Chapter 8 Orfeo
Orfeo
Diantha skips class.
Bowen makes some comment under his breath about our lack of fortitude, and the rest of his lecture passes in a bone-dry blur as he monologues about carved ivory reliefs.
The entire time, my gaze drifts to the door.
I imagine her slipping in, dark eyes scanning the room until they settle on the empty seat beside me.
I imagine her shimmying out of her winter coat and sliding into the chair, hair twisted up off her shoulders and piled at the top of her head.
She hands me a pen and rolls her eyes. So you don’t bother me.
I can imagine her saying something like that—sarcastic, dry.
Lips puckered into a half pout, half smile.
Her long, lean neck bending as she takes careful notes.
Fuck, I’m hungry. I pull on my sunglasses to keep anyone from noticing my eyes, which seem to glow brighter the hungrier I get.
Bowen goes five minutes over, and by the time I make it to Hades House, I’m delirious with desire.
Kat’s waiting for me, and this time, I let her kiss my mouth.
I wrap my arms tight around her frail body.
I devour her neck, letting her blood run over from my mouth, dripping down between her breasts.
She asks me if I want to fuck, and for some reason, I decline.
I stroke her hair and let her drift off with her head in my lap.
Afterward, Kat sleeps while I go back to work on the ceiling fresco—an abstracted swirl of red, brown, black.
From the darkness, I craft red roses in full bloom, petals falling open, heavy with their ripeness.
With my light colors, I carve out a crescent moon and the silhouette of a woman bathing in its light.
Wednesday night, Diantha ducks in when Bowen has already cut the lights and started his slides.
She sits close to the door, keeping her eyes cast firmly ahead.
Even hidden beneath a turtleneck and a sweater, I can see her shoulders sagging under an invisible weight.
Dark circles have taken shape under her eyes, bruise-like in color.
She doesn’t look well. I want so deeply to know what thoughts are passing through her mind.
The depth of this desire…
It startles me.
When Bowen completes his lecture, she darts from the classroom. Without thinking twice, I move at a vampiric speed to plant myself on one of the benches halfway between the Art History building and the campus gates.
She’s moving at an impressive clip, head down and arms folded across her chest. There’s a human obsession with people being so beautiful the room stops when they walk in.
Heads turn, voices quiet, time slows. And so, beauty like Diantha’s goes unnoticed.
Those dark eyes, the lush curve of her bottom lip.
In this place, she lets herself recede into the background. She hopes you forget her.
“Diantha,” I call out, standing slowly and burying my hands in my pockets. She freezes in her tracks like a doe. Her eyes cut left and right, and I know she’s considering running from me. I keep my distance. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she replies, refusing to meet my eye. She tilts her head toward the gate. “Um, so…I have to go—”
“Wait.” I step into her path. “I wanted to check in. Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” she cuts me off, tightening her arms around her chest.
“I was worried when you didn’t show up for class last night. Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” she bites back. “I told you I’m fine.”
I huff. “You do not look fine.”
She finally looks at me, anger flashing across her features. Her jaw clicks as she clenches her teeth. “Oh, really? Wow, thanks. How kind of you.”
“That’s not what I meant. You just look tired—”
“Because I am. Now, please.” She shakes her head hard, like she wants to knock the sound of my voice out of her ears. “Please move out of my way. I want to go home.”
Does she think I am going to follow her? I recoil at the implication. Does she think I am hunting her? I raise my hands in surrender and step back. “I will not stop you.” As she passes by, her smell overwhelms me. I drop my eyes as I say, “I don’t blame you for being afraid.”
She pauses. Just for a moment. And in the moment, she holds my heart in her hands.
Who knew? One simple conversation and it’s like I’ve finally been exhumed from my shallow grave. Her sudden presence in my life—her beauty, her wit—has shed new light on this horrible, endless existence of mine.
Her eyes narrow in acknowledgment. She is afraid.
I know she wants to say something to smooth the moment over.
Her mouth opens, but my pride gets in the way.
I turn and walk away before she can confirm what I know to be true with a flimsy lie.
What was I thinking? I am not allowed to have a friend, a lover.
I am allowed to comfort myself with acrid cigarette smoke, drugs that dull me, and passionless sex.
