Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 35
“I should like that.” Well, in truth, she’d much prefer seeing the other members of Mina’s family. She gathered her notebook, the purloined tome cloaked beneath her mantle, and looked up to see Mina sailing abruptly from the room.
Emma would have hurried out after her, but she was startled at the door by the raven who chose that moment to raise its wings in a most threatening manner.
“Thief!” it said in a low mutter. “Curse you, thief!”
With a gasp, Emma fled past it before the damnable creature took it into its head to pluck her eyes out. In the main hall, all was quiet. There was no sign of M. De Grigori or Ana, nor indeed any of the other cloaked patrons that she’d noticed earlier.
Mina opened the door and stood by, watching as Emma hurried towards her. “Don’t mind the bird.”
“P-pardon me?”
“A devilish temperament, that bird.”
“Indeed.” Emma forced a smile. The book under her mantle seemed to brand her fingers with fiery condemnation, setting her bones atremble. She dropped her notebook at Mina’s feet and gave a fearful gasp, thinking for a moment that she had dropped that which was misappropriated.
Mina bent down to retrieve it and the letter that had fallen out of the book. Victoria’s invitation. Her countenance darkened as she returned the items. “You know the Winterlys?”
Emma was shocked at the girl’s audacity. She ought to have at least pretended not to have scanned the letter. “We are acquainted with the family, yes.” With a stiff spine, she reclaimed the notebook and the letter with her free hand and marched past the girl.
“Take care, Miss Rose. You walk among monsters…”
Emma wheeled around only to have the door shut in her face with resounding finality. “Impertinent girl!” What a strange thing to say, and to a stranger no less. Still grumbling, she stormed off, eager to put queer street far behind her.
Her little sojourn into the otherworld had been exciting up till now, and the sight of the poor coachman waiting dutifully under his umbrella only added to the guilt and affront she already felt. He handed her in and closed the door, and in a moment they were off.
The book she’d purloined, Vampyris, lay silent beneath her notes and rumpled mantle. The theft was quite unforgivable! “It isn’t theft if I mean to return it,” she muttered to herself. Emma had every disposition of returning it in a few days, after she’d made a few more notes on the subject. Vampirology, it seemed, was fast becoming her new ideé fixe.
Before the coach turned off Great Castle Street, Emma observed two large men dressed in dark coats who appeared unperturbed by the rain. They alone occupied the street, their stillness uncanny. They stared at the carriage as it passed by. For a moment there, Emma imagined she recognized Mr. Valko as being one of the gentleman, but it was too dark to be sure.
That night, before she snuffed her candle out, she brought the flame close to the window latch to assure herself that the single strand of hair was still bound and intact exactly as she’d left it that morning. With a satisfied nod, she extinguished the candle, climbed into bed, and secured her braid to the bedpost with a riband. Thereafter, she fell into a deep slumber much disturbed by dreams far stranger than the night before.
Chapter Eighteen
The Dream
“Thou forsook me!” The woman turned away when he first appeared at her window. “Thou said thou loved me, god of lies!”
“I was ever thine and I love thee still.” It chilled his blood to know how fiercely he loved her despite her weakness.
He watched, enraged, as she tore at her hair and slammed her fists on the marble till they were crimson—bloody with that which would never wash off no matter how hard she scrubbed them. Those hands were stained with death. There was another she loved, she told him, keening, a mortal that loved her better than he, her god of darkness and lies.
“Love?” His face contorted with hell’s fury. “Bah! Thou hast made a mockery of love!” He gnashed his teeth in anguish. “Wherefore didst thou not wait for me? I would have given thee the sun and moon!”
“Even for thee, my lord, I could not wait forever!” The kohl ran wet and dark from her eyes.
What did she know of the agony of eternity! He kneeled and clasped her bleeding hands in his. Eternity would never wash her hands clean. “What hast thou become, my love?”
She threw her arms out wildly, her beautiful voice ricochetting discordantly in the vast bedchamber. “I am what thou hast made me!”
Emma’s eyes flew open. She sat up so quickly that her tethered braid was nearly torn from her scalp. Her hands shook as she released the riband and sat up to catch her breath, her heart roaring with fear and sorrow. Her hands! So much blood! Emma glared through the darkness, panting, desperate to see her hands. But there was no blood. Thank God! Just a hideous nightmare. Would that the incubus had come to her instead.
The dream had ravaged her so completely that her flesh was damp with tears and perspiration. It was as though she herself had felt the man’s anguish. The creature’s anguish—it was no man that had appeared at the woman’s window. He had been frightening and beautiful, and yet she had seen nothing of his face or figure. All had been obscured as though she’d watched the shadowy scene through hot tears.
There was no sign that Emma had been sleepwalking during the night or that the casement had been meddled with. She pressed her index finger contemplatively to her lips as she considered the clasp