Chapter 17
Seventeen
JULIAN
Maris needs better sense, at least a semblance of self-preservation.
Anything. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t do something this fucking stupid again once she’s mine.
I frown at the back of her head, her dark hair slides over her shoulder and swishes when turns her head at the top of the grand staircase to look from left to right like she’s crossing the street.
She’s defenseless.
Sweet.
Ripe.
If I was another vampire, I’d have her throat torn out and be gorging myself on her.
The scent of her blood lingers on my fingers.
It was a battle not to sample her blood while I cleaned her wounds.
I almost fucking licked the side of her face, the cut on her cheek tempting me more than it should have when she fucking licked me. I reined myself in. Just barely.
“It’s just up another floor,” Maris tells me.
Her voice is soft, gentle, not at all like the woman that confessed her sins to me last night.
I see the idiot I buried for her, brains smashed out.
No one would think the soft spoken woman holding my hand and leading me to her bedroom would be capable of hurting a fly.
The longer I’m with Maris, the softer she gets.
Like warm honey sliding from a spoon, sticky and sweet.
Mouth-watering.
I follow Maris down the hallway and up the next staircase.
It’s less grand than the one we took from the first floor.
I look around as we walk. There’s a window halfway up the narrow staircase.
No doubt an old servant’s staircase when the affluent didn’t want to be reminded of the hands that ran their households.
Maris is quiet while we walk but she doesn’t let go of my hand.
She stays just a step ahead, hand clasped tight to mine.
She holds me with a desperation I recognize well from the patients I tended to that didn’t have visitors.
Those souls that had no one wondering about their health or charts, the ones that only had nurses and doctors for company throughout the day.
There was an emptiness to those patients. A need that had taken root in them and shone out of them so bright you could see it in their eyes, feel it when you touched them. Maris holds me tight like she thinks I’m going to vanish. I give her hand a reassuring squeeze to remind her that I’m here.
That I’ll stay.
“You came back?”
That question. It hangs in the air, bears down on my shoulders and reminds me of the heavy fog that rolled in across the Seattle skyline in the mornings.
Her soft words, the desperate hold she has on my hand, the way she didn’t believe I would choose to come back to her, it pulls me closer, begs me to crack her open and see her for what she really is because I know what Maris can be.
She can be brutal. A murderess with an inconvenient conscience she hates. A bitter, angry woman, but she’s also scared. Lonely. Desperate.
Mine.
The word claws into my throat and chokes me just as easily as the desperate woman holding my hand invites me in.
Maris’ room is at the top of the stairs on the third floor.
It faces the street. Sunlight streams into the room from the open window, floor-length lace curtains sway in the wind as the shadows of ivy swaying in the midday sun paints the floor.
The shadows bend and twist, reaching towards us like an eager lover’s touch.
The room is not what I thought Maris might choose.
It’s regal in a princess sort of way with detailed gold filigreed molding and dark floors.
Wallpaper in the color of cornflower blue covers the walls and crystal light fixtures hang from them.
The bed is monstrous, a pale pink piece in the Rococo style.
Animals and vines are etched into the high arching headboard that reaches to the ceiling a good ten feet and the figures become aquatic the higher up I look, the headboard widening before it curves in and over the bed to form the pretty shape of a scallop shell.
Of course she sleeps in a fucking seashell.
I almost can’t believe how perfect the bed is for Maris, the perfect place for her to lay her head like some sort of murderous Venus, the unsuspecting siren waiting to drag a man to his watery grave.
Sun glints off the gold scalloped edges of the ornate bed frame.
Above it is a pink and white curtained canopy.
A breeze blows in, the chilly air sweeping the curtains away and the canopy swishes from side to side.
Maris left her bed unmade, the sheets and blankets and pillows lay rumpled and thrown.
I can picture her laying there, body languid and hair rumpled from sleep.
My very own Aphrodite. Venus mine.
“It’s weird, I know,” Maris rasps and drops my hand. She crosses her arms, eyes downcast. I can feel her pulling away from me by the second so I step in close and take her hand again.