On Thursday, I make a point of sitting on the other side of the room. If Diantha comes to class, I do not notice. If she looks my way, I do not feel it.
Class ends and we scatter, but there’s a part of me, a part I thought was almost entirely extinct, that aches.
Hades House’s transformation into a cheap den of sin is nearly complete, desecrated at the hands of the shittiest assholes I’ve ever met.
And I’ve encountered many assholes.
The downstairs walls have been covered in black paint, the curtains swapped for heavy, light-blocking velvet drapes, tables and chairs removed and replaced with plastic sofas that line the walls.
A stripper pole has been installed in the open space in front of the bar, though I doubt Alfo knows anyone with enough skill to mount the thing.
The pièce de résistance is the disco ball now hanging over the bar.
“Ta da.” Leo flicks a switch and the mirrorball commences its pathetic circle.
Nisos, the furthest thing from an ally, and I trade a blank look.
“How classy,” I remark as I finish washing my paint brushes in the bar sink.
“Don’t be such a fucking snob. Humans love a theme—they love a little ambiance.” Leo sinks down onto one of the cheap couches and lights a cigarette. “And vampires, you sick fucks only care about one thing.”
He’s not wrong. Tomorrow night, this town will be crawling with vampires from every corner of the East coast. Hungry and violent and beautiful. Women will go missing—some will never be seen again. I scrunch my nose at the thought.
“We are somehow even more disgusting than humans,” I concede.
“Aw, come on, you big Roman cuck. You’ll be the main event,” Nis says, smirking as he blows a smoke ring. “Should we chain him up and put him in a cage?”
“Orfy would look good in chains,” Leo chimes in. “Almost as good as he looks in leather.”
“Main event? For who?” I shake my head. “The entire point of this bar is to draw in rich, beautiful vamps so they can feast on the all-you-can-eat buffet of the poor souls you’ve tricked into working for you.
What the fuck do they care about me?” I dry my hands on a bar towel before tossing it over my shoulder.
“This is the problem with demons: you’re too fucking stupid to be any good at being evil. ”
Anger flares in Nis’s beady eyes. “But you’re here with us, aren’t you?
With us idiots.” He leans forward onto the bar, blown out pupils glassy under the cheap light.
“So, what does that make you?” He pulls his cigarette from his lips and presses the smoldering tip into the bar top, millimeters from my hand. “Where’s your money, bastardo?”
I grab hold of his wrist, twisting his arm backward. Before Nis can cry out in pain, I hop the bar and slam him into the back wall, pressing my forearm flat against his windpipe.
He claws at me, gagging as he tries desperately to suck down air. I loosen my grip only so I don’t lose the satisfaction of forcing him to listen to me.
If I wanted to kill Nisos, it would have already been done.
But I don’t care enough about him to have his blood on my hands. His life is worthless, as is his death. What I want is for him to fear me, down to his bones. I want his dick to shrink and his stomach to hurt when I walk in the room.
I lean my face close to his, baring my fangs.
“I’m here to fulfill a commitment to Alfo.
Don’t you ever, for one moment, confuse my presence with a desire to be in your company.
” I tighten my grip on his T-shirt and lift him off the ground, until only the tips of his sneakers touch the hardwood floors.
His eyes bulge, anger and fear bleeding together.
“If Alfo and I hadn’t made an agreement, I would have already snapped your skinny neck and let your slimy, pathetic body bleed out on the floor.
Do you understand that? Do you understand why I haven’t ripped your throat out of your neck yet?
“Instead, I paint the ceiling, I laugh at your pathetic jokes, I indulge your desperate women, and then I go home. I don’t kill anyone, actually. Isn’t that kind of me?”
Nisos pulls his lips back over his teeth, thrashing under my hold. “Fucking bloodsucker. Fucking rodent.”
I lean in so close our noses almost touch. Around me, the lights flicker. Glasses and bottles stored on the shelves behind the bar begin to rattle, not like the ground is shaking but like someone has stumbled back into them. I shoot a glare in Leo’s direction, but he’s just sitting there, smoking.
Nis thinks the energy surge is my doing. Sweat gathers on his hairline, all remaining color drained from his pathetic face. Little does he know, I have no fucking idea what’s going on either.
