10. Posy
— ? —
Posy
The grocery store in town is exactly what you’d expect from a place called Miller’s Market, small and slightly dusty, staffed by a woman who looks at me as if she knows every secret I’ve ever kept.
“You’re the Thornwick girl,” she says as she scans my items. It’s not a question.
“That’s me.”
“Eleanora’s granddaughter.” She pauses over a box of pasta, studying me with shrewd blue eyes. “She talked about you sometimes. When she came in for supplies.”
My throat tightens. “She did?”
“Said you were smart. Stubborn. Said you’d figure things out when the time came.” The woman, AGNES by her name tag, bags my groceries with efficient movements. “Guess the time came.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Agnes doesn’t seem to expect anything. She hands me my bags and nods once, and we’ve apparently reached an understanding.
“You need anything else, you come back. We’re open till six most days.”
“Thanks. I will.”
I load the groceries and sit in the car for a moment, hands on the wheel, thinking about my grandmother talking to a grocery clerk about me.
About her having a life here, in this small town, with people who knew her and maybe even missed her.
She wasn’t entirely alone after all. It’s a small comfort, and I take it.
Before pulling out, I answer two texts from Riley and one from the library.
I’d told them I needed bereavement leave, open-ended.
They didn’t ask questions. Nobody asks questions about dead grandmothers.
Then I finally email Derek Huntsman two lines I’ve owed him for days: the manor is off the market, thanks for everything.
His reply arrives before I’ve started the car, all lowercase, visibly grieving the commission.
Valerian is waiting at the gate when I pull up the drive.
He’s exactly where I left him, standing just inside the boundary, one bandaged hand pressed flat against the air. I park and get out, and he’s there before I reach the first grocery bag, taking them from me through the open gate.
“I can carry my own groceries,” I tell him.
“I am aware.” He takes them anyway, silver eyes scanning my face for damage. “You were gone a very long time.”
“Were you counting?”
“I stopped myself from telling you to the minute. I would like that noted as growth.”
I grab the last bag and follow him up the drive, watching him move, fluid and graceful despite the grocery bags dangling from his wrapped hands.
He looks better than this morning, the gray faded back to his usual pale.
My blood, still working through his system.
The thought should probably bother me more than it does.
Here’s what nobody warns you about living with a vampire you refuse to sleep with: the wanting doesn’t politely wait its turn.
The ache has become a permanent resident.
Architectural, even. It’s moved in furniture.
It’s there when I wake up, when I brush past him in hallways, when he says my name in that low register he probably doesn’t know he’s using, and every time he does, it adds another room.
I’ve started taking cold showers. They don’t help.
And the walls in this house are too thin, because the other night I heard him pacing floors below, and my pulse synced to his footsteps without permission, and my hand was drifting under the covers before I caught myself and stopped.
Because he’d hear that too. He hears everything.
I can’t even want him in privacy. There’s no privacy in a house that belongs to his senses, and the worst part, the truly unforgivable part, is that knowing he’d hear me doesn’t kill the urge at all.
“I have a plan,” I announce.
“I am intrigued.”
“We need to figure out what’s actually dangerous to you and what’s just folklore. Gran’s journals mention pieces, but they’re not comprehensive. So I did some shopping.” I hold up the extra bag, the one that isn’t food. He peers inside and raises one elegant eyebrow.
“You purchased… garlic bread?”
“Among other things. We’re going to run some experiments.”
“Experiments, is it.” He says it slowly, tasting the word. “You wish to test vampire mythology on me.”
“I wish to know what can hurt you so I can make sure none of it gets near you.” I stop at the front door and turn to face him. “Is that okay?”
The bemusement fades into vulnerability, quickly tidied away.
“You wish to protect me.”
“I wish to not accidentally kill you with the wrong seasoning. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
I push open the door instead of answering. “Library. No time at all. Bring your sense of humor. You’re going to need it.”
The library is warm with afternoon light when we settle in, me in one armchair with Gran’s books stacked on the side table, Valerian across from me with the patient attention of an elegant cat waiting to be entertained.
My supplies are arranged on the coffee table between us: the garlic bread, a small vial of water I filled at the church in town, where the priest gave me a look I’ll be thinking about for years, a hand mirror from the bathroom, and a silver letter opener from my grandmother’s desk.
“First: sunlight,” I say, flipping open a journal.
