20. Rose #2
Valtu grunts loudly and his cock jerks inside me, his hips shoving up against mine, and he comes with a hoarse gasp.
His warmth spills into me, not stopping.
He crushes me to him, my breasts pressed against his damp, hard chest and he’s growling and grunting against my ear as he continues to fill me up, all slick and hot.
Holy hell.
I’m spinning.
I lay my head on his shoulder and the sweat-slicked skin feels good against my cheek.
His heart is pounding against my chest, and it takes a while to catch our breath.
The world seems fuzzy and distant and cold and there’s nothing out there except our two bodies, deep in connection and wrapped together.
He lifts me up suddenly and I gasp in surprise as I slide off of him, but he wraps an arm around my waist, then he rolls onto his side and pulls my back into him.
He holds me like I’m precious, his grip strong and possessive and I listen to his breathing as it slows.
I close my eyes and I let myself pretend that we’re in the past. It feels so right, so good, that I wonder if I’m becoming delusional, how easy it might be to live in another reality.
I could live a whole life just on this edge of what’s real and what’s not.
At least here, in bed with each other, fucking each other, it’s as real as it gets.
I hold onto that and fall asleep in his arms.
* * *
When I wake up again, the sun is in a different position and fainter, and Valtu isn’t beside me in bed.
I raise my head, propping myself up on my elbows and see Valtu at his desk, his head down, intently flipping through the pages of the book.
I get out of bed, my legs sore from our earlier activity, and grab one of his shirts from the back of the loveseat, slipping it on and doing the middle button before walking over to him.
He hears me but he doesn’t turn around. I put my hands on his shoulders and he melts into my touch, ever so briefly, and it feels like a win.
“Any luck?” I ask, peering over his shoulder at the pages. I’m staring at a bunch of Latin and though I haven’t read Latin since I was Dahlia, it comes easy to me. “A spell to walk through walls,” I read out loud.
He turns his head slightly to glance up at me. “You can read Latin? Wait. Of course you can.” Then he shifts over in his seat, the chair moving out slightly and then pats his thigh.
I beam at him, feeling like I’ve crossed a new threshold yet again, and come around, sitting on his lap. He slips one arm around me and with the other sweeps my hair forward and plants a kiss on the nape of my neck.
“Good morning, by the way,” he murmurs against my skin, his lips warm, breath hot. I can’t help but shiver, though I’m trying to keep my attention focused on the book. “Or afternoon, I should say.”
“How long have you been awake?” I ask while trying to read over the spell. I want to walk through walls, too.
“I never went back to sleep,” he says. “My mind kept turning and you were out like a light. I think harnessing that lightning took more out of you than you realized.”
He’s right. Though I’m awake now, the groggy feeling is lingering. “What have you been doing all day?”
“This,” he says, reaching out and flipping the page of the book.
“Wait, go back. I’m not done.”
He looks at me for a moment, impressed. Then he turns the page back and I finish reading the spell, putting it away in a compartment in my brain and memorizing it.
“Okay, now you can turn the page,” I say with a satisfied nod.
“You memorized all that?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“You’re a wonder, Rose Harper,” he says appreciatively, brushing my hair behind my ear. “Let’s see if having a real witch here pleases the book. I assume if it didn’t want you to know the spells, it wouldn’t have let you read it.”
“That’s what I figure,” I admit. I don’t add the part where I’m wondering if I’m also the book’s new guardian. Does the demon need to be replaced? Or was the demon always holding the book hostage? Did I free it?
Valtu starts flipping through the pages, some with text, some blank. With each blank page we see, his shoulders deflate more and more. “I just don’t get it.”
“Maybe the book is done,” I say, but I don’t want that to be true either. How else will we find Bellamy? How else will we defeat him?
“Maybe,” he says quietly, sounding dejected.
“Can I ask you something?”
He glances at me through his lashes, eyes skimming over my face. “What?”
“If you only took the book because you wanted to erase me…”
He sucks at his teeth, his gaze darkening.
I peer at him. “That was why you took the book, right?”
“Actually,” he says carefully, “I’ve been told the reason I took the book was to bring you back from the dead.”
“You were going to bring me back from the dead?” My brows go up.
“A spell for necromancy.” He licks his lips, and I can’t tell if he’s burdened or relieved by the confession. “That’s all I ever wanted. And when I couldn’t find it, the spell of erasure appeared. Tabula Rasa. I knew what I had to do.”
I can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt. That erasing me was something he had to do.
On the otherhand, I do understand. Valtu lost me twice before, we lost our baby twice, and on the third try at our destiny, he killed me.
I can’t imagine trying to live with that kind of guilt.
I understand why he chose not to live with it all.
But it does have me thinking: how will I die this time around? I know I’m a vampire, but last night I came very close to dying again. I said it’s luck but I can’t expect luck to keep me alive forever.
Is my destiny to always be with him?
Or is my destiny to always die?
“What’s wrong?” he asks softly. I blink and look at him while that new revelation sinks in and he gives me a strained smile. “You have to forgive me when I talk about these things so matter of fact. I just don’t…”
“I know. You don’t remember. It’s fine.”
I switch the subject by leaning over and flipping the blank page and as the page is turning, I swear I see ink starting to form on it.
