The hardest part is being unable to design a new creative thought with a memory. Some days, I think I might have wanted to be sent to the mortal realm to avoid being king.
Other days, I’m sure I was trapped there.
Mostly, I do not think any of it matters.
So, I use it for fodder for a fictional man who carries my flaws through a world of romance I try not to mirror too closely to my own. Though writing out a very detailed scene involving the murder of a vampire king may be a cathartic solution in the midst of all this waiting.
“Rosie, you should have let him keep playing the piano.” Oak sighs.
“This is … worse somehow,” Holly agrees.
Ah—I am back to pacing. For how long now, I am not sure.
“Heather has been stolen away,” I growl through gritted fangs. “How is it you expect me to act?”
“By leaping into action and ripping someone’s throat out,naturally…” Oak says, rubbing his neck. I open my mouth to apologize once more, but Oak waves my bad behavior away. “We all understand. The wait has been torturous and, in our own ways, we will fight at your side.”
“Patience has never been a virtue I have readily had in my possession,” I say, lowering myself into one of the gilded parlor chairs.
“We just need to figure out which throat to rip out,” Rosie says, giving me a hearty pat on the shoulder. The cheerful tone combined with the grotesque suggestion would be comical if this all wasn’t so dire.
I knew being with me would have dangers. I worried about my form, my claws, and the bite of my fangs. What I did not give enough thought to was the worlds around us, and the way the people in them would pull us apart.
I had hoped the human hunter would have been our first and only foe.
Clara sprints into the room, waving her hands in a wild motion.
“The lavatory is down the hal—” Oak begins, but she shoves him out of the way. I realize she’s holding a small glowing object in her hands.
Her cellphone.It’s shoved into my palm before I can fully grasp Clara’s sudden reappearance. She had wandered out for fresh air, and her phone must have found a signal. Still,thisis unexpected. It must be her. There is no other reason why Clara would have burst into the room in such a way, but as I raise the device to my ear, doubt creeps through me.
“My flame?” It is a question, a prayer, and a plea all in one.
“Moth!!” Heather’s voice wraps around me with the comfort of a cloak. Despite languishing by the piano for hours, no sound has ever sounded more like music to my ears than my name from her lips.
“Heather!” I stand so quickly the chair topples. “Where are you—I will—”
“It’s okay! I’m okay! Well. you know, as okay as I can be,” Her voice crackles. “I’m biding my time. Basically, there was a …misunderstanding.”
“A what?”
What kind of misunderstanding would cause a kidnapping?
“Okay, so like, basically… Magnus thought I agreed to marry him at that ball we went to in Eclipsica. It’s a whole big thing, and now I’m trying to set him up with someone else. So, we made his dating profiles earlier, and I was able to get my phone back and—”
“You are … trying to dowhat?” My claws extend, and I swallow hard in an attempt to keep myself calm.Magnus.
She’s calling him by his first name.
“Babe, he’s literallysopathetic,” she whines. I can almost see the way her full lips pout at the words. How I wish I could kiss her, to feel the softness of her skin, and stop this ridiculous plan all at one. But she continues all the same.
“He’s fixated on me because I helped him at the ball when he was cornered by those awful butterfly twins.”
“My flame, you have been … making an internet online dating profile for your kidnapper?”
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds silly,” she says, and I can just picture her crossing her arms.
She cannot be serious.
