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“Yes, but how?” I ask.
“You must feel a little burn in your thighs, no?” Valtu asks, raising a black brow. “We just climbed all this way. Only took about three hours to do two thousand feet.”
I blink rapidly. “I don’t understand. I don’t remember any of it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he muses, then he turns around and heads up the stone steps that lead to the giant metal doors at the edge of the cliff face.
Abe puts his hand at my lower back and guides me forward. He leans into me and whispers, “When I said I didn’t know where he lived, I wasn’t kidding.”
I don’t say anything to that since I know Valtu can hear us. I guess the words Valtu said when he snapped his fingers, the Latin, was some sort of memory spell. If he can erase me from his memory, surely he has the power to do the same to others. I feel like I’d been out cold the entire hike, but he’s right, my thighs do burn a little and when I look down at my coat and my hands, they’re dirty like I’ve been climbing up a mountain.
Fuck. The idea that I’ve had three hours of memory wiped doesn’t sit well with me.
I’m still a little woozy and I’m grateful for Abe’s support as he helps me up the slick steps to the metal doors that open automatically for us, no doubt thanks to some magic of Valtu’s. Having that book for so long must mean he’s learned every spell there is to know. Another shiver goes down my back, this one cold and unpleasant. The absolute power that Valtu has at his disposal is overwhelming to think about. The destruction that this vampire can do, if he hasn’t done some already.
I try to keep my thoughts guarded and push them away. I focus on the castle instead. It’s not hard to do. It’s a marvel of engineering.
Everything inside is rock and stone. From the polished floor to the rough walls. There’s enough light thanks to all the windows and the unobstructed view of the world beyond, but the place is still dark and full of shadows. It’s a little creepy, if I do say so myself. There are some touches of warmth, like the blazing fire in the corner of the living area and the sconces lit all over, a mix of candlelit and electric bulbs, with some soft-looking Turkish rugs strewn about on the floor and rich tapestries and paintings on the walls, but even so it still puts me on edge. It certainly is the type of place that Dracula would find himself in. Cold, dark, and utterly Gothic.
“This is the main level,” Valtu says, gesturing around. “The kitchen, which has more human food than you might imagine, the living area, the dining room, a couple of bedrooms down there.” He nods to where a hallway snakes past the kitchen (which also looks straight out of the 1800s, except for the stainless-steel fridge), and disappears into darkness. “Then there’s the upstairs.”
He starts heading straight toward a wall and I fear he’s going to walk right into it but then suddenly he disappears. I make an astonished noise and go after him, while Abe chuckles behind me, obviously having seen this before.
As I get to the wall I realize it’s just an optical illusion in the rock and that you can actually walk around a corner. I follow Valtu as he heads up a flight of stairs that seem to zig zag through the dark, a few lone candles flickering on the walls, the wicks burning low. The air smells cold, like snow and frost and alpine, tempered with the scent of smoke from the fire and candles.
Most of all though, I smell Valtu.
His scent hasn’t changed.
Walking behind him up these steps, it feels like my heart is being bled dry by the sight of him, the smell of him. Mint and oranges and something deeper, almost ancient, like santal or smoked oud. His scent seems to ignite every nerve inside, making my stomach do summersaults, my heart skip a few beats. Heat floods through me, enough so that he glances down at me over his shoulder and raises his brow, as if asking himself a question.
He can probably smell what my body is doing. I have to wonder if this is unusual for him, if the women or men that are usually brought here for his enjoyment have come so ready and willing, or if they’ve needed money or drugs to make it happen, to let their guards down and relax.
My stomach stops the summersault and starts to twist, the pit of jealousy hot and deep. I don’t want to think about the others. It’s ridiculous. I know vampires are a possessive bunch and that includes me now, but I also know that sex is just sex in many cases. Valtu has lived on and on while I have lived and died in my lives. To imagine he, of all people, has been celibate while I’ve been dead is ridiculous.
And yet the feelings persist. I have to do what I can to ignore it.
Valtu’s attention turns back to the floor we step out onto. It’s like a mezzanine that leads out through shuttered doors onto a large balcony. Several dark hallways lead off in different directions, disappearing into the rock. But the mezzanine itself catches my eye because as I adjust to the dim light, I see it’s a music room of sorts. There’s a few velvet and brocade couches and leather wing-backed armchairs, another roaring fire, then a piano on one side and on the other a massive organ that looks like it’s been half-built into the rock wall.
The sight of the organ stuns me.
“Oh my god,” I can’t help but say and Valtu gives me an odd look.
“Never seen an organ before?” he asks and for a moment I think he suspects who I am, like this organ was put here as a trap. But then he walks over to it and lets his fingers trail over the keys without creating any noise. “I figured a proper vampire’s lair would need an organ,” he says lightly.
While he’s staring at the organ, I look to Abe with my brows raised in question. Even if he doesn’t remember Dahlia, does he know that she played the organ and that’s how they’d met? Or has he avoided all the details of our life together?
Abe just gives me a quick shrug, answering absolutely nothing, then says, “If you get Valtu drunk enough he might even play you something.”
Valtu chuckles and turns around, giving me an apologetic look. “I’m afraid I’m not very good anymore. I was a music teacher at one point…that’s one of the reasons I chose Mittenwald. Did you know that it’s been famous for violin-making since the seventeenth century? I couldn’t quite give music up…” He laughs again, though there is no humor in it. His tone is hard and bitter. “And yet I haven’t touched any of these instruments in years.”
He glowers for a moment and then seems to snap out of it. “If you wish to stay the night, Abe, your room is same as before, downstairs. But, Rose, yours is over here.”
Valtu heads down one of the narrow hallways that twists and turns crookedly in the dark and I notice that Abe isn’t following, which makes me uneasy. It shouldn’t. This is Valtu. This is my love. And yet I can’t help but be on edge.
“Here is your room,” he says, opening a heavy wooden door with a creak. He gestures for me to step in.
I do so, looking around. It’s relatively small and cold with one narrow window to a blur of white outside which I come to realize is a passing cloud. That’s how high up we are.
