The book screams.

Not metaphorically. The Necromancy of Thay — a thick, bound volume of dark leather with a clasp shaped like a grasping hand — physically, audibly screams when Astarion touches it. A high, thin wail that vibrates in your teeth and makes Gale recoil three steps.

"It does that," Astarion says, holding the book at arm's length with the distaste of someone holding a live snake that has personally offended him. "Every time. It tries to flood your mind with — well. Unpleasantness. Then it slams shut and leaves you with a migraine that lasts three days."

"Why do you want it?"

The question catches him off guard. His jaw tightens — a micro-expression you've learned to read as real feeling, incoming, deploying countermeasures — and then the mask slides back.

"There's a ritual inside. Information about — well, about vampiric bonds. The kind of bonds that let a master control his spawn." His voice is light. Breezy. As if he's discussing the weather. "I need to understand how that bond works if I ever want to sever it."

He doesn't say Cazador. He doesn't have to. You've heard the name once, dropped in a context that made every companion go quiet, and you filed it under bad, very bad, don't push.

"Can I try?" you ask.

"Be my guest. Though I should mention that the last person who tried without a Dark Amethyst was bedridden for a —"

You place your bare hand on the cover.

The book tries to flood your mind with horror. This is what it does — the Necromancy of Thay is a trapped artifact, a psychic defense mechanism wrapped in binding spells, designed to shatter the sanity of anyone who attempts to read it without the proper key.

Your psychic static eats it alive.

The horror wave — a cascading assault of images, sensations, dread — slams into your brain's kinetic defenses and shreds. Like throwing a snowball at a running chainsaw. The book's psychic attack meets your constant, chaotic field of raw mental noise and dissolves into fragments that your neurons don't even bother processing.

You look down at the book. The book — if a book can look startled — seems to reconsider its life choices.

"Huh," you say. "That tickled."

You dig into your pack with your free hand. The Dark Amethyst — recovered from the spider pit in the Whispering Depths, a jagged purple crystal that hums against your skin like a tuning fork — settles into the book's clasp with a satisfying click.

The cover shrieks. The clasp engages. The book unlocks.

And then you do something that is either very brave or very stupid, and you have never in your life been able to tell the difference between the two.

You force your hemokinetic energy into the book.

Not gently. Not with academic precision. You bully the book's magical weave — shove your kinetic field through the parchment, overwhelm its defensive enchantments with the brute-force enthusiasm of someone who has never been trained and therefore doesn't know what's supposed to be impossible. Your blood sings through the paper. The dark runes glow red, then purple, then — dissolve. Rewrite. Reform in glowing crimson lines that pulse in sync with your heartbeat.

"Can you read that?" you ask Astarion, tilting the book toward him.

He squints. "No. Those aren't in any language I — wait." His eyes widen. "Those are your runes. Your energy rewrote the encoding. Only someone attuned to your kinetic frequency can read them."

"So they're mine."

"They're yours."

You read. The words aren't words — they're sensations, patterns of kinetic force that translate directly into your nervous system, bypassing language entirely. And what they describe is —

"Blood-Dash," you say. "Dissolving your physical form into red mist. A dodge. A teleport. A way to be somewhere else faster than anyone can track."

You look at Astarion. He looks at the book. You can see the hunger in his eyes — not for blood, for freedom. Every page of this book is a potential weapon against the master he's been running from for two centuries.

"Hold out your hands," you say.

"What?"

"Hands. Out. Palms up."

He extends his hands, pale and still, the candlelight catching the faint scars on his wrists. You press your palms against his and push.

Not physically. Kinetically. You channel the Blood-Dash technique through the circuit your bodies create — your living hemokinetic energy flowing through skin-to-skin contact into his dead tissue, imprinting the muscle memory of the trick directly into his vampire reflexes.

Purple static dances across your joined hands. His eyes go wide. His fingers clench involuntarily around yours — not painfully, but with the full-body intensity of someone receiving a download they didn't prepare for.

"There," you say, pulling back. "Now you can do it too."

He stares at his hands. Flexes his fingers. Something moves behind his eyes — not calculation, not the usual rapid assessment. Something slower, more uncertain.

You pick up the book and hold it out to him.

"I don't need a shouting book," you say. "You do."

He takes it. And for one moment — brief, unprotected, immediately buried under two centuries of trained deflection — his expression is not a smirk, not a mask, not a performance. It's something raw and baffled and dangerously close to genuine gratitude.

"Thank you," he says, and the words sound like they cost him something.

"Just take it," you say, already turning away. "Can't have my blood-donor combat partner reading a book that tries to kill him. That's just poor planning."

---

Later, after everyone has gone to their tents, you find Gale.

"The thing you said about channeling living energy through dead tissue," you say, without preamble. "The wire-melting-from-too-much-current thing. Is that real?"

Gale sets down his journal. His expression shifts from surprised to serious. "An arcane embolism, yes. If your hemokinetic current exceeds his dead tissue's capacity to conduct it, the excess friction could — in theory — combust his cellular structure from the inside. Like a lightning bolt through a copper wire."

"How do we stop it?"

"You would need to maintain a telekinetic tether during any significant energy transfer. A grounding wire, essentially — a thin connection that bleeds off excess kinetic friction before it reaches critical levels in his system."

"So I need to be looking at him."

"Ideally, yes. Monitoring the kinetic discharge in real time and siphoning off the surplus before —"

"Got it." You stand. "New rule. He doesn't use the book unless I'm looking right at him. If I see his skin start to spark purple, I'm cutting the line."

Gale watches you go. He is thinking, in his thorough, polysyllabic way, that you have just articulated a sophisticated arcane safety protocol in the vocabulary of a field medic, and that this is either the most refreshing or the most alarming thing he has encountered in his career.

---