❝just ourselves and immortality.❞
Daisy Mercer has been told her whole life that vampires are the enemy. Witches are trustworthy. Daemons, well, daemons aren't even worth remarking on. And vampires would kill you without a second thought. But when...
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☾ ☽
DAISY COULD NOT SHAKE THE THOUGHT THAT THERE WAS SOMEONE WATCHING HER.
It had begun only minutes ago, in the mid-morning hours of a cloudy day. Something had changed—the air started to bite at her, the hairs on her arms stood on end, and there was an odd sort of feeling on the back of her head that resembled a cold numbness (such a strange feeling, but there was no other way to describe it). Yet when she looked, there was no one around her that would justify such a thought. No one was looking at her, too busy in their own minds as they passed by her without even a glance. Was she just being paranoid after what had happened yesterday afternoon, her conversation with Gillian after the woman had broken into the lab of two vampires? She had to have been. So she continued on to the shop, with that feeling still surrounding her.
Shopping went as normal as it always did. She picked up food and drink, noticed that some herbs she was running low on were in stock and figured she'd pick them up as well, nothing out of the ordinary. She left the shop with her purchases and headed back the direction of her flat, and then she felt it again, that nagging feeling that someone was watching her. It was worse this time, far stronger than it was before, but still, there was nothing around her that explained it. Her instincts kept telling her, screaming at her, and she couldn't figure out why.
Whatever it was that made her stop when she turned the corner on the street she lived on, she wouldn't be able to name, but her footfalls came to an abrupt halt just moments later. The air chilled. She knew what she would see when she turned around. Someone was standing behind her. The first thing she noticed was that he was tall. Dark hair and cold eyes. The second was that he stood there so calmly, as if he had been waiting for her. The third was the realization that she had seen him before, in the afternoon in the library.
"You're Matthew Clairmont." Her voice shook.
What was he doing back in Oxford? Wasn't he meant to be somewhere in France at his family home, with Diana Bishop? And most importantly—why had he sought out Daisy like this?
The final question that crossed her mind was answered when Matthew Clairmont said, a steadiness to his voice that almost did not fit him, "Your phone, please."
"Why do you want my phone?" Daisy couldn't help but question, but he did not answer. She swallowed her nerves and reached into her pocket to hand it over. Her thumbprint unlocked it for him. Cooperate, and she might just make it out of this alive. But why did he want her phone? He wasn't any sort of mugger. What could be on her phone that—the photographs. The photos Gillian had sent of his lab, he must have wanted them back. Trying to keep her voice as even as his was, she told him, "It wasn't me that broke into your lab."
