She was on the ground; he was above her. Everything fading.
One of those strange memory-like flashes, she thought. Though it made no sense to her at all. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would make her feel more for him. It seemed like the kind of thing that should make her feel less. Like he was the one who had wounded her somehow—but then it flickered out.
She was left with him trying to say something.
Trying to lift his hand.No, she thought he was telling her.
Then his breathing hitched once, twice, and he was still.
That one eye went dull and fixed. Still resting on her, but with nothing more behind it. She could fully see there was nothing behind it, and yet for a moment she couldn’t quite believe it. It seemed staggering that someone who loomed that large could be gone.
And to the point where she simply had to double-check.
She leaned down, just to see if she could hear one hint of him.
Some faint breathing, another word, anything, anything at all.
And shedidactually get something.
His hand coming up, whip quick, to get her by the back of her neck. Hard, so hard she couldn’t get away, even though she immediately and violently jerked back. She put a hand out to shove him and instead buried it in what felt like a mess of blood and guts.
But somehow it didn’t seem to matter. He was still terribly strong—and apparently seemed to feel no pain at all. She squeezed whatever she had just sunk into, and he barely reacted. He just gripped her harder and yanked her down, and when he did, she knew.
She knew what was going to happen.
It felt like she had always known somehow.
Like that black gaze had given it away. Like that coldness had told her what she was too afraid to believe. She could barely believe it now, even as she felt his mouth on her throat. The sting of razor-sharp teeth, hotter and brighter than she would ever have thought, from seeing guesses at it in films and reading about it in books.
But she let herself embrace the word, as she sank down into oblivion.
She saw it behind her eyes, printed, like on the page she had read only a little while ago. The thing he was, his secret, his weakness, the thing he most likely suspected she had known, the way she knew it now.
Harker St. James wasn’t human.
He was a vampire.
Chapter Eight
She woke like someone who had slumbered at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years. Slowly, heavily, and with little memory or understanding of what the surface was like. Her world was the still, strange darkness down there now. There was no easy way back to even the wild sort of normality that existed at Harrowhall.
How could there be?
Her mortal enemy was a vampire.
He had bitten her, hard and brutally enough that she wasn’t even sure how she was still alive. It was supposed to have killed her, something like that. And even if he had somehow stopped short, resisted, spared her—there were other things that definitely should have finished her off.
Because when she finally managed to focus on her surroundings, she could see she was still in the library. That was a line of burgundy book spines directly in her line of sight. She looked down, and there was the polished parquet floor. And she recognized the brown leather beneath her body.
It was one of the couches that lined the borders of the main space. She was sprawled on it—as if she’d maybe gotten away, and staggered to it, and collapsed into its plump, pillowy embrace. And then for some inexplicable reason, the wraiths had left heralone. They had not touched her. They had let her sleep off being drained by Dracula, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Could be he marked you as his kill, her mind threw up.
And that made enough ramshackle sense for her to try to get it together. She had to, really. She could hear the staff starting their day, from the direction of the main desk. A student was asking a question in a high fluting voice that grated against the insides of her head. As if she was just hungover.
It felt like she was, truthfully.
She sat up and the world spun, then settled into a slow sway. Her stomach lurched, and most likely the only thing that spared her was the lack of anything in it. Her last meal had been the inch of an egg she had managed with Anaya. The meal before that some packets of crackers.
