She felt it and pulled away, brows drawn. Hurt.
I looked down at myself. A fine coating of white-grey coated my clothing where her skin had touched me.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” she asked. “I was so worried, Lilith. I was—I was so, so worried.”
I swallowed a stab of guilt.
She was worried, and I was… I was…
I was happy there. In no great rush to come back. No great hurry to escape the quiet comfort of Vale’s home.
The final remnants of the dream I’d been living in for the last week faded away.
I hadn’t even written to her. What kind of a sister was I? Too preoccupied with—with some man— “He didn’t hurt me,” I said. “He was…”
Kind. Caring.
I settled on, “He let me recover there.”
Her mouth pinched. “When you were bleeding? You’re lucky you made it out of there alive.”
I felt foolish for not putting that together sooner—that I had been bleeding, and I probably had been very, very tempting to Vale.
“He showed no interest in eating me,” I chuckled. “Don’t worry.”
And yet, as I said it, I heard his voice: You are a very beautiful woman.
Felt his hand on my leg.
Mina was giving me a strange look.
“Well. I’m glad you’re alright. I was… we were just all so worried about you, alright? Don’t you dare leave me like that again.”
I agreed, but it was a lie. That was the cruel joke with Mina and I. She’d leave me, or I left her. I’d do everything I could to make sure it was the latter.
“A letter came for you this morning,” Mina told me later that evening. “It’s in your office. It’s… strange.”
She was right. The letter was strange. But strange in a way I now was beginning to know quite well. The paper of the envelope looked as if it could be a decade old, yellowed and a little crumpled. It was closed with a red wax seal.
I knew right away that it was him. I smiled to myself when I held it, just because it reminded me so much of him. It was so… well, so vampiric.
I opened the envelope. Inside, there were a few torn-out pages of books with notes and translations scribbled in the margins in the handwriting I now recognized as Vale’s.
And then there was a letter. At the top was my name, and then several black drips of ink, like he’d hovered the pen over the page for a long time, thinking about what to write.
Lilith,
I hope you made it home safely. I found some more notes for you. I thought you wouldn’t want to waste the time without them.
I welcome any letters you wish to send before your visit.
I will help you however I can.
If you want it.
Vale.
I didn’t realize I was smiling until my cheeks began to ache.
It was so…
Familiar. So strangely familiar. Just a few stilted lines. None of the flowery language of polite society.
And yet, I knew it said so much that wasn’t written in these words, too.
I set the letter down and jumped when I realized Mina was standing behind me. I cursed and shoved the letter into my pocket, even though I didn’t know why my impulse was to hide it.
But she had seen it, anyway.
“You startled me,” I said.
“Be careful, Lilith,” she said. “You know what will happen if they know. If they find out.”
My mouth was dry.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I didn’t want Mina to know, either. But who was I fooling? She was so much smarter than anyone ever gave her credit for.
And she was smart enough to know when I was lying.
She gave me a hard look. “Be careful.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I wrote to Vale every few days, and then every two days, and then every day. Sometimes, even, multiple times a day.
Ravens would appear in my garden, ready to deposit his latest letter or take mine back to him. Sometimes he sent his messages with magic, the parchment appearing in little puffs of white-blue smoke—those letters were always his most frantic, like he’d had an idea he couldn’t wait for a raven to tell me about, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t devour those the quickest of all.
Vale’s enthusiasm was impressive, but even more surprisingly, it was… familiar. Before, I had respected him, the way one needs to respect a great beast by recognizing that it’s something older and stronger and more powerful than you. But with each one of these letters, that respect turned from a respect of nature to the respect of a friend.
His handwriting was sometimes sloppy, his notes scrawled in margins or at an askew angle across the parchment, like he was in such a rush he couldn’t stop long enough to straighten the paper. I could imagine him writing them, leaning over a messy desk, hair falling around his face, surrounded by open books. He had less reverence for the artifacts around him than I did—he had no qualms about tearing out pages of books to send to me, folded up and scribbled on.
When I had first met him, it had been impossible to imagine him embodying that kind of enthusiasm. But now I could so clearly picture him as the general—the general attacking problems with strategic, unrelenting verve. He had never been a man of science, and his inexperience showed, yes—but he also learned fast, and he wasn’t afraid to ask questions or admit his own ignorance, a quality that many men lacked. Much of the information he sent me was genuinely helpful, and when it wasn’t, he wanted to learn why.
It wasn’t just work, either. He wove little fragments of his life into those letters, too, doodled in the corners or at the bottom of the page. A little drawing of a bird he’d seen on his balcony railing. Mundane observations about the weather: The wind is cold today. How can you people call this spring?
But I liked those things, too. I liked that they so easily allowed me to imagine him, shivering a little under the nighttime breeze. I even liked that he wanted those banal details from me, too.
One day, he ended his letter with a drawing of a nightbane flower, and a tiny note beside it: sweet with a bitter bite.
It was an afterthought, like he hadn’t even known that he’d drawn it. The rest of the parchment was filled with information he’d taken from his Obitraen books—useful stuff, actually, far more useful than a little flirtatious drawing.
And yet, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that flower. From his words beside them. Those letters were not scribbled. They were delicate and soft and elegant, like he had been very careful about how his pen had caressed them.
Sweet with a bitter bite. I could still feel the way his breath had skittered over my skin when he said those words to me that night, when he told me he thought it was what I would taste like.
And sometimes, in the rare moments I allowed myself to sleep, I would lie awake staring at the ceiling, eternally conscious of the way my clothing felt against my skin. And I would slide my own fingertips over my inner thighs—higher—and imagine, without meaning to, what his caress would feel like there, too.
Good, I decided.
It would feel good.
The truth was, I was shamefully, secretly grateful for the distraction of my task and Vale’s letters. Because I worked, and Mina withered.
Every morning I swept the dust from the door. Every evening it was covered over again. Church hymns rang through the streets, the air thick with the smoke of another funeral pyre, and another, and another. The smoke was thinner each time, because now, there was often so little left to burn.