Vampyre Bride ✔️

XX⎮Riddles

"He asked what?!" Milli's hand flew to her mouth in astonishment. "Mercy!" she cried, "how shocking!" But, however, as egregious as she found Emma's account of her private carriage ride with Winterly, Milli also appeared to be taking an abominable sort of delight in the whole affair. "And yet," she went on with a sigh, "how utterly romantic!"

"Your notions of romance, my dear," Emma scoffed, tossing her pillow at Milli, "are decidedly primeval."

They were still abed, it being not yet six o'clock, and all throughout the old castle, the cold, sepulchral silence preponderated, its habitual weight almost stifling. 

Sharing a bed with her, when there were perhaps a hundred others to be had, was not something Milli would have ordinarily suffered Emma to do had not the latter contrived an effectual ruse — of being so thoroughly disquieted by the house that she could not possibly sleep alone.

Emma's pretext was, by and large, not all fabrication, for the castle was not, by any means, conducive to blessed dreams or easeful sleep; however, she was loth to leave her sister's slumber so unguarded the while they resided amidst unearthly beings in this frightful mausoleum.

There was nothing for it but that Emma should continue to forfeit her own rest, so that Milli could continue to sleep unmolested. As a consequence, she was interminably enervated of late, whilst her sister awoke each morning well-rested, fresh of countenance, and blessedly ignorant of their perilous situation. For Emma's part, she was left to furnish herself with intermittent napping, feeling it safe to do so by daylight alone.

In so doing, she had, tragically, become something of a nocturnal creature, which suited her ill, for there was something atavistically comforting about dawn; and, in defiance of that, something altogether menacing about nightfall.

"You will soon find that we Winterlys are a nocturnal breed." And now she was coming to understand why that should be; and that the devil had, all this time, been so marvelously sly about his innuendos. Wolfishly forthright.

Would that she could go away this very day, leave this place and nevermore return, but that was impossible without arousing the suspicions of her host and hostess. In a sense she felt trapped here.

"Emma!" Milli waved her hand comically in front of her sister's face. "I'm talking to you."

"Yes, yes." She blinked away the cobwebs and refocused her attention on her sister. "I'm listening," she promised, smothering a yawn.

"I was just saying that it smacks of conceit on his part to dare assume that you would consent to be his ...to do ... well, to do such a thing as...!" Milli, poor dear, was evidently finding the notion altogether inexpressible. "What can be the meaning of it!" she finally managed.

"Indeed," Emma replied, giving in to the yawn, at last, as she settled back into her pillows. "He has proved himself to be most daring." Although she assumed an air of composed impassivity, for her sister's sake, she was quite the opposite. She had thought of nothing else since that fateful kiss and the subsequent carriage ride from Whitby Abbey; could neither eat nor sleep for fear — nay, for anticipation — of his asking her that same question again. "As to the meaning of it," she went on, "I daresay he meant to make a mistress of me."

"Like the light o'loves we saw at Vauxhall Gardens!" And then her sister's gaze twinkled with mischief. "Did you refuse him, Emma?"

"Decidedly!" she said disapprovingly, "I wonder at your feeling the need to even ask that of me."

"Well, Lord Winterly is very handsome, I myself should have been tempted. And he is exceedingly tall, to say nothing of the splendor of his figure—"