Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXIX⎮Sinistra

She moved through the castle, with her forlorn candle, like a specter in her white dinner gown. At what point had her previous life become the dream and her nocturnal visions (those seductive midnight hallucinations) her new reality. She was herself now a night creature — his creature.

Had Mrs. Skinner suddenly appeared out of the darkness just then, as was her nightly wont, it certainly would have stopped Emma's poor heart altogether, but, thankfully, that stealthy spider — whether or not she was watching from some aerial web — kept herself hidden.

Sparing only a glance at the tarnished mirror on the hallway wall, her pallid face so small within the confines of its ancient silver frame, she continued on towards the grand staircase. Her flesh, glimpsed amidst the dusky patination, had seemed so pale in the lowlight, her eyes too large for her face and her nether lids smudged with shadow. Her impromptu portraiture had savored of death and she'd shuddered to look at it. A corpse bride fit for a vampyre's bed. The thought amused her a little.

"Well, if you're to be caged like the master's pet," she murmured to herself, "then you might as well enjoy it." She gave a self-deprecating snort. She had no intention of remaining indefinitely in this gilded cage, not once the first opportunity presented itself. No matter how fatally she loved him, and she did, she would eventually fly away. Albeit for the nonce she would bide her time and perhaps even take some pleasure from the physical aspects of his love, such as it was; but this she would do strictly on her own terms. Not his. As a white queen, not a pawn. And she would remind herself of this whenever the cold claws of self-doubt clutched at her heart.

Along the lacquered banister she trailed her fingers, each marble step taking her that much closer to exquisite doom, as though an invisible red thread had coiled its seductive length about her midriff and was now tugging her forward with languid inexorability. Even her taper flickered nervously in the hush. Or was it flammeous anticipation? Doubtless a little of both, she decided. There was not so much as a draft to be felt as she ascended now that the storm was suspended over the eerie Yorkshire wolds. Perhaps they would have fog by morning.

All too soon she was at the topmost landing and turning left instead of right towards the beckoning safety of her chamber. Sinistra for her tonight. How sinister that sounded. So morbidly appropriate. Nevertheless, she pushed on towards the vampyre's den, and by some foreshadowing coincidence her flame suddenly sputtered out, smote by an obscure gust, just as she reached the imposing door behind which, she knew, he awaited her.

Now she could not retreat even if she had wished to, for all was as black as pitch, save the alluring glow discernible beneath his door; moreover, she was as like to fall and break her neck as find her way back to her room, blinded as she now was. Death by misadventure seemed somehow more tragic than death by exsanguination (leastways it did for the moment), better that she take her chances here, for who better to keep her from such pedestrian calamities than Death himself. At all events, it was too late for second thoughts ... or any thoughts for that matter.

There was no need to knock, she shortly discovered. No sooner had her flame been snuffed than the door was swiftly opened to her. The master stood to the side of the doorway, tacitly inviting her in, halfway dressed and inscrutable, his neckcloth discarded and his white cotton shirt lying open almost to his navel. His cuff, she noted cursorily, still bore the stain of vampyre blood. She endeavored not to gape at the unconcealed ridges of flesh and sinew as she slipped passed him into his chamber, nor to stare at his flawless countenance. But she knew that if she lowered her unsettled eyes to escape the top half of him she'd only wonder about what awaited her beneath his black trousers. And no thanks to the 'literature' in his library, she now had a very good idea of the beast that lay therein. There was no help for it, she could look at none of him without her face filling with vinous heat. The door closed with dooming softness.