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“On my ownmeaning without my coven’s help or blessing. If the vampires find out that a witch helped, they could blameallwitches. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Oh,” Lozen said, sitting back. “That makes sense.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Saber asked. “Are they going to kick you out or something?”
“Oh, no,” Mia said, even laughing a little. “I’d have to kill another witch to get kicked out of my coven. Witches are, as a rule, nonjudgmental. They're only angry at me, the way families get angry at each other.”
At the end of the meeting, Mia handed out small, crude ‘crowns’ of hemlock, really just branches twisted together.
“What will these do?” Elijah asked, turning his over in his hand, fascinated and skeptical.
“If you’re wearing it, they can’t get in your head,” Mia said. “If you ever encounter a vampire, you’ll know what I mean.”
“They can make youfeelthings,” Saber said, looking at her own crown, remembering. “It can be disorienting. Thanks, Mia.”
“Of course. Everyone keep an ear out. Something will happen soon. I can feel it.”
So they waited for the vampires to show themselves.
And Saber waited to see Ansel.
It was the sixth of December, and cold, even for Washington, with overnight temperatures dipping below freezing. Saber’s dad started a fire in their under-utilized fireplace and turned on the heat, and Saber spent the evening curled up with a schoolbook,The Great Gatsby, in her lap.
The warm, crackling fire, the book, the cozy blanket she was tangled in, it all made her feel a warm, safe comfort. Her eyes started fluttering closed, her mind wandered into dreaminess even as she tried to read, the words becoming jumbled on the page.
“I have to go to bed,” she mumbled to her dad, who barely looked up.
“Sleep tight,” he said, and she pulled herself up from the nest of blankets and staggered sleepily to her room.
She found her bed in the dark and, stripping out of her clothes, she pulled on a T-shirt and tumbled into bed, yanking the fluffy comforter over her head and nestling down into the pillow. For days she’d struggled to sleep, remembering all that had happened in that basement in the mansion, but now she was so tired, so comforted by the warmth of the fire, she could hardly stay awake. Her head had barely hit the pillow when she drifted off into a heavy, thick sleep.
She wasn’t asleep for long. A tapping at her window brought her to consciousness like a submarine rising from deep water.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Never more than once, with a three second interval. Patient, not insistent. A bird?
Saber sat up in bed, her hair a mess around her face, her eyesight bleary. How late was it? She couldn’t tell if it had been minutes or hours.
When she saw a figure, a human figure, at the window she was so startled that she almost screamed, but she swallowed the sound like you’d gulp back water on a hot day.
“Ansel,” she whispered, her heart quickening all the more, and ran to the window.
There, smiling, his eyes bright and glowing, was Derek.
“Open your window,” he said. “Let me in.”
“No,” Saber stammered, shaking her head.
Inside her heart, though, something was uncoiling.Desire.It felt like he was winding something around her body, something invisible, but powerful, and giving her a taste of the pleasure he might give her if she only just opened the window for him.
What’s the worst that could happen?
His smile grew.
