“I miss you more,” she promises me, then takes another bite. Her eyes hold no emotion. This isn’t my mother, not really. She’s like a holy apparition. I don’t smell her rosewater perfume or the sweet almond oil she used to moisturize her hands. I can’t reach out and pull her into my arms. Crumbs fall into the air and dematerialize. “Go back to your house, Diantha. It’s where you belong. Let that man take care of you tonight, but then push him away. You have to focus. Can you do that for me?”
I nod. “I promise.”
She lifts the cookie to her lips for a third time. As it snaps between her teeth, darkness consumes me.
Orfeo
When she’s finishedher howling, enormous tears rolling down her face while her tonsils visibly jiggle, I push the cup of tea into her hand.
“Drink, please,” I say softly.
She spins to face me. “You’rethe handsome man?” Her voice is a growl. “You?” Despite her anger, she looks a bit like a plushie toy all wrapped up in two jackets.
I arch a brow. “Scusa?”
“Oh my god—what the fuck is?—?”
She pushes the mug into my bare chest again and begins clawing herself out of the jackets, getting to her feet and flinging herself around like some sort of possessed farm animal. “It’s so goddamn hot in here. Fuck! Open all the windows! I need to get this shit off of me.There’s too much shit on me!”
I set aside the mug and, in an instant, appear at her side.
“Diantha.” I pronounce her name carefully, resting a hand on her shoulder. Her whole body is trembling, and even though she isn’t much shorter than me, she feels so small. The human in her makes her seem fragile, like a little blackbird. I know something ancient and powerful courses through her veins, but all I see right now are those sweet, human tears.
I take her narrow face in my hands, and she turns her dark eyes up on me. Two deep ponds framed by arched brows.Byzantine eyes,they’re called in English. To me, she looks like a goddess. Hecate. Persephone. A woman who should be wrapped in golden fabric and devoured on a settee.
I’d first noticed this quality of her beauty when I’d shifted into the seat beside her in the lecture hall. It isn’t just that she is pleasant to look at, proportionate in the softness of her body and the sharpness of her face. It’s that energy seems to swirl around her. Like she’s suspended in magic, in pure power.
The air around her almost ripples with each of her movements. Even as she thrashed around in her big jacket.
A single tear rolls down her cheek, and I catch it on my thumb. I wonder, for a moment, what it would taste like. Would it be sweet? Would it remind me of a ripe fig, freshly picked from the tree?
Her eyes are swimming still with that far-off look. She’s settling back into her physical body. A curl clings to her forehead, and I brush it aside. “Diantha, tell me what you are.”
Trembling, she lifts her hand to rest over mine. Her touch is like ice against my hot skin. Her fingers curl around my wrist. Mascara runs down her cheeks, and I take control of every cell in my body to keep from leaning in and catching that liquid on the tip of my tongue.
Her smell.
Even her fear smells delicious. It’s nostalgic. Like honeysuckle and cactus flowers floating on the sea air. I know those tears would taste like heaven.Like Rome.
My fangs press painfully into the soft inside of my lower lip.
“You’re…” she whispers. “Naked.”
I snap my eyes back to her foggy gaze. “What?”
“You’re naked, and you’re in my house.”
This feels like an unnecessary clarification. Obviously, I’m not naked, and obviously, I am in her home. I ease my arms around her and guide her to sit at the small table in the middle of the room.
“I took off my shirt because it’s fucking boiling hot in here. And I’m in your house because if I hadn’t scraped you off the concrete, who knows what those two boulder-brained assholes would have done to you by now.” I open a cabinet above the stove. Spaghetti. Perfect. I grab the box and begin searching for a large pot and a pan. “Now, you need to eat something. You’re weak from whatever the hell they did to you.”
“Didtome?” Her voice is thin, weak. “Did they…touch me?”
“What?No.They put some sort of fucking spell on you.”
“A spell?” She’s still coming back to herself, halfway between realms.
I’m too impatient for the speed of this conversation. There’s no point trying to make any headway when she clearly needs sustenance. If only she were also a fucking vampire, I could slit my wrist and get us to the point much quicker. Instead, I have to make her a godforsakenaglio e olio.
