Work Text:
The ancient bus emits a puff of thick black smoke from its tailpipe, leaving Boruto coughing in its wake as it rattles away. He’d been warned that the trip over the mountain would be an unpleasant one, but he hadn’t expected to almost toss his cookies twice, the first time on the way up and the second time on the way down. The bus driver had shot him the evil eye in the rearview mirror the first time Boruto approached to warn of an impending yak-tastic disaster, then told him to stop being a little girl and sit down—either that, or he’d called him a pretty little girl—he’s only four weeks into learning the local language and most nuances still escape him—but he returned to his seat beside a surly red rooster who surely hadn’t bought his own ticket and white-knuckled it through the rest of the bumpy, twisting trip.
Despite still being green around the gills, Boruto doesn’t regret his multi-continental trek in the least: two plane trips, seven train rides, one cab that took him over a border due to a misunderstanding and another one that took him back again, and the shittiest bus ride in the history of all bus rides. All that matters is that he’s finally here, staring down at the winding road leading into a village that time forgot: sheep graze on distant hillsides, white plastered houses with red tile roofs tucked amid trees cluster around a giant wall surrounding the castle at its center, angular spires and towers bathed in afternoon light.
He digs into his beat-up leather duffle bag, pulling out an ancient book he’d borrowed without permission from the library of an individual whose name is only pronounceable to snakes. Torn pieces of paper and ribbons denote passages and pictures that had caught his eye, so many that if he’d open the book upside down and give a shake, a miniature parade’s worth of confetti and streamers would rain down from between its pages.
Carefully he turns to the first page after the thin sheet protecting the old woodblock engraving and holds it up, comparing the castle in his book to the castle before his eyes—their last chance and his only hope in front of him at long last. A grin so wide it makes his cheeks ache spreads across his face as he tucks the book away once more and heads towards the village.
He doesn’t begrudge the walk, not after being on the bus. It’s a perfect summer day at this altitude. The sun is bright but not burning. The sweet smell of drying hay fills the air. A light breeze ruffles his travel shirt. If things go poorly, he doesn’t have many days like this ahead of him; if things go well, he'll have even less. Better savor them while he can.
In the distance, a motor bike’s engine rumbles, but he thinks nothing of it—over the past few days, he’d found most people in the countryside prefer a two-wheel variety of transportation to cars. Soon, however, the rumbling grows to a roar. The shiniest red bike he’s ever seen whizzes up the road, kicking up a trail of dust in its wake.
After his encounter with the bus’s exhaust, Boruto braces for another offensive lungful, but the rider pulls to a skidding sideways stop in his path rather than blowing past. He can feel himself being examined through the tinted visor by a person who wasted a perfectly good summer day in black leather, not a trace of skin showing. After a moment, gloved hands rise, grabbing onto either side of the helmet. It lifts, revealing short hair blacker than the outfit she’s wearing. The woman shakes her head from side to side, then pauses to push the pixie cut bangs away from her glasses before looking his way.
She’s pale and lean and looks like she eats thumbtacks for breakfast, with a dark-eyed stare that could stop a herd of bulls mid-stampede. She could be a dominatrix or an embalmer or any other profession in which her customers are unable to ask questions.
Her eyes go from his face to his duffle and back again. “You’re not from here”
Boruto smirks, turning on the charm that always got him free coffee at the hostels he’d slept in during his journey. “Was it the bag that gave it away?”
Her lips twitch, and he realizes his first impression was right—she doesn’t like questions. “So, you’re our guest.”
He shrugs. “I’m just here to have a look around. A tourist, you could say.”
She slides further front in her seat, leaving the back third open and jerking her thumb at the empty space. “Get on. I’ll show you how we treat guests around here.”
The “guest” hugs her around the middle as they race their way into town, squeezing tighter every time she takes a turn too sharp for his liking. It’s probably just a ruse to feel for the holster he expects to be there, the gun slipped down her front or strapped across her chest. Too bad for him, Sarada doesn’t like guns. Too loud. Too flashy. Too new. Everything someone else could do with a gun, she can accomplish with a knife. And she has one of those in each boot, another on her leg, and a small one sheathed in her bra in case she loses the other three.
