Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 82
“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.