Alice turned away from the Visage Mask's pedestal, mentally tallying the damage to her account. The number was hemorrhaging, but she was still comfortably in the black. She moved to the next case in the row, a squat display housing a set of enchanted lockpicks that hummed with a faint, lilac glow.

  She was about to ask the price when a flash of red caught her eye.

  It wasn't in a case. It was sitting on a small, black velvet cushion on the shelf adjacent to the Visage Mask, positioned as if it were an afterthought. A trinket left out for impulse buyers. But the moment Alice's gaze landed on it, she knew better.

  It was a bracelet. Serpentine in design, coiled twice upon itself like a sleeping viper, the body carved from obsidian so dark it seemed to drink the light from the display lamps. The surface was polished to a mirror sheen, smooth and organic, tapering to a flat, triangular head that rested against the cushion with an unsettling naturalism. Two eyes were set into the skull: small, faceted rubies that caught the gaslight and threw back pinpricks of deep, arterial red.

  It looked alive. Not in the way a well-crafted piece of jewelry sometimes tricked the eye. This was something else entirely. It looked alive the way a predator looked alive when it was perfectly still, watching you from the tall grass.

  "Pretty, isn't it?" the attendant said, materializing at Alice's elbow with the silent precision that was apparently a house-wide talent.

  Alice tilted her head, studying the coils. Each scale of the serpent's body had been individually carved into the obsidian, catching the light at slightly different angles so the whole piece seemed to ripple when she shifted her perspective. The kind of jewelry that would make a duchess weep with envy and a jeweler weep with inadequacy.

  "It's gorgeous," Alice admitted, which was not a word she used lightly. She leaned closer, admiring the way the ruby eyes seemed to track her movement. A trick of the faceting, surely. "I might buy it for the looks alone. May I?"

  She reached for the obsidian coils.

  "Stop."

  The attendant's hand shot out and caught Alice's wrist. The grip was brief but insistent, pulling her hand back a measured six inches before releasing it. The movement was so at odds with the woman's funereal composure that Alice almost flinched.

  "I would advise against touching it without prior knowledge," the attendant said, her voice returning to its silk-smooth register as if she hadn't just physically intercepted a customer. "It can be a bit... surprising for a first-time user."

  Alice withdrew her hand, flexing her fingers. The ruby eyes glinted innocently on their cushion.

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "Nothing is wrong with it, per se. It is simply enthusiastic about new acquaintances." She smoothed the front of her skirt. "This is the Vitric Lover."

  Alice stared at the attendant. She looked at the bracelet. Back at the attendant.

  "The Vitric Lover," Alice repeated, her voice flat. "Who names these things?"

  "Usually the original owners. However, some artifacts arrive nameless, without provenance or history. Orphans, in a sense." She gestured to the serpent with a gloved hand. "This particular piece was sold to us by a woman who took her payment in tears. She offered no history, no explanation, and no name. She simply handed it over and left. Our house appraiser catalogued and christened it."

  "He sounds like quite the romantic."

  The attendant smiled. A genuine one, small and fond, that softened the professional mask for a fleeting moment. "He is. He even named the active function. He calls it the Tithe of Love."

  Alice raised an eyebrow behind her lacquer mask. "That's either poetic or ominous. With artifacts, I'm assuming the latter. Explain."

  The attendant inclined her head and slipped back into the cadence of a practiced saleswoman delivering a product warning.

  "Because its love requires sacrifice," she began. "The Vitric Lover is not a passive ornament, Miss Dragonslayer. The moment bare skin contacts the obsidian, the artifact activates its bonding sequence. It will uncurl, travel up the wrist, and constrict."

  She mimed the motion with her own hand, fingers tightening slowly around her opposite forearm.

  "The serpent's head latches onto the inner wrist, specifically over the radial artery, and bites. The fangs are small, barely a centimeter, but they puncture the skin cleanly. You cannot wear it without surrendering blood. We have tried. Gloves, wrappings, leather cuffs. It rejects all barriers. It demands direct contact with the vein."

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Alice's hand drifted instinctively to her own wrist. "Charming. And once it's latched on? Am I married to a snake for the rest of my natural life?"

  "Fortunately, no. Removal is simple. You lift the head while it is latched, and it releases. The fangs retract, the coils loosen, and it returns to its dormant state. A possessive lover, certainly, but not an imprisoning one." She paused. "It also has a coagulating effect on the puncture site. The wounds seal within seconds of removal. You will not need to worry about blood or staining your sleeves."

  "Small mercies," Alice muttered, eyeing the ruby eyes with renewed wariness. "So it bites you, drinks your blood, and then what? What does it actually do?"

  "To activate the Tithe, you must will your mana into the bracelet through the contact point where the fangs meet the artery. A small, sustained pulse, similar to the way you would channel heat into your palm, but directed inward toward the artifact rather than outward. The serpent acts as a conduit. It draws the mana through the blood and cycles it back into the musculature."

  She gestured to the ruby eyes.