Vampire hunters. They’re all the same. They come strolling into town with their big bags and big stories, acting like someone would end up out in her village just to look at the view. She’d grown tired of the lies they concoct to explain their presence.
Oh, my great-great-great grandfather came from here.
If that was true, she could smell the scent of family on your skin.
My professor has me doing an academic survey of late 17th century architecture.
As if her clan hadn’t hunted down and burned every book about their village.
I’m learning about traditional methods of cheesemaking before they’re lost forever, and I’d like to see your sheep.
Believable if their breed wasn’t unique to their valley, meant for only its blood and wool.
The other problem with vampire hunters is that they’re always men, unsufferable, obnoxious men. Sarada's body had given her one unfortunate use for them, which she can’t seem to shake in spite of trying, but that doesn’t mean she wants to hear them talk. And talking is something men truly pride themselves in being able to do. Especially at women.
This particular one seems dumber than most—vampire hunters, that is. He’s probably just as dumb as the average man.
For one thing, she’d been unable to detect a single weapon on him. Not under his loose blue travel shirt with an unreasonable amount of buttons left undone at the top or his khaki pants. He’s wearing sneakers of all things, which soak in blood rather than repelling it! Whatever defensive items he has—blades, projectiles, spell books—are in his bag, making him an easy target for ambush. If it was night, the thing would have been done already, but she has to be careful beneath the baleful sun. If he attacks, she’ll defend herself, but it’s better if she waits to do what she must until the sky is as dark as her deeds.
Until then, she’ll need to distract him.
Going by his preppy tourist facade, Sarada drives him to the only coffee shop in the village, a round, single-story building with its double doors propped wide open. Her cousin—it’s just easier to call them that than to try to figure out the clan geneology—is already walking out to meet her when she cuts the engine.
“A friend?” he asks in their language, drying his hands on the towel tucked in his apron strings.
“A guest.”
“Ahhh, a guest.” He nods knowingly. “I have just the thing.”
The vampire hunter looks between the two of them as her cousin hurries to the counter in the back, taking in their pale skin, their dark hair, their black eyes. “Are you siblings?” he asks once she takes her helmet off.
So many questions from him, so many answers he won't be getting from her.
“We’re family,” she replies, returning to the foreign tongue that feels like chewing on the alphabet and spitting out only the consonants. “Distant family.”
She directs him to a round bistro table in the shade. Soon, their coffee is delivered, a small cup for each of them into which a brew as black as motor oil is poured tableside from a copper pot, a fine film of tan foam floating on the surface. Sarada pulls off her leather gloves, stuffing them into her jacket pockets.
The vampire hunter watches her cousin retreat to inside the shop before turning his steady blue gaze back to her. “Sorry if the sibling thing was a weird question. I can see how different the two of you look now. Your eyes… they’re… I don’t know how exactly to explain it… Softer?”
Sarada coughs into her coffee. What kind of idiot looks at her and sees something soft?
He takes a sip from the small cup, his brows rising. “Oh, it’s sweeter than I thought. And… is there booze in here?”
“Brandy, but not too much. It’s good for your circulation.”
“I usually don’t drink, but if it’s just a little...” He takes a second sip, smiling again.
The vampire hunter has the kind of teeth only had by foreigners, all large and straight and supernaturally white. His eyes are bright and curious, blond hair mussed from the motorbike ride. He’s probably new to the profession, some thrill-seeking wizard’s son who either has a death wish or no idea what he’s getting himself into.
“Your name?”
“Oh, ah…” He reaches into his shirt, pulling out a large spiraling pendant, rubbing it nervously as he speaks. “Boruto Uzumaki. And yours is…?
“Sarada.” She reaches across the table as she’d taught herself to do in recent years, forcing him to stop playing with his necklace to accept it.
“Sarada,” he repeats with a nod while shaking her hand, not stumbling over the pronunciation as much as he might have done. “That’s pretty.”
