Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXVI⎮Perfume Of Antiquity

In the small hours of the morning had Emma left the vampyre's side, at his behest, the flinty edge to his command affrighting her far more than even the night's confessions. His hasty tone had done much to disquiet her. And before she'd left him in his sylvan kingdom, he'd bade her meet him in his library at dawn. Once abed, her eyes had not strayed from the nighttime shadows playing along the paneled ceiling; not till that first hint of dawn light had swept into her room and allayed her fears. Only then had she succumbed to troubled dreams.

It was nearly midday by the time she left her chamber, overcome with a sudden urgency to see her sister. Milli had likely not found her own bed ere the sun had peered above the treetops. Tiptoeing carefully into her sister's room, Emma's fears were at once lessened to see her sister's chest rising and falling beneath her blankets. But even the sight of Milli's sleeping form, swallowed up by the monstrous four-poster bed, was insufficient to becalm all of Emma's overwrought imaginings and furtive suspicions. Quiet as even a vampyre must be, she stole the counterpane down from her sister's neck and, with tentative fingers, peeled Mill's nightshift lower, thereby unveiling the girl's porcelain throat and pale shoulders.

"Milli? Are you awake?" But not a flutter of an eyelid nor a stirring of a limb affected the sleeping beauty.

For some time she contemplated her sister's unmolested flesh, relief, by degrees, filling her heart. No preternatural fangs had, as far as Emma could discern, pierced Milli's soft skin, and yet the bloom of health seemed wanting in her complexion. It was all very odd, but she was forced to admit that perhaps the long night had exhausted the poor girl so much so that no sound could penetrate that fog of slumber. And that too — all that wild exertion and excitement — would account for her waxy cheeks. Leastwise Emma hoped that that was the case. Be that as it may, she decided, she would be remiss if she did not apply a little more hawthorn behind Milli's ear, and perhaps a touch of garlic to her bedposts before she withdrew to the library. 

Having seen to the duties invested to her by the bonds of sisterhood and love, Emma finally betook herself from the room. As with slow and measured footsteps Emma proceeded to the master's den, her mind, by comparison, set itself to reeling vigorously, furiously riddling through all the frightful congeries she'd witnessed thus far. In fine, her mind and heart were in an opposing tumult as she reached the white and black checkered landing.

Her judgment called for her to act one way whilst her heart — that wretched antipode — urged her to madness. Without knowing which way to act she admitted to herself that she at once abhorred and adored Markus Winterly. She wanted both to flee him and seek him out. That was certainly madness.

I am the sick rose after all! The realization struck her like ice to the chest, for she knew that it was her extreme and fatal curiosity — her obsession with him — that pulled her to the library as though her body was in better accord with her heart than with her deprecating reason; her ailing logic.

And though Emma knew she was only borrowing trouble, she continued onwards. She slipped past the gilded-framed paintings of long-dead ancestors resting silently on the gallery walls and from thence through the library door, entering, at last, the creature's den. A den which, by all appearances seemed wholly uninhabited at this late hour. Not even a footman was to be seen filling the coal scuttles.

"Lord Winterly?" she whispered, loth even to disturb the dust with her breath, but no answer was forthcoming. "Are you here, sir?" Feeling foolish for talking to an empty room, she transferred the clamminess from her palms to her skirts.

It smelled like it always did — the perfume of antiquity. But the ancient mustiness, the olden ink glue, and the sweet vanilla was comforting to her, and the fire's languid chattering beckoned her warmly from the door. She obliged it after only a brief pause, stepping deeper into the vast book-laden chamber.