The thought gave her pause. But she was safe, wasn’t she? She was wearing his protection now: the mark of the beast—the ruby dragon that guarded her throat from the claws and fangs of di inferni, the titans below.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Perfume Of Antiquity
My Dear Mary,—Would that I could tell you all I know of the master of Winterthurse, but I fear there are no words I could employ to make you believe me. I have always prided myself on choosing the right words, yet today the ink dries upon my pen before I can commit any sense to paper.
I have a mind full of thoughts, but none I can faithfully translate into words. Yours thoughtfully,
Emma.
The sun was high overhead by the time Emma left her chamber, overcome with a sudden urgency to see her sister. Boudicca appeared to suffer no such distress, for she was curled atop Emma’s pillow and seemed in no hurry to upset her slumber. Milli had likely not found her own bed before dawn.
Tiptoeing carefully into her sister’s room, Emma’s niggling worry was at once eased by the steady rise and fall of her sister’s chest beneath the coverlet. But even the sight of Milli’s reposing form, swallowed up by the monstrous four-poster bed, was insufficient to becalm all of Emma’s disquietude. She parted the curtains to let in some light and then carefully drew the coverlet away from her sister’s neck.
With tentative fingers, she peeled Mill’s nightshift lower, unveiling the girl’s throat and shoulders for inspection. “Milli? Are you awake?”
Her sister gave not a flutter of an eyelid nor a stirring of a limb.
For some time she contemplated her sister’s unmolested flesh, relief filling her heart by degrees. No preternatural fangs had, as far as Emma could discern, pierced Milli’s soft skin. Yet the bloom of health seemed wanting in Milli’s complexion. The apples of her cheeks had lost much of their former couleur de rose, her creamy skin tainted with grey. A Chlorosis of some sort?
Perhaps the long night had exhausted the poor girl so much that no sound could penetrate her fog of slumber. Emma would even allow that her sister’s exertions had cost her some healthful color. Leastwise Emma hoped so, for the alternative was that Milli had fallen victim to the vampyrpest rife in the castle.
That awful thought spurred her to apply Devil’s Bane to Milli’s throat. Her sister would not thank her for it, but Milli was hardly in a position to offer resistance at present. Even if Winterly was right and all it did was to mask the scent some small degree, it was all Emma could offer her sister and it would have to count for something. Why else would Ana have bestowed it if not to deter a vampyre’s kiss?
The Devil’s Bane clung tenaciously to the crystal wand as Emma held it poised just below Milli’s bare throat. Almost unwillingly, the drop hung suspended, but finally it fell. Milli recoiled with instant violence, startling Emma into nearly upending the precious brew. The girl moaned and mumbled into her pillow before burying herself back under her coverlet. She was still asleep despite the thrashing. An acrid reek tainted the air now, the sharpness of the odor summoning tears to Emma’s eyes as she leaned over her slumbering sister. Perhaps the Devil’s Bane was becoming sour.
“Milli, are you all right?” She gave her sister a light shake.
Milli peeled one bloodshot eye open and shot the window a baleful glance before thrusting a pillow over her head. “Do draw the shades, Em.”
“But it’s midday,” said Emma helplessly.
“So it is,” was the muffled reply from beneath the pillow. A dismissal if ever Emma had heard one.
Emma worried at her lip but obliged her sister nonetheless. She left the bed to give each drape a hard tug, dousing the room once more into darkness. She then withdrew after one last glance towards the cocooned little form beneath the bed hangings, her eyes still smarting from the perplexing odor that had come as swiftly as it had vanished. She was loath to leave her sister, for she felt certain there was something amiss. Yet she had found no evidence to support her dread and could therefore not justify disturbing her sister from the slumber she so obviously relished.
Having seen to the duties invested to her by the bonds of sisterhood and love, Emma finally betook herself to the master’s den. Her mind was reeling with a congeries of doubts and intrigue.
