Johnny's eyes opened and the first thing he felt was hunger and sadness.
He was beginning to understand what had happened to him. He had died trying to save his sister from the bomb explosion and had somehow been reincarnated into another world.
He still could not believe it. Part of him kept insisting that this was a dream, that the people around him were not real, but the longer he looked at them the more real they became and the harder that lie was to hold onto.
How could he be reborn and handed another mother and another father?
No. He could not accept it. It felt wrong in a way that went beyond just strange. It felt like something being forced onto him.
He only had two parents. They were from earth. Not from whatever this place was.
And on top of everything else, he had failed to protect his sister.
He had broken the promise he made to his mother. That one sat the heaviest. It pressed down on his chest like something with weight.
What kind of older brother was he if he could not even keep his sister safe?
I want to die. He thought bitterly, and tears ran silently down the sides of his face.
He meant it. He did not want to live in a world without his family. He did not want any of this.
His mother back on earth was blind. She had one arm. She lived in that house and memorised every corner of it so she could move through it without help. What would happen to her now? What would she feel when someone came to the door and told her that both of her children had died in a school bombing because of some unhinged parent who had decided that a classroom full of children was the right place to make a point?
It would break her. He knew it would break her.
People who read reincarnation stories always talked about it like it was a gift. A second chance, a clean slate, something to be grateful for. Johnny felt none of that. Being handed a new life when he had left everything that mattered behind in the old one did not feel like a gift. It felt like a punishment.
Too many emotions were hitting him at once and his head was starting to ache from the weight of all of them.
He forced himself to slow down. If he let it all come in at the same time he would lose his mind entirely, and he could not afford that. He decided, deliberately, to shut the emotions out for now. Push them into a corner. Think clearly first and feel later.
It was not easy. It took hours of silent crying before he was actually able to do it, hours of lying in the dark leaking tears he could not wipe because his arms barely functioned, but eventually the tide pulled back enough that he could think.
Okay. He told himself. Now that I have calmed down a little, I can assess the situation.
I am now called Arthur. My mother, apparently, is the woman named Artoria. The man was most likely my father.
He used the words mother and father loosely. They sat badly in his mouth. But he could not do much about it, so he put up with it.
He looked around. He was inside a black wooden crib. The ceiling above him was high and built from pale marble, a large chandelier hanging from its centre with its lights off. The architecture of the room was unlike anything he had seen on earth. The materials were different. The proportions were different. Even the quality of the darkness felt different, thicker somehow, more deliberate.
He tried to push himself upright.
His body did not cooperate in the slightest.
Right. I'm a newborn. Of course I can't move. He thought with flat disappointment.
This was a different era, or a different world entirely. The construction around him made that clear. Nothing here had come from any period or place he recognised.
His mind drifted to the reincarnation novels he had read back home and he let out a small, humorless laugh inside his head.
Ah. So I got reincarnated into one of those stories. Wonderful. Don't make me laugh.
Though honestly, he could not deny the evidence. His new mother had sharp fangs and red slit-pupil eyes that made something primal in him want to back away. His new father had the same. Pale skin like cold stone. Eyes that glowed.
Are they vampires?
It was the only thing that made sense.
Sharp fangs. Slit pupils. Skin the colour of something that had never seen sunlight.
He slowly lifted one trembling little hand and held it in front of his face.
It was pale. Pale like a corpse.
I'm a dead being now? The thought arrived with genuine unease.
He tried to move his tongue, which was absurdly difficult, and ran it carefully along his gums to check.
Oh. No teeth. He frowned. Obviously I have no teeth, idiot.
He let his hand drop and thought about what the man had said regarding his bloodline. It had been sealed. He could feel it, actually, some presence deep inside him that was there but locked away, like a room he could sense through a wall but could not open. The incompleteness of it was uncomfortable in a way he could not fully describe.
A vampire with sealed powers. Fantastic. He thought with all the sarcasm he could muster internally.
And then there was the other thing the man had said. About surviving in the family. About needing to be strong.
That gave him a bad feeling.
If this was the kind of family he suspected it might be, the kind where relatives were threats rather than safety, where power determined whether you lived or died, where being born the wrong kind of thing made you a target...
He was in serious trouble.
