Chapter 22 Osculation
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
OSCULATION
Nightwalkers are prohibited from falling in love with a human.
— Serun’s Law
I asked the Bleeder to take me to the red room before sunset. He didn’t seem to mind. Excitement stirred in his voice when I did, and he escorted me there without hesitation.
Little did he know, the reason I wanted to go earlier wasn’t that I was excited to see the nightwalker.
No.
I feared the looks from my friends. Cole’s confused expression and Manni’s tight smile. There is no excuse for my choice to return this time. Emily is easy to convince, but Manni always knows when I am lying, and Cole is my brother. I’d rather not see any more disappointment on their faces.
The doors close, and the white light cuts out, leaving a now-familiar red hue clinging to my skin and clothes. I make my way to the bed, with a quick look at the table. The wineglass isn’t there.
Sitting down, I anxiously rub my palms against my thighs.
Memories of the dead nightwalker ripping at my gown return, and I rise from the bed and make my way over to the table and chairs in the corner of the room instead.
It’s darker here. Consumed by it, I take the seat against the corner wall, tuck my feet up, and wrap my arms around my legs.
This way, he can’t appear behind me. Above, sure. But it doesn’t seem like something the nightwalker would do.
My focus settles on the vent above the bed, and I wait.
The airshaft trembles, as though something solid collided with its walls, and I freeze. The vibrations grow closer, then blood starts dripping from the vent. After a beat of stillness, shadows spill into the room and onto the bed.
I brace for an unknown nightwalker to appear. Inky shadows darker than night quiver, and as they rise, red eyes swirl into existence.
“Evening. You’re here earlier than anticipated,” he says in a low, gravelly voice.
I lower my gaze to the blood dripping from his clawed hand, not concealed by the fog of darkness. Crimson dollops splash onto the bed, staining the silk.
“Are you wounded?”
There’s a slight pause. “No. Another slipped into the vent after me.”
“And…you killed them?”
“Yes. Problem?”
His words sound matter-of-fact. Stubborn. Or…is it curiosity? It is hard to tell what this nightwalker is thinking.
Is he friend or foe?
The darkness moves to the wall near the bed. My eyes widen a fraction when he presses his hand to it, and a yellow-lit room appears.
I rise from the chair and peek over his shoulder to see it’s a bathroom. All this time, there was a bathroom right there. I could have washed instead of parading around in bloody clothes!
“Why didn’t you tell me there was a bathroom?” I say, stepping closer but still keeping my distance.
“You were drunk on venom.” The shadows swirl around a washcloth, plucking it from the rack. “The last thing I wanted to do was tell you about it, and for you—in your drunken state—to undress, only to regret it later.”
Pressing my lips inwards with a small grunt of ascent, my gaze settles on the blood circling the drain of the washbasin.
Leave him be. Leave him be. Leave him be.
The chant repeats in my head, trying to convince me to stay put, but instinct pulls me towards him as he washes his clawed hand under the running water.
I enter the bathroom, a wash of yellow light caressing my body, and I stand beside the nightwalker. “Let me.”
The shadows clinging to the nightwalker quiver, alive with emotion, and a guarded look crosses his red eyes when he looks at me, then away. I take the washcloth from him and soak it in the basin.
He is quiet, but tingles erupt across my neck as he watches me critically.
Squeezing the excess water from the washcloth, I face the darkness.
A shallow breath escapes me as I take in how tall he is.
I’m the same height as Jax—making me the tallest woman in my group—but in front of this nightwalker, I feel incredibly small.
“Hand,” I say breathlessly.
The nightwalker chuckles darkly as he raises his bloody, clawed hand. “Afraid, kamai?”
“Of you?” I smile, but it falls quickly when I touch his bloodstained knuckles. “I’m not sure.”
I don’t know what I’m doing. Not sure why I am here, in this too-small bathroom with a nightwalker.
Still, I’m reminded of all the injuries Cole sustained as a child and the many times I washed the cuts on his knees and hands.
Or the times Emily injured herself climbing the tree in the courtyard, and I was there with a cold rag, pressing it against her swelling ankle.
Even knowing he isn’t injured and the blood covering him is not his, I want to help.
“You’re very…motherly,” he says.
I draw the wet rag across his pointed claws until they shimmer black and no longer run red under the faucet.
“I often hear that from my friends.” When I look up, there is a softness in the deep red eyes watching me.