The dread Markus Winterly, a vampyre. She ought to be repulsed, but she wasn’t. Not in the least. Her heart, that wretched antipode, craved him.
Fatal obsession drew her to the library, proving that her body was in better accord with her heart than the deprecating voice of her conscience. Emma knew she was only borrowing trouble, but she reasoned the more time she spent in his company, the better she would understand him and the better she might know how to deal with him.
The library appeared uninhabited when she entered. “Lord Winterly?” she whispered, loath even to disturb the dust with her breath. But no answer was forthcoming. “No doubt you mean to materialize like some dread djinn again.” She felt foolish for talking to an empty room.
His library smelled like it always did, like the perfume of antiquity. But the ancient mustiness, the olden ink glue, and the sweet vanilla was comforting to her, and the fire’s languid chattering beckoned her from the door. She obeyed its warm invitation after only a brief pause, stepping deeper into the vast book-laden chamber.
Just how did the master of Winterthurse fill his long days and nights? His eternity, as it were. Presuming, of course, that he did not sleep as mortals did. Intrigued by the lonely book she spied atop his high-backed armchair by the fire, she betook herself thence to investigate.
The binding was rather less antiquated-looking than the books she descried on his lofty shelves. She turned it over to peruse the front panel and the title thereon. It was that blasted novel he’d slipped her. She had long since determined that he lived only to shock her and she’d been only too happy to sneak the book back into the library with no one the wiser to her having possessed, even briefly, this so-called literature. Well there were no eyes watching her now. With a determined purse of her lips, she turned the front board. The first few pages seemed innocuous enough, but she was soon to find how utterly explicit it all truly was!
“But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.”
Emma looked up from the page suddenly with a rueful blush staining her cheeks. Remarking that she was still alone, she ignored the heat of guilt in her cheeks and continued her study of this lurid little novel. Her eyes widened by gradations of mounting horror—or was it fascination?—as she read on.
“‘Oh!’” said Winterly suddenly, “‘what a charming creature thou art!’”
She gave a startled shriek, dropped the book, and thrust her hands up to guard her palpitating heart.
Laughing, he continued to quote the very sentence she’d been reading when he’d spoken over her shoulder. “‘What a happy man will he be that first makes a woman of you. Oh, that I were a man for your sake…’” And then flashing long teeth, added, “Well, mortal at any rate.”
“You startled me!”
His gaze filled with mischief. “Your race tends to startle easily.”
“Is it any wonder? Your race feeds off mine.” She lifted her chin. “I forbid you to sneak up on me. It is bad manners in a vampyre to lurk about.”
He made her a bow. “You have my word, no more ambushing my guests—wouldn’t want to frighten you to death.”
“As to that, how long will you suffer me to live now that I know what you are?”
“My dear, Emmaline, why on earth should I kill you?” He quirked an indolent brow and seated himself in the armchair. He was only a little less threatening in repose.
“You’re a vampyre.” Death personified.
“Indeed?” He looked down at himself. “However can you stand my presence?”
“With mistrustful forbearance.”
He chuckled, running his tongue
along one long canine. “Do you know, I perceived the exact moment you knew what I was.” No longer satisfied with looking up at her, he rose to his full, intimidating height. “It was at the abbey.”
“Yes,” she said, remembering every detail of that encounter—how he’d smelled, how she’d felt, the coolness of the rain against her fevered flesh.
“I might have drained you dry and thrown you from the cliffs that day, fed your empty corpse to the gulls and the sharks. Instead it was a mortal kiss I sought from you. It was a far different sort of hunger I sought to slake.”
“Yes,” she said. “Why did you spare me the vampyre’s kiss?”
“Perhaps I fancy a little warm-blooded sport just now.”
“Sport you might enjoy with any number of women.”
“Ah, yes, but there are none like you, Emma.”
“I do wish you would not use my name so freely, Vampyre.”
“You wish that then, and see where wishing gets you.”
Her mouth flattened. “I am nobody. You could sport with more exotic beauties—empresses and actresses, if you wished.”
