The rain started while you were locking up.

Not the dramatic kind. Just a thin drizzle that turned the Lower City's cobblestones slick and made the lantern flames gutter in their iron cages. You tucked the apothecary key into your belt pouch, adjusted the strap of your satchel, and started walking.

The streets were nearly empty. Most people with any sense had retreated indoors when the fog rolled in from the harbor, thick enough to muffle footsteps and turn every alleyway into a grey mouth. You pulled your collar higher and walked faster. Not because you were afraid. Because the chamomile bundles in your bag would absorb the damp if you didn't get them home soon, and you'd spent all afternoon picking out the stems.

That was the kind of thing that occupied your mind. Chamomile stems. Whether the dried valerian root was still potent enough for Mrs. Harrowfield's sleep tincture. Whether the new pestle you'd ordered from the dwarven smith would arrive before the old one cracked straight through.

You were, by every measurable standard, unremarkable.

No adventuring party had ever recruited you. No god had ever whispered your name. You had been tested for arcane aptitude at eight years old, the way all children in the Gate were tested, and the Sorcerous Sundries examiner had pressed two fingers to your temples and frowned and said nothing and sent you home with a note for your mother. No arcane aptitude detected. Your mother had been relieved. Your father — a merchant sailor who was home three months out of twelve and smelled of salt pork and pipe tobacco — hadn't cared enough to be relieved.

You'd gone on to learn herbs. An apprenticeship with a half-elf apothecary named Rensha, who had hands like leather and opinions about everything and a clinic in the Lower City where the floorboards were stained with tinctures and the air smelled permanently of camphor. Rensha had taught you the things that mattered: how to set a bone without making the patient scream. How to identify a poisoning by the color of the sputum. How to brew a sedative strong enough to knock out a half-orc and mild enough to keep his heart beating. How to listen to a patient's body when their mouth was lying.

She'd died when you were nineteen. Coughing sickness. The irony of a healer dying of a treatable illness was not lost on you, and you'd carried the lesson like a stone in your pocket ever since: you cannot heal yourself. You cannot be your own physician. The person who saves everyone else is the one no one saves.

You'd taken over the clinic. You'd kept it running for six years. Six years of boils and broken bones and difficult births and the slow, grinding parade of human frailty that constituted medicine in the Lower City. Six years of steady hands and unremarkable days and the quiet, bone-deep satisfaction of being useful.

The clinic had a name — Rensha's, still, because the sign had never been changed and because you saw no reason to replace a good name with a lesser one. The regulars called it "the herb place" or "the old half-elf's shop," and you answered to either. The floorboards were the same ones Rensha had stained with twenty years of spilled tinctures. The workbench was hers. The pestle — the cracked one, the one you kept meaning to replace — was hers. The smell of camphor in the walls was hers.

You'd kept her remedy book. Leather-bound, hand-written, the margins crowded with notes in Rensha's cramped script. Valerian: 3 drops per stone of body weight. Chamomile: NOT for children under 2 unless diluted. Comfrey: external ONLY — the Thay merchant who sold it as tea killed four people. You consulted it less now than you used to. The knowledge had moved from the page into your hands. But you kept it on the shelf above the workbench, because some things deserved to stay where they belonged.

Your patients were the Lower City's working poor — dock laborers, laundresses, tavern servers, the old and the injured and the chronically sick who couldn't afford a temple cleric and didn't trust the Sorcerous Sundries healers who treated illness like an intellectual exercise. They came to you because you listened. Because you charged what they could pay. Because you kept your mouth shut about the knife wounds that came from bar fights and the burns that came from places no one talked about.

You knew their names. You knew which ones lied about how much they drank and which ones told the truth. You knew that the fishmonger's wife had migraines that worsened during storms and that the chandler's apprentice had a rash he was too embarrassed to show a male healer. You knew that Mrs. Lethbridge on Tumbledown Row was ninety-one and claimed to have met Elminster and was probably lying but told the story so well that you let her have it every time she came in for her joint tonic.

