Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 77
She halted suddenly. “Remove your mask.” She’d grown more leery with every step that had taken her farther from the castle.
“Still suspicious of me?”
“Always.” She could hardly make him out in the darkness at all, just the delineation of his horrible mask in the umbra of the garden.
“Yet here you are alone with me,” he asked with an elegant sweep of his wrist to encompass the dark grove they’d entered. “Hardly fitting conduct for a pious skeptic.”
“You know why I came.”
“To learn something about me.” He stepped closer. “To be seduced.”
“That isn’t—”
“Is it not? You are no milk-blooded miss, you must know my intentions, I have made no secret of them.”
“You care nothing for my virtue then?”
“On the contrary, I care most passionately. I mean to take it for myself. You know that much already. Besides, you yourself have as little care for it as I do.”
“That isn’t true!”
“So you say.” He clasped his hands behind his back, chuckling. “It seems we all have our masks to wear—yours is that of a moiling pietist; and it fits you ill.”
She balled her fists. “I did not come here to have my character whittled away at, and the only way I’ll ever yield my virtue is by force.”
“I have no need to enforce or ensorcel you, Emma.”
“I did not give you leave to use my name, Lord Winterly.”
He disregarded the rebuke and continued. “I have only to be patient, for your desire is equal to my own, you have only to acknowledge it.” There was no hint of conceit, as she might have expected from such a claim, but merely a quiet confidence that irked.
Presumptuous devil! She knew she ought never have come here unchaperoned. Nor should she have returned his kiss earlier or allowed him even half the liberties he had thus far enjoyed from her. Ordinarily, she never would have dared any such indecencies, but he was no ordinary being. There was every possibility he was exerting some dark and compelling force over her. Nothing about his addresses could be deemed romantic or appropriate.
“Now that you have done presuming to tell me why I came out here with you,” she said, stiffening her spine, “I hope you will get to the point of explaining why you sought to bring me here in the first place. You gave me to understand it was an unmasking, not a seduction.”
“The night air,” he replied, his sculpted lips compressed sardonically. “I brought you out to take the night air with me.”
“Many are those that believe the night air carries diseased miasmata—a danger to one’s constitution, you know.” Coupled with the rose analogy of earlier and his desire to corrupt her, she could only assume he’d meant to trick her into a seduction after all. Or maybe he meant to drink her blood. “Shall I catch my death in this night air, d’you think?”
“From malaria?” he scoffed. “No, nothing so bland as that for you.”
“How obliging,” she murmured, rubbing the chill from her arms. What small comfort the moon offered was now and again interrupted by draping clouds.
“There,” he whispered, holding up his hand for her to be still. “I promised you lights…”
There was a dubious comment on the tip of her tongue, but it was swallowed abruptly when before her nose materialized a faint glow. Gradually, she descried tiny green mesmeric lights pulsing to life around her amidst the stygian trees. Hundreds of glowworms, kindled like muted stars, drifting indolently to and fro as she stared, enthralled. She swept her eyes from one verdant light to another until her gaze found its way back to Winterly. “They’re beautiful.”
“You see, not all worms fly about in the night with villainous intent.”
She could not help snorting at that, amused despite that his comments of a moment ago had given her the spleen.
“But,” he added, his voice softening unexpectedly, “I am not such a wyrm...” And then he was gone. She whirled around in search of him, bemused and disquieted, but he seemed to have dematerialized into the shadows themselves. Her sudden erratic movements extinguished all the little viridian lights until she felt quite alone. “Lord Winterly, come out at once!”
Suddenly she felt herself weightless and flying through the air, her breath stolen. She gave a yelp that was abruptly cut short as she was thrust against a tree with a wall of solid, male flesh caging her against it. The bark was gnarled and rough against her back.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Is this not what you expected of me?” Winterly seethed, his nose a hairsbreadth from hers.
The scud shifted and the moon came out in full force once more. The mask was gone and he stood before her with unholy eyes—devouring black pits. His flesh was preternaturally pale.
“You mean to drink my blood,” she said, strangely calm in her horror.
“Then you know what I am?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her hands like claws against his chest. “I know.” She swallowed, steeling herself to say the one word that had disturbed her slumber the better part of a sennight. “You’re a vampyre.”
The breath was jerked from her lungs as he brusquely moved away, giving her his back. “I answer to that…and a great many other appellations besides.”
“Like what?”
“Beliel. Hades. Lucifer…the Great Dragon.” He shrugged, glancing back at her. “Take whichever epithet you prefer.”
“I prefer to use the name you were born to.”
“I was not born, as you understand the term. I was created out of nothing, pulled from the ether to serve a destiny that was never my own. A seraph who watched from his throne in the north sky.”
“An angel!” This was indeed a revelation, for he looked nothing of the sort. A dark angel then. Though he was beautiful and stately, she had always imagined angels to be blue-eyed and cherubic, their halos of golden hair framing innocent countenances like those said to