"We need to talk."

"Is this about my kissing you again? Or the rest of it?" The scowl at the corners of Keel's mouth suggested he'd prefer to avoid both topics.

"No, it's about the magic." I'd spent the whole day wondering how I was going to tackle this conversation and now that we'd arrived in the royal chambers, it turned out it would be head on, just inside the door of his room.

"Continue." 

Ever since the museum, Keel had been shifting been formal and informal, as if unsure how to act with me. I wondered if he was worried I might quit again, but I was beyond that. Some decisions you didn't unmake.

"Yesterday, when you were talking about the bond and how it tries to manipulate you, I think I figured something else out."

"What's that?" Keel's attention was fixed on me. 

"It's not just bond magic that tightens the bond, but all magic we do together."

"How?"

"I don't know, but think about it. The bond might have been what allowed me to heal you after you were stabbed, but I didn't use any bond magic to save your life. I used the same sorcery I used all those months ago in my cell when I fixed your face, and yet-"

"The bond became much more demanding after."

"Exactly."

A range of emotions played over Keel's face as that sank in and spun out to all of its inevitable conclusions. "So that means if I intend to keep my promise to you and resist this to the best of my ability, we need to stop these sessions and stop using the shield."

He'd made the connections seamlessly, turning the pieces until they fit and then accepting what they revealed, just as he once had. I found a rock in that.

"We can't," I stated.

"We can't?" Keel's expression morphed to one of surprise.

"Look, you wanted me to think about the future, so that's what I've been doing, or at least trying to do. If you're assassinated your bloodline dies out just as surely as if you don't produce an heir. And magic's the thing that's keeping us one step ahead of those who would kill you."

"Have you been talking to Arthos again?"

"No."

"You know, he had no right to-"

"He was just trying to help and I deserved that after going there. The truth hurts, but it still needs to be said."

I saw a question in Keel's eyes, but he did not ask it. "Still, it wasn't his place."

"It doesn't matter. Not to this conversation," I said, trying to steer him back on course. "What does matter is that Garstatt told me about this too. He explained how he'd tried to fight the bond between him and Etan and how it didn't work. It's not going to work for us either, Your Majesty."

"You don't know that for sure." 

I sensed he was only saying that for my benefit, and I prickled against his uncharacteristic cloying gentleness. 

"Don't I?" I asked. "Look inside yourself. What do you see? Would you have told me your secret yesterday if you didn't think it was true?"

"Okay, but just a few days ago you were in the museum telling me that you couldn't deal with this." Keel took off his crown and ran his hand through his hair before reseating it on his head. "So which is it?"

"I've had more time to think," I said. What I didn't say was: And you compromised with me and held my hand, two things I could barely imagine you doing three months ago. 

"And?"

"And as a king you take calculated risks everyday, right?"

"Yes, but I don't see what that has-"

"This is just another one."

Keel studied my face and my mind. As odd as the pressure in my head felt I resisted the urge to toss up defenses. He needed to feel everything that was there, both my nervousness and firm resolve.

"Perhaps I underestimated you," he said when he was done. 

"Perhaps I underestimated myself."

As I'd struggled through another near sleepless day, my ego gave out under the scrutiny. I could delay, but I could not put the bond off forever. The choice now wasn't whether to face it, but how I would face it. Just as Keel's father's plans and Keel's transition had end dates, the bond would now dictate a few of its own. I could fight it, lock myself away in a little room far from Keel in order to try to grant us more time, and then confront him and it in little better position than we were now. Or we could work together. It might ramp up the timeline, but we'd be safer in the short term and hopefully less likely to bring about the apocalypse in the long.

Despite what I'd said in anger - and Keel was so very good at making me angry - I didn't hate him anymore. I didn't even dislike him. I knew the bond's manipulations were responsible for some of that, but when I watched him being king - from the mundane tasks to the excruciatingly difficult decisions - it was undeniable that he'd evolved from an arrogant, reckless boy to a sure-footed ruler. Arthos claimed he was struggling, but I witnessed none of it. He was a king in every sense of the word, and it wasn't a role that fell away the moment he left the public eye. And in that regard, he'd been right, I did enjoy watching him. Me. Not the bond. And though I'd never admit it, I'd also liked how it felt when he'd kissed me without any blood in play. But most of all I was discovering that I liked working on the mysteries of magic with him, just as I had with his former self. In those moments, the two came closest to overlapping and I thought I might be able to see a future where we didn't turn our connection into a weapon of mass destruction.