His bloodline had been sealed the moment he was born. He had been nerfed before he even had a chance to understand what he was capable of. It would have been funny if it were not so deeply inconvenient.
He thought it through. From what little he had gathered, bloodlines in this family seemed to be something children were born with, a kind of inheritance that determined their value and possibly their abilities. The type of bloodline you had mattered. Being a pureblood, based on the way the room had reacted when the word slipped out, was clearly significant enough to be dangerous knowledge.
I can't be certain about the powers yet, he reasoned, but that man's eyes glowed. So powers exist. That much I can confirm.
He exhaled through his nose, which was the closest thing to a sigh he could manage.
So I have to grow strong or I get killed. Got it.
Then, almost immediately afterward, a quieter and darker thought arrived.
Honestly, I'm not sure I care if I die again. If dying means I get to see my sister in the afterlife, that doesn't sound so bad.
He closed his eyes.
And then his expression went completely still.
Wait.
What if Elizabeth was reincarnated too?
The thought appeared out of nowhere and hit him like something physical.
If this was genuinely another world and not some elaborate dying hallucination, and if he had been reincarnated here, then there was nothing that made it impossible for Elizabeth to have been reincarnated as well. The odds were low. He knew that. But they were not zero. And he was living proof that it could happen.
The suicidal undertone in his thoughts went quiet almost immediately.
If his sister was somewhere in this world, there was a chance, however small, that he could find her.
But then the complications started arriving.
How would he even recognise her? She would not look the same. She would be in a different body, a different face, possibly a different name. The only version of his sister he knew was the one with black hair and loud laughter and prosthetic legs who used to cannonball onto his stomach to wake him up. None of that would carry over.
What if she had not been reincarnated into this family at all? What if she was somewhere on the complete opposite side of whatever world this was?
What if the place she landed was not safe the way this place, dangerous as it clearly was, at least seemed to be?
What if she was not even alive?
His thoughts began tumbling over each other and his tiny head started to throb.
Stop. Stop. He told himself. You are going to give yourself a heart attack from overthinking and that would be a humiliating way to go out as a newborn.
He took a slow breath and made a decision.
He was going to assume she was out there somewhere. He was going to hold onto that as a reason to keep going, because without it he had nothing. He would get used to this world. He would learn how it worked. He would grow strong enough that no one in this family or anywhere else could just casually end his life. And he would look for her.
That was the plan.
The language, at least, was not a problem. Whatever they were speaking here sounded like English to him. There was no barrier to cross. That was one thing, small but real, that was working in his favour.
The rest of it was less convenient. He was a baby. He could not walk, could not speak, could not lift his own head for more than a moment. Everything he needed to do would have to wait until his body caught up to his mind, and for now all he could do was observe and rely on the woman called Artoria to carry him around and show him the world in whatever limited way she chose to.
Useless. He thought. Being a baby is completely useless.
He opened his eyes.
His heart nearly stopped.
Inches from his face was a woman. Pale. Still. Her deep red eyes with their narrow slit pupils were staring directly at him with an intensity that had no business being that close. The room was dark and her eyes caught what little light there was and seemed almost to glow in it.
Holy—
Pure instinct took over.
His tiny hand shot out and slapped her across the cheek.
Is this an assassin?! Has someone come to kill me already?! Already?!
He opened his mouth to scream for help. What came out was loud, formless, completely undignified baby crying.
The woman straightened, reached up and snapped her fingers.
The chandelier above came to life, flooding the room with light, and there she was. Violet hair. Red eyes. Sharp features and an expression of mild concern.
Artoria.
Oh. The panic drained out of him like water. It's just her.
He stopped crying mid-wail and exhaled.
"Oh?" Artoria raised one eyebrow and lifted him out of the crib. "You were just crying your eyes out and now you stop the moment you see my face? Did I frighten you?" She tilted her head. "You should be able to see clearly in the dark at your age, but... well, it doesn't matter."
It matters plenty, Johnny thought hotly. You nearly gave a newborn a cardiac event, woman.
Then something else caught in his mind. She said I should be able to see in the dark.
He filed that away.
Artoria studied his face. He stared back at her with what he imagined was a fairly blank expression, which apparently was not what she expected, because she frowned slightly. Then something seemed to occur to her and her face cleared.
