20. Posy
— ? —
Posy
I wake before dawn and can’t breathe.
The manor is silent, the heavy dark-hour silence that presses on your eardrums until your own heartbeat is the loudest thing in the county.
Valerian is a cool presence at my back, his arm over my waist, his breath slow against my hair.
He’s not asleep. He’s doing the thing where he goes quiet and lets me rest, sweet and patient.
Right now it’s a hand on my throat.
It’s not him. That’s the terrible part. He hasn’t done one thing wrong, hasn’t pushed, hasn’t asked, has been nothing but a century of patience folded into a man, and my chest is still doing this, tight and airless, because last night I mumbled forever into his skin and meant it, and meaning it is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me.
Bigger than the box. Bigger than the fangs.
You can run from a monster. There’s no running from your own answer.
I slip out from under his arm as carefully as I’ve ever done anything.
He doesn’t open his eyes. His hand flexes once against the empty sheets where my hip was, a small bereft motion that nearly ends the whole escape before it starts, and I stand there in the dark for the length of three heartbeats, two of them his in everything but pulse, arguing with my own feet.
Go back to bed. Go back to bed and wake him and say the words.
I gather my clothes off the floor and tiptoe out instead, and I dress in the hallway bathroom with cold water on my face and panic clawing up my sternum, patient and thorough.
The house is all held breath around me. Even the floorboards, which have gossiped about every step I’ve taken since I arrived, keep my secret on the way down.
My reflection is honest with me. Pale. Shadowed. Faint pink lines at my throat where his fangs were, and newer marks on my inner thigh that throb when I move wrong. A woman thoroughly claimed by fangs, about to make the biggest decision of her life, with no idea what to choose.
The curse ends only when she chooses freely and completely. Not the bite, my darling. The exchange. Both ways, open eyes, whole heart.
On my way past the library I notice the desk drawer sitting open. The one with the false bottom. The one I know I closed. I push it shut without letting myself think about it, because before dawn every mystery looks like an omen.
Gran’s words follow me down the stairs, through the foyer, past the parlor where a velvet chair sits by the window at an angle nobody chose but him, past the dining table he polished by candlelight while furnishing rooms with futures I hadn’t agreed to yet.
The whole house is full of him now. By now there’s no room I can stand in that doesn’t have his fingerprints on it, and that’s exactly the problem, and that’s exactly not the problem, and I can’t tell which anymore, which is the actual problem.
I stop at the hall table long enough to scribble a note. My hand shakes on the second word. Needed air. Back soon. Don’t worry. Three small sentences, the great cowardly haiku of my life, and I weight it with my grandmother’s brass paperweight so the draft from the door won’t take it.
Here’s the truth I take out the front door with me: he hears everything. He heard me dress. He’s hearing the gravel under my sneakers right now, and he’ll hear the engine, and he’ll read the note, and he’ll stay exactly where he is, because caging me is the one thing he will not do.
I’m counting on it.
I hate that I’m counting on it.
The Honda starts on the third try, coughing as if personally offended by the hour, and I pull down the drive without looking at the gate in my mirror, because if he’s standing at the boundary watching me go, I’ll turn around, and I can’t turn around until I know what I’m turning around for.
I just need to think. I need space. I need to breathe air that doesn’t belong to a covenant.
The dark highway unspools and I argue with the radio static the whole way.
Reasons to stay human: my job, my apartment, Riley, sunlight on ordinary mornings, the version of my life where I grow old like everyone I’ve ever known.
Reasons to stay: him. That’s it. That’s the whole list, one item long, and it keeps outweighing the other column, and that terrifies me more than any curse has managed yet.
A county of dark highway later, the town diner’s neon says ROSIE’S into the gray edge of morning.
The lot holds two pickups and a sedan with hospital plates.
Inside it smells of griddle grease and the particular 6 a.m. loneliness of places that are open when nothing else is, and I slide into a corner booth under fluorescent light and order coffee I have no intention of drinking.
My phone shows nothing from the one person who could find me, because the person who’d text me can hear my heartbeat leave a county and chose, instead, to let me go. The silence is him keeping his word. It’s the loudest thing in the diner.
The nurses from the sedan are two booths down, splitting a cinnamon roll and speaking in the low, fluent shorthand of people coming off a night of other people’s emergencies.
A trucker at the counter reads yesterday’s paper.
The griddle hisses. A radio in the kitchen plays a country station at the volume of a secret, and it’s all so profoundly, heartbreakingly usual that my eyes sting.
Not long ago this was my species. Shift work and small talk.
I’ve been living inside a fairy tale with fangs, and I forgot how loud the ordinary world is, how bright, how completely indifferent to prophecies.
The waitress is in her fifties with tired, kind eyes, and she squints at me as she pours.
“You were in here last week,” she says. “With the flashy fella. The one who tipped like sin and flirted with the menu.”
“That’s my…” There’s no noun for Mircea. “He’s a house guest.”
“Condolences, honey.” She tops off my cup. “You okay? You look like the night shift feels.”
“Fine. Just tired.”
She doesn’t believe me. She also doesn’t push, which is its own kindness, and she moves off down the counter and leaves me alone with the spiral.
I pull out my phone and stare at it.
Riley’s name glows near the top of my contacts. Right below Valerian’s, where the covenant filed her. My best friend, demoted by a demon clerk, still sending increasingly frantic texts about the “creepy murder manor” and the “mysterious hot guy” I’ve been criminally vague about.
I should call her. I need one voice from the world where I used to live.
I hit dial before I can talk myself out of it.
“Posy? It’s five in the morning.” Riley’s voice is gravel with sleep. “Are you dying?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Not reassuring.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just needed to talk to someone who isn’t… here.”