“Wait!” Valtu cries out and he immediately flips the page back.
Ink is filling up the page as we speak and we both watch with open mouths as it forms into legible text.
“ Cantatio Pro Vertitate ,” Valtu reads in a deep voice.
“A spell for the truth. It says it will cause the recipient to be unable to lie.” He gives me a sidelong glance.
“Good thing you told me the truth last night.” His words are sharp but there’s a glint in his eyes, giddiness over finding a new spell after so long.
“Check the rest of the book,” I tell him, tapping his hand.
He flips the pages but the blank pages are still there. “Oh,” he says despondently. “At least it gave me one more.”
I feel a strange pull inside me, the urge to touch the book again, so I reach over and turn the page, slower this time. Just like last time ink begins to bleed through the fibers and I flip it back over as a new spell forms.
“You want to know why I keep the book around?” Valtu whispers in awe. “It’s because I had a feeling that one day it would show me something else I would need to know. This .”
Together we read the new text that’s forming before our eyes.
“ Movere Aliquid ,” we say together. A spell that allows one to summon objects.
“This one is very handy,” he says. “I could bring the rest of the books over to me without having to get up.”
“Or a bottle of wine,” I say, grinning.
“You turn the page,” he tells me, looking absolutely boyish in his excitement. “It’s you that’s doing this, you that the book is responding to. You’re the magic, my dove. Not me.”
And so I start flipping through the book, watching as page after page goes from blank to Latin text.
There are new spells for levitation, and causing blindness in your enemy.
There’s magic for unlocking doorways and incantations for bringing to life inanimate objects.
There’s one for an invisible shield and another for freezing someone in their place.
There’s even one for teleportation, albeit with some caveats, like you have to have been to the place before.
But despite all we read through, there isn’t the one that we need.
There’s nothing about tracking or finding people.
And there’s also nothing that can reverse a spell.
I don’t dare tell Valtu this, but this one is as equally important as the other.
If I could only find a spell of reversal or a counter-spell, then I could undo the Tabula Rasa and he’d finally see the real me.
I don’t even feel guilty, well not much, about going against his wishes because I know the Valtu I’ll see on the other side, the one who loves me, will be overjoyed at seeing me again.
At least, I hope.
Fuck. Even if there was such a spell, I guess there’s still a chance that after all that, after everything, he might not feel the same way about me. These twenty-one years may have altered him in ways that can’t be fixed.
But that’s neither here nor there right now. I’m just happy that he seems just as disappointed as I am that the spell we really want hasn’t appeared.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” I say sadly, shifting on his thigh. “All the pages are full.”
He leans in and kisses my neck. “I’m not going to give up. We’re going to get your brother back and we’re going to get you the justice that you fucking deserve.”
I give him a steady look, staring deep into his rich eyes. “Why are you being so nice to me now?”
His brows go up. “Am I being nice?”
“You are being very nice. It’s quite un-Dracula of you.”
He gives me a quick smile. “Must be the sex.” He clears his throat and looks back to the book.
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice dropping a register.
“I just feel that maybe the reason I’ve held on to the book for so long is because of you.
Maybe you were the key to show me the rest. And maybe the spell I really needed was the one to help you find your brother. ”
“Well, if we do somehow end up finding him one day, at least we’ll have a shit ton of magic to destroy Bellamy once and for all.”
“Provided he doesn’t know all of this already. Don’t forget, he is immortal.”
“And don’t forget that so are we. In the end, he’s still just a human. We are vampires. Top of the food chain. Doesn’t matter what that bastard thinks he knows.”
He kisses my cheek. “All this talk about being top of the food chain is turning me on, you know.” He adjusts himself and I feel the hard press of his cock against my ass.
I giggle. “Yeah, what the hell doesn’t?”
He smiles back at me, eyes going hazy with lust, but then they suddenly clear, like a fog has lifted. “The beginning,” he whispers harshly, brows up.
“Huh?”
“Of the book!” he exclaims. “There’s some blank pages at the beginning!”
Hastily, I reach for the book and flip the cover closed. Then I open it to the first page, a blank page, and touch the edge of it. Slowly the words seep onto the paper.
Exponentia Pro Somno.
A spell for sleep.
I flip through a few more pages that are already filled, coming across ones for walking through walls and keeping candles lit, stuff that Valtu already knows, as well as opening a portal to another world, the Red World, which I don’t think either of us will touch with a ten-foot pole.
Then I come across a single blank page.
It’s practically calling for me.
Please let it undo his spell , I think. Please bring back the man who loves me.
I touch the paper, pressing my fingers down on it and wishing.
I feel energy seep from my fingers onto the book and then back again.
The letters start to form.
Carmina ut Aliquem .
An incantation to find someone.
“This is it!” Valtu practically shouts. “This is what you’re looking for.”
I let myself feel sad for exactly one second before I push my own personal feelings away and focus on the news. The good news. The spell that not only I wanted, but that my parents and Solon and Lenore wanted as well, is finally right in front us.
“We can find him now,” I whisper. “I’m going to get my brother back.”
“Then we’re going to rip Bellamy’s fucking head right off and piss on it,” Valtu snarls. “Let’s see him still be immortal after that.”