"At any rate, knowing that," Keel said, turning towards his bookshelves, "it may be best if we go back to the books for a while. If we overlooked this, there might be other things as well."

I knew what he was doing, and it made me feel even better about my decision to keep moving forward with our studies. "We don't have to, not if..."

"No, sorceress, we must be careful. And I will keep my word." 

"So, why did it pull us into each other's heads and why did it stop?" Keel asked. Over the past six days, we'd been revisiting each nuance of the bond, and how it shifted or evolved since its formation.

Our respective journals lay splayed open across the oak table, where he hovered over them, a predator closing in on his prey. If he'd still been wearing his robes and crown, he'd have been a perfect picture of focused monstrosity, but the black slacks and grey crew neck shirt softened his sharper edges. They also brought attention to how lithe and vampiric his movements had become, sometimes blurring in front of my eyes when he forgot I was in the room. 

"It stopped when I fell into a coma after you saved Lucia and me on the roof."

"And it started for me," Keel paused and flipped through the pages of one of his journals, "about a month after that."

"So it jumped after I regained consciousness?"

"Seems that way. But why?"

"I don't know," I said. "If I were to guess-" I closed my eyes and let everything concrete we knew about the bond roll around in my head, "-it wanted us together and it was going to use every trick it could to make that happen. So when dropping me into your head didn't work, it dropped you into mine. Or maybe-" I paused and considered another option, "-the coma just short-circuited it, and it grew back wonky. I don't think there's anyway to know for sure, though."

"Either way, it worked."

"I know."

"I'm sorry it had to be like this." I opened my eyes and looked at him across the table. Unlike when he'd held my hand after he told me his big secret, the content of his words didn't carry to his face. 

"No, you're not," I said, deciding to call him out on it this time.

"I thought it was what you wanted to hear."

"Don't do that."

"What?"

"Try to be like him."

"Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"Yes, maybe, I don't know, but you've been trying on different masks with me for days now." Frustration found its way into my words even though I didn't want it there. "It's weird and confusing and I'm sure you have your reasons, and they might even be the right ones, but that isn't what I want. You are Keel Argarast, king of the Michigan Nosferatu enclave, and if we're going to work together, do research, do magic together, that's who I need in this room with me. Whoever he is."

"What if-"

I had no idea what he was going to ask and it didn't matter. "Then the king, his sorceress, and their bond will have to sort it out."

The question remained on his face.

"Ask it," I said, "or let's get back to work."

I was relieved when he bowed his head and went back to the journals. It gave me a few private moments to fret about who and what exactly I'd invited in, but still it had to be a million times better than empty apologies and perfunctory niceties with zero roots in kindness.

The next evening a Nosferatu delivery man showed up at my door with an ornate hand-carved bookcase. It had an envelope taped to it with the words "Sorcerer Sarker" written on the front in handwriting I would recognize anywhere.

I waited until I was alone to read the note. 

I'll never be sorry you're mine.

Someone else might have mistaken that for a romantic sentiment, but that's not what it was. Keel had picked up on my phrasing from the morning before, as I knew he would, and these were words of possession not endearment.

I read the sentence a second time. I could hear him saying it. I'll never be sorry you're mine.

"I hope not," I said, to the empty room, and meant it.

"Can you feel it?" I asked.

Keel grunted something that I wasn't sure was made up of any English words.

"Come on. Concentrate. Focus," I encouraged. "You can do it."

Keel cursed and stormed across the sand of the arena. "I'm Nosferatu, dammit. This is downright unnatural."

I let the shield spell we were practicing drop, and changed my focus to my blood flowing in His Majesty's veins. I infused it with a little bit of a magical mental cocktail: some power, some confidence and just a hint of pleasure.

Keel spun on me, fury in his eyes.

