8. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
I have made a terrible mistake.
A king should brood over lost kingdoms. I am aware of the correct subjects. I have brooded over them professionally, for a century, in a box. And yet here I stand at a window at dawn, an ancient and terrible power, brooding at maximum capacity over a chaise longue.
Not the feeding. That was survival, unavoidable. If Posy hadn’t forced her wrist against my mouth, I’d have faded into nothing on that bathroom floor.
No. The mistake was everything after.
The mistake was that I couldn’t stop touching her once I started. That her moans became the only sound in the universe. That I buried my face between her thighs and worshipped her, a supplicant at a shrine I’d waited a century to find.
The mistake was how much I wanted it.
I pace the manor in the dark hours before dawn, unable to rest, unable to think past the taste of her.
Not just her blood, though her blood rewrote my understanding of the word.
Her. The salt-sweet of her arousal. The grip of her around my fingers.
The sounds she made coming apart, sounds I’ll be hearing in my dreams for the next century at minimum.
I stood outside her door tonight. I’m not proud of it.
I stood in the dark hallway with my hand raised to knock and listened to her sleep, to the slow tide of her breathing, and I wanted with a violence that frightened me.
The wanting was so large it had a sound.
Not her blood. Just the warm animal fact of her, asleep on the other side of a door I have no right to open.
I wanted to lie beside her and learn how she breathes, wanted her to wake and be unafraid of me, and wanting after a century of nothing is a knife with no handle, and I stood there holding it until my hand bled, and then I went downstairs and scrubbed floors until dawn, and told myself it was cleaning, when what it was, was running.
I am a monster. Not for feeding. For enjoying it. For the certainty that I’d do it again, that even now, with her blood singing through my veins and strength back in my limbs, half of me is composing reasons to climb those stairs.
I want to taste her again, want her thighs trembling at my ears, want my name torn out of her in that desperate voice. I want to bury myself inside her and feel her heat around me while my fangs find her throat. I want everything, all of it, in an order I’m willing to negotiate.
And that wanting is precisely why I can’t be near her.
The venom did this. The bite rouses prey, makes them willing. What happened between us wasn’t her choice; it was my biology overriding hers. I took advantage of her, and the thought curdles everything her blood restored.
So I clean.
It’s the only occupation I can find for this restless, desperate energy.
I start in the foyer, sweeping a decade of dust, and work through the manor room by room.
The furniture emerges from beneath its shrouds, sleepers waking from a long dream.
The windows, scrubbed clear, let in moonlight and then the first gray hints of dawn.
It should be mindless work. It is not, because the house keeps offering me futures.
I uncover a velvet chair by the parlor window and see her curled in it with a book, some rainy afternoon that hasn’t happened, her feet tucked beneath her and my coat over her knees.
I polish the long dining table and imagine her at the far end of it, laughing at me across candlelight for some formality she finds preposterous.
Every room I wake, I furnish with her. It’s a foolish exercise.
A starving man shouldn’t plan banquets. I do it anyway, room after room, because wanting her in the future hurts less than wanting her up those stairs right now, and I take my mercies where they grow.
Through the parlor window, the gardens sprawl gray and wild in the pre-dawn, her grandmother’s roses gone feral with grief.
I stand at the clean glass with a dust cloth in my hand and think: I have nothing to offer this woman.
No kingdom she can visit, no wealth she can spend, no future I can promise.
But I have hands, and the nights are long, and her grandmother left instructions.
The floors gleam when I’m done, dark wood polished until it reflects.
I find her grandmother’s telephone in a drawer in the library.
A strange device, glass and metal, that lights when I touch it. Words appear, too small and too fast, and I jab at them with one finger.
“Why does this tiny rectangle contain so many words?” I mutter.
The rectangle does not answer.
I’m still interrogating it when I hear her on the stairs.
My whole body goes taut. Her heartbeat reaches me first, that rhythm I’ve begun to crave past all sense or dignity, and then the soft pad of her feet on the newly cleaned floors.