The work was unglamorous. Repetitive. Most days were a parade of the same dozen ailments — coughs, cuts, stomach complaints, the occasional broken bone. You set them, treated them, sent the patients home with instructions they would half-follow, and swept the floor and did it again the next day.

You loved it. Not with the passionate, burning love of a calling. With the steady, calloused love of a craft — the satisfaction of clean stitches, of a fever breaking under a compress you'd prepared, of a child sleeping peacefully after you'd cleared the congestion from her lungs. The love of being competent at a thing the world needed done.

You owned one good dress, two working smocks, and a pair of boots that leaked on the left side. Your hair was kept in a practical braid because vanity took time you didn't have, and your hands — always your best feature, steady and calloused from years of grinding herbs — smelled permanently of lavender and camphor.

If someone had told you that a vampire was watching you from the rooftop of the chandler's shop, you would have asked them to define "watching" and then suggested a calming tea.

---

He noticed you because you were boring.

Not boring in the way that implied stupidity. Boring in the way that implied a commitment to the mundane so aggressive it bordered on defiance. The Lower City crawled with prey: drunken sailors, frightened nobles, the occasional adventurer still reeking of their first dungeon. All of them stank of adrenaline the moment they sensed something wrong. Their pulses spiked. Their breathing changed. They were, in their own terrified way, entertaining.

You walked through the fog like it owed you money.

From his perch on the rain-slicked tiles, Astarion tilted his head. He'd been tracking a sailor — stocky, slow, predictable — when you'd turned the corner and his attention snagged like a thread on a nail. Not because you were beautiful. Not because you radiated hidden power or carried yourself with the unconscious grace of a trained fighter.

Because you didn't look up.

Everyone looked up. It was instinct, some primitive awareness that predators came from above. The sailor had looked up twice in three blocks. The flower seller at the corner had glanced at the rooftops every time the wind shifted. Even the stray cats kept one ear cocked toward the gutters.

You stared straight ahead, adjusting your satchel strap, thinking about something that had nothing to do with survival.

He followed you for three blocks before he decided to introduce himself.

---

The first sign was the sound. Or rather, the absence of it.

You'd been walking past the fishmonger's row — closed for the night, the shuttered stalls still reeking of brine — when you noticed that your footsteps were the only ones on the street. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the quality of the silence behind you. Not the passive quiet of an empty lane, but the held-breath hush of something waiting.

You stopped walking.

The silence deepened.

You turned your head just enough to see the alley mouth you'd passed ten paces back. Nothing. Just fog and the faint glow of a lantern two streets over. But the hairs on the back of your neck were standing up, and you'd learned to trust that reflex. Not from combat training. From years of working with animals. A horse about to kick had a specific stillness right before the blow.

This felt like that.

You adjusted your grip on your satchel strap and picked up your pace. Not running. Running was an admission, and you weren't afraid yet, just cautious. You turned left onto Chandler's Lane, where the buildings were taller and the occasional window still leaked lamplight.

Behind you, soft as a cat landing, something dropped from the rooftop to the cobblestones.

You heard it this time. A single tap of a boot heel. Deliberate.

"That's not going to work, you know." A lilting voice called from the darkness behind you. It carried the kind of amusement that belonged to someone who had never been told no. "Walking faster. You might as well try to outrun the fog."

You didn't answer. You turned the corner.

He was already there.

Leaning against the wall at the end of the lane, arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other. White hair, damp with drizzle. Pale skin that caught no warmth from the distant lantern light. Red eyes.

You stopped.

He smiled. Not a kind smile. The kind a cat gives a mouse when it realizes the mouse hasn't noticed the cat yet — except this mouse had stopped walking and was looking right at him, which wasn't in the script.

"There you are," he said, as if you'd been keeping him waiting.

Your pulse climbed. You felt it in your wrists, your throat, the tender spot behind your ears. But your feet didn't move. You stood the way you'd learned to stand when a patient seized on your table: calm body, racing mind.

"I don't carry money," you said. Your voice came out flat, which surprised you. "If this is a robbery, you've picked a bad target."

His eyebrows went up. The smile widened.