I stopped my spellcasting and held up both hands in front of me. "Hey, hey. Just trying to bring you back to the table. No one said this stuff was easy."

We'd finally wrapped up with the books and had spent the last few weeks experimenting with both magic and the bond. It hadn't taken long to realize that Keel's transition, the renewing of our connection, and the subsequent saving of his life had changed a few things. One of the biggest things was that Keel - if I was nearby and he'd freshly drank of me - could wield a bit of magic. For the last seven days, that's what our experiments had focused on, with disappointing results.

"It's a waste of time, a fluke of the connection, or some bond echo with no real substance," Keel said. "Perhaps we should move on to something else."

"No, there's something here, I can feel it. We just haven't figured out to use it properly yet."

"Is that so? Or is it just something you want there to be there, Sorceress Sarker?"

He tended to add the "Sarker" when he was losing patience. Like the old Keel, this one had tells and through our time together I was becoming ever more familiar with them.

I frowned at him. "Maybe you're right. Maybe we should wrap things up." Spending twelve-plus hours a day together forced Keel and I to learn how to cooperate, but old habits died hard and the sands seemed to be slipping through the hourglass faster and faster. Even after Keel admitted to the paranoia the transition had planted in his grey matter, he didn't seem able to  shake it, and it had a bad habit of cropping up in moments where he felt frustrated at our progress.

I expected him to agree with me, tell me that he wanted to swing by the cells to grab a bite to eat on the way back upstairs, but instead a look of steely determination settled across his brow.

"One more time. But draw from the bond magic." 

I gaped at him. I hadn't touched bond magic since I'd read his book of side effects. We'd never explicitly talked about it, but I'd considered that a silent agreement that it was too dangerous, too unknown, too destabilizing. It could well blow the whole damned hourglass apart. Or-

"No. You can't get sick again," I said.

"If I do, you'll just heal me, won't you?"

"But what if that doesn't work, what if I don't have enough left to heal you after we do the magic? Or what if-" We'd managed to avoid talking about that particular deadline for weeks; it made things a little less complicated, though I worried we were both allowing ourselves to fall victim to escapism. "Why risk it?"

"Because I told you to?" There was a touch of hardness in his voice, a reminder to those long-ago lessons that he no longer brought up but I'd never forgotten.

I shrugged. "Your choice."  This was who I'd asked him to be, the consequences would be both of ours. 

He circled around me, coming to a stop behind my back. He stepped forward into my personal space and I could feel the length of his body pressing up against mine. Then his arms came forward. His left extended outwards in front of us along with my left, while his right hand gripped my right wrist and wrapped around my waist. The bond sent its usual pleasurable electricity through my nerves, and I leaned into it and Keel for a moment, getting a feel for its oscillations. It thrummed stronger and harder in gratitude. I tamped it down, that wasn't what we were doing here today. Daily exposure to Keel and the bond had taught me a few defensive mechanisms, and our experiments had taught me a couple more. What comprised my thoughts and what were the bond's had become infinitely clearer as a result.

I pierced my nails into my palms once more and smeared the blood from my hands to his. "Let's try something simpler this time: fire. When I use bond magic I feel it pull deep down inside me - somewhere under my ribs and above my guts. I'm not sure what you'll feel, if anything, or if the sickness just comes later, but if you want me to stop, just say so, okay?"

I felt movement behind me. Keel was nodding.

I closed my eyes. I'd never done bond magic with Keel in my presence, and yet part of me thrilled at doing it with him now. It was a well of power that begged to be tapped. And we'd finally see what lay at the bottom of it.

First I focused on the blood, the magic that came with my birthright. I summoned it and balled it up inside me - throbbing, urgent, a fiery star at centre of Keel and I's perpetual orbit - but didn't allow it to go to flame, not yet. I loosened my hold slightly, a gentle untwining, and let it lick out into Keel and where I'd smeared his hands. Then I looked deeper, found that doorway at the very heart of myself, and pulled. It flew open as it never had before, exploding inside me, causing me to arc back into Keel. As he tightened his grip around me, flames leapt out of both of our palms.

