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I want to peel back her layers, unravel her secrets until she’s left naked and bleeding in front of me. Metaphorically speaking, of course, but maybe not only.
“You’re right, I don’t know your past. All I do know is your unrealized potential, and what a shame it is to let it go to waste.” I lean in quicker than she can react and whisper in her ear, “you can match me blow by blow, little one. Do you have any idea how hard that is to find? You’re faced with a monster that could rip your limbs apart, and you choose anger. Violence. I wish you’d show these worthless humans the same ruthlessness.”
To prove my point, I let my fangs extend and nip at her ear, drawing a single bead of blood. It tastes as sweet as apricots on my tongue and I can’t hold back a groan. I’ll need to feed again, and soon. Usually, I can go months between feedings with little more than slight discomfort, but Esmeralda is testing my self-control. She’s a feast laid before me that I’m not allowed to partake in.
As if waking from a reverie, Esme jolts when my teeth break her skin. She moves quickly, for a human, shoving me against the bookcase and pressing her forearm to my throat. Judging by the way her arms tremble, she’s putting all her strength in it, which manages to make the pressure against my windpipe uncomfortable. But damn, if it also doesn’t make me hard as hell.
“You want violence, monster?” She spits out the word like a curse. “I’ll give you violence. I’ll give you anger. I’ve been harboring it for years.”
She’s not lying. Her scent is all smoke, like a fire left to burn unsupervised for too long, about to turn into a natural disaster. I crave this part of her as much as I crave the delicious scent of her arousal. Even more so, I crave the two of them together.
I grip her soft hips and drag her closer, straddling my leg. She bites her lip to hide a whimper, but it already left her mouth. I grin at the sound. She smells sweeter now, that olive tang underlying it, and what I wouldn’t give to sink my teeth into her neck and draw her essence from the source.
“Shame you’re not wearing a dress,” I say, pressing my leg harder between hers. Her arm tightens against my throat, making my voice raspy, but it only adds to my excitement. “It’d be so easy for me to make you come like I did in the club.”
“You disgust me,” she growls, and yet she rolls her hips.
“You want me. You’ve wanted me since we met.”
“That was before.”
“Before?” I arch a brow. “You mean to tell me now that you know what I am, you don’t want me even more? That you don’t crave knowing a creature this powerful is at your mercy, worshipping between your pretty thighs?”
For a moment, I think she’ll cave, let me do what I described here, between the stacks. Then she uses the arm against my throat as leverage to pry herself from me, and steps so far her back hits the opposite bookshelf. “Leave, Teizel. Now.”
I lift my hands in defeat. “Believe it or not, I did come with a purpose other than vexing you.” With a flick of my head, I point to the book I’ve left sitting atop others on the shelf. “That’s for you. Do look it over — I reckon it’ll begin to enlighten you on the cursed trinkets.”
I don’t wait for her to answer. I’d rather leave her a little shaken, with the picture of our bodies fused to fuel her rage and passion for the day.
chapter 20
a land beyond the veil
esmeralda
That man — I mean, monster — will be the end of me. If he doesn’t land me in jail for murdering him, he’ll send me to my death through self-combustion. I pick up the book he left for me and tuck it under my arm as I walk to the checkout counter.
The fact that I can’t seem to shake the effect he has on me does nothing but stroke my anger higher, making me antagonize him even more. It goes against everything Àvia has taught me, and if I lost my temper this way with anybody else, I’d be the talk of the town again: Creeperalda returns. Yet, I can’t find it in me to care, with him.
I sit on the shaky stool by the register and clear out some room on the counter by shoving a stack of inventory purchase orders out of the way. It kills me Sara insists on running this place on analog. The book Teizel left is, on closer inspection, not quite a book. It’s a journal. Bound in delicately carved leather, the outside could’ve fooled me, but the pages are filled with handwritten cursive notes and sketches, making it a manuscript at best.
It carries with it the same feeling of wrongness I’ve come to attribute to Teizel, as if it too belongs to the other world. My stomach drops when I realize what I’d considered beautiful cursive is a different alphabet — I can’t read a single word of this. Instead, I pivot my attention to the charcoal drawings.
They depict unfamiliar scenery of sky-high cliffs and flower-covered hills, of spiral towers shooting towards many-mooned skies, of creatures with precious masks and heavy cloaks. I can’t help the feeling that I’m spying through a window into a world I shouldn’t be allowed to see. Each new illustration sucks me deeper under its spell and I can’t stop turning the pages. There’s an altar above which the moons line up in a perfect strip. A ballroom covered in millions of crystals. A pond circled by a field of fireflies, and inside it…
I freeze. My finger runs along the drawing as if it could wipe the image, but it’s still there. Floating on the water are hundreds of eggs, all inlaid with delicate filigree like the work of Faberge.
Eggs I’ve seen before. Well, at least one of them.
Digging through my bag, I fish out the jewelry box that has lived by my side for the past three days. The trinket egg has four little taloned feet the drawing doesn’t depict, but everything else about it matches, from the color, judging by the amount of charcoal the artist used to draw the eggs, to the patterns on the surface.
This can’t be a coincidence, considering Teizel left this book for me to browse. Surely, he was counting on the fact that I’d draw the connection to the drawing. But without being able to read the text, I have no clue what the scene is meant to represent, which puts me no closer to the solution of the puzzle.
Another realization strikes me like thunder, and I whip my gaze from the book to stare into the infinite. If Teizel knew this would be a hint to the first trinket, he must know what the object means. How many of them has he unraveled, and why wouldn’t he tell me what they mean?
Unless there’s something preventing him from doing so. If he didn’t make the rules of the game, certainly he cannot break them, either. But he’s skirting them.
I run my fingers along the leather cover of the book. It’s warm to the touch, pebbled. Teizel is helping me. The realization doesn’t make me despise him any less — it doesn’t change his deception, his wicked games — but it does bring me a kernel of hope that I might have a fighting chance at this.