"Ah. You must be hungry. That's what this is." She carried him to the sitting area in the centre of the room, three black couches arranged around a table of dark, finely worked wood, and settled herself down.
Oh no. Johnny thought as he realised what was coming. No. Absolutely not. I refuse. I am a grown man—
She began feeding him.
He went completely silent.
Tears ran down his face. He drank the milk with the helpless, resigned cooperation of someone who had no cards left to play.
I'm sorry, he thought to whatever version of his mother on earth might somehow sense his thoughts. I am so sorry. I had no choice.
Artoria watched him with a warm smile, her fangs just visible at the corners of her mouth.
"See, Art," she said softly, reaching up to touch his cheek with one finger. "You just wanted milk."
After he had drunk enough his body began pulling him under. The heaviness came quickly, the specific unavoidable exhaustion of a newborn, and before he could do anything about it his eyes closed.
Artoria held him for a moment after he fell asleep, making certain, before she stood and settled him back into the crib.
Then she straightened.
And her eyes went cold.
The room changed.
It was not a slow change. One moment the room was quiet and clean and the next it was not. Dozens of bodies covered the floor, some with limbs that had been removed, some bent and broken into shapes that a living body could not hold. Blood had spread across the marble in wide dark pools and the smell of it hung in the air like copper and iron.
Artoria had shielded Arthur's senses with magic the entire time he was awake. He had not seen any of this. He had not smelled it or heard it. He had fed his milk and slept, unbothered, while his mother worked.
She walked through the carnage without hurrying, her heels producing a steady wet sound with each step.
She stopped beside one particular body. A man with brown hair, soaked through, lying still. He looked dead. He was doing his best to be convincing about it. But she stood there and listened and he could not hide the fact that his heart was still beating, faint as it was.
She did not announce herself. She simply drove her hand into his chest.
"Uuk!" The man's performance ended. He coughed hard, blood hitting the floor.
She grabbed his hair, enough grip to feel like his scalp might separate, and hauled his face up to her level.
"Who sent you?"
The man said nothing.
She found his heart. She closed her hand around it and squeezed.
The sound he made was not dignified.
"You will answer me," she said, her voice perfectly even, "or you will spend whatever time you have left wishing that I had simply killed you."
Fear arrived in the man's eyes then, real and total. She had come through an entire squad of trained assassins without raising her voice or changing her expression. She had then picked up her infant son and looked like a completely different woman. The contrast alone was enough to break a person.
"Not going to answer?" She squeezed again.
"I will! I will!" He coughed. "I don't know who commissioned it. The request came through anonymously. I swear it."
"Are you lying to me?"
Her eyes brightened red. His brown ones locked onto them and the longer he looked the more he felt like there was nothing behind her gaze that had ever been afraid of anything at all.
"No. I swear. It is the truth, I wouldn't dare—"
Squelch.
Her fist closed.
His sentence stopped. His eyes went empty. His body went slack and she let it drop, then stepped back and drove one heel into his chest. The force of it split him cleanly and sent both halves into the wall.
She stood in the centre of it all, her red dress heavy and dark with blood, and did not move for a moment.
Did someone find out already? She turned the thought over carefully. Then she dismissed it. No. Impossible. The only people who knew were me, my most trusted maids, the doctor and Vladimir.
"Noah."
The shadow behind her moved. A man with dark skin and white hair rose out of it and dropped to one knee.
"Yes, my Lady."
"Find out when, where and who placed the request at the assassins association." She paused. "Interrogate the maids and the doctor. All of them. If any of them are lying to you, kill them. Kill their families as well. I will not have traitors near my son."
"As you wish."
He sank back into the shadow and was gone.
Artoria looked around the room one last time. Then she snapped her fingers.
The bodies disappeared. The blood disappeared. The air cleared. The room looked exactly as it had before any of this had happened, as though the last hour had been nothing at all.
Her dress was clean.
She walked back to the crib and stood at its edge and looked down at Arthur sleeping inside it. The coldness in her face softened, degree by degree, until she looked the way she had when she was feeding him. She gripped the wooden rail on either side of him and held it.
"I am sorry," she said quietly, "for bringing you into this family."
She did not look away from his face.
"But I will protect you with everything I have. For as long as I can. That is my promise to you."
Arthur slept on, small and still, knowing nothing of what had just taken place around him.