She’s awake. She’s coming down. She’s going to look at me, and I’m going to have to look back, and I’m going to remember.
The way she arched. The way she begged me not to stop.
I grip the phone and do not turn around.
“Valerian? Hello?”
Her voice is soft, still rough with sleep, and it lands somewhere low in my spine. I close my eyes and make myself breathe.
“Good morning, Posy.”
“Did you… did you clean?”
“I could not sleep. I needed occupation.”
A pause. Her footsteps move through the foyer, slow, wondering.
“You cleaned everything?”
“The upstairs rooms remain. I ran out of night.”
“So you polished the floors. All of them.”
“Among other things.”
Another pause. Then, closer: “Are you going to look at me?”
No. Absolutely not. If I look at her I’ll see her flushed and undone, spread beneath me on that chaise, and the fragile architecture of my restraint was not built to code.
“I’m occupied with this device,” I say, jabbing the screen. “It is very complex.”
“That’s my grandmother’s phone.” Closer still. “Are you trying to make a call?”
“I’m trying to understand its purpose.”
“Its purpose is communication.” She’s right behind me now. I can feel her warmth, smell sleep on her skin and beneath it the scent I’ll carry into whatever afterlife accepts my kind. “Here, let me show you.”
She reaches around me and takes the phone.
Her fingers brush mine, and my entire attention collapses to the half inch of skin where we touch. Her breath catches. She pulls back a beat late, and I hoard the beat.
“It’s called texting,” she says, slightly unsteady. “You type what you want to say and send it to someone else’s phone. Like a letter, but instant.”
“A letter that arrives instantly.”
“Basically, yeah.” Her fingers move across the glass, quick and sure, and I watch them with an envy I’m not prepared to examine. “Here. I’ll put my number in. Now you can send me messages whenever you want.”
“Messages about what?”
“Anything. ‘I’m in the kitchen.’ ‘Have you seen my book.’ ‘The microwave is looking at me funny.’” A small huffed laugh. “Whatever you need to say.”
What I need to say does not fit in a tiny rectangle.
What I need to say would require the phone, the wall behind it, and far more patience than lives in a woman this likely to flee.
I stood outside your door last night. I have imagined you in every room of this house.
Your heartbeat is the only address I have left. No. Not for the rectangle.
I take the device back with the care owed to fragile artifacts. She points to an icon, a small speech bubble.
“That’s the texting app. Tap it, tap my name, type your message, hit send.”
I follow her instructions with great precision. The letters are small and my fingers were built for swords, but I assemble a message and send it.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
She pulls it out, reads the screen, and laughs, a real laugh, bright and unguarded, and warmth spreads through my chest despite everything I spent the night deciding.
“‘I am in the foyer,’” she reads aloud. “‘You are beside me. This is a foolish way to communicate.’”
“It is foolish. You are right there.”
“That’s not the…” She shakes her head, still smiling. “The point is you can reach me when I’m not right here. When I’m across the house. Or in town.”
“I cannot go into town.”
“I know. But I can. And now you can text me while I’m gone.”
“One more thing, since you’re stuck being my home base.
” She pulls out her own phone and presses its side.
Words glow on the dark glass without unlocking it.
“Lock screen. If anything ever happens to me out there, this is what people check. Medical ID, emergency contact.” The glass shows only the labels; whatever name lives behind them sits a tap deeper, unlit.
“What is an ICE?” I ask, reading the small letters.
“In Case of Emergency. It’s the person they call if I’m unconscious.” She says it lightly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Hospitals, paramedics. There’s a form for it. There’s a form for everything in this century.”
A stranger, reading a name off glowing glass because she cannot speak for herself. I dislike this arrangement, and I want, quite badly, to know the name.
“Who is currently listed?”
“Riley. Probably. I set it up years ago and never think about it.” She pockets the phone without checking and turns toward the window. “Anyway. The important part is that you can reach me now.”
