Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 76
“I daresay,” said Winterly, “you would come to regret it bitterly had you partaken.”
A shiver of premonition stiffened the fine hairs along her spine. She watched him take the glass of Madeira from the returning footman.
He handed the wine to Emma, saying, “Perhaps some fresh night air is in order, if only to cool your martial humor.”
“My humor is only upset by your impertinence.” The Madeira burned its way down her throat. With a grimace she handed the still full glass back to him, and he in turn passed it on to the impassive footman. She gave Winterly a tight smile and allowed him to lead her back towards the plague doctors and into the silent gloom beyond the doorway. Her head was still spinning from the waltz. Or was it the wine? Lost completely in her own thoughts, Emma was startled when they emerged from the narrow tunnel. The music of the subterranean wonderland was now indiscernible and far behind them.
“Come, my Rose.” Winterly was waiting beside his plague doctors, his hand extended. “The night awaits us.”
“Alone?” she asked, shooting the cloaked sentinels each a wary look, but they remained like statues. “In the dark?”
“Just so.” He inclined his head, drawing her eyes up to those sinister horns. “I wish to show you the gardens.”
She folded her arms. “We had better not.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and appeared ready enough to take the night air without her.
Her brow clenched. “Can it not wait until sunrise?”
He glanced back at her. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
She pressed her lips together mutinously. “You said I ought not venture out at night. You warned of its danger.”
“I believe I subjoined that with the caveat that you not do so without me. Besides, daylight rather defeats the purpose of a midnight stroll. The stars and lanterns are best appreciated at night, wouldn’t you agree?”
Emma was torn between the powerful apprehension of craving his company and dreading her own reaction to him. Vampyre or not, he was dangerous to her, she understood that. Finally, she said, “What sort of woman ventures out into the dark alone with a man she hardly knows?”
“The sort of woman who dares to know the man’s darkness.”
She swallowed the surge of dreadful excitement that followed his words. “By that you mean his secrets?”
He held his hand out to her again. It was answer enough.
She deliberated only a short moment more, for she had promised herself she’d uncover at least some of his secrets tonight. At last, she placed her hand in his, a shudder of premonitory excitement spreading warmly along the point of contact.
She was almost certain she knew what lurked in the darkness beneath his mask—a vampyre. And yet she went with him anyway. Did that make her some fatal bloom? Being mindful of her doomed futurity and yet unable—nay, unwilling—to deviate from it, drawn to that which might corrupt her. Destroy her. Was she a sick rose after all?
As she and Winterly passed a curved mirror, Emma caught sight of Winterly’s reflection distorted into some giant beast. Beside it there walked an equally fearsome creature in red, her pale arm upon the beast’s black hoof. Beyond that mirror, along the avenue of mirrors she dared not venture through, she glimpsed a hundred more disfigured Emmas, all draped in lurid red. Each was as disturbing as the last. Refractions and versions of herself that disconcerted her, for she and they were but one flawed moiety. A sick Rose.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Malaria
Dearest Emma,—Whence do these feelings spring? If the source is honorable and pure, as I believe you are, then how can they be cankerous? Do you speak of your feelings for the wicked viscount? You have yet to satisfy my curiosity—who is the master of Winterthurse? Yours impatiently,
Mary.
The untamed gardens of Winterthurse were alive with symphonies—crickets, nightingales, and the majestic solo of a tawny owl somewhere in the boughs overhead. Emma listened to it all, felt the rhythm of the night as it floated around her, seductive and powerful.
Lanterns had been strung from the trees and candles flickered sleepily along the garden pathways. Some of the guests, still cloaked in their disguises, were strolling off into unlit avenues, likely for midnight trysts. Were they imagining the same of the woman in red and the devil at her side?
Her hand no longer rested in Winterly’s, yet she was no less affected by the virile force of his presence beside her. The cat’s eye stones glowed along the pathway beneath the moon and the stars as though they wandered upon some ancient Roman road; as though all of nature and all of heaven had turned to watch them.
Why did he not speak? Why did he insist on wearing that vile mask. It disturbed her all the more out here in the perilous dark. “Will you not remove your mask?” she asked.
He saluted her words with a grin. “Suppose instead that I have only ever worn a mask. Perhaps the mask incarnates who I really am, and the face beneath—the face you think you know—is the lie.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’re a dragon?” On his imposing frame the mask certainly appeared demoniacal.
“I mean to show you what I am soon enough.”
“Then do it now,” she said, her own mask affording her a dauntlessness she did not wholly feel. “Remove the lie.”
“And ruin this little idyll?”
“If the idyll is the lie, then yes.”
“All in good time.”
“Howsoever treacherous the truth may be, I wish to know it.”
“Even if that means you must acknowledge your own darkness?”
“I know who I am, Lord Winterly, the question is—”
“No, you know only who you think you ought to be. You see through a glass darkly, always afeared to look deeper. You are afraid of yourself, Miss Rose.”
Emma felt her hackles rise. Not because he offered such presumptuous insight but because he was right. At length, they passed by a massy hedgerow of wild