“I asked if that’s kind of me.” I smirk. “Am I kind, Nisos?”
He bares his teeth in a snarl, choking out each word. “You’re…fucking…kind.”
I drop Nis, moving across the room in an instant and leaving him to hit the floor with a dull thud. I dust off my hands and pick up my leather jacket.
“Leo.” I nod toward my most friendly captor. “Good seeing you.”
For Friday night’s lecture, Bowen asks us to meet him in the quad outside of the Art History building, warning us that temperatures will be below freezing so we should dress accordingly.
We’re not going to the catacombs, not yet.
He seems to have some other half-assed field trip in mind.
I’ve taken so many university classes since moving to America, there’s almost nothing that can excite me enough to distinguish one lecture from another.
When I walk up to the stone stairs outside the building at two minutes to seven, the only other person there is Diantha, bundled in her biggest winter coat and wrapped in what appears to be a stack of tartan scarves.
Great.
I keep my distance, taking a seat on the other side of the steps.
Our brief interaction had been exciting, I can admit that. Whether it was her intellect or that long, dark cascade of hair she has—fuck, maybe even her magic—she made me feel something.
If all I wanted was to fuck her, I could probably summon enough energy to glamour her into talking to me.
But that is not it. She rouses something in me other than lust. Something other than bloodlust.
Bowen shows up five minutes late, looking like he just crawled through Echidna’s sewer system to reach us. His trousers are wet almost up to the knees and his face is so pink and raw from the cold, I fear he may need some sort of medical intervention.
“Hello, hello, hello.” He adjusts his wool hat with one hand and waves us forward with the other. “Come, come, come. Why are you all so afraid of being close to each other?”
I feel Diantha’s eyes slide over me as we meet Bowen at the bottom of the steps.
“Well, I see once again a distinct lack of courage from your generation. I’ve scared everyone off with the threat of cold, eh? Their loss…” He digs in his briefcase for a moment.
Diantha shifts on her feet beside me. She looks cold. The shadows under her eyes have faded, but there’s something in the gentle tremble of her lips that makes me want to wrap my arms around her, haul her over my shoulder, and, oddly, punch Bowen in the face.
Maybe that’s a separate surge of emotion I’m feeling.
As if she can hear my thoughts, Diantha’s eyes snap to mine. Dark, wide, imploring. Maybe she expects me to look away, but I can’t. Her gaze heats me, ignites a warmth in my chest and fuels my hunger. That aliveness she brings out in me is suddenly back.
“Hey.”
Oh, we’re speaking again. How nice.
I arch a brow. “You’re cold.”
A little laugh escapes her. “Of course. It’s eight degrees.”
“She speaks,” I say softly. “And she laughs?”
Diantha narrows her eyes and parts her lips to form a rebuttal.
“Aha!” Bowen rips some papers from his bag and begins to pass them out. “Focus up, children. Tonight we’re going on a tour of the Paquet Manor. Are either of you familiar?”
“The eighteenth-century mansion on the far side of campus?” Diantha asks.
“Exactly, Miss Moro. Bit of a hike, but worth it as we’ll get a chance to look at some Venetian tapestries that were imported by the Paquets at the turn of the last century. A dubious acquisition, undoubtedly, but I’m not here teaching a class on ethics…” He picks up his pace.
“It’s been a long week,” Diantha mumbles, careful not to audibly interrupt Bowen’s diatribe. “I didn’t mean to come across so…”
“Brusque? Improper? Discourteous?”
She bites at the corner of her lip to keep from laughing. A curl has escaped the protection of the scarf wrapped around her head and it dances over her face, catching in her eyelashes. “Any other synonyms you want to try out?”
“No, I’m quite satisfied.”
“Well,” she says, batting her lashes at me, “you’ve also proven your point.”
“And you missed me, didn’t you?” I cast my eyes down toward hers, attempting an angry pout to conceal my own smile.
She makes a low hum noise in the back of her throat. “Missed you? I wouldn’t go that far—”
Bowen glances back at us over his shoulder. “Jesus, where are you—there you are! Hurry up, now, children. A little bit of urgency never killed anyone.”