Pretty. Soft. It’s like he opened up a thesaurus and mistook antonyms for synonyms.
“So, Sarada. Are there any tour guides in your town who can show me around? I can pay, of course.”
The tourist charade continues; she has to resist rolling her eyes. “You can show yourself around. No one will stop you as long as you don’t trespass on private property.”
He puts his coffee down on its saucer, fixing her with an earnest stare. “Maybe I need someone to tell me what counts as trespassing. I wouldn’t want to offend the villagers.”
She can’t ask any of them to do it, and not just because of the language barrier. It’s her duty to deal with the unwanted guests who find their way into her village and never depart.
“Fine,” she says, glaring at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “I’ll show you around.”
The bathhouses were interesting enough as was the old bridge and the old mill. A real tour guide would have probably given him better descriptions of the locations they visited instead of Sarada, who flings her arm at each site they pass with a perfunctory, “That’s the old cemetery,” before moving on.
His questions were… unwelcome to say the least.
What did they mill at the old mill? When was the last time the bathhouses were used? Why did the shrine in the cemetery contain carvings of sheep rather than saints? Eventually he gave up asking when all he got was silence, deciding instead to simply enjoy strolling around on a beautiful day with a beautiful (though surly) woman by his side. He doesn’t have many more beautiful days ahead of him and, due to that, chose not to indulge himself in the company of beautiful women. Thus, having both things at his disposal amounted to a win, even if he was getting more antsy as the day wore on, the sun getting lower in the sky and the shadows spreading.
After roughly three hours, his travel bag growing increasingly heavy throughout the afternoon, they return to the shop that served a coffee that had made him slightly buzzed for the first hour of his tour.
Sarada perches her hands on her hips. “You have seen enough, Mr…?”
“Uzumaki,” he supplies. “Boruto Uzumaki.”
He’d seen a lot. A lot of buildings. A lot of grass and trees. A lot of people who looked like Sarada. A lot of Sarada’s leather-clad body walking in front of him—and though that last part was a treat, none of it is what he needs to see.
“What about the castle?” he asks, fully aware that she hadn’t even taken him close enough to get a glimpse of the tall walls surrounding it.
Sarada’s dark eyes narrow behind her glasses. “What about it?”
“Can I see it?”
That question gets the most significant lip twitch of the day. “What do you want with an old, abandoned castle?” she asks, as if old mills and old cemeteries and old bridges were much more interesting.
Boruto adjusts the strap of his bag running over his shoulder. “You’ve been generous enough with your time so as it is. If it’s abandoned, I’m sure it won’t count as trespassing if I have a look around before it gets dark.”
“No,” she says quickly, her voice a bark that’s probably gentler than her bite. “If you insist on seeing the castle, I insist on taking you.”
That statement leads them to the castle walls, constructed of the same white stone as the rest of the buildings contained within. Sarada takes him to a pair of double doors made of ancient wood and wrought iron.
“Let me help—” he begins when she grabs onto a large metal ring and yanks.
She shouldn’t have been able to handle such a massive door on her own, especially not one belonging to an abandoned castle considering the rusty hinges and ancient hardware, but it swings open toward them as though it was nothing more than the screen door on his mother’s back porch.
“Ah…” He scratches the back of his neck as she holds it open. “Lead the way, then.”
She was sure the moment they were inside the walls of her home, the vampire hunter would attack. That’s what she would have done in his place, taking advantage of the remaining sunlight and relative privacy to eliminate the last barrier between him and his goal—or at least put up a valiant effort to do so before his life ends in the same manner as so many who’d come before him.
What she doesn’t expect, and what is most unwelcome, is that he insists on acting the tourist as they walk around the castle grounds, past the briar thicket of bushes that once was a rose garden, the stable that now housed only mice and the cats that caught them, the family chapel with its huge stained glass windows covered in shadows.
The darker it gets, the more comfortable Sarada feels, finally shucking her jacket as it nears sundown to feel the breeze on her bare arms. Another hour or so, and she’ll be able to rid herself of her glasses as well. The vampire hunter raises his eyebrows as she pauses to make sure the small key hanging from a chain around her neck is safely tucked beneath her white tanktop. “Nice guns.”
