3. Posy
— ? —
Posy
I don’t sleep.
I mean, obviously I don’t sleep. There’s a vampire outside my barricaded kitchen door, and every time I drift off against the cabinet, I hear him shift or breathe or simply exist, and my whole body snaps back to high alert.
He’s really out there. I didn’t hallucinate the smoke or the kneeling or the part where he called me his queen with the reverence most people reserve for religious icons and really good cheese.
Sometime deep in the night, I crack.
“Are you still there?” I call through the door, hating how small my voice sounds.
“Always, little bride.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It was not meant to comfort. It was meant to be true.”
I pull my knees to my chest. My eyes burn. My finger throbs in time with my pulse, and every time I close my eyes I see smoke taking shape, a king dropping to his knees on my grandmother’s stone floor.
You. Finally. You.
“This is insane,” I whisper to no one.
The vampire outside my door doesn’t respond. Maybe he’s giving me space. Maybe he’s plotting how to drain me the moment I open the door.
Except he said he wouldn’t. No touching without permission, no feeding without consent, and his voice cracked on the vow, and I want to believe him.
Which is exactly how people get murdered in their dead grandmother’s haunted mansions, Posy. Get it together.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must, because the next thing I know, light is streaming through the grimy window and my neck is screaming about the angle I slumped at.
I uncurl slowly, joints popping until I feel older than the house.
The kitchen looks different in daylight. Less ominous, more just dirty.
For a moment, I let myself believe it was all a dream.
“Good morning, little bride.”
His voice comes through the door, low and morning-rough, and no dead man’s voice has any right to sound that good. My nerve endings light up anyway. Traitors.
“I told you not to call me that,” I manage.
“Forgive me. Good morning, Posy.”
I grab the rolling pin I found in a drawer last night and clutch it to my chest. Solid wood, good heft. It’ll do approximately nothing against an immortal creature of the night, but it makes me feel better.
Slowly, carefully, I drag the table away and open the door.
He’s sitting exactly where I left him, cross-legged on the hallway floor, hands resting on his knees, morning light lying full across his face and doing him no harm whatsoever, which the paperbacks and I will be discussing later.
He looks up at me with those unreasonable eyes, pale gray ringed with charcoal, and my stomach performs a disloyal little flip.
He’s beautiful. I noticed it last night in a distant, hysterical sort of way, but daylight is worse.
Elegant angles and cruel bones. A nose some long-dead sculptor probably wept over, and dark hair with no business surviving a century in a box.
His skin is pale but not corpse-pale, marble the sun apparently wouldn’t dare damage.
And his mouth.
I shouldn’t be looking at his mouth. It’s just that it’s right there, slightly parted, the faintest hint of fang behind his lips, and my brain is doing inconvenient things with that information. I press my thighs together and hate myself for it.
“Your eyes keep coming back to my mouth,” he says, amusement threaded through his voice, and heat crawls up my neck.
“I’m assessing the threat.”
“And what have you concluded?”
That you look Renaissance-painting unfair and I am deeply unprepared for this. “That you need a haircut.”
He blinks, then touches his hair with genuine confusion. “Is it not fashionable?”
“It’s giving ‘brooding lord of the manor.’”
“I am a brooding lord of the manor.” He rises to his feet in one fluid motion, and I have to tilt my head back to follow.
He’s tall. The kind that makes me aware of every inch of space between us.
His sleeves are pushed to his elbows, and his forearms flex as he straightens his cuffs, and I look away too late.
“How old are you, exactly?” I ask, mostly to make my brain do literally anything else.
“In your years? I stopped counting. My world keeps a different calendar.” He pauses. “The box was a hundred of yours. Time moved strangely inside it.”
“Your world.” I shake my head, clutching the rolling pin tighter. “Right. Because you’re not just a vampire, you’re a foreign-exchange vampire. And I can’t believe my grandmother kept you in a box.”
“She kept me safe.” There’s no accusation in his voice, only weary gratitude. “The binding wasn’t her doing. She maintained it. Kept the seal intact, ensured I’d be preserved until…”
“Until I came along.”
“Yes, Posy.”
I wait for him to say more, but he just watches me with those silver eyes, and I’m suddenly very conscious of yesterday’s clothes and the dust in my hair and the rolling pin I’m cradling.
“I need coffee,” I announce, because it’s either that or start screaming again.
