13. Jasmine
JASMINE
The event is small enough I'm able to track the whole list of people in my head.
Thirty-five people. Name tags and warm wine, a low-stakes mixer Sebastian usually skips.
Tonight he came because a logistics CEO he's been circling will be here, and I've spent twenty minutes steering him toward her, a clipboard of mental notes ticking along: the venture man beside the bar wants ten seconds, the foundation director can wait, the CEO he wants leaves at quarter to nine.
"You're hovering," Sebastian murmurs.
"I'm working." I tip my head toward the far corner. "She's by the window. Go now, before the gray-suited man traps her in conversation."
He goes. I let myself want, briefly, a glass of wine. I slip out toward the restroom instead.
The corridor past the event space is dim and ordinary. Dead beige carpet, a service door, the murmur of the party thinning behind me. I'm checking my phone for the CEO's flight time when I hear it. A sound. Small. Wet. A woman, somewhere ahead, making a noise that isn't quite a word.
I round the corner. A man has a woman pressed to the wall.
My first thought is so stupid I almost feel relief — they're kissing, I've walked in on something, I should leave.
Then I see her face. Her eyes are open, yet wider than I've seen anyone's before.
Her hand is splayed flat against his shoulder, not pulling him closer but pushing, weakly, like someone trying to push a car with the handbrake on.
His mouth is at her throat. There's a dark line running down her collarbone into the neck of her blouse, and it's spreading. Blood. That's blood.
I decide it's a seizure, a medical thing, he's helping, but the lie dies before it finishes.
I breathe. It's all I do. One thin breath.
He stops. He turns his head, and his face isn't human.
There are veins beneath the skin, dark and branching, a flush of something moving under the surface that shouldn't.
His mouth. Red. His eyes. Green and cold.
My body understands first. I've gone cold and still, locked in place, and I can't tell if it's terror doing that to me or him. I miss the movement entirely.
He is beside the woman, then the space between us is gone and he is there, so near the chill lifts from him, my body flinches too late to matter, jerking away from something already there.
He leans in. Not touching me. He breathes me in along my jaw, slow, taking inventory, and it is nothing like being wanted.
It's like being memorized. I'm paralyzed to the spot, I can't find the courage to move.
I keep believing if I don't he can't hurt me.
Suddenly, a laugh, heels, and a group of people are spilling toward us. He's gone in a blink of an eye. A brush of cold against my arm, and the corridor is empty. The woman slides down the wall with her hand at her throat. Instead of helping, I flee.
I don't decide to. I'm just outside, the door banging behind me, the night air slapping my face.
I take a wrong turn and have to double back past the entrance, and I can't make my legs go straight.
My phone is clutched in my palm and I can't think of who to call or what I'd say.
The traffic lights are too bright. A bus sighs against the curb.
I nearly scream. The city is too loud, and the woman's eyes keep replaying behind mine, or the green ones, or the way he was simply there.
And then other things, surfacing out of order.
Sebastian's hands, always cool. The meetings he marks as private in his calendar.
A face in a painting that couldn't have been him.
The way security folds around me before I've finished being afraid.
Sebastian, arriving too soon, every time, like he already knew.
I'm running and checking behind. I'm just two blocks from home when I hit something solid and his hands close around my arms.
"Jasmine—"
"Don't." I wrench back. "Don't touch me."
"You're hurt—"
"I'm not hurt." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "A man was there. He had her. There was blood, and then he was right there. He didn't walk, Sebastian, he didn't —" I stop, because I can hear how it sounds. "Tell me I'm imagining what I saw."
"Not here." His eyes move past me, scanning the street, and a hunted look crosses his face. "Please. Somewhere we can speak."
"No. You tell me right now." I point my finger to the ground.
"Jasmine." Quiet. Urgent. "I cannot say this in the middle of a sidewalk. Walk with me. Twenty feet. That's all I'm asking."
I shouldn't. Every sane part of me says run. Instead I follow him into the mouth of an alley between a shuttered bakery and a parking structure, and stay angled toward the open street, so I can bolt, because some animal in me has stopped trusting the man I've spent months attracted to.
"Explain," I say.
He meets my eyes. "What you saw was real. Every bit of it."
"That explains nothing."
"It does." He takes a breath he doesn't seem to need, and I notice that now. My awareness spikes. "The man. What he did. What he is." A pause. "Vampires are real, Jasmine. He was one."
The word should be funny. A punchline, something I'd roll my eyes at. It isn't. It lands in the center of me where the woman's wide eyes already live, and it fits, and that's what breaks me.
I wait for him to say it's a joke. That I'm in shock, wasn't real, there's a reasonable explanation and a glass of water waiting at home.
But he just watches me with those gray eyes the streetlight can't settle on, and I understand, all at once, that the nightmare doesn't have a safe edge left for me beside him.
He isn't out here in the dark with me. He belongs inside it.