“I think it’s beautiful. Interesting choice for sure but I haven’t seen anything like this outside of a museum.”
I’m being honest. Maris’ bed isn’t something mass produced or available in a trendy boutique where bored socialites shop when they’re between galas. The bed is old, original, nothing made this century at all.
“It was Isla’s.”
I know that name. I read it on the plaque. Still, I play dumb, preferring to give Maris something to talk about while I get her into bed. It’ll help her fall asleep faster, like counting backwards from ten when you’re about to be put under for an operation.
“Tell me about her.”
“There’s not much to tell.” Maris walks with me to her bed. She stands beside me while I start to sort out the blankets and pillows enough to get her in. “She founded this place, built this home, I-I started sleeping in this room after the accident.”
“The break in,” I supply.
“Yeah, that,” she whispers and gets into bed when I motion her to. “I couldn’t sleep on the first floor anymore after that.”
“That was where your room was before?”
“Yes, I slept there growing up. It was great for sneaking out in high school.”
“I can see you doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Breaking the rules,” I say. Maris is laying on her back and looking up at me with wide eyes.
She looks more innocent now that she’s in her damn seashell bed.
She pulls the blankets tight when I sit on the bed beside her.
“You’re going to start feeling the effects of the sleeping pills soon. Don’t fight it.”
Maris will feel the effect of the pills but she’ll also feel my bite.
Both will have the same effect of putting her under.
It’s a dance I played with patients when I found a particular human with better than average blood.
My blood heals wounds, vampire bites included.
There won’t be a sign of me tasting her when I’m done and if she remembers me feeding it’ll all just come off as a dream.
“Okay,” Maris whispers. Her eyes shift past me to look up at the seashell above her. “Sometimes I wonder what she would think of me.”
“Who? Isla?”
She nods. “Yes. I don’t think she would be very impressed by the current state of affairs.”
That makes me crack a wry smile. “And what affairs would those be?”
Her eyes come to me. “My life. The newspaper. It’s dying.
This house.” Maris’ voice is getting sleepier, her words coming slower.
I can hear her start to drift off the longer she speaks, “I feel like I keep trying to repair things but it’s no use.
It all keeps falling apart. A-and I-I’m not a good person, Julian,” she ends on a yawn.
She’s right. She’s not.
“Being good is boring,” I tell her.
She gives me a sleepy smile. “Yeah…that’s true. Boring people suck. I never…thought I would still be here.”
I reach out and stroke the side of her face. I catch a lock of her dark hair and twirl it around my finger. “Be where, Maris?”
“This…town. I was going to…move away. I was going to…see the world.”
“And be famous?” I ask. It’s the same story I’ve heard from any small town would-be debutantes, because it’s easy to see that Maris is as high class in Vesper Point as anyone could hope to be, minus her murderous hermit ways, that never met her potential.
The ones too scared to actually be uncomfortable.
It surprises me that Maris is one of them.
“No…famous people are idiots.” She makes a face and turns her face into my touch. “I was going…to see…see…the world. Die somewhere new.”
Once again, Maris has completely and utterly captivated me with her answer.
“How the fuck do you keep doing this?” I whisper to her but Maris doesn’t answer me.
She’s asleep. I scrub a hand over my face and let out a deep, resigned sigh.
Even if Maris was awake to answer me she wouldn’t be able to.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing to me any more than I fucking understand why it’s working.
I move closer to Maris and look her over.
She’s pretty when she’s asleep. She’s beautiful when she’s awake, but now it’s softer.
Pretty. Like all humans do, Maris looks younger when she’s asleep.
Her eyelashes flutter. They’re so long that they fan out across her pale skin and brush the top of her cheeks.
Maris’ lips part and she sighs, that soft sound of breath has me leaning in close to her.
I slide her hair back from her neck, one hand at the back of her head and pause to take her in.
She’s lovely, the veins under her skin singing to me.
I can see them, an intricate roadmap of lines beneath Maris’ skin that beg me to taste them, to possess them.
Each one is a beautiful path for me to follow.