I turn toward the geriatric coffee maker I spotted last night, and Valerian follows. He doesn’t make a sound. No footsteps, no rustle of fabric. But I can feel him a step behind me, a presence with the charge of a storm that hasn’t decided where to break.
I open a cabinet and he’s there. The coffee maker gets inspected for mold with a royal audience.
By the time I unearth a tin of what’s either coffee grounds or fossilized dirt, his chest is close enough to my shoulder that I can feel the cool coming off him, and I spin around and nearly plant my face in his sternum.
His gaze drops to my mouth. It’s fast, barely a flicker of those pale eyes, but I catch it, and my own mouth goes dry.
“Can you just,” I step back into the counter, which helps nothing, “can you just not follow me?”
He considers this with apparent seriousness. “I could.”
“Great. Then…”
“I will not.”
I make a sound that’s half scream, half groan. “And why not?”
“Because you’re my bride.” He says it with weather-report calm. “Where you go, I go. It’s the nature of the bond.”
“There is no bond! I don’t feel any bond!”
Hurt crosses his face, quickly masked. “The bond is young, and you’re human. It may take time for you to sense it as I do.”
“Or maybe there’s nothing to sense because this is all,” I wave the rolling pin wildly, “insane! Maybe I’m having a stress-induced psychotic break! Maybe I inhaled a hallucinogenic mold spore and I’m actually passed out in the foyer right now, drooling on the floor!”
“You’re not hallucinating.”
“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say!”
Valerian’s mouth twitches. It’s barely a movement, the faintest quirk at the corner of his lips, but it turns him from ethereal statue into a man. A man with a mouth I’m apparently tracking now. Wonderful.
“Do you often argue with your hallucinations?” he asks.
“Only the really annoying ones.”
“Then I shall endeavor to be less annoying. Though I confess I am uncertain how to achieve this while also refusing to let you out of my sight.”
“You could start by finding a different queen.”
He tilts his head, genuinely puzzled. “A different queen.”
“Yes! Someone who actually wants to be a vampire bride. There are whole subcultures of people who are into this!” I think of Riley’s goth phase in college, her shelf of Anne Rice novels. “Go find one of them!”
“That’s not how prophecies work.”
“Well, how do they work? Because from where I’m standing, you decided I’m your fated whatever based on one drop of blood, and that’s a flimsy foundation for eternal commitment!”
For a moment he looks ancient and tired in a way that has nothing to do with his face.
“The prophecy was written before I was born,” he says quietly. “I didn’t choose this, Posy. I didn’t choose you. Fate chose us both.”
“Fate can go to hell.”
“I suspect fate has been there many times and remains unimpressed.”
I stare at him. He stares back, perfectly composed, and hysteria bubbles up my throat.
I laugh, high and unhinged, rope’s end fully reached, fibers audibly popping. I lean against the counter until my ribs hurt, and Valerian watches me with such profound concern that it only makes me laugh harder.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp eventually, wiping my eyes. “It’s just, this is so absurd. Yesterday I was worried about whether the house had asbestos, and now I’m arguing with a vampire king about the nature of prophecy.”
“Life is often absurd.” He steps closer, then stops, visibly reminding himself of his promise not to touch me.
His hands curl at his sides. I watch them do it, watch the tendons shift in those forearms, and my pulse picks up in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
“I’ve found the absurdity is sometimes the only thing that makes it bearable. ”
“What if I don’t want to be a queen?” My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
His eyes hold mine, and I can’t look away. I should look away. This is not a normal amount of eye contact. This is the eye contact that happens in movies right before someone gets kissed or murdered, and I’m honestly not sure which would be worse for me right now.
“Then you may be whatever you wish,” he says softly. “Librarian. Hermit in a cottage by the sea. It doesn’t matter.”
“But what?”
“But you will still be mine.” A king’s certainty, flat and absolute. “And I will still be yours. That’s the nature of the bond, little bride. It doesn’t require your permission. Only your blood.”
I should be furious at that. I should swing my rolling pin at his beautiful face and barricade myself somewhere until he evaporates back into smoke.
What I actually do is stand there with my mouth dry and my grip white on the rolling pin, repeating you will still be mine on a loop like my brain got stuck on the worst possible sentence to enjoy.
“I need to be alone,” I say abruptly.
I push past him, which requires touching him, my arm brushing his as I shove through the doorway, and the contact jolts up my shoulder and settles low in my belly. My body, no longer taking my side, files every detail for later review.
He doesn’t grab me. Doesn’t stop me. Just turns to watch me go.
