Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 101
“Attack him where he is most vulnerable.”
“And where is that?”
“The heart. Make him trust you and he will bear it to you; that is when you strike. The heart is the seat of power—lay his chest open and pierce the heart.” With that, Ana released her and slipped away.
The cumbrous darkness swallowed the three Strange sisters in an instant, leaving Emma alone beneath the lintel. But she would not remain alone much longer. She could feel the whispering tenebrosity of the wind as it changed direction. He was coming for her.
Chapter Forty-Eight
In Sanguis Veritate
Emma fled into the night, ignoring the light from the inn that beckoned her return. She stumbled towards Church Street whence she’d instructed the driver to wait for her.
A terrible north wind howled along the Esk, drowning even the roar of the waves battering the scars. Its icy breath rushed up the river as though Boreas himself, wings billowing like storm clouds, had come down from the mountains of Thrace to snatch her up. The fog was spilling onto the waterfront like the hiemal harbinger of his formidable temper. The god of the north wind—the winter god. Winterly. A premonitory fear rippled across Emma’s cold flesh as she threw a furtive gaze to the sky behind her.
Owing to the perilous cold that saturated the night and the lateness of the hour, she was not surprised to find Church Street completely deserted of Whitby’s denizens. What did alarm her, however, was that her vampiric coachman was nowhere to be seen. A cold, dark street was no deterrent to a vampyre, so where was he?
Emma gave a wretched sneeze and pulled the cloak tight around her neck lest the cold bite her with invisible fangs. It had already drained all the warmth from her numb fingers and torn chilblains into her cheeks with icy nails. Shivering, she began the long walk back to the castle, determined not to die this night. Leastwise not from the cold like some benighted indigent on the roadside. She lifted a wary scowl to the sky, silently cursing the clouds that smothered the moon.
The sudden awful caw of a raven disturbed her footing and she shrieked as she fell. The raven gave another series of reproachful warnings from its shrouded espial and then all was quiet once more. Too quiet. She had not yet moved from where she’d frozen on the road, where her legs had buckled beneath her. She dared not. Even the raven had ceased its frightful squalling. Evil bird!
A soft thud sounded behind her, accompanied by an ominous ruffling. She held her breath, but could not turn to look over her shoulder for fear that even that small movement—the rustle of her cloak—would interfere with the sound of impending danger. All the creatures of the night seemed disposed to still themselves lest they draw some evil eye.
She unleashed a wild shriek as she was suddenly hauled up from the ground and propelled into the night sky. Her screams died in her breast as the unyielding grip tightened beneath her arms and back. Her hair, loosened by the violence of the wind, whipped about her face.
“Release me!”
“Do not tempt me, woman.” Markus’s voice was thick with the sibilance of cold rage.
She bit her tongue and dug her claws deep into his greatcoat, cowing under the violent flapping of his demoniac wings. The wind lashed at her eyes till they were blurry with tears.
He held her pressed firmly against his chest as he cleared the lofty mist that lay like cobbled silver beneath a breathtaking moon. Emma blinked the tears away and gasped, for a moment enthralled by the empyrean splendor lying before her. In all her life the moon had never appeared so large and infinite. The stars, her ladies in waiting, glimmered across the vast swell of woolen wisps that stretched thick across the sky. Here, above the world, so close to heaven, there existed only she, the stars, and the moon. And Markus.
Braver now, under the reassuring glow of moonlight, Emma shifted her gaze to the vampyre in whose arms she was suspended. Fierce black eyes bored into hers. She hastily broke the contact and, instead, watched as the castle spires loomed through the clouds, jutting up like black horns.
Without warning, Markus tucked his colossal wings and plummeted through the clouds as though he meant to impale the earth like an arrow. Emma swallowed the scream that lunged up from her chest. At the last minute, as the courtyard hurtled towards them, Winterly threw his wings wide so that all the blood shot from her head and pooled into her feet.
The stars were now swimming not in the sky but around her peripheral. They were now mere feet from terra firma, soaring over the green towards the waiting castle. She had only to reach down and feel the lawn’s coarse coat against her fingertips. Perhaps if her fingers were not still frozen tight over his lapel she might have.
Just as she became certain he meant to fly them through the stone wall, he swooped up at the last minute and brought his boots down hard against the library window ledge. The force of his landing shuddered the iron casement and disturbed the fire within.
Emma stumbled into the room with a clammy hand fastened over her mouth. The ale tossed inside her, hot and forceful. She latched white fingers onto the nearest repository—a painted bowl two feet in diameter—and whimpered pitifully as her stomach disgorged the ale along with all her dignity. Once she’d spent her misery therein, she lifted her head and dragged the back of her hand across her mouth with an abject shudder, utterly disgusted and humiliated. She sat back on her haunches a moment, unable to meet the gaze that probed her heaving shoulders. She contrived to ignore the vampyre behind her. Instead, she examined the pretty, blue goldfish painted delicately across the milky porcelain beneath her fingers as if