"Okay," I whispered, using most of my strength to keep a handle on the immense amount of power flowing through us. "Now try to raise yours, make it burn even higher."

As I watched the twin flames, nothing happened. Then Keel's arm twitched and shifted upward on my rib cage, and the flame lengthened, first an inch, then two. Keel groaned and pressed himself against me, another inch. Then his fangs were in my neck, and an explosion of emotions hit me like an atom bomb. Keel was broadcasting on every frequency and I could feel my magic gobbling it up. My flame danced upwards, seemingly racing his. 

I tried to break free of his grip. "We need to stop," I shouted, feeling panicked enough that I was able to repeat it in his head through the bond. 

There was movement at my waist, across my hand, and suddenly Keel's wrist was pressing against my lips. He'd slashed himself and was forcing his blood into my mouth. I tried to fight, but I lost the battle when I needed to draw a breath. Power and ecstasy and spellcraft collided inside me and my knees gave out. Keel sank to the ground with me even as the flames climbed higher and higher, licking the stone ceiling of the arena. If we kept feeding the spell, it would burn the whole compound down. I turned my flaming hand and wound my fingers in Keel's. He gave in without a fight, maybe because he was still latched onto my neck and otherwise distracted. It was a stroke a good luck. I thrust both our hands as deep as I could into the arena's sand, attempting to smother the fire even as magic and Keel's blood continued to pour into me.

As soon as the fire was out, I threw myself sideways, knocking Keel off balance and off my neck, and collapsed in the sand. He was lying in a half fetal position beside me, his back to me. I stared up at the black scorch marks high above us and tried to slow my pounding heart. If I hadn't...

Keel rolled over, his eyelids heavy and my blood smeared from chin to cheek. "Let's consummate it. Consolidate the power. Can you imagine? No one would ever threaten us again."

I blinked at him. He was lying on his back, basking, as if there was only sky above us. Could he not see what I saw? "Are you crazy? Do you realize you just forced your blood on me, right before we nearly burned the place down? Let's learn to manage the magic we've got first."

"So, you're not saying no."

"I can't say no, remember? But I am saying you're still bound to our agreement." I backed that up with a mental cold shower.

"Harsh," he said.

"So is trying to get into my pants just so you can rule the world."

"So we can rule the world."

Now it was my turn to roll over and stare at him. There was never we anything down here. "Still not a good enough argument," I said, chalking it up to another blood-drunk proposition.

"Harsh," he repeated.

We stayed there for a long time recuperating, each lost in our own thoughts. We'd made a big breakthrough magic-wise, but if the flame proved anything it was that Keel didn't exactly have the rock-solid self-control he thought he had and if he couldn't learn it, we'd always run the risk of going overboard when accessing the bond. But how the hell was I going to approach that?

"Are you sure you want to wait?" Keel said, breaking the silence. His hand moved across the sand to stroke my arm. "Do you really think it would be that terrible?"

I sat up, snatching my arm out of his reach and shot him a look that could have put out the fires without the help of sand.

"Okay, sorceress, understood," he said, and got up. "It's just the, you know." He tapped his head.

"I know," I said. "Let's call it a day."

-----

Author's Note: Stage two of writing this series for me, right after outlining, has always been imagining each of the chapters and scenes in my head as if they were a movie. And doing it over and over again until it felt absolutely right, before writing them. In fact, to this day, this is what I do every night in bed as I fall asleep. At some point in this imagining process, which can take anywhere from a half hour to multiple nights, songs get attached. Lots of them end up as the video clips on these chapters. So, for those of you who enjoy peering into my creative process, this chapter's song - "Hometown" by Twenty-One Pilots (from their Blurryface album, which - sidenote - has been my daughter's favourite thing since she was a year-and-a-half old) - came to me the moment I knew that Mills and Keel were going to use bond magic to cause the hand flame inferno. But in this case, this is one of those rare occasions where a song not only helped me flesh out a chapter or scene, but also became the background music for the movie version of the arena magic scene in my head. So, long story short, this is the tune I always imagine playing when their magical fire is shooting up, up, up.

"I know, I know, You can bring the fire, I can bring the bones

I know, I know, You make the fire in my bones, and make it grow."