I shift Maris in my arms and the pliant woman turns in her sleep to nestle closer.
She wants this.
It’s a line that all vampires trot out when they have a human they truly desire.
One they haven’t made a Thrall because the pleasure of their company is more intoxicating than mindless obedience could ever hope to be.
I rolled my eyes when I heard the vampires insist on it even though I could tell their human was just in it for the chance of becoming a vampire.
Delusional. That’s what I called them. I’d never want a human, I’d never take one and swear they belonged to me, or find my pleasure and entertainment in their existence.
But here I am, holding Maris like she’s the most precious, delicate being on the face of this fucking planet while I drop fang and wax poetic about her fucking veins. I lean closer, fingers stroking the side of her neck where I feel her pulse the strongest.
Ba-dump. Ba-dump.
It’s music to my ears, a fucking symphony.
I might have just fed on the padre but while he was fucking surprisingly delicious, the feed was driven by pettiness, a definite moment of me acting out at being forced into this small town because my maker fucked me over…
again. Call me old-fashioned but betrayal from a maker brings my idiot teen to the surface. Maris is different.
Maris is because I want her. The blood is just a benefit.
At first I only planned to give her mine to speed up the healing.
She’ll wake up tomorrow fresh as a daisy because of my blood.
It’s a trick I used on patients that needed more care, the ones that were about to keel over and were decent enough.
Even though I’m a soulless demon, there’s a line to how much suffering I’ll watch before I decide to intervene.
Maris has been mine since she stumbled into the confessional booth last night.
I lift Maris and move into her ridiculous seashell bed with her and ease her into my lap.
Maris is out cold. The sleeping pills are effective but I’m sure she’s also just that exhausted.
Murder is tough work, I should know. A quick slip of my fang along my wrist is all it takes before I open Maris’ mouth and offer her my blood.
I hold it over her mouth and squeeze my fist to force my sluggish veins to work faster.
Like all vampires, my heart beats at a glacier pace and it takes some coaxing to get my blood moving.
A drop hits her tongue and she sucks in a sharp breath.
For a moment I think she’s going to open her eyes.
“Fuck.”
I freeze and watch her, waiting for her to move or open her eyes.
I’ll have to glamour her then. I wait another second but thankfully she doesn’t open her eyes.
Instead, Maris moves closer to me, she turns her body into me and curls close like she knows I’m there.
I have to nudge her onto her back to make sure I don’t get any blood anywhere other than inside of her.
One drop at a time I feed her until I’m sure she’s swallowed enough.
By the time I lick my wrist to close the wound, Maris' wounds are healing. They’re not entirely healed but her black eye has all but vanished and her split lip is gone.
She’s prettier when her face isn’t beat to shit.
I look her over for another second. With my blood in her system she won’t wake up. Vampire blood relaxes humans, it’s an aphrodisiac to some, but mostly it makes them feel drunk. She’ll sleep well.
I lift Maris in my arms and when she scoots in closer to me, I let her. She nuzzles her face against my chest and lets out a contented sigh when I pull her closer. See, my idiot vampire brain tells me—she wants this, even in her sleep. She wants you.
“She’s just touch-starved, that’s all,” I whisper but still no human has reached for me like this.
She’s like a moth to a flame. I stroke her hair for a moment and lean in to lick the side of her neck.
Fuck. The second I feel her heat, feel the beat of her pulse against my lips, I almost bite down.
I don’t though. I’ll rip her throat out with how keyed up I am.
“Do not kill her,” I order myself, like I did when I was young. “Under no conditions.”
I bite down and finally taste Maris. The second her blood hits my tongue, fruity with a dash of spice, I know I’m fucked. I moan, arms tightening around her and pull her as close as I can get her.
I’m so unbelievably fucked. Not because I’m going to kill her. No never that. I’d rather stake myself than ever harm her.
But because I’m going to fall in love with Maris. It should be impossible for me, my heart barely beats, but for her it sings. I lift my head and look down at the sleeping woman in my arms. I cradle her close like she’s precious, made of glass, because to me she is.
“Wife,” I whisper.