Sarada looks down, wondering if the handle of her knife is showing. “Guns? I don’t have any—”
He chuckles at her confusion, an irritatingly pleasant sound. “No, I mean guns, like guns.” He raises his arm, pulling back his sleeve to make a muscle, his upper arm bulging. “These guns. You know, how arms can mean guns, so guns—”
“Can also mean arms. I understand now.” Despite loving her home, there are parts of the outside world that Sarada misses, secluded in her little village home. Cultural shifts. New technology. Slang. Simply talking to people who she wasn’t related to. It makes her feel like her father, old and static, never adjusting to new centuries and new eras, when she’s really only half him in more ways than one.
Unfortunately, a daughter’s duty calls. And it’s calling louder the closer it gets to sunset.
He jerks his thumb at the large keep. “Could you please show me how we can get in there?”
Sarada wishes she didn’t have to play along, that she could smack the blond idiot upside the head and yell at him. Could he be more obvious? Where’s the subterfuge? The artifice? It’s almost insulting that he expects her to let him waltz inside… Or it would be if it wasn’t also a bit refreshing after so many previous vampire hunters had barged into her home, climbing over the walls or crawling through tunnels. It’s almost sweet that this one asks for permission to step foot inside.
Well, if he’s not going to drop the pretenses, she’ll do it for both of them. “Fine, come on. Let’s get this over with.”
They slip in a side entrance servants once used to access the great hall. As she closes the door, she hears the unzipping of his bag behind her. In one swift motion, Sarada reaches down to grab a knife out of her boot and spins around to face the vampire hunter. A second later, a blinding white light scalds her eyeballs as the beam of a giant flashlight hits her face.
“Oh, sorry!” The vampire hunter redirects the light behind her. She’s sure he had to see the glint of her blade, but he says nothing, instead noticing a massive covered portrait hanging on the wall.
“Now… What is that?” he asks curiously, leaving his bag by the door to approach it. Sarada pushes up her glasses, trying to rub the floating spots out of her eyes. By the time she can see again, the fool has tugged down the canvas cloth that’d been draped over the frame and is staring at its subject in awe. Sarada swallows down the heart that leaps into her throat the moment she sees her.
The woman is dressed in layers of lace and petticoats that went out of fashion over three hundred years ago, seated at a desk piled with papers and herbs while her jade green eyes look dreamily out a window at a blossoming cherry tree that perfectly matches her styled locks. Without a door in frame, she appears to be trapped both in the painting and in the room, contentedly so.
“The last lady of the castle.” Sarada finds herself answering a question he hadn’t even asked.
“She’s beautiful,” The vampire hunter says, glancing over his shoulder at her. “Her eyes… they’re…”
“Soft,” she concludes, bending over to pick up the canvas he’d discarded on the floor and avoiding his searching gaze.
He assists her in recovering the portrait, brushing the wrinkles out of the fabric once it’s up. “You know, there’s less dirt than I’d expect in an abandoned castle.”
It’s a line of questioning she wants to avoid. “What do you want to see next?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He picks up his flashlight, swishing its beam toward the many exits from the room. “Any cellars or crypts or dungeons around here? Something that leads downwards.”
Downwards? If that’s the case, she has the perfect thing to show him. “I know just the thing.”
“This… isn’t what I mean,” he says after she’d taken him through the kitchens and servant quarters, past the grand staircase leading upstairs, a brief peek into the ancient throne room with its dusty dias, and finally to the room behind it. A great circle of stones hip-high rises up in its center, a gaping pit leading down into darkness. Not that darkness wasn’t already surrounding them. The sun had set not long ago, the windowless walls of the chamber hiding the nearly full gibbous moon.
He shines his light into the pit, leaning over peer down. “Is there a rope to get down? Or stairs…”
No, there are no stairs. The drop leads straight into an underground river once used for water and refuse, now used to dispose of pesky vampire hunters that shouldn’t be poking around. Most of their lives end in more violent and bloody ways before being tossed over the edge, but this seems like a fitting end for man who is too curious by half.