“I find you infinitely exotic, my prim little rose. Besides, you are hardly a nobody. If you were that, you’d be moldering away in your uncle’s attic.”
Or in a grave, she thought.
“Instead, you waltzed in the underworld and kissed a vampyre beneath a full moon.” There was something of redoubtable hunger in his countenance; and it excited her abominably. “And you have only whetted his appetite, I’m afraid.” When he closed the distance between them, she did not balk. When he lowered his lips to hers, she held her ground. When he molded her frame to his, he pressed an exquisite kiss upon her lips. The furnace flared in her belly and the flames weltered in her blood. He made a leonine noise deep in his throat as her arms tightened around his neck.
She made no protest as he ran his hands into her coiffure, releasing the mass to tumble down her back. He was always letting her hair down. She dropped her head back obediently as he tugged her hair like a bell rope so that her neck was more exposed and vulnerable to his grazing teeth.
More kisses ensued. Prurient fingers descended over her hips and began to draw the hems of her skirts up slowly from where they’d rested at her ankles. “Who shall delve with you all the mysteries of Venus?” he whispered. “Who shall be your preceptor and lover?”
In a heady moment, she was supine atop the Aubusson rug before the fire. He had her skirts bunched around her waist and a hand was gliding up her stockinged thigh. But she swiftly caught that hand before it ever reached…Venus. “No,” she said, breathless.
“I know you are not afraid, Emma. I would smell it if you were. You know it would be but the work of a moment to make you change your mind. You know that I could.”
She nodded, pinching her lip between her teeth. “I know. I have little doubt of your influence, but I cannot abandon all social mores.”
“Ay, you can.”
“But I will not.”
“You might enjoy my world if only you would not stand in your own way.”
“And follow your example? Go your way?”
“Yes, my way.”
But his way would only take her further from rectitude. “A way without love, to be sure.”
He grew still. “What use have I for love? You mortals are fickle lovers.”
“Lust is fickle, not love—true love is eternal and infinite.”
“Then let me love you,” he said with nonchalance, “you may call it what you will—I promise, you will find infinite pleasure in it.”
“You mock love.”
“I mock my own folly, for I have tasted that bitter poison before. And now you find yourself at a crossroads: will you take the path unknown or will you venture no further than your moldering attic and predictable little novels.”
A crossroads?! She nearly laughed. It was a perfect analogy. Suicides were buried at crossroads. And was she not suicidal to be lying here beneath a vampyre, on the brink of her own destruction?
“Do you deny yourself because you love another?” he asked.
“There is no one else.” There was only him.
“But you do intend to marry someday, or why else would you guard your virtue?”
Frowning, she shook her head. “No.” She had long ago resigned herself to spinsterhood.
He nuzzled her throat. “Then shall I come to your room tonight, Emma? Say yes.” There was a hint of pain and frustration in his voice that thrilled her. “Let me love you in my own way.”
She felt the last of her resistance reduced to rubble beneath his unexpected sincerity, felt her limbs tremble with yearning. And though she knew there was no possible outcome in which she might survive him unscathed, she gave the answer she herself most wanted to give.
“Yes.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Black Moon II
There was a stinging on Milli’s neck below her ear. What the devil? She moaned and buried her head deeper beneath the covers. Her bones ached and her flesh was overrun with ceaseless itching.
She could still hear Emma’s footfalls fading down the corridor. Or was that her imagination? Had her sister been here at all? At length she sighed and gave herself up to drowsy evocation, her mind wandering back to the night of the black moon.
The shadows beyond the torchlight had proven too dark—it was black as Hades—and Milli had returned briefly to the foyer for a lantern. Without it she would never have found the hedgerows or kept to the right pathway.
“Mr. Valko?” she whispered, holding her lantern out in front of her. Where could the man have got too? Surely he had not ventured out onto the bog. Perhaps she ought to call out no more, lest Mr. Grimm answer her instead. She shuddered at the thought. He was not a man she would ever seek to encounter on a night like this, or any night for that matter; she might stop her heart and perish from fright at the very sight of him in the dark, never mind the danger of hidden bogs.