My fingers run up the back of his hand, and I hold him tenderly while I am stolen away in those eyes. “Do you have a lover?”
His eyes widen at the question, and so do mine.
I clear my throat, releasing my grip on him, and I turn away to wash the towel in the basin. A flush of blood rushes from the towel with every squeeze, and I keep my focus on what I am doing while I internally scream over what I just said.
“I mean someone to tend to your wounds,” I say in a thin attempt to revise my words. “Do you have someone who cares for you?” I rinse and wring out the towel again, leaving it clean and damp. “You told me nightwalkers don’t fool around, so…”
I’m lying. Lying through my damn teeth because of the word-vomit.
“No,” he answers, and I hear the confusion in his voice. “I don’t.”
I nod. “Right. You hadn’t kissed anyone before me, so that makes sense. If you had a lover, you would have kissed them by now.”
“I suppose…”
There’s a weird, static air between us, and I am the cause. I shouldn’t have entered the bathroom. Shouldn’t be here, tending to a nightwalker who isn’t even wounded.
“Okay, I am going to go now,” I say in a rush, and I move towards the door when his clawed hand shoots out to wrap around my wrist, stopping me in my tracks. My entire body stiffens, and I turn to see him holding his other hand out to me, but I can’t see his expression. What is he thinking?
“The washcloth,” he says, reaching for the towel I am holding onto like it’s my lifeforce. “I need it to wash the rest of the blood off.”
I quickly shove it into his hand, turn back around, and walk stiffly to the bed. Blood has stained parts of it, so I tear the sheets off the bed and toss them in the corner. I sit on the bed as the nightwalker emerges and hides the bathroom away once more.
“You’re quite awkward,” he says, and my face burns. “And now your heart is beating very fast. Fascinating.”
Gripping my knees and glaring at the ground, I say, “What do you want from me, nightwalker? Why did you summon me here again?”
“I enjoy your company—and also wanted to know if you have decided to drink my blood.”
“No,” I say flatly, facing him now that the heat from my face has fled. “I’m not interested.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I have more questions for you.”
His shadows stir, as if laughing at me. “And you want me to answer them without my liar’s tongue, correct?”
I nod once, firmly.
The shadows move, and my body becomes rigid when he sits on the bed beside me. I shuffle away slightly when the springs of the mattress groan in protest, tipping me towards him. “I will only do this if you agree to answer one of mine.”
My hands run up and down my thighs, across the itchy fabric of my white gown. “We will see.”
He huffs a breath and leans back, resting his clawed hands behind him. The shadows wrap around him like velvet, revealing the muscled silhouette of a man. What little saliva I had in my mouth dries up completely, and I quickly look forward, away from muscles tensing across his stomach.
“Saya, indulge me.”
He is amused. He finds this fucking funny.
I clear my throat, straighten, and keep my eyes on the door as I ask, “What were you doing before you entered the Darkovish Feeding Ground?”
From the corner of my eye, I see the nightwalker tap a claw against the mattress, and those crimson eyes narrow slightly as he watches me. “Looking for a cure.”
Turning to him, my attention fixes on the darkness of his face, genuinely curious. “A cure for vampirism?”
Hope lathers my words. Hope that I might rid myself of this shell wrapped so tightly around my body. Anything to help free me from what I’ve hated my entire life.
I can be hu—
“No,” he says before hope can take root in my mind. “Sunlight. To be able to walk in sunlight. To be able to stay awake during the day. To see the sun again.”
Slowly, I blink, and my disappointment becomes mild curiosity. “You can’t stay awake during the day?”
“No. We can’t. A lull starts to pull us under at dusk, and we must find somewhere safe to sleep before daybreak.”
I lean into the groaning springs and rest my hand against the mattress. “Where do you sleep when you leave here?”
“In the airshaft.” His eyes crinkle. He’s smiling. “I watch you sometimes after I wake.”
I make a face. “Don’t do that. It’s weird.”
“You hide yourself, even when you sleep,” he continues. “You cover yourself in blankets as if you’re afraid your glamour will stop working while you sleep.”
My eyes narrow further. “Can you read minds, too?”
“Sure,” he chuckles.
I twitch a smile. His laugh is contagious. Infectious. Annoyingly captivating.
As I clear my throat, I look away to face the door again. “Where is the cure?”
“I don’t know. If I knew, I would have it by now.”
“Then how do you know there is one to find?”