he wears his tailored suit. I feel like I'm ninety percent shoulders, and the other ten percent is kneecaps. When we pass Huntsmen in the hall, they go from joking and swaggering to stiffly upright, eyes full of awe and something resembling shame. He nods to each of them, stoic and certain, his eyes narrowed as he files them away. The second his back is to them, they jeer at me, finding me a much more appealing target. Like coyotes going after puma cubs when the mother's back is turned.
The entrance to the mage Community yawns before us, but my father turns away from it, passing instead through hall after hall of black stone. When I was a kid, I got lost more than once in the labyrinth of these hallways. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen the end of them. Order operations happen mostly in the front quarter of the building, and whatever happens past there is anyone's guess.
Father leads me down a hall I've passed by but never entered, as there's nothing the Order needs doing in that direction. The floor is covered in dusty footprints left who knows how long ago, and the tile is chipped and cracked. A little further past where the gloom swallows the hallways, my father stops in front of a pair of wooden doors.
They're unassuming, no different from any of the other doors within the building, but my father’s smile twitches under his beard as he struggles to keep a stern face.
“Open it,” he instructs.
My hands feel suddenly heavy, but I do as he says. The handle is freezing beneath my fingers as I push the door hard. It swings wide.
Strong sunlight washes the room white and gold, stinging my eyes after endless dark hallways. I cross the threshold, squinting against the brightness as I examine our new surroundings. My stomach plummets. I stagger into a small banister that separates the upper portion of the room from the lower portion one step below.
It's a library. I didn't know we had a library. As far as I was aware, the only books in the keep were on my father's shelves or the occasional training manual. There are hundreds here. Thousands. Not just regular books, but enchanted ones too, their black spines practically glowing where they sit on the shelves, waiting to be read.
I can’t read them, though. Of course not. They should be categorized, organized, seen which can be useful and which should be destroyed. My fingers itch. I want to pull them off the shelves and pile them around me, organize them by author, by genre, by size. I want to make little lists of their contents and create a catalogue for anyone who might need a specific book.
Then there's the work space. Four desks accompanied by four chairs sit in the alcove. A dozen file cabinets stand behind them, full of who knows what secret knowledge. The sun casts swaths of light through the windows’ warped glass, creating patterns on the desks and floors that resemble rippling water. I run my fingers along the wood, then greedily head to a rusty file cabinet, pulling it open with a satisfying squeal.
Empty.
Oh well. I can fix that.
My father watches from the door, his arms folded behind his back. I turn to him, and whatever expression he sees on my face makes him break into a rumbling laugh.
“I take it you like it,” he says.
I nod mutely, sliding the cabinet closed. When I finally find my tongue, my words are thicker than mud. “I didn't know we had a library.”
This makes him laugh harder. “Perishing is full of secrets. Who knows what was going through our predecessors’ heads when they constructed this maze. Not like anyone kept decent records of the place. Or blueprints. Or anything. When I took over, we didn't even have a historian. The previous Huntsmaster left me a blank slate.” He slides into the room and stops beside one of the desks, leaning his hip against it. It groans in protest of having to hold weight for the first time in what could be decades. “Found it a few years back, but I hadn't decided what to do with it. Until now.”
He places his hand on my shoulder and draws me toward the books. The magic in them is all ancient, rusty, but still as powerful as the day it was cast—if not more so. It makes my eyes sting as much as the sunlight. “Renn, the day you were born was the happiest of my life. The only thing I've ever wanted is to make this world safe for you to live in. That was the promise I made to your mother.”
I glance at him, surprised. He never talks about my mother. Sometimes I forget she ever existed at all.
“I want to create a legacy for you to build upon, stone by stone. Part of that starts here. The Order is mighty, but it's incomplete. In many ways, the lack of accountability from previous regimes stunted us terribly. We need to solidify our foundation, and for that, I'm thinking of creating a new role.” He nods toward me. “Does Head Archivist Renn Mason sound good to you?”
Pinpricks race up my spine, and my hand falls on the nearest bookshelf. Magic creeps along the edges of my fingertips, but it's easy to ignore in the echoes of what my father said. “Does that mean I can work in here?”
“The room is yours, Renn. And as the Order’s first Archivist, that means you create the parameters of your role. This is not a position I would trust to just anyone, but I know the way your mind works. You'll come up with amazing things and fill those file cabinets in no time. The Huntsmen will have a history to be proud of when you’re done sorting through the mire.”
“I'd like to create duty rosters,” I find myself saying. My feet pace, body moving ahead of my brain. “Censuses. We should know who is in what Community or which part of the Federation at all times. I'd be happy to accept correspondence from other Communities, if you'd put me in charge of that, too. And all scheduling. The idea of who should be where and doing what gets a little loose around here, and I think some of the Huntsmen are taking advantage of that blind spot.”
My father snorts. “See? I knew you'd take to the role like a bird taking flight. Whatever authority you need, I’ll grant it. Just make out a list of what you want, and we’ll work out the details.”
I inspect the room again, unable to comprehend that this space is all mine. The perfect place to work and dream. I'm even able to ignore the voice tickling at the back of my mind that whispers the perfect place to hide. Instead I think about acquiring lamps, paper, pens. A box for incoming work. File folders.
The rows and rows of books catch my eye again, and I wave toward them. “The first thing I'll do is categorize those. Perhaps they contain some of our lost history that—”
“No,” my father snaps, making my shoulders jump. He never raises his voice. A man like him, with all the power in the world, doesn't need to.
He clears his throat and speaks again, more evenly this time. “No. I had a look at them when I first found the place, and some are highly volatile. Too dangerous to touch.” He frowns at the collection. “I thought about getting a mage in here to clean them up, but that might cause even more problems. We may need to plan a special destruction.” He smiles back at me. “I assume that will be under your preview, Archivist.”
I stare at the tall bookshelves, a thousand ideas reeling through my head. How to make the Order better. How to comb through the last of the tangles my father already thoroughly trimmed. But when I look at those books, the volumes upon volumes of history and magic, I know one thing for sure.
I could never bring myself to destroy them.
Renn's story continues in Blackblood out April 1st and available for preorder now wherever books are sold.
Come back next week, when we meet Canto, an imprisoned mage, and subscribe to the Tiny Ghost Newsletter for more bonus content.
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