Valerian sighs. “I performed this yesterday. On the front steps. With commentary.”
“Science requires replication.”
“This is undignified.”
“This is method.” I gesture at the sunbeam through the window. “One more time, for the record.”
He gives me a look with opinions in it, but he rises with that fluid grace and steps deliberately into the beam.
He stands there, bathed in gold, infuriatingly unbothered, sun in the dark waves of his hair and the silver of his eyes, and he knows exactly what he looks like, and my pen has stopped moving on the page.
I could walk over there. I could put my mouth on the sun-warm line of his throat and find out what daylight tastes like on him.
I put the thought down the way you’d put down a spider, firmly, at arm’s length, and drag my pen back into motion.
“Satisfied yet?” he asks dryly, and there are layers in it now, because my heartbeat just told on me and we both know it.
“Very satisfied.” I make a note in the margin. Sunlight: MYTH. Twice confirmed. “What’s the deal with that one, anyway? Why does everyone think vampires burn?”
“A myth propagated by vampires who wished to be left alone during the day.” He returns to his chair, settling with lazy ease. “If humans believe we cannot walk in daylight, they do not hunt us when the sun is high. It is a useful fiction.”
“Huh. Clever.”
“We have had centuries to develop clever strategies.”
“Do you actually need to breathe? Sometimes you do, sometimes I catch you just… not.”
“Only to speak. The rest is habit, and the habit slips when I’m distracted.” He turns a page. “You are extremely distracting.”
“Noted for the file.” It goes next to the pattern I’ve been assembling all week.
Concepts, he absorbs on contact: tactics, systems, sarcasm.
Objects defeat him. The man deployed the phrase “strategic withdrawal” about a blender he calls “the blade jar.” “While we’re doing science: how long does a feeding actually last you? ”
“A week, give or take.” He says it evenly, but his eyes flick to my wrist, to the faded marks there. “Longer if I’m careful. The curse kept me in suspension for a century on nothing; awake is a costlier state.”
I write that down. I underline it. I refuse to examine why I’m underlining it, or why my pulse just picked up, or why the phrase “a week, give or take” has filed itself somewhere deeply inappropriate in my brain.
A week. That’s how long until his mouth is on me again. Unless something happens sooner. Unless I want it sooner.
I underline it a second time, harder than necessary, and don’t look up, because he can hear my heartbeat and the less said about what it’s currently doing, the better.
“Okay, next one.” I lift the vial. “Holy water. Supposed to burn you on contact.”
He extends his hand, palm up. “Pour it on me, then.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am sure it will do nothing except make my hand wet.”
I tip a few drops onto his palm. The water sits there, perfectly ordinary, refusing to participate in the genre.
He rubs it between his fingers, profoundly bored. “Peasant superstition. The church wished to feel powerful against creatures that predate their religion by millennia. Holy water is water.”
I cross it off. “Mirrors next. Can you see your reflection?”
He picks up the hand mirror and examines himself with evident satisfaction. He smooths a strand of hair off his forehead, adjusts his collar, and tilts his head to admire his own jawline.
“Yes, I can see my reflection.”
“You’re checking yourself out.”
“I am ensuring I am presentable. There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
He sets the mirror down and gives me a look that curls heat low in my belly. “Would you prefer I were less concerned with my appearance? I could stop bathing. Wear the same clothes for a decade. Allow my hair to…”
“Point taken. The vanity stays.”
“I prefer to call it self-awareness.”
“I’m sure you do.”
While I write up my notes, he drifts to the shelves and repairs a torn dust jacket with a strip of archival tape he found somewhere, his head bent, his hands precise and patient over the old paper, and I watch a man who once commanded armies concentrate entirely on saving a battered gardening book because it was her grandmother’s, and I have to put my pen down and go refill a glass of water I don’t want.
When I come back, he doesn’t ask. But he’s smiling at the dust jacket.
I mark mirrors and holy water as myths, then reach for the garlic bread and unwrap the foil.
The reaction is instantaneous.
His nostrils flare. His eyes go wide. He makes a sound I can only describe as a hiss, an actual hiss, the exact noise of a cat discovering a cucumber, and scrambles backward so fast his chair goes over.
“What is that?” he demands from against the bookshelf. “Why do you have that?”
“It’s garlic bread.” I am trying so hard not to laugh. “From the grocery store. It was two dollars.”
“Put it away.”