I did not return him to the Court.
There are moments when even I understand that spectacle is a kind of weakness, and that what has just been revealed will only grow distorted beneath too many eyes. The great room behind us was already alive with it—voices held just beneath restraint, thought sharpening into intention, curiosity beginning its slow and dangerous transformation into desire. I would not have Louis stand at the center of that a moment longer than necessary.
So I took him away.
Not hurriedly. Not with the air of crisis. I did not wish to provoke pursuit or alarm. I simply left, and he came with me, and that was enough. The corridors received us in quiet, the house itself seeming to settle as we passed through it, as though it too preferred distance from what had been set in motion.
Louis walked beside me without faltering. There was no sign in him of collapse, no trembling, no confusion that might betray instability beneath what we had witnessed. If anything, there was a strange alignment to him now, a coherence that had not been there before, as though something long at odds within him had at last found its balance.
I felt it without needing to name it.
"You are very composed," I said to him, once the sounds of the Court had fallen entirely away.
He glanced at me, and there was a quiet, almost wry awareness in his expression. "You say that as if it's unfamiliar."
"It is unfamiliar," I said. "At least in this particular circumstance."
He considered that, and for a moment I saw the old instinct in him—the inclination to turn inward, to examine the statement rather than deflect it. But he did not retreat into himself. He remained present.
"It doesn't feel like composure," he said. "It feels like…nothing is pressing in."
That was not how Louis had ever described his existence before.
I opened the door to one of the smaller rooms—private, contained, a place for conversation rather than assembly—and let him enter ahead of me. I closed the door behind us, shutting out not only the Court but the expectation of it.
The quiet inside was complete.
Louis moved a few steps into the room and stopped, not uncertain, not lost, but attentive to himself in a way that was new. His hand came again to his chest, and I watched the gesture closely now, not as an anomaly, but as a fact.
"It's steady," he said. "I thought it might slow, or—" He stopped, searching for the right distinction. "It doesn't behave like something temporary."
"No," I said. "It does not."
"You're certain of that."
"I'm certain that nothing about this feels like a passing condition," I replied. "And I have endured enough of those to recognize the difference."
He absorbed that without argument.
There was a knock at the door.
I did not need to ask who it was.
"Enter," I said.
Fareed came in first, composed but intent, followed by David, who closed the door carefully behind him. No one else. I had made that clear without needing to speak it.
Fareed approached Louis with the same restraint he had shown before, though there was something tighter in him now, a greater precision to his movements. "May I examine you again?" he asked.
Louis inclined his head slightly. "Here. Not before the others."
"That was always my intention," Fareed said.
He took Louis's wrist, not hurriedly, not with any display of urgency, but with careful attention, adjusting his fingers once, then holding them still.
"It is consistent," he said after a moment. "Not fluctuating. Not compensating. It is not behaving like a reaction."
David stepped closer, watching both of them. "And the temperature?"
Fareed shifted his hand, touching Louis's throat, then his cheek. "Stable," he said. "There is no cooling. No deviation."
Louis remained still through all of it, not withdrawing, not offering himself beyond what was required. He was not submitting to examination. He was allowing it.
"And the hunger?" David asked him.
Louis looked at him directly. "Gone."
There was no hesitation in that answer.
No reluctance.
No grief.
Fareed released his wrist slowly, as though reluctant to break contact with something he had not yet finished understanding. "There is no indication of strain," he said. "No sign that this is transitional."
"Then it is not," I said.
David's attention shifted to me. "You accept that very quickly."
"I accept what I can observe," I said. "And I do not pretend uncertainty where there is none."
"That is not how inquiry is usually conducted," he said.
"It is how this will be conducted," I replied.
He did not answer immediately.
He was thinking now, and when David thinks, he does not do so halfway.
"If this state is stable," he said at last, "then the question becomes unavoidable."
Louis looked at him.
I did not need to ask which question he meant.
"You want to know if it can be done again," Louis said.
"Yes," David answered.
"And you would have me attempt it," Louis said.