Rustling, blankets, the creak of her sitting up. “Okay. I’m awake. Talk.”
Where do I even start?
“There’s a man,” I say finally.
“I knew it.” Her voice sharpens straight past sleep. “The hot mysterious manor guy. The one you mention and never describe. Name. Now.”
“His name is Valerian.”
“Valerian. That’s either a romance novel hero or a serial killer. Please tell me it’s the first one.”
“He’s…” I search for anything true that won’t sound insane. “Older. A lot older. And it’s complicated.”
“How much older? Silver fox older or concerning older?”
“Riley.”
“These are important taxonomic distinctions, Posy. I have a flowchart.”
Older than the house he lives in, and then some. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Posy, stop.” Her tone drops its jokes. “You’re scaring me. Is this guy hurting you?”
“No! God, no. He’s the opposite. He’s gentle, and he looks at me like I’m the only thing in the universe worth looking at. He makes me feel safe, Riley. Safer than I’ve ever felt anywhere.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that being with him means changing my whole life. And I don’t mean moving-in changing. I mean everything. Permanently. Forever.”
Silence on the line.
“I just need to think,” I say into it. “I need to figure out what I want before…”
“Posy, this sounds like a cult.”
“A cult?”
“Or a murder podcast.” Flat now, worried, and I can hear her getting out of bed to pace.
“Mysterious older man, makes you feel ‘safe,’ wants you to change your ‘entire life,’ and you’ve known him for what, five minutes?
That’s textbook. That’s the episode where I end up giving interviews about how you seemed so happy. ”
“He’s not dangerous.”
“You’re in an inherited manor with a stranger. That’s the opening scene of every horror movie ever made. Do I need to call someone? The police? Your mom?”
“Riley, no. Listen to me. It’s not like that.”
“Then explain it!”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out, because there’s no version of the truth with a survivable shape. He’s a vampire. He waited a century in a box for me. The choice isn’t whether to move in. It’s whether to stay human.
“I can’t,” I say finally. “Not without sounding crazy.”
“You already sound crazy.”
“I know.”
“You called me at five in the morning from a diner to tell me you met a much older man who makes you feel safe and you’re considering changing your entire existence for him, and you can’t explain any of it, and you want me to not activate the emergency friendship protocols.”
“When you organize it like that, it sounds worse.”
“There’s no organization where it sounds better, Posy!”
My laugh comes out closer to a sob. “I know. I’m sorry I called like this. I just needed to hear your voice. I needed to remember I have a life outside of…”
“Outside of what? Posy. What is going on out there?”
“I have to go. I’ll call you later, I promise. I just need to figure some things out.”
“Posy Thornwick, if you hang up this phone I am driving out there, I swear to god, I will bring mace and my true crime podcast host voice…”
“I love you. I’m okay. I promise.”
I hang up on her protest, which I’ll be apologizing for until Christmas, and set the phone face-down on the table like that will contain her.
It buzzes against the formica again and again.
Then once more, longer, indignant. I flip it over just far enough to see CALL ME BACK in capital letters and turn it face-down again, and guilt joins the party in my chest, pulling up a chair next to the panic and the want and the exhaustion. It’s getting crowded in there.
The coffee’s gone cold. The diner hums around me, dishes and bacon on the grill, all of it aggressively, achingly normal.
A whole room of people making ordinary choices with their ordinary mortal lives, and not long ago I was one of them, and I sit in my corner booth feeling the exact shape of the glass between me and everything I used to be.
I stare at my phone. EMERGENCY CONTACT: VALERIAN.
I could have changed it a hundred times this week. A tap or two. I haven’t.
And somewhere between the parking lot and this cold cup of coffee, the actual truth catches up with me, sitting down across the booth like it’s been chasing me the whole drive: I’m not running from him.
I was never running from him. I’m running from the woman who already knows her answer, because once I let her speak, there’s no unhearing it.
The lights in here are too bright. The room’s too loud. I need air that doesn’t smell like hash browns and other people’s mornings.
I stand up. I’ll drive back. That’s the decision the truth makes for me, sitting in a cold booth with my name in someone else’s emergency plans: I’ll drive back, and I’ll walk into that absurd manor, and I’ll find him wherever he’s pretending not to have been waiting by the door, and I’ll open my mouth and let the woman who knows her answer finally talk.
The room tilts.
It happens fast and from underneath. The edges of the room go white and airless, sound arrives from very far away, and my body sends one final memo, no breakfast, no sleep, too many feedings too close together, before it resigns entirely.
The floor comes up sideways. I grab for the table and my hands miss their appointment, and there’s a sharp crack as my temple finds the table’s edge on the way down.
Then dark.
I come back in fragments. Voices. Hands on my shoulders. The smell of coffee much too close, checkerboard tile cold through my shirt.
“Honey? Honey, stay with me.”
The waitress. Kneeling over me, kind eyes swimming in and out of focus, and my phone is in her hand. She must have taken it off the table.
“What…” My mouth isn’t cooperating.
“You fainted, sweetheart. Cracked your head good on the way down.” Her thumb is already moving on my screen, finding the lock-screen shortcut, the one anyone can reach, the one with the form behind it. “I’m calling your person, okay? Stay still for me.”
My person.
Valerian.
“No, wait…” I try to say.
She’s already dialing. The phone rings once. Twice. Then his voice, distant and tinny through the speaker, and panic and relief hit me in the same heartbeat, indistinguishable.
“Hi, is this Valerian?” the waitress says into my phone. “You’re listed as her emergency contact.”
I close my eyes and let the dark have me.