Steeling herself, and finding she has to steel herself for once instead of gleefully engaging in his execution, Sarada creeps up behind the vampire hunter, ready to do away with him. All she has to do is grab him around the middle, lift, and push. Just grab, lift, and—
Sarada hadn’t realized she’d shut her eyes until her arms close around him and her cheek meets with a warm expanse of chest. Somehow, in the fraction of a second between resolving to kill him and attempting to do so, he’d turned around.
He chuckles awkwardly, one large hand coming down to rest on her shoulder, sending an electric tickle across her skin. “I didn’t take you for a hugger.”
“I’m not hugging you!” Sarada jumps backwards to flee her mortification and his touch instead of sending him plunging to an early death. “I just tripped!”
“Hey, I’m not complaining.” The glow from his flashlight catches the edge of an upturned cheek complete with a slight dimple, the kind of smile that would have wooed women in every single decade since the creation of movie stars. “You can trip into me any time you want if you do it like that.”
She takes another step back, crossing her arms. “You are very stupid.”
“Oh, is that so?” he says, an amused eyebrow raised on his infuriating face. “Well, if I’m stupid, then you’re clumsy.”
Sarada is fully aware that it’s her responsibility to stay close to him, to handle the intruder she’d allowed into their home, to protect her father at any cost, but in that moment, she can’t stomach standing in front of him a moment longer.
“Hey, come back!” he shouts as she stomps away, ignoring everything that she was ever taught about not turning her back on an enemy.
He’s on her heels the entire time, his sneakers squeaking behind her. “Wait up!”
The sound only stops when she hurries through the long hallway overlooking the rose gardens, huge windows allowing in white moonlight that paints the chamber in streaks of creamy moonlight and darkness.
“Sarada!” She’s nearly through the opposite door when he calls her name yet again. “Stop, I need to see the vampire.”
She whirls around. He’s still standing on the opposite end of the hallway, the beam of his flashlight directed at the floor. “So, now you’re just going to say it? You need to see him?”
“Yes, I need to. Please.” His voice cracks when he speaks, pathetic and desperate. “So, if you’d just take me to him…”
Sarada tosses her coat, and once again pulls out her knife, ready for the inevitable fight that’s been heading their way since the moment she met him out on the village’s dirt road. “If you want to get to my father, you’ll have to get through me first.”
The vampire hunter frowns at the flagstone floor. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he admits, stepping forward. A streak of moonlight washes over his face, paleness over taking his features. For a second, she mistakes it for a trick of the light, the way all the color washes out of him, his blue eyes appearing a light shave of lavender, his hair gone white. Then, he smirks a cold smile that isn’t his.
“You see…” He speaks with a demon’s voice, deep and soaked with an eternity of malice, as he advances towards her, evil glinting in his eyes. “I have a problem.”
In the darkness once more, his appearance changes back to that of a human, his voice strained and pleading. “A problem I hoped he could help me with.”
As he approaches, his appearance alternates between that of a pallid skinned monster with flowing pale gray hair and that of a blond-haired, blue-eyed man, sad and pained. “That vampire… Your father, if I’m not mistaken… He’s my last hope… My only hope… So, if you’d just take me to him… There will be no violence…”
Sarada’s fingers tremble as they tighten on her knife. “What will killing my father do for you?”
The vampire hunter—or the demon—pauses in the last sliver of darkness in front of her, head cocked to the side. “Who said anything about killing anyone? I just have something I need to ask him.”
He feels the demon inside of him raging to get free the moment they step out of the Uchiha family crypt and into the moonlight, and, for the first time ever, Boruto wonders if he should just let him win. The sight of the vampire Sasuke lying in his tomb, skin as withered and dry as tree bark, had stolen the last bit of hope he had left.
Sarada comes out after him, not flinching at his demonic appearance after she locks the door behind them.
“How… How long has he been like that?” Boruto finds himself asking numbly.