At last, she spied the towering hedges and their black roses. She could go no further, for she had promised herself she would not. That she had ventured this far from the castle lights at all bespoke her great desire to catch Mr. Valko alone, for there was little she feared more than the dark.
And yet Nicholas was close by, she could feel it. It was indeed wicked behavior in her to be out like this; to be thus caught, chasing after a man in the dark like some light-o-love, could very well be ruinous. Emma would be horrified. Her perfectly pious sister must never know, for Milli would never hear the end of it. “Faugh!” Emma could march her blue stockings straight to Hades for all Milli cared tonight, let her sister vent her probity on the devil instead.
It was no use, Emma might not be here with her now but her sister’s voice was still very much her constant niggling companion, the whispering small voice in her ear in the dark. Frustrated, Milli turned to consider the hedge as though the roses might offer better advice. They were beautiful, these night roses. Their petals were dark with sharp invitation, their perfume sultry. They crooked their gleaming, wicked claws, beckoning her to touch and feel their seductive bite. She gave a saturnine laugh and reached the fingers of her free hand out to touch the silky, red flesh of the nearest rose. Her nose bowed in homage. Unwilling to leave the garden wholly disappointed by her fruitless search, Milli gave into her impulse and plunged her hand into the hedge. She was intent on snapping the bloom’s frail neck at its base so that she might take it with her. Instead, it was the rose that drew first blood. Its claw plunged deep into Milli’s flesh.
With a cry of outrage, Milli snatched her hand back and popped her bleeding finger into her mouth, running her tongue over the wound. The tang of blood, however, made her gorge rise. She held her finger up to the lantern light and watched as the blood domed red at the tip, swelling until it fell from her fingertip in a teary freshet to warm the gravel underfoot. How ironic that it was her essence that would now nourish the very rose that had wounded her.
She gave the vampiric roses a glare. “Tomorrow I shall return with shears and guillotine the lot of you.”
The feral growl that answered from the hedge instantly withered her innards. The resonance of such a growl was enough to palsy every cell in her body. It curdled her blood. For a terrible moment she was certain of its having come from that bloodthirsty rose. But it was not the rose.
In the lantern light a pair of savage yellow orbs appeared unblinking amidst the rank leaves. If that deep growl was any indication of its size, the beast was monstrous.
With a piercing scream, Milli shrank back from it and tripped over her skirts in her haste to flee. She gained no more than three clumsy steps before the air was stricken from her lungs. She hit the gravel and screamed again. A pair of mighty jaws closed over her wrist, the fangs holding fast as she was shaken mercilessly.
Amidst her desperate struggle and the sound of her own terror, she heard a shout and the sound of gravel flying beneath pounding feet. And then, as sudden as the attack had come, it was over and she was being lifted, still thrashing, into a pair of steely arms. There was gravel dust and tears in her eyes, she couldn’t see. The momentary blindness only compounded her horror. It was of no moment in whose arms she was cradled, she wanted only to be away, safe inside the castle. Safe from the thing that had tried to eat her.
Her rescuer was of the same mind, for he was already racing from the scene, his calming whispers lost in the confusion of her cries. She used her uninjured arm to swipe the tears and dirt away. Behind them, her lantern lay abandoned and snuffed by the hedge. The darkness was thick, too thick to see the fiend now shrouded therein. But it was there, watching; she could see the glare of unholy yellow eyes cutting through the night to pierce her very soul.
Only once the mighty doors were barred against the darkness did Milli close her eyes again. Every sinew trembled with violence. Her teeth chattered with cold and shock, and there was a throbbing ache in her wrist and a chafe in her eyes. Worst of all, her ears were still ringing with the sound of growls and gnashing fangs, and with her own blood-curdling screams.
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 27
