Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXXVIII⎮The Sound of Silence

At the threshold, Emma was confronted by the familiar, devastating gleam of Markus's Hadean glare, mirror-like—monstrous—in the low light. Though there was ample room to enter past him, she halted and deflected her gaze up to the glimmering firmament. To the seat of grace from which he'd fallen.

"What are you waiting for?" The heat of brimstone pervaded each of his clipped words.

"For absolution," said she, lowering her gaze from Heaven with a melancholic shrug. "Or for God to dispatch a thunderstone upon my head."

He considered her a moment. After a pause, in which he raised a sardonic brow, glancing briefly up at Heaven, he said, "Yet here you stand with impunity, my dark rose."

The cold had by now thoroughly saturated Emma's damp skin. She gave an involuntary shiver and wrapped her arms tight about her chest. Her obvious discomfort instantly galvanized all affected calm—what little he had been evincing thus far—clear from Markus's features.

His brow buckled beneath the substantial weight of his choleric. "Why should He waste a thunderstone on you—" Markus ignored her shriek of fright as he snatched her up in his arms "—when you're making fast work of dispatching yourself just fine?" He then booted the door shut with a curt slam and marched her to his library. There they were met with a hearty fire licking feverishly at the logs, its efforts so worthy that the heat it threw at her, when he set her down by the hearth, was such as to rival even Markus's ire. It was with brusque energy that he began unfastening the buttons of her dress.

Suspicion stiffened her limbs and she promptly slapped his hands away. "If you think for a moment that I would—"

"Are you determined to catch a cold and die just to spite me?" He paused only to glower at her. Then, with a peremptory tug, the dress split down her back and glided to the floor in a desultory heap so that she was now only scantily covered in her clinging chemise and wet boots.

She surreptitiously turned her ankle just enough to impede his view of the booted weapon. She could not have felt more exposed than if she was standing in nothing but the flesh God gave her, but Markus appeared not to notice or, rather, to care.

"You had better not do something so perverse as to contract an ague whilst I'm gone." He turned from her with a growl and stalked directly from the room, threatening tea and blankets on his return.

As soon as his footsteps were heard no more, she fell into action. Searching frantically about her, Emma seized the dagger free of her boot. She really could not say how long his domestic errand would occupy him. In spite of her haste and flurried movements, however, she could not very well ignore the glaring discovery, upon pulling her weapon from its sheath, that the blade was forged not from iron but from blackened wood! A hardwood blade with a killing edge so sharp, or so her bleeding thumb attested, she was obliged to shove the injured digit into her mouth, lest the smell of her blood summon the vampyre all the sooner.

Her next act was to rush, extempore, towards Markus's formidable armchair, all the while wary and listening for his returning footfalls. One last glance at the door satisfied her she was yet alone, so she buried it, deep and secure, between the upholstery and cushions. Without, she hoped, impaling the armchair in her haste as she had done to her poor thumb.

Emma had quite worked herself into a fever fit by the time Markus materialized at the door. She was now not only cold and still shivering but had, on a sudden, also begun to feel quite nauseous. The sight of her thus wracked with tremors, if it could be believed, only further provoked Markus's temper.

He set the tea tray down with a clamor and, with the blanket still over his arm, stalked towards her and cupped her cheek with a surprisingly gentle touch. His eyes tightened with suspicion. "What have you done? You look ill."