Riley. I do not know a Riley. I file the name away with the growing archive of things I intend to outrank.
The thought of her beyond these walls, somewhere I can’t follow, tightens my chest, and what tightens it is fear, plain and undignified.
“I have sent you a message,” I say, instead of any of that. “You have received it.”
“Valerian, I’m standing right here.”
“And now you have written proof of my regard.”
She looks up at me, and I make the mistake of meeting her eyes.
They’re warm in the morning light, amber shot with gold, shadowed underneath in a way that says she slept as badly as I didn’t.
Her hair is loose and pillow-tangled. Her oversized shirt has slipped off one shoulder, baring the delicate line of her collarbone, and I know now how her skin tastes, which is the cruelest piece of knowledge I’ve ever acquired.
I look away.
“I should continue cleaning. The upstairs rooms require attention.”
“Valerian…”
“There is much to do. The manor has been neglected.”
“Valerian, stop.”
Her hand catches my arm and burns straight through the sleeve.
I freeze, every muscle locking, jaw tight enough that my fangs press against my gums.
“Look at me,” she says quietly.
“I cannot.”
“Why not?”
Because if I look at you I will want you, and the wanting is already using both hands. Because I spent the night constructing the theory that this was venom and nothing more, and your face is the evidence that disproves it.
“What happened last night was a mistake,” I say instead.
Silence. Then, softly: “Which part?”
“I should not have…” I close my eyes. “The bite causes arousal. I should have warned you. I should have stopped once you were out of danger. I should not have touched you.”
“That’s three answers, and none of them is the part you actually regret.”
She has me there, and she knows it, and I am lost the moment I open my mouth again.
“The mistake was not the act,” I say carefully. “The mistake was how much I wanted it.”
Her breathing stumbles.
“Your blood is the sweetest thing I have tasted in all my centuries. But it wasn’t the blood, Posy. It was you. The sounds you made. The way you said my name. The part I cannot stop thinking about is your face when you…”
I stop. Force myself to stop.
“Oh,” she says.
“Yes. That.” My voice has dropped into gravel. “That image is carved somewhere permanent. I’ll see it when I close my eyes for the rest of my existence, and I don’t trust myself around you, because all I can think about is putting it there again.”
She stares at me.
I stare back, hands fisted at my sides, the phone creaking faintly in my grip.
This close, I can chart the exact distance between us.
One step, and my hand could learn the curve of her jaw.
Two, and her heartbeat would be against my chest instead of merely in my ears, and I’ve begun to suspect that’s the only place it would sound right.
I take neither step. Wanting her is mine to carry. Choosing me has to be hers.
“I’m not avoiding you because I didn’t want it,” I finish, because she deserves the whole confession. “I’m avoiding you because I want it too much. Last night was supposed to be survival. It was not supposed to be the finest hour of a very long life.”
The silence stretches, and I wait for her to retreat. It’s the wise move. Any sensible woman would take the stairs two at a time.
Posy steps closer.
Closer, when every instinct of self-preservation says away.
Chin lifted, pulse loud enough that it’s the only weather in the room, and every one of my instincts surges toward her at once.
My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails carving crescents into my palms, the last two loyal soldiers of a collapsing kingdom.
Her phone buzzes.
She blinks. Pulls it out. Looks at the screen, then up at me, and her mouth does the thing it does when she’s trying not to laugh and failing.
“Valerian. Explain.”
“Yes, Posy.”
She turns the screen toward me. Below my first message, sent from the phone currently white-knuckled in my fist, is a second one.
Seventeen exclamation points.
“Written proof of my regard,” I say with as much dignity as the situation permits.
She looks at me for a long moment over the rectangle. Then she types, and my phone buzzes in my fist.
We’re finishing that sentence later. The one about my face.
“I look forward to the appointment,” I say out loud.
She’s already walking away, and her heartbeat is not walking away at all.