“Posy, wait…”
“I need to be alone,” I repeat, and then I’m moving through the manor, past the shrouded furniture and the judging portraits.
He follows. Of course he follows. That silent presence trails me up the stairs, and I spin around on the landing to find him closer than I expected. Close enough to smell him, smoke and old paper, and under it a darker note my body answers before my brain can veto it.
“What do you want from me?” I demand.
His hand comes down on the banister beside my hip. Not touching me. Nowhere near touching me, technically, and yet I feel caged by it, by him, by the drop of his gaze to my throat and the slow, deliberate way he drags it back up to my eyes. My heart is doing its level best to exit through my ribs.
“I want you to let me stay,” he says.
“You are staying. You’re literally stalking me around the house.”
“I want you to want me to stay.”
Somewhere unguarded in me takes the hit and doesn’t report it. He’s not talking about the bond or the prophecy. Maybe what’s left after a century in a box is just a man looking at me as if I’m the only lit window in a dark country.
I can’t deal with that. Not with his hand on the banister and my body voting against me.
I turn and run.
I find a bedroom on the third floor, dusty and dim, a four-poster draped in white, windows over the wild gardens. I slam the door, lock it, drag a dresser in front of it for good measure, then slide down the wall with my knees to my chest.
On the other side of the door, I hear Valerian settle against the wall.
“I will wait,” he says quietly.
“Go away.”
“No, Posy.”
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars. “Why are you like this?”
“Like what?”
“Persistent! Unable to take a hint!”
“I took the hint. You wish to be alone. I’m giving you solitude.”
“You’re sitting outside my door!”
“I’m giving you solitude at a respectful distance.”
I grab the nearest object, a shoe, and hurl it at the door. It hits with a satisfying thunk.
“Feel better?” he asks.
“Not even slightly!”
“Would you like me to retrieve the shoe so you can throw it again?”
I choke on a sound that’s either a laugh or a sob. “I hate you.”
“You don’t know me well enough to hate me.” There’s a smile in his voice, I can hear it. “Give it time. I have many irritating qualities you haven’t yet discovered.”
“I don’t want to discover your qualities! I want you to go away!”
“I know. I’m sorry, Posy. You came here expecting a simple task, and I’ve complicated it immeasurably.
But I can’t leave you. Even if I wanted to, and I don’t, the bond wouldn’t allow it.
Your blood sings in my veins. You’re the first thing I’ve felt since they sealed me in the dark, and I won’t give that up. ”
I press my forehead to my knees. The adrenaline holding me upright since yesterday finally drains out, and exhaustion moves into the empty space.
“Are you going to sit there all night?” I ask.
“If that’s what it takes.”
“For what?”
“For you to believe I’m not going anywhere.”
Silence falls. I sit on the floor of my grandmother’s dusty bedroom, listening to the vampire on the other side of the door, patient and inarguably real.
At some point, I fall asleep.
When I wake, the light has changed. Late afternoon, shadows stretched long across the floor, my body aching from hardwood. He’s still there. I can hear him breathing, slow and even, less monster than man waiting outside a door.
“Are you awake?” he asks.
I don’t answer. I’m not ready to face him or the bond or anything else that has invaded my life.
My body has other ideas. My stomach growls, no delicate rumble but a full roar, loud enough that there’s no way he didn’t hear it.
Then, through the door: “You haven’t eaten.”
I close my eyes.
“I haven’t eaten since before your grandmother was born,” he continues, “so I understand the discomfort. However, I suspect your mortal body has less tolerance for…”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re hungry.”
“I’m fine.”
When he speaks again, his voice has gone gentle in a way I refuse to find endearing.
“I will prepare you a meal.”
I sit up straighter. “You’ll what?”
“A meal. Sustenance.” He tests the words, remembering their shapes. “I may not require it, but I remember the rituals. Bread and meat. There are other things now, yes? I saw strange objects in the cold box. I will investigate.”
“You can’t cook.”
“I can learn.”
“Valerian, seriously…”
“Rest, little bride.” His voice is firm now, decided. “When you emerge, there will be food waiting. I swear it.”
He stands. His footsteps moving away down the hall, still nearly silent but purposeful now.
He’s going to cook for me. The vampire king who doesn’t eat, from a world that has never seen a blender, is going to cook for me.
“This is going to be a disaster,” I mutter to no one.
Somewhere below, a cabinet door slams, followed by what I swear is the word “hostile.”