Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXXVI ⎮The Invisible Wyrm

Once outside the library, and now without candlelight to guide her, she stumbled through precarious darkness—blinded by shadows, tears, and fear—towards the atrium. She knew not whence she was bound thereafter, only that she was in desperate haste to escape the castle and its master most of all, the consequences be damned as Emma herself must surely be. It was the weight of all the darkness in the world, rushing in her blood like wormwood, that precipitated one calamitous foot in front of the other; and the terrible and overwhelming sense of loss that girded her heart like a cilice. A loss of innocence perhaps? Emma's naiveté had rendered her a purblind fool—to think that she had freely given herself to such a creature. And, what was worse, given herself over to loving the fiend! God help her, she loved him still!

Even as she swiped at her tear-stained cheeks the images she'd seen through the gossamer veils of time and blood rushed into her brain with searing clarity to torment anew. She had watched and keened from some vague empyrean mist, unheard and unseen, as the angel of death had swooped down from above, fallen upon the young queen with bloody tears and fury. She had lain limp and waxen in his arms as he'd violently kissed her breast, weeping as he drank from the hot well of her stuttering heart. When that heart had knelled its last he'd lifted his head to roar at the heavens like a savage wolf, eyes imbrued with black agony, mouth a lurid and slaughterous crimson. She'd watched the white plumage fall rapidly from his wings till they were naught but black scorched bones deformed and tipped with demonic antlers.

Cleopatra's head had lolled aslant, lifeless as a porcelain doll, the black tresses falling away from the viperous wounds over her heart. Bite marks so deep and stark a red they were nigh black against the pale cold flesh.

Emma stifled a whimper and fled along the darkened flags as swiftly as she dared. There was a chthonic and feeble light that disturbed the shadows in the atrium, yet her relief was little dampened, for she had only a few more steps to take across the onyx and alabaster chessboard floor before she reached those imposing doors beyond which lay her escape.

However, as she neared her egress, a darkness at her periphery—which she at first mistook for shadows, stirred atremble by the anemic light as she swept past a sconce—materialized into the dread form from which she'd fled.

Winterly moved to stand before the doors to thwart her escape like the fierce titan he was. "Where are you going? Or have you forgotten our contract so soon?"

"Considering all you have withheld," said she with warmth, "I daresay that contract is not worth the blood it is blackened with."

"You may dare all you wish, but it is not for you to break it at a whim, Miss Lucas." He stepped closer to tower over her. "It is I who decides when and to what extent your contract is fulfilled."

"Then kill me and be done with it." She made to move past him, but she might well have had better success walking through the very walls of the castle, such was the impossibility of getting past an indissoluble wall of preternatural muscle such as the one that now barred her way.

"You speak of death as if it is no more than an insect bite."

"Has not death been the constant stalking shadow in every corner of your castle? I am grown weary of dreading the hour it shall strike me down. Let it come now if it will. I am ready."

"You are no such thing. And I grow weary of your morose tongue." He snapped his teeth with the force of a guillotine. "If you will not heed your vow then perhaps you might heed the hour, madam." As if to emphasize his caveat, the old clock began to toll the midnight hour. "If you must unleash your feminine fits of rage upon the moors then do so at a rational hour if you please. Or do you imagine me to be the only monster you need fear? I assure you, I am not."