"A robbery," he repeated, as though the word tasted funny. "No, nothing so crude." He pushed off the wall and took a step toward you. His movements were liquid, unhurried. "I was curious. You walked past the fishmonger's row, through the fog, in the dead of night, and you didn't look up. Not once. Do you know how unusual that is?"

"I was thinking about chamomile."

He stared at you.

"Chamomile," he said.

"The flowers. They absorb moisture if you don't dry them quickly." You took a small step backward. Then another. Testing whether he'd match the movement. He did. "You're blocking my route home."

"Am I?" He glanced over his shoulder at the empty lane, then back at you with theatrical surprise. "How thoughtless of me."

He didn't move.

You exhaled through your nose. "You're a vampire."

The silence that followed was different from the ones before. Sharper. His posture didn't change, but something behind his eyes went still.

"What makes you say that?" His tone was light. The lightness was a weapon.

"Your skin is cold. I can see the condensation forming on your collar from three feet away — your body temperature is well below ambient. Your pupils are fixed despite the shifting light levels, which suggests your irises don't contract normally. And you dropped from a two-story rooftop without limping." You shifted your satchel to your other shoulder. "I'm an herbalist, not an idiot."

For a long moment, he just looked at you. The smile had faded into something harder to read. Not anger. Not threat. The expression of a man who'd picked up a stone expecting a worm and found a scorpion.

"Well," he said quietly. "Aren't you something."

"I'm really not."

"Oh, darling." The smile came back, slower this time. Hungrier. "That's what makes it interesting."

He moved.

You'd seen it coming — the shift in his weight, the way his shoulders dropped before he lunged — but knowing didn't help. He was faster than anything you'd ever seen. One moment he was six feet away. The next, the wall was against your back and his hand was beside your head, palm flat on the brick, his face close enough that you could count the droplets of rain in his hair.

Your heart was hammering now. You could feel the blood in your ears, hot and loud.

He leaned in. His nose almost touched your throat. You heard him inhale — a slow breath through his teeth, tasting the air around your pulse.

"Lavender," he murmured against your skin. "Camphor. And something else." He trailed off. His brow furrowed.

You waited.

He pulled back. Just enough to look at your face. His red eyes searched yours, and for one strange second, you had the impression that he was the one who was unsettled.

Then the mask slid back.

"Run," he said softly.

"What?"

"Run." He stepped back, gesturing toward the open end of the lane. "I'll give you to the count of ten. Consider it sporting."

You didn't run. You walked. Briskly, with purpose, your satchel clutched to your chest and your jaw clenched tight enough to ache. You didn't look back.

Behind you, a low laugh echoed off the wet stone.

"Oh, this is going to be fun," he said to no one.

---

You made it home with your chamomile dry and your hands shaking.

The shaking annoyed you. Your hands never shook — not when setting a broken bone, not when lancing an abscess, not during the outbreak last winter when you'd worked eighteen hours straight and three of your patients hadn't made it. Steady hands were the one thing you could always count on.

You set the satchel on the workbench, lit the tallow candle, and started separating the chamomile blossoms from their stems. The repetitive motion helped. By the time you'd filled the first drying rack, the tremor had faded to a faint vibration in your fingertips.

He hadn't bitten you.

You kept coming back to that. A vampire had cornered you in an alley, pressed his nose to your throat, and let you go. Told you to run, like it was a game. Like he'd be back.

You looked down at your hands. Calloused, herb-stained, unremarkable.

Something else, he'd said, right before the mask came back. Something in the way you smelled that had thrown him off his script.

You didn't know what that meant.

You finished the chamomile, checked the valerian stores, and went to bed. The left boot by the door, the right boot beside it. You pulled the blanket to your chin and stared at the ceiling, listening to the rain.

When you finally slept, you dreamed of red eyes in the fog.

---

Somewhere on a rooftop three streets away, a vampire sat in the drizzle, touching his lips with the tips of his fingers, trying to name the thing he'd tasted in the air around her throat.

He couldn't.

That bothered him more than he would ever admit.

---