Sarada stretches, a long stretch that shows off her curves and gives the human part of Boruto a reason not to give in just yet. “I haven’t really kept count. Close to two hundred years, I suppose. He stopped feeding after my mother passed away and refused to consume the annual blood sacrifices from the villagers’ flocks. He was still doing well when I left to see more of the outside world, but then the vampire hunters started coming, and without more blood, he was unable to heal the damage they did.”
“So, he’s dead?”
“Not exactly.” She sighs, trying to figure out how to explain it. “He’s recuperating, but as weak as he was, it’s going to take centuries. So, whatever you wanted to ask of him, you’re going to have to ask of me. Come on.”
She takes him back to the keep, up the grand staircase, down a hall, and up yet another smaller staircase. As soon as he figured out Sarada was the Sarada, the vampire Sasuke’s half-human child, Boruto suspected she lived within the castle walls. What he didn’t expect is the electric lights that she flicks on as they enter a remodeled suite of rooms.
“Solar panels,” she explains, tossing her coat and glasses down on an end table that has to be less than fifty years old. Colorful carpets cover the stone floors as she leads him down a hallway to a narrow kitchen, one little table and two little chairs, one upturned teacup and spoon in the drying rack beside the sink.
She digs around in a cabinet, pulling out matching glasses and a large bottle of vodka, filling one for herself, then offering the other to him. Manners dictate that he should take it, but…
“I’d rather not. No offense. When I drink, he…” He pauses, tapping against the side of his skull. “Gets louder than usual.”
That’s how he ends up seated at the table with one glass of water across from Sarada sipping from two glasses of vodka. “Let’s start at the beginning…”
“Boruto,” he supplies yet again when she stumbles. “Boruto Uzumaki.”
And so he does, telling her about the curse he’d unwittingly stumbled into as a teenager helping his father do occult research, a curse that seemed like nothing more than an idle threat made on the lips of a dying demon until Boruto’s body started to change over the years. No amount of exorcisms or otherworldly interventions had been able to cure him as the monster inside him grew stronger, counting down the passing phases of the moon until he’d be able to fully take over and kill everyone Boruto loved. By the time he realized the gravity of the situation, it was too far gone for Boruto to handle himself. Every attempt he made to end his own life was thwarted by the demon who needed his body to survive. The only viable solution he’d come up with—they’d come up with—was to have his older brother kill him during his final month of humanity, which would coincide with that year’s winter solstice.
At first, it’d felt comforting to have a plan, a means of escape from his hellish fate. But the more Boruto lived with the reality of what he was asking, the more he thought about what it’d mean for his entire family after he was gone, the pain he’d leave them with, the burden of a decision they made together that his brother would have to carry alone. And so he’d used the excuse of wanting to go on one last grand adventure before the end to set off on his own journey to find a solution—and the solution he’d found was Sasuke.
“Of all the vampires I read about, I thought he’d be the one who actually would understand what I was asking for and why it is important,” he tells Sarada who’d finished off both of her drinks and was in the process of pouring a third one. “His brother—”
“I know my own family’s history,” she says, taking a long sip of booze and sighing. The vampire Itachi who’d embraced his younger brother, turning him into a vampire as well before carrying out an order from the Dark Lord to execute their entire line. In doing so, Sasuke had been able to save their family members who were in the castle, whose descendants inhabit the village below to this very day. Itachi had been branded a kinslayer, Sasuke a protector, but no one would have survived had it not been for his older brother.
Sarada leans back in her chair. “So, your plan was to have my father turn you into a vampire so you’d lose both your soul and the demon’s, but you’d be able to live on?”
Boruto props his chin up on his hand, amused by this more casual side of her. “Do you think it would have worked?”
She purses her lips, thinking for a moment. “If he didn’t kill you for being annoying first, I think it might have.”
“I know this might be asking a lot, but could you do it?”
Sarada laughs, and it’s a nice laugh. A laugh he wouldn’t mind having heard a little more often that day. “I’m only half vampire. I’m sensitive to the sun and stronger at night. I’ll live for fifteen or twenty human lifetimes. But, as you can see, blood isn’t my drink of choice. Sorry, you’ll have to find another way.”
