Chapter Fourteen #2
Then all around them, everything just seemed to stop.
People froze mid-twirl, mid-kiss, mid-cry of delight.
Someone had thrown confetti in the air; it hovered there, in a spray of color. She could see a girl’s teeth, caught just as
she opened her mouth to laugh. The wild eyes of people in the middle of a revelry, now unable to come back down to earth.
It was like moving through a painting called The Bacchanal.
Because they were moving.
He was moving her.
He had her by the waist, and he used it to pull her through the maze of mannequins everyone had become. Fast, so fast she
couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t think how to even start to get out of this. And of course, all the while his words
sank her in deeper.
“Come with me, come with me, my love, let me take you, let me hold you the way I long to,” he said, voice now almost a burr of something soft, against her cheek, her throat, the insides of her head.
Stop, she wanted to say, but it was like drifting into a dream.
Like before, when he had told her the story of Lilibet.
Only stronger. So much stronger.
Oh, this was undoubtedly something more.
Whatever that had been, it wasn’t thralling. Because this was thralling—this sense of walking without moving her own feet, of being drowned even as she did her best to swim. She was
never going to break the surface of this, never. It was impossible to, even when he pulled her into some dusky darkness, behind
a curtain that concealed a room beyond.
To savage her, she assumed.
But she was a fool to, and she knew it. Being savaged was a thing he could just do, if he wanted to. But persuading her to
do something soft—well. That was something else. That was the real prize, the true proof of his power. If he could make that
happen, he had her in his thrall, unquestionably.
Yet somehow, it still shocked her when he said it.
“Kiss me,” he murmured, the moment they were alone. Syrup soft, like all the rest of the words he’d used to put her under
his spell—but with a strange current of something else. Hunger and desperation, all tangled together. Impossible, and yet
it was there in his eyes, too. It was in his face.
He looked down at her through a kind of fog, as lost in this thrall as she seemed.
Eyes heavy, one hand coming up to almost touch her face again.
And when it did, she came so close to doing it she actually felt his breath fan against her face.
She saw the flecks of black in his brown eyes.
Felt her own hand on the nape of his neck, pulling him down to her, in a way she knew he couldn’t possibly want.
This was just about tormenting her.
He wanted to claw through her soul, to turn her upside down and inside out. And yet it still didn’t look like it. She saw
it clear through the fog of whatever this was—his face changing, when her lips were within an inch of his. Those eyes filled
with a strange sort of despairing softness, like someone resigned to losing their life. Then they seemed to drop to her parted
lips, as he leaned in.
And it was him who leaned, in that moment.
She didn’t pull him. She didn’t move at all.
Somehow, she had stopped—as if his influence had suddenly dissolved.
Even though she knew it hadn’t. She could still feel it, as strong as ever. But it seemed easier to resist, for some reason.
She pushed, and it drew back. And when his lips almost grazed hers, it pulled back so far, she couldn’t even say it was controlling
her at all. She was just nearly kissing him, and he was nearly kissing her, as if they were suddenly two different people
entirely.
And she knew why.
The girl in the long grass, she thought.
The one with the ribbon around her throat.
Once, that girl had kissed someone like him. She even got a flash of it, then—sitting in a deck chair, as dusk settled in. The smell of mown
grass in the air, the sense of someone sitting next to her. He had long legs, like Harker. Dark hair, like Harker. That interesting
dimple in his chin.
But the hand he had in his lap was nervy, always fidgeting.
He constantly cracked the knuckle of his forefinger over his thumb.
And he didn’t turn to the girl sitting beside him in a confident way. He snuck a glance, eyes as big as moons. Lili, she thought she heard him murmur. Lili, about the other day. I wasn’t feeling like myself. I don’t know what came over me. Sometimes it feels like something
gets hold of my body and makes me do awful things.
Like a shadow has a hand on your shoulder, Mina thought.
But she couldn’t follow that idea. Because a moment after she had it, Lili replied to the boy in the deepening dusk. I don’t think something can be awful if I welcome it, she murmured back. And then she leaned forward, slower than sinking into syrup. And she pressed her lips against his parted
ones. She kissed him—and oh. Oh. Oh.
It was simply too sweet to resist.
No clashing teeth, no rough fist in her hair.
Just exquisite tenderness, and a sense of overwhelming heat. As if this moment was so much more than just a kiss. It had meaning
behind it, of a kind she didn’t understand, she couldn’t know.
All she did know was that then and now mingled so deeply, for a moment, that she almost went ahead and kissed Harker. She came so close it almost seemed like she
tasted that sharp mint scent on his breath. That the sensation pouring through her was because of him, and not that sultry
and strange memory.
And it was only magic that stopped her.
That heavy desire made it bloom within her. And when it did, she couldn’t help looking down. She stopped and stared at her
hands in wonderment. At that bright glow gathered there, without even the need to cup or call or anything. It simply was—and
it brought her back to her senses immediately.
This wasn’t the boy in the deck chair, making her feel so delicious.
This was the thing, lurking in the shadows.
This was Harker, and she was Mina.
And the moment she registered that again, she just let that magic burst out of her. She let it surge toward him, hard enough
to hurt. Hard enough to burn him, before he could drag her any deeper into this nastiness.
He staggered back, wincing, shaking the hand she’d just singed.
Though she didn’t get the satisfaction of hurt or anger.
No—he laughed as he went. Curled his tongue up to his teeth, almost ruefully, before sinking his hands into his pockets. “There.
Now you know what thralling feels like. And also exactly why I have never bothered to try it on you. Even when it’s something
easy to persuade someone into, you apparently just flick it away, like a speck of dirt from your sleeve,” he said—all matter-of-fact
about it. Like it was some sort of obvious given.
Even though it hadn’t felt that way to her.
Her whole body seemed like something ripening past the point it could stand, in the sun. Any second and she thought her skin
might split. And he found it amusing. He found it so nothing. “I caught myself by the skin of my teeth, you absolute fucking nightmare,” she hissed.
And all he did in response was roll his eyes.
“Don’t be so dramatic. I wouldn’t have actually let you do it, even if I had somehow been wrong about your will being strong
enough to deflect it. Which I wasn’t, by the way.”
“It was the magic that stopped me.”
“You wouldn’t have even been able to use the magic, if you didn’t have the strength of mind. But you did, and so now you can understand. Whatever you do with me, you do of your own free will,” he said—as if her free will was important to him.
When of course she knew it wasn’t.
This was all just nonsense.
“And you couldn’t have just told me this?”
“Would you have believed me if I had? Would you have trusted it?”
“So that’s what this was? What it always is with you. Tricks and traps until I learn my lesson. Tests, everything tests, toward