David met his gaze. "I would have it understood."
"That is not the same thing," Louis said.
"No," David agreed. "But it is close enough to require action."
The room held that quietly.
There was no urgency in it, no reckless push toward decision. But the logic of it was there, and once present, it would not leave.
Fareed spoke then, more carefully than either of them had. "If it is to be attempted," he said, "it must be controlled. Minimal exchange. No delay in intervention if the reaction is adverse."
Louis did not answer him at once.
He turned to me instead.
Not for permission. That has never been our way. But there are moments when we recognize one another's place in what is about to occur, and this was one of them.
"You know what this is," he said.
"Yes," I answered.
"And you know what it might become."
"Yes."
He held my gaze for a moment longer, then nodded once, as though something had settled within him.
"I will try," he said.
David stepped forward.
There was no ceremony to it. No attempt to frame the moment as anything other than what it was. He stood before Louis without dramatics, without pretense, simply present.
"If it fails," Louis said quietly, "it will not be because I intended it."
"I know," David replied.
That was all.
Louis moved with care, not hesitation, but precision, as though he were aware now that what had happened to him had not yet been translated into instinct. The exchange was small, measured, exactly as Fareed had instructed.
For a moment, nothing happened.
David drew a breath.
"I don't feel—"
He stopped.
The change was immediate.
Not gradual.
Not ambiguous.
His body reacted with a force that was unmistakably wrong, his expression tightening, his breath catching in a way that had nothing to do with the controlled rhythm Louis had found. He staggered, one hand going to his chest as if to contain something that was refusing containment.
Fareed moved at once, catching him before he fell.
"This is rejection," he said, his voice controlled but sharp with urgency. "It's not integrating—"
I was already beside them.
David's eyes found mine, and there was clarity in them still, but it was slipping, pulled downward by something his body could not sustain.
I did not hesitate when it became clear that whatever had taken hold in him was not yielding. There was no time for caution, no space for measured restraint, and I had never been one to stand idle while something within my reach slipped beyond recovery. I brought him closer and gave him my blood without calculation, without any attempt to moderate what I knew must be decisive if it was to succeed at all.
For a brief and terrible instant, it seemed as though even that might not be enough. The resistance in him did not disappear immediately; it held, straining against the intrusion, as though his body could not yet recognize what it was being offered. I felt it in the way he seized beneath Fareed's grasp, in the tightening of his frame, in the unnatural interruption of breath that had nothing in it of Louis's strange new rhythm and everything in it of failure.
And then it gave way.
Not with grace, and not with anything that could be mistaken for ease, but with the unmistakable shift of something that had resisted being forced at last into alignment. The tension left him in a single, visible release, his body no longer fighting itself, no longer rejecting what had been introduced into it.
Fareed leaned in at once, his attention sharpened to its limit, his movements quick but controlled as he followed the change where it led. He did not speak immediately, but I could see in him the moment recognition took hold.
"It's stabilizing," he said at last, his voice low but certain. "The reaction has ceased."
I eased back only slightly, not removing myself entirely, but allowing the moment to settle without pressing further into it. There was no need. The worst of it had passed, and what remained was no longer collapse but transition.
David's breathing steadied gradually, the irregular strain giving way to something more consistent, more sustainable. When his eyes opened, he did not look lost. He looked, as he always has in such moments, as though he had already begun to understand what had happened to him even before he found the words to describe it.
He looked at me first, then at Louis, and something quiet passed through his expression, not relief, not triumph, but recognition.
"So," he said.
No one answered him. There was nothing to add that would not diminish what had already become clear.
The conclusion did not need to be spoken aloud. It had already taken its place among us with the weight of fact.
Louis could not do what I had done.
And I alone could.
I rose then, not with any sense of victory, but with the certainty that comes when something has revealed its nature beyond argument. There would be debate, of course. There always is. But not about this.
"This is the law of it," I said.
No one challenged me.
They could not.
Because what had just occurred was no longer a question.
It was fact.