She lifts her glass to her mouth, taking another sip.
“Do you mind just regular killing me, then?”
“What?!” she yelps, spitting a mouthful of vodka all over the table and Boruto’s shirt.
Boruto brushes the droplets off his front, chuckling to himself. “Oh, come on. An hour ago, you were ready to kill me. You were going to stab me when we first walked in, then you were going to push me into that hole, and don’t forget the whole ‘you’ll have to get through me first,’ thing. If I was all that worried about dying, I wouldn’t have let you show me around in the first place.”
“I’m not going to kill you, you idiot! First, you’re not even a real vampire hunter—”
“Though I was kind of hunting for one,” he says, hoping it’ll bolster his case. Instead, he gets glared at.
“Second, because you’re not a real vampire hunter, I’m sure you didn’t take proper precautions getting here, and I’m not going to have officials from some foreign embassy poking their noses around here when a tourist goes missing.”
“What’s my name?” Boruto asks suddenly.
“It’s…” Her brow furrows as she stares at him, puzzled.
Reaching into his shirt, Boruto yanks off the spiral pendant he’s been wearing. “It’s Boruto Uzumaki.” He drops the talisman down on the table between them. “And I’ve been wearing that this entire trip so no one remembers me. What other objections do you have?”
Sarada looks to the ceiling for another excuse before finally giving up. “Third, I don’t really want to kill you, Boruto Uzumaki.”
Boruto rubs a finger beneath his nose. “I don’t really want to be killed either, but unless you have any other suggestions…”
Her dark eyes search his for a moment, just as soft and kind as her mother’s eyes were in the portrait downstairs. Then, she throws back the rest of her drink and stands up. “Fine. Follow me.”
Sarada didn’t have much need for her family’s chapel, the small church building in which generations of her ancestors worshiped before the last two sons of their line were turned into soulless vampires with no real concern about what happened in the afterlife. The door creaks open, leading into a mosaic-lined floor. Moonlight catches the stained glass windows, the patterns of shadow and light cast across Boruto’s face making him into a puzzle of half-man, half-monster.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just toss me into that pit?” Boruto asks as Sarada walks down the aisle to the wooden altar in the front. “You don’t have to do anything special for me.”
Shaking her head, Sarada reaches down into one of the nooks beneath the altar and pulls out their family bible, lifting it to her lips to blow off a layer of dust. Its front and back cover are locked together, protecting its precious contents. For the first time since her father gave her the key, Sarada lifts it off her neck and inserts it into the lock.
“Come over here, you idiot,” she says, noticing that Boruto has slunk back into the shadows to hide his demonic appearance. “There’s something I need to show you.”
He comes up behind her, breath warm and welcome on her neck as he looks over her shoulder. “I don’t need any last rites before I go, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not that sort of—”
She twists the key before he can finish, the latch falling away, then carefully opens the ancient book to reveal the hollowed out pages and what’s hidden within them.
“My mother…” She begins, pulling out the vial sealed with wax. “She wanted to live as a human and die as a human, and my father honored that. But it was a choice they made together, and he wanted me to have that choice as well.”
She lifts the glass vial, holding it up so that the moonlight catches the ruby red blood.
“I don’t understand,” Boruto says when she offers it to him, always the idiot—though it’s a flaw she could learn to live with.
“My father lost the love of his life, and he didn’t wish the same fate on me. He left this in case I ever decided to… to marry someone. So, if you want it…”
Boruto takes the vial, staring down at it in his hand. “I’m not sure if you’re killing me or proposing to me.”
“A little bit of each?” she admits, hoping he can’t see the faint blush warming her cheeks. “First, we’ll have to kill you… or almost kill you. Then, you’ll have to drink his blood. And if that all goes well, you survive and the demon doesn’t, we’ll figure out what happens afterwards… Do you like the sound of that?”
“I do,” he says, slipping the vial into his shirt pocket and stepping closer to her, his hand coming up to cup the side of her face. He stares down at her, one eye blue, the other purple, but with a smile that’s all his. “One question, though. May I kiss you now, or is that part of the afterwards?”