  "You will know it is active when the eyes emit a faint glow. A brief, red pulse. And then the enhancement begins."

  "Enhancement," Alice echoed. "Be specific."

  "While active, the Vitric Lover significantly improves the user's physical output. Strength, speed, reflexes, structural integrity of the bones and tendons. All augmented well beyond the user's natural baseline."

  "Define significantly." Alice leaned forward. The word was carrying a great deal of weight, and she wanted numbers beneath it.

  The attendant paused, choosing her phrasing with the precision of a woman accustomed to selling expensive things to dangerous people.

  "During our testing, we found that a Tier 6 mage wearing the Lover was able to keep pace with a mid-level Tier 5 in sustained hand-to-hand combat. The enhancement does not grant magical abilities. It will not give you barriers or wind blades. But in terms of raw physicality, the speed of a punch, the force of a kick, the durability to absorb a hit without shattering, it closes the gap."

  Alice went quiet.

  A Tier 6 keeping pace with a mid-level Tier 5. Physically. In a fistfight.

  If she had been wearing this thing in the pit against the Icebreaker, she wouldn't have needed the molten glass or the cheap shots. She could have stood in front of him and traded blows. Not comfortably. The man was a veteran with years of experience and thirty pounds of muscle on her. But she wouldn't have been a lamb waiting for the butcher's rhythm. She could have met him on his terms instead of resorting to tricks and anatomical warfare.

  Could she have fought Sheltie?

  The memory surfaced before she could stop it. The invisible fist rocketing toward her chin. Sand erupting in its wake. The casual, insulting ease with which the woman had swatted a point-blank fireball out of the air without breaking stride.

  No. The bracelet bridged a gap. It did not erase a canyon.

  But against anything short of a monster like that? Against the next thug, the next bandit, the next man who decided a girl in a black dress was easy prey?

  "Is there a catch?" Alice asked, keeping her voice level. "Aside from the initial bite."

  The attendant nodded, the golden arrows on her mask catching the light. "The Vitric Lover is a continuous drain. While active, it feeds on blood and mana simultaneously to fuel the enhancement. The rate is manageable in short bursts. A few minutes of exertion will leave you winded but functional. However, prolonged activation depletes your reserves rapidly. You will feel it as a creeping fatigue, a hollowing in the limbs, and eventually, if you push past the threshold, unconsciousness."

  She tilted her head, and her voice dropped a register.

  "There is also a secondary neurological effect. The artifact emits a sedative compound into the bloodstream through the fang contact. A calming influence. Subtle, but pervasive. It suppresses the adrenaline response, steadies the hands, and quiets the noise of fear and doubt."

  That sounded useful. Far too useful. In Alice's experience, anything that sounded too good was simply hiding where it bit.

  "And the problem with that is?"

  The attendant hesitated. It was tiny, almost imperceptible, but in the sterile quiet of the Vault it rang out like a struck bell.

  "Subjects have shown addictive behaviors when wearing it for extended periods," she said carefully. "The feeling of power, combined with the artificial calm, can be intoxicating. The body becomes accustomed to the sedative, and the mind becomes accustomed to operating without fear. Several of our testers reported difficulty removing the bracelet voluntarily after prolonged sessions. Not because it resisted. The release mechanism functioned perfectly. But because they did not want to."

  She let the words settle in the cool air of the Vault.

  "They preferred the version of themselves that wore it."

  Alice stared at the obsidian serpent, its ruby eyes twinkling with patient, gemstone indifference. She traced her thumb along the line of her jaw beneath the lacquer mask and thought about the pattern she'd seen repeated in every display case in this corridor.

  "Don't use them too much, and you should be fine," Alice said.

  "That tends to be the case for most of our inventory," the attendant agreed, a note of approval in her voice. "The Cellar does not traffic in curses, Miss Dragonslayer. We traffic in temptations. The distinction is entirely up to the customer." She let the line breathe, then: "Are you interested in purchasing the Vitric Lover?"

  "Price?"

  "As it is a premier artifact, six thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine chips."

  "Lord above," Alice breathed. The sound escaped before she could catch it. Six thousand on top of the Visage Mask, on top of the Sanguimancy Grimoire. Her mental ledger had gone from a tidy fortune to something that made her teeth ache when she looked at it directly.

  But the money wasn't the point. The money was numbers on a spectral account, abstract and weightless, already half-forgotten. What mattered was the gap. The yawning, brutal distance between her and the world she had stumbled into: Tier 5 brawlers who punched through stone, Inspectors who built cages out of thin air, fighters who treated her fire like a mild inconvenience.

  She was a Tier 6 pyromancer who had won her first real fight by grabbing a man's groin and cooking it. She needed every edge she could buy.

  "It's worth it," Alice said. Her hand brushed absently against her own wrist, and the memory ambushed her: Sheltie's grip closing around that exact spot, clinical and unhurried, the barrier insulating the woman's skin from Alice's fire as if it were a child's tantrum. The quiet appraisal. The feeling of being a specimen pinned under glass.

  "I'll take it."