“Please. Five foot three is hardly two apples. You’re just gargantuan.”
“I wish I was. Then my face would be too far away from your body to catch your scent. God, do you have any idea how glorious that scent is? I dream of it. I live for it—every day I feel an inch away from losing myself right into it. And if I did, if I do, oh, Jesus, just drop me here, just let me die,” he gasped.
While she did her absolute damnedest not to listen.
It was just the ravings of a starved vampire.
Once she got him sorted, she would never have to hear him talking ever again. Or at least, not in a way that made her feel all weird and shaky and like she was about to burst with magic. She just had to focus. “Don’t be so dramatic. Just tell me where your dorm is,” she managed to get out. But god, he was no help on that score at all.
“I don’t live in a dorm.”
“Of course you don’t. Okay, your majesty, point me to your palace.”
“It’s down in the basement. North wing, seventh staircase from the left.”
What the heck?she thought.
She couldn’t linger on this fact, however.
She had to just keep up the veneer of sardonic calm she had slapped on.
“Christ. Well, at least you’ve come to your senses enough to let me take you.”
“It’s not my senses talking to me now. It’s the part of me that knows you’ll be trapped down there,” he said, in a way that made her want to update her serial killer tally again. But when she tried, she found she couldn’t.
Because even an overt threat afforded her a strange sort of safety.
“Good of you to be honest and warn me, I guess.”
“There’s enough of me still left to, darling.”
“Don’t call me darling. In fact, don’t say anything else at all,” she ground out, from between teeth that were now gritted. Though she was surprised when he fell mercifully quiet. They made their way through a warren of increasingly dim hallways in silence—or near enough to silence anyway. There was still therattle of her increasingly harsh breathing, echoing in the emptiness. And the click of his expensive shoes on the polished floor.
She didn’t even know how he was still wearing them.
He’d lost his fancy coat somewhere in the middle of the night. His shirt was missing a sleeve and most of its buttons. Like he’d tried to tear it off and only half succeeded. Though he went for the rest, the second they were at his door. “This one,” he said, once they’d passed several of the same, all featureless wood.
Like storerooms, she thought.
But didn’t have time to think more.
He was half naked now. Through the door but on his hands and knees. “Oh god, I’m burning up,” he moaned, as he crawled into the room. “I feel like I could tear off my own skin.” And she simply couldn’t let him do that. She followed him and shut the door behind her, fully expecting him to spring up and get her.
You fool, she imagined him saying.
But he didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t do anything. He just made his way across the threadbare rug-covered floor, until he got to the bed. Old looking and a little rickety, with what looked like a metal frame.An iron frame, she realized with a start. And that wasn’t the only thing that got her in the guts.
There was also the window above it.
The one that looked a little off, to her eye. She glimpsed a deep twilight-colored sky, a hint of velvety grass, maybe a tree in one corner, and went back for a longer look immediately.
And sure enough, it wasn’t a look through to the outside at all.
It was a painting. Someone hadpainteda window view onto the wall. And this seemed so odd, for a second she forgot everything else. She just stared at this thing—and then at other strangethings in the room, too. Old statues and busts stacked about the place, rugs rolled into corners, what seemed to be a large brass tub in some small, dank room beyond. And the bookcases—oh, there were so many bookcases.
It was practically a cave of them.
Gorgeous to her, of course.
