10. Posy #2
“Does it hurt you?”
“It is…” His face performs profound disgust. “It is vile. The smell alone is… put it away, Posy. Please.”
“So garlic is real.” I wrap the bread back in its foil prison. “Good to know.”
He cautiously rights the fallen chair but doesn’t sit. He’s watching the wrapped bread as if it might attack.
“It is not fear,” he says stiffly. “It is a… strong preference against.”
“You knocked over a chair.”
“The chair was in my way.”
“You hissed.”
“I did not…” He stops, apparently realizing the acoustics are against him. “It was a mild vocalization of displeasure.”
“It was a hiss. Like a cat.”
“Cats are dignified creatures.”
I’m laughing now, helplessly. The image of this ancient, lethal king scrambling away from two-dollar garlic bread is too much. He glares, but there’s no heat in it, just wounded pride and maybe embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, wiping my eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s just… your face…”
“My face was perfectly composed.”
“Your face looked at that garlic bread like it killed your family.”
“Garlic has killed many vampires.” Immense dignity, twitching lips. “It is a serious threat.”
“Noted. No garlic in the house. What about Italian restaurants? Off-limits too?”
“I would rather face a horde of angry villagers with pitchforks.”
I’m still giggling when I reach for the last item on the table.
The silver letter opener.
Valerian goes still.
The garlic got theater from him, the holy water got performative boredom, and this is neither. This stillness is cold, watchful. Serious in a way the garlic never touched.
“Put the silver down, Posy.”
His voice has changed. The warmth is gone, the teasing edge, all of it, and under what’s left there’s a note I’ve never heard from him before.
Fear.
I look at the letter opener in my hand, an ordinary thing, ornate handle, pointed blade, the kind every old house owns.
Then I look at Valerian. His face has gone paler than usual, which I didn’t think was possible.
His jaw is tight, his hands are fists, and his eyes are fixed on the silver, unblinking.
“Is it like the garlic?” I ask carefully.
“No. It is not like the garlic.” Rough, flat.
“Valerian…”
“Put it down. Please.” The please costs him. I can hear the price. “Put it down and step away from it.”
I set the letter opener on the table with exaggerated care. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t come closer.
“Silver is poison to my kind,” he says finally.
“Not discomfort. Poison. A silver blade does not merely cut; it burns through our flesh like acid, and the wounds do not heal, and the pain does not fade.” His throat works.
“I have seen vampires die of silver. Slowly. Begging for an end that would not come.”
The horror of it settles into my bones.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have…”
“You could not have known.” Some of the tension leaves his shoulders. “I should have warned you. There was much to discuss. I did not think to mention it.”
“How bad is it? If you touched this right now?”
“The handle would burn my palm. The blade…” He shakes his head. “The blade would be worse.”
I look at the letter opener lying there, suddenly sinister in its innocence.
Then I wrap it in three dish towels from the kitchen, carry it out the back door with Valerian trailing me at a wary distance, and bury it a foot deep under the dead oak at the bottom of the garden, patting the soil flat with the trowel while he watches from the terrace steps.
“What are you doing?” Valerian asks.
“Holding a funeral. It had it coming.” I stand and dust off my knees. “Out of the house, out of reach, out of mind.”
He’s watching me, and the fear is gone, and what’s replaced it is naked gratitude with more than gratitude underneath.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s nothing.” He doesn’t look away. “I am simply… grateful.”
“For burying a letter opener in the garden?”
“For caring enough to do so.” He comes down the terrace steps, one at a time. “For wanting to protect me. Even from small things. Even from objects you did not know could hurt me.”
“Of course I want to protect you.” It’s out before I can stop it. “You’re… I mean, we’re…”
I don’t know how to finish. We’re what? Bonded by blood and prophecy? Trapped together by a curse neither of us chose? Or more than that, a word I’m not ready to use.
“We are,” he agrees softly, answering everything I didn’t say.
His hand comes up, hesitant, and brushes a strand of hair back from my face, asking permission with every inch of the motion.
I don’t pull away.
“No more silver in this house,” I tell him. “I’ll check every room. Every drawer. If there’s anything else, it’s gone.”
“You do not have to…”
“I want to.” I hold his eyes so he can see I mean it. “You spent longer in a box than anyone I’ve loved has been alive. The least I can do is make sure your prison is comfortable.”
“It is not a prison anymore.” Low, rough. “Not with you in it.”
The words land somewhere I’ve been trying to protect. I want to answer with matching weight, and my throat is tight and my heart is going too fast, and all I manage is to stand there feeling the cool of his palm against my cheek.
“I’ll make a list,” I say finally. “Everything that’s dangerous. Garlic, silver, whatever else. None of it gets near you.”
“A list.” His lips curve. “Very practical.”
“I’m a librarian. Lists are what I do.”
He laughs. A real laugh, warm and so unexpected that I forget to breathe. It transforms his whole face, chases out the shadows, makes him look younger. Almost human.
I want to make him laugh like that every day.
The thought scares me more than the silver did.
“Come on,” I say, stepping back before I do something stupid. “Help me check the rest of the house. There might be more silver hiding somewhere.”
“As you wish, little bride.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You like it when I call you that.”
“I absolutely do not.”
“Your heartbeat says otherwise.”
I turn and march toward the door, face burning, and he follows with that silent, predatory grace I’m learning to recognize.
He’s right, of course. I do like it.
But I’m not about to admit it.
“I heard that,” he calls from the hallway.
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Your heartbeat disagrees, little bride.” A pause, silk over steel. “We’ll discuss it during the silver hunt.”
The hunt takes us through the ground floor, drawer by drawer, and I notice, not for the first time, that he routes us the long way around the kitchen, past the pantry, wide of the short hall with the old bolted door at the end of it, the one that wouldn’t open for me on move-in day or since.
When I nod at it and ask what he thinks is down there, he develops a sudden scholarly interest in a candlestick.
“Cellars,” he says. “Old houses keep their dead air somewhere.”
I add it to the growing list of doors in this house that answer questions with weather reports.